Our body is believed to have its own energy field. Like acupuncture, a method developed by Mr. Gary Craig, EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique aims to relieve a person from pain without the use of needles.
If acupuncture is centered on alleviating physical pain, EFT is geared towards relieving someone of emotional anguish. It is because the problems involved in weight loss also include the emotional aspect of a person’s life that emotional freedom technique for weight loss is considered. EFT is one type of energy healing practice. It is the goal of EFT to restore the natural flow the mind and body’s energy.
This type of energy healing practice has been in existence for quite some time. Practitioners of EFT tap a person’s pressure points or meridians with the use of their fingers as the person being healed concentrates on his emotional dilemma.
The mind does not have eyes that see or ears that hear and it can’t actually feel things, it doesn’t know if a coffee cup is hot to the touch or cold when you pick it up. It relies on our senses to gather all of its information.
The brain is housed inside the skull and within that it’s immersed in a fluid so it’s very much cut off from the outside world and the only way it can find out what’s going on is through our five senses.
That of touch, smell, sight, taste and of course hearing, but that is the limit to its accuracy. It relies on the feedback from these receptors to judge where it is in the world and it is because of these receptors that it sometimes gets its information wrong.
Let me give you an example of how this can be so. Have you ever seen a program on TV where a contestant is blindfolded and asked to put their hand in a box to find out what is in that box?
Well when this happens the mind has to process the information that is coming in from the sense of touch, the sense of touch feeds back information and the mind then goes through its memory store where it tries to match what is being felt to what is held in its memory. So if there was a tennis ball in the box the mind would very soon realize that it wasn’t a football or a rugby ball because of the size and shape.
It might then detect that touch was also telling it that it was slightly furry on the outside, and this would narrow down its search even more.
Eventually it would come to the conclusion that it was a tennis ball and that idea would be passed to the contestant’s vocal cords and they would then shout out the answer. During this time the other senses would be feeding their respective feelings back to the mind and even though that information wasn’t really needed it would still be added to the moment.
As you can see the mind has a lot of work to do, but it was controlled so it was fun. This of course is a very simplification of what the mind has to do, but I’m sure you understand what I’m trying to tell you.
let’s change this idea slightly let’s take the blindfold off and let’s play the same game at night it’s pitch black and you are on your own driving in the car you suddenly get a puncture and have to pull over.
As you get out of the car you drop your keys on the floor. You grope around in the wet grass and try to find your keys, suddenly you feel something furry and your hand recoils in fear because now the situation is different you started this situation in a different frame of mind. You were surprised because you had a puncture and feeling anxious because it was dark.
The mind will look at this differently because of the added emotional state, your actions will be more frantic the rest of your senses will be heightened you sense of touch will be feeding even more information back to the mind and when you touched that thing that felt furry your mind quickly added that you are outside, at night, groping around in the grass and then based on its own knowledge of events that it knows about and it’s situational awareness it puts forward the idea that you have just touched a mouse or even a rat!
As you can see by changing the emotional aspects of the situation the mind looks at what you are doing with a very different outcome. It will take this scenario and remember every part and it will file it under a “fearful” feeling or one that should be avoided at all costs.
The next time you are driving in the dark it will remind you about it, this remembering will induce a feeling of anxiety and you will be mindful of it happening again. This fearful feeling has been hard coded into your memory but it’s not just the events that get remembered it’s also the emotional states that go with it.
The mind doesn’t remember words or place names it remembers feelings and emotions and it attaches these emotional feelings to words and situations.
Now driving in the dark comes with a risk of getting a puncture this is a belief because it has actually happened to you, you’ve actually experienced it happening!
This is where tapping comes in, it takes that situation and cleans it up, it unwraps the outer layer or rather the wrapper of fear that the mind put around that event, it frees it up to become a normal thought. Then while you are driving in the dark the original thought of fearfulness of that original event is taken away. In most cases you don’t remember, that’s not the same as making you forget!
To make you forget is an action that doesn’t always serve you, whilst to reset means to bring something back to what was. This is why tapping is as powerful as it is gentle, it does not take anything away from you or make you forget about a situation. I once had a client that was afraid of water.
She asked me if once I had taken away her fear of water, would that mean she would jump in a swimming pool even though she could not swim. I explained that it would not make her silly around water, but it would allow her to attend swimming classes without fear so she might learn to swim.
