Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) & How it Can Change Your Life

What is EFT?

Emotional freedom technique (EFT) is a powerful holistic healing tool for accessing healing on the mental, emotional and physical levels. This technique involves tapping on various acupressure points on the body for getting to the root cause of any health and wellness challenge. Tapping can interrupt the body’s stress response quickly and effectively. Tapping is proven to reduce stress, lower cortisol, improve sleep, reduce anxiety, relieve pain, increase productivity, etc.  You can use tapping for literally any challenge you may be facing whether it’s related to your health, manifesting money and abundance, working through limiting beliefs… you name it and tapping can help!

Acupuncture and Meridian Points

Acupuncture and meridian points, used for 5,000 years, have been recognized as an effective healing system. Tapping on meridian points is a form of energy healing for working with psychological issues. Tapping helps to release any energy blockages from the body. When tapping on a particular negative memory or emotion, it helps you to release the strong emotional hold you have to that particular situation. You can then refile this memory as neutral and sometimes maybe even positive. The brain is very neuroplastic meaning that nothing is permanent. You can change your brains neuronal pathways! How amazing is that!!!

If you are interested in acupuncture like I am, the following is a list of internal organs each tapping point correlates with!

Karate chop: small intestine meridian

Eyebrow: bladder meridian

Side of the eye: gallbladder meridian

Under the eye: stomach meridian

Under the nose: governing vessel

Chin: central vessel

Beginning of the collarbone: kidney meridian

Under the arm: spleen meridian

Top of the head: governing vessel   

Tapping and the Stress Response

Tapping can help to effectively halt your fight-or-flight response and to reprogram your brain and body to respond differently. When you experience a negative emotional state – anger, fear, shame, upset – your brain goes on high alert and prepares your body to enter into the fight-or flight stress response. Your body is sensing danger in your environment. Historically this danger would be a saber tooth tiger, and your stress response was activated by a physical threat. These days, your fight-or-flight response is activated more commonly internally by thoughts, emotions and negative memories. Your flight-or-flight response can activate your cortisol and adrenaline hormones and causes your blood pressure, heart rate, and blood sugars to increase.

Tapping and Brain Changes

Tapping can turn off the amygdala center in your brain. By tapping on various acupuncture/meridian points on the body, it sends a calming message to the body for the amygdala center to signal it’s safe. The amygdala, part of your limbic system, is the area of the brain where negative experiences get encoded. An early negative experience in childhood can become programed in the amygdala, so this area of the brain will raise the alarm when a similar experience triggers it in the future. Daily stressors can constantly trigger your amygdala to perceive threats and therefore continues to triggers your stress response.

EFT Research

Research from Harvard medical school used brain scans to show the amygdala center in the brain getting turned off when acupuncture points (meridian points) were stimulated. These acupuncture points do not have to be stimulated with needles, with pressure and tapping you can benefit with similar results. Other research conducted on EFT tapping has been shown to reduce cortisol (your stress hormone) by 43%. That’s amazing!!

How to Tap & the EFT Tapping Process

There are different ways to experience tapping now. You can start with choosing a current issue that is bothering you most or called the “most pressing issue (MPI)”. You can rate how distressed this issue is making you on a scale from 0-10 (10 being highly distressed). You will come back to your rated number post tapping session to re-evaluate how your mind and body are feeling. You can keep tapping on an issue until you feel relief and on the low end of the scale. You can create a setup statement such as “even though_______________ [fill in the blank with your MPI], I deeply and completely love and accept myself.” For example: even though I have this back pain, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.

Tap on your setup statement three times while tapping on the karate chop point. Move through the rest of the EFT tapping sequence points. There is no wrong way to tap. Trust your instincts and inner voice to guide your through releasing the most pressing issue that is coming up for you. You can do this process on your own and you don’t need to follow a specific script. You can tap on the sequence of points and talk freely about any topic causing you distress. You can use tapping to talk through and vent about any situation that may be bothering you. Talk like you would to your friend on the phone about an emotional situation or to your partner after a stressful day at work. Taking the time to tap and tune inwards allows you to let go of your emotional story faster. Tapping can bring a new awareness to your emotional issue and to come up with a creative solution.

Tapping may seem strange at first but give it a try and notice the relief you experience. You can tap both sides of the body if you’d like but the same meridian lines run down the same sides of the body. You can also tap with whatever side is the most comfortable for you.

Four Common Targets for Tapping   

There are four common types of targets to work on: symptoms/side effects, emotions, events and limiting beliefs. We are like onions and there are layers to our healing. When we address and clear one layer it allows underlying layers to surface for us to recognize and address.  

Symptoms/side effects: headaches, physical pain, self-sabotage, procrastination, acne, weight problems, asthma, financial issues, etc.

Emotions: anger, anxiety, despair, frustration, guilt, grief, embarrassment, fear, resentment, worry, shame, loneliness etc. Tapping helps us to process our emotions from past memories.

Past events: That affect us and stay with us. An event from our past that is still emotionally charged within us.

Limiting beliefs: The false beliefs we have about ourselves and the world. We learn limiting beliefs in childhood from our peers, our parents, and from society. Examples: I am not safe, I am not loveable, I am not good enough, I am not worthy etc.

Final Thoughts

What are the stories you are telling yourself? What are the old programs running in your mind that you’d like to erase? What new stories can you start telling about your life. Start telling yourself a new story today by trying the emotional freedom technique.

I believe in the power EFT has to heal the body which is why I have included the emotional freedom technique within my 8-week Clear Skin Alchemy program! If you are looking for more mindset tools check out my Blissful Awakening meditation podcast!

Happy Tapping,

Reference

The Tapping Solution: A Revolutionary System for Stress-Free Living – Nick Ortner