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.
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