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Through the connectivity of the Web and the wonder of SKYPE, I am now getting customers from
across the world who want to get rid of their emotional and physical aches and pains. But
most of my clients view EFT as a form of therapy where you take what is wrong to the
practitioner, and he or she helps you get better. Better, in this case, means back to your
life before you had your emotional or physical aches and pains.
Stopping at "okay" seems to be an insidious consequence of the indoctrination of the
disease-state paradigm. We are so used to Western medicine's "Nature broken - man fix it"
approach that we want to apply it to natural therapies as well. Nature isn't broken; it is
giving us a message to change something about the way we are living.
Like other holistic practitioners, I choose to see health as sliding scale where
death is at one end and optimal health and well-being is at the other.
Death <– Disease <– Dis-Ease <– Okayness –> Feeling Good –> High Energy -> Optimal Health and
Well-being.
The goal of the current disease-state paradigm is to bring the person back a step toward okayness. If
someone is in a disease state, we cut it out and/or cover it up -- that is, "manage" it -- with medications
that will get them from disease to dis-ease to feeling okay.
Likewise, an emotional sliding scale might look like this:
Powerlessness <– Anger <– Irritation <– Okayness –> Optimism –> Happiness –> Spiritual Abundance and Enthusiasm
Clients typically come to me to get their unmanageable, suppressed emotions to the point where they are
manageable. The client is ready to settle for just-about-okay.
This is the state I call Grey Life Syndrome–not good, not bad, but bearable: While it's well and good for the
sufferer to feel happiness, self-esteem, joy and love, these qualities are considered transient and eventually
return to, at best, the okay state. We don't have to be happy with our job, it can be okay or irritating if it
feeds us. We have television to get us through to the weekend when we don't have to go to that job. Relationships
start well but digress into a comfortable support structure to make us feel like we are okay.
Grey Life Syndrome. Let's give it an acronym–a pharmaceutical ploy to make a disease state sound familiar
and acceptable. Ahem. GLS is a state where we rehash what has happened in the past, lowering our self-esteem and
fearing what the future will bring. We don't believe life can get better, so we strive to make it tolerable.
We have plenty of dreams, but our fear that they are not possible (or practical) stops us from making plans to
achieve them. Being happy here and now is impossible because we are constantly thinking about what went on
before and what will happen next.
The heartbreak of GLS is that we never get to feel good. In fact, there is no reason that we cannot be
heathy, be happy, enjoy life, have good relationships, enjoy our family time, have abundance and beauty around
us, enjoy our work, and live in joy. Except that we don't.
What I am discovering with EFT clients who are willing to go the distance, is that the same process that
can take them from unmanageable, suppressed emotions to feeling okay, is the very process that can take them
from feeling okay to feeling happy.
When we use EFT to relieve emotional pain, we look to the experience that triggered the pain reaction.
(For details, see my free eBook, The EFT Quick-Start Method.) Using the trigger as a guide, we can trace it
back to events in the past, like a detective, looking for the core issue that is being triggered.
When we release the core issue with EFT, chances are the triggers collapse as well.
Likewise, if we want to deal with GLS, we examine how we are feeling, and trace those feelings back to
core events that made us feel unsafe or less than. These feelings have caused us to create a "safety net" of
stability. We don't want our expectations to be dashed like they were in the past, so we don't try, or at
least not very hard. Somewhere in our past, we made a decision like "I can't have what I want," so we avoid
situations that might get our hopes up.
By releasing the emotions that led to our decision, we come to a place where we can reverse that decision.
However, to move forward on the emotional scale, at some point we have to stop focusing on what is wrong
with us and start focusing on what is right with us. EFT can be helpful here as well.
Dr. Pat Carrington has created a powerful EFT exercise called the "Choices Technique." The idea of the
technique is that you take one of your core beliefs or decisions that no longer supports you, and change
it into a belief that does. (Again, if you are unfamiliar with the EFT tapping process, please download my
free 15-page eBook, The EFT Quick-Start Method.)
The first step is to take our core belief and transform it into a statement that is more supportive.
For example, if we believe:
Working hard and suffering is virtuous
we can transform it to:
Life flows easily when I am happy and in tune with God
(or the Universe, or whatever feels right for you).
This gives us the basis for our set-up phrase, which is a combination of our past belief and our new choice.
We would use this set-up phrase while tapping on our karate chop point:
Even though I believed that working hard and suffering was virtuous,
I now choose to believe that life flows easily when I am happy and in tune with God.
Then the tapping sequence is done in three rounds. In the first round, we tap on the negative statement to
release the emotions associated with it.
I believed that working hard and suffering was virtuous.
In the second round, we tap on the new choice to establish it in our consciousness.
I now choose to believe that life flows easily when I am happy and in tune with God.
In the third round, you alternate. For instance, tap on the eyebrow with
I believed that working hard and suffering was virtuous.
Then tap on the side of the eye with
I choose to believe that life flows easily when I am happy and in tune with God.
It is important to have an even number of tapping points so that you always end on the positive choice
statement.
We don't have to live with Grey Life Syndrome. We don't have to settle for feeling okay. We are allowed to
be happy. We are allowed to have things we want. We are allowed to live our dreams.
...That is, if, at some point, we decide to do something about it.
© 2007 Chip Engelmann
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