Emotional Freedom Techniques:
Tapping Into Your Well-Being
by Rob Roy

There is an old saying in Traditional Chinese Medicine, "Where there is resistance or disruption, there is pain. Where there is no resistance or disruption, there is no pain."
Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) is an impressive method for eliminating emotional and physical problems by re-balancing the energy system of the body. It is based on one simple paradigm-shifting concept: The cause of all negative emotions is a disruption in the body's energy system.

EFT is a meridian energy therapy similar to acupuncture but without needles. The basic technique involves "tuning into" a troubling issue, emotion, or thought and then tapping on specific acupressure points with your fingers. This might sound far-fetched, but I can tell you frankly, it not only works effectively and rapidly, its results are usually permanent. I have used it myself at crucial times in my life for more than three years, and I continue to use it consistently as part of my daily personal development practice. I have overcome a multiplicity of traumatic events and memories from my childhood, even those subtle ones that kept seeping into my present. Plus I am free of many of the ensuing issues that come from childhood trauma: low self-esteem, insecurity, and habitual negative thinking. Also, through EFT, I completely overcame a lifelong fear of snakes in less than two minutes.

EFT has been called the "Ambassador of Meridian Therapies" because it is so user-friendly. It has an effectiveness rate of about 80 per cent. Once you have learned this simple technique, you can easily use it any time, any place, and in any situation to bring relief from addictive cravings, anxiety & panic attacks, anger, compulsions & obsessions, depression & sadness, dyslexia, fears & phobias, grief & loss, guilt, insomnia, negative memories, nightmares, pain management, physical conditions & healing, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), self image, sexual abuse issues, and more.

You see, although it might seem that we "recover" from unpleasant experiences or thought patterns during the normal course of living our lives, we can, nevertheless, be affected by recurring emotions, memories, and doubts that we still carry as held energy. Also, we can be affected by ongoing or future events such as stress, interpersonal problems, depression, and various kinds of anxieties for the same reason. EFT is about returning the mind, body, and feelings to a state of balance and harmony so that we are not limited by negative emotions. It is literally like clearing a log that is blocking a stream, where the log represents a stuck emotion in our stream of energy.

For example, the technique works in this way: Let's say you've told me that you still carry anger towards someone who has hurt you in the past. I would ask you to think about a specific incident when that anger became manifest, and to assess the intensity of the feeling by giving it a number from 1 to 10 (10 being most intense). You do not have to relive the past event; you just have to be aware that the negative feeling is there. Then I would ask you to give a name to the event, as in a movie or book title, e.g. "Bully Punching Me After Gym." Once you have "tuned into" it in this way (there are many ways to do this), you would then tap lightly on certain meridian points while saying out loud the reminder phrase you gave to the event. Having done that, I would ask you to think about the event again and check how you feel. Typically, you would notice a significant reduction in the intensity of the feeling. We would continue to tap on that specific issue until the intensity was reduced to a 1 or 0. The process may be deceptively simple, and yet, its results can be profound.

There is also a remarkable progression to this process. You will notice in our example above that the initial emotion we focused upon was anger. EFT will clear the anger very effectively perhaps in one or two rounds of tapping. But now, all of a sudden, you may be overcome by a new feeling: deep hurt perhaps, or sadness. These other emotions, previously covered up by the anger, are now free to come running to your attention. In this case, which is very common, you would simply use the EFT process again to collapse, one by one, all the aspects surrounding the event. Interestingly, once several of these aspects have been collapsed by EFT, you will find that ALL the aspects surrounding the event collapse as well. This is called the "generalization effect." In other words, even though you might have literally hundreds of traumatic memories and you used EFT to collapse only a specific portion of them, you would find that all the others, even hundreds, are collapsed permanently as well. In all cases, you will still retain the memory of the event, but it will no longer have the emotional charge that it had before. Profound insights often follow as these previously distressing and dysfunctional patterns change naturally in a healthy direction.

It is truly a wonderful gift for you to learn to do this, whether you want to calm yourself down, think more clearly, or have more energy, stop being upset or angry, miserable or depressed, ease your mind and get to sleep at night, put an end to procrastination, stop worrying all the time, get better at golf, sex, playing piano or parking your car, like your body better and become more confident, stop snacking, free yourself from self-doubt and anxiety about money, love or health, have a fabulous tool to calm crying children, get rid of that haunting "history" and move freely forward in life, or just to get on with life without being tripped up constantly by doubts and fears. Whatever it is, EFT is a tool for working intentionally with our own subtle energies, which in turn naturally enhances the effectiveness of all we do.

Rob Roy is an EFT practitioner living in Saskatoon. For private consultation in person, or over the phone, as well as group work please call (306) 384-6386 or email: scratchatune@yahoo.ca. For more information on what EFT has done for thousands of people, please go to www.emofree.com.