Worry & EFT

Worry!  It pervades our modern life. It is what we do as humans. We worry about relationships. We worry about finances. In certain instances, we worry about our safety and we worry if we will have sufficient food to feed our children the next day. We just worry. And often, if there is nothing to worry about, we worry about that! I’ve actually had clients come to me to tap on just that specific idea. If they have nothing to worry about, they will create something worrisome. Worry is what they do.

Philippians 4:6-7 reads, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” All our fears, anxieties, and worry are to be placed into His loving arms. They are His to carry.

I believe Apostle Paul is referring to an attitude. An attitude of knowing who our Savior is and what He has done for us. That knowing keeps us surrendered to Him all day long, through the thick & thin of life’s travails, desiring to do His will every minute of our lives. J. Vernon McGee wrote in one of his Thru the Bible entries entitled “The Attitude of Prayer, “Prayer is an attitude of the life. It is more an attitude of life than an action of the lips.”

Dr. McGee ended the short study with this, “There was a famous preacher, years ago in the state of Georgia, who had many very unusual expressions. One of them was this, ‘When a man prays for a corn crop, God expects him to say Amen with a hoe.’ You can’t just stay on your knees all the time and pray for a corn crop. That’s pious nonsense. But to pray for the corn crop and then go to work is the thing our Lord is talking about in days when men’s hearts are failing them. “Men ought always to pray, and not to faint.” (Luke 18:1).

Prayer is an attitude of awareness that God is with us, and unlike the New Ager’s non-personal god, He is interested and involved in our every thought and action. We whisper prayers of thanksgiving throughout the day, or ones asking for help, if something difficult arises. We just know He is right there with us, a prayer or thought away.  He waits for us to talk to Him. He desires that communication. If at Baptism the Holy Spirit indwelt us, how can we do anything differently? 

Now, that all said & done, we know nothing is that easy!  After all, we are human, and our thoughts turn to worry, fear, discouragement, and anger.  It is life, and it appears to be the way we are programmed. Or is it?

As we go through the day, prayer should be our first response to everything that makes us fearful, anxious, or angry, etc.  A lack of prayer will cause us to be dependent on our own abilities and thoughts instead of depending on God's grace and mercy and help. Unceasing prayer is the humbling of ourselves through continual dependence upon and communication with the Father.

But what happens when the fear, worry, or anxiety continues to rear its ugly head?  What happens when we cannot seem to follow that Biblical admonition to stop worrying? Do we not trust God? Is God not answering our prayers?  I don’t believe that to be the case at all. God created us with a specific physiology. He knows what He created and how we function within our bodies. God allows certain situations to occur in our lives, sometimes for decades, to keep us growing closer to Him, or to teach us something important, lessons required for us to do a job God has appointed us to do for Him.

God’s physiology goes something like this:  We learn worry early in our lifetime. Oh, it might be something that today we would find inconsequential, like being afraid of the history report we must give before the class tomorrow, or not understanding the science in an upcoming big test. Worry and anxiety set in. The cognitive learning process instilled in our mind has just begun.  We brew up unconsciously a mix of neurochemicals. Each mix is different, but specific to us, for each emotion we feel. Our bodies memorize those chemical mixtures.

Time and time we feel the exact feelings when we experience similar circumstances because those special chemical mixtures are brewed and dumped into our blood streams.

We become accustomed to the feelings. Sometimes, we even like them because they are familiar to us, or, as the body is prone to do, we like the kick of endorphins it releases immediately after the neurochemical mix is released. Endorphins relax us, and the body is programmed to do that to ameliorate the original stimulating chemicals it released in emotions of fear, worry, or anxiety.

Over the following decades, other problems arise that reinforce all that worry and fear and anxiety. Each time, it seems we worry more and more, or the worry is more deep set. Finally, by middle age, we find ourselves literally worrying about nearly every single thing in our lives. We can tell ourselves a million times that we have nothing to worry about – God has it all under control, but, for some reason, that never really reassures us, and we continue to worry (Matt. 6:25-26, Luke 12:22-31).  Eventually, the guilt about worrying begins to set in, too, adding to the angst. We know in our heart it is wrong and sinful, as it places us in control of our life, not God, and we pray diligently to be delivered from it.

We all know God can do whatever He finds necessary. Sometimes, He simply rescues us from our deep-seated worry, setting us free. Other times, it continues, like St. Paul’s thorn, leaving us overburdened and sick. God, at other times, brings alongside us something else to assist us, and answering our prayers in other ways.

If you have prayed for God to help you stop worrying about everything, perhaps it is now time to consider using Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT).

Hindsight is a wonderful thing!  Now, after praying for more than 40 years for God to “fix” my life, one that I felt was pathetic, filled with constant negativity, self-doubts, self-hatred, and persistent worry, He lead me to a permanent solution – EFT!

Would I right here, right now, be doing what I now do – tapping with hurting people, teaching other wonderful Christians to become Christian EFT practitioners, and writing this article, if God had promptly and immediately, when I first asked 40 years ago, relieved me of that early emotional turmoil. Absolutely not!

God used all that horrible negative stuff to mold me (Isaiah 64:8) and make me as He wished me to be and desired me to do for Him.  

Romans 9:20 as written in the Message says it best: “Who in the world do you think you are to second-guess God? Do you for one moment suppose any of us knows enough to call God into question? Clay doesn’t talk back to the fingers that mold it, saying, “Why did you shape me like this?” Isn’t it obvious that a potter has a perfect right to shape one lump of clay into a vase for holding flowers and another into a pot for cooking beans? If God needs one style of pottery especially designed to show his angry displeasure and another style carefully crafted to show his glorious goodness, isn’t that all right? Either or both happens to Jews, but it also happens to the other people. Hosea put it well: I’ll call nobodies and make them somebodies; I’ll call the unloved and make them beloved. In the place where they yelled out, “You’re nobody!” they’re calling you “God’s living children.” Isaiah maintained this same emphasis: If each grain of sand on the seashore were numbered and the sum labeled “chosen of God,” They’d be numbers still, not names; salvation comes by personal selection. God doesn’t count us; he calls us by name. Arithmetic is not his focus. Isaiah had looked ahead and spoken the truth: If our powerful God had not provided us a legacy of living children, We would have ended up like ghost towns, like Sodom and Gomorrah. How can we sum this up? All those people who didn’t seem interested in what God was doing actually embraced what God was doing as he straightened out their lives. And Israel, who seemed so interested in reading and talking about what God was doing, missed it. How could they miss it? Because instead of trusting God, they took over. They were absorbed in what they themselves were doing. They were so absorbed in their “God projects” that they didn’t notice God right in front of them, like a huge rock in the middle of the road. And so they stumbled into him and went sprawling. Isaiah (again!) gives us the metaphor for pulling this together: Careful! I’ve put a huge stone on the road to Mount Zion, a stone you can’t get around. But the stone is me! If you’re looking for me, you’ll find me on the way, not in the way.

Emotional Freedom Techniques is another of those answers to prayer. While He allows worry, fear, and anxiety to be part of our human experience, one started in response to original sin our first parents committed in the Garden of Eden, He also instilled in us a mechanism to relieve just those emotions.

EFT, or tapping, is a physiology process where by these fore mentioned emotions can be permanently dismantled. How? By allowing the subconscious to bring to the surface those early memories where the worry first began, and tapping away the emotions attached to those events. As we can read in the next paragraph, we must break the negative worry patterns in our lives in order to maintain our health. Even our grandmothers understood that worry could kill us. Now, science understands why.  The old computer adage, “Garbage in, garbage out” works within our own bodies. Every piece of negativity we think or speak is picked up by the antennae on our cellular receptors, and all 50-200 billion cells in our bodies have 50,000 to 100,000 cellular receptors on each. That is an awful lot of communication tools to pick up negative vibes.

Dr. Allison Adams writes in an article, “According to Dr Lipton, all living things and all cells can only be in one of two modes. The first of these modes is 'survival' whereby they are in a protective or bracing mode and the second is that they are reproducing. For any cell in the body, to remain for too long in the 'protective mode' eventually undermines the body's defenses as normal replacement and maintenance cannot take place and the adrenal system shuts off the immune system which can ultimately result in various diseases. 

Dr Lipton determined that all cells have antennae that are tuned into the signals broadcast by the mind and that fearful signals cause the cells to remain in their 'protective' mode indefinitely. Individual humans, he maintains all have unique frequencies associated with all their cell membrane receptors. Further, that many of the beliefs that we broadcast to our cells are unconscious and were acquired in a semi-hypnotic state before the age of 7 years of age.

This means that in order to get a different physical outcome, we must change the broadcast and this can be done either by becoming very mindful of our internal chatter, undergoing hypnotherapy (to access the same mind state as the program) or by using one of the energy psychology techniques such as Emotional Freedom Technique, body talk, Avatar, holographic re-patterning or Psyche-K.” (http://www.thenaturalrecoveryplan.com/articles/cell-membrane-the-cells-brain.html).

It’s how God created us when He breathed breath into Adam’s nostrils on the sixth day of creation.

EFT will break all that negative self-talk, those voices in your head, that cause you to worry, or feel God doesn’t love you, or you are worthless to humanity, etc.

Free yourself of those emotions of anxiety, fear, and worry through EFT, opening you up to an awakened spiritual experience through God’s mighty grace.  Somehow once EFT knocks back those unwanted feelings, a whole new world of God’s grace opens up to us. It’s been there the entire time, but we have been wallowing in base emotions, allowing them to drown out our Savior’s voice. Instead of allowing worry or fear to persist, overwhelming those cellular receptors, tap instead, allowing them to flood you with God’s mercy and grace and love.

Allow God to instill into you the peace of God that passes all understanding by using this EFT mechanism God implanted in you at birth.

God bless your walk with Him! 

EFT is not a substitute for a physician's care. Call your doctor if you determine to need to do so. Please take responsibility for all of your physical needs. 

Sherrie Rice Smith, R.N. (Retired)

Certified EFT Practitioner

Author EFT for Christians (2015)