Tap Yourself Free

Happiness and Truth in your Health, Wealth, and Relationships

Magnus

Tapping.com
 Tap Yourself Free

Copyright © Magnus 2007

The right of Magnus to be identified as the author of this book has

been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.

First Edition – September 2006

Second Edition – April 2007

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Part 1 .............................................................................................................. 6

Summary and Premise ........................................................................ 7

1. Introduction.......................................................................... 9
2. Emotional Literacy............................................................. 15
Thought + Feeling = Belief .............................................................. 21
Beliefs are your Perceptual Filters ................................................... 24
Emotions create more of the same Emotion..................................... 25
Ego and Identity-Level Beliefs......................................................... 26

3. Releasing............................................................................ 29
How Tapping Works ........................................................................ 32
Meridians .......................................................................................... 34
Meridian Paths through the Body..................................................... 36
Chakras ............................................................................................. 37
Positions of the Chakras ................................................................... 38
Equivalent Therapies ........................................................................ 40

4. The Road Map.................................................................... 44

Charting Your Progress .................................................................... 50
Common Tapping Goals................................................................... 54

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Part 2 ............................................................................................................ 57

5. Dealing With Your Problems............................................. 58

Depression ........................................................................................ 58
Stress................................................................................................. 61
Addictions......................................................................................... 64
Laziness and Procrastination ............................................................ 66
Forgiveness ....................................................................................... 69
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ........................................................ 71

6. Living the Good Life.......................................................... 73

Sleeping Well.................................................................................... 74
Self Acceptance ................................................................................ 80

7. Wealth ................................................................................ 84
Success Barriers................................................................................ 86
How to Achieve any Goal ................................................................ 86
How to Learn any Skill..................................................................... 91

8. Finding Love and Healthy Relationships ........................... 95

Why you must first love yourself ..................................................... 97
The shadow of past relationships ..................................................... 99
Finding the right person.................................................................. 102

9. Health ............................................................................... 104

The Emotional Diet ........................................................................ 105
Exercise........................................................................................... 109
Food Allergies ................................................................................ 112

10. Spiritual Matters ............................................................. 116

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Finding Your Life Purpose ............................................................. 118

Interpreting Dreams ........................................................................ 120
Karma ............................................................................................. 122
The Law of Attraction .................................................................... 124
The Nature of Beliefs ..................................................................... 126
Ego Detachment and Enlightenment .............................................. 127

11. Physical Healing ............................................................. 129

Asking Your Body.......................................................................... 130

12. Tapping the Planet .......................................................... 133

Tapping for World Peace................................................................ 134

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Part 1

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Summary and Premise

There is a basic mechanism by which the human mind associates
negative feelings with memories as they are created in present
time. When we are later unconsciously reminded of the memory
we feel the feeling.

This is an animalistic survival mechanism that evolved to protect

us from danger and warn us against repeating actions which in the
past threatened our survival.

In order to respond very fast to that danger, this survival

mechanism generalizes widely and matches current situations to
past memories very loosely. With the complexities of modern life,
it becomes confused and errs on the side of caution, triggering
inappropriate feelings in certain situations.

This survival mechanism is as such responsible for the

overwhelming majority of mental and emotional problems.

Each negative feeling held in the memory corresponds to a

proportionally sized area of chronic physical tension held
somewhere in the body, which wastes energy and restricts the flow
of blood and lymph.

Persistent stimulation of these negative feelings results in the body

being in a continually stressed state, during which resources are
diverted from promoting health and wellbeing to maintaining a
fight or flight response.

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As such these feelings are also responsible for many problems with
physical health.

There is a reciprocal mechanism by which the human mind

releases the negative feelings stored within a memory. The
emotional quality of the memory is changed from one charged with
tension to one of peace, and that particular feeling no longer arises
when the memory is revisited.

Any effective therapy works through the activation of this

releasing mechanism.

When we become aware of how we are unconsciously reminded of

earlier times we encountered similar situations, we realize that our
emotional reactions are often exaggerated in the present moment.
Tracing the feeling back to the first time we felt it, and releasing
the emotion attached to that memory, frees us to respond
appropriately in the future.

As the trapped negative emotion is released, life-energy that was

previously wasted holding that negative emotion is re-allocated to
wherever in the body it is needed for optimum health.

Tapping is one way to reliably activate the releasing mechanism.

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1. Introduction
It started, as many things do, because I wanted to improve my sex
life. At the time in fact, any sex life at all would have been an
improvement. After fruitless searching for magical chat-up lines
and stories to recite to women, and trying pheromones and wearing
rock-star boots and loud shirts to gain attention, I eventually
realized that what women really found attractive in a man was
confidence, and I didn’t have it; not with women, at any rate.
What I actually had was shyness, nervousness, and on a good day,
quite a bit of arrogance that I mistook for being confident.
Without the confidence, the chat-up lines come across as either
pathetic or creepy, and the outlandish clothing try-hard.

It wasn’t much use learning how to start a conversation with a girl,

if when I thought about walking up to one in a bar, my stomach
became queasy, my legs started shaking, and my voice started to
stammer. Enter my friend Dave, a hypnotherapist. One night in
the pub he was very excited about a new therapy he’d learned
called Emotional Freedom Technique, now affectionately known
as Tapping. It wasn’t hypnosis per se; in fact, a lot of hypnotists
didn’t like it at all, for the simple reason that it was teachable in 5
minutes and seemed to achieve better results than what they had
spent years studying.

Dave asked me what feelings arose in my body when I wanted to

walk up to a girl that I liked in the pub. I looked at him oddly, and
he re-phrased his question to ask what negative feelings arose in
my body that stopped me from walking up to the girl. I told him
there was queasiness in my stomach. It took 30 seconds to apply
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the Tapping and I couldn’t feel the queasy feeling any more. We
repeated it for the shaking legs and stammering voice, and from
that day I found it a lot easier to make friends with new women in
bars.

It was maybe two years before I started to realize the power of this
technique. I started to notice more subtle aspects of my behaviour.
For example, I would be talking to a girl that I liked, but I wouldn’t
ask for her number. Even though I knew she wanted me to, I
didn’t really believe that a girl like her would be interested in a guy
like me.

Around the same time I was also working on building passive

income – money that just comes to you without having to work for
it, or at least where the amount isn’t dependent on the number of
hours you work, but on the amount of property you own, or the
number of people who visit your website in a day, for example.
The biggest barrier was that I just didn’t think money should come
to me so easily.

That’s when I started to apply Tapping to my negative beliefs, as

well as just my negative feelings. There were a lot of them. But as
those beliefs changed, so did the world around me. I am now
comfortable believing that the right girl will come along sooner or
later, and in the meantime I am having a lot of fun looking for her.
I’m not rich, by any stretch of the imagination, but I don’t want for
much that I don’t have. My living expenses are paid by that
previously elusive passive income, which means I am free to spend
my time as I choose.

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While there was plenty of actual work involved in achieving this,

and hours of study of dating psychology and wealth-building
techniques, much of my effort went into removing the conflicting
negative beliefs. Once the internal barriers were gone, the
romantic interests and cold hard cash started to flow relatively
effortlessly.

The biggest shift in my consciousness was in June 2006. Around

that time I was really trying to work out what I wanted to do with
my life, and trying to understand what, if anything, was my life’s
purpose. I had several business ideas on the go but didn’t really
feel like any of them were particularly what I wanted to be doing.

The one thing I knew I didn’t want to do was become a therapist.

There are already enough bad therapists who came to a particular
mode of therapy through receiving it, had very little training and
set up a practice, even though they were still in dire need of help
themselves. I felt like Tapping was a tool I should be using to
ensure my success in other areas, not particularly something I
wanted to be teaching others.

I told my friend Carol-Anne that what I wanted was direction, and

she asked me what was stopping me from having that. My
immediate response didn’t make much sense, I just said “I don’t
know who I am any more”. She suggested that I tap that belief!
As I did, I remembered that those were the exact words I’d said to
myself, looking in the mirror in my room at Cambridge University
in the midst of two years of depression.

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It was 7 years since I had considered myself depressed, but as I

dredged up that rather unpleasant memory, I realized that I had
never truly recovered, just pushed the feelings to the side. I’d been
carrying them ever since, at the back of my mind, my default way
of feeling, and being. I did several rounds on that memory, finding
all the feelings that were there during that period and tapping them
away.

Four days of euphoria followed as my body and mind adjusted to

feeling lighter and clearer-headed than I had for a long time.
Everything seemed brighter, colours more vivid, and my mind had
entered a new mode of operation where negative feelings tapped
themselves as they arose. I feel like I did as much tapping in those
four days as I ever had before.

During those four days I could see perfectly how we don’t live in
the real world at all; we live very much in the world in our heads.
Our beliefs affect the way we perceive the outside world, and they
always lead our behaviour to reinforce that perception. As well as
seeing this in myself I found I could see it in others.

I realised that very few people reached this level of awareness, and
that I should share what I had found. In fact, I realised that all my
life experience to date had brought me to where I was, including
the analytical thinking I’d learned in what I thought was a more or
less wasted 3 years studying Computer Science at Cambridge. For
self-development work, there is a lot of value in regarding the
mind as a computer, and finding and deleting it’s negative
programming.

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I still don’t see myself as a therapist; I’ve never given more than
one or two individual sessions in the same week. I would rather
spend my time writing and finding ways to introduce new people
to Tapping and to my website. I believe that Tapping and similar
techniques will raise people’s consciousness on a global scale over
the next few years. I have made the task of helping that process
along, in whatever way I can, part of my purpose for the next few
years.

I am not a scientist, but I hope you will consider my reasoning

sound, and encourage you to conduct your own personal
experiments to verify it. I do consider myself spiritual, in the sense
that anyone who likes to look up at the night sky, or enjoy nature,
is spiritual.

I do not have time for any religious dogma or new age woo-woo.
For example if I talk about Chakras, it’s because I have found that
they accurately describe a phenomenon I have encountered. In this
case they correspond to the areas in the body where people tend to
hold various feelings.

I take the view that all religions begin by directly describing the
experience of being human and even historical figures and events,
and then add assorted nonsense due to cultural bias, to perpetuate
the religion and control the population. Reverse-engineering that
process became a hobby of mine for a while.

This is a scientifically sound technique. I assume it must be,

because it works and it is repeatable. I am sure science will be

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able to explain it sooner or later. But right now if you’re looking

for randomly controlled trials that prove it works, I can’t help you.
In fact if you google hard enough you’ll probably even be able to
find some that prove it doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t work any
better than a placebo. This has not been my experience, so if you
care overly about that sort of thing, you are probably reading the
wrong book.

If you’re interested to hear more about the technique that my friend

Dave taught me in the pub, to help me get more girls, and that I
then applied to every area of my life to the point where I really
don’t feel like I have any problems any more, then read on. This is
my personal interpretation of what I have found working on myself
for the last 3 years, and hundreds of other people for the last year.
It should be useful to anyone who has a memory, a nervous
system, and a life they want to improve.

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2. Emotional Literacy
The following process is a great tool for understanding yourself.
You can use it whenever you are stressed, angry, procrastinating or
otherwise experiencing negative feelings getting in your way and
affecting your behaviour. More likely you will use it after the
event - when you are trying to rationalize actions or examine a
behavioural pattern you would like to change.

1. Find the dominant feeling that you are feeling, or felt at the
time.

2. Focus on where you feel it in your body.

3. Allow it to grow and become a little stronger.

4. Follow the feeling back to when have you felt the same
feeling before.

5. Find the first time you felt that feeling.

It’s important not to think when you do this. Don’t try to

remember – follow the feeling. If you find that your internal
dialogue starts up, and you’re asking your mind to think of times
when you think you might have felt a similar way, stop. You’ll
probably find memories that are worth working on that way, but
they may not be relevant to the feeling you are working on now.

The memories are chained together in your mind, and the link
between them is the feeling. So follow the feeling intuitively.
Relax your thoughts, focus carefully on the feeling, imagine
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yourself diving into it. At the core of it there will be a memory. It

might be a faint memory, only the vaguest images or impressions.
You may not think it is relevant at first – people often remark that
it’s silly or that it can’t be anything to do with it. Well if it’s the
memory you found at the heart of the feeling, then it absolutely is
relevant.

When you have found the memory, start focusing on it. Play it
over and over in your mind until it becomes clearer. You should
realise that you felt the same feeling at some point in that memory.
It will usually be the first time you felt it, although occasionally
you realise there is an even earlier memory.

This process gets easier with practice, and you learn to trust it
more with experience.

When we notice an inappropriate emotional response, this process

helps in the understanding of it.

My friend Lucy is a great girl, smart, funny, and very beautiful.

She usually comes across as calm, relaxed, and in control – at
cause in her life and the things going on around her. One day I
offered her what I thought was constructive criticism, and her
demeanour instantly changed. Her eyes widened, her nostrils
flared, and she snapped at me. I can’t even remember what I’d
said – but it was something trivial, and her emotional response was
disproportionate.

Later I asked what feeling I’d triggered, and what it reminded her
of. It was the feeling of having her wishes ignored and controlled
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by other people, and it reminded her of when she was 4 and the
smallest girl on her street. So in that moment, she wasn’t
responding to my suggestion, she was reacting to the other kids, 20
years ago, who didn’t care about what she wanted unless she
shouted and screamed at them. Now as a successful woman,
respected and admired by her friends, that had become an
unnecessary strategy.

When asked to think of times that their emotional response was

inappropriate to the situation at hand, most people can think of a
time, or a particular situation they encounter often, when they got
angrier or more upset than they think they really should have.

Emotional Literacy is the skill of being able to understand what the

reaction was really about. If it sounds cheesy that Lucy still
sometimes reacted to people as if she was the smallest girl on her
street, that’s because it is. That’s just the way that this particular
part of the mind works.

That’s because it’s a survival mechanism. In order to protect you,

it reminds you of the way you felt in earlier, similar situations to
what you are encountering now. It matches patterns in the world
around you to patterns stored in your memory. It evolved to save
your life, so it has to be a very fast pattern matcher. In order to be
very fast, it has to be very simple, matching patterns very broadly.

Many people hold the opinion that this primitive animalistic

mechanism just can’t cope with the complexities of modern life. It
evolved to deal with things like bears, and one bear is going to

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behave pretty much like another. The problems start when it starts
drawing conclusions about trickier animals, like women, for
example.

My friend Ralph is a good looking guy, well paid and on paper a

great catch for any girl. But he has absolutely no confidence with
girls, which people think is strange because a lot of girls are
attracted to him. The moment a girl shows any interest in him, he
gets a sick feeling in his stomach, and his head starts to spin – he
gets the strongest feeling that he just doesn’t know what to do.

We did some work on this and I asked him about the head spinning
feeling – when had he felt it before. He said he’d felt it any time
girls at university or school had been interested in him. I asked
him to go back to the first time he’d felt that feeling. Eventually
he realised it was when he was 8 years old, and a girl in his class
had marched up to him and told him she liked him, and that he was
going to be her boyfriend. He just didn’t know what to do, he
knew there were all these things he was supposed to do or say, but
as an 8 year old he had no clue. His head started to spin… and
later he became so worried he felt sick.

Ralph’s sub-conscious mind took steps to avoid feeling that stress

in the future. It associated the head-spinning and the sick feelings
to women. Not just the girl that asked him to be her boyfriend, the
mechanism isn’t refined enough for that, it linked those feelings to
all women. Literally, he developed a phobia of girls.

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It’s easy to see, how sometimes, you might have an emotional

response that is rooted not in the present moment, but in the past.
Most people quickly accept that when they respond
inappropriately, this is what is happening behind the scenes. As
you start to know yourself and understand yourself, you start to
find you can apply this process to everything you feel from day to
day.

This mechanism isn’t just triggered occasionally, it’s triggered

continually. Probably 99% of the negative feelings we feel daily
are actually coming from the past.

I was depressed for two years at university, for what seemed like
absolutely no reason at all. There was no clue in my external
situation. I started off doing fine academically and I’d somehow
managed to make a really awesome, gorgeous girl my girlfriend. I
had plenty of friends and no real worries about money. But for
some reason I spent a lot of time really miserable.

I still don’t really understand why I was suffering. I may never

know. Through working with other people though, I’ve started to
understand one way that depression develops.

What do you think happens when one day you’re really sad about
something – something happening in the present and real, maybe a
relative dying, or not getting the grade you wanted, it doesn’t
matter what. You wake up the next morning and think about it,
and those sad feelings come flooding back, and you lie in bed
trying to process it in your mind. In the meantime your mind is

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busily associating those negative feelings with the faint smell of

fabric conditioner on your pillow, or with being wrapped up in a
duvet, or with the shadows cast across the room when the curtains
are closed.

Even when the present situation has resolved itself and you are no
longer quite so sad about it, when you wake up, those associations
are triggered.

Once you start to understand how this works, you see your
behaviour and other people’s in an entirely new light. It’s a very
powerful and insightful process, and after a while you develop an
intuitive ability to see the roots of people’s behaviour without even
thinking about it.

The next time someone reacts to you negatively, and takes

something in a way you didn’t intend, you realise it’s not about
you. They are just reacting, out of habit, to someone in the past
who you just reminded them of. I have learned it’s usually best not
to point this out to them. Rather, you have just learned one of their
personal tripwires and you can aim to avoid it in the future. If they
want to trace it back and deal with it, that’s up to them.

In the same way, when you find yourself overreacting to people,

you start to realise they are actually doing you a favour by
triggering your tripwires. They are unknowingly drawing your
attention to feelings from the past that are denying you personal
peace in the present.

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Understanding yourself in this way is the first step towards dealing

with an issue and growing beyond it as a person. Sometimes it’s
enough just to realise what memory you are acting out, but usually,
you need to make peace with that memory, releasing the emotional
charge that is attached to it. That’s where Tapping, and in fact, any
successful therapy, comes in. Exactly how that works will be
covered in the next chapter.

Thought + Feeling = Belief

“Belief is an emotional state that is not

susceptible to rational persuasion” - Spinoza

So far I have discussed how negative feelings become attached to

external stimuli. These could be people, places, sounds, colours,
foods, or certain situations. Feelings also become attached to
internal stimuli – thoughts.

There is a name for thoughts that we are emotionally attached to,

we call them beliefs.

This is why people defend their beliefs so emotionally – they

literally associate that emotion with the thought. The moment that
thought is brought up, they start to feel those feelings. The
moment anything challenges that thought, they feel the feeling
even stronger.

If I tell you that I have a painting of a boat above my bed, then

unless you have reason not to trust me, you will think that I have a

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painting of a boat above my bed. But this is not a belief, because

when I tell you actually, it’s not a boat, it’s a painting of a car, you
can easily change that thought with very little resistance. You are
not emotionally attached to the idea that I have a painting of a boat
above my bed.

In fact, I don’t currently have anything hanging above my bed, the

walls are empty. At this point you might start to get slightly
annoyed or frustrated because I’m clearly feeding you
misinformation to communicate my point. If you did get annoyed,
that’s just your sub-conscious reminding you of the way you felt
last time someone messed with your head - you still have no
beliefs about what I have above my bed, only thoughts.

The thought becomes a belief when emotion is brought into the

mix.

When Ralph felt bad because he didn’t know what to do with a

girl, those bad feelings became associated with that thought. He
became emotionally attached to the thought “I don’t know what to
do with girls”, and it became a belief.

We learn most of our beliefs about ourselves in similar ways. One

day we feel bad for some reason, and think negative thoughts that
we then believe are true, and become emotionally attached to.

Other beliefs tend to start off as thoughts and become beliefs as we

discuss them with other people. If I told one person I had a
painting of a boat above my bed, and another that it was a painting
of a car, or even better, if I had them over and showed them that
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was there, but happened to re-arrange my paintings in between,

they would start off with that thought, but would still not be
emotionally attached to it.

If they happened to discuss the painting later, and found that they
were in disagreement, that might trigger feelings for them about
not wanting to be wrong, or about wanting people to believe what
they say. Those feelings would then be associated with their
thoughts about what painting I had hung on my wall, and those
thoughts would become beliefs.

Advertisers and good public speakers know this. By charging their

message with emotion, it is more likely to stick in our minds.

A good way to tell if a thought is a belief is if you get emotional

when you talk about it, or when that thought is challenged. The
emotional component of the belief acts as a label to the mind,
marking the thought as important for survival. It is a warning that
if you change the thought, you might feel physical or emotional
pain.

The emotion stops you thinking rationally, and prevents you from
objectively considering other people’s point of view. It takes a lot
of contrary evidence, and a calm, balanced emotional state, to let
go of your beliefs. Once you dissociate the feeling from the belief,
you are no longer emotionally attached to the thought, and it
changes easily.

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Beliefs are your Perceptual Filters

Your mind works hard to keep your belief system consistent.
When a thought becomes a belief, your mind starts to disregard
information that conflicts with that thought. The belief becomes a
filter on your perception of the world.

In order to hold one belief, your mind must add others to

rationalise it. The seed of “I don’t know what to do with girls”
grows into a tree with “because I never had a sister” or “I’m
supposed to be alone” as its roots and branches.

We don’t live in the real world; we live in the world in our heads.
If you believe something is true, you will behave as if it is true. At
some point your beliefs will conflict with reality, and that’s when
we experience stress. The usual response, rather than to change
the beliefs that lead us into pain, is to add new beliefs that
rationalise them further.

For example, if you believe you can fly, that doesn’t mean you
can. But it might mean that you will try and jump off a building.
Then the reality of the situation will cause you pain. But it won’t
change the belief if you believe it strongly enough, you’ll just
rationalise that the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, or the
building wasn’t high enough.

A more day-to-day example is when other people don’t behave in

the way we believe they should. Rather than change our beliefs
about what we expect from others, we tend to draw the conclusion
that the other person is deficient in some way. In a way they are,

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they don’t have our particular belief about how people should
behave.

Again, rather than simply change our belief about the way we think
someone else should act, we feel bad because their behaviour
didn’t fit our beliefs. The only thing to do with that bad feeling is
to attach it to new negative beliefs about that person or people like
them.

Emotions create more of the same Emotion

You can see how this leads to a vicious circle where negative
feelings and beliefs create more negative feelings and beliefs.

I’m sure you know someone who is very insecure about

themselves. This means when they think about how they feel
about themselves there are lots of negative feelings attached to
their self image. These feelings have blossomed into all sorts of
rationalisations that they carry around with them, but the truth is
that one time, someone or some thing made them feel that way
about themselves and it stuck.

The feeling clouds their perception of the world and they start to
see other people’s perfectly normal behaviour as reinforcing the
insecure feelings. Now, in that persons mind, the other people are
behaving unfairly… so it’s OK to behave differently towards them.
The insecure person starts acting defensively, which naturally
results in other people behaving differently towards them. Now
there are present time reasons to feel insecure, and the cycle
repeats.

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This explains how someone who is victimised amongst one group

of people quickly starts being victimised in a new group of people.
This isn’t blame the victim, in fact it should be a very empowering
concept if he or she can grasp it. It’s important to realise that the
bullies create and perpetuate the circle from their own side too.

The good news is that good emotions create more of themselves

too, so once you have let go of the negative feelings, and the
positivity shines through, the world instantly starts to change. See
how differently your day goes when you smile and say hello to
people, for example bus drivers and shop assistants. I don’t
suggest this as an experiment for a day, but as a way of being every
day.

Ego and Identity-Level Beliefs

Most people have a list of things about themselves that they would
like to change, and most of these can be boiled down to negative
feelings and beliefs. These are the superficial baggage that we
carry round that we would like to change about ourselves.

These are usually phobias of one sort or another. We would often

like to not be afraid of the things we are afraid of.

On a deeper level, we start to identify with these feelings. We start

to see them as a part of us, and something that we could never
change without losing a part of ourselves. This is the ego.

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In the severest cases these are centred around hatred. If you know
people who are racist or bigoted, you will agree that their hateful
feelings towards other people make them who they are.

For most of us the feelings are fears or worries about what we

might become. Fears about what other people might think, fears
about letting ourselves down. The ego is all about the fear.

One time I was working with a friend’s little sister who didn’t like
having her feet touched. We quickly reduced the weird feeling she
got when someone touched her feet, so that it was no longer quite
so scary, and just an odd feeling. She didn’t want to completely
remove it, because she liked that it made her special.

When you are working through your issues you will hit a point
where you find one that you don’t want to let go of because you
believe it to be a part of you, and that you would be less of a
person without it.

That’s just the ego talking again, from the fear of losing control
over who you are. It’s just doing it’s job, trying to keep you safe.

Some people stop at this point, and avoid working on that issue
until they have grown on other areas to the point where it becomes
a real problem for them. Of those that continue, I have not known
anyone to regret proceeding – no-one has complained that they
miss their old way of being.

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You are not your fears, phobias, and insecurities.

You are not your worry, hatred or anger.
You are not your wants or needs.

You are whatever is left when those things are gone.

You are your hopes, dreams and aspirations.

You are your skills, talents and ambition.
You are happiness, gratitude, and love.

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3. Releasing
Effective therapies release the negative emotion stored in the
memories.

There are many different ways of doing this, but for a therapy to
improve your life, it must reduce the effect the negative feelings
from your past have on your present. The mechanism by which
this happens is one that is common to every human being –
releasing.

In life you either are collecting more emotional baggage, or you

are letting go of it. These are basic functions of the mind, just like
eating or defecating are basic functions of the body. Different
therapies cannot invent new functions of the mind; they can only
activate the ones that are there.

Every memory has two components, the factual information and an

emotional quality. The facts are just that – what you saw, heard,
said, smelt, touched. The factual component of a memory doesn’t
change, you can’t change the past.

The emotional quality is how you felt, and when you return to the
memory you will probably feel that way again. This happens
consciously when you deliberately recall a memory, but it also
happens unconsciously when you are reminded of something in the
factual side of the memory.

Our memories are always recording. The survival mechanism is

continually associating whatever we are feeling with the memory

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as it is created. The memory is a very efficient system, it tends to

only record new information. For example you won’t remember
every single time you drove to work, but you will remember that
you passed an accident one day. Memories with a strong
emotional component stand out – the emotion labels the memory
as being important.

The reciprocal mechanism of releasing the feeling from the

memory is activated less often. When we are feeling good, in a
situation that previously caused us stress, releasing happens.
Sometimes all we need to do is think about the memory when our
current state of mind is relaxed, and releasing happens.

These are all ways of unconsciously releasing the emotion from the
memory. You’re not aware of it happening, it just does. If you
want to make more rapid progress, and deal with all your baggage
as quickly as possible, you need a conscious method.

1. Identify an issue

2. Find the relevant memories

3. Release the emotion from them

4. Move on, enjoy your life without the issue

Steps 1 and 4 tend to happen pretty naturally, we all at least know

what the next issue we want to deal with is, and that’s all you need
to know. Most people are already ‘Connoisseurs of their
Neuroses’, to one degree or another.
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Step 2 is covered by Emotional Literacy. You don’t need to talk

endlessly about your past experiences, you just need to find which
ones are relevant. This can be done quickly without further self-
analysis.

Step 3 is where Tapping comes in. There are literally an infinite

number of ways to activate the releasing process, and you can
probably find websites describing every one of them if you are so
inclined. I have explored most of the more popular ones, and
found that Tapping beats them all in terms of

• Speed and Efficiency

• Ease to Learn

• Consistency and Reliability

• Range of Applicability

I wouldn’t discourage anyone from trying other methods, and in

fact trying as many as possible is the best way to familiarise
yourself with the internal releasing process that is at the heart of all
the methods. They all have their pros and cons.

The best way to learn Tapping is to be taught it by someone who is

experienced in it. If you can’t do that, the next best way is from
videos, or from reading about it. My free videos on Tapping.com
should take you through the basics. Gary Craig, the creator of EFT
has a vast collection of excellent seminar videos available on
DVD. If you don’t have access to these videos you can follow the
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instructions in the Tapping Guide and Workbook, accompanying

this book.

From this point on I assume you have a basic knowledge of the

Tapping points and the process and have experienced it a few
times.

How Tapping Works

There are people who would prefer to wait for scientific papers
explaining how tapping works before they will try it. It’s a shame
because these tend to be the sort of people who stand to benefit
most from using it. Direct experience of tapping is enough to
convince most people that it does something, and when you have
done a hundred rounds or so on the right things, you start to notice
obvious changes in the way you feel about things.

Experimenting a little with different shortcuts to the technique

shows you that every part of the full recipe is necessary to
guarantee success. It only works consistently when you apply it
completely and properly. Suggestions that you can just read the
affirmation or it doesn’t matter where you tap, are meaningless.

Negative emotions are held in the nervous system. You can

experience this yourself. Think about when you feel a negative
feeling - you feel it in a particular part of your body. For example
we tend to feel nervous feelings in our stomach, angry feelings in
our forehead, stressed feelings in our shoulders.

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When I talk about energy I usually mean nervous energy, not a

mystical life force. The interesting thing about the mysterious life
energy that new age advocates talk about is that it often happens to
move along with blood, or oxygen, lymph, or just nerve signals.
My own experience with new age healing techniques is that hands-
on techniques like Quantum Touch seem to work better than
hands-off techniques like Reiki. There are no nerves for the
energy to flow through in the air.

Chinese Medicine talks about Chi that flows through Meridians. I

tend to think about nervous energy that runs through nerve
channels. At the end of the day it does not matter, both are just
ways of describing an aspect of the human body that you can
directly experience.

Do not get hung up on the language. Do not allow your prejudices

to cut you off from ideas that may be useful to you.

It’s said that when you ‘move a lot of Chi’, you need to breathe
and drink a lot of water. Another way of looking it this is that
when the feeling is released, the brain starts reprocessing related
information. This uses up a lot of water and oxygen. This
instantly lowers the oxygen levels in the bloodstream and you’ll
find yourself sighing. Some people find themselves yawning
deeply and uncontrollably. After a few rounds you will get thirsty.

To avoid letting the brain get tired too quickly, you should spend
time on breathing exercises and drink a lot of water. Eventually

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you need a break; this tends to be after about 2 hours of continuous

tapping.

Meridians
In my Science of Tapping video on Tapping.com, I demonstrate the
use of an electronic detector pen to find the tapping points. These
points are end points or junction points for the meridians/nerve
channels. They are not arbitrary points made up by the ancient
Chinese. They discovered them in their exploration of the body.
When you examine the points scientifically you find their electrical
resistance is lower and they respond differently to magnetic
resonance than other areas of skin. Most people can find them just
by feeling around.

It’s quite fun to watch skeptics play with the detector pen. They
are often convinced there is a trick to it, like maybe it beeps faster
depending on how hard you press it. The idea that something like
Tapping could work conflicts with their negative beliefs, and when
they see something mechanical like the pen responding to the
points they are flummoxed.

The reason we feel the feelings in different parts of our body, is

because each feeling is held in a different meridian. The negative
feeling is ‘blocked energy’ somewhere along that meridian. When
you tap the points, which are on the ends of the meridians, you
send a shockwave through the system that clears the blockage, and
the feeling vanishes. This is known as balancing the meridian.

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The feeling is only held in one meridian, but you don’t really have
any way of knowing which one, so we tap all the points to be sure
of hitting it. Some people find they can tell intuitively which point
needs tapping for a particular feeling. This tends to come with
experience.

One thing you do start noticing early on, is that as you are tapping
around the points, you find yourself sighing, or thinking about
something else, or suddenly realise that you cannot find the
feeling. This shows you have tapped the point for the meridian in
which that particular feeling was held, and the feeling has been
released.

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Meridian Paths through the

Body
These figures are as a guide only.
For more accurate representations
and more information on
Meridians, refer
to ‘Energy
Medicine’ by
Donna Eden.
You may notice
that sometimes
you feel feelings
on a particular
Meridian, and
tapping the
corresponding
point clears it.

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Chakras
Another thing you notice after a lot of tapping with other people is
that different people tend to hold different feelings in different
parts of their body. One person might hold most of their feelings
in their belly and their throat. Another might hold most of them in
their heart and their forehead.

Sometimes different aspects of the same feeling will be held in

different places. These are actually two separate feelings that are
closely connected.

Ayurvedic (Ancient Indian) medicine has a name for these centres

where feelings are stored, they are called Chakras. Other names
are Energy Centres or Databanks. I call them Chakras because that
is the most widely used name for them.

Whatever they are, I have found there to be seven running in a line

down the centre of your body. These are the most significant ones,
and there also smaller ones in the palm of each hand and the sole
of each foot. There also seems to be one in each eye.

Different schools of thought will describe different layouts of

chakras. Some say there are 8 main ones, others 13. Most
teachings agree on the location of the first 7, and then suggest that
some chakras float in the air above your head, or 6 feet behind you.
So far this is outside my experience.

To an extent, particular types of feelings tend to be held in a

particular chakra. It’s never a good idea to second guess this, and

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you don’t need to. Any two people might hold what sounds like
the same feeling in a different chakra.

You do not need to think about chakras when you are finding
things to tap, but you will probably notice which areas you tend to
hold most feelings.

You can work on the chakras directly if you like. There are many
different exercises in the new age community for clearing your
chakras, I could never get any of them to work until I used the
‘EFT Chakra Clearing Protocol’, by Nicola Quinn.

When I tried that for the first time I felt noticeably lighter for the
rest of the day. It seems to
clear out whatever feelings
are hanging around at the
time. My ‘Chakra Clearing’
video on Tapping.com will
take you through it if you are
interested.

Positions of the Chakras

This diagram shows
approximate locations of the
chakras. You may notice that
you tend to feel most feelings
in one or two of these
locations.

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Advanced Tapping

Tapping is a reliable way to activate the releasing mechanism

naturally in your body. Ultimately most people learn to activate it
at will, just by focussing on a feeling or belief and deciding to let it
go. Maybe you can already do this.

I studied Buddhist Meditation for several months, visiting a

working monastery once or twice every week. We would sit in
silence for 30 minutes to an hour, watching our thoughts. The idea
was that feelings would arise and they would be let go. I had no
trouble with letting the feelings arise, but they would not let go – I
had no idea how to activate the releasing mechanism.

When I learned Tapping, I had a reliable way to consciously

activate it. I started off repeating the full affirmation, out loud, and
carefully tapping each point 7 times. Then I found it usually
worked just fine to repeat one word and tap the point 2 or 3 times.
At some point I heard that it was enough to imagine saying the
affirmation, and imagine tapping the points – this is useful when
you want to tap something in public.

Whether you imagine tapping or actually do it is all the same to

your nervous system –the tapping is just a way to direct your
attention. I got faster and faster at doing this, until I didn’t need to
consciously trace around all the points in my head, laboriously
saying the phrase to myself. I could just activate the releasing
mechanism at will.

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Some Buddhist monks spent decades meditating. I suspect this is

because they are trying to learn to activate their releasing
mechanism. I’m sure they learn all sorts of other interesting things
along the way, but there are faster ways to start releasing your
negative feelings.

I still use the full Tapping protocol occasionally, particularly if a

feeling doesn’t seem to want to budge. For most things I just
notice that I’m feeling a feeling from my past, and let it go – the
Emotional Literacy step, of “when have I felt this before”,
becomes automatic too.

As your awareness rises, you can more easily tell the difference
between a feeling coming from the present and one coming from
the past. Eventually Tapping becomes fairly automatic – your
mind learns what you want it to do when you find a negative
feeling and releases it for you.

Most people reach this point in a matter of months of committed

Tapping, where the affect of their past experiences is negligible
compared to what it was. Being in the moment is a great place to
be.

Equivalent Therapies
The releasing mechanism is the basic element that must be at the
root of any effective therapy. If you are not releasing, you are not
improving.

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When you release negative feelings, you become a little happier

and a little healthier. You will feel lighter and more connected.

Often you will start to see the past and the present in a whole new
light. You will realise things that you just didn’t get before. The
negative feelings and beliefs that were present before, blocked you
from seeing things as they really are. When those feelings and
beliefs are gone, suddenly everything falls into place. This is
called a Cognition, otherwise known as an ‘aha!’ moment.

There are three components that are present in all therapies to

different degrees.

1. Discovery of the feeling or memory that is holding you

back

2. Releasing that feeling

3. Cognition

This book teaches Emotional Literacy for the discovery of the

relevant memory, and Tapping for releasing the feeling. Cognition
always occurs sooner or later after this has happened.

When you hold conventional therapies up to this yardstick they do

not often measure up.

Traditional talking therapies skip the Releasing step. You can

spend endless hours talking about your feelings and your
memories, and the therapist will attempt to lead you to the

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cognition. This works eventually, but it is slow. Your mind is

literally blocked from having the cognition by the feelings you are
holding on to.

When you find the feeling and release it, suddenly you have the
cognition. I have been told that a single 2-3 hour Tapping session
is equivalent to 5 years of psychotherapy, by more than one client
who has had that much experience to be able to tell.

Hypnotherapy and NLP include various techniques for releasing.

Rewind the Tape, Time Line Therapy, and other methods all
activate the same releasing mechanism. However they also include
methods that appear similar but are not. A friend of mine was
guided by a hypnotherapist in a visualisation to find their negative
feelings and lock them in a safe. NLP includes various techniques
where feelings are pushed far away or quietened or made
monochrome. This is known as manipulating the sub-modalities.

The difference is that when you have truly released a feeling, you
cannot bring it back, without experiencing the same memory that
created it in the first place. With the techniques above, you can
always open the safe again, or pull the feelings close again, make
them louder, or more colourful. If the technique is reversible it is
not a release. At best this is less effective, and at worst it is
encouraging suppression of feelings.

There are many other less well known therapies that are broadly
equivalent to Tapping. Eye Movement Desensitization and
Reprocessing, Thought Field Therapy, Attractor Field Therapy, Be

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Set Free Fast, ZenSight, ZPoint, Sedona Technique. Buddhist

Meditation, Reiki, and even Christian Healing, all aim to activate
the same releasing mechanism in their own way.

I would encourage the study of any or all of these techniques and

others, to familiarise yourself with the releasing mechanism. They
are all different ways of working with the same body and mind.
Don’t just read about them, try them out and see how they work for
you.

I have studied and tried many of them, and continue to research

new ones as I hear about them, and I am still yet to find something
that works as well for me as Tapping.

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4. The Road Map

At first the effects of Tapping can be very subtle. I find that most
people notice an obvious difference after a session of 2-3 hours of
tapping. This is equivalent to 50-100 rounds, and it is important
for the best progress that the right things are tapped.

Starting out, some people are sensitive enough to notice a change

in the way they feel about things after just a couple of rounds. I
call this the Convincer. It won’t make any big change to your life
but it is enough for most people to realise something interesting is
happening, and continue experimenting with Tapping.

In a 2-3 hour one-on-one or a single evening session I am

expecting to help the client create a Beneficial change in their life.
Something obvious and noticeable that makes them happier or
makes it easier for them to move towards their goals.

In weekend workshops, 5-week evening courses, and coaching

courses of 5-sessions over 3 months, I am expecting to see a
Profound impact on several aspects of people’s lives.

I use the Convincer in three ways:

On a Feeling

Ask someone to locate a negative feeling that they have felt in the
last few days, and see if they can bring it up in their body to feel it
right at that moment. Ask them to rate its intensity from 1-10, and
if they can, and feel comfortable to do so, to make it even more
intense by 1 or 2 points. Then ask them about where they feel it in
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their body, and to give it a colour, and characterise it by a

particular emotion.

Then do a complete round of tapping (set-up, meridian points, 9-

gamut, meridian points) on that feeling. Compare the intensity,
colour, and emotion afterwards to what they felt before. It may
require a couple of rounds. Encourage them to bring the feeling
back up, and they will find that they can’t, or at least they can’t
bring back the precise original feeling.

I will tell them that literally, their body has forgotten how to feel
that way.

On a Belief

Some people are unable to bring feelings up in the moment.

Sometimes they can’t even imagine what the feeling was like.
This is perfectly normal, everyone is able to do this to different
degrees. In this case you can use the Convincer on a belief instead.

Ask them a simple question, like “What stops you tidying your
room?” Tell them to just give the very first answer that springs to
mind.

Use that answer to do just the set-up and tap the meridian points.
For example “Even though it takes too long” or “Even though it’s
just such a mess”.

Then remind them to give you the very first answer that springs to
mind, and ask precisely the same question again. They will almost
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always give a different answer. Repeat this process two or three

times.

The mind orders thoughts by which are emotionally the most

intense. So when you tap away the first answer, it is no longer the
most intense and they will give a different answer when the
question is asked again. The difference between “it takes too long”
and “it’s just such a mess” is an emotional one, not a logical one.

On a Memory

I tend to use the above methods in group workshops. When I am

one-on-one with someone and have more time, I spend a bit
longer. Find a feeling as before, and then trace it back to find the
first time they felt that feeling. Once a memory is located, tap
away the feelings in that memory.

It’s interesting to watch people’s reactions as their memories

change. Most people have never experienced this happening so
quickly, and it is a curious sensation, particularly when the
memory was previously very upsetting.

When you tap away feelings or groups of feelings, your body

literally forgets how to feel them. This means you lose the ability
to identify with the old you who felt that feeling.

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As a result, people forget precisely what it was they were like

before. This makes it very easy for them to believe they are not
making progress with tapping.

I remember calling up a client a week after a one-on-one, to find

out how they had progressed. They reported that there hadn’t
really been any difference, and they were not interested in
continuing with another tapping session. Nothing significant had
changed on the main issues we had worked on – mild depression,
job stress, smoking, and relationship issues. I knew we hadn’t
really gotten to the bottom of those issues in the session, so I
understood his reasoning.

Ten minutes later he rang me back, excitedly talking about how he

was getting up much more easily in the mornings. His old pattern
was to be woken abruptly by the alarm clock, and sleepily hit the
snooze button ten times in a row and then be late for work. Almost
every day that week he had found himself coming back from the
shower to find the alarm going off. He’d been waking up and
getting out of bed easily and hadn’t even noticed.

Thinking back to the session, I remember that was the one issue
we’d worked on where he’d gone completely clear – after tapping
away various tired feelings, he couldn’t think of any other reasons
why he wouldn’t get out of bed. After thinking about it further, he
realised that actually his mood had also been much improved over
that week, and there were subtle differences in all the things we’d
worked on.

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His body had forgotten what it was like to feel so lethargic when
first waking up, it was almost like it was hard for him to believe he
had ever had trouble with that. It took careful self-analysis to
notice that small things about his work colleagues no longer
bugged him. Those thoughts were no longer so emotionally
relevant to him and he had forgotten about them.

It is not essential that you believe in tapping for it to work, but it is

absolutely essential that you believe in tapping enough that you
persist with it. If you notice the subtle differences then you will
persist until the subtle differences become big differences.

People often attribute the effects of tapping to other self

improvement work they do. My friend Mark was finding that he
felt strong feelings of inadequacy when he talked to girls, which
meant he didn’t ask for their number even when they obviously
liked him. We traced these feelings back to ex-girlfriends and
earlier rejections, and tapped them all away.

A few weeks later he got a very beautiful girlfriend. I asked him if

he had felt those feelings of inadequacy when he had met her. He
said no, and that it was probably because he’d been working out a
lot. He is yet to explain to me the mechanism by which working
out disconnects feelings of inadequacy from being around beautiful
girls.

Having a better body and feeling good about it might give you the
thought “she should be attracted to me because I have this great
body”. But if you still have an unresolved memory about an

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attractive girl making you feel bad, those feelings will still jump
out when you are around an attractive girl.

One of the thoughts those feelings would cause in Mark was “if I
have a better body I will feel better about myself”. This may or
may not be true, but in any gym there are plenty of men who have
excellent physiques who still get that feeling and think they must
be able to bench press even more in order to feel good about
themselves.

The feeling doesn’t go away until it is dealt with. The danger is

that some guys will continue to be driven by that feeling until they
give themselves back problems or muscle damage. Without those
feelings, there are still plenty of reasons to maintain a healthy
body, and you do it to feel more good about yourself, rather than to
feel less bad.

Mark already had the confidence and charm to attract his

girlfriend. He didn’t need bigger muscles to gain that. The
problem was he also had nervousness around women and feelings
of inadequacy, and no amount of working out would remove those
associations in his mind, only activating the releasing mechanism
does that.

I was slightly hurt that Mark didn’t think the work we’d done
together had helped, but at the end of the day he is happier now
and I don’t feel any need to claim credit for what is really his true
self shining through a bit more brightly. What frustrates me is that
sooner or later he will find other things he wants to work on, and if

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he doesn’t attribute his earlier improvements to tapping maybe he

won’t choose to apply it in the future.

Charting Your Progress

Careful journaling is the answer. Record precisely how you feel
about the situations that you work on, and check that a week or so
after you tap on them. Often when I read back what clients have
told me about how they feel in certain situations they find it hard to
believe that I am quoting their own words back to them.

When the feelings are gone you lose your frame of reference for
them. This is a good thing of course, but it is vitally important you
notice it happening. After a while you learn to do this
automatically, but when you are starting out it is critical to be
aware of what is happening.

Personality Tests

One female client I worked with over several weeks on intensely

traumatic memories of child abuse noticed that her handwriting
changed dramatically after the first few sessions. I do not
necessarily believe that handwriting can be interpreted and
conclusions drawn about someone’s personality, as different
people may express different aspects of their personality in
different aspects of their handwriting. However, the way you are
with one thing is the way you are with everything, and I took this
as a sign that the tapping had lead to concrete shifts in her way of
being.

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A way to measure these more precisely is through personality tests.

Many of these are constructed with the assumption that peoples’
personalities don’t really change, so if you are looking to track
changes in your personality, it is best to take the test answering
questions based on how you were over the preceding 3-6 months.

When taking personality tests, do not take the results personally.

They measure how your life experiences to date have moulded
your programming, they do not reflect your value as a person.
Only when you learn tapping and other self-improvement methods
do you really start to have control over your programming.

If you are unhappy with the way you are currently, it is not your
fault, but now that you know how to change it, it is absolutely your
responsibility to do so.

One test that did the rounds as a viral email a few years ago is the
Personality Disorder test at 4degreez.com. It is a fun test to do and
people would forward each other their results and paste them into
their myspace profiles, and so on. Nonetheless, it is a useful
benchmark, takes only a few minutes to do and is freely available.

On the left are my test results from 2003, before I had even heard
of EFT. On the right are my results from late 2006, after 2 years of
tapping, the last six months of which I intensively tapped every
negative thought I could possibly find.

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Before Tapping After 6 months of Tapping

Disorder Rating Disorder Rating

Paranoid: Low Paranoid: Low
Schizoid: Moderate Schizoid: Low
Schizotypal: Very High Schizotypal: Low
Antisocial: High Antisocial: Low
Borderline: Very High Borderline: Low
Histrionic: Very High Histrionic: Low
Narcissistic: Very High Narcissistic: Low
Avoidant: High Avoidant: Low
Dependent: Very High Dependent: Low
Obsessive-Compulsive: High Obsessive-Compusive: Low

The website offers clear explanations of each term. If you find

yourself with a lot of Highs or Very highs, do not worry about it, it
just shows you which things you need to tap. It is about knowing
yourself, not judging yourself. Also do not be disheartened, I think
that after reading this book you will be able to create similar results
for yourself I much less time than it took me.

You can take the test yourself here:

http://www.4degreez.com/misc/personality_disorder_test.mv

I also found that my Myers-Briggs personality type changed. I

used to be INTJ – Introverted Intuition Thinking Judging. Now I
am ENFP – Extraverted Intuition Feeling Perceiving. I had
noticed this myself – I am much more outgoing, and I definitely
tend to go with the flow more.

People who exhibit introverted characteristics tend to have obvious

fears of being centre of attention, or worries about what other
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people will think. Less obviously on the other hand, an Extravert

is someone who has fears of being ignored or left out. As you tap
these fears you will become more balanced and more able to
express yourself in whatever way you like.

Very young children tend to be fairly balanced. They are happy

playing endlessly on their own with their toys, and at social
gatherings they are comfortable with the attention they get.

It’s only later when he is criticized or teased that a child develops

social phobias and finds he is more comfortable by himself or
around people he knows.

If when that child leaves school he decides the way to get rich is a
career in sales, he may be sufficiently motivated to push past those
social phobias and force himself to be more Extraverted.
Continuously fighting those negative feelings associated with
meeting new people makes it a stressful lifestyle for him.

You can be whoever you want to be, it’s just a case of tapping
away the negative feelings you associate with being that sort of
person.

You can pay vast sums of money for proper Myers-Briggs type
analysis, but a quick test sufficient for quantifying any differences
from tapping is here:
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

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Common Tapping Goals

Everyone will have their own goals when it comes to what they
want from tapping. Some people will have very specific ideas
about phobias they want to clear or barriers they want to remove
from success in a particular area.

The Tapping Road Map is presented as a general framework to

which to fit your own values and ambitions. It is drawn from the
goals of clients I’ve worked with, my own goals, and various
psychological, anthropological and theological sources.

There are 4 stages to the road map

1. Overcoming Problems

2. Living the Good Life

3. Success in Health, Wealth and Relationships

4. Spirituality

These tend to be tackled sequentially but needn’t necessarily be.

There are various tapping milestones one can reach, which are not
intended as goals in themselves but can certainly be used that way
as a means to prioritise how you spend your tapping sessions.
They are certainly not intended to encourage competition.

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It should also be borne in mind that as we live our lives we collect

new negative feelings and beliefs to tap, so we should revisit
milestones periodically.

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 TAPPING ROAD MAP
SPIRITUALITY
□ I like and love □ I know my life □ I am not my Ego □ I am at peace with □ Nothing scares me □ I feel connected to □ I have transcended
myself, I accept purpose and I am living the world about the future the Earth, to the suffering
everything about it Universe, and to God
myself
HEALTH WEALTH RELATIONSHIPS
DIET EXERCISE SUCCESS MONEY FAMILY FRIENDS ROMANCE
□ I eat healthily □ I have the body I □ Nothing stands in □ Money comes to me □ I love every member □ I am open to □ I am free to love my
want the way of what I want easily of my family meeting new people partner
to do with no pre-
□ I am active and □ I have no problems □ I hold no negativity conceptions □ I am open to
exercising regularly earning or accepting towards any member meeting new potential
money of my family □ I love all of my partners with no pre-
friends conceptions
□ I have no worries
about money □ I hold no negativity □ I hold no negativity
towards any of my towards any past
friends partners or their
new/past partners
LIVING THE GOOD LIFE
□ I am happy most of □ I keep my living □ My life is reasonably □ I get enough sleep, I
the time habitat tidy and clean well organised and in sleep soundly, and
order have no trouble getting
out of bed
OVERCOMING PROBLEMS
□ Stress doesn't affect □ I don't hold any □ I would not describe □ I have no addictions I
me in a negative way grudges myself as lazy consider unhealthy
Tap Yourself Free

Part 2

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5. Dealing With Your Problems

The hardest thing for new tappers to realise is that their problems
are not what they think they are. The problem is not the situation
you find yourself in, the problem is the way you feel about it.
When you change the way you feel, problems literally disappear.

People tend to need help and guidance tapping at this level. They
often feel like the tapping is not making a difference or that it will
take forever to do enough tapping to deal with the problem
entirely.

It cannot take forever. The negative feelings that you are tapping
are learned during various life experiences, and you don’t have an
infinite number of those. There may be many feelings to tap, but
as long as you focus on the earliest feeling in your memory, similar
feelings will fall away – when you tap one, you tap a dozen or
even hundreds at the same time.

Depression
I have not yet worked with anyone whose depression was rooted in
their present moment. People who are depressed often find their
depression inexplicable, assuming that there should be a reason in
their current situation that would depress them.

Their main problem really is that they are depressed, and that
colours their current experience. The depressed feelings come
first, and they view the world through the filters that come with
those feelings.

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Depression occurs when negative feelings become associated with

mundane things, every day occurrences or situations, like waking
up, sitting down to work, or looking out of the window.

Unless you understand how these feelings trigger past memories,

the way you are feeling won’t make much sense. You look at your
life and either you don’t see what could possibly be upsetting you
so much, or you start to blame your situation and try to fix it –
which doesn’t work. Eventually you learn to live with and distract
yourself from the feelings.

I was depressed for 2 years at university and around 2 years in my

childhood. I still don’t know really why I was depressed at
university – I had everything going for me. When I got depressed I
quickly fell behind on my work and eventually broke up with my
girlfriend, who was a saint to put up with me for so long. But
those things weren’t what made me depressed in the first place.

A healing session with my friend Carol-Anne shed some light on

why I was depressed as a child. Twenty years later I thought I was
well over being depressed, but it turns out those depressed feelings
were still there, lurking beneath the surface. I had just learned to
suppress them and live with them.

I would still feel them at the back of my mind, and in quiet

moments, even at the age of 28, years afterwards. Carol-Anne
took me through a process that simply asked what those feelings
were, and we traced them back.

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I remembered being 9 or 10, and going to bed every night feeling

terrible sadness and, curiously, unfairness. I would go downstairs
and tell my parents I couldn’t sleep, but sooner or later they would
send me up to bed again, and I would cry myself to sleep. There
was no reason why I should behave like this.

As we cleared away the feelings, a memory surfaced. When we

moved into our new house, my parents brought my brother and I
cabin beds – like a bunk bed but with a desk and a wardrobe
underneath. I was very excited and demanded mine be built first,
and I was so demanding that my dad built my brother’s first
instead.

By the time my bed was built I had worked myself into such a
strop that I threw myself into it in a very upset emotional state,
forever connecting those feelings to being in that bed. Every night
after that, when I went to bed, I would feel the same feelings of
unfairness and sadness that I’d felt that day.

If you are depressed or know someone else who is, it’s likely that
their depression is caused in the same way. One day they felt
strong negative feelings, and associated those feelings with
something in their daily life.

With most people I’ve worked with, there is actually more than
one memory being triggered. There are several layers of negative
feelings, and once one starts coming up, they all start coming up.

To an extent, we have control over how much these feelings affect

us. We can focus on the moment and push them to the side. But
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this is hard work, and requires great willpower – you are fighting
your body’s own natural survival mechanism.

Following the feeling back so you know where the feelings come
from helps with this process, but it still requires discipline and
effort to focus your attention in present time. Tapping away the
feelings in the memory calms that survival mechanism, and is the
only true way to deal with the problem.

Stress
According to the UK Health and Safety Executive, 1 in 6 working
individuals regarded their job as highly or extremely stressful.

Different people deal with daily stress in different ways. Some

people thrive on stress, other people gradually let it get on top of
them. When people get very stressed and suffer nervous
breakdowns or make themselves ill, it has not happened overnight.
That stress has accumulated over time.

Your mind is constantly recording the stress you feel and

reminding you of it. On one day, you feel the stress you felt on all
the bad days in the past. You disappoint your boss, and feel the
same feelings you felt all the other times you disappointed your
boss. You feel like you have a lot to do, and that reminds you,
sub-consciously, of all the other times you felt like you had a lot to
do.

The first times these things happen, you feel like you can deal with
them, but as the later times remind you more and more of earlier

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times, the feelings get stronger and stronger until breaking point.
Then you start to associate what you felt at those moments with
just being in the office, or around your colleagues.

That was the point at which I quit my full-time job in IT, but if I
hadn’t done that I would probably have been encouraged to leave
sooner or later.

The seeds for the stress are usually planted in childhood or

adolescence. One highly capable guy I worked with hated being
given assignments at work. Even though he had the experience
and qualifications to do it, he felt the same feelings of doom and
intrepidation he had with Business Studies coursework in year 11.
Whenever he went to see his boss, he became nervous and
automatically felt the guilty feelings he felt when he was sent to
the headmaster after writing on his desk.

There will always be a certain amount of daily stress, but very few
people have jobs in which the daily stress is more than they can
handle. The problem is that it piles up in your sub-conscious mind
until it becomes unbearable – you are feeling the stress of the
whole year in one day.

The daily stress you encounter is generated as a result of your

beliefs. When you feel like you couldn’t find a better job, or don’t
have the time to relax, or get new qualifications, or that you don’t
want to disappoint yourself or your parents, all those are things that
you can tap and let go of if you choose to.

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It is your beliefs that trap you, not the situation that you find
yourself in.

An older friend of mine stayed in regular full-time employment

even when he was offered shorter term contracts at five times his
current salary. He had a mortgage to pay and a family to consider,
and didn’t feel like he could risk his job security. Eventually he
made the leap and hasn’t looked back.

The contracts come and go, and he hasn’t always worked the full
year, but he still made several times what he was making before.
Before he did it, he felt like it was too much of a risk, afterwards
he wondered why he hadn’t done it years earlier. I asked him how
it felt when he thought about quitting his job and taking the first
contract.

“Nerve-racking, I got a sick feeling in my stomach,” he said. I

asked him when he’d felt that feeling before, and he said it
reminded him of losing his paper round as a boy, as the
newsagent’s son needed extra money. He’d gone to another
newsagent but they had too many paper boys already. He’d felt
sick to his stomach because it meant he’d have no money to buy
comics.

Leaving his job for the new contract was a calculated risk, but he
didn’t realise he was factoring in feelings of doubt and worry he’d
had because he couldn’t find a new paper round.

If you don’t think that makes logical sense, you are absolutely
right. It does make emotional sense though. There is no way to
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predict which memory is affecting you, the only way is to follow

the feeling and see where it leads. When the paper-shop memory
came up, my friend shook his head and didn’t believe it had
anything to do with it. But the same feeling was there, and when
we tapped it away his jaw dropped, because he realised it really
had influenced his decision to stay in his job so long.

Addictions
People don’t become addicted to cigarettes, junk food, or anything
else just because they enjoy those things. However much we
might like them, that is not enough motivation to continue to do
them when they are unhealthy.

An addiction is a strategy we develop for dealing with negative

feelings. Smoking a cigarette is a popular way to distract ourselves
from stressed feelings. People who feel lonely turn to casual sex
for comfort. Sugary foods suppress feelings of sadness. Surfing
the internet distracts our minds from feelings of boredom.

You can use tapping to reduce specific cravings you feel for
nicotine or caffeine, but that is only part of the story. To give up,
you must tap away all the feelings that trigger you to feel like you
need those things, and that basically means most of the strong
negative feelings we feel from day to day.

My friend Hamish gave up smoking after just a ten minute tapping

session. The craving feelings he felt were tapped away in 5
rounds, and then he found this feeling of “I must have a cigarette”.
We traced that back to peer pressure when he was 15 that led to

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him smoking for the first time. A few more rounds on that
memory were all it took.

I told him not to put any effort into stopping smoking. The next
couple of days he had a cigarette or two, but each one he wondered
more and more why he was doing it, until he put one out halfway
through and hasn’t had a cigarette since.

I was very surprised at this result, but it could easily be like that for
you. Hamish already has very strong willpower and doesn’t really
let things bother him in general. He had also made a commitment
to give up.

It took me several months to become less compulsive about eating

chocolate. I used to buy a chocolate bar or two whenever I passed
a corner shop. I still enjoy chocolate, but rarely more than once a
day. I can take it or leave it and I often choose fruit instead. I still
view this as a work in progress.

Addictive habits flood our emotional systems so that we don’t

notice the negative feelings that we were feeling before. Most
drugs, including caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine, are literally
regarded as poison by our systems. So whatever negative feelings
we were feeling before, they are pushed to the side while our
bodies take various measures like pumping blood harder to filter it
faster.

Tapping offers a new strategy for dealing with negative feelings –

let them go.

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If you can identify the feelings that trigger your addiction, you can
sit down and tap them away over a few sessions. Even better,
develop the habit of tapping whatever it is you are feeling before
you eat junk food or smoke or whatever. If you still want to
continue after that, fine, but if you persist, eventually you just
won’t feel the need.

Laziness and Procrastination

Often when I ask people what holds them back from taking the
next step in their lives, they say “I’m lazy”. The topic of
procrastination is one of the biggest draws to my workshops.

I used to always leave my taxes until the last minute, I hated doing
the washing up, my room would continually be a mess, and I’d
start most school and work assignments late and rush them, usually
delivering them after the deadline.

I used to be so lazy, that if I wanted to watch something on one

channel, but the TV was switched to another one, unless the
remote control was within reach I wouldn’t get up to change it. It
seemed like such a huge effort.

It was funny because most times when I completed my tax self-

assessment, the taxman ended up owing me several hundred
pounds. I like having a tidy room and it’s much less effort to do
the dishes before the food dries and becomes welded to them.

What really put me off doing all those things was that negative
feelings that had somehow become associated with them.

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One day I was sat watching TV, and caught myself telling myself
it just wasn’t worth getting up to change the channel. It seemed
ridiculous, and I asked myself when I’d felt that feeling before. I
instantly recalled being sick and staying home from school. I had
a fever and felt dreadfully drained of energy. The recurrence of
that feeling was enough to dissuade me, years later, from getting
up to change the channel.

The way you are with one thing is the way you are with
everything, so when I coach students on overcoming
procrastination we start with basic tasks like tidying your
apartment or house and doing the washing up.

Have you ever noticed how the tidiness of your living area is
proportional to how sorted out your life is? The same things that
stop you tidying your room stop you sorting out the rest of your
life. Several times now I’ve noticed people really start to get their
life in order after working just on tapping towards tidying their
room.

Over time, every feeling becomes rationalised with an excuse, so

it’s not essential to look for the feeling and trace it back in time.
The magic question is “what’s stopping you?”:

Q: “What’s stopping you from doing the washing up?”

A: “It takes too long.”
“Even though it takes too long…”

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Q: “What’s stopping you from doing the washing up?”

A: “I want to do something else.”
“Even though I want to do something else…”

Q: “What’s stopping you from doing the washing up?”

A: “I just can’t be bothered.”
“Even though I just can’t be bothered…”

Q: “What’s stopping you from doing the washing up?”

A: “er… nothing”

Each time your mind voices the excuse attached to the strongest
feeling, and keys your body into that feeling. When you tap it
away, the excuse is no longer emotionally relevant, and your mind
throws up the next one. When working with someone else, never
ask “what else?” – there is no need to prompt for a different
answer.

I encourage people to give the same answer if they still believe it.
Occasionally they do, which just means the same excuse has
become attached to two different feelings. They’ll say “I still feel
a little bit like I can’t be bothered”, in which case you just tap that.

My friend Zachary had a $3,000 credit card bill, and $6,000 of

unpaid invoices for work he’d done for people. He just didn’t like
sending off invoices and chasing them up. I asked him what was
stopping him sort out his invoices, and we tapped away every
answer he gave. At the end he said “well, I guess it’s not such a
big deal…” and I agreed, suggesting we did some more tapping on
other things we’d talked about. No thanks, he said, he wanted to
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go and get on with those invoices… and he dealt with them solidly
over the next two days.

It’s amazing what limits us in this way. Another student of mine,

Stavros, had been procrastinating draining his central heating
system to swap in a new radiator. After tapping away various
excuses like “I’ve never done it before”, “I don’t know how”, “I
don’t know where to get the parts”, he still didn’t want to do it.

I asked “what would stop you doing it, and really enjoying it?”
After some thought he found he had a very bad feeling about doing
it, and we traced it back to criticism from his father when he was
younger. Even though his father was in another country at the time
and not likely to see his handiwork, his sub-conscious mind was
making him feel like he would let his father down.

It’s healthy to be curious about where we pick up these feelings

and beliefs, but there is no cause to blame our parents, teachers or
friends, or ourselves. Even the best parents damage their children
in this way. That brings us nicely on to forgiveness.

Forgiveness
“Resentment is like drinking poison
and expecting the other person to die”
– Nelson Mandela

We automatically resist forgiving people. After all, we usually

have what we think is a good reason to resent that person.

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Once you see how our negative feelings affect our lives, it
becomes clear that forgiveness is something we do for ourselves,
not for the person we are forgiving. If you hate someone, it’s you
that feels that hatred, not them.

Our negative feelings limit us, trapping us in a world where

unfairness and sorrow rule. When we forgive, we transcend that
view and the world becomes a brighter place.

Forgiveness is the letting go mechanism. They are one and the

same. Without tapping, it can be difficult to forgive, as we hold on
to the feeling. When you tap, forgiveness becomes automatic.

Who do you need to forgive? Make a list of all the people you
hate, or are angry at, or you feel have wronged you in some way.
Include by default all members of your family, even if you have a
good relationship with them. Include your teachers, school friends,
your ex-partners and their partners or ex-partners.

For each person on the list, start by asking yourself, what feelings
do I have towards this person? When did I feel that feeling? The
answer tends to come easily, the person, the event, and how they
made you feel are often closely linked.

If you have a good relationship with the person already, look for
any negative feelings underneath the positive ones. What stops
you loving that person completely and utterly and unreservedly?
It’s often our closest friends and most loved relatives that wound
us most deeply.

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When you have tapped away all the feelings in the memories, you
should reach a sense of peace when you think of that person. If
you can’t find more memories, you can tap away any feelings you
still have towards them without tracing the feeling back.

I often ask students to imagine bumping into that person in the

street, and even asking them for a coffee. You don’t have to
actually do this; you don’t have to even ever see them again.
Being in a place where you could, emotionally, is what’s
important.

Quite often people will say “well, they would ignore me, they
wouldn’t want to talk to me”, and you can tap that too. Maybe the
other person has forgiven you as well. If they haven’t it doesn’t
matter, the important thing is that the negative feelings you had
associated with that person are gone.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

In a way, every problem caused by negative feelings trapped in our
memory is a very mild form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

PTSD occurs when memories include particularly intense feelings,

including physical pain. Strong feelings are always with us, we
feel the relevant feelings all the time to a varying degree, and we
relive the event any time we close our eyes.

According to Wikipedia, “Symptoms can include general

restlessness, insomnia, aggressiveness, depression, dissociation,

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emotional detachment and nightmares. A potential symptom is

memory loss about an aspect of the traumatic event.”

Because the feeling is always there, one strategy people develop is

to detach from all their emotions generally. If the feeling activates
our fight or flight response, restlessness, insomnia and
aggressiveness will follow. The memory loss is due to the memory
being so painful to visit that our sub-conscious mind will not go
there.

Tapping is the ideal treatment for PTSD, as it goes directly to the

memory and releases the emotional charge stored there. Gary
Craig, inventor of EFT, personally worked with Vietnam War
Veterans with profound results. Emotive videos of some of the
time he spent there are available from Gary’s website,
www.emofree.com.

Every time you tap, you become a little happier.

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6. Living the Good Life

It scares me how often I don’t get the answer “yes” when I ask
people if they are happy. They say “sort of”, or “no, not really”, or
“Magnus, no-one’s really happy, look around you”.

I eventually beat my depression away, before I first learned about

EFT, with my own invented form of Cognitive Behavioural
Therapy. I realised that I often acted on my negative feelings, and
that just created vicious circles. So I decided to try and act as if I
felt good. My life philosophy became “Do whatever makes you
happy”.

Most people had two immediate criticisms of this; what if that

made someone else unhappy, and what if it just led to short term
happiness but caused you problems later. My answer was that true
happiness was a gift shared by all, and a lasting one.

Hurting other people’s feelings doesn’t really make you happy,

although sometimes people will blame you when they are just
making themselves unhappy through their own actions. Likewise,
short-sighted happiness requires denial of what you know full well
are the later consequences of your actions.

Still, it worked for me, and happiness became a habit. When I

really got stuck in to my emotional detoxification, however, I
found that I was still carrying the feelings of depression with me. I
had just learned to ignore them and live with them.

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Now that philosophy has become “Do whatever makes you happy,
and tap away anything that doesn’t”.

That gets you to true happiness. True happiness goes all the way
down.

I am truly happy. This isn’t to say I am happy all the time. It’s the
difference between being deeply sad inside but occasionally having
happy days, and being fundamentally happy inside but
occasionally having bad ones.

At our core, we are happy, that is our natural state. We are born
basically happy, and learn to feel negative feelings on top of that,
until we assume they are just part of who we are.

When you do a lot of letting go of those feelings, at some point

you hit a threshold when enough of that central core shines
through. You realise that your true nature is someone who is
basically happy, and a good person, and so is everyone else.

Sleeping Well
I used to take forever to get to sleep, and had tremendous difficulty
getting out of bed, no matter how much sleep I’d had.

This was in contrast to friends of mine. I remember going on a trip

with Air Cadets once, and a friend of mine fell asleep in the back
of the mini-bus. He nodded off as soon as it started moving, and
slumped over the person next to him. After a little while he fell
forwards, onto the floor of the bus, without waking up. His ear

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was just above a hole in the floor, beneath which the engine
occasionally backfired loudly. He slept through all of this.

At sleepover parties I noticed that certain friends would jump up as

soon as they woke up, and be cooking breakfast while I was cosy
in my sleeping bag, unable to move without great effort.

One of the greatest techniques for self-development is modelling,

where you look at another person and decide you want some
attribute that they have, for yourself. They will also have certain
behavioural patterns that lead to that attribute, and the idea with
modelling is to adopt the behaviour patterns until you have the
attribute too.

Having decided I wanted to be able to not just get out of bed when
I wanted, but to jump out of bed, with all the joy in the world, and
that I wanted to be able to fall asleep in minutes whenever I lay my
head down, I set about modelling the early risers and easy sleepers
that I knew.

The difference is one of emotional state. It’s not the noise outside,
or that you are uncomfortable, or the thoughts in your head that
keep you awake, it’s the emotional reaction you have to them. If
they trigger your fight or flight response, the last thing your body
wants to do is sleep.

When you wake up, it doesn’t matter how tired you are or not, it’s
mostly your emotional state that dictates whether or not you feel
like getting out of bed. Certainly it’s more difficult if you were in
the middle of a sleep cycle or simply didn’t get enough sleep.
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Sleep cycles are usually around 2 hours long, although it varies

from person to person. You start off sleeping lightly, and then you
head into a state of deeper sleep, where different physical and
mental processes give you the rest you really need. At some point
the period of deeper sleep ends naturally, and you doze lightly until
you enter another deep sleep. It’s at this point that you wake up
naturally in the night, for a bathroom trip or glass of water.

When you wake up naturally, at the end of a sleep cycle, after 7-9
hours of sleep, and still don’t feel like you really want to get out of
bed, that’s a good clue that an emotional component is in play.

Think about how easy it is to jump out of bed when you’re

catching a flight to go on holiday, even though you were up all
night packing. Think about how hard it is to wake up when it’s
time to get up for work when you hate your job, no matter how
much sleep you had.

True tiredness occurs when you’ve been working hard and your
body really needs time to recharge. Emotional tiredness occurs
when your emotional system is just letting you know that you are
in a situation when you’ve felt true tiredness before. I call this
FakeTired.

I noticed one day waking up, that my alarm clock actually made
me feel like staying in bed. I’d woken up naturally before it had
gone off, having had enough sleep and being roused by noises
outside and the sun filtering through the curtains. I felt like I

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wanted to get up. Then my alarm clock went off, and I instantly
felt like staying in bed for longer.

How many times had my alarm clock gone off in the past and
woken me up before I was ready, with my mind conscious but my
body still feeling like it was in the deeper part of a sleep cycle?
That feeling became associated with the sound of the alarm. Try
thinking of how your alarm clock sounds now… does it instantly
make you feel tired?

Recently I attended a series of lectures over a weekend. I knew

that it would be interesting and I wanted to give it my fullest
attention, so I made sure to get an early night and to be well fed
and rested in the morning. I turned up to the seminar room feeling
bright and awake, ready to learn.

Ten minutes into the lecture my head started to feel cloudy and
confused, and I felt an overwhelming feeling of tiredness behind
my eyes. I instantly started wondering if I’d not had as much sleep
as I’d thought. I started taking sips of water to wake me up, and
popped to the toilet for fresh air and to slap myself in the face.
Having run up and down the stairs, I returned to the seminar room
feeling wide awake again.

When I sat down I instantly felt tired again. I realised I wasn’t

really tired – this was FakeTired. I started tapping away in my
head – it would have been odd to do it in the seminar room – and
quickly felt better. After some more tapping in the break and that

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evening, the next day I felt awake and alert throughout, despite
drinking alcohol and going out later than I’d intended.

I realised that my body was just reminded of the way it had felt
during lectures at Cambridge, during which I would have at
various times been genuinely tired, most likely hungover,
depressed, and probably quite confused, depending on the lecturer.

Feeling good when you wake up often determines how the whole
day is going to go. Although you could just tap these feelings
when you next wake up, it’s hard to tap when you don’t feel like it.
It’s good enough to just imagine how you think you’re going to
feel tomorrow morning, and tap whatever you think of in advance.
Or tap whatever feelings you remember feeling when you woke up
this morning. Do that a few days running and you’ll be waking up
easily.

Be thorough, start by asking yourself “how do I feel when I wake

up?”, and then when you have tapped enough that you think you’ll
feel fine, ask “what’s stopping me bounce out of bed with all the
joy in the world?”

I often use working on waking up in the morning as a route to

helping with depression. If you’re depressed, then that’s what
stops you feeling like getting out of bed. When you wake up, the
collection of negative feelings that makes up your depression starts
waking up too, and it’s a good way to find them and tap them
away, one at a time, until they are all gone.

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Likewise, you can ask, “what’s stops me from falling asleep?”

Answers like “it’s noisy outside” or “I’m not comfortable” can be
tapped easily – remember it’s your emotional reaction to them that
actually keeps you awake.

“Lots of thoughts running around my head” can be tapped as itself,

but really you have to find the thoughts one-by-one and tap them
away. These are the thoughts or feelings that have arisen during
the day, or just are always with you, and you need to be specific in
dealing with them.

The moment you put your head down and get some peace and
quiet your brain turns its attention to dealing with those thoughts,
that’s why they all start running around in your head. This makes
last thing at night the ideal time to do tapping. See what thought or
feeling comes up, and tap it.

Have you ever felt so tired you couldn’t sleep? That’s FakeTired
again. Because the feeling isn’t true tiredness, but actually comes
from the survival mechanism, the feeling is fear-based. That fear
activates the fight-or-flight response, so even though you feel tired
you just can’t sleep.

One way to temporarily banish FakeTired – or any negative feeling

– is to have a powernap. Closing your eyes and quietening your
mind distracts your mind from whatever association was bringing
up the FakeTired feelings. I’m not convinced that powernaps do
much at all for true tiredness; I don’t really take them any more.

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It takes a bit of persistence, but it is very easy to use tapping to turn

yourself into someone who can fall asleep and wake up with ease.

If your sleep is restless and disturbed, that’s something that will

tend to sort itself out after a lot of tapping. During sleep our minds
are led to any particularly traumatic memories we have, and the
feelings in those memories give us nightmares.

If you can remember the nightmare and relate it to a particular

memory, you are well on your way, but not everyone can do this
easily. You can also train your partner to tap the points for you
while you are asleep if they notice you having a bad dream. The
top of the head point is very useful for this.

In general though, as you tap away the things that stress you day to
day, and as you tap towards happiness, you’ll find that the quality
of your sleep improves automatically.

Self Acceptance
Happiness and Confidence both stem from Self-Acceptance. You
can’t be truly happy until you are happy with yourself, and you
can’t be confident unless you accept who you are.

On the other hand, you can be unhappy or shy, but accept yourself
as those things. It’s actually a lot easier to change them once you
accept them, because the negative feelings you feel about those
things binds you to them, and limits you from seeing any other
possible way of being.

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Most people’s feelings towards themselves vary throughout the

day. We all make mistakes and we all let ourselves down from
time to time, but some people are harsher on themselves than
others. Some people hate themselves even when there doesn’t
really seem to be a good reason on a particular day.

The reason is they are still hating themselves for something they
did in the past, and it could be something from a long time ago.
Often they are consciously aware of what it is, but sometimes they
are not, sometimes people hate themselves and don’t even know
why.

Whenever we ask ourselves how we feel about ourselves, our mind

deliberately digs out a memory when we felt ashamed, or guilty, or
inadequate. The feeling comes from however we felt that day, and
we look at our present or future situation through the lens provided
by the feeling.

Because that feeling is there, no matter how hard we try to feel

differently about the current situation, our thoughts will keep
coming back to the same conclusion.

How do you feel about yourself? What is the strongest negative

feeling that comes up? When have you felt it before? What was
the first time you felt it?

My friend Trey told me he always felt inadequate, around women,

and around his superiors at work. He works in the city and is good
at his job, but whenever he hands in a piece of work he feels like

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it’s not good enough, and when he gets praise he feels like he
doesn’t deserve it.

We found that feeling, and traced it back to one of the first pieces
of homework he had at secondary school. He’d missed the
previous lesson and didn’t understand what he had to do. When he
told the teacher this, the teacher offered to help him out after
school, so Trey stayed behind after the last lesson of the day.

While he arrived at the classroom, all the school drop-outs were

there for detention, and while Trey was waiting for the teacher he
started to feel like he must be one of them. He saw his friends
walking home out the window and felt like he wasn’t as good as
them.

The teacher that had offered to help him had been called away, and
sent another teacher to handle the detention. That teacher didn’t
believe that Trey wasn’t there as punishment and made him stay
for the full hour.

During that hour Trey felt worse and worse, and more and more
inadequate for not being able to explain his situation and for not
being able to do the work in the first place. That was the feeling
he felt when talking to his superiors at work.

Out the window, a girls after-school club were playing Lacrosse,

and watching them he drew the conclusion that no girl would be
interested in him because he was sat inside with the kids he
considered to be drop-outs. He described watching girls dance in

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nightclubs, and feeling like there was a sheet of glass separating

them from him and how he couldn’t reach them.

That one event coloured his whole perception of himself from that
day. Rather than focussing on his successes, all he could see and
would expect to see was more inadequacy with women and at
work.

In retrospect I was rather surprised that it was this simple. When

Trey came to see me, he had a page long list of areas where he
didn’t feel he was good enough in his life. It was the same feeling
connecting them all.

After tapping that memory he looked at the list again and actually
started laughing. He started explaining how none of those things
were really as bad as he’d thought. Now that the feeling was gone,
his world had already started to change.

Every time you tap, you grow a little bit more

into the person you want to be.

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7. Wealth
Money should be easy. It should come to you in return for doing
something you enjoy, something you are good at and uniquely
qualified to do. In fact, plenty of money should come to you for
doing nothing at all other than being yourself. You deserve to
have everything you need in life and more than a few of the things
you want.

If any of the above conflicted with your beliefs, then those beliefs
are limiting, and it would help you to change them.

Even though I believe what I wrote above, I’m not going to

persuade you that those ideas are true. But I am going to
encourage you to try tapping your conflicting beliefs. You can’t
tap away true beliefs, just like you can’t tap away positive feelings
– so it doesn’t hurt to try.

Wouldn’t it be nice if they really were true! Is it possible that you

could at least shift your view of the world a little bit in that
direction? Think about what sort of difference that might have on
your life.

The best book I have found on the subject of money is The Science
of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles. It’s available for free on the
internet and I am producing a tapping guide for it. The style is a
little old-fashioned, it is around 100 years old, but it describes
timeless principles that are equally valid now as when they are
written.

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The central idea is that to gain wealth in the form of cash, you give
value in other ways that is greater than the cash value you receive.

I spent some time with two friends studying that book together,
and we tapped away all the conflicting beliefs we could find.
Things are (slowly) starting to happen. We changed the world in
our heads, and the real world is being brought into line.

How do you feel about people that are wealthier than you?
Distrustful, jealous? Do you assume that they cheated to get where
they are? How do you respond when you see someone speed past
in a fancy car? I used to call them names under my breath. Now I
tend to think “nice car”.

If you have negative feelings towards rich people, your sub-

conscious mind translates that into negative feelings towards you
being rich. Why would you want to become something that you
hate? Those feelings trap you and they need to be tapped.

Make a picture of how your life would be if you had more money.
How does it feel to be in that picture? Pretty good, I hope. Dig
deeper under the surface and you might find feelings that you don’t
deserve it, or guilt, or disbelief. Tap those away and becoming
wealthier will start to feel like a more realistic possibility.

This isn’t a magical process, you have to take action to bring about
what you want. But the actions you take depend on what you
believe is possible.

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Success Barriers
We all know what we should be doing to bring more wealth into
our lives. Apply for a new job, go for a promotion, grow our
business somehow, make new investments. Success Barriers are
the fears and doubts that stop us doing these things.

There are also more subtle success barriers that lead us to sabotage
our efforts. Spending money frivolously, or distrusting our
business partners.

Once again, the magic question is “what’s stopping you?” In all

the clients I have worked with who wanted to improve their lives,
no-one has ever given me a good answer to that question. Even if
the barrier seems immovable, once you tap it, your mind suddenly
starts finding ways to circumvent it.

The slight exception is “I don’t have enough money”, and there are
often even ways around that. You can tap away the beliefs that
stop you looking for outside investment or loans, for example. The
other way around that is time – just start saving and be patient.

How to Achieve any Goal

The way to achieve any goal then, is to make a picture of where
you want to be, and take a step towards making it happen. This is
true whether you want to make a cup of coffee or start an airline.
You might want to break down big goals into several smaller ones,
but it is still just a case of repeatedly applying this principle.

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Your negative feelings and beliefs hold you back at every step.
Some people say they don’t know what they want – the truth is
they do know, but they talk themselves out of wanting it because
they think it is unrealistic. So these beliefs can even stop you
making a clear picture in the first place.

Once you have made a clear picture, imagine what it would feel
like to be in that picture. Associate yourself fully with it – this
means imagine being right in the centre of the picture as if you had
achieved the goal. Probably overall you want to be there, but the
negative feelings that are there will cause self-sabotage. When you
come to take steps towards the picture, because your sub-conscious
doesn’t really want to go there, it will take the wrong steps.

When you have a clear picture and feel only positive feelings about
it, work out the first few steps you could take towards it. When
you start out you don’t need to know precisely how to make it
happen – at any point, you just need to know what the next step is
you need to take.

Then look at what is stopping you take that next step or steps.
Once you have tapped away whatever is stopping you, you will
find yourself taking that step automatically and effortlessly.

In my experience people don’t need extra motivation. If they want

motivation to do something, they must want to do it, and that is
enough to motivate them. They just need the relevant barriers to
be removed. It’s those barriers that make things feel like hard
work, because they are hard work to push through. Because most

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people don’t know a way to just remove the barriers, they think
they need more motivation to push through them. This just creates
more stress, and never really works anyway.

My friend Paul works in IT, but he wants to be a fashion

photographer. He’s been pursuing that as a hobby, and now has
the experience and contacts to do it for real. I asked him to
imagine himself doing that, and what his life would look like a
year from now.

He vividly described the scene at one of his future fashion shoots,

and I asked him how it felt to be there. “Great,” he said. “I’m
doing what I love.” I asked him if, at the back of his mind, there
were any worries or doubts about being there, and after thinking,
he said “yes, I’m worried my work won’t be good enough”.

His work is fantastic, I’ve seen it and he constantly receives great

feedback from it. I asked him if there was a time he’d felt like his
work wasn’t good enough. Yes, he said. One paid shoot he did a
while ago, the client had been disappointed. When we tapped
away how he’d felt about that he started to remember how fussy
the client had been, and how he hadn’t been able to do things they
way he’d wanted – it really hadn’t been his fault at all.

He became happier about being in the picture, and I asked him

how it would feel, to imagine himself now stepping into it.
“Scary,” he said. “Like I’m drowning.” We traced that feeling
back to the first time he dived into a swimming pool off a diving

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board. He hadn’t been expecting to end up so deep under water,

and in the seconds before he surfaced, felt like he was drowning.

To his sub-conscious mind, the idea of diving into the world of

fashion photography reminded him of the memory of diving into
that pool – he was doing something new and exciting, and as he’d
learned, that lead to the feeling of drowning.

It’s funny sometimes, what holds us back. It’s incredibly cheesy

sometimes but that’s just the way our mind works.

When I was working on the draft of this book, I became incredibly

frustrated, feeling like I wanted to jump up from the desk and walk
around the room. It didn’t make sense, because I was very happy
with what I’d written and knew what else I wanted to say. I’m not
completely sure where those feelings came from, but I managed to
tap them away, I think they were to do with writing essays at
Cambridge, and being frustrated because I didn’t understand what
was being asked of me.

When the draft was nearly finished, I started to feel like I wanted
some feedback on it, so I sent it off to a couple of friends. They
read it and wrote back saying it was great. I was disappointed – I
wanted constructive criticism so I could make it better. I put it
aside for a few days, and when I came back to it, the feeling was
stronger.

As I thought more about it, it became clear to me that I didn’t just

want feedback, I wanted someone to sit down and write it with me.
I closed my eyes and focussed on the feeling, and realised that
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what I really wanted was my mum to sit down and help me with it.
This was of course, ridiculous, and I instantly remembered getting
stuck with my GCSE history coursework about Christopher
Columbus.

I hadn’t studied, didn’t understand and didn’t really care. I just

wanted to hand the project in and forget about it. After trying to
help me, my mum eventually sat down at the computer and
finished the project based on one word answers from me. After
tapping away that memory I finished the draft.

It sat on my computer for a couple of weeks until I realised I didn’t

really want to show it to anyone. I was getting the hang of this
now, and thought “ok, what feeling is this?” It was shame and
embarrassment. I recalled working on a school project on
Dungeons and Dragons when I was 11.

My dad brought home an Apple Mac from the office at weekends

for me to use. Very few people really had computers like that in
those days and I was the only kid in the class who had word-
processed his project. Dad also printed the project on the office
laser and used a binding machine there.

It looked very professional compared to all the hand-written

projects, and all the other kids teased me and called me a computer
geek. Even though it got an A minus, I felt bad about it. When I
sat down to write my book, my mind was warning me that if I
finished it, I might feel those feelings again.

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So all that time I’d been finding it hard to write my book because I
wanted my mum to help me with it, and because I was worried
about a bunch of 11 year-olds laughing at me.

How to Learn any Skill

You have an amazing capacity to learn, your mind is a highly
effective learning machine. It takes time to learn skills, of course,
that’s one reason it helps to start early. When you look at
accomplished musicians or artists, they always started at an early
age.

There is another reason that it’s harder to ‘teach an old dog new
tricks’. As we get older we also pick up certain beliefs that
become barriers to learning.

One night after leaving a nightclub in London, I was feeling

particularly charged and energetic, and decided to try walking
along a railing between the road and the pavement. I wasn’t drunk,
I was just feeling good. I swung myself up using a signpost, and
found myself standing on the railing. It was about an inch wide,
and wobbling rather a lot as I stood on it.

I let go of the signpost and took a step, and then another, looking at
my feet as the railing wobbled from side to side. Almost instantly
I made a picture in my head of falling off, and so I did, jumping
back down onto the pavement. I took a deep breathe and tapped
“Even though I’m going to fall off” and “Even though it’s
wobbling”, and jumped right back up again.

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This time I didn’t make that picture in my head of falling off, I felt
calmer, and focused on my goal, which was walking ten metres
along a wobbling railing as cars and buses whizzed past me. I
realized that looking at my feet didn’t help, and instead focused on
a lamppost directly ahead of me. In a calm and relaxed manner, I
walked all the way along the railing.

My friend Matt was with me, and he ‘doesn’t believe’ in tapping.

He said he thought he could do it anyway, and hoisted himself up.
He took about two steps before falling off. I asked him if he’d
made the picture of falling off before it happened, and he said he
had. We did a couple of rounds of tapping. Then he climbed up
and walked right along in one go.

Think how long it would have taken for us to learn to do that

without tapping. It would have required great self-discipline to
avoid making the picture in our minds of falling off. It only
occurred to me not to look at my feet when I was more relaxed and
clear about what I was doing.

You can apply this technique to any skill you might want to learn.
It still takes time and persistence to learn the skill, but it’s a lot
easier when you tap away the fears and nervous feelings that make
it difficult.

I wish I’d had Tapping when I took my driving test at 18. I’m very
comfortable behind the wheel now, but at the time I got very tense,
particularly parallel parking and doing three-point-turns. I’d be

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worried about holding up other traffic, and would rush the

manoeuvre, usually over or under-steering.

Whenever I do public speaking I look carefully for nervous

feelings about being in front of an audience and tap them away.
When you tap away the emotional significance of standing in front
of a group of people, public speaking becomes as easy as having a
chat with some friends.

Recently I bumped into a former student who was very pleased

with his results using tapping to improve his interview technique.
He thanked me for having taught him and for encouraging him to
apply tapping to everything. He’d had a recent job interview that
he thought was his best ever, and had gotten the job. I was pleased
that I’d been able to help, but it was really him that did it – he was
right for the job and perfectly capable of communicating that.
Tapping away interview nerves just allowed him to truly give his
best in the interview.

As a last example, I’ve helped a few university students with their

studying technique. I’d always known that the most successful
students weren’t necessarily the brightest, but really the ones that
just got stuck into studying. Part of this is self-discipline, but a
positive outlook is also essential. I used to look at my notes and
think things like “I’ll never understand this” and “there’s too much
to do”, and of course those beliefs came true. Tap those beliefs
away and it’s much easier to study. If you actually do the work,
you can’t help but do well.

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Every time you tap, the world becomes a slightly brighter place.

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8. Finding Love and Healthy Relationships

In no other area of our lives do emotions run higher than in and
around relationships. It’s also the one area where most people
readily acknowledge that their emotional issues affect them. Our
past relationships affect our current and future ones, and usually
not in an ideal way.

Everyone knows someone who has been hurt from a bad break-up
who is now reluctant to be open to new people. A female friend
once told me that the rule is that it takes half the length of time a
relationship lasted to fully get over it. This sounded like an awful
limiting belief to me, and besides, I knew people who it clearly
didn’t apply to.

Some people bounce back immediately after a relationship ends.

They have a couple of casual flings and sooner or later find
something serious again. Other people are still bitter about their
ex-partner five years after the relationship ended.

The difference between those people is the state of their emotional

health, some people find it natural to forgive themselves and their
previous partner, and some people don’t.

Each wound from the past has a trigger. When our current partner
behaves in a particular way or says a certain thing, it stirs up the
feelings stored in a memory of when a previous partner behaved in
that way. When we spend a lot of time with someone, we end up
with intimate knowledge of their triggers and they of ours.

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Compatibility is determined by how often you trigger each other

with your natural behaviour, and how willing you are to learn to
avoid doing that. The trigger can be tapped away though, and the
wound healed. The fewer wounds you have the more open to
different relationship possibilities you will find yourself.

Most of my experience is in the first few hours of a relationship,

I’ve worked very hard on becoming the sort of person who is open
to meeting new people, so that is my area of expertise.

I did work with one couple who were having difficulties, and I
simply sat them down and had them take turns to answer the
question “what is it that annoys you about your partner?” – tapping
on whatever they said each time. They certainly became more
amiable towards each other after that session, but I think by then
things were already well past the point of no return.

In general though, the same principles that make someone happy

and balanced outside a relationship will keep them happy and
balanced within one. If you know yourself you can be surer that
you are going into a relationship for the right reasons.

Being ready for love is another quality that develops after a lot of
growth (ie, tapping) in other areas, it won’t always be something
you can deliberately work towards as a goal. When you hold on to
strong negative feelings of any kind, regardless of what they are
directly connected with, they tend to interrupt the flow of positive
feelings. Let go of those negative emotions, and the positive ones
start to flow - including romantic love.

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Why you must first love yourself

We tend to like other people for two reasons, either because they
have something in common with us that resonates with that aspect
of ourselves, or they have a quality that we want, one that is
opposite to one that we have. At the same time, ‘like attracts like’,
and ‘opposites attract’.

The characteristics we share make us feel connected, give us the

re-assurance that the other person is on our wavelength, and that
we are not alone in the world. The opposing characteristics keep
things interesting, and are a way we each provide value to the other
person.

I’ve noticed in successful couples I know that the ways in which

they are different are often the more superficial personality
characteristics. Underneath those, the deeper worldview and way
of being that both people hold are similar if not identical.

The reason that you must first love yourself is that the person you
are compatible with is the same as you in the most important ways.
If you don’t love yourself then you won’t love them.

When you don’t love yourself, and dislike particular qualities in

yourself, it’s natural to look for the opposing quality in a potential
partner. It’s not fair to expect someone else to make up your own
shortcomings, and this creates tension in the relationship.

When I’ve worked with guys coaching them in confidence and

how to start conversations with girls in bars, their biggest problem

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is that they want what they can’t have. They are often shy, dressed
like computer programmers and frankly, usually a little bit
miserable, but they want to pull the pretty party girls that are
drunkenly dancing on tables.

They don’t like themselves, and want to get an attractive girl so

they can believe that they are attractive themselves. They probably
already know twenty girls that they could easily get, but because
those girls are shy, drably dressed and a little bit miserable, they
would not make the guy feel better about himself and are therefore
not interesting.

If they could realise that they had value in themselves (computer

programmers do, after all, make the world go round these days),
and learn to like themselves, then they wouldn’t be looking to
another person to validate them as human beings. They would
suddenly notice that there are lots of things to like about
themselves and about the shy girls. They’d also notice that the
party girls aren’t so great after all – they are often just as insecure
as the shy guys themselves, and hard to connect with anywhere
other than the dancefloor or the bedroom.

If you really want the party girl, you have to become the party guy.
Tapping can help with that too, but the first step is still to accept
yourself – deeply and completely ☺. Only when you accept the
way you are can you really begin to change it.

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The shadow of past relationships

I was out with some friends in a bar, and waiting for a girl I was
seeing to come and join us. She was a bit late, and after a while I
got a text from her to say she wouldn’t make it, she’d gone
drinking after work and was now going home to pass out. I
instantly assumed she was cheating on me.

After a minute I realised that was ridiculous. She liked me a lot

and most likely had just gotten carried away drinking with her
work colleagues and gone home. Why had I drawn that
conclusion? I traced back the jealous feeling that I’d gotten when I
received her text, and realised that I had unconsciously been
reminded of a time a few years ago when I was seeing a girl who
really had cheated on me.

If I’d reacted based on that feeling I’d have needlessly ended a

relationship that we both enjoyed for a while after that, simply
because my sub-conscious mind had assumed that both girls were
behaving the same way.

Any negative feeling that a previous partner or potential partner

has given you in the past becomes associated with all members of
the opposite sex. It literally builds into a phobia of new
relationships. For men this tends to affect their confidence when
they have the opportunity to move things forward with a particular
girl and make a pass, for women it makes them closed when men
make passes at them.

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This is one reason many people first get together under the
influence of alcohol. Alcohol relaxes the body and detaches you
from those feelings. Men become more confident and women
become more receptive – particularly towards the end of the night
when both sides become more sexually aroused.

I met a lovely girl and we dated a few times. After the third or
forth time we’d seen each other she stopped responding to my texts
and didn’t answer the phone. A few nights later, at 3am I got a
drunken text message from her saying she liked me a lot, but didn’t
want to see me again because we were too different. I persuaded
her to meet me for a coffee, and asked her why she thought that.

She didn’t know! She had just started to feel that way. We were
different, but we also got on very well – I didn’t really see why it
was making her uncomfortable. I asked her if she got that feeling a
lot when she met new guys, and she said yes. I asked her when the
first time was that she felt it, and it was her first boyfriend at 18.
After liking him a lot at first she’d quickly realised that he was
different.

Later in the conversation I told her more about tapping, and had
her tap “even though we’re too different” as an example. We did a
couple of rounds on different aspects of it, and mysteriously, she
found herself wanting to see me again. I should point out that you
can’t tap someone into liking you if they don’t already – but you
can help them remove the blocks they might have stopping them
feeling it or expressing it, if they are willing.

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It’s the same with longer term relationships. If the love is gone,
then it’s gone. But if it’s still there, underneath layers and layers
of negativity, you can probably improve things by tapping that
negativity away.

When resentment between two people builds up, you are no longer
dealing with each other in the moment. One time your husband
gets angry and shouts at you becomes every time your husband got
angry and shouted at you. It all piles up until it gets too much.

Our unconscious thoughts don’t distinguish between different

partners, so the resentment for a particular thing most likely goes
back to previous relationships, and even further back to our
parents. If you don’t like the way you feel when your boyfriend
talks to you in a particular way, it’s probably because it reminds
you of when your dad talked to you in that way.

Eventually the aim is to make a list of all your previous partners,

look for negative feelings you have towards them, and tap those
feelings away. Sometimes a particular time they made you feel
that way will jump out, other times it won’t, you can just tap the
feeling that is there now.

Then imagine seeing them – a chance meeting in the street, or

when you see them through mutual friends, or whatever. How do
you feel when you see them? Again, tap those feelings away, until
you are comfortable and happy to see them.

Forgiveness is a curious thing. When the strong feelings of hurt

are gone, you start to see previous events in a different light.
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Maybe you don’t excuse the other person’s behaviour, but perhaps
you start to understand it. It doesn’t mean you have to see the
other person again, and it certainly doesn’t mean they will want to
see you. It does free you from having the same feelings and
making the same mistakes in the future.

Finding the right person

Plain and simple, it’s a numbers game. The more people you meet
and get to know, the more likely you are to meet someone you like.
Fate still plays a hand, but by getting out and meeting as many of
the right people as possible, you can certainly stack the deck.

When you meet the right person it definitely feels like they are one
in a million. But if you actually count how many people you meet
in between the people you look on favourably as potential partners,
it turns out it’s more like one in a hundred.

How many new people did you meet in the last month? Most
people’s social circles are very insular. Going to the same bars or
clubs with the same people and not meeting anyone new, or even
not going out that much at all.

It doesn’t take that much of a shift to start meeting more people.

There are new people around you all the time. It’s not like you
have to date them all, we tend to judge whether or not someone
could be a potential partner very quickly. We may not decide that
we want to jump into bed with them right away, but having
decided that we don’t, we very rarely change that opinion later.

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There are plenty of resources that cover the subject in more detail,
but in general, men need to make the moves, and women need to
be receptive. It’s a natural process, and once you have tapped
away everything that stops you moving things forward, or showing
interest and allowing him to move them forward, things will just
start to happen.

People often think too far in advance – “well I don’t want the
hassle of getting to know someone new, so I shouldn’t give him
my phone number”. You can tap away the feeling of hassle, and
then you realise that the next step is just meeting for a coffee, and
that that would be a fun thing to do.

It all comes down to fear, our emotions cutting us off from

connecting with people. Whether we are shy or lonely or cynical
or bitter, the basic error is in our unconscious mistaking aspects of
replication for something that might threaten our survival.

Every time you tap, you become more open to love.

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9. Health
Medicine readily recognises that there is a statistical link between
stress and illness, and this link has been acknowledged for a long
time. Doctors still do not really understand the mechanisms
behind this, even though it is well understood in the alternative
health industry.

Intuitively is it obvious; if you are stressed, your mind is directing

the body’s resources to dealing with whatever it perceives is
stressing you. Your body is being prepared for fight or flight, and
there are various physiological measures associated with that. If
it’s doing that, it’s not directing resources to longer term health
aims such as cell growth and repair, and maintaining the immune
system.

Your body is supposed to enter this state when it is directly

threatened. It’s a useful state to be in if you are being chased by a
bear, an experience that, assuming you manage to run fast enough,
will last a matter of minutes. When your body learns to enter this
state when you’re at work it becomes a problem, it’s not designed
to spend all day like that.

There is a whole spectrum of negative emotions, but they are all

basically fear-based and they are all ‘stress’. They all affect your
health in different ways, although it’s only when you feel these
feelings constantly that they cause problems. Feeling negative
feelings from time to time is perfectly healthy, as long as they
don’t stick around.

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Do you know someone who just never seems to get ill? Do they
tend to be pretty chilled out and relaxed about life too? This is not
a coincidence.

Not only do we feel negative emotions in the body, but they are
held there too - or at least in the brain’s map of the body. Each
feeling, and thus each negative association or belief, is connected
to muscular tension. When muscles are chronically tense, this
restricts the flow of blood and lymph – reducing the supply of
nutrients to that area and the removal of toxins from it.

Simply feeling negative feelings impacts our health directly. Of

course negative feelings and beliefs also influence our behaviour,
which also impacts our health. Our behaviour determines what we
eat and how much exercise we get.

The Emotional Diet

For many people, food is part of their strategy for dealing with
negative feelings. Sugary and fatty foods in particular distract us
from how we feel. The heavy feeling of digesting heavy foods
masks whatever emotions are bothering us.

If you know that you eat when you feel bad, would you find it
easier to eat better if you didn’t feel bad so often?

There is so much conflicting dietary advice out there, it’s

confusing and difficult to draw any sort of consensus. I’m
certainly not going to pretend to be significantly educated in
nutrition, and if I was, I wouldn’t want to add to the confusion.

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Your body actually knows exactly what it wants to eat, it’s just that
most people don’t listen to it. Instead, we listen to flashy
advertising, and our own negative feelings as they turn to cravings.

I heard that if you take a baby that is just learning to feed itself,
and lay out in front of it a smorgasbord of different foods, it
intuitively goes for what it really needs nutritionally. It will feed
on things like freshly mashed banana, avocado, apple, and so on,
but leave processed baby foods full of huge amounts of salt and
refined sugar.

I remember tricking my little brother into eating stuff, by

pretending I was going to eat it myself and leading him into
stealing it first. Endless charades like miming the train going into
the tunnel of his mouth, or aeroplane spoons. It makes no sense
that a child would evolve to avoid eating food that was good for it.

On holiday in Ibiza I found myself eating too much fast food, and
basically gave myself a touch of scurvy after a week, not taking
into account that I needed extra vitamins due to the sunshine. I
was walking over to meet my friends in a restaurant, and saw a
stall by the side of the road selling melons. My mouth watered and
I felt a deep desire to eat one.

Sure enough, talking over dinner with my friend, I realised that I

was vitamin deficient and that my body was trying to tell me
something. I bought some vitamin C tablets (unfortunately laced
with aspartame) and drowned myself in fresh fruit smoothies.

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Look for the feeling that is telling you to eat a particular food. If
there is a feeling that tells you “I need chocolate” or “I must have a
coffee”, and if you characterise it as a negative feeling, then try
tapping it away. If the feeling is still there (you can only tap
negative feelings), then go ahead and eat whatever you want.

Cravings are certainly partly physiological, but in my experience,

maybe 9/10ths of the feeling is emotional. You can reduce it by
tapping to the point where you can comfortably ignore it.

As you tap the important issues in your life, you will probably hit
many of the triggers that lead you to eat unhealthy foods. This will
happen automatically as you deal with things, and you can also
prioritise by looking at the feelings you get that drive you to eat the
foods you see as unhealthy.

Always ask one question; “what feeling is telling me to eat this?”,

and when you can, look into the future and ask “how will I feel
when I have eaten it?” Adapt your diet so that it gives you good
feelings.

Eating a heavy English breakfast used to make me feel beautifully

full and satisfied. When I realised that the feelings that drove me
to eat it were connected with loneliness and a need for love, I
tapped them away. After that, I realised that the full feeling was
just a way to cover up the loneliness feeling, and the same
breakfast now made me feel bloated and tired. Emotions are
subjective and relative. I still eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, but

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in approximately half the quantity I used to! I enjoy it much more

now.

As you improve your diet you should find yourself enjoying food
more, not less. If you don’t like the idea of eating particular
vegetables, try tapping on it. “Even though courgette tastes bland
and watery…” or “Even though I don’t like the texture of
tomatoes…” – whatever your thing is, if you tap it, your feelings
towards those foods will change.

Most people experience just three basic tastes in their diet – fatty,
sugary, and salty. As we reduce the overwhelming amounts of
these tastes we start to notice more subtle aspects to particular
foods. There is a vast spectrum of different spices to open up to,
and you start to enjoy food more and more.

The worst thing you can possibly do is ‘go on a diet’, your diet is
just what you eat, and any improvement should be a permanent
step forward. I have a friend who turned vegan overnight after
reading The China Study, an excellent book that outlines the links
between animal proteins and most modern diseases. I’ve read it
too, and I’m sure that one day I will basically end up eating only
raw vegan food, but for me it’s a much more gradual process.

When I graduated university and started work, I was eating

Macdonalds twice a day. I’d have pancakes and hash browns, or
an egg McMuffin there for breakfast, and a Big Mac for lunch,
with a litre of Coca Cola. I eventually discovered Subway, which
is marginally healthier, and now I am fortunate enough to live

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above a Pret a Manger, where I buy a salad or a wrap when I don’t

want to spend the time preparing lunch myself.

For dinner I used to eat pizza, curry, or pasta, until one day I
counted up the calories I was getting in a day and was horrified to
find it was twice the recommended amount. I bought a steamer
and got into the habit of buying oven-ready meat meals, basically a
slab of meat with sauce, and eating that with thick-cut chips and
steamed vegetables. I lost a stone in a couple of months,
effortlessly.

My policy is to eat whatever I feel like, but to work on how I feel.

If you can tap away a feeling, it’s not a feeling you can trust to tell
you what you want to eat.

Exercise
Similarly, your emotional state determines the amount of exercise
you get. If you feel good, you are more likely to choose to walk
instead of drive, when you can. Taking the London Underground
every day, I tapped away the feelings that stopped me walking up
the stairs instead of riding on the escalators.

It’s not a rational decision that stops you doing these things, it’s
that when you think about doing them, your body remembers how
tired similar things have made you feel in the past. But actually
the times they made you feel really tired were times you were tired
anyway, and if you get into the habit of doing those things they
don’t make you feel tired at all.

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I live on the fourth floor in an apartment building with no elevator.

After the first week or so I stopped noticing the stairs. I only
notice when other people arrive at my front door complaining. I
found it a hassle at first, and started to feel tired literally when I hit
the first flight. After tapping those feelings away, now I only
notice sometimes at the end of a long day out, when I’m nearing
my floor.

A year or so ago I made a commitment to go to the gym and work

on improving my body. I knew it wouldn’t particularly make me
more attractive to women, but I thought it would make me feel
better about myself and that I’d have more energy.

I found it a great struggle to go at first, and I was very self-

conscious when I was there, I really felt like gyms weren’t for
people like me. Again, I tapped all those things away, and my
confidence at the gym improved. I also tapped away my pre-
conceived ideas about what it meant to me to be well built – I
believed most guys like that were likely to be less intelligent or
insecure.

I got into a regular habit of going to the gym for a while, but as I
continued tapping, my motivation almost disappeared. I found that
I could tap away a lot of the tired feelings and that that made my
energy improve. Now that I accept myself I don’t feel I have to go
to feel better about myself. I am happier now with my body – and
my belly – than I’ve ever been.

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This information might put you off tapping, it shouldn’t. It might

make you re-consider your reasons for going to the gym. Wanting
a better body to feel more confident will never make you feel as
good about yourself as tapping away what you don’t like about
yourself. I suspect that is the logic that leads guys to use steroids.

I’m working on building the habit of going to the gym again, but
for different reasons – I want more flexibility, and actually the
release of tension will help ‘tap’ things that I can’t actually pin
down to tap. But I’m not sure I need the gym like I thought I did,
so I can save some time and money if that turns out to be the case.

In terms of the effect it has on your emotional and mental health,

exercise is actually equivalent to tapping, or rather, tapping is
equivalent to exercise. I am especially fond of a girl I saw for a
while because of her relaxed attitude to life. She had the sort of
mindset I had achieved through a lot of hard work tapping. Every
day she’d run a few miles around Hyde Park, and allowed her
mind to wander around whatever it was that was stressing her. She
called it “her therapy”.

The tapping points on your fingers are mirrored in your toes, so it’s
not surprising that exercise activates the releasing mechanism.
I’ve been trying to track down a story I heard about a psychiatric
hospital that happened to be by the sea. They started taking their
patients for a long walk barefoot along the beach every day, and
found that they all started getting better.

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Of course tapping is no substitute for leading an active life, but any

time a doctor recommends more exercise to reduce stress, you can
probably achieve faster results for a lot less effort with tapping.
When you’re done you should feel more able to walk when you
could ride, and generally build more exercise into your every day
life.

It’s up to you precisely how much you want to do, but having
tapped around the subject, you can be sure you are doing it for the
right reasons, and that you will be able to stick to whatever you
decide.

Food Allergies
I love cheesecake, I love it more than any other dessert ever.
Particularly chocolate cheesecake, which turns out is something of
a misnomer as it doesn’t always contain actual cheese. The only
trouble was, one day I developed an allergic reaction. When I’d
eat a whole slice, I’d get a headache, and then a migraine, would
have to sleep for several hours and then probably throw up.

Around that time I started buying freshly baked double chocolate

cookies from the supermarket. I used to buy a bag of five and
share them around the office, but that usually only left me with
one. So I started buying two bags… which left me with six!
When I ate those during the course of an afternoon, I’d get the
migraine and have to go home from work sick.

Hearing from a diabetic friend, it sounded very similar to the

experiences he had before he was first diagnosed diabetic. It was

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obvious that I was sending my blood sugar levels haywire. Our

bodies almost certainly haven’t evolved to take such a hit of
refined sugar, and it was causing mine to produce buckets of
insulin which overcompensated and lowered my blood sugar.

One time I ate a slice of ‘Rocky Road’ chocolate and marshmallow

cake from Starbucks, hoping it wouldn’t have the same effect on
me, but it did. As the migraine came on, I started tapping the
migraine feelings. When it got worse and I couldn’t continue
tapping I put on an mp3 that contains special beats that basically
activate the same releasing mechanism that tapping does. I fell
asleep, and woke up only a couple of hours later with a completely
clear head.

Being a relentless self-experimenter, a few weeks later I went for

more Rocky Road and tapped away all the feelings that came up.
This time the migraine hit me a lot less hard. I’ve now reached the
point where I can eat the cheesecake or Rocky Road without any ill
effect. I tried eating a bag and a half of freshly baked double
chocolate cookies, and found that they still made me sick, and in
fact, they brought back the cheesecake effect.

I don’t know the full mechanism at work here, but I’m wondering
if there is an actual chemical in the cookies that causes the body to
react with a migraine. Eating the cheesecake or the Rocky Road
reminded my body of the chocolate in the cookies, and to be on the
safe side it produced the same reaction. So my body had
associated the chemically-caused migraine with the blood sugar
effect of the refined sugar in the chocolate.

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This story should not be mistaken for medical advice, I probably

should have played it safe and seen a doctor to find out if I was
diabetic. But as it is, I tapped the symptoms and am able to enjoy
cheesecake whenever I like. You may have similar experiences,
but please consult a professional.

I heard a story from my friend Will about his wheat allergy. When
he eats wheat he gets a rash on his skin, and a similar effect in his
throat and lungs that makes it hard for him to breathe. If he
doesn’t get an injection of adrenalin at that point he could have a
very short time to live.

I asked him if he’d always had the allergy, and he said no. He had
several stories about accidentally eating wheat and various trips to
the emergency room. I asked when he’d first experienced the
symptoms, regardless of whether or not he’d eaten wheat, and he
told me he was playing football when he ran into a bush. He was
pricked by a poisonous thorn and his body had reacted with a rash
on his arm.

What had he eaten just before playing football? Probably a

sandwich. It struck me that maybe his body had associated the
wheat digesting in his stomach with the rash from the bush. The
rash is not a chemical reaction, it’s the body’s reaction to what the
immune system interprets as a poison. Understandably Will
declined to test my hypothesis as he didn’t want to risk bringing on
the allergic reaction.

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An allergic reaction is not the same as a chemical one. If you pour

acid on your arm, it will blister and burn, and pretty much
everyone’s arm will respond in the same way. But allergic
reactions are brought on by the nervous system. They differ from
person to person because they are learned responses.

If you have a serious allergy and decide to test your potentially

fatal immune system response, I suggest you do so with the
relevant emergency medicines standing by.

You can definitely try tapping Hayfever. My friend Miranda used

to get it really bad, from pollen and pollution. We did about 10
rounds on how the air smelled, the blocked feelings in her sinuses,
and the emotional effects – it made her feel pretty miserable. A
few minutes later her nose started running like a tap, and a while
later her sinuses were clear for the rest of the day.

Every time you tap, you get a little bit healthier.

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10. Spiritual Matters

When I began tapping in earnest, my aim was to rid myself of
inappropriate negative emotions, and tension in my body. I wanted
to clear the feelings from my past that were haunting my present
and affecting my behaviour, tainting my relationships and standing
in between me and happiness.

As I made progress with this task, what started off as a quest for
emotional clarity increasingly became a spiritual journey. I started
to see parallels in many religious teachings and spiritual
disciplines, and took whatever insight I could from studying them.

It became clear to me that all religions and spiritual writings are

different ways of describing the same human experience. When
you detach yourself from any one paradigm this becomes an
obvious conclusion to draw. The great teachers were just
describing their personal experiences, from their own particular
perspective.

Their description becomes a religion when other ingredients are

added, in particular cultural variations, common sense advice, and
instructions to perpetuate that particular set of teachings.

At this point, you will either see this or you won’t. If you are
attached to a particular religion, that’s ok. You can use tapping in
a way that is compatible with it, within whichever paradigm you
like.

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Sooner or later though, you will find your religious beliefs

conflicting with what you intuitively know is true. I can only
suggest that when this happens, you trust that your intuition is the
divine speaking within you, leading to the spiritual truth behind the
religious dogma.

You can use tapping to test this. You cannot tap away a thought
that is in line with spiritual truth. You can tap away a belief that is
religious dogma, and you should, because it is hiding the truth
from you.

Popular religions all teach a variation on the idea that sin separates
us from God. What is sin? Well, the seven deadly sins are Pride,
Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed, and Sloth. You can tap all of
those and the feelings related to them.

Sin is negative emotion, negative emotion is sin. When you

release negative emotion, you literally remove sin from your body
and mind.

I believe that this spiritual truth is the basis of the coming one
world religion that has been prophesised for so long. It will cut
through all the dogma and offer a direct experience of the releasing
mechanism.

Tapping certainly does that, and I see tapping as the next stage
towards that spiritual truth. Probably a faster, easier, and even
more accessible way of activating the releasing mechanism will
emerge.

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I’ve already mentioned that I eventually found tapping to be

equivalent to Buddhist meditation. How about Catholic
confession? This is clearly intended to activate the releasing
mechanism. Christian healing, particularly the kind you see in
evangelistic churches, where the preacher places his hand on the
top of your head. All the tapping points are mirrored there, in
some situations you can just tap that one point and activate the
releasing mechanism.

Once you start looking you can see how various rituals were once
designed to activate the releasing mechanism, but how over time
that has gotten lost in the dogma and ceremony of it all.

It does not matter which way you want to look at it. You needn’t
even acknowledge any spiritual experience at all – tapping makes
you happier, brings you more into the moment, and gives you a
feeling of being at peace with the world.

Finding Your Life Purpose

The first goal I work towards with students on my coaching
programme is to help them find their life purpose. I’ve read about
many ideas on how to do this, including hiding away on a desert
island for as long as it takes to work it out.

What I’ve found is that people pretty much already know their life
purpose and what they want to do with their life, they just don’t
believe they can do it.

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There are some fun questions to ask to arrive at the answer; one of
them is “if I was to give you a million pounds every week, for the
rest of your life, what would you do?”

After the usual travelling, partying, and buying the old folks a
house, most people find the answer they are looking for.
Sometimes you need to distil the answer into a scalable purpose,
but it is usually there.

For me, right now, the first thing I think of when I ask myself that
question is “write my book”. That’s how I can be sure that I’m on
purpose with what I’m doing. Granted, I’d be writing it on the
beach in Hawaii, but at the end of the day, this is what I want to
do.

Your life purpose can also change throughout your life. I really
only see myself helping people with tapping for the next 5-10
years or so. I have no idea what will happen after that.

Until you find your life purpose, your default life purpose is
‘looking for your life purpose’. The best way to do that, apart
from sitting down and thinking about it, is to get experience in
different areas, travel, and meet new people.

Another way to find your life purpose is to write down your top ten
life goals, every day, for two weeks. They could be ambitious,
long term goals, like ‘climb Everest’, or shorter term goals like
‘take out the trash’. Each day, just write down whatever is on your
mind, and do not look at yesterday’s list. After a week or so you

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will see your goals start to crystallise, and you will probably be
able to draw out a theme.

When you produce the daily list, tap away everything that might
stop you achieving those goals. When the barriers disappear, you
become more certain about what it is you want to achieve.

Everyone has a life purpose. This doesn’t necessarily mean that

before you were born you set out to achieve certain things in this
lifetime, but it does mean that your life experiences to date have
shaped you, leaving you uniquely qualified to do something or be
someone.

When people come to me for help in finding what that might be,
they always have similar demands. They want to find something
they feel passionately about, something that does not feel like work
to them, and something that is rewarding to them financially and
spiritually.

If you think that such a thing does not exist for you, try tapping the
reasons why you think that and then see how you feel. It’s easy to
become disenchanted and bitter, and certainly, there may be much
work to be done before you can get yourself in a situation where
you can pursue your dream, but it is always there.

Interpreting Dreams
Now I’d like to talk about the other kind of dreams, those we have
while asleep. Emotional Literacy gives us another way to interpret
them.

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Our minds work on reprocessing memories and emotion while we

sleep, and this is reflected in our dreams. My students almost
always report crazy dreams after intense tapping sessions.

One time during a weekend workshop one attendee told me he’d

been having a recurring nightmare about being chased by various
monsters. The night after the first day of the workshop the dream
had changed, he was the one doing the chasing.

Feelings from our past memories manifest in our life, and affect
the way we perceive the world. Our dreams are like giving this
process an empty canvas. Whatever feelings are floating around in
our minds create the dream.

An example for me is a feeling that I can’t tap – needing to pee!

Whenever I drink too much before I sleep, I often have a
nightmarish dream of looking for a toilet. So the feeling of
needing to pee manifests in the dream. But when I do find a toilet
in the dream, I obviously can’t use it because my body knows I’m
in bed, and won’t pee.

So in my dream the toilets are always engaged, or unreachable, or

too disgusting to use, or, in one rather memorable dream, on stage
in a theatre in front of a large audience!

Whatever feeling is there creates the dream, and it often brings

with it images from the memory when we felt the feeling. So the
dream is a signpost to whatever feeling or memory we need to deal
with.

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Whenever I became stressed at work, I’d have a dream that I was

still at school retaking my A-levels. I’d be walking around the
school buildings, but it didn’t make sense because I had left school
years ago, and I wasn’t sure why I was still there. Sure enough,
when I tapped the feelings that were stressing me at work, they
went back to my A-levels.

Various theories abound as to how to interpret your dreams, and

there are many interesting and pretty much completely useless
books on the subject. All you need to do is find the feeling you are
having in the dream, and trace it back.

I often have flying dreams, particularly when I’m feeling

particularly effective in my life, like I can do anything. However
sometimes I’ll be flying, but there are electricity pylons I have to
avoid, that stop me flying too high, or I’ll be flying inside a
building, or I simply can’t fly fast enough.

On one occasion I woke up in the middle of the night, tapped the

frustrated and trapped feelings I was having from being caught in
the electrical wires between the pylons, and went back to sleep, to
find the pylons had vanished.

I’ve also found myself doing tapping on myself and other people
within the dream. There’s no reason it shouldn’t work just as well.

Karma
Just as we create our dreams with whatever emotions are floating
around within our minds, we also create our lives. I’ve already

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used the example of someone who feels insecure and acts a certain
way causing other people to dislike them, thus creating more of the
insecure feeling.

Whenever you store away a certain feeling in your memory, you

will later either re-create that feeling, or try to create the opposite
feeling. Ever notice how bullies have always been bullied at some
point by a bigger bully? Not only are they mimicking behaviour,
they are looking to create a feeling of being powerful in
themselves, instead of a feeling of being powerless.

So when you tap and release the feeling, you also transcend the
effect it has on you karmically. Whether or not this mechanism
works across many lifetimes is anyone’s guess. I don’t have
enough experience of that to comment, but within our current
lifetime, it certainly applies.

If you grow up with parents who give you the feeling that money is
scarce and you can’t afford anything, whenever you think about
money as an adult, you will get that feeling, even if you are being
paid a larger salary than your parents ever earned, and don’t have a
mortgage to pay and kids to feed.

If a guy you like leaves his girlfriend for you, even though it might
feel good at the time, that feeling defines for you a reality where
you are with a guy who will leave his girlfriends when presented
with a better option. That will plant the seeds of worry in your
mind that he might leave you for another girl, and the worry will

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make you act a certain way, that even though you don’t mean to,
will probably lead him to leave you too.

Karma is just a way of describing what happens when feelings get

stuck. Tapping those feelings breaks the cycle, you see the world
differently and stop creating the feeling for yourself.

The Law of Attraction

A related mechanism to karma is the Law of Attraction. The idea
is that the process whereby feelings create more of the same
feeling works for positive feelings too. So if you want something,
find the feeling of gratitude you would feel if you already had it.

Focussing on that feeling switches your mind from thinking about

reasons you can’t have something, to thinking about ways you can
have it. This process is described very well in a popular DVD
called The Secret, which is based on Wallace Wattles’ book, The
Science of Getting Rich.

Does the idea of focusing on something with a feeling of gratitude

sound familiar to you? Of course it does, this is exactly what
prayer is, and you can see the idea within most religions.

The Law of Attraction works on a physical and meta-physical

level. It certainly helps to take action towards getting what you
want. However when you focus your mind and open it to new
possibilities, you will suddenly notice helpful coincidences that
help you towards your goal but seem entirely random.

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For example when I first tried to use the Law of Attraction to bring
more money into my life, I certainly started thinking of new places
to advertise my services and new ways I could make money. As
well as that though, the very next day I found a five pound note
blowing in the street. That was a coincidence, of course, but it’s
the sort of coincidence you see a lot when you start working with
the Law of Attraction.

It’s helpful to start by tapping away any conflicting beliefs you

might have with the idea of the universe working for you like that.
Cultivate an attitude of Pronoia – the irrational belief that the
world is out to help you.

When you have specific ideas of what you want to attract into your
life, look for beliefs you have that conflict with the idea of that
thing coming to you, and tap them away. I found this works very
well with bringing the right sort of people into my life – friends I
can relate to, romantic interests I can connect with, and business
partners.

I use a vision board for this. When there is something I want to

bring into my life, I find a picture of it online and paste it onto an
image I use as my computer backdrop. So I am aware of the image
every time I use my computer, my mind is constantly focussed on
it. When I have a spare minute, I look for negative beliefs or
feelings associated with having whatever it is, and tap them away.

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The Nature of Beliefs

I have previously tended to talk about beliefs as being
characterised as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. In this sense there are
beliefs that serve you, and beliefs that do not.

There are also ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions, which are a way
of differentiating feelings that feel good, and those that feel bad.
Negative emotions are those that threaten your survival, and they
are stored differently to positive emotions.

A belief is formed when we become emotionally attached to a

thought. Because only negative emotion is stored in this way, it is
always a negative emotion that is attached to the thought.

The theory of Cognitive Dissonance says that stress arises when

the world in your head is different to reality. When reality clashes
with your internal representation of the world, you feel bad
because the world isn’t the way you think it is, or the way you
think it should be, or just the way you want it to be.

When you think a thought that represents the world differently than
the way it really is, it generates a negative emotion. That negative
emotion becomes attached to the thought.

This means that if you believe something, that’s a pretty good sign
that it isn’t true.

Just to clarify that – when I use the word ‘believe’, I am talking

about a thought that you have that you are emotionally attached to.
If you just ‘think’ or ‘know’ something, you aren’t necessarily
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emotionally attached to it. But the moment negative emotion is

associated with a thought, the strength of the negative emotion is
proportional to the difference between that thought and reality.

So true perception of reality occurs when you just have thoughts;

with no emotion attached to them.

Ego Detachment and Enlightenment

The network of beliefs in your mind is basically what forms the
ego. Every time you tap, you let go of a belief, and destroy a part
of your ego. Eventually, you won’t have an ego left.

I still have an ego, certainly. But at some point I stopped

identifying with it. I tapped so much of it away that I started to
recognise what thoughts were coming from my ego and what was
really me. It’s hard to understand this unless you experience it
yourself. Many have tried to explain what this is like and I have
read many of their explanations. But I didn’t get it until it
happened to me.

Babies are born with no beliefs, and therefore no ego. When you
let go of enough of your beliefs, and destroy enough of your ego,
by tapping or other means, you return to that state. One way of
describing this might be to say you are ‘born again’.

Your beliefs trap you in the past – they cause you to react to
current situations the same way you did to previous situations,
even if it is not quite appropriate. Only by letting go of those
beliefs can you truly be ‘in the moment’.

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What is suffering if it is not the process of enduring negative

feelings? You can certainly use tapping to reduce the negative
feelings you feel day-to-day, and eliminate all but those that come
from the present moment. One way Buddhism describes
enlightenment is as the ‘cessation of suffering’.

I’m being deliberately woolly, partly because I don’t have all the
answers but also because I don’t think words can do them justice.
The only way for you to understand is to explore these ideas
yourself.

I found that tapping has helped me understand spiritual teachings

that previously baffled me, and certainly went way beyond any
other practical steps that were available for me to take.

Wherever I am now, I still have a way to go, but I do know that

tapping is what brought me here, and will continue to take me
onwards, and that it can do the same for you.

Every time you tap, you get a little bit closer to God.

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11. Physical Healing

Tapping bridges the gap between conventional medicine and faith
healing. Tapping is precise enough that you get consistent,
repeatable results. If there is an emotional or spiritual root to a
disease or illness, tapping is probably the best tool available right
now for healing it. That emotional and spiritual healing may or
may not be sufficient to allow the body to heal physically.

This chapter should in no way be interpreted as medical advice.

When I work with clients who have physical healing as a goal, it
would be irresponsible to promise a cure. What I can promise is
that any emotional issues they have will be improved and usually
resolved, if they do enough tapping. I have always insisted that
clients continue to seek medical advice from professionals.

The alternative healthcare industry is full of quacks and charlatans.

It is also full of people who sincerely believe they have ways to
help people. Amongst all that there may even be methods that
work.

I personally am in no doubt that the way to cure any disease, is to

stop whatever it is you are doing that is creating it. This may
sound harsh, and you may not know what it is that you are doing
that is causing your illness, but the natural state of the body is one
of health. Any true cure restores the body to that natural state.

There are plenty of exceptions to this of course, such as babies

born with degenerative diseases. It may even be too late for a
particular adult onset case to be reversed. Nevertheless, for the

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vast majority, disease is knowingly or unknowingly caused by

some aspect of lifestyle that could have been changed.

Your body is continually replacing old cells with new ones. We

replace about 1% of our cells every day, although different parts of
the body regenerate at different rates. The outermost layer of our
skin sheds about a million cells every forty minutes. We have an
entirely new outer skin every 27 days.

The inner lining of the small intestine is replaced in less than a

week. Taste buds last for about ten days before being replaced.
Other organs take longer – for example the cells in the pancreas
can take more than a year.

So your body is creating itself anew every day. Whether it creates

itself in a health state or an unhealthy state depends just as much
on your emotional and spiritual wellbeing as on your environment
and genetics.

Asking Your Body

The theory goes that holding on to strong negative emotions
impairs the immune system, and in the case of cancer, causes cells
to grow improperly. Letting go of those negative emotions allows
the immune system to do its job, and proper cell growth to be
restored.

There may also be nutritional or other factors at work which are

outside the scope of this book.

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Really there is no absolute way to tell what emotions are causing a

particular problem. Anyone looking to achieve physical healing
through emotional release should resolve to deal with every major
emotional issue they have. There is, however, a way to prioritise.

My friend Alexander has an interesting growth on the end of his

finger, at first he thought it was a blister, but now it looks more
like a wart. We sat down and I asked him to relax and take some
deep breaths.

I had him imagine jumping out of his body and shrinking to a very
small size, and running along his arm to the wart. I asked him to
imagine getting right up close to it, and holding it, putting his ear
to it, and asking it how it felt.

He immediately said ‘profound sadness’. I asked what sort of a

sadness feeling it was, and he said he felt it in his chest, and it
reminded him of riding in the back of his parents car when he was
6 and they were going through a divorce.

We tapped the relevant memories, and repeated the visualisation.

This time there was a different sadness feeling there, so we found
and tapped those memories too. Eventually the wart had nothing
left to say.

It’s been a few months and admittedly it’s still there – there may
be more subtle feelings to tap, or it may just take a while for the
body to catch up with the emotional healing. There is no doubt
though, that the wart and those emotional memories were
connected in Alexander’s mind.
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I’ve used this technique with several people, and all were able to
find emotions stored in the part of their body where they had the
health problem. I was particularly struck by my friend Alice, who
had breast cancer, she worked on a wide variety of emotional
issues to tap, and reported that the majority of them were held in
her breasts. She was also having conventional treatment, and is
cancer free now.

This chapter is deliberately short, as my focus is not on healing but

on happiness, emotional balance, and success coaching. For more
information, I recommend Energy Medicine by Donna Eden, and
The Journey by Brandon Bays. There is also interesting
information online about a Dr Hamer, and a theory called the Iron
Law of Cancer.

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12. Tapping the Planet

“The world is not going to the devil,

the world is going to God”
– Wallace Wattles

The world is changing now faster than ever before. Each level of
advancement in technological and social progress previously took
centuries, now it takes years.

It’s easy to look at the world and think it is getting worse, the news
is full of negativity, murders, disasters, and wars. As usual that is
where our focus is, because those are the things that threaten our
survival.

When you take a wider perspective, the good outweighs the bad.
The Berlin Wall coming down, democracy in numerous countries
that didn’t have it before, the end of the cold war. The world is
more peaceful now than it ever has been.

The key is to understand history as an evolution of consciousness.

My favourite example is the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet

Union were deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba, which would have
been their only base within striking range of the United States.
President John F Kennedy ordered a naval blockade to prevent
further military supplies being delivered from the Soviet Union.

The world has never come so close to nuclear war. It looked like
neither side would back down. Nikita Khrushchev eventually
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agreed to withdraw the weapons if Kennedy made a promise not to

invade Cuba, and a conflict was averted. The crisis led directly to
the establishment of the Hot Line, a direct phone line between
Washington D.C. and Moscow, for better communications between
the two super powers.

It is no coincidence, that at the precise time we developed the

technological power to annihilate all life on the planet, we also
developed the consciousness not to do it.

Tapping for World Peace

Just as focussing on our personal worries and fears draws them to
us, and creates more worry and fear, this process operates on a
global level too.

Soon we will begin clearing people’s negative feelings on a global

level. This could work with tapping lead by celebrities on national
TV, more likely they will be using another process that produces
the same result but faster.

As this happens we will develop more mature foreign policies

based on understanding and forgiveness rather than fear and
defensiveness.

It only takes a few visionaries to lead the rest of the world, their
connection with the divine consciousness connects the rest of us.
It is the duty of every individual to release their own barriers to
creating a peaceful future.

If everyone tapped, there would be no war.

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