EFT for Christians presents a video on how to tap on emotional triggers.
Remember, EFT is not a substitute for sound medical advice or care, so please contact your own personal physician when psychological or physical help is needed.
Wednesday, September 30, 2020
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
Tapping Suggestions for Children
Tapping with children suggestion:
I'm a Donna Eden aficionado! Donna has been teaching Energy Medicine for decades. Example: Last weekend my head was clogged. I looked up Donna's thoughts on draining my sinuses. Following her simple instructions, within minutes, my head began to drain (after putting up with 2 weeks of it being clogged!).
While reading I found another of her suggestions. Sorry, I don't know how to shorten this so it will still make sense.
"Tapping the k-27 points (in EFT that is our collarbone points) 'flips' your energies around. It is so simple and unobtrusive to tap or massage K-27 points that you can use this technique in a classroom or business meeting.
"Tapping the K-27 points not only can keep you awake, but also can help you think more clearly {I also suggest the gamut point on the back of the hands}. I have countless times seen children in school, sitting at a desk, looking first at what the teacher is writing on the blackboard and then looking back to the desk. By the time some children's eyes reach the desk, their mind is blank or the information has become totally muddled. The energy circuitry has been disrupted by this up and down movement of the eyes. THIS IS THE MECHANISM THAT ALLOWS EYE MOVEMENT DESENSITIZATION TO DISENGAGE A TRAUMATIC STRESS RESPONSE FROM A TRAUMATIC MEMORY, but it can also keep you from absorbing new information.
"By tapping K-27, however, the energy circuitry will hold strong even as the child's eyes move up and down. THIS TECHNIQUE IS ALSO HELPFUL WITH DYSLEXIA AND OTHER LEARNING DISABILITIES, AS WELL AS ANY SITUATION, SUCH AS TENNIS OR READING, WHERE YOUR EYES ARE SHIFTING FROM ONE SPOT TO ANOTHER."
The K-27 points (collarbone tapping spots) are juncture points that affect all of the other meridians.
Donna suggests that one consider tapping with hands crossed over the chest (tap right K-27 with left hand, and tap left one with right hand) because it assists "the energy in crossing over from the left-brain hemisphere to the right side of the body" and vice versa.
For what this is worth......I may just tap with my hands crossed sometimes for the heck of it!
Energy Medicine, Donna Eden, pages 74-75
Remember, EFT is not a substitute for sound medical care, so please contact your own personal physician when medical needs arise.
Sherrie Rice Smith
Certified EFT Practitioner
Author of EFT for Christians 4 Book Series
Use Promo Code SAVE20 when ordering from Publisher to get 20% Off
Tuesday, September 1, 2020
Life's Thought Filters
Recently I was asked: "Is this true? That once we judge something is true or a fact, our
brain actually filters the input we receive to support what
we’ve already decided we believe."
My answer: Yes, you have it!!
What happens from the
"learning" of something is we build strong, thick neural pathways,
like interstate highways, where our thoughts just tend to gravitate to.
Once we believe something and these neural highways are built that is exactly
where we head - right down the same thought line we believe to be our truth,
and we return to that pathway over and over again. We are then STUCK! It
kinda is a "dog returning to its vomit".
Canadian researcher
Donald Hebbs said, and we repeat, "Neurons that fire together, wire
together". In EFT, our motto is, "Neurons that don't fire together,
never wire together" which means we can break down those pathways with
tapping so we don't with a knee jerk reactionimmediately run down
that same thought road.
2000 Nobel prize winner
Eric Kandel taught us that ONE hour of thinking the same
thought, be it positive or negative, DOUBLES the size of the neural pathway of
that thought. So, worry and rumination strengthens and almost guarantees
us more worry and rumination because again we are stuck, literally, in that
thought pattern.
Since we have kazillions
of neural connections, so many of our thoughts intersect with other thoughts,
binding them altogether in one big mass of lies. Cathy & I call these our
lying emotions because of that idea.
Good part of this is
with tapping comes the "generalization effect" where disconnecting
some neural pathways often takes out big chunks of other rather unrelated life
habits and patterns that were peripherally connected. This is why other
thoughts or even physical afflictions or things just seem to go away without
any tapping at all. Subtle personality changes happen and we often don't even
notice.
I'm not sure, but you
could be correct, that this a spiritual piece of EFT as much as it is a
physiological piece.
God put these learning
patterns in us to create safety for us. We learned what was good for us and
what could harm us.
With Adam & Eve's
sin, the whole system went awry. What was meant for good, like everything else,
turned not so good when trauma or abuse is introduced into our lives. Instead
of knowing that a yellow snake could bite and kill us (and we stay away from
it), we now ruminate and worry about the "snake", trying to keep
ourselves safe, but the worry finally digs us a big fat stress hole whereby our
health can be ruined with chronic illnesses. Dumb example, but you get my gist!
Tapping is all about
safety. We will attempt to heal WHEN we feel it is safe to do so. Those who
"resist" or have secondary gain around getting better, either
spiritually, emotionally, mentally, or physically, don't feel safe at that
moment to step into that healing.
Sadly, some people never
do feel safe and maybe never receive their healing on this side of heaven.
So,
perceptions usually eventually turn into beliefs about who we are in Christ,
which is pretty much the sum total of why we should be tapping! Everything else
slides in under this one.
Remember, tapping is not a substitute for medical care from your own personal physician, so please contact a medical doctor when care is needed.
Sherrie Rice Smith
Certified EFT Practitioner
Author of EFT for Christians 4 Book Series
Use Promo Code SAVE20 when ordering from Publisher to get 20% Off
Friday, August 14, 2020
Brain Signals & EFT
"The signals from our brains are communicated constantly via the matrix of energy conduction within our bodies. Every thought you think is echoing through your connective tissue communication system, turning genes on and off, producing either stress responses or healing responses."
Genie in Your Genes, Dawson Church, page 159
Our thoughts give us the ability to turn our disease genes on and off. Negative hurtful memories and thoughts turn the genes on; positive, peaceful thoughts turn genes off.
Isn't it wonderful God implanted in us this healing ability?
Tapping is a wonderful tool to assist you to neutralize and change abusive, hurtful, and damaging memories.
Email me if you want a Christian EFT Practitioner referral!
Blessings in Christ!
Remember, EFT is not a substitute for medical care. Contact your own personal physician when medical help is needed.
Sherrie Rice Smith
Certified EFT Practitioner
Author of EFT for Christians 4 Book Series
Use Promo Code SAVE20 when ordering from Publisher to get 20% Off
Friday, July 31, 2020
"Resistance" to Tapping: What is That All About?
Emotional healing is personal to each of us.
How we do life is all based on what we learned as youngsters. If our family understood emotions, listened to each other express them, and reacted in an appropriate way, we often live our adult lives in a more comfortable emotional way.
When a child has seen much emotional abuse, learning to express oneself as an adult is often more difficult. It is a learned behavior.
There are times when we wish or think we are ready to heal, but doing so just plain doesn't come easily.
Why?
The youngster inside us doesn't feel it is safe to confront or access earlier feelings now because it wasn't safe to do so back in childhood. Our feelings today directly reflect how we felt decades ago.
Tapping is all about feeling safe.
Sometimes during talk therapy, and I know this from personal experience, discussing how we feel now about something decades ago often brings a torrent of tears, anger, and sadness. It just plain feels safer NOT to discuss any of this. Leaving it buried deep within our psyche seems to be a more prudent course of action, however, doing that usually doesn't bring healing.
When a client doesn't seem ready to change, we call this "resistance" in the EFT trade. Sometimes it sounds like we are blaming the client for not wanting to get emotionally better.
In reality most of the time it has to do with safety and feeling ok to discuss, tap on, and let go of our old emotional baggage that just isn't allowing us to move forward as our Lord would have us do.
It isn't satan holding us back, it is our own stored stuff. And it may not be our fault we aren't ready to heal now. It is our responsibility to try to work on it though, as emotional healing usually brings us closer to our Lord.
EFT is one of the best techniques and the closest thing to a safety net that is known today. When we access a memory that makes us uncomfortable, tapping most often will settle down the feelings that come up around it. A few tapping rounds usually does the trick.
Don't beat yourself up if there are memories you aren't quite ready to tackle alone with tapping yet. You can also email me to obtain a referral to a Christian EFT Practitioner who can walk beside you as you do tap on these memories.
How we do life is all based on what we learned as youngsters. If our family understood emotions, listened to each other express them, and reacted in an appropriate way, we often live our adult lives in a more comfortable emotional way.
When a child has seen much emotional abuse, learning to express oneself as an adult is often more difficult. It is a learned behavior.
There are times when we wish or think we are ready to heal, but doing so just plain doesn't come easily.
Why?
The youngster inside us doesn't feel it is safe to confront or access earlier feelings now because it wasn't safe to do so back in childhood. Our feelings today directly reflect how we felt decades ago.
Tapping is all about feeling safe.
Sometimes during talk therapy, and I know this from personal experience, discussing how we feel now about something decades ago often brings a torrent of tears, anger, and sadness. It just plain feels safer NOT to discuss any of this. Leaving it buried deep within our psyche seems to be a more prudent course of action, however, doing that usually doesn't bring healing.
When a client doesn't seem ready to change, we call this "resistance" in the EFT trade. Sometimes it sounds like we are blaming the client for not wanting to get emotionally better.
In reality most of the time it has to do with safety and feeling ok to discuss, tap on, and let go of our old emotional baggage that just isn't allowing us to move forward as our Lord would have us do.
It isn't satan holding us back, it is our own stored stuff. And it may not be our fault we aren't ready to heal now. It is our responsibility to try to work on it though, as emotional healing usually brings us closer to our Lord.
EFT is one of the best techniques and the closest thing to a safety net that is known today. When we access a memory that makes us uncomfortable, tapping most often will settle down the feelings that come up around it. A few tapping rounds usually does the trick.
Don't beat yourself up if there are memories you aren't quite ready to tackle alone with tapping yet. You can also email me to obtain a referral to a Christian EFT Practitioner who can walk beside you as you do tap on these memories.
Andy Hunt's article is all about feeling safe during tapping in order for us to access and let the emotional content of old memories go back to the Cross where they belong.
God bless your healing!
Remember, EFT is NOT a substitute for sound emotional or medical care. Call your own personal physician when you need that kind of help.
Sherrie Rice Smith
Certified EFT Practitioner
Author of EFT for Christians 4 Book Series
Use Promo Code SAVE20 when ordering from Publisher to get 20% Off
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
Why Tap at All?
I’m often asked why we need to tap when we’ve lived in abusive situations. Won't we just forget the old memories eventually, or just come to accept them?
My answer is always, "No! Because of the way God put our physical body together with its emotional underpinnings, we often need to find a technique that calms not only the emotional impact of the abuse, but also calms the body, too, so it can heal."
Our body continues to react to what it "thought" the abuse meant when it happened. Most abuse occurs in childhood, and as children, we believe the world revolves around us, our wants, needs, and desires. We lack the maturity to see the entire picture of what was happening around us in society, church, and our family.
While the originating abuse was real, the life perceptions we gain over the ensuing years & decades are often faulty because our safety system built into our limbic system by God Himself goes awry. The abuse often is seen personally as something about who we are or what our worth is as a human being. Shame creeps into the scene sending our future actions off in a direction they weren't meant to go because we want to feel safe in our emotional and personal environment.
When that perceptual lens gets clouded early in life, like cataracts, surgery is needed to clear that damaged lens! Tapping is emotional cataract surgery! It clears our life perspectives not only on an emotional level, but often on spiritual and physical levels, too.
Consider taking a tapping class so you can learn all the nuances of effective tapping. It might be the best education you will ever receive.
Remember, EFT is not a substitute for sound medical or psychological advice, so please contact your own personal physicians when that type of help is needed.
Sherrie Rice Smith
Certified EFT Practitioner
Author of EFT for Christians Tapping in God's Peace & Joy (2016)
Author of EFT for Christians Devotions (Christmas, 2020)
Use Promo Code SAVE20 when ordering from Publisher to get 20% Off
Tuesday, July 7, 2020
Tapping on Prejudice and Other Societal Opinions!
Prejudice is a fact-less and usually negative attitude toward members of a particular group. Common features of prejudice include negative feelings, stereotypical beliefs, and a tendency to discriminate against that group of people. Many definitions of prejudice exist, most of us pick up negative ideas of others based on generalizations from opinions from others, usually those in authority, or ones who are older and deemed wiser and more experienced than we are.
Prejudice can be based on just about anything including sex, race, age, sexual orientations, ethnic background, socioeconomic status, dress, educational background, and religious beliefs.
Most beliefs, including prejudices, are nothing more than arbitrary interpretations of another person’s viewpoints. Events happen around us in the world, but the meaning we give the events is our own personal perception of that event. It’s these perceptions that shape our life and the actions, thoughts, and behaviors within that existence.
Please don’t misunderstand me. Some of our beliefs are needed to keep us safe.
Should we see a man (that’s an assumption, as I just as easily could have said a woman!) wielding a gun a half a block away, yelling at the top of his lungs about his rights being violated, we would have an immediate “perception” that the situation is not safe and we should duck behind a building until the police have that corridor under control.
We have made a correct assumption that the gun swinging man just might harm us. An incorrect assumption would be that all men of a certain skin color are threatening, whether they hold a gun or no. It’s even more prejudicial if we base that opinion on just this one incident.
Genesis 1:25-31 talks about creation of man. We were created in God’s image. The word Adam simply means “man”. It is not the specific name of the first male creature God created; therefore, there is a male man and a female man – Adam and Eve. They were created male and female for the perpetuation of the human race.
Deuteronomy 10:17, Job 34:19, Romans 2:11, and Acts 10:34 specifically state that God shows no partiality or favoritism. He loves us all no matter who we are or what we are. Galatians 3:38 clearly states, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
So, how do racial, sexual, ethnic, etc. prejudices get formed?
As an infant all our needs must be met by our parents or other caregivers, otherwise we will die. This care includes teaching us all that we need to know to survive in life from how to dress ourselves, eat good food, drive an automobile, act responsibly, how to interact with others, and all other opinions that we feel are unique to us and we came to form freely.
But did we form all those opinion freely? Research science shows clearly we didn’t do this thinking on our own – someone taught us. And some of that training, so to speak, can be epigenetic biases. Another article for another day!
Those opinions and thoughts about the world can come literally from anyone. Our parents, grandparents, older siblings, teachers, pastors, friends, and can include other gang members or people we meet hanging out on a street corner, including the local merchant. As we see behaviors of others played out in our life, we accept them as truth, whether they are moral or immoral behaviors. The filters through which we see those behaviors are based on what we learned early in life as children. It’s the patterns we acquired as we matured that play out later in life in our own behavior.
As children we learn red means stop and green means go. We just as easily learn that apples are yummy to eat, but pine cones really don’t taste too good. And so it is with prejudices. Prejudices are learned traits based on someone else’s opinion.
If someone in higher authority than you rants on about how awful German people are, you have no reason to disagree, and so you believe the well-read woman is correct. At that point, you file away a prejudice that German people are bad. Most likely, because that is “your opinion”, you will state it freely even though you have little reason or experience to know that “German people are awful” on a personal basis. In fact, you literally have no idea in your daily encounters who is German and who isn’t, but should someone state specifically that they are German, your guard, based on previous beliefs and teachings, will come up.
Your heart rate will rise, hearing become acute, listening for any dangerous signals the German person may make, breathing becomes more rapid, blood sugar rises, as does your blood pressure. This all happens unconsciously based on previous information someone else taught you.
Your amygdala just threw you into “Flight, Fight, and Freeze” mode, surging neurochemicals throughout your body based on those prior acquired perceptions. Specifically, you are ready to run or fight and you have no idea what just happened. Prejudicial thoughts just sabotaged your neurochemistry. And you may have no idea why it all just happened, until you investigate by asking yourself about the situation.
Once you get to know the “German” in your midst, you realize he poses no threat to you, and then your neurochemistry will settle down, as you relax.
But what happens when the “German” in your midst is not given a chance to “prove” himself a non-threatening person? This is where prejudice turns violent. We say things to the person we shouldn’t, bullying begins, fists start flying, and soon physical damage is done all based on someone else’s idea of who is good or bad.
As we look back through history, many horrific incidents have taken place all based on someone else’s perception of what was good or bad in life. World War I was started by one person assassinating a political figure who was thought to be unfair. Millions of people died because of an opinion. Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s, had 1.5 million people killed to enforce his opinion that Cambodia should remain an agrarian society. Somewhere Pol Pot was taught modern society was evil.
Most political debacles occur due to someone’s opinion. Often these turn deadly for those around the leader.
So, how should we handle prejudices with Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT, tapping)?
Prejudicial beliefs can be handled like any other problem a client could bring to us. Different techniques could be used to undo the basis of the prejudice.
I personally would want to tap, asking the Holy Spirit, if there is any trauma suffered at the hands of the one against which the prejudice stands. Often this is the case when sexual abuse has been perpetrated.
If a male has abused a young lady, often that woman wants little to nothing to do with males. This is a prejudice, too. Once we tap away the underlying emotions of the trauma, most often this frees the client to see other males in a completely different light, understanding that the abuse was perpetrated by one particular male, not the entire male race!
The same would pertain to a young African American boy who was bullied or beat-up by a gang of Caucasian males. Later in life that same man might come to believe that all white males are dangerous bullies, locking the African American male into a life that keeps him from ever being successful because he won’t involve himself in white society. This becomes a prejudice that denies a person the fullness and abundance talked about in Psalm 31:19. God wants us to have an abundant life filled with love, beauty, and laughter.
I invite you to pray and think about what prejudices in life you have against other people, institutions, churches, etc., which might be holding you back in life from doing your best for God.
What opinions do you hold in life that may have no factual basis at all, except what you heard someone tell you those ideas decades ago?
Consider hiring an EFT practitioner to explore and eliminate those prejudicial viewpoints from your life, allowing God to open up opportunities you never considered for yourself. God just might have a very special job for you to do for Him!
EFT is not a substitute for medical care, so please take personal responsibility for all your physical and emotional needs.
Sherrie Rice Smith, R.N. (Retired)
Certified EFT Practitioner
Author of EFT for Christians – order from my website below.
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