Monthly Archives: August 2010

Natural Stress Relief Or Just Pop A Pill?

EFT, Manifestation, Stress relief, Tapping, Tapping Points

Stress is part of modern living. You always seem to have work to do, mouths to feed, bills to pay and often not enough time or money to do all the things you want and need. The constant and unrelenting demands put a lot of stress on your body and mind.
stress-relief and EFT
Some of the symptoms of being overly stressed are: trouble sleeping, muscle pains, digestive troubles, heart palpitations, breathing difficulties or any one of a dozen other health problems. You may also find yourself becoming impatient, angry, irritable, clumsy and accident prone.

It is unnatural and unhealthy to live in a state of constant stress. The body just can’t handle it without serious repercussions. Eventually you will try to do something to relieve the stress. But will your attempt really be a solution or create another problem.

Unhealthy ways people deal with stress include

  • Alcohol consumption
  • Illegal drugs
  • Internet addiction
  • Gambling
  • Sex
  • Shopping
  • Overeating

While these may serve as pleasant distractions, they do not solve the problem. They only mask it.

In some cases, you might need to seek medical help for your stress. If you’ve let your stress get to the point where it’s caused you heart damage, high blood pressure or any other serious medical problem, seeing a doctor should be the first thing you do otherwise not going to the doctor could be the last thing you will ever do. Too often doctors will simply give you a pill to relax you but these don’t solve the problem and like almost all medicines, you may have unpleasant side effects. And once you are on these kinds of drugs, getting off them can be very difficult.

On the other hand, if your stress is hasn’t created any major physical problems yet, you can avail yourself of natural treatment that won’t cost much if anything and have no harmful side effects.

Exercise is a very good way to reduce stress. Not only will you burn up your nervous energy, you will also make your body stronger and more able to handle daily stress. You don’t have to have a stressful, exhausting workout. Walking every other day for twenty minutes will do you a lot of good.

Meditation is a time-tested way to quiet your mind and your body. It isn’t difficult to do either. You don’t even need to be limber. Sitting in a chair works as well as sitting cross-legged on your floor. Meditation isn’t hard to learn. The trick is to just do nothing.

Changing your diet is another way to ease your stress. If you eat a lot of junk food and sugary treats, eating a better diet will make it easier for your body to handle stress.

Let’s not forget, one of the most important ways to deal with stress is to minimize or eliminate it if you can. Try to simplify your lifestyle and minimize your expenses. Stress is a signal that something is going wrong. Listen to it and heed what it tells you.

One of the fastest stress relief methods is the Emotional Freedom Technique. This simple method of tapping on acupressure points produces almost instant relief. For complete directions as well as more ways to use EFT, please read Transform Your Life With EFT from Amazon. It is also available in other formats for other ereaders from Smashwords.

Five Tips For Stress Relief

EFT, Stress relief, Tapping, Tapping Points, ,

Stress is a physical condition that can have immediate and long-term effects on your health and wellbeing. Some transient stress is OK and even healthy for you. You are under stress when you first get behind the wheel or when you are at bat at the bottom of the ninth and the winning run is on third. Life without that kind of stress would be boring. But prolonged, unrelenting stress is harmful to you. We live in a world where it’s way too common to be stuck at a job or relationship you hate, or you are never getting enough sleep or you struggle to make enough money just to survive. But even the rich and well-rested aren’t immune from stress.
Common symptoms of stress include:

  • Rapid heartbeat.
  • Headaches.
  • Stiff or tight muscles.
  • High blood pressure
  • Sleeping difficulties
  • Back and neck pain.
  • Difficulty breathing.
  • Profuse sweating and sweaty palms.
  • Stomach pains

Here are five tips to find relief from stress.

Turn off the TV: Sitting in front of the TV might seem like a great way to veg out but if you are watching the news, cop shows or even medical dramas, you are experiencing stress into your body. The shows wouldn’t be any fun if you didn’t have some emotional response when you watch them but that emotional response is actually stress. When you watch a stressful TV show, you r body produces, cortisol, the same hormone as you do when you go through a stressful experience yourself.

Take a walk: Exercise is one of the best ways to reduce stress hormones is by walking. A twenty minute walk a couple times a day gives you the chance to burn off stress. Exercising also strengthens your heart, lungs and immune system which strengthen your ability to handle stress in the future.

Meditate: Taking time to quiet your mind and empty of thought is one way to give your body a break from stress. It’s is easy to learn and costs nothing to do beyond a class or book that teaches you the techniques. And you can even learn how to do it on the web. The benefits of meditation are well documented and go beyond simple stress relief.
Emotional-freedom-technique-for-stress-relief

Help somebody: Like meditation, making someone else the focus of your attention takes your mind off your own stress. Volunteer somewhere. Teach inner city kids how to read. Walk dogs at your local animal shelter. Coach your son’s little league team. Find a cause and give your time to it. You can be sure some charity or organization in your city or town is looking for your help.

Have an active social life: Happy people spend more time with their friends than unhappy people. When you are happy, you won’t feel stressed. And when you get together with your friends, don’t spend the evening bitching about how much life sucks. Have fun.

Dance: Getting yourself lost in music and movement combines the benefits of walking and meditation into one activity. Dance your heart out when nobody is watching . You could also take a dance class which would combine the benefits of meditating, walking and having an active social life.

And a bonus sixth step.

Learn EFT: This simple method can significantly reduce the amount of stress in your life as well as how you react to stress-inducing situations. For complete tapping directions as well as more ways to use EFT, read my book, Transform Your Life With EFT from Amazon.

It is also available in other formats for other ereaders from Smashwords.

Beliefs Are Hidden Masters

EFT, Stress relief, Tapping, Tapping Points

It seems to be a recurring theme lately, accepting beliefs at face value that aren’t true. People frequently get their lives bent out of shape believing lies. These lies come from bad observations, unusual experiences or a belief in the infallibility of some authority.

I had a client who had a very ingrained belief that it was wrong to have more than two pieces of toast with breakfast. Since the belief didn’t cause him any pain and probably saved him from gaining a couple pounds, he never really examined it. But he mentioned his belief in session one day. He didn’t even realize his belief was a problem. Nor did I.

EFT turns dysfunctional beliefs into toast
EFT turns dysfunctional beliefs into toast.

He was telling me about his day as we tried to zero in on what to work on that session. He casually mentioned that he had a couple pieces of toast for breakfast and that the bread was so good he wished he had more. I asked him why he didn’t have more. He told me it was because you can’t have more than two pieces of toast with breakfast. He said it with the same casual certainty as if he had told me the sun rises in the east.

I didn’t question his belief outright but I asked him to tap on “Even though I can only have two pieces of toast for breakfast, I deeply and completely accept myself.“

He thought it was an odd request but he humored me and did it. The amount of anger and tears tapping brought up from that setup phrase astounded both of us.

When he was a kid, his mother was probably trying to get him to eat a balanced diet when she told him he could only eat two pieces of toast with his breakfast. But the little four year old didn’t see it that way. He mistook it for an inviolable rule. His mother had inadvertently programmed not to eat more that two pieces of toast ever at one meal.

As he suddenly realized the stupidity of that belief. We tapped on his feeling foolish for believing this. Then we had to tap on the anger he felt towards his mother for inflicting this lie on him. Then we had to tap on forgiving her for inflicting that lie on him. Then we had to tap on all the anger and sadness he felt about all the times he denied himself a third or fourth piece of toast when he really wanted one.

I never met anyone before or since who had so much emotional upset connected to toast.

This session opened up the floodgates of unexamined beliefs about himself and his abilities, most of which were lies or at the very least based on nothing substantial. As we tapped, he saw how much he was unnecessarily restricting himself for no good reason in areas beyond toast.

The takeaway lesson is to question everything you believe. And I mean everything. If you find yourself trapped in an unpleasant or restrictive situation, ask what beliefs you have that are keeping you there. You can try tapping on, ” Even though I believe I must have this unpleasant situation in my life, I deeply and completely accept myself and my situation.”

We build our lives around beliefs that have little or no bearing in reality. Then we build other beliefs around a sense of reality that has no real basis to it other than our belief in it. We get into a self-perpetuating, vicious cycle that keeps us glued to dysfunctional beliefs and corresponding dysfunctional lives until we take a moment to examine what’s really going on.

As you do more tapping, you will start to see what beliefs you have that are total nonsense. You will probably have more than a few beliefs to tap on.

For complete directions as well as more ways to use EFT, read, Transform Your Life With EFT from Amazon.

It is also available from Smashwords for those who don’t have a Kindle reader.

Spiritual Experiences With EFT

EFT, Law of Attraction, Manifestation, Tapping

Every once in awhile, you can have a tapping session that blows you away. You may even think you feel the presence of your guides, or the Universe or God. If it isn’t God, at the very least, it’s something much larger than yourself. These experiences are very blissful.

You can’t control when this will happen. These occurrences happen with no warning. I wish I could make them happen more predictably and more often. I also haven’t found the one setup phrase that works on everyone. What makes one person feel the presence of God does nothing to someone else.

Another problem is that these feelings eventually fade. Eventually you will come back to Earth.

Bliss
Bliss is attainable with EFT.

This leads to another problem; like a good drug high, you can become addicted to spiritual highs. They feel so good and life seems so right and perfect when you in them. And when you come down, you want another. This is how cults and religions get and keep new members.

You may know some people who attend every workshop their budget and time allows. They are often referred to as “energy junkies” or “workshop addicts.” They’ve experienced that rare and natural state of bliss and want it again. It’s like their souls have been starved all their lives and they suddenly have a spiritual Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings. They don’t want to leave the table even when the dinner is over.

Of course, the obvious way to treat that is to tap on it. You can tap on the feelings of longing if that’s what you are experiencing but I’ve found that many people can avoid feeling that way if they just tap regularly. If you can’t tap every day, tap at least a few times a week. It doesn’t have to be about anything specific either. Tapping on your run of the mill issues is good enough. While not bliss inducing, having just tapped is a pleasant enough state for most people to not crave the spiritual highs.

And if you can’t tap every day, tap on that. A round of tapping takes less than a minute once you have the method memorized. You can do a couple rounds before getting out of bed. You can even do it while on the toilet. You can tap at a traffic light on the way to work. The people in the cars next to you might look at you funny but what do you care? You’re not likely to see them again. And if it bothers you, tap on it.

My latest book, Manifesting From The Heart: Using Heart Energy to Achieve Reality Transformation is the result of some sessions that led me to experience what could only be described as a transcendental experience. It is based on questions I had about why the Law of Attraction didn’t seem to work for me. If you have wondered why trying to use the Law of Attraction hasn’t produced the results you wanted, this book could have the answers you are looking for.

Manifesting From The Heart is also available in other formats from Smashwords.

When You Can’t Get Your Ex Back Try Tapping On Heartbreak

EFT, Heartache, Tapping, Tapping Points

Heartbreak or heartache, one of life’s most difficult problems is also one of the most difficult to treat with the Emotional Freedom Technique. Whenever a client says they are feeling heartbroken, you can almost bank on the SUDS level being at least a 9 but it’s most likely off the charts. Like being pregnant, nobody I’ve ever worked with has ever been just a little heartbroken. Losing a love is one of the hardest things for a person to experience. You can get heartache relief but it will take some work on your part.

Heartbreak is a mixture of feelings and emotions that meld into a deep, dark despair that does not go away quickly. While you are experiencing it, it feels like it will never go away ever. No two people’s reactions to heartache are the same. Every case heartbreak is difficult in its own unique way so there isn’t a standard way to go about treating it. EFT will definitely help but there aren’t likely to be many one-minute wonders when it comes to treating heartbreak.

EFT is useful for treating heartbreak

Heartbreak encompasses, among other things, loss of love, friendship, companionship, touch, pleasure and hope. One also experiences the loss of an expected future. Heartbreak completely changes the roadmap one was using to guide their life. Actually, it totally shatters the roadmap along with the life.

It’s horrible if it’s sudden and out of the blue. It’s only slightly better when it’s been a long time coming and inevitable as in a drawn out breakup. In drawn out, inevitable break ups, the heartache is sometimes balanced by a feeling of relief because the hovering axe has finally fallen.

On the SUDS scale, tapping will not take heartache from a 10 to a 1. What is most likely to happen is that tapping on heartache will initiate a process whereby one can unravel, examine and tap out all the components of the problem. One may start with heartache being a 10 but as the feeling is tapped, the heartache changes to sadness, anger, despair, loneliness or just about any other feeling.

Whatever feeling arises needs to be treated. Don’t skip treating any feeling just because it seems trivial or doesn’t seem like the right feeling or the crucial feeling. If it comes up, it came up for a reason. Treat it then and there. What seems like an unimportant or trivial feeling may mushroom into something much deeper and more significant as you tap on it. But if you tried tapping on the deeper issue right away, you’d feel overwhelmed.

Treating heartache and heartbreak almost always requiring a lot of tapping on forgiveness issues. I had one client that spent a lot of time working on forgiveness for his friends who knew the girl he was dating was sleeping around but didn’t say anything. He also had to tap on forgiving the one friend who did tell him about his roaming girlfriend. Then he had to tap on forgiving himself for chewing out his friend for telling him such preposterous lies. Then he had to tap out feelings of regret for not believing his friend who had never lied to him before and didn’t lie to him then either. Forgiving his ex didn’t even come up until a later session.

Time is also needed when dealing with heartbreak. It’s not the time is the healer, either. What I’ve seen is that clients will be doing fine after a break up and then “their song” will come on the radio which triggers some buried feelings. The anniversary of their first date or the passing of a weekend where they were supposed to go away together may also put them in a funk that requires tapping.

In addition to tapping, you need to be patient when going through heartbreak. You will get better but it isn’t going to happen overnight. Unfortunately there is no magic pill, silver bullet or “easy” button to help you get through it.

EFT is definitely useful for finding relief from heartache and heartbreak but it’s probably not going to be an easy or quick treatment. But it will help you get better faster than doing nothing which is a much worse alternative.

For more information about how to do EFT, read, Transform Your Life With EFT from Amazon.

It is also available in formats for other ereaders from Smashwords.

Do You Want To Be Normal?

EFT

In working with clients, one of the oddest and most common hurdles I have with them is getting them to see a genuinely better life for themselves. They can only imagine a life that’s marginally better which usually translates to being out of pain or out of a current predicament. If they stretch their imaginations too much and try to envision a life where they actually feel happy, gratified, connected and amply rewarded they can’t relate to it. It’s not for them.

Many clients work with issues surrounding wealth and material accumulation. They want more money, a better car or just more stuff. And that’s fine. Having more money and more stuff allows you to have more and better or at least different experiences. However only a fool thinks money and stuff are the only ingredient you need for a happy life which is what everybody really wants. All our desires for tangible goods boil down to wanting intangible happiness.

The problem I see is that even after they see how to get happiness and stay happy, my clients often don’t do the necessary steps. If they are no longer miserable they stop doing the work, the work being EFT. Not being miserable is all they let themselves have/be.

Happiness means different things to different people but it is not simply the absence of misery. Happiness will never be perpetual on this planet however most people can’t even imagine a life of frequent happiness. They settle for normal.

Normal lives are usually OK. For most people, normal isn’t spectacular but it is serviceable and tolerable. But normal in our society usually is not fulfilling or exciting.

Ending feelings of misery are certainly a worthy and attainable goal for most people but stopping at that point shortchanges them and their lives. Even though they have learned how to improve their mental and emotional state, they stop tapping because they settle. They can’t imagine feeling any better than not miserable so they stop doing EFT until they experience something painful again. Their lack of imagination is as unfortunate as their lack of persistence.

If you really want to be normal, fine. But please, look around you. Look at what normal is our society. Do you really want to be normal?

Rise above normal with EFT. Learn how to do it with, Transform Your Life With EFT from Amazon.

It is also available in other formats for other ereaders from Smashwords.

The Law Of Attractions Says I Deserve Better. So Where Is It?

EFT, Law of Attraction, Manifestation, Stress relief, Tapping

In a recent session, the client was bitching about a guy she was dating who wasn’t treating her with the consideration, respect and courtesy she thought she should be getting. Her studies of the Law of Attraction and affirmations about self-worth had her believing that she deserved better. He was wealthy and influential and was a total jerk. She also believed that he didn’t deserve all his good fortune.

This led to a lot of tapping about getting what one deserved. She felt she deserved more and better in life. She wasn’t asking for the moon. She just wanted the affection and honesty in her relationship she felt she deserved. She really FELT she deserved it so we tapped on the feeling of deserving.

Law of Attraction

Feelings of deservedness aren’t necessarily a bad or painful feeling so it wouldn’t have occurred to her to tap on it if I hadn’t asked her to. She started tapping on Even though I feel I deserve more, I deeply and completely accept myself. The set up phrase morphed a lot over the next 15 minutes to include how she felt about the guy who got what she felt he didn’t deserve.

When the session was over, she realized feelings of deservedness have nothing to do with the Law of Attraction. Feelings of deservedness aren’t based on any objective standard. Rating such a feeling is totally capricious in nature. Who’s to say how much you have to feel like you deserve something to get it? Who’s to say feeling like you deserve something will even lead to getting it?

She further realized feeling like she deserved something put distance between her and the object of her desire. If she felt like she deserved something, she hadn’t really internalized the feeling of actually having the object of her desire. Saying she deserved something was like saying she wanted something and any student of LOA knows you never affirm that you want something.

She left the session feeling lighter having lifted the burden of this unworkable belief off her shoulders. As for her budding relationship, she dumped the guy. She knew she didn’t deserve the aggravation.

If you have wondered why the Law of Attraction doesn’t seem to work for you, this book, Manifesting From The Heart: Using Heart Energy to Achieve Reality Transformation could have the answers you are looking for.

If you don’t have a Kindle reader, Manifesting From The Heart is also available in other formats from Smashwords.