Energy Provocateur

Note from Steve Wells:

10 years ago Dr. David Lake’s daughter Tanya nearly lost her life in the Bali terrorist bombings. On her return to Australia, David treated her using EFT for the emotional trauma she had experienced. The original account of that successful tapping treatment appeared in EFT Creator Gary Craig’s newsletter.

You can read  a copy of the original article here. It is also included in our book Enjoy Emotional Freedom.

Recently, David and his family travelled to Bali for a very special event. This is his account of what happened there…

Bali Revisited: Personal Note from Dr. David Lake:

The first week in May marked a family milestone for me and a deeply satisfying affirmation of life. It is also a reminder of the power of the energy techniques to facilitate life-affirming change far beyond the idea of “treatment”.  My Mum once said that “you can’t worry about what never happened” (meaning, don’t speculate with negative thinking about the ‘what-if’s’ in life). I have often thought of her words in the context of having four adventurous daughters.

2012 marks a decade since the date of the first Bali bombing where my daughter Tanya nearly lost her life. If you have read the account on our website or in our book “Enjoy Emotional Freedom” of her survival and tapping treatment—for the trauma she experienced—then you know she was determined afterwards not to live her life “under a rock”, hiding away from danger or living in fear. Her family and friends gathered in Ubud, Bali, last week to see her marry. It was a celebration in every way. For me it was also evidence of a complete healing.

During the ceremony and afterwards I had many thoughts about how far she had come since that awful day. Who could ever forget receiving a telephone call in the night saying “I’ve been blown up, but I’m alright! ”? I know that her friends were sometimes conscious of that time in the past, during the ceremony. I was very concerned personally about even going to Bali for the wedding. [At this moment a group of terrorists remain at large on the island with the intention to cause another atrocity.] Let’s just say that a lot of tapping was happening in my house recently.

None of this apprehension mattered in the realization of her creative and inspiring ‘dream wedding’. It was held in a lush, tropical paradise and every detail spoke of care and good intention. We were all surrounded by the love and affection of her friends and our family. Having her two children at play with all the guests provided a delightful counterpoint to any formality. We came completely into the moment. We had so much fun! We all created a vibrational space that is still resonating.

I mention all this purely to give thanks for the wonderful tapping technique that I consider allowed Tanya to continue to live her life, without being held back by the trauma she went through in 2002. It was a timely and vital intervention. I’m pleased that the opportunity came for her to benefit from all that I had learned, especially from Gary Craig. I know some sufferers from that time are still very afflicted. I also know that many trauma sufferers generally have as yet had no access to the kind of good outcomes that tapping can deliver. Their lives have been blighted. But life goes on; families keep going (and giving) too. This ‘ongoingness’ is so important in one’s inner world. Techniques alone can’t give you the emotional ‘food’ that you need to become authentically yourself.

Living well is not just avoiding mistakes or dealing with problems. Tanya has had plenty of those. It is manifesting your real values: the truth as you see it. I think that this tapping result from long ago has allowed Tanya to live her values in a beautiful way that culminated in the ceremony in Bali. How fitting that she should choose the place she loves to show her self to us all.

By Steve Wells

“It is the physician’s love which heals the patient” — Sandor Ferenczi

Many people don’t realise that the term provocative as used in Provocative Energy Techniques actually means “to call forth”, that the focus of PET is on calling forth clients strengths and helping them to access their energy for change, to help them to get back in touch with their own power. But what blows them away even more is when they discover that approach is really grounded in a loving, warm energy and it is this which gives PET its true healing power.

What is really most provocative in a PET session, what is most difficult to handle for many clients is not the practitioners exaggeration of their negative belief systems, nor is it the practitioners ” seeming encouragement of” their own internal put-downs or their doom and gloom thinking. What is most provocative and often hardest to handle for clients is the warm-hearted accepting energy which is flowing to them through the practitioner.

What is this like from the client’s perspective?

Here is a beautiful description from Caroline from our last Brussels seminar:

“In May 2011, when Steve motioned me to come before the group for a PET demonstration, my heart was pounding. He then asked me what I wanted to work on. I replied that “I’m very talented for depression” and I felt the sadness beginning to overwhelm me and I started to feel the sobs rising and shaking me. While tapping, Steve in his inimitable style and with lots of love began to imitate the movements of my body shaken by sobs and says “Looks like a car that is misfiring to start”. The audience and I were quite sure rocked with laughter. What was not visible from the outside but very strong inside, was the sensation of pain mixed with laughter. With equal intensity.

I felt Steve was with me. I felt his look of love and his presence in this moment of most intense pain. He was there with me. Once in a while I was a little embarrassed to have an audience of 130 people on the side but I was trying to welcome something that was beginning to happen in myself. Steve kept looking at me in silence. We tapped continuously. In silence. And gradually as time passed, I felt Steve’s love into my heart I felt someone’s love for me for the first time in my life. Pure love. He looked at me as no one had ever looked at me. It was extremely beautiful and deliciously soothing. I left this demonstration rebuilt, touched in my heart, a place I did not know. I felt that my heart had opened to love and it is still open a year later much bigger. So I say thank you Steve and thank you PET.”

Many patterns used in PET owe their origin to Provocative Therapy, created by Frank Farrelly, including the humorous provocation and paradoxical language, but the main element, the one really key thing Frank taught us, is to keep your heart open.

It was this which so overwhelmed me way back in 1986 when I had my first session with Frank, the overwhelming feelings of love, warmth and acceptance such as I’d never experienced before. And that is what kept me coming back to this man and his approach to experience and to learn more. What I didn’t realise sometimes when I was so focused on learning the techniques and trying too hard sometimes to be funny, was that Frank was really teaching me to open up my heart. Bit by bit.

Over the years as my heart has been able to open more my results with clients have improved exponentially.

When we certify practitioners of PET it is this element which we cannot emphasise enough: Keep your heart open towards the client. Keep yourself in an open, connected,  warm-hearted state at all times.

Ultimately, far beyond any techniques you use, it is this love which does the healing.

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

Experience the power of PET at a live workshop.

By Steve Wells

- John Farnham, Have a Little Faith (in us)

About 18 months ago I was contacted out of the blue by Bill, a gentleman I’d originally met in the USA back in 2000 at the second Energy Psychology conference. Bill is a war veteran who had suffered clinical depression and had been helped significantly by tapping using EFT to overcome this. He called me to tell me about a new process he’d learnt for treating trauma which involved some exercises designed to initiate a natural shaking process in the body, a process called Trauma Release Exercises (TRE), developed by David Berceli, PhD. TRE  worked remarkably to release tension and trauma, he said, and he told me he was doing all he could to support Berceli to get this out to help the world. He said he knew that I was open-minded and hoped I might be able to help.

I listened with cautionary interest as Bill related the basics of TRE, but my ears really pricked up and the hair stood up on my skin when he said these words:  “Tapping got me back on my feet but this stuff put the smile back on my face.”  I agreed right there to find out more, to try it out and let him know once I’d experienced TRE if I felt it was something I could support.

I immediately went online and ordered Berceli’s DVD, took it home and – eventually – started experimenting with the exercises. As I’ve mentioned in a previous newsletter, I have to admit I put off trying the techniques for a while, as the “control freak” side of me was a little worried about engaging in a process which would initiate a shaking or tremoring process in my body. Once I did manage to watch the DVD’s and try out the exercises however I found that my fears were misguided as the TRE process was very gentle and empowering, the opposite of what I’d feared.

I quickly became convinced through my own bodily experience that what Berceli has uncovered is something quite important and powerful, and I have since become involved in supporting Berceli’s Australian workshops and promoting his work worldwide.

TRE’s simple exercises work to relieve the tension held in our core muscles from the traumas and life stresses which we have experienced through our life, and which have arisen from both “little t” traumas as well as “big T” traumas. The experience is different for everyone, but most find it as I did to be very gentle, relieving and empowering. But there was something more to it, something at the time I felt hard to describe, but it felt positive, whatever it was.

I went on to participate in two training workshops with David Berceli last year in Melbourne, and found him to be a wonderful, gentle soul and dedicated philanthropist who is committed to sharing this natural healing process with the world.

I now feel the need to tell you about what happened to me in the first workshop I attended with David, an experience which was both profound and life altering.

I went along to the workshop with the intention of simply learning the pure process David was teaching and not to impose my own ideas onto it (although I already had some thoughts of how tapping might work together with TRE).

Each time I did the TRE exercises in the workshop, the tremors started happening for me, however they never managed to move much further than my hips. Although this is fine and ultimately the idea is to just let the tremors work at their own pace, it seemed to me they had stalled in that area, and the energy was blocked from being able to move through. When this happened for the third set of exercises in a row I had the idea to try something different, and that was when I made my first discovery.

As I stood (or “sat”) with my back against the wall, one of the exercises designed to initiate the shaking, I noticed that the tremors I was having were once again concentrated around the top of my legs and didn’t seem able to move any further than this.  Now before we did the exercises, Berceli had told us  about a group of chiropractors in one of his workshops who had been easily able to get the tremors to go right through their bodies up to their necks, a sign that their bodies were clear of tension, thus allowing the energy to pass right through.

As I stood/sat on the wall and noticed the tremors becoming stuck in my upper leg area I decided to try a little bit of fingertip tapping as we use in Simple Energy Techniques (SET). The effect was both instantaneous and profound.

In the very instant I started tapping, the energy of the tremors moved right through my body up to my shoulders. As they did so, I felt them starting to release tension in my back and shoulders. The tapping had somehow opened up a pathway to allow the healing energy of the tremors to flow through my body. Or it settled down my judging mind and inner “control freak”, I’m not sure which. The feeling was very pleasurable as I felt the tremors continue to move, more freely now, through my body to the areas of greatest tension and pain.

A little while later I was still standing/sitting on the wall and I began to muse on David’s story about the chiropractors. A world trauma expert (I think it was Stephen Porges) was in the room at that time observing David’s work. When discussing it later with David later, he’d made this statement:  “They were able to let the tremors go right through to their necks because they loved you.” When David explained this to us he said that Porges obviously meant that they trusted him, he had rapport with them, and that was why they were able to allow the process to go so far. As I thought about this I wondered to myself,  “What if Porges meant it literally? What if it was really feeling the love that facilitated the process?” Stay with me here.

I noticed that the tremors in my body had almost stopped completely at this point, as I was “in my head” thinking about this stuff. I wondered what would happen if I were to access the feeling of love.  An image of my youngest son Callum instantly came to my mind. As many of you know, Callum has Down Syndrome, and like many people with Down Syndrome he seems to have a special ability at times to resonate what I can only describe as a state of pure love. That is certainly what I experience many times in his presence…

As I saw my son’s smiling face in my mind I started to feel that wonderful loving feeling that he both resonates and evokes in me. And then something incredible started to happen.

Instantly, the tremors started to move right through my entire body in a way that was amazing, rich, and deeply liberating. As the tremors moved through me, they began to release huge amounts of tension from my back, neck and shoulders, and I became intensely present to observing and being incredulous of the process.

I realised that this energy, this healing, this love is always available to us, always present and willing to serve us, it is simply a matter of clearing the blocks that are preventing us from seeing it, feeling it, accessing it.

I moved to the floor and was able to let the tremors continue to move through me and that day I felt that the tremors removed about 95% of all the tension I’d been carrying in my back  for many months. I felt revived. And my thoughts took on a clarity I’d not known for some time.

Later that day, I speculated on the experiences I’d had. Seeing my state, a friend said the only thing she could liken it to was kundalini rising, which she’d seen before on a couple of occasions. I don’t know about that, but what I do know is that I enjoyed the results for many days afterwards with noticeably less tension and markedly less anxiety along with a feeling of centeredness and positive vitality. And another benefit was that I discovered I no longer needed to do the TRE exercises to initiate the shaking, all I needed to do was lay on the floor, bend my knees up and put my feet flat on the floor and I could simply let the shaking begin. It’s now something I do regularly, and especially before my workshops, as a way of getting myself into a clear state and staying in balance.

After my experiences at that first TRE Workshop, I started to experiment with taking others through the TRE exercises and also to explore the many ways that tapping could be combined with TRE to facilitate the release. I found tapping could prevent people slipping into negative emotional states or dissociating, as can happen with some people with severe trauma when doing TRE. I also found that some others who’d learned tapping also found that doing it along with the TRE helped them to get better results. Here’s just one example:

“TRE is fantastic – highly recommend it, especially for the amazing insight it gives into the way we are so much more than just our minds. For me it was like meeting a whole other part of ‘myself’. When I did the workshop I was concerned that I might be too inhibited to let go and allow the shaking in a room full of strangers, so during morning tea I went off by myself and tapped on this. The result was that, far from slow or Inhibited to learn it, my body was the first to get shaking and the whole experience was extraordinary and surprising. - Beth Spencer, http://www.feelingdelicious.com/

I wondered what might happen if we did this deliberately, if we taught people both techniques, and explored what would happen if we combined them. I already knew results like Beth described were possible, and I was also interested in what more could be gained.

In December I had dinner with David Berceli and Richmond Heath (Australia’s only Level 3 TRE facilitator) and discussed my ideas about doing a workshop combining tapping and TRE. I said I wanted to explore how both approaches might work together synergistically, to facilitate more gentle release, and also to help us access more expansive experiences, as had been my experience. Both agreed it was an idea worth exploring, and thus was born the workshop which I’ll be conducting this May in Melbourne with Richmond Heath.

This will be the first workshop worldwide combining the power of Tapping and TRE. I’m hugely excited about it (if that isn’t obvious) as I’ve already experienced the benefits of using  these wonderful techniques together.

Of course, everyone’s experience is different, so I can’t promise you’ll have the more uplifting or spiritual experiences I had, however I do know that at a minimum you’ll learn some powerful new distinctions for relieving trauma, tension and general anxiety and stress using these two fantastic techniques.

A weekend of tapping and shaking! Sounds weird? It will be, but it will be both wonderfully weird and weirdly wonderful. I hope you’ll consider joining us, especially if you want to explore new potentials or even if you just have some problems you haven’t been able to shake!

More details on the workshop can be found here:  http://www.eftdownunder.com/tretapmel.html

PS: For those who can’t make it to our workshop, I highly recommend you look into Berceli’s work. You can find out more at: http://www.traumaprevention.com

PPS: As future workshops are announced, they will be listed on the Events page of our website.

By Steve Wells

When I was 17 years old I cared more about being with my friends than achieving anything. I avoided study like the plague. My friends and I joked about it – If any of us thought the others were studying we would actively work to stop them or sabotage them. Whilst majoring in “socialization” I let my school studies go. Then came the day when I sowed what I had reaped.

During the “mock” examinations that were to lead us into our major examinations – the ones that would determine whether we went to university and gave ourselves a chance of succeeding in life or went on the dole queue and ate gruel for eternity (or so we were led to believe), I failed miserably.  My low scores shocked even me. Somehow I had thought I could ignore my studies yet still get through. Boy was I wrong. With the final examinations only 8 weeks away I started to get worried. Very worried.

Shortly after my comprehensive failure at the “mock finals” I truanted school with some schoolmates to purchase tickets to a rock band named Kiss (that was a long time ago but the band is still around). It was during that day that I was to have the experience which ultimately caused me to face my failure and realize that I needed to turn my life around.

We had been waiting all day in line, however many people came in front of us throughout the day as their friends had been saving them a place. We ended up standing next to a high school teacher that afternoon who was waiting to buy tickets for his daughter, and my friend and I got talking to him.

Inevitably the conversation turned to examinations. He asked how we had gone. My friend looked at me with a shy grin on his face as I told the teacher my score. He looked a bit shocked, then looked me directly in the eye and gave me his prognosis. “That’s a real shame; you know you’ll never recover from that.”  I did a double take, and my first reaction was “Perhaps he’s trying reverse psychology trying to motivate me.” But as I looked back at him I realised he was being deadly serious. This motivated a stronger internal reaction: complete rejection of his statement “You are wrong” I thought to myself. My friend and I looked at each other and laughed at his statement, but I could see that it had affected my friend in a similar way to how it had affected me. Part of me believed the guy was right, but a bigger part of me knew he was totally wrong.

Even at 17 I knew that my life wasn’t over regardless of how poorly I did on a test. When I arrived home that day I was determined to change things – but I didn’t know how.  Over the next few days I meditated on this experience. I knew I needed to do something but I didn’t know what. Maybe he was right, maybe it was too late to turn things around…

A few days after this experience I was laying on the lounge in my parents house (something I did often in my teenage years, after spending late nights out socializing with my friends). On this day I was particularly subdued, even a little depressed as I meditated on my fate. In the middle of my self-pity and depression I spied a book in my father’s well-stacked bookshelf. I took it out and began to read. I finished the first chapter and kept on reading.  I don’t remember where in that book that a light went on in my head but I do remember the feeling of hope and possibility that swept over me as I read it. As I continued to read the book all the way to the end, I realized that I had found something different to anything I had read before. I realized that the author was right, that there was a way out of any dilemma – that there truly exists a pathway to success and if you follow it you really can achieve your dreams.

The name of that book was Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and reading it changed my life. What Hill had distilled into Think and Grow Rich was not only the information and strategies on how to achieve your dreams; he had included an essential element missing from many other self-help and personal development books –the feeling of success that I needed in order to get myself to make the transition from failure to success. As I read the stories of others who had succeeded, I was filled with feelings of possibility and hope.

I read Hill’s book to the end and I followed his formula to the letter. And from the moment I started on that new path, my life started to change. I decided on the score I would achieve in my examinations, and went on to exceed it, getting into the university course of my choice with ease. More importantly than all, my new-found certainty and positive attitude towards life caused me to attract into my life the woman who has become my wife and soul-mate, the mother of my 3 wonderful children.

I believe that the 6-step formula marked out by Hill in his book has stood the test of time and has not yet been superseded despite the massive proliferation of popular psychology and self-help books since his time. However the psychology that supports that process of making it work, that has been updated and improved and I feel very fortunate to have been around to both witness and be involved in seeing these new approaches added to the solid foundation of Hill’s formula. I am referring here to the Energy Psychology techniques, including in particular Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and Simple Energy Techniques (SET). These updated methods can accelerate our progress and assist us to more adequately adopt the methods for success…However, Napoleon Hill’s basic formula will still work for all who wish to apply it.

Here is that all-important 6-step formula which changed my life over 27 years ago. Note that although Hill was referring to financial riches, I applied the same formula to improve my academic performance, and others have used the same formula to make all sorts of changes. Thus, I have modified Hill’s original statements slightly to show that the formula can be used for all types of goals My modifications in square brackets and my comments in curly brackets :

First: fix in your mind [an exact description of what] you desire… Be definite…

Second: determine exactly what you intend to give in return… There is no such thing as something for nothing…

Third: establish a definite date when you intend to possess [what it is] you desire.

Fourth: create a definite plan for carrying out your desire, and begin at once, ready or not, to put this plan into action. {This is the missing element in the movie and book The Secret; the all-important action step. Tapping can help us get over our inner objections to taking the action we need to take to achieve our goals}

Fifth: write out a clear, concise statement of [exactly what] you intend to achieve, name the time limit for its achievement, state what you intend to give in return, and describe clearly the plan through which you intend to achieve it. {that plan doesn’t have to be perfect, it never can be, but without planning and action based on your plan, nothing will happen… Thinking alone is not enough, as Hill points out in the action step as well as the next step…}

Sixth: read your written statement twice daily… As you read – see and feel and believe [that you have already achieved your goal]. {Getting yourself to believe is a process and requires us to overcome internal objections, emotional blocks, and blocking beliefs… All of these tapping can help us with}

Hill also taught me that persistence is absolutely essential to all high achievement,, and that all who have gone on to achieve great things experienced set-backs and temporary defeats, but that ultimately success comes to those who persist with definiteness of purpose…

(Adapted from Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill)

By the way, you can probably access a free copy of Think and Grow Rich online as the original version is out of copyright. I warn ladies that the stories are almost exclusively about high-achieving men as it is a product of its time, however my experience has shown these principles work as adequately for women as they do for men. Also, the emphasis is on material riches, although the formula, as Thomas Edison, one of the people who inspired the original formula, stated that it could be used for any form of achievement.

This basic formula can work for you as it has for me and as it has for many people who have read Think and Grow Rich and applied its teachings to improve their lives. By the way, I’d change its title to Feel and Grow Rich as I now believe the feeling part to be more important in this basic formula. And with the addition of tapping to work with that feeling part, we can reduce the discomfort involved in going outside of our current comfort zone, and, more importantly, we can improve the strength of our emotional and energetic connection when we seek to connect with our goal.

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

By Steve Wells

If you suffer from food cravings, tapping using EFT and Simple Energy Techniques (SET) is often successful at reducing the desire for your craved food in the moment. However if you want to go beyond this to produce long-term behaviour change, you need to look at what is driving the cravings in the first place. This might be a simple connection of an emotion to a food but is more likely to be an underlying issue, such as anxiety or depression, where food is being used to sedate the bad feelings (By far the most common symptom is anxiety).

Treating a food craving is actually quite simple. Here is a basic format you can use:

• Identify the food(s) you crave
• Activate the craving (by visualising the food initially, and imagining eating it; then later, after you have calmed the feeling, using some of the food itself)
• Tap on the activated thoughts: e.g. “I want this”, “I need this”, “I have to have this”
• Tap on the feelings associated with eating the food: e.g. The feeling of the food in your mouth, the taste of the food, the qualities you love (e.g. smoothness / crunchiness)…
• Scan your body for any tension and tap on that
• Try hard to activate the craving and keep tapping until the craving settles down and can’t be easily activated by thinking about eating the food
• Repeat the above steps using a portion of the craved food
• If you do indulge in the craved food, tap on your bad feelings (more on this below)

For many people, tapping works to reduce the craving in the moment, but doesn’t produce long term behaviour change. In these instances, we need to look deeper.

First, realise that the craving is performing a function for you. Even at a basic level, for most sufferers, the craving is an unconsciously driven attempt to reduce emotional stress. If the craving does serve to reduce your stress then if you take it away then when you get stressed you will just suffer. So in the short term, accept that the underlying intention of this behaviour is positive, even if the ultimate results for you are not positive.

Often, a craving is held in place by a specific belief, and the behaviour is an attempt to compensate for that belief. If you treat a craving for a specific food but you leave in place the underlying belief then you will be driven to find another substance to medicate the bad feelings which are generated by this belief…

Here are some common issues and negative beliefs that came up in our research study treatment groups:

• NOT feeling loved by either parent,
• The belief that there is not enough,
• Feeling not enough or not good enough

These beliefs may have been picked up from parents who carried these feelings from past events such as world wars, the great depression, or other personal experiences of hardship. As a result of these beliefs, some people end up frequently feeling empty, or never feeling full.

I suffered from a version of this for much of my life, the belief that “There’s not enough”. One of the key drivers behind this belief were childhood experiences where my father, who was “never full”, would distract my attention so that he could eat the food off my plate. The worst thing was that I liked to “save the best til last”, as a reward to myself for having eaten the less tasty stuff first… When my Dad would then “steal” the good bits off my plate, I would be very hurt and angry. That anger and hurt led me to become someone who would eat very fast, to the point where I would not so much eat my food as “engulf” it!

Tapping on these childhood experiences can lead to significant shifts. In my case, tapping on these incidents not only defused the hurt feelings, it also led me to feel compassion and understanding for my father, who was clearly compensating for the fact his own father walked out when he was just 10 years old, among other things. I realised that for him and for me, eating food was really about wanting to feel loved, and no amount of food could compensate for that particular emptiness. Tapping on that feeling increased my love for my father when in the past these experiences for me had represented the opposite of love. Many of you know that my work on Values has also helped me to experience more love in my life, and I find this work very valuable in working with clients with these issues. When you get what you really want, you no longer need your old patterns as much…

Another very common issue for many people with emotional eating issues is FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. This fear also gets in the way of progress as they also fear that by treating their problem with emotional overeating or food cravings they will MISS OUT or SUFFER (Diet, for many people means deprivation!). Instead, they discover to their delight that they can still eat whatever they want, but they don’t HAVE TO. When the intense attachment to the craved food is released, you can either enjoy it without stress, or leave it alone.

One key strategy to help you get to this hallowed place is by using acceptance tapping when you do indulge.

What do I mean here and how to you do this?

Quite simply, the negative pattern causes you to feel as though you are “driven” to do the behaviour you know you “should not do”, such as eating the food you know is “bad for you”.  Ultimately, many people do end up acting on that drive (discipline is highly overrated!). At this point, they then go into guilt and self-punishment mode. This is a  key time to add the tapping, without judgement. Of course, the judgement will be present, so you can then apply the tapping directly, not to the problem behaviour which you just engaged in, but to the judgement itself!

Tap, not on your guilt for having “failed again”, but on the fact that you are judging yourself for this. This interrupts the judgement cycle. When you can engage in the behaviour that was previously a problem for you and feel little or no judgement afterwards, you will have gone a long way to creating the conditions for the problem to simply disappear…

As Eckhart Tolle states: “The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.”

So the simple starting point for most people: Just add tapping to your problem behaviour without trying to change things. That, in itself can often lead you to a very good place.  For our research groups, as well as my clients, the moment they interrupt their pattern of self-deprecation and blame is the moment when things start to change for them.

There is much more we could say on this issue, and a comprehensive program for change will go far beyond the above to:

• Treat the underlying emotional issues driving the cravings / compulsive eating habit
• Treat your beliefs related to food and weight issues
• Treat your inner values conflicts
• Help you to define how you want your life to be
• Give you the tools and strategies to make that a reality; and
• Help you get started

This is exactly the type of program I’ve put now put together for you. Find out more.

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

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.