All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
-Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher
I looked pretty silly. At least, I thought I did.
It was the spring of 2004. I was sitting alone, staring at a computer screen, talking to myself, and tapping different parts of my body. If you’d glanced through my window and seen me, you might have thought I’d lost it.
In truth, I was going a little crazy. The neck pain I’d woken up with that morning was so bad I wasn’t sure how I’d get through the day. You know the kind of pain I’m talking about. You sleep in the wrong position and wake up with a crick in your neck. You spend a day, sometimes two, sometimes three, moving your head slowly and looking like a robot to the rest of the world. I was willing to do just about anything to make it go away. Including trying something as seemingly strange as tapping.
I had been hearing a lot about “tapping,” or EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques). Said to be a combination of ancient Chinese acupressure and modern psychology, proponents said it remedied a vast number of issues. [Tapping is a method of acknowledging issues or concerns within yourself, and using positive visualizations and affirmations while making concentrated tapping pressure on the body at specific checkpoints to alleviate the stress or concern about those issues or problems.] I’d been reading one miraculous story after another, so I thought, Why not? Might as well try it and see what happens. To my astonishment, the pain—which would normally have taken days to go away—vanished within ten minutes. Ah, relief! To be able to turn my head again like a normal person and not feel uncomfortable all day! This tapping thing actually worked.
I was ready to go on with my day, satisfied to be pain-free. But suddenly, it hit me: this was about a lot more than neck pain. If tapping worked on my neck, what else could it help me change? Like many of us, I had one particular worldview—one that did not include instantaneous pain relief. This little experiment opened my mind to an ocean of possibilities that I had never before contemplated.
Let’s face it, many of us have been taught to think that it takes a certain amount of time to “fix” or change a problem—if we believe it can be fixed at all. But what if pain, health concerns, addictions, weight issues, relationship challenges, and financial problems really could be resolved—quickly and easily? What if the impossible was actually possible?
These are the thoughts that started percolating after my first tapping experience. Heck, maybe the neck pain had been inhibiting blood flow to my brain—and only now was I able to think more clearly! I started to see—to imagine—what else I might be able to change in my life and how I might be able to help those I loved.
Do you have issues or circumstances in your life that you’d like to change? Childhood trauma, anxiety, physical conditions, weight problems, financial difficulties, relationship challenges? Whatever your situation, EFT has proven to be dramatically effective. I don’t have to be psychic to know that you have been running the same patterns, sometimes with little change, your whole life. I don’t have to even meet you to guess that you are frustrated with doing the same things over and over again—and, as can be expected, getting the same results.
You’ve probably said to yourself countless times, “Oh, I can’t believe I did that again!”
“Why did I say that to him . . . again?”
“Why did I eat that food . . . again?”
“Why did I skip exercising . . . again?”
“Why am I short on money . . . again?”
“Why am I frustrated (or angry, lost, overwhelmed, anxious, tired, or whatever your “thing” is) . . . again?”
In the past, the challenge was that we could identify these patterns—but not a way to move them, to actually do something about them, and quickly. Finally, there’s a way to interrupt, disengage, dissolve, and vanquish them. Tapping gets to the root of what’s going on, balancing the mind and body, and changing what we do, how we feel, and how we experience the world. Tapping can be used for everything.
We’re not magically changing the situation—if I find something that does that, I’ll be sure to let you know!—but we’re changing our perspective and reaction to it. One of the amazing things I’ve found in doing this work for the past ten years is that when you change your perspective, often your feelings, reactions, and the situation itself naturally change too—most of the time for the better. So use tapping to bring down the noise in your head and in your life to find a clearer perspective and begin telling a new story. It’s possible to move through our busy lives, in a busy world, with grace, joy, and peace. EFT can make this a reality.
— Nick Ortner, author of The Tapping Solution (Hay House 2013). To learn more about Nick Ortner and inspirational authors such as Dr. Wayne Dyer, Cheryl Richardson, Doreen Virtue, Kris Carr and more, we invite you to join us at the Hay House I Can Do It! event. For more information please visit www.hayhouse.com or call 800-654-5126.
