#11 EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) Tapping Part 1

Ahead of the annual family ski trip, Kelly turns to EFT Tapping in hopes of overcoming her increasing fear and anxiety on the slopes.

As she unravels the root of the issue with an online EFT practitioner, an unexpected truth is revealed.

This episode comes with a free PDF of journal prompts and resources

Join Project WE to work on your life alongside Kelly and other women who are stepping out of auto-pilot and into higher levels of conscious living.

Get the free Project Me Life Wheel® to help you check in with your 8 Key Life Areas.

Subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode! Thanks for your reviews and shares.

Read the Transcript for this Episode below:

Episode 11 of the Project Me podcast.  Hi guys, I'm recording a speedy episode today as I'm getting laser eye surgery in three days, and I've been warned that I need to stay off screens for at least a couple of weeks. It's a PRK surgery, which takes much longer to heal than LASIK, and man, have I been putting this surgery off.

Three years ago, I was writing my book, and I couldn't possibly be off my computer. And then that led into the book launch, and then that merged into creating Project Me Live, my live event in London. And then I think that merged right into launching Project We, my membership site. And this year I was finally going to have the surgery done in April.

I thought, you know, there's always going to be something, but of course we went into lockdown and I ended up running my high vibe journey online program five times this year in a row. So I've barely had a day off of screens for a long time. And the time is finally now my lovely project. We members have kindly said that they'll really step up in the members community and not to worry about them.

So I'm just here today getting anything and everything done that requires a computer and then turning it off until my eyes are healed again.  I love running my online business and I feel such a sense of connection to these incredible women from all over the world. So it's going to be challenging for me not to be able to check in on everyone and to share what I'm doing.

I do have some posts auto scheduled to go out on social media so my algorithms don't go to crap. But if you see a post there, you know, it's not really me doing it like it's me in auto post, but please go ahead and like it so that my algorithms stay in tune. But I am letting go of control of this and I'm going to surrender to this digital detox.

When I'm back in business, I'll be sending out the new 2021 design my year workbooks to all of my project. We members joined for the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve to get that and actually joined before December 14th and come to our virtual Christmas party. I wasn't sure how my eyes would even be by December 14th and whether I'd be able to host it.

And then, like magic, a solution appeared in the form of Susie Bashford of the Big Juicy Creative Podcast. She's also a Project We member, and she offered me up an idea for our Christmas party that sounds so fun, so I've handed it over to her.  This is going to be a part party, part personal growth, as we explore the different roles and multiple personalities that make up who we are, identifying the different characters within ourselves and how to bring some of them out to play more often.

Susie Bashford writes for Psychologies Magazine and she specializes in exploring creativity. Since Unleashed Creativity is my word of the year for 2020, this feels like the best way to end it. So I'm really hoping that my eyes are better and I can be there. I'm sure I can if I'm not hosting it and I can just kind of take part that way.

New members to Project We are warmly welcomed and I actually think now is the best time of year to join. So head to myprojectme. com and go to the Courses and Workshops tab to join in.  Okay, let's head into the next installment of the ongoing story Of my journey into the wonderful world of woo woo,  a new chapter of my life opened up for me in 2010 when my family moved from Wimbledon in the UK to Madrid in Spain.

Our boys were 10 and seven, and we easily sold it to them as a family adventure. We'd all learn a new language and a new culture and get out of what I'd come to call the Wimbledon bubble.  I was more than ready for change, but nothing prepared me for just how positive this change was going to be for the whole family.

In particular with me moving away from freelance graphic design and other people's designs and briefs and into becoming a female entrepreneur and launching and developing the project me concept into an actual business, ultimately creating my dream career about what I'm most passionate about. Helping women to step out of autopilot and into higher levels of conscious living.

I talked about launching Project Me in episode 7 if you want to hear more about that.  In 2014, I attended a networking event in Madrid run by the International Women Building Businesses Abroad. This is a group designed for women living abroad, wherever that might be, who have a business or are thinking about setting one up.

I met a lovely lady there who said she was an EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique practitioner. Well, I'd never heard of EFT, but I did have an amazing emotional acupuncture session with Justine Hankin to shed emotions around my abusive ex. I shared that story back in episode three. So I was definitely open minded and curious to hear what this EFT was about.

I learned that EFT works by tapping on acupressure meridians to release blockages. EFT works by tapping on acupressure meridians to release blockages. When these blockages are released, the problem feeling can be released and moved through the body. Unlike emotional acupuncture, there are no needles, and one can tap on their own meridians and be guided by a professional or work by themselves.

She told me that, with working with a professional, it's particularly effective for overcoming fears and phobias or for getting to the root of an issue that's causing us some ongoing problems. Welp. As much as I was open to giving it a go, at that time, I actually couldn't think of a fear or a phobia or any issues I was having at that time, so I sort of banked the information in case I'd need it one day.

Well, a few months later, I was having dinner with my family, and once again, all anyone could talk about was our upcoming ski holiday. We were going to be heading to Zermatt in Switzerland.  All they were talking about was constant ski condition updates and everything about the ski trip, and it was driving me mad.

I was getting so irritated. My family couldn't figure out why I'd turned so foul any time the ski trip came up, and I didn't really understand it myself, so I ended up opening up my journal to explore my emotions on paper. Why was I getting so agitated about this ski trip?  Our annual ski holidays have been going on since the boys were little, and they used to be hard work, with getting their ski boots on, and lugging their skis to the lift, and putting them, pulling them along the flat bits, and coaxing them onto their feet when they were in heaps of tears falling into snowdrifts.

I didn't love all of those moments, but they were balanced out by the sheer beauty of being up high on those magical mountains and the fresh crisp air and eating gorgeous mountain food.  Why now, when the boys were teenagers and skiing independently and things were so much easier, was I increasingly bad at skiing and really not enjoying these trips?

I'd grown so fearful of falling that even my trusted botch rescue remedy, which always got me down any steep or icy slopes, was not working to calm my nerves. I'd end up in tears at the top, with them all waiting for me below. It was hugely embarrassing. On top of that, my legs and feet were cramping up, and I was spending a lot of time in physical agony.

I was at a point where even talk about the upcoming ski trip made me want to push the conversation away.  In my journal, I recognized that this emotion of pessimism was masking my fear of skiing. So I did what I do best and I gave myself a pep talk on paper, listing all the positives about skiing and some positive affirmations I could tell myself.

But even as I wrote, I was worried it wouldn't work, and images flashed up from previous slopes that had freaked me out, and I felt pangs of anxiety in my chest.  Well, setting my intentions on paper must have put it out into the universe, because a couple of days later, I got a really lovely email from one of my Project Me newsletter subscribers.

Her name was Diana and she said she was a Canadian, also living in Spain. She told me just how much the Project Me Life Will was helping her to make sense out of her life as a new mother, and that she was now becoming an EFT practitioner.  Bingo, EFT. Yes, I'd heard of that. I asked if she thought EFT would work on a fear of skiing, and I said there wasn't much time because the ski trip was in a few days.

She said, sure, and we arranged to do the session. She said it would happen by Skype. I'll admit, I was super skeptical of how something like this could possibly be done without being together in person, which makes me laugh because of course we're doing everything virtually now, but this was 2015.  In our session, Diana talked me through the various points on my face, collarbone, back, and top of my head that I need to tap on with my fingers as I repeated after her different statements about my fears and my emotions associated with skiing.

The idea with EFT is that you identify and acknowledge all emotions and then bring them to the surface rather than push them down or immediately focus on the positives as I'd been trying to do.  This felt counterintuitive to me as I never like to focus on the negatives and I always give myself positive pep talks.

Why amplify the negative emotions like this?  But now I know that in order to release emotions, we must acknowledge them first. I just wasn't aware of that back then.  So after a few rounds of tapping all over my face and acknowledging these fears and visualizing myself on the worst icy slopes with my feet cramping up, a sudden anger rose up in me.

I began saying, Luka makes me go on this bloody holiday every year, even though I don't even like skiing. He makes me get up early. We have to be first on the slopes and ski all day, and go down black runs. We can't socially ski like other people. There's no apri ski. Because we're so bloody knackered at the end that all I can do is crawl into a hot bath before dinner and then go straight to bed.

Only to get up and do it all over again the next day. He makes me do this every year, and I can't stand it!  Diana picked up on this shift of energy from fear into anger and blame, and she glided the prompts into this new direction.  He makes me do things I don't want to do.  What else does he make you do?

He makes me do what he wants to do all the time. We always have to do what he wants to do, and never what I want to do.  Well, what do you want to do?  I want to do yoga. But he would never go on a yoga holiday with me. He only ever came to one yoga class with me. He didn't want to do it ever again, and that was that.

I would never make him do yoga, but I'm forced onto this bloody ski trip every year because he likes to ski.  Diana guided me to keep tapping on these emotions around having to do what he wants and not getting to do what I want.  What do I want? She guided me.  And that's when I felt an explosive release of anguish.

I want to be on a sunny beach in Goa doing yoga with Susie.  I was howling now, sobbing so hard, we'd uncovered the crux of the issue.  For the past three years, I'd felt pangs of jealousy that the same February half term week I was heading to the slopes, my friend Susie was heading off to India to do yoga.

We'd done our yoga teacher's training together years earlier, And she was now running an annual retreat in India. It always fell on the same half term week in February.  It fell out of the question that I could ever join her.  February half term week was our annual family ski holiday. Just, that was it.

Also, unlike Susie, who regularly goes away with girlfriends, in my marriage, we do all holidays together. Which I had no issue with. I love holidaying with my husband. But, he doesn't do yoga. And, he has expressed that he doesn't like the idea of going to India. And so somewhere deep inside, I believe that meant I would never in my life go on a yoga trip, probably never to India.

I'd maybe never go on a yoga retreat ever because we only ever holiday together doing what he wants to do. If I ever saw even in a magazine something about a yoga retreat, it would just actually, I just had to flip the page. It just brought up all this anguish inside of me. My unresolved resentment over this was causing me to resent the family ski trip.

And suddenly, I even recalled that during my worst slope experiences when I was actually thinking I could be on a sunny beach doing yoga right now instead of being stuck in this mountain in the freezing cold.  At this point in my EFT session, I was ugly crying. I mean, there was snot running everywhere. I had to pause to go and get tissues, and she suggested I journal a bit, calm down, and then we'd continue.

Here's where the magic happened.  When we picked up again, she guided me on tapping on a new, empowered me.  The me who's not afraid to ask for what I need and want from my husband.  I said, my marriage is so strong, and I see relationships around me in tatters, and I don't want to do or say anything that will create division between us.

She helped me to tap on finding the words to express my needs in a way that he would hear them without conflict between us.  She helped me to believe that in expressing my needs, I was not jeopardizing the existing harmony in our marriage.  By the end of it, I felt strong, empowered, and hugely confident.

And as we headed off on that ski trip a few days later, I felt calm and I confidently expressed to my family that I would be having a lie in some mornings and they would ski without me. And when I'd had enough skiing, I'd head back to the chalet or I'd walk around the village and enjoy the shops.  And this small tweak changed my energy around the trip.

I stopped being the victim.  I felt more in control.  And you know what? I did my best skiing ever.  And I enjoyed the trip. And even though it had been my plan to skip the ski trip the following year and head to Goa, We went skiing again the following year, with really good friends and their kids, and we had such a fun time that we did that again the following years, too.

And, there was a positive, long lasting shift in my marriage, too.  I realized that we don't always have to do what he wants to do, and never what I want to do. That was just a story I was telling myself.  Be aware in your own relationship with using the words always and never.  When you use phrases that include always or never, you're telling a partner that they can never do anything right and that you don't believe they can change.

This leads to your partner feeling resigned not to try. Let your partner know you have faith in them to change. In my example, I realized it was simply untrue that we never did what I wanted to do, and it gave me permission to change. I simply wasn't used to asking or expressing what I wanted because I presumed it would be a no.

Or I wasn't prepared to sell him on an idea. He's the king of selling his ideas to me, but I'm not a natural salesperson. If someone says they don't want to do something, I drop it.  I am now better at expressing my desires with him without fear of rejection. I don't just give up or give in so easily. And that's not affected our marriage the way I feared it might.

If I suddenly began doing things differently.  After that session, I sang the praises of tapping. I invited Diana Tower to be a guest in my first online program. To all of my original gold diggers who are listening now, you all know about tapping. This got so many women into tapping off the back of that course, and none of us had tried it yet back then.

Diana has moved into other work now, and doesn't do tapping sessions anymore. But I have a new EFT goddess, Xandra Spencer, who is rocking a lot of worlds right now, and I can't recommend her enough.  She's done one on one sessions with several Project WE members and some of my friends and everyone loves her.

She is specializing in healing birth trauma and helping women to get over fears around childbirth. But she can help with whatever you're needing to move through or heal from the past.  I had two sessions with her this week over my deep fear of pelvic exams and anxiety over having my IUD coil removed.

Oh my god. I've discovered what's really going on behind this huge fear.  As I like to keep these episodes short and in chronological order, I'm going to save this one. It's very mind blowing and it needs its own episode. Plus, some other modalities I've done prior to this already unlocked parts of the story, so I need to tell those parts first in order for this one to even make sense.

What I will say for now is that Zandra adds in matrix re imprinting, where the memory is actually transformed. You can go into any past memory to say and do what you wished you'd said and done. You could bring in a new resource, and you can transform the picture you have of that memory.  Until you transform the memories, you keep tuning into them on a subconscious level, and they affect your health, your well being, and your point of attraction.

Changing the picture enables you to attract more positive experiences into your life. And by tapping on the meridians on your body at the same time, the process is accelerated.  I think it's important to recognize that this process is very different from denying what's happened. From a quantum physics point of view, we have any number of possible past or futures And this is simply tuning us into one that's more resourceful while releasing the stress and trauma that we hold onto due to traumatic life events.

If you'd like to work with Zandra on a one on one Zoom session, she's ZandraSpencer. com. And on Instagram, she's BirthStoriesRetold.  I am now such an advocate of getting to the bottom of our fears and anxieties, not pushing them down where they get stored in our systems and affect our health. I mean, it affects our physical bodies.

The true root of almost every disease and illness and pain is blocked energy.  Tapping on meridian endpoints helps to stimulate the system, and when verbally or mentally addressing the emotions causing distress, the areas of blocked energy are released and flow naturally.  We need to pay much more attention to our emotions and what they're trying to tell us.

I now use tapping in my everyday life when I feel overwhelmed or frustrated or angry or anxious and I'm able to bring these emotions from like a level eight all the way down to a three in just a couple of minutes.  I recommend the Tapping Solution app, which guides you through the tapping points and has specific ones you can do on a whole range of emotions from boosting your patience levels to reducing stress over money to having more confidence.

Really there's like a different topic for everything. It just talks you through it. I really recommend it. It's called the Tapping Solution app.  For more deep seated stuff, I really recommend a one on one session with someone who can dig a little deeper than what you do yourself, or a lot deeper, actually.

Above all, tune into your emotions. They are your absolute indicator of your well being.  When you spend too much of your life in downward spiral emotions like impatience, irritation, overwhelm, anger, insecurity, This affects your body's energies and will ultimately affect your physical health too, and of course your mental health as well.

Become emotionally literate. Acknowledge all emotions, like understand your emotions, and then listen to what they're trying to express to you. Tapping is a wonderful tool to help you with this.

Dear listener, relax your forehead,  take in a long deep breath  and let it out with a sigh.  Are you willing to bring to mind a situation that causes you some stress, anxiety or worry?  Has something flashed into your mind,  maybe something you'd immediately push to the back again?  Let it stay there so you can look at it for just a minute and then you can put it back into its box again if you want to.

Do you have something in mind?  Right now, in this moment. What emotions come up for you when you think about this?

Where do you feel it in your body?

If you had to give it a color or shape, what would it look like?

Is there an upcoming situation that is going to be affected by this? Are you stressed, fearful, or anxious about it?

Has there been a time that this has affected you in a negative or limiting way? And what emotion comes up when you recall that time?

How do you think this is potentially limiting you?

Could this be affecting your physical health,  your mental well being?  How?

What could be possible if this emotion was no longer within you?

Imagine right now how you would feel in your mind, heart, and body if this were released. Gone for good.  Breathe into this new emotion and smile.

Now before you tuck this back into its box, Acknowledge whether you're willing to look at this again with the intention of addressing it properly another time.  It's okay if you don't want to do it now or even any time too soon.  Simply set an intention in your heart, if you are willing, to look at it again, using a tool such as tapping or something else.

Well done.  It's not easy to look at the emotions we don't want to look at.  Thank yourself for doing this.

Thank you for listening to the Project Me podcast. You can download a free PDF of journal prompts that go with this episode in the show notes. If you like this episode, please subscribe, review, and share with your friends. And if you're brand new to Project Me, head to myprojectme.  com for the free life wheel tool that will help you to see your life through a fresh new lens.

I'd love to be alongside you on your journey. Come and join Project WE, where over 100 women from all over the world are working on our lives together in a really fun and inspiring community. It's like having your own personal mastermind and we'll help you to find your focus as we finish out the year that's been 2020 and head into 2021 with a positive outlook.

Until next time,  open your mind, open your heart, and stay curious.  We all need some space in our lives for the magical and unknown.