EFT & Relaxation & the Subconscious

Accessing the subconscious is an issue with most of us humans, since it runs 95% to 98% of our life; I would think we ought to know what in the world it is thinking.  It contains all our early programming. Everything anyone has ever said to us is stored in our mind. I think it was Dr. Bruce Lipton who said our subconscious intakes something like 40 million bits of information per second, but our conscious minds only processes 40 bits of it. That’s a huge disparity.  What in the world is the other 39,999,960 bits of information doing to us?  That’s the ultimate question. What is it doing to us?

According to all the newest research, it is the underlying programming that actually runs your life. You think you do, but you really don’t. What gets stored from every teeny tiny comment or facial expression or other environmental input is what runs your life. Your subconscious processes it as quickly and efficiently as it can, storing it for later analysis (sleep and dreams), or putting it in an experience file to compare to any upcoming events you might encounter. It apparently loves to mix and match life’s stuff. Once you experience an emotion, the body is signaled to mix up a particular neurochemical mix to match the emotion, and the next time you experience something akin to the first event, the body mixes up another batch of that very specific neurochemical mix, giving you, once again, the exact same emotion you experienced with the first memory.  Does that make sense?  Your subconscious is a great big memory bank. It would rival the largest most powerful computer on earth.  It remembers everything, even if consciously you do not, but it also chemically imprints all those emotions deeply, strengthening all those learned cognitive neural pathways. That is what controls your emotional responses to daily living.

So, how do we access all that information? Meditators for millennia have known how to do this. My problem with meditation is I don’t think I have time. Everything I have read makes meditation sound long and boring and tedious. Anything that drab won’t allow me to relax! I will only mull the laundry list of what I should be doing instead of meditating! Western culture doesn’t afford us that much self-reflective time in any one given day, and, even if it did, do I want to use my time for that purpose?

With all the new science coming out of research labs explaining to us how our mind is really in our body, causing much of our physical issues, I suspect time has come to pay attention to what the subconscious has packed away. So, how can we do this effectively and quickly and still have time for that baseball game?

My answer to that question is Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). EFT breaks through all of the barriers, allowing us to answer the questions of what are we really thinking inside that subconscious. What is the bottom line of who we are and what we really believe about ourselves and our environment? Those are the beliefs that are impacting our health & life decisions today.

I would like to suggest another step in addition to tapping with EFT that might facilitate getting inside the subconscious more quickly. I’m going to take a chapter from ancient times here. How about 2 simple techniques that will take less than a minute to do?

First, drop your tongue onto the floor of your mouth, allowing it to relax there (thank you, Dawson Church). Teach yourself to do this as much as possible during the day, or, at the minimum, when you feel under stress, try to remember to relax that tongue!  Do this immediately when you sit down to tap, too. To demonstrate why I suggest this, try something.  Right now, with your tongue totally relaxed on the floor of your mouth, think about a distressing, angry thought and attempt to get mad about it.  Are you succeeding?  I bet not. For some physiological reason, if the tongue is relaxed, emotions don’t seem to be able to flair. Play with the technique a bit. Let me know via email (eftforchristians@gmail.com) if you get any further insights into the technique. I’m always interested in feedback.

Secondly, and this is one I’m borrowing from the ancients, start some deep breathing. Take 5 five second long in breaths, slowly, counting, and then pause for one second, exhaling slowly for another 5 seconds. Do this routine 5 or 6 times, or 10 or 12, if you so desire, but just make it a minimum of 5 rounds. This small amount of time invested in deep breathing will drop you into high alpha or low theta brave waves. You have descended out of the everyday hectic beta brain waves into the lower realms of meditation.  It really does happen that quickly. I use this technique to relax me once I lay down at night to sleep. Get a head start of slowly dropping into the delta brain wave state, where REM sleep thrives.

I read somewhere, and I wish I had written it down from where exactly, so I could give proper credit, but the author suggested that by taking a couple of minutes at the beginning of the nightly bedtime relaxation period to deep breathe in some rhythmic, slow method, we could knock off the need for a couple hours of sleep. Now, I don’t advocate only getting 5 to 6 hours of sleep each night because you did 2 or 3 minutes of deep breathing, but I think the author was trying to illustrate that the deep breathing nearly immediately gets us out of our daily beta state into the lower brain states where relaxation dwells. The faster we get there, the quicker the REM and delta states arrive; thus the better we sleep & the more restful we sleep.  

However, I want to take this relaxed state on step further, if I may. I also believe because I use it quite frequently that when we get ourselves relaxed by whatever method we choose, it allows the Holy Spirit to “talk” to us. Now, I don’t hear audible voices, but I do hear that “still, small voice” whispering. Sometimes, it’s not a “voice” at all, but suddenly clarification of something that happened during the day comes. Other times I get a brilliant idea, like the proverbial “light bulb” going on. I personally attribute it to the Holy Spirit. Others call it intuition or the universe or whatever they choose. My Christian worldview says the Holy Spirit is the Great Counselor, the One who reveals all.

I believe this is why EFT works so effectively. As it drops us down into lower, relaxed brain states, the Holy Spirit begins to speak, opening up our subconscious, allowing old hurtful memories and pain to come to consciousness for release from our “bodymind”. This is an amazing combination! The Almighty of the Universe indwelling us through the Holy Spirit, helping us process all our emotional concerns. He’s not an impersonal God, but a God who is hands-on, who loved us so much He sent His only Son to earth to expiate our sins, but He goes a step further by having sent His Holy Spirit, the Great Revealer, to keep us on track and on course in our lives for Him. It is much more difficult to do this on-track thing, if we are preoccupied with all of our past distressful memories, trapping us in our inner self-centered selves.

Use EFT regularly, losing those emotions about those distressful memories and watch how quickly your spiritual life opens up fully to God. It blows it right open!  How do I know? I’m living proof of this exact thing. God, using EFT, has blasted open all things Christian to me. It is an amazing process. I hope you decide to try it.

For more information, go to:  www.eftforchristians.com

To schedule a free EFT coaching session, email me at eftforchristians@gmail.com

Always remember to take complete responsibility for your own health and well-being.  Contact a medical professional, if necessary.

EFT & Trauma

Trauma in our lives, and I’m talking about the big “T” traumas, like physical abuse, war memories, rape, sexual abuse, etc. are huge. Anyone carrying them around knows exactly what I am talking about. These issues shape every facet and minute of our lives. They override and overwhelm every thought process we have. They cloud our thinking about who we are in Christ.

Often the memories shape our personality. It’s the physiology God put into us that makes this all so. He didn’t mean it as destructive, but as a protective mechanism.

The problem with the subconscious, if it is really a “problem” is that its main function is survival. Anything it perceives as a life threat, it will bury, hide, disguise or do anything it needs to do to protect us.  And I’m talking “us” here, because I have firsthand experience on this subject. Sadly, for me, I know it intimately, and the deep burial of the memories nearly killed me. God using EFT saved my life.

So, let me continue, explaining why traumas get buried so deeply into the subconscious, where no one or nothing, including the conscious mind, can access them. Traumas are overwhelming, trapping us in the freeze part of the limbic system’s “fight, flight or freeze” mechanism. During the trauma, the person feels helpless, hopeless, without any resources. If it happens to a child, it is even worse, because up to the age of about 7 (Remember, all you Catholics, and probably other denominations, how the Church used age 7 as the “age of reason” when the sacraments of Penance and Holy Communion were permitted?), children function purely in delta, theta, and alpha brain waves, sucking up information, with absolutely no processing ability whatsoever. They are building a lifetime of neural pathways. Repetition is what builds those. That is why 2 or 3 year olds repetitively ask the same question over and over and over again. They don’t do it to irritate the adults in their lives; they do it because that is precisely the way their brains work. Kids have no cognitive neural pathways when they are born. They are a clean slate. Every event, good or bad, that happens to them begins that neural learning, all cognitive, creating a lifetime of neural connections & memories. In order to make those learned neural bundle stick, kids must ask the same question time and again to make the bundle thick and heavy duty. Our thoughts will ascend a thickened neural pathway much quicker than a lesser used one.

It is the same process that is involved in habit changing. We always hear that it takes 3 weeks to change a habit. That’s about right based on the neurology involved. You decide you want to stop eating toast for breakfast and eat fruit instead. You’ve eaten toast your entire life, so what does your taste buds want when your feet hit the floor in the morning? Yes, toast, because it is a comfortable, known habit. You’ve done it forever, it seems. In order to change that habit, you need to become mindful that you want the toast habit changed, and keep it in your mind for a couple of days. The subconscious will want you to revert back to the old toast habit, and you might even slip up a day or so and have your toast half eaten by the time you remember you had chosen to switch to fruit. Don’t fret, get up the following morning & eat your fruit. After about 3 weeks of fruit eating, you will, in the future, probably reach for fruit without thinking. Why? Because you simply, by choice, changed that particular, mundane as it might seem, neural pathway to another idea. After about 3 weeks, the body, which never wastes a single component part in the brain, disassembles the toast pathway and puts those component parts elsewhere where repair is needed.

Young children are the same way. In order to remember that the color blue is the color blue, the concept must be repeated a 100 times, or what feels like to an adult a million times. We, as adults, tell kids to quit asking so many questions. Don’t bother telling them that – they will just continue to ask the same thing over and over. Kids have to – it’s the way God programmed them to learn and to build up the neural bundles they need to function in life.

But, back to traumas, the concept here is similar. At the time of the trauma, the event is fixed in our memories; much of the details in our subconscious, where we cannot access it, the things we tell ourselves around that memory are what begins the problems. We aren’t good enough, it was all our fault, men are scary, Mom doesn’t care, red cars crash, public speaking is uncomfortable, etc.

EFT goes in & dismantles all those encoded details that are getting into our way, causing us anxiety or fear, stalling us out in life. Once 2 or 3 or 4 aspects (details) around an event are disabled, the event becomes a non-issue, allowing us once again to move forward in life, to that abundant life that God has called us to live.

It’s all in the God created physiology. God made us this way, so why not use what He gave us to improve our relationship with Him & others.

Are you stalled, or are some emotions getting in your way of your abundant life in Christ? If so, email me. I believe EFT can help!

For more information, go to  www.eftforchristians.com

To schedule a free EFT coaching session, email me at eftforchristians@gmail.com

Always remember to take complete responsibility for your own health and well-being.