Self Healing Portal

I had the pleasure of having a good friend staying with me a while back. We were doing lots of healing together, and had also been tackling a job in the garden. It occurred to us,as we worked together, how much the job in the garden was a metaphor for the healing we'd been doing.

Our healing was mostly centered around pretty core issues of self acceptance, and at times it seemed there were just so many issues to tackle, we couldn't see our way through them. The job we were doing in the garden felt a bit the same at the start. In fact, the story started several months earlier really, when I finally acknowledged that the blackberries' threats to take over the property were getting serious. Like I do sometimes with healing big issues, denial kicked in and it took several months before I managed to get myself motivated on the job. A while later, I went great guns at clearing away some of the blackberry for a while, but then got fed up with being scratched and caught up in it, and somehow managed to forget all about the job for several weeks! Then my friend arrived, and we decided to tackle it together.

These are the things that became clear to us with our healing, through clearing away the blackberry:

* Denying that the plants needed clearing away for several months didn't make the job any easier! Not healing our issues as they come up means they can grow from a small plant easily pulled out, into a tangled web that's hard to remove.

* This sort of work is much easier with a friend to motivate you, share successes and laughs and learning along the way.

* At first the job seems huge, like there's no way you will be able to get it all finished, and it's easy to become disillusioned. But just chipping away, 1/2 an hour at a time, sees the job done much quicker than you realise.

* You often get to a stage where the vines grab you and get caught in your clothes one too many times, and you get fed up and just don't want to do any more. You pack it in for the day, and start again feeling much fresher and ready to deal with it the next day. And you know that if you don't, there will just be more to clear when you do finally get back to the job.

* At times it seems impossible to see how to cut the vine out at the bottom, it's such a tangle you can only work on the edge, snipping way what you can. But then all of a sudden, after snipping enough away, the bottom comes into view, and it's easy to reach through and snip it, and pull out a huge mass all caught up in it.

Fortunately there is one difference between the two jobs though - I can't see that it could be at all possible to pull all the roots of the blackberries out and stop them regrowing, but with the fantastic tools that we have for our healing, like EFT & Focusing, we really can get our issues out by the roots, with persistence!

So if anyone out there is feeling like your issues are just too big and you'll never be able to clear them, draw on the motivation and support of a group or a friend, or just someone who can listen, and think blackberries!!! It didn't take that long until we couldsee the whole wall, and it looks fantastic!! And because were were working at the core of our issues, we are both starting to really see that self acceptance is becoming a real goal, rather than a hazy concept that we can intellectually buy into but can't really see ourselves achieving.

In this world where the intellect is prized, and the right side of the brain seems to be crowded out by logic, we are lucky to have the tools that we do, such as EFT, TAT, Reiki, Meditation & Focusing, to swing things a little more in favour of the right side of the brain. When I recently saw the 18 minute video (available to view here) of Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who spoke about the experience of watching the affects of a stroke on her, it really got me thinking how it is that these tools are so useful.

Jill spoke about how when the left side of her brain shut down in the minutes and hours following the stroke, the feeling of separation and logic so familiar to that side of the brain receded, and allowed the expansive feeling of belonging and being connected to all, that the right side of the brain knows, to come to a fore. She concluded her passionate presentation with an urge for all of us to make the choice to live more from the right side of the brain.

Reflecting on her presentation later that day, I realised how powerful a metaphor Jill had shared with those of us walking the path of self healing. We live in a world dominated by the left brain, and yet the left brain is simply not equipped to heal most of our physical and emotional issues, if any. If we could heal based on logic and reasoning alone, none of the fabulous tools available for self healing today would ever have emerged. Their strength, both individually and collectively, lies in their ability to help us to tap into the right side of the brain, where I believe all true healing occurs.

And yet it’s still so tempting for a lot of us to analyse and try to reason our way out of our issues! We think if we can only figure it out, we’ll be free from the emotional highs and lows we are experiencing, and live happier lives. I feel that the key to our healing lies in the times that we make the choice that Jill was talking about – making the choice to maximise the times where we are living out of the right side of our brain, and allow that part of our brain to resolve our issues based on it’s own wisdom.

I’ve had a couple of wonderful experiences of this recently in my own healing journey. Travelling through my home country of New Zealand over the last couple of months, I’ve noticed a couple of issues creep in. Trying to “figure them out” netted no change at all, so I sat down to do some EFT to see if I could get to the bottom of what was going on. As I went through the EFT, I became aware of a part of me that I had previously been completely oblivious to, a part that was trying to protect me, based on assumptions left over from an experience so long ago, that I thought was no longer affecting me. I was incredulous to hear that part’s message, to realise that a part of me was still frozen in time, and to experience the integration that followed theEFT session. I would never have figured it out logically, it would simply never have occurred to the left side of my brain that the issue I had was in any way connected to something that I thought I had resolved long ago. I gave thanks for the power ofEFT to help me to get out of my own road, and allow my right brain to go to work.

A month later, during a Focusing session with my new Focusing Partner, I saw this in action again. I was feeling overwhelmed about my inability to shift a long term pattern, one that the logical side of my brain has been ready to trade in for some time, but seems to lack the ability to figure out how! As I Focused, and went into the felt sense that developed in my stomach, I asked the felt sense what it needed. All of a sudden I saw an image of a little plant in a pot, badly wilted with the flower drooping right over. I just knew that the plant represented a part of me that I hadn’t given any energy to for a long time, if ever, and I felt such sadness. My left brain immediately kicked in and demanded to know how the little plant could possibly be saved. I took a breath, put my hand back on the felt sense, and just allowed whatever needed to form the space to do so. The little plant revealed that all it needed was a little water to keep it going, that no great measures or heroic efforts were required, simply a little water, and the energy that went with delivering it. Logically the issue was still as big and impossible to resolve as before, but I had had that shift that all Focusers come to know, that shift that suddenly meant I was no longer in the place of disempowerment that I was, and had instead felt an undeniable forward movement. I smiled and gave thanks for the power of Focusing to help me to get out of my own road, and allow my right brain to go to work.

It is my belief that Reiki, EFT, & Focusing, and many other methods of the same genre, all assist us to get out of our own way, to move aside the logical left brain, to allow a window into the creative and wise right brain. However none of these methods are any use to us, without what Jill Bolte Taylor spoke so eloquently about – we need to make the choice to live more out of the right side of the brain. So if you are tempted to spend more time trying to figure it all out, remember that involving both sides of the brain will actually enable you to do that far more effectively. All the tools mentioned on this Self Healing Portalcan help you do this, once you’ve made the all important decision to honour the right side of your brain.

When I was new to EFT, I spent a lot of time studying how to deal with psychological reversal, and I felt it held the key to healing complex cases. I regularly used language like ‘self-sabotage’ and ‘resistance’ in my healing vocabulary. As a new practitioner I found myself feeling like I was ‘doing battle with PR’ a lot of the time. With what I’ve learnt over the last few months, I now realise that using all of these terms can be counterproductive, and there’s a much more supportive way to look at this important aspect of healing.

Learning Focusing has completely changed the way I approach my own healing, and the way I work with others. It has helped me to realise that there is no definitive “I” who is feeling something, but rather “I” am a collection of feelings, thoughts and beliefs, some of which are completely inconsistent with each other. I have come to realise that it isn't helpful to see myself as being reversed on healing an issue, or as if a part of me is sabotaging myself, and that instead, it is far more supportive if whenever I feel stuck in any healing that I’m doing, I acknowledge that it's probably simply a result of there being a belief, emotion, or thought inside of me that needs to be heard.

After working with the ideas in Ann’s writing about using Focusing with action blocks, I realised that what she was talking about extends far beyond dealing with action blocks themselves. Ann writes that any time there is something that you want to do in your life that you don’t, you need to be aware that there is also a part of you that doesn’t want to do the action. I have found that this also applies to things that you want to do that you actually do. Here’s an example that may help explain this:

I have made the decision to move back to New Zealand, and to build an eco-home and create a large permaculture garden with my partner. I’m really excited about the upcoming move and the whole project, even though I know it’s going to be a huge amount of work. I’m also aware of some thoughts that in the past I would have pushed out of my awareness, because they would have seemed too difficult to deal with. These thoughts are along the line of the fact that I love living by myself, I love having all the time I do to do the healing and learning that I’m doing, and I’m not going to have the luxury of all that time once building our own home. By sitting with these thoughts, I am able to acknowledge them as real. With what I’ve learnt with Focusing over the last few months, I know that it’s not a matter of having to convince that part of me that it is wrong and that it needs to change it’s mind, but rather all I need to do is simply hear it’s concerns. I’ve experienced the forward movement that comes with this so many times, I know it’s a safe thing to do, and that I’m not going to end up feeling like I have to negotiate with someone holding me hostage, which is how I would have felt in the past if I had seen this as resistance or self-sabotage or psychological reversal.

If you are feeling stuck in some area of your life, or things just aren’t flowing in the direction you want to go in some aspect, consider looking at the language you are using, when you talk about the problem, or simply when you are ‘talking’ to yourself with your thinking. You may find that there are aspects of yourself that you are denying the right to be heard, who are, for good reasons, pulling in a different direction to where you want to go. If you are using EFT, consider tapping for these thoughts in a way that you acknowledge that this part of you has a right to feel the way it is, and try finding ways to listen to it, rather than simply tapping to ‘remove the resistance’. You may find that your relationship with yourself changes radically, and moves you towards true self-acceptance.

I now realise that my initial instinct that dealing with what is termed psychological reversal is indeed very important. However I have found that my approach to it has completely changed. Where in the past I thought I need to tap to ‘remove’ the PR, I now realise it’s far more a case of needing to take the time to truly listen to feelings, beliefs and thoughts inside me. Focusing has really helped me to do this, because through it, I have experienced time and time again that I do not need to exile the part of me that is pulling in a different direction to where I want to go, and I don’t have to negotiate with it either, or try to change its mind. All I need to do is simply listen. What a relief!

The internet is such a rich source of free information and inspiration to help us with our healing, but there is so much out there sometimes it can take some time to tap into useful resources. This article provides links to and information about a couple of sites on the internet that have some really useful resources.

This blog, created by the makers of the new DVD on EFT called “Try it on Everything” has lots of free audios available to listen to online, or download. Each audio is an interview with an EFT expert, giving ideas of how to approach a certain issue with EFT. I find them to be a rich source of both inspiration and information – I download a few onto my MP3 player, and listen to them sometimes while walking with the dogs. Each one is about 30 minutes long, and contains ideas on how to approach the issue, as well as some example tapping. Initially I stuck with listening to the ones with topics that seemed relevant to what I was working on, but I later discovered that listening to the topics that didn’t seem relevant was often just as useful, because it gave me ideas of different approaches, which can be used no matter what the issue you are working on is.

EFT is such a wonderfully simple method, and yet it has such scope for creativity in its use that different people can use the same basic method in quite different ways. The interviews on the EFT Revealed blog give many ideas on how to approach an issue, because they are with such a wide variety of very experienced EFT practitioners. If you are stuck on working with an issue on your own, or just looking to learn new ways of applying EFT, I highly recommend these audios. If I’m working on something and no matter what I tap on, I just don’t seem to be able to clear the issue, I sometimes download and listen to one of the EFT Revealed audios, and more often than not, I have an idea of a different way I could approach it which helps me to clear the issue.

One interview that I listened to recently which contained a particularly useful idea was Maggie Adkins Talking to Your Body. Maggie presents a very simple but powerful method for getting answers from your body about an issue, that could be used any time you are working on something physical and looking for a new lead to tap on.

I have recently discovered that EFT Practitioner Brad Yates has two free demo e-tapping files available on his web page. This tapping is a brilliant way to start your tapping on a resistant issue that you have been trouble shifting. I find that if I do the tapping with a particular issue in mind, before starting other work with that issue, something seems to open up inside me and give me more access to shift the issue. You can either play the two audio files online and tap along, or download them in MP3 format onto your computer.

Ann Weiser Cornell’s Focusing website is really rich with sources of free information and inspiration for anyone using Focusing as a tool in their self healing. There are three main areas of free information on this site:

The library contains lots of articles that give insight into Focusing. Ann generously shares her huge experience with Focusing through these articles, and reading a selection of them is a great way to see how powerful the Focusing process can be, and how you can approach the stories waiting inside you to be told.

The FAQ page not only contains answers to frequently asked questions, but also an index to the weekly Focusing tips that Ann sends out in her newsletter. These tips are a brilliant source of information – if you have been doing some Focusing and seem to have hit a brick wall and just can’t go any further with an issue, scan your eye down the list of topics and you may well find something jumps out at you. I’ve used this quite successfully – picking a topic that seems to be drawing my attention, and through reading the tip learning a new approach to listening to the story inside of me.

The multimedia download page gives links to download sample chapters from Ann’s books, and recordings of phone seminars that Ann has done. The phone seminars are a great way to get a feel for how you can use Focusing.

One area I’ve really benefited from with Ann’s resources is Focusing on Action Blocks. If there is something in your life that you want to be doing, that you just don’t seem to be able to do, using Focusing can be really powerful. If you prefer to read about this, you can read a chapter from Ann’s book “Radical Acceptance”, or if you would prefer to listen, you can listen to the phone seminar Ann did on Focusing and Action Blocks.

I recently had the privilege of witnessing the most beautiful healing in the son of a friend who came to see me. There were a lot of learnings for him so he generously suggested that I write up his case to share in case some of the learnings help others.

Lucas is in his mid twenties and is a healthy and fit young man. The reason he came to see me was that he had a huge longing for an intimate relationship and it was dominating his feelings. He stressed that he came from an excellent family and had a great childhood and felt that he didn’t really have any issues, yet he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t had any success in finding a relationship.

The first session we did didn’t really reveal any new information and Lucas was a little frustrated that he wasn’t able to access his feelings. So at the start of the second session I asked Lucas whether he knew anything about his birth (I was working on the basis that the first intimate relationship we have is with our mother and was curious to know whether there were any challenges for him right from the start.)He said that he was born a month early and spent several weeks in an incubator. He knew that his mother was upset at not being able to spend as much time with him as she wanted to, or hold and feed him when she wanted to. I introduced Silvia Hartmann’s idea of proxy tapping for past selves to Lucas and asked him if he would like to try some and he thought it sounded worth trying.

While tapping for the little newborn baby he was, alone in the incubator, Lucas started to get in touch with a little sadness for the little boy. We did some tapping on the sadness and some on how he didn’t have the intimacy he wanted with his mother right from the start and how that may still be affecting him now, and Lucas suddenly realised that a part of him was really afraid of intimacy. We continued working on this theme, while also tapping for the little baby he was, and this issue was collapsed and Lucas felt really differently.His longing for a relationship and his fear of being hurt and vulnerable seemed to have simply vanished.

At the start of our third session together Lucas was feeling a little raw and was very surprised to have realised since the last session that in actual fact he wasn’t very in touch with his feelings at all. He had come to realise that he is a very intellectual person and constantly analysed what he thought about a situation, but was rarely in touch with how he actually felt. When we started tapping on sadness for the little boy who had been so isolated, Lucas said he felt it wasn’t worth going there and really minimised the sadness. We both felt like there was a brick wall in between Lucas and his feelings as the session progressed, and that we weren’t getting to the real issues, instead it felt like we were just circling round and round symptoms of the problem.

At this point we decided to try some Focusing, which Lucas had read a little about but not yet tried. I invited him to go inside and see if he could get in touch with the part of him who was sad. He said he felt as if he had been hit in the stomach and that he could feel the sadness there, then almost immediately Lucas said that he thought this was silly and not worth going there. I suggested he see if he could get in touch with the part of him who thought it was silly.As Lucas sat and listened to this part of him, it became evident that the part was trying to protect him from feeling, something it had done all his life, since the intense feelings of being all alone in the incubator had been too much for Lucas to deal with. Once he had truly listened to this part, Lucas was then able to get in touch with the intense sadness and aloneness of the little baby in the incubator, and for the first time in many years, he found himself able to cry. As we tapped and Focused the image of the baby in the incubator went from one of intense loneliness and vulnerability, to one of being protected and safe, and Lucas felt like a huge mountain of emotion he didn’t even know was there had been shifted.

When Lucas suggested that I might like to write up his case, he told me some of the things he had learnt from the EFT and Focusing sessions that were really important to him. They included:

He was incredulous that things from so far back in his life that he had no conscious memory of could still be affecting him,and affecting him so much. He was convinced that the proxy tapping we did for the little boy was what opened the door to him being able to get in touch with the fear of intimacy that he hadn’t been aware of.
Lucas was amazed to see how many of the current themes in his life (fear of being alone, fear of intimacy, need for independence, longing for an intimate relationship but feeling it was out of reach) all stemmed from his experiences in his first few days of life.
Lucas was also amazed to realise that where he thought he was a very emotional person, he had actually been keeping himself distant from his emotions all his life by analysing situations and living in his mind and fantasies.
He said that he could really see that it was in truly listening to the part of him who was saying it was silly to spend time tapping on the sadness that he was able to get past that huge brick wall that was standing between him and his feelings.
Lucas was very interested to learn that the part of him protecting himself from feeling was trying to help him. He had a strong sense that it wasn’t trying to prevent him from healing, it was simply doing what it thought was in his highest good – protecting him from feelings that could hurt him.
Lucas commented that he had recently been introduced to the Enneagram tool, and was amazed to have found during the EFT and Focusing sessions that the core issue appeared to be exactly as predicted for his Ennea-type. He is type 7 in the Enneagram, and the core issue for those with this type is emotional isolation very early in life (his time in the incubator). Lucas felt that without doing the EFT he wouldn’t have been able to move from simply an intellectual understanding of the Enneagram. He also felt that exposure to the information about his Ennea-type enabled him to recognise just how core the issue he had been working on was.

Lucas feels like so much in his life has changed as a result of this and he left the fourth session determined to maintain his newly established dialogue with the fearful voice in his head.

If you have been working with EFT or another method of healing for a while and are finding that there seems to be a brick wall standing in your way, consider taking some time to go quietly inside like Lucas did, and see if you can hear the voice in your head that is urging you not to go near how you are feeling. Simply listening to that voice, without reasoning with it or trying to change its mind, may enable you to discover why that part of you is afraid of you getting in touch with how you are feeling about the issue. If you find it difficult to do this sort of exploration alone, consider having a session with a Focusing coach to help you to get in touch with this aspect of you.

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The Dangers of Positive Thinking (Making friends with “negativity”)

If ever there could be an unpopular title in the self help world, this might just be at the top of the list! I know, I can hear the uproar now, but I believe that this is a really important topic to address. Fortunately with an awareness of the downside of too much positive thinking, and tools like EFT and Focusing, this needn’t be a problem for any of us.

Many people think it’s not possible to have “too much” positive thinking, but I believe that positive thinking used unwisely, when it essentially just smears a very thin coat of paint over a wall covered in unhealthy beliefs and points of view and unresolved emotions, can literally kill us.Research is now showing that there is a common profile amongst people who have cancer, and included in this profile are being nice and positive and rarely expressing negative emotions or thoughts.

Negative thoughts and feelings have had a bad rap over the last couple of decades, but it is my belief that these thoughts and feelings are in actual fact our friends. I see regular “negative” thoughts and feelings as being similar to a warning light on a dashboard – if they keep showing up they are alerting us to some underlying issue that needs to be resolved. We can try to stop the light coming on with a lot of positive thinking, or we can clear the underlying energy blockages that are resulting in the light coming on. If we clear the underlying blockages, we will find ourselves naturally thinking positively because the cause of the “negative” thoughts will be gone. This has the added benefit of freeing up all the energy we were using to consciously create positive thinking, which becomes available for healing and enjoying life.

It can be difficult to see so called “negative” thoughts and feelings as our friends, so here are a couple of examples to illustrate this idea in action:

Food sensitivities

For many years I had reactions to a lot of different foods. I thought that it was the inevitable end result of damage to my digestive and immune systems due to the long term illness I had, and the medication the doctors prescribed. I was determined to be positive about it, and my message was that it didn’t matter that I couldn’t eat a lot of regular foods,I was lucky just to be well, and when I didn’t eat the foods I was reacting to,I wasn’t ill. Eventually, thanks to EFT,I was able to discover that there was a little voice inside me that was trying to protect me from the foods that it considered to be dangerous for me. When I was able to stop covering over the voice with positive thinking, and instead listen to its message, I was able to heal the beliefs that were causing that part of me to react to common foods. I haven’t had a single reaction to a food or chemical in the 18 months since, all because I stopped ignoring the “negative”thought, and instead befriended it and took the time to listen to it.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

A common pattern with folks with CFS is to push ourselves very hard. This often includes lots of positive thinking to convince ourselves that we can seethe positive in any situation and carry on and get things done. CFS is a devastating illness, and the need to be positive is very real. However it’s another good example of where being positive to the exclusion of listening to the “negative” messages of our body and mind is not conducive to healing.

There is always a reason why we have the symptoms that we do and in a lot of cases no amount of positive thinking is going to make them go away.With CFS a far more helpful approach is to make friends with our body,and really spend the time hearing its message, hearing all those so called“negative” thoughts, beliefs and feelings, which are truly our friends as they hold the keys to us discovering why we are ill and how we can heal. For those of us who put a lot of pressure on ourselves sometimes the only way our body has of drawing our attention to points of view and feelings that we have that need resolving is to shut down our ability to really function in the world.While we can just put a brave face on and accept our limiting functioning, we can often move to far greater healing by befriending our body and our “negative” thoughts and in doing so discover the key to our healing.

If you would like to explore this idea further, check out Appendix J in the free book “You CAN Heal with EFT” and do some tapping for the part of you that wants to just think positively and the part of you that is producing the “negative” thoughts. This process by EFT Master Jaqui Crooks can be a great way to start a tapping session and maximise your chances of making friends with that part of you that is being “negative”. When we do this, more often than not we discover that the part has positive intentions and if we can hear it out, we can start working with that part of ourselves instead of just painting over it with positive thoughts.

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Animals have been teachers for me for as long as I can remember, and I recently learnt a powerful lesson from a wonderful cat who I shared a home with for two years. As a result of our move to New Zealand, my partner and I drove the cat we had previously given a home to up to his new home in the north of France. The initial 15 minutes of the trip were really difficult for me. Monty had previously been a wild cat and had never been confined before. He has a strong constitution and the sedative only took the edge off for him, so he was meowing a lot and sounded so plaintive it felt like it was cutting right through my heart. I started tapping for Monty as we drove away from the house, and continued tapping but it didn’t seem to be having any effect, I was in tears and both Monty and I were getting more and more upset. My partner suggested I switch to tapping for myself as he could see that I was getting more upset and knew that we had a 10 hour drive ahead of us.

As I started tapping on how awful it was to hear him cry and feel his pain, we noticed that Monty immediately calmed down. I continued tapping and as I did I realised that the main issue was that Monty’s meow represented pain and suffering for me, and that was why I was so upset. I talked to my partner in an attempt to find a way to reframe how I was relating to Monty’s meow, and as a result tapped on “Even though Monty’s meow represents pain and suffering to me, I now choose to see that his meow actually represents strength and fortitude.” Tapping on this statement led to the realisation that as a highly sensitive person I hadn’t realised that my suffering with someone who is upset is often simply adding more suffering to the mix. All of a sudden I realised that I had the choice, I could choose to be upset or I could choose to trust that Monty is a strong cat (evidenced by his response to a strong sedative!), and trust that he could handle the move just fine.

This is such a great example of how tapping on an emotion with EFT can help us to clear the excess emotion and reveal the point of view that is actually generating the emotion. As I tapped on the feeling that his suffering was cutting through my heart I was able to see with clarity that it was my interpretation of the sound of Monty’s meow that was actually causing the suffering, and that in choosing that interpretation I was adding more to Monty’s upset. Monty settled right down and slept most of the trip, only making small complaints about being in the cage each time we stopped, and adjusted incredibly well to his new home.

As I continued to tap and process the learnings from this experience as we continued on our journey, I realised that I have for a long time unknowingly worn suffering as a badge of being a highly sensitive person. It became so clear to me that I would be able to help far more in situations where someone is upset if I was able to maintain clarity and see the strength in the other person/animal rather than focusing on my own interpretations that have been coming from my points of view rather than any factual basis.

This was a huge learning experience for me, and I know there are a lot of other folk who read the Self Healing Portal newsletter who are highly sensitive, so I thought I’d write this experience up in case it can help anyone else out there who suffers terribly in the face of others’ upset. It is a powerful example of how emotions are generated from a point of view, and how we can use EFT to clear the emotions and then reframe the point of view.

One of the blocks that many of us encounter along the path of our healing journey, whether we are consciously aware of it or not, is a part or parts of us not wanting to be made wrong. When working to heal any long term pattern it is inevitable that we will encounter points of view that are supporting the pattern that are not in our best interests. This can result in a part of us feeling like it will have to be made wrong in order for us to heal, and so it stubbornly digs it’s heels in and refuses to co-operate, feeling that we will get in trouble if we are proven to be wrong and so it is not in our best interests.

Most of us go through life taking on points of view as a result of the experiences we’ve had, then collecting evidence over the years that support our points of view. Healing requires us to allow the points of view to change as we clear the emotional trauma associated with the experiences that result in us taking on the beliefs and perspectives that we did. With the assistance of wonderful tools like EFT and Focusing we are able to let go of the comfort of “being right” and instead experience the joy that comes from having the freedom to see things in a new way.

Years ago someone shared a great analogy with me to help me with this. Imagine that there are two men standing on opposite ends of a football field, talking to each other on cellphones. Jim and Bob don’t know where each other are, and Jim says to Bob, “Have you seen the new hot air balloon in town?” Bob replies, “Yeah it’s pretty cool. I’ve never see a black hot air balloon before.” Jim says, “Surely there can’t be two hot air balloons in town, but the one I’m looking at is white.” “Where are you?” asks Bob. “Down at the football field.” replies Jim. Bob shakes his head and says “That’s where I am, and the balloon is definitely black.” Both men shake their heads as they wonder if their friend is losing it, Jim can clearly see that the hot air balloon is white and Bob can clearly see that it is black. Eventually Bob realises that if Jim is at the football field too, if he goes for a wander he and Jim could talk in person and resolve the mystery. As he walks around the hot air balloon and looks up, he can see that in actual fact the hot air balloon is white on one side and black on the other…

When something traumatic happens to us, it’s easy to take on a point of view as if the event was solely how we experienced it and that there is no other way to see it. Like with the hot air balloon, if we are able to shift our perspective a little, we will be able to see more of the situation and see if from other angles. We weren’t wrong in how we saw it, we simply had a limited perspective and couldn’t see the whole picture.

One area where remembering this can be very useful is if we are struggling to forgive someone for something that they did that caused us to be hurt. If we can use EFT or Focusing or another method that works well for us to raise our perspective and see it from another angle, we may find it easier to forgive the person for their involvement, without having to make ourselves wrong. Life really isn’t black and white, just like the hot air balloon, even though it can feel that way when we are convinced there is no way we can forgive someone.

Another area I find this helps is when I’m stuck in some strong emotions that just aren’t shifting when I’m tapping with EFT. A good example of this is an experience I had where my partner and I were taking our cat on a long trip to his new home. I was very upset by Monty’s meows and it wasn’t until I asked my partner how he saw it that I was able to see that I was stuck in my own perspective of Monty’s suffering, which was quite different to my partners’. You can read about this at <insert link to Monty article>. Asking someone else how they view a situation can be a wonderful way to help us to reframe our point of view and find the emotional relief that comes from doing so.

There is no doubt that it can be uncomfortable coming face to face with points of view that we have taken on that are no longer supporting us. I experienced this in a graphic way when I realised while doing some EFT that I had taken on the belief that the world is an unsafe place and that I was vulnerable due to birth trauma. When I realised that a part of me was causing me to react to foods that aren’t in fact harmful because its perspective was that the foods were dangerous, I went through an uncomfortable few moments realising that my years of illness were rested on a point of view I took on that was not actually true. Initially it felt like my whole illness would be invalidated if I was to heal as a result of discovering this, there was real resistance to accepting that in actual fact, my beliefs were wrong! Fortunately EFT got me past that resistance and my years and years of seriously poor health are now becoming distant memories.

So if you are stuck in an illness or a pattern that you are having real trouble shifting, consider looking at your point of view and having a chat with any parts of you that may be feeling threatened by the idea of your points of view changing. Remember the hot air balloon and see if you can rise above your old story and take on a new one, and enjoy the freedom that comes from doing so.

Most people who learn to drive discover that there is a blind spot in the mirror fairly early in their driving career, hopefully by being told rather than by experience. It’s just as important to realise that we have an inbuilt blind spot when it comes to doing our own healing, so that we can find ways to manage it. In the same way that an entire car can fail to be revealed in a rear view mirror, we can find ourselves working on clearing issues that just don’t budge because we are only dealing with what we can consciously see. One way to look at it is that what we can see in the car mirror is like what is known to the conscious mind and what we can’t see (what is in the blind spot) is what is known by the subconscious mind. The key to healing the big issues therefore lies in finding ways to adjust the mirrors so we can see what is in the blind spot. No amount of carefully looking into the mirror without moving it will help us.

How do you know if you have a blind spot? Many people are sure that they are very self aware and have looked at all the aspects that could possibly be contributing to their issue, and yet they still find the issue negatively influencing their lives. It’s actually very easy to know if you have a blind spot – if you have tried every angle on an issue that you can think of and yet are still adversely affected by the issue, chances are you have a blind spot. Note that the blind spot is issue specific – you may find that you can work with EFT or Focusing on particular issues and they heal without difficulty and yet have another issue that just doesn’t seem to want to budge no matter how you approach it.

So if you’ve discovered that it’s likely that you have a blind spot for the issue you are working on, what can you do? The answer is the same as dealing with a blind spot in a car mirror:

1. Adjust the mirrors so that you minimise the area that can’t be seen in any of them.

2. Continually scan between the mirrors as you drive to ensure that you are seeing from all angles.

1. Look at whether there could be something resulting in the mirror being set to avoid seeing the issue clearly. This is what is known as psychological reversals in EFT. I prefer to look at these as parts of us that have something that needs to be heard before they feel safe and OK to heal. Ways you can work with this include guessing what the “reversals” might be and tapping through them with EFT, and using Focusing (see below) to listen in and hear what needs to be heard. This step can require patience. If there is something inside us that needs to be heard and we haven’t been listening for a long time, it can take some time to build the trust to hear what needs to be said. For one way to approach this if it is proving difficult for you, see The Importance of Basic Trust in Healing. For another approach see Rue Hass’ excellent article Honouring Your Dark Angels and have a go at answering the questions she poses in that article.

2. One particular type of reversal that is common in long term illnesses and patterns is that of not feeling safe to heal. If there are subconscious issues surrounding safety it can be necessary to sit and tap with a trusted friend or practitioner before those parts of us that need to open up feel safe to do so. Even if you aren’t consciously aware of safety related issues, if you have a long term illness that you are having difficulty healing on your own, working with a trusted friend or practitioner may be beneficial for you to allow those hurt and afraid parts of you to feel safer in the healing process. I have personally found this to make an enormous difference to my healing journey.

3. Considering doing a course to learn the skill called Focusing. While some people are able to learn this skill simply by reading a book, most of us find it much easier to learn with a teacher guiding us. Part of the Focusing experience seems to be that the parts inside us that are afraid or reluctant to talk really feel heard when we Focus with another person, and the Focusing training can be the start of this for some people. If you would like you can read about how much difference learning Focusing has made for a woman who had suffered from depression and weight challenges for many years here.

4. Using a combination of EFT and Focusing can be very powerful. I find that this is like scanning the various mirrors on the car – by using different ways in to my subconscious I am able to see from more angles. And further combining this with meditation and reflection – watching the thoughts come and go while sitting formally in meditation or throughout the day as you go about other activities – can bring another mirror into play and further widen the angles you can look from onto the issue.

5. Use other tools to help to see the issue from new angles. A great book that I use for this is Lise Bourbeau’s Your body’s telling you: Love Yourself. This book not only contains suggested metaphysical meanings for physical symptoms, but also has a great questioning process that you can use to get some clues as to what you can tap on for any issue.

6. Try some tapping around self acceptance as suggested in Ideas for Enhancing the EFT Setup on Gary Craig’s EFT website. This can sometimes help us to come from another angle as it deals directly with common psychological reversals.

7. Another option is to try working with an experienced EFT practitioner. A practitioner may be able to guide you and help you to be able to gently adjust the mirrors, and look at the issue from many different angles, making it easier for you to gain access to your subconscious and hear what needs to be heard.

If you have been using some of these tools for some time and are despairing of ever healing the major issue you are working on, try looking at it from the point of view of the blind spot, enlist some help from a trusted friend or experienced practitioner, and consider trying a combined approach with different methods, including some meditation and reflection in your day. You may find that it really widens the angle that you can see from and helps you to make headway with your persistent issue.

I recently had a physical issue that no amount of tapping was shifting, so decided to find a new way to approach it. It is a good example of how we often need to look at an issue from different angles, as described in article The Blind Spot.

For several nights I had been kept awake part or most of the night with intense itching in my hands. There were small red blisters developing and patches of what I suspected might be eczema. I tapped on the physical symptoms and how I felt about them but the itching didn’t lessen at all. I had skimmed through the ideas in Lise Bourbeau’s book Your Body is Telling You: Love Yourself and hadn’t been able to relate to anything she had written as useful. I suspected that I might have a blind spot on this issue, given that I’d tapped and tapped and got nowhere.

I was feeling very frustrated by my inability to resolve this issue and the itching was driving me crazy, so I decided to sit down with Lise’s book again and make notes from each section that could be relevant and see if a theme developed. I felt it was likely that there were clues in what she had written that I had discounted because I didn’t want to see the issue. These are some of the notes I made:

At this point I realised it that time was marching on and I hadn’t had any lunch so I decided to stop for a bite to eat and continue after lunch. An hour later after doing all sorts of things I found myself hanging out the washing and realising that I had real resistance to sitting down and tapping. I assumed there must be something in me that needed addressing so guessed at what it could be. The first tapping statement below is a result of that guess.

That night my hands were still itchy and I thought perhaps the tapping had had no effect. The next day however I noticed a real change in my attitude towards the work we were doing. I found myself doing jobs that I had been avoiding because I felt like doing them, and because they no longer felt like work, but rather simply an activity I had always enjoyed doing. I realised that I had really been driven by my beliefs about work and getting things done, and had been letting that erode my enjoyment in activities I had found enjoyable in the past. That afternoon I also suddenly realised that I had been wearing gloves that weren’t allowing my skin to breath and that perhaps the sheer number of hours with the gloves on was what was causing the eczema. I did a quick search on the net and it revealed that there are two types of eczema – immune related and contact. A change to cotton gloves resulted in the itching and eczema clearing rapidly.

While some people may say that the EFT had nothing to do with it, it was simply a physical issue that was resolved with a change in gloves, my feeling is that my hands were pointing me towards a major issue that I seriously needed to resolve early on in our project. Once I had become aware of, and cleared, some of the beliefs that were driving me, the simple solution to the symptoms became apparent and I was able to heal. To me this is a great example of a blind spot – if there is something that we need to become aware of before we are able to heal, it can be fully concealed in the blind spot unless we find a way to approach the issue from new angles and reveal what is in the blind spot.

A.H. Almaas writes a lot about what he calls “basic trust”. In simple terms this is something that we have when we trust that what appears to be a separate ego self is in actual fact not separate from the whole at all. In practical terms that means that few, if any, of us have this basic trust by the time we are more than a few hours old, if not a lot earlier. When I first encountered Almaas’ ideas about basic trust I was intrigued, fascinated… and couldn’t really see how they related to my healing journey on a day to day basis. I’ve recently had some insight into how this key concept can underlie some of the healing that many of us who are unwell or dealing with destructive behaviours can benefit from doing.

My life circumstances have changed hugely over the last couple of months. I’m now living in a caravan on a small block of land where my partner and I plan to build our own natural home (with our own hands), and establish extensive native and food forest plantings. I’m learning so many new skills and working so hard physically that I’m almost constantly outside my comfort zone, and I’m regularly grappling with the enormity of going from a bare block of land with three trees on it to implementing our vision. I’m also too busy most of the time to take much time to tap (EFT), but I’ve found that hasn’t slowed down my healing journey at all, because working with planting trees and bagging mulch and building bridges etc all gives a chance for reflection and to watch my thoughts. What comes up provides rich material for further observation, and for my EFT tapping when I do get the chance.

Today it’s pouring with rain and too wet to work outside and I’ve run out of productive inside jobs that need doing. So I finally sat down to do some tapping. I started by writing down what I’ve been observing in myself lately as I work: I seem to have an innate tendency to assume that things will not turn out the way I want them to, that something will go wrong and that there is something wrong with our plans that is waiting like a huge hole for us to fall in. I’ve always thought I was quite an optimistic person but confronted with so much change and so much manual work over the last month and a bit, I’ve seen that there are a lot of negative thoughts running through my mind on a regular basis. So I start tapping with a question that comes up for me as I reflect – “Why don’t I trust life?” Immediately the tears start flowing and I know I’ve hit onto something big.

I’ve found that when I hit something that likely has origins early in my life that proxy tapping seems to be the most powerful way forward. I wrote about this in an earlier article and highly recommend this to anyone working on long term patterns or illnesses that they want to heal. I use a three step process based on what Silvia Hartmann described in her article about proxy tapping, with the addition of the gamut process. (For the detailed steps see further on in this article.) I often find that as I do this process I end up going back to earlier in time. In this particular case the phrase that came to mind was “she was deprived of the chance to trust in life before she was even born”, so I did some proxy tapping for “This unborn baby girl” and then once that had cleared came back to doing the same tapping for “This young girl” and then “This teenage girl.” For each I did the three step process described below and it was amazing how much emotion came up, and how much relief I felt as I tapped through each step.

I have come to believe that healing is a matter of listening to the pain inside us that is as yet unheard. I believe it is that unheard pain that subconsciously drives our behaviour now, and why many of us can tap a lot with EFT without getting results on the big issues. Until that pain is accessed and heard it stands in the way of our healing. Once heard it no longer drives our behaviour or our feelings – it no longer runs our life by determining our reactions to all that happens without us even realising it.

The more I work with EFT the more I realise the depths that it can take us to. I’ve found that the key to this is gaining the trust of the hurting parts inside of us. One of the most effective ways I’ve found to do this is Silvia’s proxy tapping. As we tap for the younger parts of us we let them know that we care and that we are willing to hear their stories. As we do this we gradually gain their trust so that they open up more and more and share their pain and stories, making them accessible for us to work with and heal. I suspect that when we have tapped and tapped and still not found relief on the issues we are working on, it is quite possible that we have some major underlying trust issues that are resulting in the parts of us that hold the key to healing not being ready to lend their vital support to our healing process. If you find yourself in this situation perhaps some proxy tapping for the younger parts of you around the theme of trust would be useful.

1. Start with the premise that something might have happened early in your life, perhaps even before you were born, that eroded your ability to trust in the goodness of life. You don’t need to have any “evidence” to prove this, just be open to it being a possibility.

2. Tap with the following three step process, based on Silvia Hartmann’s proxy tapping, with the addition of the 9 gamut process. Run the process first for “this unborn baby girl/boy”, then move on to “this newborn baby girl/boy”, then repeat for “this young girl/boy” then “this teenage girl/boy”:

a. Tap with the setup statement as Silvia uses it. For example, “Even though this young girl has no trust that life will turn out OK, I now deeply and profoundly love, accept and heal this young girl.” Tap through the points for the younger part of you, “this young girl has no trust”. Follow any feelings or thoughts that come up in the usual way of working with EFT but using Silvia’s phrasing.

b. Do the 9 gamut process very slowly linking it with the issue at hand each step of the way. For example with each step of the process think “Everything that has resulted in this young girl not trusting that life will work out OK”.

c. Tap a round through all the points as Silvia suggests in her article, but for all the effects of whatever happened. For example, “I now deeply and profoundly heal this young girl of all effects of everything that resulted in her not trusting that life will work out OK.”

3. All the while that you are tapping ensure that you follow the trail of any thoughts or feelings that come up, incorporating them into the tapping. As you are proxy tapping, the thoughts and emotions quite likely belong to the earlier you, so make sure that you use the proxy tapping wording and the intention to be tapping on behalf of the younger you.

4. Remember to go on and work with “this newborn baby girl/boy” then “this young girl/boy”, then “this teenage boy/girl” once you have run through the three steps for “this unborn baby girl/boy”. Do each step whether you consciously think that trust was an issue for you at that point in your life or not.

5. Remember that this sort of work can run deeper than you realise. If you feel tired you may need to stop for a while and give yourself a break before carrying on. Respect those inner parts of you that have carried this pain for so long – you may feel enormous relief on their behalf or tremendous sadness that they have been carrying this pain for so long. Tap on whatever comes up and respect the inner parts need for time to process if you feel tired.

This sort of work can make an enormous difference to our healing journey. As we gain the trust of those inner parts, we are able to heal from those events that happened that gradually or rapidly eroded our trust in life, and in doing so enable us to relax and trust the flow of life. Over the last couple of months it has become very apparent to me that everything that causes me stress comes back to one simple thing – not trusting in the flow and goodness of life. As I tap and address this, I feel immense relief. It’s still a work in progress but it feels good. I invite you to try this process and to drop me an email to let me know how it went if you would like to (selfheal4me@gmail.com)

Most of us who have been working with our healing for some time discover that the core of our current time reactions can be found in our early childhood. For many this is a real surprise, we like to think that we are rational beings and it’s hard to believe that we could be hostage to a child inside us who didn’t have his or her needs met. The more healing I do, the more I discover that the roots of my reactions to circumstances and people in the present can be found in the first seven or so years in my life. This article details a few resources that I’ve found invaluable in the process of getting to know and heal my inner child.

I’ve already written about Silvia Hartmann’s proxy tapping on several occasions; however an article about healing our inner child without a reference to Silvia’s message would be incomplete. Since starting to do proxy tapping for my early self, I have really noticed a difference in my healing, so I highly recommend this sort of tapping to anyone with long term issues that they are struggling to budge. The time between conception and birth, our actual birth and our first few years of life were a time when we were unable to express how we were feeling all the time and unresolved emotions from this time period have a huge influence on us for years to come.

More recently I have come across an excellent book (published in 1992!) which has helped me to understand how it is that I am regularly held hostage by my inner child, and why so many of my issues go back to the first few years of my life. The book by John Bradshaw, one of the original inner child pioneers, is called Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child. On it’s own I suspect I wouldn’t have been able to do the amazing healing I have, but combining it with EFT to help me to release the blocks to my doing the exercises in the book, and tapping through all the issues that arise from doing the exercises, has been very powerful.

One of the simple methods of accessing more material to work with using EFT that I’ve found from reading and working with Homecoming is writing a letter to and from my inner child. John Bradshaw suggests writing a simple letter from you to your inner child to tell him/her how much you love him/her, that you are there for him/her, and that you are so happy that s/he is there. He then suggests using your non-dominant hand to write a response from your inner child back to your adult self. I put off trying this for a few days and couldn’t really understand why. Eventually I decided to tap on my reluctance to write the letters and the next minute I found myself writing them. The simplicity of the letter back from my inner child took me by surprise, however it was incredibly powerful and resulted in tears, tapping and release of emotions that have obviously been sitting unreleased inside me for most of my life.

I followed the letters and tapping with some more tapping using some simple phrases that I learnt from watching and tapping along with one of Brad Yates’ videos on Youtube, which combines EFT and Ho’oponopono. I’ve found that each time I’ve tapped with this two minute video with the intention of directing the phrases to my inner child something deep has opened up inside of me.

There is a wealth of information on the internet to do with healing and the inner child. I’ve found it’s important to read through different articles and watch the different videos and find the ones that resonate most with me. Here are a couple of other resources that I haven’t personally used much, but came across while searching online, that others might resonate with:

Recently there was a posting on one of the EFT Forums by a practitioner who has discovered the power of having a Tappy Bear to tap with on her own issues. She found that she was much more likely to want to sit down and do EFT with the help of her bear. So I decided to take my inner child shopping and get her a Tappy Bear of her own (the commercial sold ones are very expensive, but a trip to the local second hand clothing store for a toy and some buttons is all that is needed!) I have been amazed to see what has taken place as a result of this. My inner child thinks Benji the dog is just great, and I become quite playful and childlike when he’s around, making things a lot lighter with my healing. I also find that sometimes I just spontaneously “play” with Benji and my inner child and get some real gems coming into my mind of things that I can tap on. I tap using Silvia’s proxy tapping for the age I was that fits the issue and have let go of some emotions that have been smouldering inside me for a very long time. My inner child loves having a friend of her own - many thanks to Kirsten for sparking this new direction in my inner child healing.

I recently listened to an excellent interview of Sarah Chana Radcliffe on Shrink Rap Radio in which Sarah had the most wonderful way of explaining how it is that we all end up with issues. While an intellectual understanding of this is not necessary to use the tools that we have to heal, for those of us with stubborn long term issues the sort of understanding that Sarah shares can be invaluable on our healing journey. The best way to listen to the interview is with a blank piece of paper and a pencil in hand, so that you can draw the picture she unfolds that gives such an excellent explanation of how it all works.

Sarah then goes on to talk about how she incorporates tools like EFT and Focusing into her practice, and she continues to give a great example of how we can work visually to go within and find our own answers (for many of us we can do the same healing without someone guiding us in the way that Sarah guided her client – where she uses a combination of Focusing and other methods, you can simply continue the process with Focusing.)

While listening to the interview is the best way to be introduced to Sarah’s concepts (you get more of a feel for her and her approach that way), for those on dial up or slow connections who can’t download the audio file, there is a PDF transcript available that allows you to read the material.

Most of the time when we think “I” we think of ourselves as being a single individual. One of the things that has become increasingly apparent to me over the last couple of years is that “I” can actually more appropriately be seen as being rather like a committee. Instead of just a single entity with coherent beliefs and thoughts “I” appear far more like a group of people who broadly have the same goal but seem to often be pulling in different directions and going about it in different ways!

Thinking about this recently, I realised that the committee metaphor is actually quite a powerful one for helping us to understand some of the important concepts in our healing. It occurred to me that I’m often finding myself in the position of being like a chairperson on a committee – mediating between committee members with different opinions, and working to make sure all committee members get to have their say, with my own healing.

What sort of a chairperson are you on your own inner committee? Do you do all the talking and tell everyone how things should be, or do you honour the contribution of each member, drawing out the quieter ones and helping them to have their say? Are you easily swayed by the more vocal members of the committee? Do you jump down a member’s throat if they start to express something you don’t agree with or do you encourage each member to continue talking even though you don’t agree with them, so you can better understand their point of view?

It led me to start thinking about what a good chairperson does. I see a good chairperson as being like a leader – the person who sets the overall vision and instead of monopolising the committee, works to bring out the best in the whole team, ensuring that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. I see an ineffective chairperson as being more like a detailed manager – someone who tells everyone what to do and when to do it, rather than honouring each contribution and getting everyone working together with a common vision. Would you prefer to be a leader or a manager with your own committee?

Here are some of my own thoughts on what makes a good chairperson in the self healing sense.

Listen to and engage all members of the committee, and recognise that there are (at least!) two sides to every story

Whenever we are stuck on an issue it suggests that there is more to the internal story than we realise. As the chairperson we may be very focused on the way we want to move forward and failing to notice that there is one (or more) committee members who don’t feel the same about moving forward as we do. Ann Weiser Cornell’s work on Action Blocks really helped me to understand that any time I’m stuck with an issue, it suggests that there is a committee member who has an opinion that I’m not aware of, and I know incorporate what I learnt from Ann’s writing into both my Focusing and my EFT.

Spend time just listening

Sometimes we just need to listen. We need to put away our own agenda and stop trying to get everyone to do what we want them to. One way we can do this when working with EFT is to stop tapping and simply put our hand over the place where we can feel the issue in our body and let it know we are just there to listen. Sometimes we can tap with the attitude of fixing everything and forget that sometimes all we need to do is truly listen to how it is for one or more of the committee members.

Recognise the need for trust

It is so important to recognise the need to build trust amongst the committee members and in the chairperson. Disagreements will arise, and without trust will be difficult to resolve. Just like with a committee, sometimes we might choose to bring in outside consultants (for example an EFT practitioner) to help us with our healing, and we need to be aware that just because the chairperson trusts someone, it doesn’t mean that all the committee members do!

Understand beliefs

Just knowing how the individual committee members feel is rarely enough to gain forward movement, it is usually essential to find out what they believe. If a committee member is emotional, we need to hear the emotions and listen and once the emotions have been released and cleared, then we are able to start understanding what they believe. This is so important because belief is one of the main drivers of behaviour. If you are a chairperson trying to get a new initiative through, it’s essential that you know which way the individual committee members are voting. Each committee member will be carrying different baggage, pushing different barrows. As the chairman you will find the committee as a whole functions far more effectively if you are aware of the baggage and barrows!

Dealing with opposing views

A chairperson also needs to be aware of opposing views amongst the committee members and be able to respect each point of view and hold a space for them all to contribute. Sometimes there will be two or more members vying for attention, and the chairperson needs to be able to perhaps quiet a vocal member long enough to let a quieter person have a say. Sometimes the vocal member has to really have their say, but we need to first let the quiet one know that they will have their turn. Sometimes also a quiet member will have a reason they are holding back and it’s important that the chairperson takes the time to discover why they are holding back.

Committee members can come in many forms. The more I learn to witness the thoughts in my own head, the more I start to see the different committee members pushing their own barrows! One who is labelled in many methods as the inner critic is quite a vocal member for me, and as I’ve learned to appreciate that whenever she pipes up it’s because she’s actually afraid of something and trying to protect me from it, I’m finding that I’m able to handle her much better. She’s the one who urges me not to rock the boat and bombards me with thoughts about why my ideas won’t work. She’s also the one who fixates on details when an uncomfortable feeling starts to arise. I’ve learnt to watch her with compassion and it helps to alert me to there being something more to the story than I realised, which has resulted in some wonderful healing.

Another form that committee members come is as inner children. I see inner children as being like members of a subcommittee. A recent example for me was when I was doing some Matrix Reimprinting work with an incident where I was involved in a car crash when I was 5 years old. The first time I worked with my five year old self I really struggled to engage her, she just seemed to be concerned about her younger sister and her Mum because they were upset. It took me some time after the session to realise that her concern for others was masking her own feelings and that the incident hadn’t actually been fully cleared. The second time I worked with this another aspect come up that required patience and compassion – in the end I discovered that she felt that the accident had been her fault and it wasn’t until we had been able to clear that belief with the tapping that we were able to move forward with the whole incident. (As a side note – I am often surprised to find how much we took on board as our fault as children, but in the reading I’ve done it seems it is quite common, so don’t be surprised if your younger self isn’t ready to heal because s/he is blaming him/herself for the event. It can seem totally illogical to an adult that a child thought that they could have prevented something traumatic, but when we are children the world revolves around us and we assume that anything that happens is because of us. This is a common area that people who experienced trauma or abuse as a child may need to spend time focusing on.)

Another recent example was when I was working with my 15 year old self. I had found frustration building as I didn’t seem to be able to get to the core of the issue so I tried some of the phrases in Betty Moore-Hafter’s great free Creative Language with EFT class, and all of a sudden I realised that the 15 year old didn’t trust me enough to share her feelings. To read more about this experience, check out When Listening Is Not Enough.

An example where I learnt about trust was some Matrix Reimprinting work I did with an issue where I started with a 13 year old self and she took me to an infant self who didn’t seem to trust me, but did trust the 13 year old. The three of us made a good team, with me leading the tapping and the 13 year old tapping on the baby me!

I realise that some people might think that suggesting that we are like a whole committee of people is bordering on suggesting that we a schizophrenic or completely losing touch with reality, but I invite you to play with these concepts in your own healing and see whether they of use to you. Recognising the contrasting viewpoints inside of me and learning to treat each inner child and “committee” member as an individual has made a huge difference to my healing, and it might do the same for you.