Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), or Tapping

EFT, or tapping helps you work through difficult emotions, triggers and challenging times. With spiritual and emotional support, you can transform pain into compassion, and find gifts buried within trauma.

Doing shadow work helps uncover your life purpose. As you smooth out the bumps in your nervous system that make you feel stuck, you’re available to hear & trust your inner guidance.

Tapping is a somatic process combined with dialogue, to bring clarity, safety and peace. When your biology supports you being calm and centered, situations or people won’t trigger you so much. You’ll have less emotional pain, greater compassion for yourself and others, and be more resilient.

You’ll experience love and self-acceptance, where before there was anxiety or disconnect.

Your nervous system records important  experiences of unresolved pain and trauma. Tapping is a systematic way to reset your nervous system, to come out of Fight/Flight/Freeze, so you can live more fully in the present. Grounded in western science and Chinese medicine, EFT is an intuitive process. I guide you through it, lead you to connect with buried feelings, meet them with kindness, process them and experience the beauty of release, self-kindness and self-love.

Every tap has a theme and an arc, like a film clip that is charged with triggers.

Sometimes we feel hijacked in situations we thought we’d dealt with. We’re under the spell of past pain. Tapping regulates the intensity of trauma by rewiring your nervous system. It helps your brain regulate, so your reactions are neither overblown, nor numbed out.

Everyone processes emotions in their own unique way. It can take a series of sessions to get the results you desire.

I offer 90 minute, 2-hr and, by request, longer sessions, according to what best serves you.

CREATING POSITIVE OUTCOMES

As your nervous system gets more resilient, tapping can help you pre-pave positive outcomes. My clients have been empowered to parent their children more consciously, be more confident and effective navigating pressures in schools, jobs and family situations, ace job interviews, engineer the best possible severance package when leaving the corporate world, recover more easily from surgery or medical procedures, overcome eating disorders, ease pregnancy and childbirth, reduce anxiety and lose their fear of dying. The possibilities are vast.

The list of ways tapping can help is endless. It’s great for anxiety, sleep disorders and procrastination. It’s used with veterans in VA hospitals because IT WORKS. There are no risks to tapping, and no side effects.

Kaiser-Permanente, one of the nation’s largest hospital systems, and the Veterans Administration (VA) now recognize EFT as an effective treatment for combat veterans, and anyone who has experienced severe traumas from car accidents, domestic violence,  sexual abuse, natural disasters and other traumatic incidents.  

I KNOW TRAUMA FROM THE INSIDE

As a trauma survivor myself on a healing journey, I felt unsupported by clinicians who I felt “othered” me. They may have been highly trained, but if they hadn’t done, or weren’t doing their own inner work, I felt that they weren’t showing up for me in an embodied way. I didn’t feel secure with them.

When tapping was new to me, it took time to warm up to it. As I persisted, even when I doubted that tapping would work for me, I released pain and shock that had disrupted my life for decades. 

Depending on your goals, it can take a series of sessions to get the results you desire. Trauma survivors who work to dismantle their triggers can bring amazing gifts to the world. We can transform fear to compassion and kindness, starting with ourselves, then manifesting these qualities in the world.

Though I’ve worked extensively with clients with trauma for 20+ years, and I’m a survivor of trauma myself– I’m not a psychotherapist. (see my bio here.) If you have a diagnosed mental illness, please discuss doing this work with your therapist. If  it would be helpful, I’m happy to consult with your therapist.

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EMOTIONAL CONNECTION

In addition to EFT, I’m certified in Emotional Connection, a somatic process that helps you connect with bodily sensations in a mindful way, and is an integral part of healing trauma. I weave this approach into every session of EFT and Akashic Records readings.

Emotions are physical sensations coupled with thoughts. It can be hard to know which comes first, sensation or thought.

We learn to avoid unpleasant feelings by going into our heads or dissociating. When anxiety increases and thoughts start racing, we lose connection with the present moment and the innate wisdom of our bodies.

When your thoughts fixate on disastrous, worst-case scenarios, your body can bring you home.

Here’s an example:

You’re driving to work. You’re stuck in traffic. You glance at the clock, thinking, “I’m going to be late.”

Your breathing gets shallow. “I’m supposed to start the meeting!”

You’re holding your breath. “My boss is going to fire me!”

You think about losing your job and start hyperventilating.

“What if I can’t pay my rent and then I’m homeless?”

You get the idea. We’ve all been there.

Meanwhile, in present time, all that is really happening is: you’re sitting in your car. And it isn’t moving.

What would change if you sat in your car mindfully, stayed connected with your body, and sensed the tension in your solar plexus, gently suspending thoughts about the tension and simply noting sensations in real time?

From years of practice and supporting people through this process, I can tell you what can happen. If you attend to the sensation itself, without trying to change it. It will peak, soften and move. At at some point it will dissipate on its own.  When that happens, you’ll feel as if you’ve successfully surfed a wave and glided to shore. You’ll feel ease. And your thoughts will change.

While thoughts can be all over the map, the body doesn’t lie. A tight solar plexus, a closed heart—or any sensation–is how your body communicates with you. The sensation isn’t the problem—your body is the messenger. To decode the message from your body, exercise your capacity to sit and stay present to discomfort.

In the example above, the new message from your body could be, “Everyone gets stuck in traffic sometimes. I’m safe, I’m really OK, even if I’m a bit late.” You can reassure yourself instead of ramping up the anxiety.

Even though this sounds simple, it often isn’t easy. We’re taught in childhood to leap away from our bodies’ messages, and trust our thoughts instead. We’ve been taught that our  bodies are dumb, while our minds are brilliant. And that to be a successful person, we have to exercise mind over matter. This approach is rooted in cultural patterns of materialist thinking. Thinking is great for some things—but it doesn’t help us be fully embodied and may not help us be emotionally well.

I hold the space of gentleness and kindness, while I support you staying present to sensations without flying off into thought or leaving your body altogether.

It takes slowing down. You can disrupt stress by staying connected with physical sensation in a spacious, supported way. It can feel magical, when deep guilt, pain, anger or fear dissipates and instead you feel peaceful. This change is sustainable because the stored emotions are no longer there.

Here’s how it works:

• I guide you through a body scan
• Once you identify a place holding tension in your body, I support you staying present to it as sensation for 2 to 5-minute periods.
• I hold space for you to notice your thoughts, separate from sensation.
• We do as many rounds as indicated, according to your needs.
• You never have to go too deep or too far. You choose how deep to go. At all times, I check in with you.
• Over time, your nervous system learns to self-regulate, so you don’t go into fight or flight when the situation isn’t truly dangerous.

My personal story of healing with Emotional Connection

For 35 years after the death of my beloved sister, I lived with heavy, relentless grief that I was unable to process. Grief was a taboo emotion in my family. I blamed myself for her death. With Emotional Connection, I uncovered the painful beliefs that were keeping me stuck in self blame, which started when I was 3 and believed I could protect her from the family’s pain. 

Twenty years later, I couldn’t protect her from death by her own hands. I felt debilitating shame and self-blame.

I used Emotional Connection to stay present to the stone surrounding my heart. Feeling it was almost unbearable at first.  I persisted and gradually, it thawed out. 

When the tension peaked and eventually, in it’s own time, flowed, I actually laughed out loud, I was so relieved. Instead of blame and shame, I felt deep peace, knowing I hadn’t caused her death. 

For 30+ years after her death, I’d felt afraid of feeling a sensation. The sensation was generating thoughts of shame and self-blame that kept me stuck and unable to move on. Once I surfed the wave, I felt light and free. I could grieve appropriately and open my heart to love again.

Emotions serve a higher purpose. When you have the skills to connect with the sensations that accompany thoughts, you can ride your emotional waves to peace and calm.

I’m a certified Emotional Connection Facilitator. To read more about this work or get trained in by my teacher Raphael Cushnir, click here

Links to blogs on EFT & Emotional Connection