23 April 2013

Hove Holistic and Mystic!

Sunday was amazing. I want to do another fete. Now. I want to do one every 6 to 8 weeks.

EFT is different from any other service provided at one of these holistic fairs, because we don't give.  You do not come away from the table with a reading or a lot of useful paperwork or anything to take home that explains the contrast between where your life is, and where you might wish it to be. Direction is a wonderful thing, but it's not what we deal in.

EFT is different from any other service provided at one of these holistic fairs, because we take. We remove the drama that's kicking at the back of your eyeballs and stopping you from enjoying life, right in this moment. We allow you to change, but right there, on the spot. No map from A to B, just a teleport.  We even take your idea of your limitations.  Obviously we give so very much more, but not anything you could point to on a table in a meeting hall.

Sometimes people even have quite a bad night's sleep after a session. We even take your slumber. The body simply holds all these tiny emotional stresses and strains in slumped shoulders, a stiff neck, a dry cough, sore ankles - you name it, and gets used to them being there. Suddenly, after EFT, it is safe to 'stand down', to begin to release, and that can cause secondary aches and upsets as the physical systems realign. "Drink lots of water, and rest", we tell them. What else can we say?

Next time I think I will scrap the price tag and go for donations; let people pay what they can, or what they know it to be worth after the session.  I ended up doing so much for free because I could quite literally see the bitter regrets and smashed self worth reaching out of these people to try and touch the table, even as their bodies took on the memory and froze. A group could approach and I would know which one was silently hoping. I was on a roll. Came away broke, but meh. First things first.

I am ill, again. Two weeks down with gastroenteritis and now I have a severe head cold with a really sore throat. I am so tired. I'm sure that there are dietary and lifestyle considerations in the mix, but quite honestly, I believe it hit this hard and fast because of the amazing time I had at the fair, the numbers of lives we changed, the number of spontaneous hugs. The high was incredible, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt now that I can read people, that I am sh*t hot at this, that all I want to do is plough in and help. I can even do this standing up in the middle of  the crowd.

I don't know why its so hard to recognise myself as unlimited and perfect and powerful. Its not about being better than anyone, its about getting up and dancing with the feet God gave me, so that others can start to join me. I am in full blown emotional and physical resolution, worse than any a client could experience from an hour or less of work. I feel like death warmed over. My body is repairing after the removal of self-limiting beliefs brought about by seven hours of tapping at the fair, yet all I can say is "Bring it on".

My nickname when I first trained in EFT was 'hit and run fairy godmother'. It even got a round of applause at the time (as EFT people live by the concept of getting in quick, working the change, and getting back out of the way), but I soon dropped it when I 'mistakenly'* joined a trades-heavy chapter of the BNI for a year (wonderful people who are now friends for life) and was told, publicly, that I sounded like I was depicting my services as a car crash.

I think when I let that go, I also forgot that 'zapping' people, such as doing the fifteen minute tasters we ran at the fair, is my absolute favourite thing in the world. On Sunday, I remembered.

*(There are no mistakes. Hence inverted commas.)

Working for Karl Dawson last year was also such a thrill, because I was needed to follow people out of the room when their issues were pricking their eyes with tears and demanding to be faced.  I love it! At the time I reasoned that my total joy was at 'coming home' to the situation where I first began my own life changing path.

Now I see it was simply reaffirming that my favourite part of EFT and Matrix Reimprinting (especially Matrix) is the bit where people are bursting to be shot of the issue that's holding them back, where their attitude is "Yes, please, do your worst" and they are totally, totally ready for the magical mystery tour through their mind, heart and soul into those surprise observations that start pennies dropping and dominoes falling and old wounds healing faster than you (or they) can say "O,...M,...G......"

I'm not so sure I'm built for running a practice, as much as being out there with a queue and a crowd, introducing people to their forgotten potential, and pointing them at other practitioners.

Again, again, again!
So      
much  
fun!!!!

16 April 2013

Feeling like a Chinese Farmer

...well, one in particular; the one in the parable.

Chinese farmer loses his horse. "What a disaster!" cry the neighbours.
"Maybe yes, maybe no" replies our venerable and, in some stories, ancient tiller of the soil. And that pretty much sets the tone.

The whole story could have been renamed Yes But, as one disaster after another turns out to be a blessing in disguise, although to be fair, each resultant so-called good fortune also turns out to be the trigger for the next apparent catastrophe.




10 April 2013

Off Sick

Today I am off sick, in full and furious resolution.

It does seem that my number of sick days at my salaried work have exploded since I trained in EFT and I am so glad for a surface understanding of MetaHealth; the dry, toughening stress phase of illness where we toughen up under perceived assault, and the soft, swollen, hot and sore phase which is resolution and healing but which we traditionally assume to be the illness.

This too shall pass, including this delightful sensation of having been kicked in the kidneys.

Anyway, retrospectively its easy to see that I was becoming foggy minded yesterday, and unnecessarily despondent the day before.  Today then, in between drifting off into no-man's land, I am listening to youtube videos and mp3s:

1. The Solfeggio scale

2. Prayer (Singing) bowls

3. Meditation cymbals (Tingsha)

4. Eckhart Tolle

5. Silvia Hartmann


6.  ...and cute children and cats because, meh, if I'm running on half a brain, I have every right to be as distractible as Dug.

This is Dug (from Up)


And this is a cute kid.


That is all.

09 April 2013

Why use EFT Tapping? What does it do?

(This was going to be a reply to a comment on the previous post, but it explains the process of tapping with EFT in a very simple way)


Dearest Doris!

It doesn't matter if the success of others is even partly smoke and mirrors. When other people achieve something that is on my own personal wish list, as travel, or chances to meet and hug industry leaders, or amazing qualifications that open up whole new chapters in their ability to help others, my issue isn't with them but with my own measure against myself. They have proven that I could have done that already, and so I have been in the habit of castigating myself. Its been a bit like the sensation of not getting your homework in on time and missing out on the sweets or class treat.

With EFT I am learning to separate the sensations of an emotion from the situation or memory to which they are attached, and while I wouldn't recommend doing this without using the tapping points to maintain physical peace, the next steps are:

1. Fully accept the sensation - sit peacefully and bring it to the fore instead of squashing it down and notice where in your body you experience the sensation of the emotion; the weight/sickness/constriction etc of the fear/shame/anger etc. 

WARNING: Owning the sensation in this way can be surprisingly distressing without EFT tapping on the places that acupuncturists call 'entry and exit points' - the ones nearest the surface that they resort to with needles only when an issue won't shift by other means. (I'd sooner stimulate them with finger tapping than with needle points, where the bone is so close to the surface; wouldn't you?)

Likewise if distress does ramp up, it puts us further into the fight or flight reaction and works against achieving rational thought, so tapping counteracts this by holding a state of physical calm and opening what some call 'the alpha bridge' - the link between the delta and theta brainwaves of the subconscious where we find inspiration, deep thought and enhanced memory, and the alpha waves of relaxed and alert conscious rationality. It inspires a kind of 'whole brain' state.

If you have ever had a shining moment just as you wake up in the morning where you are both awake and still in dream space and everything starts to gel, with pennies dropping all over the place so that for a fraction of a second everything in the world makes sense... just before you forget it all again.... that's the state.

2.  If not using EFT to work directly on shifting the sensation and so switch off the panic button/fire alarm that has been going off to cause this (the easiest way forward), allow your mind to drift until you find an earlier situation when your body felt exactly the same way. Try and go as far back in your mind as possible. If you are doing this right you won't be looking for another situation when you had the same trigger, just the same bodily discomfort.  Typically the mind will go back to the first, the last, or the worst (most memorable).

No, I'm sorry, I can't continue with this description without begging you to open that alpha bridge and calm your reactions by tapping all the way through this exercise. Its imperative to be inserting something into the mix to keep your body and mind calm and alert and as emotionally uninvested in the memory as possible. The ideal trip through your past triggers and core beliefs is one where you can observe with your intellect intact and with remarkable clarity, and have a reaction no stronger than 'How interesting!'

If you find a related memory that is astounding in its ability to cause you pain once you've dug it up, then you need to work face to face with a practitioner. Trained practitioners can take over the tapping; they have the ability to spot your train of thought becoming scattered (the alpha bridge breaking down), they have tools to deal with abreaction and keep you safe, with your consciousness in the here and now instead of re-living or re-enacting the need to fight or run. They have any number of tricks and tools to add extra layers of disassociation and they are masters at spotting the tiniest physical alteration (colouration, tiny facial movements, changes in vocal tone or posture) that indicate an issue has just been even ever-so-slightly shifted or conversely compounded by new insight.

One of the greatest blessings of being a practitioner is experiencing what are called 'borrowed benefits'.

Unlike the myriad 'off the peg' tapping scripts available, or the tapping videos you can find on YouTube, bespoke, personally tailored, face to face consultation involves using only the client's own words, applying the basic counselling or NLP skills of mirroring and reflecting to repeat back to the client what they have just said, as a direct use of their particular words or as a reframing of their statement. The whole session is therefore entirely client led and that way the client is never jarred out of deep thought by the interjection of a phrase or intention which is not 100% their own, nor are they allowed to step into an emotional minefield and get lost in there. This makes the work faster, deeper and cleaner.

Borrowed benefits, then, come about when a practitioner empathises or resonates with the client, which is pretty much all the time. I'm not talking about taking on the client's issues, but about simply understanding the emotion or recognising the situation. Tapping on, or alongside, the client, also works on the resonating emotion within the practitioner.

In other words helping you helps me; blessing you blesses me. There is no superiority, no power imbalance. You provide the issue and pay for the session, and I provide the skill and the work, the place of safety and the protection and the utter investment in what it is you need to say or feel, and we are equal and equally blessed.

Perfect :-)

08 April 2013

Not such a great day.

I'm doing okay, I know that. The people that I encounter to work with all benefit. Given time constraints, family, my own limited energy resources and the room for improvement in my financial resources, I'm blessed, I know.

So why does it hurt to notice that close friends I trained alongside, are achieving so much more? I love that they are happy and purposeful, I love that they are so blessed, I accept that we are all different, that I have other gifts, that their drive and focus and energy and resources are different than mine, and yet after I've thought good things for them, I look at my own development and feel stagnant, stunted, lazy in comparison. It just makes me feel like such a failure. I want to jump for joy on their behalf, hug them and tell them they are so, so lucky; and then I remember it has nothing to do with luck, at all. They did it. I didn't. That's all there is to it. Pointing to luck is just a way to try and absolve myself of responsibility. "Lucky" is what people with a victim-mindset say about those who have worked their nuts off.

This is bringing up so very many names I was called as a child. "You let yourself down, you do, and you let me down. You're such a disappointment, you never finish anything. You could have been X, you could have done Y. You cut your nose off to spite your face you do. You just couldn't listen, could you. You just couldn't buckle down and do what you were told. Never mind, we can't all be high achievers, we can't all have the discipline or the self control; you certainly don't."

Even the kind stuff was conciliatory. I don't think there was ever straightforward praise for an effort or achievement. Even when I got it right, there was always the debriefing attitude - the 'well, next time you could try xyz and then it could be even better'. By memory that idea was supposed to make me happy and fired up to go again.

At least, that's how I remember it. I was being trained to pull myself up by my bootstraps, by a loving mother who had absolute conviction that she was teaching me to shine, but one who had no idea how far off the mark she was in her estimation of my resilience.  I was sensitive. She didn't 'do' sensitive. Sensitivity was an affectation to be stoically ignored until it gave up and went home.

In my childhood I was the moon the stars and everything, allegedly, or at least I was supposed to have been. I just didn't match up. At some point I decided to live down to my reputation, I just forgot to tell myself, and so the angst continued.

My initial training in EFT was the first I'd undertaken in a decade and the first course I'd ever gone on, ever, that inspired me and that I'd planned for and looked forward to. I don't think I'd entered a classroom with such expectation since my first day at infants school.

The training was utterly transformative, it opened a window on another life and was almost a religious experience. Five days of constant energy work and by the end of it I was gobsmacked at my own potential - I'd forgotten I had any.  I even spent a couple of weeks seriously worried that I might have a crush on the trainer. I didn't. I had an overwhelming gratitude and understanding of a level of kindness and acceptance that hadn't touched my radar for years. It somehow felt as if it ought to be immoral to be that happy because of encountering a man with a powerpoint presentation.

That's the thing about really good EFT practitioners. They can't see the mess and limitations that you see from a downtrodden perspective. They see a perfectly good, capable, caring person temporarily side-swiped by a series of heartaches. Recognising that somebody saw that in me was briefly an emotionally confusing experience.

In that nearly-week, as we all went through our own revelations and changes, the women I connected with became my sisters. They will forever hold a place in my heart that is exclusive to them. We each left our own limitations behind and set out in glorious technicolor on the yellow brick road to happy-ever-after, together, side by side.

I guess that somewhere in my mixed up subconscious I correlated that with setting off, arms linked, matching our strides. I guess its to my credit, then, that seeing how they all have skipped so far ahead, I'm not angry or jealous, I don't feel that they left me, instead I feel that I let myself down, dropped the ball, that I could have been still side by side with my heart sisters, but I'm back here at the starting blocks because I'm...... useless.

Yup, some tiny part of me sees every tiny achievement those girls have made, as proof that I am, by comparison, useless.  There is one of our crowd who has positively flown ahead; her rise has been stratospheric and my little node of fear and insecurity weeps in torment at being even-more-completely-and-utterly-useless by comparison. Its all about how I could have, would have, should have; very unhealthy. And then another ECHO/memory throws a hissy fit that 'No I'm not useless, and its all not fair anyway'.  I really am beating myself up.  I know its all irrational and my conscious brain wouldn't choose to endorse either outlook, let alone experience them, but that's the joy of pre-programmed subconscious subroutines. Something small will hit the play button and then they just run, on repeat, and there's not a dang thing you can do about it without some energy healing or energy psychology, such as EFT.

This is in print because I tried working it out verbally by dumping it on a very dear friend, and yet even though she habitually thinks the very best of everybody, I somehow managed to convince her this was jealousy and resentment targeted at another individual. It's not it's not it's not!  Its just the pain of failure, or more specifically the regurgitated re-run pain of never being quite good enough, a long time ago.

I do hope I'm coming down with something, or heading for a menopausal meltdown. It would be so lovely to have something to blame for this coming to a head so forcefully, but maybe its just decided that at my age, its about time I got rid of this misrepresentation.

Tap tap tap tap tap...

Healing the world one smile at a time

I have a six-week client coming to the end of our contract, and she is so pleased with her sense of direction and self respect that our last session has been deferred for a week or two. It won't be about working with any new issues, simply about mopping up the fine detail. I am happy.

I was also delighted by an absolutely amazing session over in Portslade in which we connected an attempted rape back in the seventies to continued misery and side effects from a barrage of medication begun years later. Turns out the link was fear of altered perception, as Rohypnol (or some other brand of flunitrazepam - see, I'm learning) was used in the earlier event. Reading up after the fact I see it was odourless, colourless and ten times stronger than diazepam.  The client experienced a severe blockage of the throat during our session and her voice even changed. The amazing thing is that in one session we connected the two events to birth, and saw clearly that her mother was encouraged to take as much pethidine (as gas and air) as she could, and so the entire birth process was missed and the baby slept and felt sick and scared for several days.

At this point we honoured the client's wish to stop and come back to this another time. While I'd normally encourage someone to work on something else attached but not requiring recall, even chasing the pain, it was clear that one thing the client felt about the three incidents was that freedom to choose and to say no had been taken from her, so that choosing her own time to deal with this was part of the empowerment needed.

Wonderful stuff.

Thank you Sharon King for teaching me Matrix Birth Reimprinting. I never would have had the skills to communicate with a pre-birth human without that.

I love EFT!

03 April 2013

Emo Trance

A friend of mine, Sami, has been rating Emo Trance for ages. The whole 'soften and flow' concept aligns with 'this too shall pass' and what with Benita putting a brilliant infographic about the symbolism of Ganesh on our joint business page yesterday, I realised from the description of the large stomach that I could do with some improved skill in letting things wash over me (or in Ganesh's case, through).


So.

So, via an email, I went to the website of Dragon Publishing, the people who print all Silvia Hartmann's books, and found out two things:

1. They are based up the road in Eastbourne. Oh give me a job, pllllleeeease!
2. Roughly £7 gets me a Silvia Hartmann EMO-Trance meditation download.

Now Silvia, I know, has a very individual accent; the German vowel sounds are just unusual enough to my ear to draw my attention away from the content of her message, but not in this audio.

Its sublime. I listened to it twice yesterday and it is just lovely.

Today I am grateful for all the signposts leading to this discovery,it is a new treasure in my toolkit.

Night.xx

01 April 2013

Hard Day

I had a vivid dream last night that G and I were at my mother's, in her kitchen without her, and that G had decided, without getting permission, to help by turning all the gases up full and preparing two huge roasting joints that belonged to mum - bigger than I'd ever seen her bring to table.

He was busy and jolly and relishing the idea of a table laden with food - he was excited like a man who'd excelled himself and was certain of applause. I shot him down in flames for:
wasting mum's gas
running up her bills
cooking all her food
assuming we would ever be allowed to tuck in to such giant portions.

I started frantically calculating how to bump things up with vegetables and lots of mash until there were modest meals to last a month of Sundays that might still make him feel like he'd eaten more than a scrap, because we would never be allowed simply to have such a huge (immoral?) blow-out.

Seems I have plenty of childhood-related abundance issues, but as G pointed out in real life, once I'd woken and told him of the dream, the seventies were hard years - the three day week and the electricity cuts and every household was counting eggs, bread slices and the rest of it, all eking things out. Its just that I wasn't taught that these were hard times which would pass in the end, I absorbed the earnest notion that permanently hungry, permanently without for the good of the many, was the moral way to be.  And if two years later, my brothers broke all the rules of self denial, and helped themselves? The sky didn't fall in, although I expected it to. Behaviours that were threatened out of me before I even tried them, were explained away in my brothers as 'boys being boys', 'boys having hollow legs', them being 'growing boys' or 'only boys'.

Like I said; issues.

This is the Easter half term, the kids are home for the next two weeks and so there won't be many opportunities to use EFT on myself - tuning into a memory can be so vivid and whilst I'd cheerfully cry it out in order to transform this one; perhaps not with an audience of blithely opinionated teenagers. Better to ask a friend for Matrix Reimprinting, which adds a second layer of disassociation as I get to work on my younger self like a separate person, instead of stepping in to the feelings.

~~~~~

Last night the police called. Its about a report I made recently, about an incident many years ago. I'd swept it under the carpet, or more likely buried it under a life of other things to worry about, but this energy psychology/energy therapy/whatever you want to call it has worked its magic and dealt with those issues and burdens and inner conflicts which used to demand the most attention, so that slowly, gently, the memories and learned reactions which were not such a priority have gradually found space to come to the fore. This event was one of those, and looked at in a new light, it worried me that others could have come off badly/worse and that therefore I was duty bound to say something.

So the nice policewoman asked me to go to google maps street view and see if I could add a few more specific details. They said they would have just given me a lift around the area if only I still lived anywhere near there.

So I went online, cheerful as you please, while the kids watched a movie in the next room.

I went
I looked
I found
and I then I froze, staring at 'that doorway', 'that window', 'that corner'.
I discovered that whilst I may have come to a peace about the main event, seeing the streets, calling up the peripheral memories and the rest of the story, these brought their own quite unexpected emotional charge, and then suddenly I feel like a teenager again, helpless, inadequate, so isolated. So angry.

It must have taken a good hour or more to relive the whole scene, moment by moment, relate it to places looking back at me from the Google photos, and put it all in a semi coherent email. I managed without being noticed.

I kind of spoiled Easter Sunday after that; not really grounded or present; not really hearing people, although I tried to be pleasant. I even cajoled the kids into going to their rooms at 9 and then, finally, the pent up frustration surfaced as hot, angry tears. And now, even though I know one or two people will come along and read this, I have no option but to journal it. I am committed to recording my growth and healing and change. I am heading for wonderful things and need to understand the journey, even if only in retrospect.

But boy, am I glad for that vision yesterday. I only have to think of it, to re-visit. What a blessing.