Your happiness is in your hands

Do you live a life of health and vitality?
Are your relationships loving and harmonious?
Do you feel balanced emotionally?
What is your passion and purpose?
Do you feel empowered in making choices that serve you?
Do you feel creative, inspired and passionate in your work and play?
Do you feel clear and purposeful in the direction your life is taking?

These are all questions that I was encouraged to ask myself over the weekend.

I participated in a two hour workshop on Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) presented by Ascenta Fields, a holistic health and wellbeing practitioner.

EFT works with the mind/body energy system to reduce or eliminate all kinds of emotional, mental, physical and spiritual discomfort. It involves tapping on acupuncture points along meridians and being tuned into a particular problem or issue. EFT can be used for anxiety, fears, phobias, depression, mental/emotional overwhelm, confusion, obsessions,  compulsions, conflict, grief, loss, guilt, shame, addictive cravings, panic attacks, PTSD and abuse issues.

It is also highly effective for pain and symptom management of conditions such as Fibromyalgia, Arthritis, headaches or migraines, back, neck, shoulder and knee pain, fatigue, hormonal imbalances and physical traumas. This technique can be used to address and resolve the underlying causes of relationship, financial, career and health issues.

EFT can also be used for self-exploration or for instilling an intent such as ‘I am now living a happy and healthy life’.

Juggling as many commitments as I do, and being a high achiever, I tend to place extraordinary amounts of stress on myself. I juggle well and I get a lot done, but as I have said before, it can sometimes come at the expense of my own emotional wellbeing. Taking more time out for me is at the top of my list of priorities this year, and while I am committed to my mindfulness practices and allocating time to simply be, there are weeks where this seems impossible. When my Mum suggested that we do this EFT workshop together, I was a little ambivalent – after all my Mum is a practitioner of the MACE Energy Method (MEM), which is a similar protocol or so I thought. She explained to me that the benefit of EFT is that you can apply it to yourself as opposed to MEM, which requires you to be guided by a practitioner.

The fact that I could potentially handle spur of the moment upsets or unpleasant incidents myself, close to the time of onset, appealed to me. We all experience work related stress, relationship issues or misunderstandings with people and physical tension or ailments at times. Having a tool that could assist in mitigating the negative effects of the above at the ready looked like a pretty good proposition.

We learnt the tapping protocol which required us to ‘tap’ through a personal issue – physical or emotional. We tapped away through each of our meridian points and the results across the group were many and varied. Some people uncovered what seemed to be epiphanies linked to very old memories, others identified issues that hadn’t previously presented as issues which gave them more fodder for tapping. I, on the other hand didn’t find much at all – this bears no reflection on Ascenta or EFT. This came down to my Cancerian armed protection squad guarding the interior of my thick emotional shell, which would not allow any one of the absolutely divine, supportive, caring, participants at the workshop to get a whiff of what I was thinking of feeling.

At the beginning of the workshop, Acenta invited us to pull a card from a bowl which we could discuss and ponder at the end of the session. When I pulled my card, I didn’t resonate with it, I thought ‘what a load of bull****’, but halfway through it dawned on me just how relevant it was. WILLINGNESS!!!! This was not something I was AT ALL ready to give freely. I was not willing to share with the group, as supportive as they were. I was not willing to be vulnerable, which is something that I am generally not willing to be in life. And I was not willing to let anyone see that there was any aspect of my life that I could not control.

This little exercise forced to me to acknowledge something about myself that that is probably not serving me well. It takes a lot of energy to be in control all the time. It is also near impossible to love fully and live freely without vulnerability. This is definitely one to ‘tap’ on!

It is hard to say how I really feel about EFT, in view of my reluctance to let go and experience it fully in a workshop forum, but I witnessed some very powerful results from the people around me and I am WILLING to practice and delve deeper in my own time.

All in all this was a very interesting workshop and I feel as though I have learnt some techniques that I can implement into my daily life, to help me in my quest to maintain balance.

If you’re interested in learning more about EFT check out Acenta’s website or read more from Nick Ortner, Author of The Tapping Solution.