Friday 15 February 2013

Free your memories, free your life.




Today I heard a great story. It was told by Jack Canfield the author of Chicken Soup for the Soul at a seminar that I was watching on YouTube.

He began by asking the audience if anyone had ever spent the night in hospital and of course many had. He then asked if anyone knew what a “We nurse” is and after a pause and a little banter with the audience he described a We nurse as someone who asks you things like “have we had breakfast yet” or “how are are we feeling today” and of course the worst of all “have we had a bowl movement today.”

Jack goes on to talk about a friend of his who had a stay in hospital and quickly got irritated by the We Nurse and one day got his chance to get even.

He had just been given his breakfast when the nurse came and informed him that “we need to provide a urine sample today”. He asked her to close the curtains and would be able to have one for her in a few minutes. As soon as he nurse had left poured some apple juice into the specimen jar and waited. When the nurse returned he handed her the sample, she looked at it and said it was looking quite cloudy today. Quick as a flash he took it back off her and proceeded to drink it and said to her “OK let me process it again and see if we can get it a little clearer this time.”

Jack's timing was perfect and he received the laughs that he was no doubt working towards. It's one of those stories that we have no way of knowing if it actually happened or not but as a favourite speaker of mine Ed Foreman says, if it didn't happen, then it ought to have.

It made me think though, isn't that story like our memories? That if we process them for a second time we are able to get them a little clearer, especially the embarrassing or painful ones. The problem is though if a we remember a situation in a negative light it becomes much harder to revisit it. A case in point would be things that happened to us as children or in our formative years. Those kind of memories tend to be stashed away and marked as 'do not visit' as we know that by reliving them we will again experience the pain, anguish and embarrassment all over again. The thing is though, these are exactly the memories that we do need to revisit. Something that happened to us when we were a child was processed with the intellect and live experience of a child. If we are able to look at it now in a new unit of time we can process the information again with our experience and intellect as it is today.

That is all very easy to say but it's not always so easy to do. If the memory is too painful we will most likely avoid it at all costs. At the very least once we begin to focus on it we will again begin to feel the original emotions and we become stressed. Stressed people neither remember clearly or process information logically and this is one of the things that EFT work excels at. When we approach these kind of memories, at the first sign of stress the practitioner will work with you to lower your stress levels. Often at this point something seemingly magical happens, the person remembers things that they have never consciously thought about before, like they suddenly have more information that has never been available in the past. It's not magic of course though it's extremely logical, de-stress a person and they remember more clearly it's as simple as that. Once the new information is available the person in their low stress state can process it in a way that they never have been able to before. They draw new conclusions and often see things in a whole new light. It's really not unusual at this point for people to become really excited and full of energy and at times people will literally be bouncing around the room. It's hardly surprising really, suppressing these memories as we tend to if they hurt is a little like locking a part of ourselves in a prison cell and suddenly we are releasing a part of us that has been chained up for years. Unlocking our memories really does unlock another little piece of ourselves and gives us a little more of that freedom that we all desire.

Tuesday 15 January 2013

Pain relief with EFT


Firstly I must be clear, EFT cannot treat physical pain and we do not even try. If you are suffering from pain you must of course consult your doctor as soon as possible.

However now that the disclaimer is out of the way EFT has shown that in many cases the effects of pain can be helped with energetic healing. More importantly this help is 100% natural therapy and is completely drug free

What is Pain?

There are many kinds of pain, physical pain, emotional pain, psychosomatic pain, residual pain and chronic pain are some of the labels that are used. So let us look at the different types and approaches that are available to us.

Emotional and psychosomatic pain.

While people may use either of these labels they are essentially the same thing. Psychosomatic pain is not caused by an illness, disease or any accident to the physical body. Your doctor cannot find the cause by using an x-ray, or an ECG machine or any other form of medical testing, but lets be clear on one thing, psychosomatic pain is real pain and for the sufferer it hurts every bit as much as a broken leg or a kidney stone.

There is one additional element to emotional pain and that is because medical science cannot measure it there is tendency for the sufferer to not be taken as seriously as they would from a physical ailment. This can leave them feeling isolated and in some cases even crazy as they are told that it is all in the mind.

The first thing that I can do to help you is that I will believe you. In the past I have 2 serious panic attacks which is another condition which while very real for the suffer apparently has no physical source. As with all types of pain we will also work on reducing your stress and anxiety levels which can immediately begin to reduce pain levels and equally importantly it allows you to think clearer and to understand the situation in a much more cause and effect way.

We can then look for the causes of any emotional disturbances and once those have been treated the pain is often much less and in many cases completely gone.

Physical pain.

There are really 3 kinds of physical pain.
  • Current and temporary pain.
  • Residual pain.
  • Chronic pain.
Current pain is caused when you have a temporary illness, a headache, a broken wrist or gall stones for example.

Residual pain is caused from an actual injury or illness in the past. For example a person who had a car accident may still carry the emotional scars long after the physical condition has healed. Perhaps a fear that they were going to die or a guilt that they have harmed someone else in the accident is still lingering. It could be that the that the stress that was incurred during an illness is taking longer to heal than the physical injury.

Chronic pain could also be referred to as long term or constant pain and is often associated with illnesses such as arthritis. You can often recognize the emotional content of a persons illness by the way that they speak of it. “My backache is getting me down”, “these migraines won't let me sleep” or “I hate this arthritis for ruining my life”

While I have separated these into different categories there is often a lot of overlap between all kinds of pain.

Even when pain is provably physical there is often an emotional aspect too and I cannot repeat often enough that the most likely of these is stress. Perhaps for a person who who works as a gardener and has a broken wrist the stress is caused by loss of earnings or worry of losing clients. For the busy executive who has an ulcer it may be a worry that the pressure of their job may cause more and more ulcers, or simply that taking the correct time to recover will unduly affect their career. Whatever the cause of the stress it certainly doesn't help.

One of the key elements of physical pain is that when we add stress to the equation our body will allocate valuable resources to dealing with it. Our bodies often have an amazing in built ability to heal themselves and by taking away stress and emotional upset we are leaving all of our resources where they are most needed.

My own introduction to EFT was through pain relief.

I had a pain in my shoulder for a long time that was diagnosed as impingement syndrome which is a little like tennis elbow but in the shoulder. I tried to heal this by using natural exercises helped by a chiropractor as I wanted to stay away from cortisone injections but after about 9 months I finally gave in and went to see my doctor. During a scan it became clear that not only did I have the impingement I also had osteoarthritis in the same shoulder. Right then the pain became worse and I became more miserable. I felt cheated to have arthritis and was also scared as my father had suffered from from it for much of his life. I was also mad at the pain, I couldn't play golf or my guitar, I was in pain at work and I blamed the pain for pretty much everything.

Fortunately for me a friend introduced me to EFT and I began practising it on a daily basis. I didn't see a practitioner I just worked on my own from resources that I found on the internet. Very quickly the pain began to get less and less and within 6 weeks it had gone completely after living with it for the best part of a year. I never did have the cortisone shot and I have never been bothered by it since. I get very occasional slight twinge in cold weather which I put down to the arthritis, EFT can not heal my bones but if has changed the way that I think and feel about the pain. Pretty soon afterwards I became very interested in EFT and what else it could do for me. Within a year began training as an EFT therapist. I was very happy to cure the pain so quickly but I am now convinced that had I seen a professional I could have resolved this in a fraction of the time.

Tony Leake
www.eftforlife.net