I remember seeing a montage in the beginning of a documentary about one man’s journey of healing. It showed his decade long quest to find healing from his depression and anxiety. Across the screen flashed images of every kind of healing modality you can imagine including some pretty crazy ones like taking herbs and psychedelics that led to violent vomiting. Apparently, it was thought to help you purge and be free of what was stuck inside that was believed to be causing all of your problems.
Yikes.
The montage was set to catchy music and exaggerated humor, so I laughed a little but mostly I recall feeling like I could totally relate to his endless quest to relieve his suffering which left him coming up short over and over again. While I never sought out a method that would literally “purge” you of your “stuff”, thank God, I have tried a lot of things over the years to find relief from my physical and emotional pain. Countless self help books, acupuncture, physical therapy, cupping, chiropractors, and numerous therapists.
For the physical pain, I’d sometimes feel a little relief but it never lasted. Emotionally, talking it out with different psychotherapists increased my insight and understanding about myself, my emotions, my patterns, my relationships, my behaviors but I still felt pretty stuck.
I was sick of it. Exhausted by it.
I thought, maybe I was just broken. Maybe, this was just my life and it would never get better than this. I would have many moments of joy, but underneath those moments was a heaviness, a lack of purpose, and a feeling that there had to be something more.
Thankfully, I never stopped searching and I found energy healing!
Energy healing is a big broad term that encompasses many different modalities. For me, in the beginning, one of the most powerful was Emotional Freedom Technique also known as EFT or Tapping.
When you have a bad experience, it can be hard to let go of the sadness, anger, fear or anxiousness connected to the memory of that experience which is literally still stored in your body. There are lots of ways to deal with emotional baggage, but what many methods don’t account for is the very nature of emotions. Thanks to quantum physics, we understand that emotions each have their own vibrational energy that can affect your body’s energy field.
Emotions can feel messy and unpredictable and when we seem to be feeling these things over and over again and can’t seem to let them go it’s because this energy has gotten stuck in your body.
Emotional Freedom Technique also known as EFT and Tapping is an energy healing technique developed by Gary Craig discovered that we can literally get rid of emotional baggage from negative past events.
These trapped energies cause blockages and imbalances that can manifest emotionally, physically, in your relationships, and overall well being. This can block people from love and happiness and make us feel disconnected from others. We release these emotional energies connected to painful experiences that may be trapped within you, one at a time. It’s like peeling away the layers of an onion, experiencing freedom and lightness instead of opening old wounds that can bog you down — even decades later.
EFT combines modern psychology with acupressure to activate the energy of past memories, negative thoughts and beliefs and this allows the body to gently (and without needles) release this energy so that you can finally heal. We call upon the memories while tapping on ten acupressure points. We work together to heal all the aspects of the memory so you can look back on in with neutrality and actually learn from the experience rather than feeling plague by it.
It's like we divorce the memory from the pain connected to it.
It’s surprisingly quick and creates deep, root cause healing.
Once I started doing this work, it was like all the heavy baggage started falling away. I felt less triggered by the things that would take me emotionally from zero to sixty. I started to feel lighter. Those joyful moments were becoming more often. I was finding happiness in the ordinary parts of my days, even in the busyness. Nothing externally was changing, but I was changing internally, in a big way.
As a social worker and therapist, I knew I had to learn more so that I could bring this same level of healing to others. Too many of us believe we have to accept mediocre results, because that’s all we know.
I am living proof that you can set the bar higher for yourself and your healing. Life can be more than a collection of joyful moments. Joy, peace, gratitude, ease can be a state of being. Your state of being.
Emotional Freedom Technique can help get you there.
