This is a space for you to share your experiences, your questions and any interesting information that others may find helpful relating to your journey of healing yourself, increasing self-care, self-acceptance and self-love, plus generally catching up on arrested emotional development from childhood.
At the Mindful Parenting talk on Friday night in Dunedin, one of the tools I recommended for reducing stress, anxiety, fears, symptoms of PTSD, as well as physical symptoms is EFT Emotional Freedom Technique, also known as Tapping.
I think it’s good to try different techniques to reduce stress, as well as working on our triggers, as well as inch by inch making those diet and lifestyle habits. But EFt is definitely a good one to try out! And generally children respond really well to it, you can get them to say the words with you and you do the tapping on the different spots if they’re too young or disinterested to copy you tapping the spots on your body.
The first video really covers the theory for those of you who like to really understand how and why something works! And the second one is a good one to save and just follow along when feeling anxiety or overwhelm or whatever you’re struggling with, physical pain too!
I shared at the talk that I because a strong believer in the power of Tapping after I used it successfully to clear a phobia of flying that I had developed. Living on the opposite side of my world from my family and being someone who loves travelling as well as reaching new parents and teachers in different areas and countries, I really was not willing to accept that flying had become a terrifying experience for me! When flying from New Zealand to England with my then 7 year old daughter, I had my first panic attack before the plane even took off, and I had 13 hours ahead of me before landing and the last thing in the world I wanted to happen was for my fear to impact my little girl who was just so excited about being on this adventure and having mum all to herself!
If you’ve ever had a panic attack you’ll know how horrific they are. I was trying everything I could, meditating, rescue remedy, all my usual ground and calming techniques, but the panic was still threatening and it took everything I had to keep it from being unbearable. But was when I really focused on using the tapping that I started to have brief moments of genuine relief, and it was when I hit the statement that most hit the spot in terms of resonating with what I was actually afraid of that brought the most amazing relief. For me I learned how important it was to get the wording right. For me, the big relief came when I named what it was that I was afraid of – which for me was the fear of again having the same experience as I’d previously had on a plane from Brisbane to Auckland when I had an anaphylactic reaction to the lunch I had before flying).
I’ve since used it with success for so many issues, physical, mental or emotional and just yesterday did a bit of tapping for about 30 seconds on a headache and soon after I realized it had totally disappeared. The headache was a remnant hangover still from one bite of food that contained gluten two days earlier, but the EFT somehow reduced the inflammation that caused my head and neck to be tight and sore.
I downloaded The Tapping Solution app yesterday and I’ve tried three different tapping meditations on it now. It did help me to feel more positive and more energised! I like to meditate anyway, although the habit has fallen away over the past year, so this feels like meditation with a bit extra.
I’m new to EFT, having only read it about it after Genevieve mentioned it in one of the Zoom calls a few months ago, but I’m going to try to spend at least ten minutes every day to do this for myself. I’m very interested to see how tapping helps me to respond to pain, and also wonder if it would help my husband with his migraines.
I can certainly see the benefits it would have for my daughters (and clients) so I’m going to share it with them as well.
Thank you for drawing my attention to this technique @peacefulparent – it feels like something I should have been doing for a long time now 🙂
Hey Toria, delighted to read that you’ve downloaded the Tapping Solution app and have found it helpful so far. I love how it takes you through the process making it easier to drop in to the process of being with and hopefully gaining that sense of relief for the uncomfortable emotions. It’s a challenge to keep up with the practice of meditation, but so great that you’re getting back to it again. It’s been consistently shown to make positive changes in the brain.
And yes lots of benefit for your girls, just even seeing you sitting and giving yourself that time is such great modelling. As your meditation strengthens you’ll keep getting better at coming in and out as they need your attention and dropping back in again.
I did share it with my daughters a few days ago, and I’m encouraging my ten year old to try it when she wakes in the night. She seems to go through phases of not sleeping well at the moment (I wonder whether the onset of puberty is around the corner) and at the moment she’s waking a couple of times a night and struggling to fall asleep again.
I’ve been modelling tapping with them both at bedtime which is a nice way to settle them both. Hoping it starts to help with this night time waking too. It certainly can’t hurt!
Just wanted to come back to this and say that I upgraded the Tapping Solution app and I’m getting so much out of it! I’m currently listening to Nick Ortner’s first book through the app and doing at least two tapping meditations every day. Just having access to all of the audiobooks makes the app worth the money for me.
I’m amazed at the range of meditations available on the full version of the app… there’s even one for endometriosis which I’m keen to try next time I’m in pain. I’ve been tapping on a range of issues and I’m really feeling a shift in how I’m feeling. I feel like it really is clearing out some emotional baggage that I wasn’t even really aware of!
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