“Try it on Everything”

“Try it on Everything” was a key principle put forward by EFT Founder, Gary Craig. I also like to say, “Try it on Anything”. This is because it is such a simple and safe procedure and anecdotes abound of it being tried for computers or cars that won’t work, lost keys right up to published research for its use on serious mental health conditions such as PTSD or accounts of how helpful it is with eating disorders such as Anorexia Nervosa. And in between there are hundreds of peer-reviewed research papers, as well as the thousands of published articles and anecdotes, wherein it has been tried on just about everything, often with startling success.

What EFT does Best (and how/why)

We know both from what everyone who ever tries it reports feeling, as well as from a Harvard acupuncture study using fMRi to monitor activation in areas of the limbic brain, stimulation of acupoints calms the nervous system.

Put quite simply, tapping (or rubbing or pressing) stimulates acupoints when they are at or near one of the ends of a meridian (first or last points); EFT calms the nervous system and this is the basis for any of the work we do with EFT. If we have a problem and we can hold it in focus whilst tapping the EFT meridian points, we calm our nervous system in respect of that problem, in the process also gaining clarity around the issue as the fight-flight system (amygdala) that had hijacked our thinking brain, calms down, bringing reason back online.

In the case of a problem where a fragment of implicity memory is troubling us, if we tap whilst focussed on this memory or problem, the calming of the limbic brain can also trigger the unlocking of the troublesome memory fragment, making it available for memory reconsolidation, which by definition completely resolves the problems caused and maintained by the troublesome memory (for further details see the article: How EFT Works).

So many issues have a troublesome memory, or indeed multiple troublesome memories at their root that EFT is ideal for gaining relief from any condition that originated in this way (actually, most of the issues we struggle with!).

Why it’s worth trying it on everything

I hope you are beginning to understand why we can “try it on everything”. In everything that troubles us there will be at least some element of nervous system activation, which we can calm with tapping and thus become better emotionally regulated, gain more clarity and emotional awareness, leading to heightened Emotional Intelligence, giving us the edge in whatever we need to achieve.

Two levels of depth of work with EFT

There are also always two levels at which we can work. It is possible to gain some relief with simple, superficial, self-help tapping, focussed on feelings in the moment, physical or emotional pain or tension in the body, just mechanically following instructions from a book or video. Then there is the really deep curative or transformational work that you can do over multiple sessions with a practitioner, working together to get right to the root of things, however far back that may go (often it is a very young age), working through originating memories and completely removing the emotional charge from them that has been holding you back all your life. This work has the potential to peel back limiting beliefs and self-doubts and completely to change how you go through life.

Click the buttons below to access either my free EFT Basics introductory online self-help course to work at that first level, or to book your free initial chat about whether and how we could work together to achieve that deeper level for you.