What is EFT? (Transcript)

So this is my understanding of EFT. As I understand it, EFT is based on two main things. The first bit is Meridian Science. Now, if you're not sure what meridians are I'll explain that to start with. You know that in your body you've got a vascular system that carries all the blood around, and you know you've got a nervous system, and you know you've got a musculo-skeletal system, and you know these things because years and years ago the medical practitioners of the day used to dig up dead bodies, cut them open and find out what was inside. And that's what they found, among other things obviously.

The Chinese, as well as doing that spent five thousand years studying living bodies and what they worked out was that in addition to all those things that we have in our bodies there are also energy channels running through bodies, that they called meridians. Now the people that dug up dead bodies didn't find those because they're not there when you're dead! They're just there when you're alive carrying energy through your body

Now, if you've ever been to an acupuncturist, or you've ever seen anyone have acupuncture, then you'll know that what they do is stick needles into the body. And if you don't know anything about acupuncture, you may think that's a bit strange. What they're actually doing is sticking the needles into the meridians in the body and wiggling them about to release blocked energy because in Traditional Chinese Medicine, one of the Guiding Principles is that any dis-ease in the body is caused by a blockage in one of the energy channels.

EFT is what we call a Non-Invasive Meridian Therapy because we use the meridians, but instead of sticking needles into them we tap on them. And we tap on the side of the hand (karate chop point), the top of the head, between the eyes, at the corners of the eyes, under the eyes, under the nose, on the chin, on the collar bones and under the arms. And those points are where a lot of different meridians start before they run through the body, so when we tap generally, we are catching a lot of meridians all at the same time. So, that's one aspect of EFT - meridians.

On the other side, while we're tapping on the meridians, we talk to the subconscious. Now this isn't like hypnotherapy because the person is completely conscious, completely engaged and in the moment with what's going on. Let me give you an example, if you have a child who's born to healthy parents, as the majority of children are, they're all born healthy and then life happens! So, something traumatic can happen to a child - it doesn't have to be something huge and horribly traumatic, that we would see as traumatic as an adult, just something that's quite traumatic when you're little. So, for example, you could be skipping down the street quite happily and then a big dog jumps out and barks at you and frightens the life out of you. At that point, the child makes up rules. They make up rules about themselves and they make up rules about how the world works and those rules go straight into the subconscious. And the subconscious continues to run those rules until it's told not to because the subconscious doesn't question whether what it's doing is good for you or bad for you. Whatever the subconscious is doing it just does. So it doesn't wake you up in the middle of the night and say "Do you want to keep breathing?" it just assumes that as it's been told to keep you breathing that's what it does - it keeps you breathing.

So these rules that this two or three year old made up when the dog jumped out were probably very helpful to the two or three year old and may have continued to be helpful when they were four, five, six, seven. Now they're forty, not so useful to be running those rules. So, whole we're tapping on the meridian points, we talk to the subconscious and we find those hidden memories, those hidden traumas that happened, maybe many years ago and what we do is we release the emotion invested in those traumas. So that's why it's called Emotional Freedom Technique. People don't lose their memories, they can still remember the incidents but they don't have the emotional attachment to them which means ... well, let's try another example.

Have you ever seen anybody overreact to something? Something very small happens and they just explode. And you're thinking to yourself, well do you know, that was a really tiny thing and I don't think it warranted that outburst. Well the thing is that they're not actually responding to that very tiny thing, what they're responding to is how that tiny thing made them feel and all the times that they've been made to feel that way in the past. So that kind of accumulates like a big emotional baggage that all gets invested into this one small thing that's like the straw that broke the camel's back, and they explode.

So, what EFT does is clear all of that emotional baggage, all those past times, it puts those in the past where they belong, it removes the emotional attachment to them so that people can respond in the moment, to what's going on in the moment, without all these hidden rules that they've made up about themselves and how the world works.

---oooOOOooo---