Energy Provocateur

By Steve Wells

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure” – Jim Rohn

At this time of year many people are thinking about what they wish to achieve in the coming year (and some have already broken the resolutions they made just a few days ago!). Fresh from having successfully completed my own year-long resolution of taking over 10000 steps every day, and having coached many clients to successfully follow through and achieve the goals they’ve set for themselves, I would like to devote this article to describing how you can achieve the goals you set for yourself THIS year.

My Experience

At this time last year I resolved to take at least 10 000 steps every day, so every day since that time I have worn a pedometer on my belt and recorded my daily steps. I have found opportunities to move where I could never “find the time” to do enough exercise prior to this. Sometimes I just made it over the mark, but most days I did many more than 10 000 steps. As a result, I feel better, I am fitter, I’m definitely healthier,  and my size and shape have improved as well.

Was it difficult? Sure sometimes when it was cold and wet it was difficult to go out, but the most difficult of all was to maintain the commitment whilst travelling. I spent a lot of time walking around airports knowing that once I boarded the plane it would be almost impossible to make up the steps.

The toughest of all was a day in Brussels where I’d been running a PET workshop with David Lake. A lot of that day was spent sitting down doing one-on-one demonstrations  or watching David work. After the workshop we went out for a lovely dinner with our friends and had a few drinks. In the taxi on the way home David remarked to me that I “probably wouldn’t fit my steps in” that day. Oh dear! I had totally forgotten. I looked at my pedometer and I still had nearly 6000 steps to do! I was tired, it was late, and it was cold and raining outside. The last thing I wanted to do right then was to go out and do my steps. But I did.

That experience and the many other times I went forward despite my internal objections (sometimes tapping as I walked on how much I didn’t want to be walking right then) are now resource experiences for me.  They help me to see that I can follow through and achieve a goal based on higher values even when lesser values seek to distract and sabotage me.  Although I’ve achieved many things in my life which may seem more significant, this is the first thing I’ve been able to do every single day for such a sustained period, despite the myriad seemingly-legitimate distractions and barriers. that arose. Daily movement is now so much a part of my life that I can’t imagine a life without it.

So what have I learned and how can this help you, whatever your goals, to follow through on your resolve, to stick to your commitment, to live life the way you define it, and live free from the prison of “whim” and the trap of “comfort”?

The Moment of Truth

If you are going to achieve anything significant, you need to start with significant motivation. And that motivation doesn’t have to be positive. In fact, the motivation that often works is the type that comes from a moment of truth which can be painful at the time.

Although I’d asked for a pedometer for Christmas, my resolve to take 10 000 steps every day was cemented in a conversation with my wife the day after Christmas 2010 when we were discussing our goals for the coming year.  I said that I wanted to lose about 5kg and Louise spluttered “Huh, you mean 10!”, then met my slightly hurt, incredulous look with the words “You know that don’t you?” Sadly, I did know that, I was just in denial.

Negative experiences can even be the impetus to very positive achievement (see my previous articles on negative thinking with positive results) Just look at Michael Jordan, widely considered the best basketball player of all time, whose rise to the professional ranks was in large part the result of him being cut from the team in high school. As he later wrote, “Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I’d close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it, and that usually got me going again.”. I did the same thing sometimes in the past year, when I thought about not doing my 10 000 steps that day, I would remember my wife’s words and the way she spoke to me in that moment of truth. Rather than being a negative, her words were a tonic, shaking me out of the lethargy of my previous victim state where I could never “find time” to exercise.

For many people, their moment of truth comes when they look at themselves in the mirror and really see what they have allowed to happen to their form. For others, like me, it comes from the tough love words of a loved one or close friend. Whatever it be, there really is power in the moment when we scream, once and for all, enough is enough. IN that moment, use that power to define a new goal for yourself, to make a new decision, to resolve how things WILL be in future, to decide how you will be and what you will do.

Deciding is not enough

The spark of a new decision or a defining moment may be enough to get us started but it is not usually going to be enough to help us to maintain. Not if we are striving to achieve a big goal, or seeking to fulfil a commitment which requires us to endure (what other type of commitment is truly fulfilling anyway?). So this is where you need a system for success.

This is also where you can start to use tapping to great effect. Immediately when you have an idea or you make a commitment there will typically be a lurking a critical part or a background thought which says “You won’t do that… You won’t follow through… You can’t do that…” or such like. Now is the time to start tapping on those objections. Allow the objections to rise up in your mind and follow where they lead as you tap and tap and tap.

Objections are your friend

Pay attention to the objections which come up when you consider making a change or seek to achieve a new goal, they are telling you something. Sometimes they represent an important value, part of you which is concerned that it will suffer if you embrace the new action or way of being. Unless that part of you is acknowledged and validated it will continue to scream for your attention, and resist the changes you want to make. Allow that part to speak and ask if it will be ok with the goal you want to achieve – or what would make it so – and if there are continued objections make sure to do tapping in order to settle them down. Sometimes your goal will need to be modified to ensure you stay in balance in other important areas of life

If the changes you want will help you fulfil your highest values then you won’t have to fight against your own energy to achieve them. You can also draw on the energy and motivation of living your values to help you through the tough times.

Most objections however come down to one thing: Fear. And fear is easily treated with tapping. The greatest fear for me, as for many people, was that I would fail to follow through again. So tap for your fear of failure, and tap on all the thoughts that tell you that you won’t follow through and the feelings which these are connected to.

Once the objections have settled down, come back to your intention and re-affirm it, tapping as you do. Start with affirming that you want that, then affirm that you will do it and have it and be it.

Break it down

Break your big goal down into small, achievable steps. Too often we expect too much of ourselves too soon, this is why many people fail to really follow through, they make their first steps too large. So they decide they are going to exercise for an hour every day then they get out and exercise for an hour on the first day and push so hard that they injure themselves, or activate an old injury, or they simply collapse in pain and have an excuse not to go out again. Or they try to write for an hour when they haven’t been writing anything at all for many months. And when they don’t manage to get anything written, or things get in the way so that they don’t manage to “find the time” to write for that length of time they collapse in a heap of self-blame and recrimination.

I tell my clients and workshop participants that the bigger your goal or intention the smaller your first steps should be. (David Lake told me that once one of his daughters wrote a recipe for elephant soup. The first step? First cut elephant into bite-sized pieces…). So instead of making a commitment to write for an hour every day, consider a commitment to write for 5 minutes, especially if you haven’t been writing anything for the past months. Yes, you can go over if you want, but some days when 5 minutes is all you can manage 5 minutes is enough.

Make it a daily commitment

“Some things you have to do every day. Eating seven apples on Saturday night instead of one a day just isn’t going to get the job done.” – Jim Rohn

The best kind of step to take is the step you can take every day. So consider what you can commit to doing every day which will ultimately allow you to achieve your valued goal / live your highest values. There is a trick here and it is that the daily commitment must be a stretch for you but it also must be something you know you can achieve. My 10 000+ steps per day commitment might seem large to some people whereas others may already easily exceed that number in a normal day. What’s important is that it was sometimes easy for me and sometimes it was a real stretch! So doing it many days wasn’t a challenge but doing it every day was a challenge. And this is key: the challenge was never overwhelming, I always knew that it was something I could do. And so I did.

By the way, when I started my step commitment I didn’t make a commitment to take 10000+ steps per day for an entire year, it was just to take that many steps every day. This might seem like hair-splitting but that distinction is a crucial one. Yes, as I went on I thought “Wouldn’t it be good” to reach targets like 100 days, 200 days and a full year. But ultimately this was something I wanted to do every day. And it was something I could to today.

One day at a time, that’s the secret to success…

Start now

Jim Rohn says you should never leave the site of a goal without doing something, no matter how small, towards its achievement. Whatever it is, if you are going to do it for life the time to start is right now. Be honest, you know that anything that you are going to do “tomorrow” is not really going to happen (unless you are a rebel and you want to prove me wrong!). If you can’t do at least something right now, then forget it, the challenge is too overwhelming, and your first step needs to be broken down to something smaller. Like tapping itself, many people don’t realise the power of small things.

So there you have it: Just one thing. Easy to do. Something you can do today. Decide what it is. Start tapping.  And do it.

P.S.: My son Josh has started a daily photo commitment. Wish I could claim the credit but he’s actually been motivated by other professional photographers. It’s called a 365 in the field. You can see Josh’s photos and watch his progress at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/josh-lenom/

PPS: My wife Louise, who is a textile artist, has started a Colour Project for 2012. She’s going to explore a colour each month in relation to meaning, feeling and specifically art and textiles. She will research, read, write, experiment with techniques and ideas as they develop and inspire her relating to that colour, with a commitment to do something on this every day J

What will you do?

We’d love to hear about your goals, commitments, plans and projects, as well as your comments on this article.

Achieve Your Goals in 2012

Do you want to make this the year that you finally make the changes you’ve been promising yourself for so long that you will make? Is so, I want to support you to follow through and make the changes.

I’ve designed a special 3-level support program to help you – You’ll find all the details here: http://corporatetapping.com/achieve-your-goals-in-2012/

By Dr. David Lake

“Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds” – Emerson

In the bustle of thinking there is always the need to come to a decisive conclusion—the mind loves doing this. But how can the complexity of some situations lend itself to that outcome? Sometimes the uncertainty causes anxiety and stress. Here are some reflections on the nature of that process, and how it might become more acceptable. In particular it’s an introduction to a little ‘trick’ that I find very useful.

The nature of thinking is really the problem, sometimes. Because the mind deals in polarities there is ‘black and white’ thinking, two sides to every question. This is close to right and wrong, good and bad. Which is quite easy, really, if you are a fundamentalist and have ready access to the correct answer to everything. Then you can be 100% assured of having the right answer to life’s problems. But for the rest of us, the ‘shades of grey’ (conflicting beliefs or ideas) are a bother. When it comes to personal and family problems they represent life itself: messy and chaotic. In psychological terms this is called “cognitive dissonance”.

Why is this a problem? Because the mind doesn’t like the lack of certainty, especially if strong emotions are also present in a charged situation. So, dealing with trauma, shock, disruption and disappointment in life is a massive conflict between what is and what should be. Are you going to go with the story of what you believe, or take a clear, cool look at what is the reality and truth (thanks to the work of Byron Katie for this distinction; particularly the book “Loving What Is” )?

Well, we do the best we can, given our training, conditioning and the degree of personal work we have endured. We can help ourselves to deal with the strong emotions using tapping. We can apply cognitive strategies to the thinking. But there is also room for anything that promotes more acceptance of complexities in a useful way. Acceptance, of course, being partly defined here as a willingness to allow all of the reality to be on the agenda.

Here is the useful trick. Thanks go to therapist Stephen Gilligan, I believe, who talked about this to one of his Sydney workshoppers, who told me. Just represent the other side of the issue in your thinking or speaking simultaneously.

This will give you the flavour of the concept:

I always manage to do the right thing—except when I don’t

I’m never wrong—except when I am

I don’t like dealing with difficulties—except when I do

Part of me wants to, and part of me doesn’t

This should never have happened—but it has

This is very helpful if the mind is being primitive and wants you to use the words always and never, which tend to back you into a mental corner and increase your tension in a situation. It is settling when you don’t have to mentally vote. Of course, with this approach you are allowing the duality of the situation to exist when in a better world you could just choose one or the other. But that duality does always exist (prior to enlightenment) so let’s not be too concerned right now. Such a balance of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ will always be present in some way while humans wander around wrestling with concepts.

Using the trick to maintain a healthy balance is a great way of defusing the critical mind and strengthening the creative aspects of thinking. It also can represent ‘time out’ from fretting for those who have obsessively thought themselves to a standstill. Best of all—it represents the truth of the situation!

What do you think? We would love to read your comments on this article.

By Steve Wells

You situation in life will not improve if you do nothing about it – Source Unknown

If you have found a meaningful destination, a strength-filled purpose, a “big” goal, tapping can help you to achieve it more easily. How? By reducing the disliking associated with taking the actions you will need to take in order to make it real. By helping you to move outside your comfort zone without as much suffering as when you use willpower alone to push or pull against your internal (energetic) resistance.

One common resistance pattern is to find that you are focusing on the pain of taking action, and this wrenches your attention away from the beauty and power of your ultimate destination. So use tapping to turn your attention back to your ultimate goal, and the ultimate results of taking this action, and harness the power of your intention to take you there.

One powerful approach is the one I call Connecting with Success. Here you focus on your ultimate goal and tap whilst holding the intention to connect with how it will FEEL when you have fully achieved that. Initially, there can be incredible resistance to this process, and many internal objections and opposing feelings may arise. If it seems too overwhelming, then stop long enough to write those objections and negative objections down for later tapping. Tap to ease the feelings. Then return to tapping whilst holding the intention to access the success feeling, the feeling of what it will be like to BE in your meaningful future, and bring the feeling of that into your experience NOW. If you are able to visualise, you can get an image of yourself being successful and then step into the picture.

Now, identify some FIRST STEPS which would take you towards your meaningful future. Be careful here not to make those steps too big. In my experience, most people fail to take action because they expect to take massive action. I recommend to my clients the larger your goal the smaller your first steps should be.

If you think right now about taking one of your FIRST STEPS towards your worthwhile future, you are bound to unearth some inner resistance. So start tapping right now as you think about that. As you tune into that internal resistance to taking action now, and you start tapping, you begin to transform your internal feeling resistance towards taking that action in order to move into a better life.

So identify a step which you can take right NOW, no matter how small. Start tapping as you feel the resistance which tells you that later will be a better time, that this is too hard, that you will only fail again. Break your first step down even further to an initial action which is the beginning of that first step (the first step of the first step!). Tap continually as you go ahead and take that first little action Then move into the next part of your first step, and keep on moving, tapping as you go. As you move into that first step, remind yourself of where you are heading, the ultimate goal which will make all of this worthwhile. Then do something to acknowledge what just happened. You are on your way.

What do you think?  We would love to read you comments on this article.

By Steve Wells

We can’t get to where we want to be using the same level of thinking that got us to where we are now. – Einstein

Nor can we get there as long as we remain attached to the feelings that we are attached to now! – Steve Wells

Your success is on the other stage of your current comfort zone. In order to be successful in the ways which you want to be, you will need to move beyond your current comfort zone. To do this means (obviously) being willing to do some things that currently make you feel uncomfortable. It also may involve detaching from the (false) pleasure connected to your current activities, the things that currently “seem” to make your life more comfortable but which ultimately hold you back. Fortunately, tapping can be a powerful ally to help you with this challenge.

Your past conditioning has led you here. Conditioning that tells you that it will be physically painful to get out of bed to do your exercise program. Or that it will be emotionally painful to make that call to sell your product or service. Now you must release your attachment to those conditioned patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting which keep you locked into your current position and prevent you from having the more expansive and successful life that you really desire. First, however, you must decide where you want to go…

In E.M Gray’s famous essay, The Common Denominator of Success, he writes:

“The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.”

Now before you think that I am going to encourage you to “feel the fear and do it anyway” or use Nike’s famous “just do it” quote, I’m not. Although that can work, with tapping we can do better.

Let’s look again at Gray’s quote. He rightly points out that it is the difference in ACTION that makes the greatest difference between people who succeed and those who don’t. The absolute key, however, is in his second sentence where he states (emphasis mine): “their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose. ” What he means is that those who are successful have found something BIGGER that makes taking these uncomfortable actions worthwhile. They have found something purposeful, something meaningful to focus towards. An ultimate pleasure which makes all the pain worthwhile.

And that is the starting point for all significant life change: What would give your life greater meaning? What would be worthwhile creating or achieving? What would be worth taking massive action for? It’s connecting in with that worthwhile future where we need to begin.

Do you have a purpose for your life? Have you identified a meaningful destination towards which you would like to strive? Do you even know what you really want?

Ask yourself the above questions and tap on the energy points while you seek to answer them. If you encounter negativity and resistance, that is great! Tapping on that negativity and resistance is the first step towards releasing your negative attachments and improving your life. You can even write your objections and negative beliefs down as they arise, as externalising them can be a great first step towards bringing them into the light and reducing their power over you. Tapping, however, is the main thing here, as tapping can help to release the feelings in the body that are linked to these thoughts, and it is these feelings which make them seem so powerful. By interrupting the thought-feeling connection we can start to weaken a negative belief structure which has been holding us down, and free ourselves up to see more clearly where we want to go and how we can get there.

In the next edition we will look at how tapping be used to help you take the crucial first steps outside your comfort zone and towards your meaningful life goals.

What do you think? We would love to read your comments.

By Steve Wells

Recently I read an article in a popular EFT newsletter written by a “certified EFT expert and  trainer” on a “four-word phrase that often clears depression”. I was intrigued. The phrase? “I am soooo happy!” The author of the article says when this phrase is repeated at every tapping point (meaning you tap on each of the EFT points in turn whilst repeating the phrase as you do so), followed by similarly tapping on “I am such a happy person” that this “usually resolves the underlying emotions and begins the recovery process”. The author claims to have had “hundreds” of clients “break through depression” using this technique!!  The author then goes on to say, “Of course, using this four-word phrase just begins the process. To clear depression, more tapping should be done.”

I admit I had to do a lot of tapping on my own negative reactions before I could write this!

My first thought was that the writer doesn’t know anything about real depression. My second thought was that it would be insulting to those who HAVE experienced true depression, and it perpetuates a myth of “instant success” from tapping with depression which “just ain’t so” for the majority of sufferers.

In my experience from 14 years of using numerous Energy Techniques with all types of depression and other emotional problems the approach this person advocates  does not and will not work on the types of depression I see in my practice. I showed it to one of my clients who has suffered from severe depression and she dismissed it immediately with “I’m proof that approach won’t work”. This lady has been through the mill of positive thinking approaches like this, including various intensive programs of spiritual study and learning that would put most of us to shame. She knew it all, yet she was still depressed  (Depressed no longer by the way, but that’s another story which I’ll come back to another time).

The author lumps what I would call feeling “a little down”, or “little ‘d’ depression”, the kind that most of us experience quite often, into a basket category right along with “big ‘D’ Depression”, the kind that overwhelms people’s energy, can incapacitate them for months and years and is totally toxic and destructive to relationships, families, and to life itself.”

I strongly doubt that this person has followed up with those clients to see if the results they apparently achieved in the workshop or tapping session actually held up a few days or weeks or months later.

The challenge with depression is that often it WILL lift in the short term in response to tapping or other treatments. So it DOES often (though not always) tend to lift in a workshop or in the office. And the client goes away with a smile on their face. But what is the case a few days or weeks later? In many cases, without additional support, the client is back to being deeply depressed. And that can be the case even if they have tapped every day. So for these clients tapping usually needs to be combined with other things in order to lift the energy sufficiently to keep their head above water for long enough for them to catch their breath and begin to regain sufficient energy to swim for shore!

Most people working with large numbers of depressed clients in clinical practice agree that the rapid results that tapping achieves on anxiety-based problems are usually not achieved in the same way on depression, other than cases of mild depression. So the approach advocated by this practitioner might be fine for some cases of “little ‘d’ depression, but not “big “D” Depression. In fact, that’s a bit of a test really. IMO if it responds to this approach then it IS NOT what I would call depression. So, hey, if you are feeling a bit down, give it a go. If it works for you, great. But please don’t tell the world it cured your depression. That will feel like an insult to those people who are truly depressed. And if any readers have been depressed for some time and want to give it a go just to prove me wrong, I encourage you to do so and write about your experiences below. Maybe I’m just seeing more than my fair share of really strongly depressed people…

By the way, I am NOT depressed about working with depressed clients, nor am I negative about the chances of getting results. In fact, I think the results I’ve been getting with my own “combo approach” with depressed clients are world class.  I’ll write about this in more detail at another time.  I just know from experience that the best approach for long term results involves a bit more than having them repeat a phrase such as “I am so happy”, even if they really emphasise the word “SOOOOOOOOO”!!

In my experience, treatment for “big “D” Depression usually requires a combination approach to be most effective. Tapping on its own rarely works with severely depressed clients, and here I am referring to those stronger and more clinical forms of depression which are characterised by intense periods of darkness and heaviness, very black feelings and even blacker thoughts, low energy, deep sadness and despair, disrupted sleep patterns, low or no motivation, among other things. Their energy system is overwhelmed, and their brain chemistry is completely awry.  Something needs to happen to “lift” the energy of the depressed person. Now tapping CAN be a huge part of a successful approach, and since using the continual tapping approach of SET and having people tap on a daily basis my results using tapping with depression are far superior to when I was just using EFT. However, in most cases of moderate to severe depression, tapping is not enough on its own, even if clients do tap every day.

What needs to happen to get big “D” depression to lift in a sustainable way? (That’s the key, sustainable, so that the results last). In no particular order, some combination of the following can help:

Good therapy with a skilled therapist or practitioner with experience in treating depression and the capacity to connect with you in a way that you feel understood and safe and held. If you have moderate to severe depression, this will almost certainly need to be more than just “a few sessions”. IMO the therapist needs to see the client through until they are able to function well over time. This doesn’t necessarily need to be someone who uses tapping, as tapping can be added to any therapy. But ideally they are not just a technician who is focused only on technique such as where to tap / what to say, they are someone who can connect on a human level and knows how to use their own energetic and emotional state to influence the state of the client on an ongoing basis. Good therapy with or without tapping addresses not only the despair, but the roots of this in past trauma and negative future projections….

Daily SET tapping in order to help the energy to lift and stay lifted. I recommend  up to an hour a day of tapping or even more for very depressed clients, particularly in the early weeks. It’s not enough to do a few rounds of tapping or a few positive affirmations and expect that alone to do the job. Tap every morning and night and inbetween and add tapping to your daily routine. Get enough of it happening and you will be doing something which may progressively help to lift your mood as over time the benefits can accumulate and build. And combine this with…

Other people. Friends, families and faiths have for centuries done most of the real therapy. We need other people and the key here is to find people who can help your energy to lift. I’d also caution to avoid those who deplete your energy when you are working with the sort of energy deficit of strong depression.  To get your energy to lift you are going to need a steady diet of people who will help you. Asking for their help and accepting it can be an issue to work on in therapy!

Medical diagnosis and possibly antidepressants.  This is a hugely contentious issue as people hate the idea of going to the doctor and detest the idea of drugs. A good medical diagnosis will rule out other things such as thyroid problems which can be upsetting your general balance and mood. I want to go on record that I dislike drugs but not as much as I hate to see people suffering.  They are not for everyone however I’ve seen  people get their life back with the right treatment. We need to get over the “either-or” thinking of alternative vs traditional and “all drugs are bad” biases and work with whatever will help your energy to lift and stay lifted. Sure, the ideal is to ultimately live drug-free and if you can lift the depression sustainably with natural methods alone that is great, however I have seen many people struggle for years trying to use “natural” approaches only to end up more depressed. Many natural approaches  only have good results on milder forms of depression unfortunately…

Good nutrition. There is good evidence that dietary changes can help lift energy, and there’s a lot of good research now for supplements like fish oil, which has in some studies outperformed antidepressants. Without wishing to prescribe anything specific for any one person (you must work with your personal therapist, doctor, alternative practitioner, etc, to work out what is best for you specifically), if I were depressed I’d be getting into daily doses of fish oil, and increasing my diet of raw foods (which I like to do anyway!).

Exercise. There’s heaps of evidence that exercise can help to lift depression. The challenge is  you need to do it regularly and for a long enough period to get your energy to lift and stay lifted. Best advice is to find someone who will commit to doing it with you. If you can keep it up for a couple of months or more there is usually a compounding effect with increased production of good things like endorphins and a suppression of stress chemicals …

Whatever (else) it takes…  As Dr. David Lake advises, ” May I suggest that you consider having whatever treatment it takes, either natural or orthodox, to get the depression to lift?” This might include exploring such things as allergy treatments, cranio-sacral balancing, David Berceli’s Trauma Release Exercises (TRE), 5-element acupuncture, St John’s Wort, eliminating grains, among other things, as well as seeking out a medical practitioner who you trust and can work with as a partner in health, and exploring all the options offered.

There is much more I could say about effectively treating depression, however I don’t have space here. The main thing is to accept that as long as you are still feeling depressed it means you still need further help, accept that it is out there but may take time and a few blind alleyways before you find the unique combination that works for you. Persist even though at times you may feel that all is lost, realise people can and do overcome this condition and you can to be in that category.

And, hey, if tapping and reciting “I am so happy” works for you, let me know, I’ll be happy to reconsider my position if enough people who’ve experienced real depression convince me it works!! If it doesn’t, take heart, many people – in fact most in my experience – who have experienced real depression DO need more than this. Just because that is so doesn’t make the situation hopeless, just more real.

What do you think?

We would love to read your comments.

By Steve Wells

I’ve worked with so many people who set out on a life path then realised at some point that it wasn’t giving them what they really wanted. (Like the old saying: You spend your whole life climbing the ladder of success only to find its leaning against the wrong wall!) They come to me at crisis point, with emotional symptoms that are really stressing them. But when you get underneath the challenge of what they are or are not doing or achieving, the most important underlying issue is about who they (think they) are. Their identity. They are not happy with who they are being on a daily basis. They have not been living in a manner that is congruent with their own personal beliefs, values and rules. What’s more they may even be starting to question their old values and beliefs. The values and beliefs that drove them to get where they are, they often find are not enough. This is frequently the case when the values and beliefs driving their behaviours come from seeking the approval of their parents, for example. Or from trying to rebel against their parents’ core beliefs and values. Either way they end up on a treadmill. And it hurts.

It hurts to live a life that is not 100% congruent with your true self. Finding out who you really are and what you are here to do is one of the most confronting and challenging tasks we can face, which is why most people will do almost anything to avoid it. Yet those that have resolved this dilemma for themselves are instantly attractive to us. The Chinese have an ancient saying: All bow before the congruent man.” My research proves they will do exactly the same if the person before them is a congruent woman. These days we know that congruency is not confined to just one gender. Those who know who they are and what they are about command our attention, whatever their gender.

Do you know who you are? Moreover, are you happy with who you are? Are you happy with who you are being in the world? Would you prefer to be (like) somebody else?

It’s interesting to me that ultimately we can manifest any particular way of being that we choose, simply by doing the things that correspond with that way of being, progressively over time we grow into the new identity. But is that in the end who we really are? Or is it just one choice among many to manifest certain parts from an infinite number of possible selves, to choose from the dress up box and simply put on some make-up to cover the outside when the inside is what it’s really all about?

If you are like me then you learned to rate yourself based on what you do. Therefore, you get to feel bad or good based on your achievements. The belief underlying this is, “I am my achievements”. We see ourselves as good or bad based on what we have done in the world. We are still locked into the childlike world of having to gain the acceptance and love of an imaginary – or internalized – parent. So now we are the parents dishing out false acceptance to ourselves on the basis of our achievements – and dishing out punishment based on non-achievement or failure or bad behaviour or procrastination or whatever else we have learned we “shouldn’t” be doing instead of what we “should”.

But what if it is all just BS? What if the real solution isn’t actually to achieve more, to stay endlessly on the treadmill of stimulus-response, of action and reward, of “I’ll feel better when…”. What if the real need is not to install (or condition or self-hypnotise or even affirm) something more into you to get yourself to do the things you “should” do, but actually to question whether you “should” be doing these things at all? What if what we really need is not to put something into ourselves to make us better, but to release our attachments to what has already been installed by a world which was preparing us for a lifetime of pain and suffering based on conforming to how it “used” to be?

What would happen if we were able to simply focus on only the world that is, right here right now, without the need to cling to an illusion from the past about how it “should” be, and how we “should” be within it.

When you strip away all illusions, the person you meet will be the person who has been staring out of your eyes from day 1. Without any judgment.

What do you think? We would love to read your comments on this article.

Want to change your life? Come to a live workshop. See our international workshop schedule at: http://www.eftdownunder.com/events.html

By Dr. David Lake

“Good times are coming—be they ever so far away!” (seen on a board outside a Dublin pub, 2010)

I would like to share an endearing trait of my late Mum with a larger audience. As the title of this piece implies, she took every opportunity to celebrate those times when life just conspires against you at the wrong time, in the wrong way and for the wrong reason. I never questioned this celebrating when I was little and see no need to do so now. In fact, I am carrying on the good work and have established more of the tradition personally. I have noticed that the most successful entrepreneurs don’t focus on their failures but ride their ‘winners’ relentlessly. Surely it is easier to let problems go when you have celebrated them correctly?

I suppose I am describing medium-sized problems that are not too dire. The re-telling of such ‘disasters’ and setbacks in our family became more and more fanciful and absurd over time. There was always plenty of laughing. Whatever the involved cost or humiliation, it seemed to be less important than the getting together to relish the moment. Better times would not be coming later—they were here now!

The confounding paradoxical approach was simple when she explained it to me. “You need cheering up when something bad happens, so you might as well have a party. And when things go really well, of course you have a party!” Her preferred drink at such times was champagne (naturally she also would be up for a glass even if neither good nor bad things were occurring). She always maintained that important decisions in time of crisis were best faced after a meal at our favourite Chinese restaurant. You didn’t pass the exam with the marks you wanted? The bank wouldn’t lend the money? The parking tickets just kept coming? Of course, some problems took more accepting than others, but we all knew what was really going to keep on coming: the acceptance and the celebrating!

Her mischevious sense of humour was naturally a pre-requisite. She could always take a joke herself. My small daughter informed her one day about effects on Mum’s appearance after  years of sun-baking as a beach lover. The little one gazed carefully at the weatherbeaten face in front of her.  “You have a lot of lines”, she said, “Are you going to die soon?”. Mum said, “No, I hope not, but maybe one day”. “Well,” the answer came quickly, “You look like you’re going to!” . Mum ‘dined out’ on this story thereafter.

The many dramas of family life provided many opportunities to indulge her approach. On a family boating holiday, she tried and failed to step between two boats, and gracefully plonked into the water. All we could see was bubbles, but we didn’t know that her heavy toweling dress was now saturated, and dragging her down strongly. Time passed, nobody moved. We began to feel panic. She fought back and surfaced, fighting for air. The main reason she was fighting for air was due to her hysterical laughter at her own silliness. Now we could laugh too. And celebrate in the telling over many years.

I had an inkling of her philosophy as a young father when a passing truck’s mirror clipped my elbow painfully while our family was standing at the kerb. The real problem was that I was holding my infant daughter in that arm and struggled (successfully) to keep my hold. As I regrouped, and began telling myself a semi-tragic angry story about the incident, I caught my Mum’s eye.  “Nothing really happened”, she said wisely. I was struck for the second time! How right she was. Everyone was actually OK. Time to celebrate.

Her favourite movie scene was at the end of “Zorba The Greek”, where all of Zorba’s life savings disappear in a spectacular business failure, and he then slowly starts to dance. And laugh. And, despite everything, celebrate life (this moment has not yet arrived in Greece today at the time of writing although the situation is identical!). I read in the paper today that consumer confidence now is at a very low ebb after the GFC. However, Mum showed me that the measure of somebody is the way they live their life—who they are, how they love, not what they have or how they appear.

The quality of her happiness and resilience was informed by much personal difficulty. She experienced the intensity of having twins as a new mother without help, and the later pain of having her infant daughter die. Her second son had severe meningitis and was not expected to live (but did). She did know the deep despair of the dark side of marriage. Many of her classmates from her small country school lost their lives fighting the Japanese. She lived under the shadow of a huge business overdraft with the prospect of imminent financial disaster—for 25 years. A host of major health problems plagued her later decades, culminating in a 13-hour heart and aorta operation, with severe complications, at age 80. None of this had the slightest influence on her love for life and people. Her generosity of spirit extended outwards to encompass everybody, including their problems. Her speciality was melting the hard hearts of others. She modeled tolerance and acceptance. Our family life was the result.

Following that surgery and near-death experience she was confined to a soul-destroying rehabilitation hospital for a time. I visited her there and after a moment’s observation, decided to kidnap her and take her for a ride in my car. The matron was adamant that her doctor would not allow this, and that furthermore, Mum could “drop dead” at any time if I did. As a doctor, I told her that Mum was not really alive in this hospital, and that I would take responsibility because I knew she would prefer to drop dead than miss out on a ride into the real world. Mum beamed at this idea and, despite a few qualms on my part, we got going. I drove her over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and into the city for a gelato. She was truly thrilled, and said it was the best thing that had happened to her for years. When I returned her intact the matron was “not happy”—despite her patient’s being alive and well. But it was a physical risk worth taking, in my Mum’s opinion. And it was my opportunity to put her positive belief into practice for her, when she was trapped.

She developed by herself the mind set of the survivor in life: the pervasive sense of humour, the careful observation of the situation, the appreciation of irony, the reality-testing, common sense wisdom, and, most importantly, the acceptance of good and bad together—without denial. In the celebrating (in good times and bad) she succeeded in letting something that happens mean what you want it to mean –and never allowing problems to define you! She also used tapping that I taught her, also in good times and bad, and in this was ahead of her generation and her time. She maintained her resilience as well as using it to help resolve problems.

Her life-affirming force meant she held on to what mattered—which, in this case, is the living itself!  Living life fully is the ultimate celebration. She hasn’t ‘gone to a better place’—because every time I celebrate I feel her presence.

By Dr. David Lake

This is a plea for paying more attention to the complexities of the healing process.

Recently I consulted a boy aged 10, who came with his mother and father. The boy was “not sleeping”. After a detailed assessment, and a session of teaching SET continual tapping for all, on review, two weeks later the problem had resolved completely. I was struck by the father’s phrase then that his son had “achieved his goal of sleeping”. As I gently pointed out to him that sleeping well was not really a goal, but a normal process (the ‘default’ position)—and that the sleep disturbance was the issue—I realized once again that personal problems are too easily medicalised or socialized (given labels or categories) when often they are a reflection of that person’s dealing with a life event, a transition in life, trouble in a social or work context, family tensions, or the clash of a particular personality with reality. This is termed the struggle between ‘what should be’ and ‘what is’! It is the cause of all stress and most problems in relationship. .

There are always good reasons for people to get ‘stuck’ in life and this happens regularly. We are not hypocrites. Nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to have troubles. But they exist, or life will provide some for you. I have faith in the process of working through such troubles with the help and support of others, with helping yourself, with a good therapeutic technique to facilitate matters, and sometimes luck, and the passage of time. We are the ones who have to deal with our own reactions .

Above all this process requires personal acceptance of what is. It cannot be achieved by willpower or a decision. .

In the boy’s case his parents had helped him by providing a safe environment for him to regain his confidence. He had several excellent reasons for not sleeping well but the main issue was his persistent worrying and highly sensitive nature. The continual SET tapping gave him some relief. He was able to feel more neutral about the issues generally. Then he got back into his normal balance. His parents were fascinated in the treatment session that I spoke frankly about all the difficulties and hurts the boy was facing, by way of helping him accept the ‘dark side’ of his life at that time. What they did not see initially was that doing this, with good rapport, was enormously relieving for their son. When you accept the negative you don’t have to agree with, or approve of it; it does, however, seem counter-intuitive that talking about it and focusing on it, while tapping, can help. Of course, tapping only ‘works’ on the negative so it’s best to find a way to have the problem come alive in the beginning, so that the healing process can really begin.

I often say to patients that if it were a matter of intellect, reason or logic they would not be sitting in front of me; in other words, if they could have solved their problem by thinking it through then it would have been solved. The feeling dimension is what ‘hurts’ and that cannot be simply sorted out by a decision of will or applying any technique. Humans have not changed inside for thousands of years and we all need what we need: to be heard, affirmed and validated. Suffering is necessary only to get our attention. It is what we do next that counts. This is often a relational effort—getting help. Sometimes this can lead to acceptance (and forgiveness), sometimes not. But the process is very necessary.

Steve Wells repeats the quote (from Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen) in his Values workshop that “a failure to live according to your values is a real failure”. It is very instructive to give your mind a job to do by sorting out your values and driving beliefs; this will help it fulfill its function as a faithful servant (thanks, Larry Nims), and bring more satisfaction and self-confidence on that intellectual level. But the modern push in the world of therapy to ‘achieve happiness’ seems bizarre to me. In the world of tapping there is a parallel false belief about personal success, where you are supposed to cure all your own problems by tapping and, ideally, to do it quickly.

Cheerfulness, contentment and happiness I regard as a birthright. Equally, our own negative thoughts and beliefs are our biggest block to just being who we are. We exist in a matrix of friends, family and community, like it or not. This is where the process of “walking the walk” (being authentic) takes place. This “being presence” (see Bob Adamson) is what you bring to the party when you help another, or help yourself.

And remember the tapping…

What do you think?

We would love to read your comments…

These are the audio recordings from a lighthearted and highly informative interview conducted by EFT Master Emma Roberts with Steve Wells on the topic of Advanced Energy Methods (AEM).

You can download the recordings of this interview at no charge from the links below.

There are two files in all as skype managed to disconnect us mid-sentence!

Click on the links below to listen to the audios, or right click and then select “Save link as”, “File save as” Or “Save target as” to save to your computer.

Advanced Energy Methods (AEM) – Part 1 (36 minutes)

Advanced Energy Methods (AEM) – Part 2 (6 minutes 40 seconds)

Hope you enjoy listening to them – I’ll be interested to read your comments!

You can also ask a question which I’ll either answer here or in a future audio interview.

Best wishes,

Steve Wells

Find out more about our workshops here: http://www.eftdownunder.com/events.html

Find out more about Emma Roberts at: http://www.theeftcentre.com/

By Steve Wells

“Say yes to life in spite of everything.”

- Victor Frankl

Four years ago in our Stuttgart workshop I had the privilege of doing a PET Session with an 81-year old German gentleman named Guenther. Guenther was blind, the result of being wounded in the trenches in the second world war when he was serving on the front line opposite the British and Australian armies. He was just 19 years of age at the time. He’d spent many years since the war working in the world of therapy as a psychoanalyst and participating in many many therapy sessions. And now at age 81 he came along to a workshop on Energy Techniques being run by a couple of mad Australians! I’ve often wondered what it was that attracted him to this new, alternative approach.

Guenther looked a very old. tired man as he was led, hunched over, to sit next to me for the session. Seeing as he was a military man and seeing the harshness and hardness in his body and hearing it in his voice as he started to talk about his problems, I found myself adopting a similar language style where I began delivering mock “orders” to him. This was balanced by the fact that I was gently tapping on the points for him, which I said I was only doing because he “couldn’t do it properly”.

The session was about Guenther’s lifelong quest to answer one fundamental question: Yes, or no? By which he meant to live, or to die, to be, or not to be. Of course, in PET we go to the dark side (in an exaggerated, perceptive way, whilst maintaining a loving connection and rapport), which inevitably allows the person to consider the light (as opposed to approaches which invalidate the client’s negative feelings and attempt to drag them into being more “positive”).

Here, the positivity is “called out” from within the client as the negative energy progressively disperses through the humour, tapping, and loving connected energy. Paradoxically, validating the clients dark thoughts and feelings within an atmosphere of trust and rapport begins to allow them to loosen their hold.

At one point the juxtaposition of my soothing tapping style combined with the provocative language led him to state: “I love your tapping, but I hate your f#@%ing philosophy!” This was a significant moment in the session, since he knew on one level that my “philosophy” was really an exaggerated mirror of his own negative internal thinking and feeling. In his voice tone as he said this was the first of some small signs of humour, which, to a PET practitioner is the sound of victory.

As we continued to tap while “tuning in” and with me humorously exaggerating this destructive inner philosophy, borne out of his mother’s failed attempts to abort him, his harsh treatment at her hands as a child, his subsequent blinding in the war, and other negative events and aspects, he actually started to soften, he began to laugh spontaneously, he became more animated and started sitting up in the chair, and by the end of our session his face was actually glowing. The wizened old man had come back to life.

During our feedback after the session, Guenther was asked how he felt. Perhaps some in the audience were wondering what he would say given that my provocative language style at times from the outside may have sounded quite harsh. His reply: “After this procedure I feel a deep openness and love for life.” A deep openness and love for life. Wow.

Guenther went on to explain that his first encounter with an Australian was when he was in the war opposite the Australian and British armies in the trenches on the front line of the battleground in Italy, where he saw and heard the Australians every day. Then he was blinded. There was a particular Australian major who was on the other side of the trenches on the day he lost his sight. Some years after the war, he was able to meet that man and, he said, (and here I knew he was also talking to me), “It was great to touch each other”. Later, he spoke to me directly: “It feels good to be with you.” And I with he. It was a moment of great mutual love and warmth that I’ll never forget.

It is sometimes hard to explain to people how you can use a provocative style where you seem to be saying the opposite of what is “supposed” to be helpful, and yet you can end up with a beautiful outcome like this. That’s because the key is never in the words which are spoken or the images which are portrayed but is really in the underlying energy and feeling and love which is being communicated at a deeper level. Antoine de Saint Exuprey said it best: “It is only with the heart that you can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye”.

We talk about energy because it is a convenient metaphor to make us seem all important and clever and act as if we know all about quantum physics. But it’s really love that transforms. What we are really doing is creating an opening to allow love to flow through us. That’s what creates the real healing, not the techniques we use.

Comments?

We would love to read your comments on this post.

Want to see Guenther’s treatment session?

If you would like to see the video of the session with Guenther described above, it is part of our 2007 Stuttgart Self-Acceptance and PET Workshop DVD set. Previously these DVDs were only available to workshop participants, but I’ve decided to release them more widely as long as you agree to some simple conditions which include using them only to learn SET and PET, agreeing to keep confidentiality of the brave participants (who all agreed to be filmed for the purposes of helping other trainees), and agreeing not to make copies in any format.

There are 4 days of training in all, available in 2 separate sets. The 2-day Self-Acceptance Workshop included in this first DVD set is followed by a 2-day Provocative Energy Techniques (PET) Workshop. In each case the entire workshop is included, from presentations, demonstration sessions, exercises and audience question and answer sections, with very little editing. The workshop is presented in English with translation to German. The DVD’s are PAL format. Each DVD set can be purchased separately for AUD$150, or together for AUD$250 (Plus shipping). NOTE: The Guenther module is on the Self-Acceptance DVD set (although there are also some other brilliant sessions on both sets). Here is the link for purchasing:

https://fsplugins.com/clients/eftdo/PETDVD.html