By Dee Lucas

'The cause of all negative emotions is a disruption in the body's energy system' Gary Craig

Emotional Freedom Technique commonly known as EFT is a modern and growing form of personal development and therapy.  It is all about returning the mind, body and spirit to a state of balance and harmony so that you are not limited by negative emotions.  

Although it is still often overlooked, emotional health is absolutely essential to your physical health, wellbeing and healing.  No matter how intent you are on a proper diet and lifestyle, you will not achieve your body’s ideal healing and preventative powers if emotional barriers stand in your way. 

Even though you are able to recover from unpleasant experiences or thought patterns, you can be affected by recurring emotions and health issues from past events, such as relationships, trauma or loss.  You can also be affected by ongoing or future events.

EFT can be effective for a variety of purposes: 
*Personal and self development
*Attitude and behaviour development
*Fears, phobias, anxieties, traumas
*Restoring life balance
*Work-related, social stress and personal problems
*Depression
*Family life issues
*Headache and migraine pain relief
*Chronic pain relief, all forms of PTSD
*Food, drug, alcohol and smoking addictions
*IBS, Crohns Disease and other digestive disorders
*Auto-immune diseases, Allergies 
  
In these examples, emotions can be stuck rather than being dispersed.  Even if we try to ignore them, they can still affect our lives.  If people do decide to do something about the negative feelings or patterns they may try counselling or see their doctor.  

Every approach has its merits, but sometimes people compensate for their feelings in some other way, very often resorting to alcohol, smoking, drugs or over-eating.  Many people will not have heard of EFT as an option for resolving their problems.

How EFT works
EFT is a form of psychological acupressure, based on the same energy meridians used in traditional acupuncture to treat physical and emotional ailments but without the invasiveness of needles.  EFT has simplified the realignment process by gently tapping on the key meridian points on the head, chest and hands.  It is non-invasive and a very effective and gentle method of directly balancing the body’s energy system for the feelings that you want to change. 

It is a bit like clearing a log that is blocking a stream, where the log represents a stuck emotion in your stream of energy.  You don’t have to believe in the system, just as you don’t need to know how a car works under the bonnet to drive one.

What EFT involves
Using EFT involves ‘tuning into’ the issue and then tapping with your fingers on specific acupressure points with your fingers.  For example, if you carry anger towards someone who has hurt you in the past, you would be asked to think about them, and notice how you feel.  But you do not have to relive past events.  You just have to be aware that the negative feeling is there.  

Having therefore ‘tuned in’ to it, you are shown which acupressure points to tap, and what words to say as you do so, (saying a few things also helps to disperse the emotion from the system).  Having done that you are then asked to think about the person or situation again and check how you feel.  Typically you will notice a significant reduction in the intensity of the feeling.  

If it’s not completely gone then the EFT practitioner repeats the process, bringing the intensity down each time until full balance is restored.  All this is done while sitting normally in a chair.  EFT also works incredibly well over the telephone.  This allows worldwide access to the many benefits of energy psychology through this unique use of EFT.

Do feelings return after EFT
Following an EFT session, the dispelled feelings very rarely return.  If they do this implies that there is a bit more work to do than the practitioner initially thought.  Of course you can still feel angry, fearful or guilty about other things, and it might be appropriate to do so, but if you have thoroughly used EFT for a specific issue, the feeling will not return.  Once you have sent the problem ‘downstream’, it does not come back up.

You will still retain the memory of the event you were working on but it will no longer have the emotional charge that it had before.  The other thing to say is that there may be more than one emotion that needs to be cleared, like more than one log jamming the stream.  

So using our example there might be the anger towards the person, but there could also be anger towards you, or other emotions involved such as guilt or sadness.  All of these can be addressed separately, and often when you start to disperse one emotion the intensity of others can start reducing straight away. 

Some people are initially wary of the principles that EFT are based on.  The electromagnetic energy that flows through and around the body and regulates our health is only recently being recognised in the west.   It draws on eastern discoveries that have been around for over 5,000 years, also Albert Einstein told us back in the 1920’s that everything (including our bodies) is composed largely of energy, and this is why EFT often works where nothing else will.

The origins of EFT
The roots of EFT are in acupuncture, kinesiology and psychology.  The concept was pioneered in the US in the 1990’s by Gary Craig, a Stanford engineer; the core of which he learned from Dr. Roger Callahan and Thought Field Therapy (TFT).  He is also a Certified Master Practitioner in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and has seen some outstanding results since using the system of EFT over a decade ago. 

Reclaim your life and health by using EFT, every area can be improved.

This article was written by Dee Lucas bsya nutri, EFT Practitioner and Accredited Independent Cambridge Diet Counsellor. Visit Dee's website to find out more abou her work at www.visions-healing.co.uk