Tap Yourself Free

Happiness and Truth in your Health, Wealth, and Relationships

Magnus

Tapping.com

Tap Yourself Free Copyright Magnus 2007 The right of Magnus to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First Edition September 2006 Second Edition April 2007

Tap Yourself Free

Part 1 .............................................................................................................. 6 Summary and Premise ........................................................................ 7

1. 2.

Introduction.......................................................................... 9 Emotional Literacy............................................................. 15

Thought + Feeling = Belief .............................................................. 21 Beliefs are your Perceptual Filters ................................................... 24 Emotions create more of the same Emotion..................................... 25 Ego and Identity-Level Beliefs......................................................... 26

3.

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

4.

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

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

Tap Yourself Free

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

5.

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

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

6.

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

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

7.

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

8.

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

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

9.

Health ............................................................................... 104

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

10. Spiritual Matters ............................................................. 116 4

Tap Yourself Free

Finding Your Life Purpose ............................................................. 118 Interpreting Dreams ........................................................................ 120 Karma ............................................................................................. 122 The Law of Attraction .................................................................... 124 The Nature of Beliefs ..................................................................... 126 Ego Detachment and Enlightenment .............................................. 127

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

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

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

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

Tap Yourself Free

Part 1

Tap Yourself Free Summary and Premise There is a basic mechanism by which the human mind associates negative feelings with memories as they are created in present time. When we are later unconsciously reminded of the memory we feel the feeling. This is an animalistic survival mechanism that evolved to protect us from danger and warn us against repeating actions which in the past threatened our survival. In order to respond very fast to that danger, this survival mechanism generalizes widely and matches current situations to past memories very loosely. With the complexities of modern life, it becomes confused and errs on the side of caution, triggering inappropriate feelings in certain situations. This survival mechanism is as such responsible for the overwhelming majority of mental and emotional problems. Each negative feeling held in the memory corresponds to a proportionally sized area of chronic physical tension held somewhere in the body, which wastes energy and restricts the flow of blood and lymph. Persistent stimulation of these negative feelings results in the body being in a continually stressed state, during which resources are diverted from promoting health and wellbeing to maintaining a fight or flight response.

Tap Yourself Free As such these feelings are also responsible for many problems with physical health. There is a reciprocal mechanism by which the human mind releases the negative feelings stored within a memory. The emotional quality of the memory is changed from one charged with tension to one of peace, and that particular feeling no longer arises when the memory is revisited. Any effective therapy works through the activation of this releasing mechanism. When we become aware of how we are unconsciously reminded of earlier times we encountered similar situations, we realize that our emotional reactions are often exaggerated in the present moment. Tracing the feeling back to the first time we felt it, and releasing the emotion attached to that memory, frees us to respond appropriately in the future. As the trapped negative emotion is released, life-energy that was previously wasted holding that negative emotion is re-allocated to wherever in the body it is needed for optimum health. Tapping is one way to reliably activate the releasing mechanism.

Tap Yourself Free 1. Introduction

It started, as many things do, because I wanted to improve my sex life. At the time in fact, any sex life at all would have been an improvement. After fruitless searching for magical chat-up lines and stories to recite to women, and trying pheromones and wearing rock-star boots and loud shirts to gain attention, I eventually realized that what women really found attractive in a man was confidence, and I didnt have it; not with women, at any rate. What I actually had was shyness, nervousness, and on a good day, quite a bit of arrogance that I mistook for being confident. Without the confidence, the chat-up lines come across as either pathetic or creepy, and the outlandish clothing try-hard. It wasnt much use learning how to start a conversation with a girl, if when I thought about walking up to one in a bar, my stomach became queasy, my legs started shaking, and my voice started to stammer. Enter my friend Dave, a hypnotherapist. One night in the pub he was very excited about a new therapy hed learned called Emotional Freedom Technique, now affectionately known as Tapping. It wasnt hypnosis per se; in fact, a lot of hypnotists didnt like it at all, for the simple reason that it was teachable in 5 minutes and seemed to achieve better results than what they had spent years studying. Dave asked me what feelings arose in my body when I wanted to walk up to a girl that I liked in the pub. I looked at him oddly, and he re-phrased his question to ask what negative feelings arose in my body that stopped me from walking up to the girl. I told him there was queasiness in my stomach. It took 30 seconds to apply 9

Tap Yourself Free the Tapping and I couldnt feel the queasy feeling any more. We repeated it for the shaking legs and stammering voice, and from that day I found it a lot easier to make friends with new women in bars. It was maybe two years before I started to realize the power of this technique. I started to notice more subtle aspects of my behaviour. For example, I would be talking to a girl that I liked, but I wouldnt ask for her number. Even though I knew she wanted me to, I didnt really believe that a girl like her would be interested in a guy like me. Around the same time I was also working on building passive income money that just comes to you without having to work for it, or at least where the amount isnt dependent on the number of hours you work, but on the amount of property you own, or the number of people who visit your website in a day, for example. The biggest barrier was that I just didnt think money should come to me so easily. Thats when I started to apply Tapping to my negative beliefs, as well as just my negative feelings. There were a lot of them. But as those beliefs changed, so did the world around me. I am now comfortable believing that the right girl will come along sooner or later, and in the meantime I am having a lot of fun looking for her. Im not rich, by any stretch of the imagination, but I dont want for much that I dont have. My living expenses are paid by that previously elusive passive income, which means I am free to spend my time as I choose. 10

Tap Yourself Free While there was plenty of actual work involved in achieving this, and hours of study of dating psychology and wealth-building techniques, much of my effort went into removing the conflicting negative beliefs. Once the internal barriers were gone, the romantic interests and cold hard cash started to flow relatively effortlessly. The biggest shift in my consciousness was in June 2006. Around that time I was really trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life, and trying to understand what, if anything, was my lifes purpose. I had several business ideas on the go but didnt really feel like any of them were particularly what I wanted to be doing. The one thing I knew I didnt want to do was become a therapist. There are already enough bad therapists who came to a particular mode of therapy through receiving it, had very little training and set up a practice, even though they were still in dire need of help themselves. I felt like Tapping was a tool I should be using to ensure my success in other areas, not particularly something I wanted to be teaching others. I told my friend Carol-Anne that what I wanted was direction, and she asked me what was stopping me from having that. My immediate response didnt make much sense, I just said I dont know who I am any more. She suggested that I tap that belief! As I did, I remembered that those were the exact words Id said to myself, looking in the mirror in my room at Cambridge University in the midst of two years of depression.

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Tap Yourself Free It was 7 years since I had considered myself depressed, but as I dredged up that rather unpleasant memory, I realized that I had never truly recovered, just pushed the feelings to the side. Id been carrying them ever since, at the back of my mind, my default way of feeling, and being. I did several rounds on that memory, finding all the feelings that were there during that period and tapping them away. Four days of euphoria followed as my body and mind adjusted to feeling lighter and clearer-headed than I had for a long time. Everything seemed brighter, colours more vivid, and my mind had entered a new mode of operation where negative feelings tapped themselves as they arose. I feel like I did as much tapping in those four days as I ever had before. During those four days I could see perfectly how we dont live in the real world at all; we live very much in the world in our heads. Our beliefs affect the way we perceive the outside world, and they always lead our behaviour to reinforce that perception. As well as seeing this in myself I found I could see it in others. I realised that very few people reached this level of awareness, and that I should share what I had found. In fact, I realised that all my life experience to date had brought me to where I was, including the analytical thinking Id learned in what I thought was a more or less wasted 3 years studying Computer Science at Cambridge. For self-development work, there is a lot of value in regarding the mind as a computer, and finding and deleting its negative programming. 12

Tap Yourself Free I still dont see myself as a therapist; Ive never given more than one or two individual sessions in the same week. I would rather spend my time writing and finding ways to introduce new people to Tapping and to my website. I believe that Tapping and similar techniques will raise peoples consciousness on a global scale over the next few years. I have made the task of helping that process along, in whatever way I can, part of my purpose for the next few years. I am not a scientist, but I hope you will consider my reasoning sound, and encourage you to conduct your own personal experiments to verify it. I do consider myself spiritual, in the sense that anyone who likes to look up at the night sky, or enjoy nature, is spiritual. I do not have time for any religious dogma or new age woo-woo. For example if I talk about Chakras, its because I have found that they accurately describe a phenomenon I have encountered. In this case they correspond to the areas in the body where people tend to hold various feelings. I take the view that all religions begin by directly describing the experience of being human and even historical figures and events, and then add assorted nonsense due to cultural bias, to perpetuate the religion and control the population. Reverse-engineering that process became a hobby of mine for a while. This is a scientifically sound technique. I assume it must be, because it works and it is repeatable. I am sure science will be 13

Tap Yourself Free able to explain it sooner or later. But right now if youre looking for randomly controlled trials that prove it works, I cant help you. In fact if you google hard enough youll probably even be able to find some that prove it doesnt work, or at least doesnt work any better than a placebo. This has not been my experience, so if you care overly about that sort of thing, you are probably reading the wrong book. If youre interested to hear more about the technique that my friend Dave taught me in the pub, to help me get more girls, and that I then applied to every area of my life to the point where I really dont feel like I have any problems any more, then read on. This is my personal interpretation of what I have found working on myself for the last 3 years, and hundreds of other people for the last year. It should be useful to anyone who has a memory, a nervous system, and a life they want to improve.

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Tap Yourself Free 2. Emotional Literacy

The following process is a great tool for understanding yourself. You can use it whenever you are stressed, angry, procrastinating or otherwise experiencing negative feelings getting in your way and affecting your behaviour. More likely you will use it after the event - when you are trying to rationalize actions or examine a behavioural pattern you would like to change. 1. Find the dominant feeling that you are feeling, or felt at the time. 2. Focus on where you feel it in your body. 3. Allow it to grow and become a little stronger. 4. Follow the feeling back to when have you felt the same feeling before. 5. Find the first time you felt that feeling. Its important not to think when you do this. Dont try to remember follow the feeling. If you find that your internal dialogue starts up, and youre asking your mind to think of times when you think you might have felt a similar way, stop. Youll probably find memories that are worth working on that way, but they may not be relevant to the feeling you are working on now. The memories are chained together in your mind, and the link between them is the feeling. So follow the feeling intuitively. Relax your thoughts, focus carefully on the feeling, imagine 15

Tap Yourself Free yourself diving into it. At the core of it there will be a memory. It might be a faint memory, only the vaguest images or impressions. You may not think it is relevant at first people often remark that its silly or that it cant be anything to do with it. Well if its the memory you found at the heart of the feeling, then it absolutely is relevant. When you have found the memory, start focusing on it. Play it over and over in your mind until it becomes clearer. You should realise that you felt the same feeling at some point in that memory. It will usually be the first time you felt it, although occasionally you realise there is an even earlier memory. This process gets easier with practice, and you learn to trust it more with experience. When we notice an inappropriate emotional response, this process helps in the understanding of it. My friend Lucy is a great girl, smart, funny, and very beautiful. She usually comes across as calm, relaxed, and in control at cause in her life and the things going on around her. One day I offered her what I thought was constructive criticism, and her demeanour instantly changed. Her eyes widened, her nostrils flared, and she snapped at me. I cant even remember what Id said but it was something trivial, and her emotional response was disproportionate. Later I asked what feeling Id triggered, and what it reminded her of. It was the feeling of having her wishes ignored and controlled 16

Tap Yourself Free by other people, and it reminded her of when she was 4 and the smallest girl on her street. So in that moment, she wasnt responding to my suggestion, she was reacting to the other kids, 20 years ago, who didnt care about what she wanted unless she shouted and screamed at them. Now as a successful woman, respected and admired by her friends, that had become an unnecessary strategy. When asked to think of times that their emotional response was inappropriate to the situation at hand, most people can think of a time, or a particular situation they encounter often, when they got angrier or more upset than they think they really should have. Emotional Literacy is the skill of being able to understand what the reaction was really about. If it sounds cheesy that Lucy still sometimes reacted to people as if she was the smallest girl on her street, thats because it is. Thats just the way that this particular part of the mind works. Thats because its a survival mechanism. In order to protect you, it reminds you of the way you felt in earlier, similar situations to what you are encountering now. It matches patterns in the world around you to patterns stored in your memory. It evolved to save your life, so it has to be a very fast pattern matcher. In order to be very fast, it has to be very simple, matching patterns very broadly. Many people hold the opinion that this primitive animalistic mechanism just cant cope with the complexities of modern life. It evolved to deal with things like bears, and one bear is going to 17

Tap Yourself Free behave pretty much like another. The problems start when it starts drawing conclusions about trickier animals, like women, for example. My friend Ralph is a good looking guy, well paid and on paper a great catch for any girl. But he has absolutely no confidence with girls, which people think is strange because a lot of girls are attracted to him. The moment a girl shows any interest in him, he gets a sick feeling in his stomach, and his head starts to spin he gets the strongest feeling that he just doesnt know what to do. We did some work on this and I asked him about the head spinning feeling when had he felt it before. He said hed felt it any time girls at university or school had been interested in him. I asked him to go back to the first time hed felt that feeling. Eventually he realised it was when he was 8 years old, and a girl in his class had marched up to him and told him she liked him, and that he was going to be her boyfriend. He just didnt know what to do, he knew there were all these things he was supposed to do or say, but as an 8 year old he had no clue. His head started to spin and later he became so worried he felt sick. Ralphs sub-conscious mind took steps to avoid feeling that stress in the future. It associated the head-spinning and the sick feelings to women. Not just the girl that asked him to be her boyfriend, the mechanism isnt refined enough for that, it linked those feelings to all women. Literally, he developed a phobia of girls.

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Tap Yourself Free Its easy to see, how sometimes, you might have an emotional response that is rooted not in the present moment, but in the past. Most people quickly accept that when they respond inappropriately, this is what is happening behind the scenes. As you start to know yourself and understand yourself, you start to find you can apply this process to everything you feel from day to day. This mechanism isnt just triggered occasionally, its triggered continually. Probably 99% of the negative feelings we feel daily are actually coming from the past. I was depressed for two years at university, for what seemed like absolutely no reason at all. There was no clue in my external situation. I started off doing fine academically and Id somehow managed to make a really awesome, gorgeous girl my girlfriend. I had plenty of friends and no real worries about money. But for some reason I spent a lot of time really miserable. I still dont really understand why I was suffering. I may never know. Through working with other people though, Ive started to understand one way that depression develops. What do you think happens when one day youre really sad about something something happening in the present and real, maybe a relative dying, or not getting the grade you wanted, it doesnt matter what. You wake up the next morning and think about it, and those sad feelings come flooding back, and you lie in bed trying to process it in your mind. In the meantime your mind is 19

Tap Yourself Free busily associating those negative feelings with the faint smell of fabric conditioner on your pillow, or with being wrapped up in a duvet, or with the shadows cast across the room when the curtains are closed. Even when the present situation has resolved itself and you are no longer quite so sad about it, when you wake up, those associations are triggered. Once you start to understand how this works, you see your behaviour and other peoples in an entirely new light. Its a very powerful and insightful process, and after a while you develop an intuitive ability to see the roots of peoples behaviour without even thinking about it. The next time someone reacts to you negatively, and takes something in a way you didnt intend, you realise its not about you. They are just reacting, out of habit, to someone in the past who you just reminded them of. I have learned its usually best not to point this out to them. Rather, you have just learned one of their personal tripwires and you can aim to avoid it in the future. If they want to trace it back and deal with it, thats up to them. In the same way, when you find yourself overreacting to people, you start to realise they are actually doing you a favour by triggering your tripwires. They are unknowingly drawing your attention to feelings from the past that are denying you personal peace in the present.

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Tap Yourself Free Understanding yourself in this way is the first step towards dealing with an issue and growing beyond it as a person. Sometimes its enough just to realise what memory you are acting out, but usually, you need to make peace with that memory, releasing the emotional charge that is attached to it. Thats where Tapping, and in fact, any successful therapy, comes in. Exactly how that works will be covered in the next chapter. Thought + Feeling = Belief Belief is an emotional state that is not susceptible to rational persuasion - Spinoza So far I have discussed how negative feelings become attached to external stimuli. These could be people, places, sounds, colours, foods, or certain situations. Feelings also become attached to internal stimuli thoughts. There is a name for thoughts that we are emotionally attached to, we call them beliefs. This is why people defend their beliefs so emotionally they literally associate that emotion with the thought. The moment that thought is brought up, they start to feel those feelings. The moment anything challenges that thought, they feel the feeling even stronger. If I tell you that I have a painting of a boat above my bed, then unless you have reason not to trust me, you will think that I have a 21

Tap Yourself Free painting of a boat above my bed. But this is not a belief, because when I tell you actually, its not a boat, its a painting of a car, you can easily change that thought with very little resistance. You are not emotionally attached to the idea that I have a painting of a boat above my bed. In fact, I dont currently have anything hanging above my bed, the walls are empty. At this point you might start to get slightly annoyed or frustrated because Im clearly feeding you misinformation to communicate my point. If you did get annoyed, thats just your sub-conscious reminding you of the way you felt last time someone messed with your head - you still have no beliefs about what I have above my bed, only thoughts. The thought becomes a belief when emotion is brought into the mix. When Ralph felt bad because he didnt know what to do with a girl, those bad feelings became associated with that thought. He became emotionally attached to the thought I dont know what to do with girls, and it became a belief. We learn most of our beliefs about ourselves in similar ways. One day we feel bad for some reason, and think negative thoughts that we then believe are true, and become emotionally attached to. Other beliefs tend to start off as thoughts and become beliefs as we discuss them with other people. If I told one person I had a painting of a boat above my bed, and another that it was a painting of a car, or even better, if I had them over and showed them that 22

Tap Yourself Free was there, but happened to re-arrange my paintings in between, they would start off with that thought, but would still not be emotionally attached to it. If they happened to discuss the painting later, and found that they were in disagreement, that might trigger feelings for them about not wanting to be wrong, or about wanting people to believe what they say. Those feelings would then be associated with their thoughts about what painting I had hung on my wall, and those thoughts would become beliefs. Advertisers and good public speakers know this. By charging their message with emotion, it is more likely to stick in our minds. A good way to tell if a thought is a belief is if you get emotional when you talk about it, or when that thought is challenged. The emotional component of the belief acts as a label to the mind, marking the thought as important for survival. It is a warning that if you change the thought, you might feel physical or emotional pain. The emotion stops you thinking rationally, and prevents you from objectively considering other peoples point of view. It takes a lot of contrary evidence, and a calm, balanced emotional state, to let go of your beliefs. Once you dissociate the feeling from the belief, you are no longer emotionally attached to the thought, and it changes easily.

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Tap Yourself Free Beliefs are your Perceptual Filters Your mind works hard to keep your belief system consistent. When a thought becomes a belief, your mind starts to disregard information that conflicts with that thought. The belief becomes a filter on your perception of the world. In order to hold one belief, your mind must add others to rationalise it. The seed of I dont know what to do with girls grows into a tree with because I never had a sister or Im supposed to be alone as its roots and branches. We dont live in the real world; we live in the world in our heads. If you believe something is true, you will behave as if it is true. At some point your beliefs will conflict with reality, and thats when we experience stress. The usual response, rather than to change the beliefs that lead us into pain, is to add new beliefs that rationalise them further. For example, if you believe you can fly, that doesnt mean you can. But it might mean that you will try and jump off a building. Then the reality of the situation will cause you pain. But it wont change the belief if you believe it strongly enough, youll just rationalise that the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, or the building wasnt high enough. A more day-to-day example is when other people dont behave in the way we believe they should. Rather than change our beliefs about what we expect from others, we tend to draw the conclusion that the other person is deficient in some way. In a way they are, 24

Tap Yourself Free they dont have our particular belief about how people should behave. Again, rather than simply change our belief about the way we think someone else should act, we feel bad because their behaviour didnt fit our beliefs. The only thing to do with that bad feeling is to attach it to new negative beliefs about that person or people like them. Emotions create more of the same Emotion You can see how this leads to a vicious circle where negative feelings and beliefs create more negative feelings and beliefs. Im sure you know someone who is very insecure about themselves. This means when they think about how they feel about themselves there are lots of negative feelings attached to their self image. These feelings have blossomed into all sorts of rationalisations that they carry around with them, but the truth is that one time, someone or some thing made them feel that way about themselves and it stuck. The feeling clouds their perception of the world and they start to see other peoples perfectly normal behaviour as reinforcing the insecure feelings. Now, in that persons mind, the other people are behaving unfairly so its OK to behave differently towards them. The insecure person starts acting defensively, which naturally results in other people behaving differently towards them. Now there are present time reasons to feel insecure, and the cycle repeats. 25

Tap Yourself Free This explains how someone who is victimised amongst one group of people quickly starts being victimised in a new group of people. This isnt blame the victim, in fact it should be a very empowering concept if he or she can grasp it. Its important to realise that the bullies create and perpetuate the circle from their own side too. The good news is that good emotions create more of themselves too, so once you have let go of the negative feelings, and the positivity shines through, the world instantly starts to change. See how differently your day goes when you smile and say hello to people, for example bus drivers and shop assistants. I dont suggest this as an experiment for a day, but as a way of being every day. Ego and Identity-Level Beliefs Most people have a list of things about themselves that they would like to change, and most of these can be boiled down to negative feelings and beliefs. These are the superficial baggage that we carry round that we would like to change about ourselves. These are usually phobias of one sort or another. We would often like to not be afraid of the things we are afraid of. On a deeper level, we start to identify with these feelings. We start to see them as a part of us, and something that we could never change without losing a part of ourselves. This is the ego.

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Tap Yourself Free In the severest cases these are centred around hatred. If you know people who are racist or bigoted, you will agree that their hateful feelings towards other people make them who they are. For most of us the feelings are fears or worries about what we might become. Fears about what other people might think, fears about letting ourselves down. The ego is all about the fear. One time I was working with a friends little sister who didnt like having her feet touched. We quickly reduced the weird feeling she got when someone touched her feet, so that it was no longer quite so scary, and just an odd feeling. She didnt want to completely remove it, because she liked that it made her special. When you are working through your issues you will hit a point where you find one that you dont want to let go of because you believe it to be a part of you, and that you would be less of a person without it. Thats just the ego talking again, from the fear of losing control over who you are. Its just doing its job, trying to keep you safe. Some people stop at this point, and avoid working on that issue until they have grown on other areas to the point where it becomes a real problem for them. Of those that continue, I have not known anyone to regret proceeding no-one has complained that they miss their old way of being.

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Tap Yourself Free You are not your fears, phobias, and insecurities. You are not your worry, hatred or anger. You are not your wants or needs. You are whatever is left when those things are gone. You are your hopes, dreams and aspirations. You are your skills, talents and ambition. You are happiness, gratitude, and love.

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Tap Yourself Free 3. Releasing

Effective therapies release the negative emotion stored in the memories. There are many different ways of doing this, but for a therapy to improve your life, it must reduce the effect the negative feelings from your past have on your present. The mechanism by which this happens is one that is common to every human being releasing. In life you either are collecting more emotional baggage, or you are letting go of it. These are basic functions of the mind, just like eating or defecating are basic functions of the body. Different therapies cannot invent new functions of the mind; they can only activate the ones that are there. Every memory has two components, the factual information and an emotional quality. The facts are just that what you saw, heard, said, smelt, touched. The factual component of a memory doesnt change, you cant change the past. The emotional quality is how you felt, and when you return to the memory you will probably feel that way again. This happens consciously when you deliberately recall a memory, but it also happens unconsciously when you are reminded of something in the factual side of the memory. Our memories are always recording. The survival mechanism is continually associating whatever we are feeling with the memory 29

Tap Yourself Free as it is created. The memory is a very efficient system, it tends to only record new information. For example you wont remember every single time you drove to work, but you will remember that you passed an accident one day. Memories with a strong emotional component stand out the emotion labels the memory as being important. The reciprocal mechanism of releasing the feeling from the memory is activated less often. When we are feeling good, in a situation that previously caused us stress, releasing happens. Sometimes all we need to do is think about the memory when our current state of mind is relaxed, and releasing happens. These are all ways of unconsciously releasing the emotion from the memory. Youre not aware of it happening, it just does. If you want to make more rapid progress, and deal with all your baggage as quickly as possible, you need a conscious method. 1. Identify an issue 2. Find the relevant memories 3. Release the emotion from them 4. Move on, enjoy your life without the issue Steps 1 and 4 tend to happen pretty naturally, we all at least know what the next issue we want to deal with is, and thats all you need to know. Most people are already Connoisseurs of their Neuroses, to one degree or another. 30

Tap Yourself Free Step 2 is covered by Emotional Literacy. You dont need to talk endlessly about your past experiences, you just need to find which ones are relevant. This can be done quickly without further selfanalysis. Step 3 is where Tapping comes in. There are literally an infinite number of ways to activate the releasing process, and you can probably find websites describing every one of them if you are so inclined. I have explored most of the more popular ones, and found that Tapping beats them all in terms of Speed and Efficiency Ease to Learn Consistency and Reliability Range of Applicability I wouldnt discourage anyone from trying other methods, and in fact trying as many as possible is the best way to familiarise yourself with the internal releasing process that is at the heart of all the methods. They all have their pros and cons. The best way to learn Tapping is to be taught it by someone who is experienced in it. If you cant do that, the next best way is from videos, or from reading about it. My free videos on Tapping.com should take you through the basics. Gary Craig, the creator of EFT has a vast collection of excellent seminar videos available on DVD. If you dont have access to these videos you can follow the 31

Tap Yourself Free instructions in the Tapping Guide and Workbook, accompanying this book. From this point on I assume you have a basic knowledge of the Tapping points and the process and have experienced it a few times. How Tapping Works There are people who would prefer to wait for scientific papers explaining how tapping works before they will try it. Its a shame because these tend to be the sort of people who stand to benefit most from using it. Direct experience of tapping is enough to convince most people that it does something, and when you have done a hundred rounds or so on the right things, you start to notice obvious changes in the way you feel about things. Experimenting a little with different shortcuts to the technique shows you that every part of the full recipe is necessary to guarantee success. It only works consistently when you apply it completely and properly. Suggestions that you can just read the affirmation or it doesnt matter where you tap, are meaningless. Negative emotions are held in the nervous system. You can experience this yourself. Think about when you feel a negative feeling - you feel it in a particular part of your body. For example we tend to feel nervous feelings in our stomach, angry feelings in our forehead, stressed feelings in our shoulders.

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Tap Yourself Free When I talk about energy I usually mean nervous energy, not a mystical life force. The interesting thing about the mysterious life energy that new age advocates talk about is that it often happens to move along with blood, or oxygen, lymph, or just nerve signals. My own experience with new age healing techniques is that handson techniques like Quantum Touch seem to work better than hands-off techniques like Reiki. There are no nerves for the energy to flow through in the air. Chinese Medicine talks about Chi that flows through Meridians. I tend to think about nervous energy that runs through nerve channels. At the end of the day it does not matter, both are just ways of describing an aspect of the human body that you can directly experience. Do not get hung up on the language. Do not allow your prejudices to cut you off from ideas that may be useful to you. Its said that when you move a lot of Chi, you need to breathe and drink a lot of water. Another way of looking it this is that when the feeling is released, the brain starts reprocessing related information. This uses up a lot of water and oxygen. This instantly lowers the oxygen levels in the bloodstream and youll find yourself sighing. Some people find themselves yawning deeply and uncontrollably. After a few rounds you will get thirsty. To avoid letting the brain get tired too quickly, you should spend time on breathing exercises and drink a lot of water. Eventually

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Tap Yourself Free you need a break; this tends to be after about 2 hours of continuous tapping. Meridians In my Science of Tapping video on Tapping.com, I demonstrate the use of an electronic detector pen to find the tapping points. These points are end points or junction points for the meridians/nerve channels. They are not arbitrary points made up by the ancient Chinese. They discovered them in their exploration of the body. When you examine the points scientifically you find their electrical resistance is lower and they respond differently to magnetic resonance than other areas of skin. Most people can find them just by feeling around. Its quite fun to watch skeptics play with the detector pen. They are often convinced there is a trick to it, like maybe it beeps faster depending on how hard you press it. The idea that something like Tapping could work conflicts with their negative beliefs, and when they see something mechanical like the pen responding to the points they are flummoxed. The reason we feel the feelings in different parts of our body, is because each feeling is held in a different meridian. The negative feeling is blocked energy somewhere along that meridian. When you tap the points, which are on the ends of the meridians, you send a shockwave through the system that clears the blockage, and the feeling vanishes. This is known as balancing the meridian.

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Tap Yourself Free The feeling is only held in one meridian, but you dont really have any way of knowing which one, so we tap all the points to be sure of hitting it. Some people find they can tell intuitively which point needs tapping for a particular feeling. This tends to come with experience. One thing you do start noticing early on, is that as you are tapping around the points, you find yourself sighing, or thinking about something else, or suddenly realise that you cannot find the feeling. This shows you have tapped the point for the meridian in which that particular feeling was held, and the feeling has been released.

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Tap Yourself Free

Meridian Paths through the Body These figures are as a guide only. For more accurate representations and more information on Meridians, refer to Energy Medicine by Donna Eden. You may notice that sometimes you feel feelings on a particular Meridian, and tapping the corresponding point clears it. 36

Tap Yourself Free Chakras Another thing you notice after a lot of tapping with other people is that different people tend to hold different feelings in different parts of their body. One person might hold most of their feelings in their belly and their throat. Another might hold most of them in their heart and their forehead. Sometimes different aspects of the same feeling will be held in different places. These are actually two separate feelings that are closely connected. Ayurvedic (Ancient Indian) medicine has a name for these centres where feelings are stored, they are called Chakras. Other names are Energy Centres or Databanks. I call them Chakras because that is the most widely used name for them. Whatever they are, I have found there to be seven running in a line down the centre of your body. These are the most significant ones, and there also smaller ones in the palm of each hand and the sole of each foot. There also seems to be one in each eye. Different schools of thought will describe different layouts of chakras. Some say there are 8 main ones, others 13. Most teachings agree on the location of the first 7, and then suggest that some chakras float in the air above your head, or 6 feet behind you. So far this is outside my experience. To an extent, particular types of feelings tend to be held in a particular chakra. Its never a good idea to second guess this, and 37

Tap Yourself Free you dont need to. Any two people might hold what sounds like the same feeling in a different chakra. You do not need to think about chakras when you are finding things to tap, but you will probably notice which areas you tend to hold most feelings. You can work on the chakras directly if you like. There are many different exercises in the new age community for clearing your chakras, I could never get any of them to work until I used the EFT Chakra Clearing Protocol, by Nicola Quinn. When I tried that for the first time I felt noticeably lighter for the rest of the day. It seems to clear out whatever feelings are hanging around at the time. My Chakra Clearing video on Tapping.com will take you through it if you are interested. Positions of the Chakras This diagram shows approximate locations of the chakras. You may notice that you tend to feel most feelings in one or two of these locations.

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Tap Yourself Free Advanced Tapping Tapping is a reliable way to activate the releasing mechanism naturally in your body. Ultimately most people learn to activate it at will, just by focussing on a feeling or belief and deciding to let it go. Maybe you can already do this. I studied Buddhist Meditation for several months, visiting a working monastery once or twice every week. We would sit in silence for 30 minutes to an hour, watching our thoughts. The idea was that feelings would arise and they would be let go. I had no trouble with letting the feelings arise, but they would not let go I had no idea how to activate the releasing mechanism. When I learned Tapping, I had a reliable way to consciously activate it. I started off repeating the full affirmation, out loud, and carefully tapping each point 7 times. Then I found it usually worked just fine to repeat one word and tap the point 2 or 3 times. At some point I heard that it was enough to imagine saying the affirmation, and imagine tapping the points this is useful when you want to tap something in public. Whether you imagine tapping or actually do it is all the same to your nervous system the tapping is just a way to direct your attention. I got faster and faster at doing this, until I didnt need to consciously trace around all the points in my head, laboriously saying the phrase to myself. I could just activate the releasing mechanism at will.

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Tap Yourself Free Some Buddhist monks spent decades meditating. I suspect this is because they are trying to learn to activate their releasing mechanism. Im sure they learn all sorts of other interesting things along the way, but there are faster ways to start releasing your negative feelings. I still use the full Tapping protocol occasionally, particularly if a feeling doesnt seem to want to budge. For most things I just notice that Im feeling a feeling from my past, and let it go the Emotional Literacy step, of when have I felt this before, becomes automatic too. As your awareness rises, you can more easily tell the difference between a feeling coming from the present and one coming from the past. Eventually Tapping becomes fairly automatic your mind learns what you want it to do when you find a negative feeling and releases it for you. Most people reach this point in a matter of months of committed Tapping, where the affect of their past experiences is negligible compared to what it was. Being in the moment is a great place to be. Equivalent Therapies The releasing mechanism is the basic element that must be at the root of any effective therapy. If you are not releasing, you are not improving.

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Tap Yourself Free When you release negative feelings, you become a little happier and a little healthier. You will feel lighter and more connected. Often you will start to see the past and the present in a whole new light. You will realise things that you just didnt get before. The negative feelings and beliefs that were present before, blocked you from seeing things as they really are. When those feelings and beliefs are gone, suddenly everything falls into place. This is called a Cognition, otherwise known as an aha! moment. There are three components that are present in all therapies to different degrees. 1. Discovery of the feeling or memory that is holding you back 2. Releasing that feeling 3. Cognition This book teaches Emotional Literacy for the discovery of the relevant memory, and Tapping for releasing the feeling. Cognition always occurs sooner or later after this has happened. When you hold conventional therapies up to this yardstick they do not often measure up. Traditional talking therapies skip the Releasing step. You can spend endless hours talking about your feelings and your memories, and the therapist will attempt to lead you to the 41

Tap Yourself Free cognition. This works eventually, but it is slow. Your mind is literally blocked from having the cognition by the feelings you are holding on to. When you find the feeling and release it, suddenly you have the cognition. I have been told that a single 2-3 hour Tapping session is equivalent to 5 years of psychotherapy, by more than one client who has had that much experience to be able to tell. Hypnotherapy and NLP include various techniques for releasing. Rewind the Tape, Time Line Therapy, and other methods all activate the same releasing mechanism. However they also include methods that appear similar but are not. A friend of mine was guided by a hypnotherapist in a visualisation to find their negative feelings and lock them in a safe. NLP includes various techniques where feelings are pushed far away or quietened or made monochrome. This is known as manipulating the sub-modalities. The difference is that when you have truly released a feeling, you cannot bring it back, without experiencing the same memory that created it in the first place. With the techniques above, you can always open the safe again, or pull the feelings close again, make them louder, or more colourful. If the technique is reversible it is not a release. At best this is less effective, and at worst it is encouraging suppression of feelings. There are many other less well known therapies that are broadly equivalent to Tapping. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Thought Field Therapy, Attractor Field Therapy, Be 42

Tap Yourself Free Set Free Fast, ZenSight, ZPoint, Sedona Technique. Buddhist Meditation, Reiki, and even Christian Healing, all aim to activate the same releasing mechanism in their own way. I would encourage the study of any or all of these techniques and others, to familiarise yourself with the releasing mechanism. They are all different ways of working with the same body and mind. Dont just read about them, try them out and see how they work for you. I have studied and tried many of them, and continue to research new ones as I hear about them, and I am still yet to find something that works as well for me as Tapping.

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Tap Yourself Free 4. The Road Map

At first the effects of Tapping can be very subtle. I find that most people notice an obvious difference after a session of 2-3 hours of tapping. This is equivalent to 50-100 rounds, and it is important for the best progress that the right things are tapped. Starting out, some people are sensitive enough to notice a change in the way they feel about things after just a couple of rounds. I call this the Convincer. It wont make any big change to your life but it is enough for most people to realise something interesting is happening, and continue experimenting with Tapping. In a 2-3 hour one-on-one or a single evening session I am expecting to help the client create a Beneficial change in their life. Something obvious and noticeable that makes them happier or makes it easier for them to move towards their goals. In weekend workshops, 5-week evening courses, and coaching courses of 5-sessions over 3 months, I am expecting to see a Profound impact on several aspects of peoples lives. I use the Convincer in three ways: On a Feeling Ask someone to locate a negative feeling that they have felt in the last few days, and see if they can bring it up in their body to feel it right at that moment. Ask them to rate its intensity from 1-10, and if they can, and feel comfortable to do so, to make it even more intense by 1 or 2 points. Then ask them about where they feel it in 44

Tap Yourself Free their body, and to give it a colour, and characterise it by a particular emotion. Then do a complete round of tapping (set-up, meridian points, 9gamut, meridian points) on that feeling. Compare the intensity, colour, and emotion afterwards to what they felt before. It may require a couple of rounds. Encourage them to bring the feeling back up, and they will find that they cant, or at least they cant bring back the precise original feeling. I will tell them that literally, their body has forgotten how to feel that way. On a Belief Some people are unable to bring feelings up in the moment. Sometimes they cant even imagine what the feeling was like. This is perfectly normal, everyone is able to do this to different degrees. In this case you can use the Convincer on a belief instead. Ask them a simple question, like What stops you tidying your room? Tell them to just give the very first answer that springs to mind. Use that answer to do just the set-up and tap the meridian points. For example Even though it takes too long or Even though its just such a mess. Then remind them to give you the very first answer that springs to mind, and ask precisely the same question again. They will almost 45

Tap Yourself Free always give a different answer. Repeat this process two or three times. The mind orders thoughts by which are emotionally the most intense. So when you tap away the first answer, it is no longer the most intense and they will give a different answer when the question is asked again. The difference between it takes too long and its just such a mess is an emotional one, not a logical one. On a Memory I tend to use the above methods in group workshops. When I am one-on-one with someone and have more time, I spend a bit longer. Find a feeling as before, and then trace it back to find the first time they felt that feeling. Once a memory is located, tap away the feelings in that memory. Its interesting to watch peoples reactions as their memories change. Most people have never experienced this happening so quickly, and it is a curious sensation, particularly when the memory was previously very upsetting.

When you tap away feelings or groups of feelings, your body literally forgets how to feel them. This means you lose the ability to identify with the old you who felt that feeling.

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Tap Yourself Free As a result, people forget precisely what it was they were like before. This makes it very easy for them to believe they are not making progress with tapping. I remember calling up a client a week after a one-on-one, to find out how they had progressed. They reported that there hadnt really been any difference, and they were not interested in continuing with another tapping session. Nothing significant had changed on the main issues we had worked on mild depression, job stress, smoking, and relationship issues. I knew we hadnt really gotten to the bottom of those issues in the session, so I understood his reasoning. Ten minutes later he rang me back, excitedly talking about how he was getting up much more easily in the mornings. His old pattern was to be woken abruptly by the alarm clock, and sleepily hit the snooze button ten times in a row and then be late for work. Almost every day that week he had found himself coming back from the shower to find the alarm going off. Hed been waking up and getting out of bed easily and hadnt even noticed. Thinking back to the session, I remember that was the one issue wed worked on where hed gone completely clear after tapping away various tired feelings, he couldnt think of any other reasons why he wouldnt get out of bed. After thinking about it further, he realised that actually his mood had also been much improved over that week, and there were subtle differences in all the things wed worked on.

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Tap Yourself Free His body had forgotten what it was like to feel so lethargic when first waking up, it was almost like it was hard for him to believe he had ever had trouble with that. It took careful self-analysis to notice that small things about his work colleagues no longer bugged him. Those thoughts were no longer so emotionally relevant to him and he had forgotten about them. It is not essential that you believe in tapping for it to work, but it is absolutely essential that you believe in tapping enough that you persist with it. If you notice the subtle differences then you will persist until the subtle differences become big differences. People often attribute the effects of tapping to other self improvement work they do. My friend Mark was finding that he felt strong feelings of inadequacy when he talked to girls, which meant he didnt ask for their number even when they obviously liked him. We traced these feelings back to ex-girlfriends and earlier rejections, and tapped them all away. A few weeks later he got a very beautiful girlfriend. I asked him if he had felt those feelings of inadequacy when he had met her. He said no, and that it was probably because hed been working out a lot. He is yet to explain to me the mechanism by which working out disconnects feelings of inadequacy from being around beautiful girls. Having a better body and feeling good about it might give you the thought she should be attracted to me because I have this great body. But if you still have an unresolved memory about an 48

Tap Yourself Free attractive girl making you feel bad, those feelings will still jump out when you are around an attractive girl. One of the thoughts those feelings would cause in Mark was if I have a better body I will feel better about myself. This may or may not be true, but in any gym there are plenty of men who have excellent physiques who still get that feeling and think they must be able to bench press even more in order to feel good about themselves. The feeling doesnt go away until it is dealt with. The danger is that some guys will continue to be driven by that feeling until they give themselves back problems or muscle damage. Without those feelings, there are still plenty of reasons to maintain a healthy body, and you do it to feel more good about yourself, rather than to feel less bad. Mark already had the confidence and charm to attract his girlfriend. He didnt need bigger muscles to gain that. The problem was he also had nervousness around women and feelings of inadequacy, and no amount of working out would remove those associations in his mind, only activating the releasing mechanism does that. I was slightly hurt that Mark didnt think the work wed done together had helped, but at the end of the day he is happier now and I dont feel any need to claim credit for what is really his true self shining through a bit more brightly. What frustrates me is that sooner or later he will find other things he wants to work on, and if 49

Tap Yourself Free he doesnt attribute his earlier improvements to tapping maybe he wont choose to apply it in the future. Charting Your Progress Careful journaling is the answer. Record precisely how you feel about the situations that you work on, and check that a week or so after you tap on them. Often when I read back what clients have told me about how they feel in certain situations they find it hard to believe that I am quoting their own words back to them. When the feelings are gone you lose your frame of reference for them. This is a good thing of course, but it is vitally important you notice it happening. After a while you learn to do this automatically, but when you are starting out it is critical to be aware of what is happening. Personality Tests One female client I worked with over several weeks on intensely traumatic memories of child abuse noticed that her handwriting changed dramatically after the first few sessions. I do not necessarily believe that handwriting can be interpreted and conclusions drawn about someones personality, as different people may express different aspects of their personality in different aspects of their handwriting. However, the way you are with one thing is the way you are with everything, and I took this as a sign that the tapping had lead to concrete shifts in her way of being.

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Tap Yourself Free A way to measure these more precisely is through personality tests. Many of these are constructed with the assumption that peoples personalities dont really change, so if you are looking to track changes in your personality, it is best to take the test answering questions based on how you were over the preceding 3-6 months. When taking personality tests, do not take the results personally. They measure how your life experiences to date have moulded your programming, they do not reflect your value as a person. Only when you learn tapping and other self-improvement methods do you really start to have control over your programming. If you are unhappy with the way you are currently, it is not your fault, but now that you know how to change it, it is absolutely your responsibility to do so. One test that did the rounds as a viral email a few years ago is the Personality Disorder test at 4degreez.com. It is a fun test to do and people would forward each other their results and paste them into their myspace profiles, and so on. Nonetheless, it is a useful benchmark, takes only a few minutes to do and is freely available. On the left are my test results from 2003, before I had even heard of EFT. On the right are my results from late 2006, after 2 years of tapping, the last six months of which I intensively tapped every negative thought I could possibly find.

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Tap Yourself Free Before Tapping

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

After 6 months of Tapping

Disorder Paranoid: Schizoid: Schizotypal: Antisocial: Borderline: Histrionic: Narcissistic: Avoidant: Dependent: Obsessive-Compusive: Rating Low Low Low Low Low Low Low Low Low Low

The website offers clear explanations of each term. If you find yourself with a lot of Highs or Very highs, do not worry about it, it just shows you which things you need to tap. It is about knowing yourself, not judging yourself. Also do not be disheartened, I think that after reading this book you will be able to create similar results for yourself I much less time than it took me. You can take the test yourself here: http://www.4degreez.com/misc/personality_disorder_test.mv I also found that my Myers-Briggs personality type changed. I used to be INTJ Introverted Intuition Thinking Judging. Now I am ENFP Extraverted Intuition Feeling Perceiving. I had noticed this myself I am much more outgoing, and I definitely tend to go with the flow more. People who exhibit introverted characteristics tend to have obvious fears of being centre of attention, or worries about what other 52

Tap Yourself Free people will think. Less obviously on the other hand, an Extravert is someone who has fears of being ignored or left out. As you tap these fears you will become more balanced and more able to express yourself in whatever way you like. Very young children tend to be fairly balanced. They are happy playing endlessly on their own with their toys, and at social gatherings they are comfortable with the attention they get. Its only later when he is criticized or teased that a child develops social phobias and finds he is more comfortable by himself or around people he knows. If when that child leaves school he decides the way to get rich is a career in sales, he may be sufficiently motivated to push past those social phobias and force himself to be more Extraverted. Continuously fighting those negative feelings associated with meeting new people makes it a stressful lifestyle for him. You can be whoever you want to be, its just a case of tapping away the negative feelings you associate with being that sort of person. You can pay vast sums of money for proper Myers-Briggs type analysis, but a quick test sufficient for quantifying any differences from tapping is here: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

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Tap Yourself Free Common Tapping Goals Everyone will have their own goals when it comes to what they want from tapping. Some people will have very specific ideas about phobias they want to clear or barriers they want to remove from success in a particular area. The Tapping Road Map is presented as a general framework to which to fit your own values and ambitions. It is drawn from the goals of clients Ive worked with, my own goals, and various psychological, anthropological and theological sources. There are 4 stages to the road map 1. Overcoming Problems 2. Living the Good Life 3. Success in Health, Wealth and Relationships 4. Spirituality These tend to be tackled sequentially but neednt necessarily be. There are various tapping milestones one can reach, which are not intended as goals in themselves but can certainly be used that way as a means to prioritise how you spend your tapping sessions. They are certainly not intended to encourage competition.

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Tap Yourself Free It should also be borne in mind that as we live our lives we collect new negative feelings and beliefs to tap, so we should revisit milestones periodically.

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TAPPING ROAD MAP

I like and love myself, I accept everything about myself I know my life I am not my Ego purpose and I am living it SPIRITUALITY I am at peace with the world Nothing scares me I feel connected to I have transcended about the future the Earth, to the suffering Universe, and to God RELATIONSHIPS FAMILY FRIENDS I love every member I am open to of my family meeting new people with no pre I hold no negativity conceptions towards any member of my family I love all of my friends I hold no negativity towards any of my friends

HEALTH DIET EX ERCISE I eat healthily I have the body I want

WEALTH SUCCESS MONEY Nothing stands in Money comes to me the way of what I want easily to do I am active and I have no problems exercising regularly earning or accepting money I have no worries about money

ROMANCE I am free to love my partner I am open to meeting new potential partners with no preconceptions I hold no negativity towards any past partners or their new/past partners I get enough sleep, I sleep soundly, and have no trouble getting out of bed I have no addictions I consider unhealthy

I am happy most of the time

I keep my living habitat tidy and clean

LIVING THE GOOD LIFE My life is reasonably well organised and in order

Stress doesn't affect me in a negative way

I don't hold any grudges

OVERCOMING PROBLEMS I would not describe myself as lazy

Tap Yourself Free

Part 2

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Tap Yourself Free 5. Dealing With Your Problems

The hardest thing for new tappers to realise is that their problems are not what they think they are. The problem is not the situation you find yourself in, the problem is the way you feel about it. When you change the way you feel, problems literally disappear. People tend to need help and guidance tapping at this level. They often feel like the tapping is not making a difference or that it will take forever to do enough tapping to deal with the problem entirely. It cannot take forever. The negative feelings that you are tapping are learned during various life experiences, and you dont have an infinite number of those. There may be many feelings to tap, but as long as you focus on the earliest feeling in your memory, similar feelings will fall away when you tap one, you tap a dozen or even hundreds at the same time. Depression I have not yet worked with anyone whose depression was rooted in their present moment. People who are depressed often find their depression inexplicable, assuming that there should be a reason in their current situation that would depress them. Their main problem really is that they are depressed, and that colours their current experience. The depressed feelings come first, and they view the world through the filters that come with those feelings. 58

Tap Yourself Free Depression occurs when negative feelings become associated with mundane things, every day occurrences or situations, like waking up, sitting down to work, or looking out of the window. Unless you understand how these feelings trigger past memories, the way you are feeling wont make much sense. You look at your life and either you dont see what could possibly be upsetting you so much, or you start to blame your situation and try to fix it which doesnt work. Eventually you learn to live with and distract yourself from the feelings. I was depressed for 2 years at university and around 2 years in my childhood. I still dont know really why I was depressed at university I had everything going for me. When I got depressed I quickly fell behind on my work and eventually broke up with my girlfriend, who was a saint to put up with me for so long. But those things werent what made me depressed in the first place. A healing session with my friend Carol-Anne shed some light on why I was depressed as a child. Twenty years later I thought I was well over being depressed, but it turns out those depressed feelings were still there, lurking beneath the surface. I had just learned to suppress them and live with them. I would still feel them at the back of my mind, and in quiet moments, even at the age of 28, years afterwards. Carol-Anne took me through a process that simply asked what those feelings were, and we traced them back.

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Tap Yourself Free I remembered being 9 or 10, and going to bed every night feeling terrible sadness and, curiously, unfairness. I would go downstairs and tell my parents I couldnt sleep, but sooner or later they would send me up to bed again, and I would cry myself to sleep. There was no reason why I should behave like this. As we cleared away the feelings, a memory surfaced. When we moved into our new house, my parents brought my brother and I cabin beds like a bunk bed but with a desk and a wardrobe underneath. I was very excited and demanded mine be built first, and I was so demanding that my dad built my brothers first instead. By the time my bed was built I had worked myself into such a strop that I threw myself into it in a very upset emotional state, forever connecting those feelings to being in that bed. Every night after that, when I went to bed, I would feel the same feelings of unfairness and sadness that Id felt that day. If you are depressed or know someone else who is, its likely that their depression is caused in the same way. One day they felt strong negative feelings, and associated those feelings with something in their daily life. With most people Ive worked with, there is actually more than one memory being triggered. There are several layers of negative feelings, and once one starts coming up, they all start coming up. To an extent, we have control over how much these feelings affect us. We can focus on the moment and push them to the side. But 60

Tap Yourself Free this is hard work, and requires great willpower you are fighting your bodys own natural survival mechanism. Following the feeling back so you know where the feelings come from helps with this process, but it still requires discipline and effort to focus your attention in present time. Tapping away the feelings in the memory calms that survival mechanism, and is the only true way to deal with the problem. Stress According to the UK Health and Safety Executive, 1 in 6 working individuals regarded their job as highly or extremely stressful. Different people deal with daily stress in different ways. Some people thrive on stress, other people gradually let it get on top of them. When people get very stressed and suffer nervous breakdowns or make themselves ill, it has not happened overnight. That stress has accumulated over time. Your mind is constantly recording the stress you feel and reminding you of it. On one day, you feel the stress you felt on all the bad days in the past. You disappoint your boss, and feel the same feelings you felt all the other times you disappointed your boss. You feel like you have a lot to do, and that reminds you, sub-consciously, of all the other times you felt like you had a lot to do. The first times these things happen, you feel like you can deal with them, but as the later times remind you more and more of earlier 61

Tap Yourself Free times, the feelings get stronger and stronger until breaking point. Then you start to associate what you felt at those moments with just being in the office, or around your colleagues. That was the point at which I quit my full-time job in IT, but if I hadnt done that I would probably have been encouraged to leave sooner or later. The seeds for the stress are usually planted in childhood or adolescence. One highly capable guy I worked with hated being given assignments at work. Even though he had the experience and qualifications to do it, he felt the same feelings of doom and intrepidation he had with Business Studies coursework in year 11. Whenever he went to see his boss, he became nervous and automatically felt the guilty feelings he felt when he was sent to the headmaster after writing on his desk. There will always be a certain amount of daily stress, but very few people have jobs in which the daily stress is more than they can handle. The problem is that it piles up in your sub-conscious mind until it becomes unbearable you are feeling the stress of the whole year in one day. The daily stress you encounter is generated as a result of your beliefs. When you feel like you couldnt find a better job, or dont have the time to relax, or get new qualifications, or that you dont want to disappoint yourself or your parents, all those are things that you can tap and let go of if you choose to.

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Tap Yourself Free It is your beliefs that trap you, not the situation that you find yourself in. An older friend of mine stayed in regular full-time employment even when he was offered shorter term contracts at five times his current salary. He had a mortgage to pay and a family to consider, and didnt feel like he could risk his job security. Eventually he made the leap and hasnt looked back. The contracts come and go, and he hasnt always worked the full year, but he still made several times what he was making before. Before he did it, he felt like it was too much of a risk, afterwards he wondered why he hadnt done it years earlier. I asked him how it felt when he thought about quitting his job and taking the first contract. Nerve-racking, I got a sick feeling in my stomach, he said. I asked him when hed felt that feeling before, and he said it reminded him of losing his paper round as a boy, as the newsagents son needed extra money. Hed gone to another newsagent but they had too many paper boys already. Hed felt sick to his stomach because it meant hed have no money to buy comics. Leaving his job for the new contract was a calculated risk, but he didnt realise he was factoring in feelings of doubt and worry hed had because he couldnt find a new paper round. If you dont think that makes logical sense, you are absolutely right. It does make emotional sense though. There is no way to 63

Tap Yourself Free predict which memory is affecting you, the only way is to follow the feeling and see where it leads. When the paper-shop memory came up, my friend shook his head and didnt believe it had anything to do with it. But the same feeling was there, and when we tapped it away his jaw dropped, because he realised it really had influenced his decision to stay in his job so long. Addictions People dont become addicted to cigarettes, junk food, or anything else just because they enjoy those things. However much we might like them, that is not enough motivation to continue to do them when they are unhealthy. An addiction is a strategy we develop for dealing with negative feelings. Smoking a cigarette is a popular way to distract ourselves from stressed feelings. People who feel lonely turn to casual sex for comfort. Sugary foods suppress feelings of sadness. Surfing the internet distracts our minds from feelings of boredom. You can use tapping to reduce specific cravings you feel for nicotine or caffeine, but that is only part of the story. To give up, you must tap away all the feelings that trigger you to feel like you need those things, and that basically means most of the strong negative feelings we feel from day to day. My friend Hamish gave up smoking after just a ten minute tapping session. The craving feelings he felt were tapped away in 5 rounds, and then he found this feeling of I must have a cigarette. We traced that back to peer pressure when he was 15 that led to 64

Tap Yourself Free him smoking for the first time. A few more rounds on that memory were all it took. I told him not to put any effort into stopping smoking. The next couple of days he had a cigarette or two, but each one he wondered more and more why he was doing it, until he put one out halfway through and hasnt had a cigarette since. I was very surprised at this result, but it could easily be like that for you. Hamish already has very strong willpower and doesnt really let things bother him in general. He had also made a commitment to give up. It took me several months to become less compulsive about eating chocolate. I used to buy a chocolate bar or two whenever I passed a corner shop. I still enjoy chocolate, but rarely more than once a day. I can take it or leave it and I often choose fruit instead. I still view this as a work in progress. Addictive habits flood our emotional systems so that we dont notice the negative feelings that we were feeling before. Most drugs, including caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine, are literally regarded as poison by our systems. So whatever negative feelings we were feeling before, they are pushed to the side while our bodies take various measures like pumping blood harder to filter it faster. Tapping offers a new strategy for dealing with negative feelings let them go. 65

Tap Yourself Free If you can identify the feelings that trigger your addiction, you can sit down and tap them away over a few sessions. Even better, develop the habit of tapping whatever it is you are feeling before you eat junk food or smoke or whatever. If you still want to continue after that, fine, but if you persist, eventually you just wont feel the need. Laziness and Procrastination Often when I ask people what holds them back from taking the next step in their lives, they say Im lazy. The topic of procrastination is one of the biggest draws to my workshops. I used to always leave my taxes until the last minute, I hated doing the washing up, my room would continually be a mess, and Id start most school and work assignments late and rush them, usually delivering them after the deadline. I used to be so lazy, that if I wanted to watch something on one channel, but the TV was switched to another one, unless the remote control was within reach I wouldnt get up to change it. It seemed like such a huge effort. It was funny because most times when I completed my tax selfassessment, the taxman ended up owing me several hundred pounds. I like having a tidy room and its much less effort to do the dishes before the food dries and becomes welded to them. What really put me off doing all those things was that negative feelings that had somehow become associated with them. 66

Tap Yourself Free One day I was sat watching TV, and caught myself telling myself it just wasnt worth getting up to change the channel. It seemed ridiculous, and I asked myself when Id felt that feeling before. I instantly recalled being sick and staying home from school. I had a fever and felt dreadfully drained of energy. The recurrence of that feeling was enough to dissuade me, years later, from getting up to change the channel. The way you are with one thing is the way you are with everything, so when I coach students on overcoming procrastination we start with basic tasks like tidying your apartment or house and doing the washing up. Have you ever noticed how the tidiness of your living area is proportional to how sorted out your life is? The same things that stop you tidying your room stop you sorting out the rest of your life. Several times now Ive noticed people really start to get their life in order after working just on tapping towards tidying their room. Over time, every feeling becomes rationalised with an excuse, so its not essential to look for the feeling and trace it back in time. The magic question is whats stopping you?: Q: Whats stopping you from doing the washing up? A: It takes too long. Even though it takes too long

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Tap Yourself Free Q: Whats stopping you from doing the washing up? A: I want to do something else. Even though I want to do something else Q: Whats stopping you from doing the washing up? A: I just cant be bothered. Even though I just cant be bothered Q: Whats stopping you from doing the washing up? A: er nothing Each time your mind voices the excuse attached to the strongest feeling, and keys your body into that feeling. When you tap it away, the excuse is no longer emotionally relevant, and your mind throws up the next one. When working with someone else, never ask what else? there is no need to prompt for a different answer. I encourage people to give the same answer if they still believe it. Occasionally they do, which just means the same excuse has become attached to two different feelings. Theyll say I still feel a little bit like I cant be bothered, in which case you just tap that. My friend Zachary had a $3,000 credit card bill, and $6,000 of unpaid invoices for work hed done for people. He just didnt like sending off invoices and chasing them up. I asked him what was stopping him sort out his invoices, and we tapped away every answer he gave. At the end he said well, I guess its not such a big deal and I agreed, suggesting we did some more tapping on other things wed talked about. No thanks, he said, he wanted to 68

Tap Yourself Free go and get on with those invoices and he dealt with them solidly over the next two days. Its amazing what limits us in this way. Another student of mine, Stavros, had been procrastinating draining his central heating system to swap in a new radiator. After tapping away various excuses like Ive never done it before, I dont know how, I dont know where to get the parts, he still didnt want to do it. I asked what would stop you doing it, and really enjoying it? After some thought he found he had a very bad feeling about doing it, and we traced it back to criticism from his father when he was younger. Even though his father was in another country at the time and not likely to see his handiwork, his sub-conscious mind was making him feel like he would let his father down. Its healthy to be curious about where we pick up these feelings and beliefs, but there is no cause to blame our parents, teachers or friends, or ourselves. Even the best parents damage their children in this way. That brings us nicely on to forgiveness. Forgiveness Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die Nelson Mandela We automatically resist forgiving people. After all, we usually have what we think is a good reason to resent that person.

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Tap Yourself Free Once you see how our negative feelings affect our lives, it becomes clear that forgiveness is something we do for ourselves, not for the person we are forgiving. If you hate someone, its you that feels that hatred, not them. Our negative feelings limit us, trapping us in a world where unfairness and sorrow rule. When we forgive, we transcend that view and the world becomes a brighter place. Forgiveness is the letting go mechanism. They are one and the same. Without tapping, it can be difficult to forgive, as we hold on to the feeling. When you tap, forgiveness becomes automatic. Who do you need to forgive? Make a list of all the people you hate, or are angry at, or you feel have wronged you in some way. Include by default all members of your family, even if you have a good relationship with them. Include your teachers, school friends, your ex-partners and their partners or ex-partners. For each person on the list, start by asking yourself, what feelings do I have towards this person? When did I feel that feeling? The answer tends to come easily, the person, the event, and how they made you feel are often closely linked. If you have a good relationship with the person already, look for any negative feelings underneath the positive ones. What stops you loving that person completely and utterly and unreservedly? Its often our closest friends and most loved relatives that wound us most deeply. 70

Tap Yourself Free When you have tapped away all the feelings in the memories, you should reach a sense of peace when you think of that person. If you cant find more memories, you can tap away any feelings you still have towards them without tracing the feeling back. I often ask students to imagine bumping into that person in the street, and even asking them for a coffee. You dont have to actually do this; you dont have to even ever see them again. Being in a place where you could, emotionally, is whats important. Quite often people will say well, they would ignore me, they wouldnt want to talk to me, and you can tap that too. Maybe the other person has forgiven you as well. If they havent it doesnt matter, the important thing is that the negative feelings you had associated with that person are gone. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder In a way, every problem caused by negative feelings trapped in our memory is a very mild form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD occurs when memories include particularly intense feelings, including physical pain. Strong feelings are always with us, we feel the relevant feelings all the time to a varying degree, and we relive the event any time we close our eyes. According to Wikipedia, Symptoms can include general restlessness, insomnia, aggressiveness, depression, dissociation,

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Tap Yourself Free emotional detachment and nightmares. A potential symptom is memory loss about an aspect of the traumatic event. Because the feeling is always there, one strategy people develop is to detach from all their emotions generally. If the feeling activates our fight or flight response, restlessness, insomnia and aggressiveness will follow. The memory loss is due to the memory being so painful to visit that our sub-conscious mind will not go there. Tapping is the ideal treatment for PTSD, as it goes directly to the memory and releases the emotional charge stored there. Gary Craig, inventor of EFT, personally worked with Vietnam War Veterans with profound results. Emotive videos of some of the time he spent there are available from Garys website, www.emofree.com. Every time you tap, you become a little happier.

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Tap Yourself Free 6. Living the Good Life

It scares me how often I dont get the answer yes when I ask people if they are happy. They say sort of, or no, not really, or Magnus, no-ones really happy, look around you. I eventually beat my depression away, before I first learned about EFT, with my own invented form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I realised that I often acted on my negative feelings, and that just created vicious circles. So I decided to try and act as if I felt good. My life philosophy became Do whatever makes you happy. Most people had two immediate criticisms of this; what if that made someone else unhappy, and what if it just led to short term happiness but caused you problems later. My answer was that true happiness was a gift shared by all, and a lasting one. Hurting other peoples feelings doesnt really make you happy, although sometimes people will blame you when they are just making themselves unhappy through their own actions. Likewise, short-sighted happiness requires denial of what you know full well are the later consequences of your actions. Still, it worked for me, and happiness became a habit. When I really got stuck in to my emotional detoxification, however, I found that I was still carrying the feelings of depression with me. I had just learned to ignore them and live with them.

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Tap Yourself Free Now that philosophy has become Do whatever makes you happy, and tap away anything that doesnt. That gets you to true happiness. True happiness goes all the way down. I am truly happy. This isnt to say I am happy all the time. Its the difference between being deeply sad inside but occasionally having happy days, and being fundamentally happy inside but occasionally having bad ones. At our core, we are happy, that is our natural state. We are born basically happy, and learn to feel negative feelings on top of that, until we assume they are just part of who we are. When you do a lot of letting go of those feelings, at some point you hit a threshold when enough of that central core shines through. You realise that your true nature is someone who is basically happy, and a good person, and so is everyone else. Sleeping Well I used to take forever to get to sleep, and had tremendous difficulty getting out of bed, no matter how much sleep Id had. This was in contrast to friends of mine. I remember going on a trip with Air Cadets once, and a friend of mine fell asleep in the back of the mini-bus. He nodded off as soon as it started moving, and slumped over the person next to him. After a little while he fell forwards, onto the floor of the bus, without waking up. His ear 74

Tap Yourself Free was just above a hole in the floor, beneath which the engine occasionally backfired loudly. He slept through all of this. At sleepover parties I noticed that certain friends would jump up as soon as they woke up, and be cooking breakfast while I was cosy in my sleeping bag, unable to move without great effort. One of the greatest techniques for self-development is modelling, where you look at another person and decide you want some attribute that they have, for yourself. They will also have certain behavioural patterns that lead to that attribute, and the idea with modelling is to adopt the behaviour patterns until you have the attribute too. Having decided I wanted to be able to not just get out of bed when I wanted, but to jump out of bed, with all the joy in the world, and that I wanted to be able to fall asleep in minutes whenever I lay my head down, I set about modelling the early risers and easy sleepers that I knew. The difference is one of emotional state. Its not the noise outside, or that you are uncomfortable, or the thoughts in your head that keep you awake, its the emotional reaction you have to them. If they trigger your fight or flight response, the last thing your body wants to do is sleep. When you wake up, it doesnt matter how tired you are or not, its mostly your emotional state that dictates whether or not you feel like getting out of bed. Certainly its more difficult if you were in the middle of a sleep cycle or simply didnt get enough sleep. 75

Tap Yourself Free Sleep cycles are usually around 2 hours long, although it varies from person to person. You start off sleeping lightly, and then you head into a state of deeper sleep, where different physical and mental processes give you the rest you really need. At some point the period of deeper sleep ends naturally, and you doze lightly until you enter another deep sleep. Its at this point that you wake up naturally in the night, for a bathroom trip or glass of water. When you wake up naturally, at the end of a sleep cycle, after 7-9 hours of sleep, and still dont feel like you really want to get out of bed, thats a good clue that an emotional component is in play. Think about how easy it is to jump out of bed when youre catching a flight to go on holiday, even though you were up all night packing. Think about how hard it is to wake up when its time to get up for work when you hate your job, no matter how much sleep you had. True tiredness occurs when youve been working hard and your body really needs time to recharge. Emotional tiredness occurs when your emotional system is just letting you know that you are in a situation when youve felt true tiredness before. I call this FakeTired. I noticed one day waking up, that my alarm clock actually made me feel like staying in bed. Id woken up naturally before it had gone off, having had enough sleep and being roused by noises outside and the sun filtering through the curtains. I felt like I

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Tap Yourself Free wanted to get up. Then my alarm clock went off, and I instantly felt like staying in bed for longer. How many times had my alarm clock gone off in the past and woken me up before I was ready, with my mind conscious but my body still feeling like it was in the deeper part of a sleep cycle? That feeling became associated with the sound of the alarm. Try thinking of how your alarm clock sounds now does it instantly make you feel tired? Recently I attended a series of lectures over a weekend. I knew that it would be interesting and I wanted to give it my fullest attention, so I made sure to get an early night and to be well fed and rested in the morning. I turned up to the seminar room feeling bright and awake, ready to learn. Ten minutes into the lecture my head started to feel cloudy and confused, and I felt an overwhelming feeling of tiredness behind my eyes. I instantly started wondering if Id not had as much sleep as Id thought. I started taking sips of water to wake me up, and popped to the toilet for fresh air and to slap myself in the face. Having run up and down the stairs, I returned to the seminar room feeling wide awake again. When I sat down I instantly felt tired again. I realised I wasnt really tired this was FakeTired. I started tapping away in my head it would have been odd to do it in the seminar room and quickly felt better. After some more tapping in the break and that

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Tap Yourself Free evening, the next day I felt awake and alert throughout, despite drinking alcohol and going out later than Id intended. I realised that my body was just reminded of the way it had felt during lectures at Cambridge, during which I would have at various times been genuinely tired, most likely hungover, depressed, and probably quite confused, depending on the lecturer. Feeling good when you wake up often determines how the whole day is going to go. Although you could just tap these feelings when you next wake up, its hard to tap when you dont feel like it. Its good enough to just imagine how you think youre going to feel tomorrow morning, and tap whatever you think of in advance. Or tap whatever feelings you remember feeling when you woke up this morning. Do that a few days running and youll be waking up easily. Be thorough, start by asking yourself how do I feel when I wake up?, and then when you have tapped enough that you think youll feel fine, ask whats stopping me bounce out of bed with all the joy in the world? I often use working on waking up in the morning as a route to helping with depression. If youre depressed, then thats what stops you feeling like getting out of bed. When you wake up, the collection of negative feelings that makes up your depression starts waking up too, and its a good way to find them and tap them away, one at a time, until they are all gone.

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Tap Yourself Free Likewise, you can ask, whats stops me from falling asleep? Answers like its noisy outside or Im not comfortable can be tapped easily remember its your emotional reaction to them that actually keeps you awake. Lots of thoughts running around my head can be tapped as itself, but really you have to find the thoughts one-by-one and tap them away. These are the thoughts or feelings that have arisen during the day, or just are always with you, and you need to be specific in dealing with them. The moment you put your head down and get some peace and quiet your brain turns its attention to dealing with those thoughts, thats why they all start running around in your head. This makes last thing at night the ideal time to do tapping. See what thought or feeling comes up, and tap it. Have you ever felt so tired you couldnt sleep? Thats FakeTired again. Because the feeling isnt true tiredness, but actually comes from the survival mechanism, the feeling is fear-based. That fear activates the fight-or-flight response, so even though you feel tired you just cant sleep. One way to temporarily banish FakeTired or any negative feeling is to have a powernap. Closing your eyes and quietening your mind distracts your mind from whatever association was bringing up the FakeTired feelings. Im not convinced that powernaps do much at all for true tiredness; I dont really take them any more.

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Tap Yourself Free It takes a bit of persistence, but it is very easy to use tapping to turn yourself into someone who can fall asleep and wake up with ease. If your sleep is restless and disturbed, thats something that will tend to sort itself out after a lot of tapping. During sleep our minds are led to any particularly traumatic memories we have, and the feelings in those memories give us nightmares. If you can remember the nightmare and relate it to a particular memory, you are well on your way, but not everyone can do this easily. You can also train your partner to tap the points for you while you are asleep if they notice you having a bad dream. The top of the head point is very useful for this. In general though, as you tap away the things that stress you day to day, and as you tap towards happiness, youll find that the quality of your sleep improves automatically. Self Acceptance Happiness and Confidence both stem from Self-Acceptance. You cant be truly happy until you are happy with yourself, and you cant be confident unless you accept who you are. On the other hand, you can be unhappy or shy, but accept yourself as those things. Its actually a lot easier to change them once you accept them, because the negative feelings you feel about those things binds you to them, and limits you from seeing any other possible way of being.

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Tap Yourself Free Most peoples feelings towards themselves vary throughout the day. We all make mistakes and we all let ourselves down from time to time, but some people are harsher on themselves than others. Some people hate themselves even when there doesnt really seem to be a good reason on a particular day. The reason is they are still hating themselves for something they did in the past, and it could be something from a long time ago. Often they are consciously aware of what it is, but sometimes they are not, sometimes people hate themselves and dont even know why. Whenever we ask ourselves how we feel about ourselves, our mind deliberately digs out a memory when we felt ashamed, or guilty, or inadequate. The feeling comes from however we felt that day, and we look at our present or future situation through the lens provided by the feeling. Because that feeling is there, no matter how hard we try to feel differently about the current situation, our thoughts will keep coming back to the same conclusion. How do you feel about yourself? What is the strongest negative feeling that comes up? When have you felt it before? What was the first time you felt it? My friend Trey told me he always felt inadequate, around women, and around his superiors at work. He works in the city and is good at his job, but whenever he hands in a piece of work he feels like 81

Tap Yourself Free its not good enough, and when he gets praise he feels like he doesnt deserve it. We found that feeling, and traced it back to one of the first pieces of homework he had at secondary school. Hed missed the previous lesson and didnt understand what he had to do. When he told the teacher this, the teacher offered to help him out after school, so Trey stayed behind after the last lesson of the day. While he arrived at the classroom, all the school drop-outs were there for detention, and while Trey was waiting for the teacher he started to feel like he must be one of them. He saw his friends walking home out the window and felt like he wasnt as good as them. The teacher that had offered to help him had been called away, and sent another teacher to handle the detention. That teacher didnt believe that Trey wasnt there as punishment and made him stay for the full hour. During that hour Trey felt worse and worse, and more and more inadequate for not being able to explain his situation and for not being able to do the work in the first place. That was the feeling he felt when talking to his superiors at work. Out the window, a girls after-school club were playing Lacrosse, and watching them he drew the conclusion that no girl would be interested in him because he was sat inside with the kids he considered to be drop-outs. He described watching girls dance in 82

Tap Yourself Free nightclubs, and feeling like there was a sheet of glass separating them from him and how he couldnt reach them. That one event coloured his whole perception of himself from that day. Rather than focussing on his successes, all he could see and would expect to see was more inadequacy with women and at work. In retrospect I was rather surprised that it was this simple. When Trey came to see me, he had a page long list of areas where he didnt feel he was good enough in his life. It was the same feeling connecting them all. After tapping that memory he looked at the list again and actually started laughing. He started explaining how none of those things were really as bad as hed thought. Now that the feeling was gone, his world had already started to change. Every time you tap, you grow a little bit more into the person you want to be.

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Tap Yourself Free 7. Wealth

Money should be easy. It should come to you in return for doing something you enjoy, something you are good at and uniquely qualified to do. In fact, plenty of money should come to you for doing nothing at all other than being yourself. You deserve to have everything you need in life and more than a few of the things you want. If any of the above conflicted with your beliefs, then those beliefs are limiting, and it would help you to change them. Even though I believe what I wrote above, Im not going to persuade you that those ideas are true. But I am going to encourage you to try tapping your conflicting beliefs. You cant tap away true beliefs, just like you cant tap away positive feelings so it doesnt hurt to try. Wouldnt it be nice if they really were true! Is it possible that you could at least shift your view of the world a little bit in that direction? Think about what sort of difference that might have on your life. The best book I have found on the subject of money is The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles. Its available for free on the internet and I am producing a tapping guide for it. The style is a little old-fashioned, it is around 100 years old, but it describes timeless principles that are equally valid now as when they are written.

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Tap Yourself Free The central idea is that to gain wealth in the form of cash, you give value in other ways that is greater than the cash value you receive. I spent some time with two friends studying that book together, and we tapped away all the conflicting beliefs we could find. Things are (slowly) starting to happen. We changed the world in our heads, and the real world is being brought into line. How do you feel about people that are wealthier than you? Distrustful, jealous? Do you assume that they cheated to get where they are? How do you respond when you see someone speed past in a fancy car? I used to call them names under my breath. Now I tend to think nice car. If you have negative feelings towards rich people, your subconscious mind translates that into negative feelings towards you being rich. Why would you want to become something that you hate? Those feelings trap you and they need to be tapped. Make a picture of how your life would be if you had more money. How does it feel to be in that picture? Pretty good, I hope. Dig deeper under the surface and you might find feelings that you dont deserve it, or guilt, or disbelief. Tap those away and becoming wealthier will start to feel like a more realistic possibility. This isnt a magical process, you have to take action to bring about what you want. But the actions you take depend on what you believe is possible.

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Tap Yourself Free Success Barriers We all know what we should be doing to bring more wealth into our lives. Apply for a new job, go for a promotion, grow our business somehow, make new investments. Success Barriers are the fears and doubts that stop us doing these things. There are also more subtle success barriers that lead us to sabotage our efforts. Spending money frivolously, or distrusting our business partners. Once again, the magic question is whats stopping you? In all the clients I have worked with who wanted to improve their lives, no-one has ever given me a good answer to that question. Even if the barrier seems immovable, once you tap it, your mind suddenly starts finding ways to circumvent it. The slight exception is I dont have enough money, and there are often even ways around that. You can tap away the beliefs that stop you looking for outside investment or loans, for example. The other way around that is time just start saving and be patient. How to Achieve any Goal The way to achieve any goal then, is to make a picture of where you want to be, and take a step towards making it happen. This is true whether you want to make a cup of coffee or start an airline. You might want to break down big goals into several smaller ones, but it is still just a case of repeatedly applying this principle.

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Tap Yourself Free Your negative feelings and beliefs hold you back at every step. Some people say they dont know what they want the truth is they do know, but they talk themselves out of wanting it because they think it is unrealistic. So these beliefs can even stop you making a clear picture in the first place. Once you have made a clear picture, imagine what it would feel like to be in that picture. Associate yourself fully with it this means imagine being right in the centre of the picture as if you had achieved the goal. Probably overall you want to be there, but the negative feelings that are there will cause self-sabotage. When you come to take steps towards the picture, because your sub-conscious doesnt really want to go there, it will take the wrong steps. When you have a clear picture and feel only positive feelings about it, work out the first few steps you could take towards it. When you start out you dont need to know precisely how to make it happen at any point, you just need to know what the next step is you need to take. Then look at what is stopping you take that next step or steps. Once you have tapped away whatever is stopping you, you will find yourself taking that step automatically and effortlessly. In my experience people dont need extra motivation. If they want motivation to do something, they must want to do it, and that is enough to motivate them. They just need the relevant barriers to be removed. Its those barriers that make things feel like hard work, because they are hard work to push through. Because most 87

Tap Yourself Free people dont know a way to just remove the barriers, they think they need more motivation to push through them. This just creates more stress, and never really works anyway. My friend Paul works in IT, but he wants to be a fashion photographer. Hes been pursuing that as a hobby, and now has the experience and contacts to do it for real. I asked him to imagine himself doing that, and what his life would look like a year from now. He vividly described the scene at one of his future fashion shoots, and I asked him how it felt to be there. Great, he said. Im doing what I love. I asked him if, at the back of his mind, there were any worries or doubts about being there, and after thinking, he said yes, Im worried my work wont be good enough. His work is fantastic, Ive seen it and he constantly receives great feedback from it. I asked him if there was a time hed felt like his work wasnt good enough. Yes, he said. One paid shoot he did a while ago, the client had been disappointed. When we tapped away how hed felt about that he started to remember how fussy the client had been, and how he hadnt been able to do things they way hed wanted it really hadnt been his fault at all. He became happier about being in the picture, and I asked him how it would feel, to imagine himself now stepping into it. Scary, he said. Like Im drowning. We traced that feeling back to the first time he dived into a swimming pool off a diving

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Tap Yourself Free board. He hadnt been expecting to end up so deep under water, and in the seconds before he surfaced, felt like he was drowning. To his sub-conscious mind, the idea of diving into the world of fashion photography reminded him of the memory of diving into that pool he was doing something new and exciting, and as hed learned, that lead to the feeling of drowning. Its funny sometimes, what holds us back. Its incredibly cheesy sometimes but thats just the way our mind works. When I was working on the draft of this book, I became incredibly frustrated, feeling like I wanted to jump up from the desk and walk around the room. It didnt make sense, because I was very happy with what Id written and knew what else I wanted to say. Im not completely sure where those feelings came from, but I managed to tap them away, I think they were to do with writing essays at Cambridge, and being frustrated because I didnt understand what was being asked of me. When the draft was nearly finished, I started to feel like I wanted some feedback on it, so I sent it off to a couple of friends. They read it and wrote back saying it was great. I was disappointed I wanted constructive criticism so I could make it better. I put it aside for a few days, and when I came back to it, the feeling was stronger. As I thought more about it, it became clear to me that I didnt just want feedback, I wanted someone to sit down and write it with me. I closed my eyes and focussed on the feeling, and realised that 89

Tap Yourself Free what I really wanted was my mum to sit down and help me with it. This was of course, ridiculous, and I instantly remembered getting stuck with my GCSE history coursework about Christopher Columbus. I hadnt studied, didnt understand and didnt really care. I just wanted to hand the project in and forget about it. After trying to help me, my mum eventually sat down at the computer and finished the project based on one word answers from me. After tapping away that memory I finished the draft. It sat on my computer for a couple of weeks until I realised I didnt really want to show it to anyone. I was getting the hang of this now, and thought ok, what feeling is this? It was shame and embarrassment. I recalled working on a school project on Dungeons and Dragons when I was 11. My dad brought home an Apple Mac from the office at weekends for me to use. Very few people really had computers like that in those days and I was the only kid in the class who had wordprocessed his project. Dad also printed the project on the office laser and used a binding machine there. It looked very professional compared to all the hand-written projects, and all the other kids teased me and called me a computer geek. Even though it got an A minus, I felt bad about it. When I sat down to write my book, my mind was warning me that if I finished it, I might feel those feelings again.

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Tap Yourself Free So all that time Id been finding it hard to write my book because I wanted my mum to help me with it, and because I was worried about a bunch of 11 year-olds laughing at me. How to Learn any Skill You have an amazing capacity to learn, your mind is a highly effective learning machine. It takes time to learn skills, of course, thats one reason it helps to start early. When you look at accomplished musicians or artists, they always started at an early age. There is another reason that its harder to teach an old dog new tricks. As we get older we also pick up certain beliefs that become barriers to learning. One night after leaving a nightclub in London, I was feeling particularly charged and energetic, and decided to try walking along a railing between the road and the pavement. I wasnt drunk, I was just feeling good. I swung myself up using a signpost, and found myself standing on the railing. It was about an inch wide, and wobbling rather a lot as I stood on it. I let go of the signpost and took a step, and then another, looking at my feet as the railing wobbled from side to side. Almost instantly I made a picture in my head of falling off, and so I did, jumping back down onto the pavement. I took a deep breathe and tapped Even though Im going to fall off and Even though its wobbling, and jumped right back up again.

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Tap Yourself Free This time I didnt make that picture in my head of falling off, I felt calmer, and focused on my goal, which was walking ten metres along a wobbling railing as cars and buses whizzed past me. I realized that looking at my feet didnt help, and instead focused on a lamppost directly ahead of me. In a calm and relaxed manner, I walked all the way along the railing. My friend Matt was with me, and he doesnt believe in tapping. He said he thought he could do it anyway, and hoisted himself up. He took about two steps before falling off. I asked him if hed made the picture of falling off before it happened, and he said he had. We did a couple of rounds of tapping. Then he climbed up and walked right along in one go. Think how long it would have taken for us to learn to do that without tapping. It would have required great self-discipline to avoid making the picture in our minds of falling off. It only occurred to me not to look at my feet when I was more relaxed and clear about what I was doing. You can apply this technique to any skill you might want to learn. It still takes time and persistence to learn the skill, but its a lot easier when you tap away the fears and nervous feelings that make it difficult. I wish Id had Tapping when I took my driving test at 18. Im very comfortable behind the wheel now, but at the time I got very tense, particularly parallel parking and doing three-point-turns. Id be

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Tap Yourself Free worried about holding up other traffic, and would rush the manoeuvre, usually over or under-steering. Whenever I do public speaking I look carefully for nervous feelings about being in front of an audience and tap them away. When you tap away the emotional significance of standing in front of a group of people, public speaking becomes as easy as having a chat with some friends. Recently I bumped into a former student who was very pleased with his results using tapping to improve his interview technique. He thanked me for having taught him and for encouraging him to apply tapping to everything. Hed had a recent job interview that he thought was his best ever, and had gotten the job. I was pleased that Id been able to help, but it was really him that did it he was right for the job and perfectly capable of communicating that. Tapping away interview nerves just allowed him to truly give his best in the interview. As a last example, Ive helped a few university students with their studying technique. Id always known that the most successful students werent necessarily the brightest, but really the ones that just got stuck into studying. Part of this is self-discipline, but a positive outlook is also essential. I used to look at my notes and think things like Ill never understand this and theres too much to do, and of course those beliefs came true. Tap those beliefs away and its much easier to study. If you actually do the work, you cant help but do well.

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

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Tap Yourself Free 8. Finding Love and Healthy Relationships

In no other area of our lives do emotions run higher than in and around relationships. Its also the one area where most people readily acknowledge that their emotional issues affect them. Our past relationships affect our current and future ones, and usually not in an ideal way. Everyone knows someone who has been hurt from a bad break-up who is now reluctant to be open to new people. A female friend once told me that the rule is that it takes half the length of time a relationship lasted to fully get over it. This sounded like an awful limiting belief to me, and besides, I knew people who it clearly didnt apply to. Some people bounce back immediately after a relationship ends. They have a couple of casual flings and sooner or later find something serious again. Other people are still bitter about their ex-partner five years after the relationship ended. The difference between those people is the state of their emotional health, some people find it natural to forgive themselves and their previous partner, and some people dont. Each wound from the past has a trigger. When our current partner behaves in a particular way or says a certain thing, it stirs up the feelings stored in a memory of when a previous partner behaved in that way. When we spend a lot of time with someone, we end up with intimate knowledge of their triggers and they of ours.

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Tap Yourself Free Compatibility is determined by how often you trigger each other with your natural behaviour, and how willing you are to learn to avoid doing that. The trigger can be tapped away though, and the wound healed. The fewer wounds you have the more open to different relationship possibilities you will find yourself. Most of my experience is in the first few hours of a relationship, Ive worked very hard on becoming the sort of person who is open to meeting new people, so that is my area of expertise. I did work with one couple who were having difficulties, and I simply sat them down and had them take turns to answer the question what is it that annoys you about your partner? tapping on whatever they said each time. They certainly became more amiable towards each other after that session, but I think by then things were already well past the point of no return. In general though, the same principles that make someone happy and balanced outside a relationship will keep them happy and balanced within one. If you know yourself you can be surer that you are going into a relationship for the right reasons. Being ready for love is another quality that develops after a lot of growth (ie, tapping) in other areas, it wont always be something you can deliberately work towards as a goal. When you hold on to strong negative feelings of any kind, regardless of what they are directly connected with, they tend to interrupt the flow of positive feelings. Let go of those negative emotions, and the positive ones start to flow - including romantic love. 96

Tap Yourself Free Why you must first love yourself We tend to like other people for two reasons, either because they have something in common with us that resonates with that aspect of ourselves, or they have a quality that we want, one that is opposite to one that we have. At the same time, like attracts like, and opposites attract. The characteristics we share make us feel connected, give us the re-assurance that the other person is on our wavelength, and that we are not alone in the world. The opposing characteristics keep things interesting, and are a way we each provide value to the other person. Ive noticed in successful couples I know that the ways in which they are different are often the more superficial personality characteristics. Underneath those, the deeper worldview and way of being that both people hold are similar if not identical. The reason that you must first love yourself is that the person you are compatible with is the same as you in the most important ways. If you dont love yourself then you wont love them. When you dont love yourself, and dislike particular qualities in yourself, its natural to look for the opposing quality in a potential partner. Its not fair to expect someone else to make up your own shortcomings, and this creates tension in the relationship. When Ive worked with guys coaching them in confidence and how to start conversations with girls in bars, their biggest problem 97

Tap Yourself Free is that they want what they cant have. They are often shy, dressed like computer programmers and frankly, usually a little bit miserable, but they want to pull the pretty party girls that are drunkenly dancing on tables. They dont like themselves, and want to get an attractive girl so they can believe that they are attractive themselves. They probably already know twenty girls that they could easily get, but because those girls are shy, drably dressed and a little bit miserable, they would not make the guy feel better about himself and are therefore not interesting. If they could realise that they had value in themselves (computer programmers do, after all, make the world go round these days), and learn to like themselves, then they wouldnt be looking to another person to validate them as human beings. They would suddenly notice that there are lots of things to like about themselves and about the shy girls. Theyd also notice that the party girls arent so great after all they are often just as insecure as the shy guys themselves, and hard to connect with anywhere other than the dancefloor or the bedroom. If you really want the party girl, you have to become the party guy. Tapping can help with that too, but the first step is still to accept yourself deeply and completely . Only when you accept the way you are can you really begin to change it.

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Tap Yourself Free The shadow of past relationships I was out with some friends in a bar, and waiting for a girl I was seeing to come and join us. She was a bit late, and after a while I got a text from her to say she wouldnt make it, shed gone drinking after work and was now going home to pass out. I instantly assumed she was cheating on me. After a minute I realised that was ridiculous. She liked me a lot and most likely had just gotten carried away drinking with her work colleagues and gone home. Why had I drawn that conclusion? I traced back the jealous feeling that Id gotten when I received her text, and realised that I had unconsciously been reminded of a time a few years ago when I was seeing a girl who really had cheated on me. If Id reacted based on that feeling Id have needlessly ended a relationship that we both enjoyed for a while after that, simply because my sub-conscious mind had assumed that both girls were behaving the same way. Any negative feeling that a previous partner or potential partner has given you in the past becomes associated with all members of the opposite sex. It literally builds into a phobia of new relationships. For men this tends to affect their confidence when they have the opportunity to move things forward with a particular girl and make a pass, for women it makes them closed when men make passes at them.

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Tap Yourself Free This is one reason many people first get together under the influence of alcohol. Alcohol relaxes the body and detaches you from those feelings. Men become more confident and women become more receptive particularly towards the end of the night when both sides become more sexually aroused. I met a lovely girl and we dated a few times. After the third or forth time wed seen each other she stopped responding to my texts and didnt answer the phone. A few nights later, at 3am I got a drunken text message from her saying she liked me a lot, but didnt want to see me again because we were too different. I persuaded her to meet me for a coffee, and asked her why she thought that. She didnt know! She had just started to feel that way. We were different, but we also got on very well I didnt really see why it was making her uncomfortable. I asked her if she got that feeling a lot when she met new guys, and she said yes. I asked her when the first time was that she felt it, and it was her first boyfriend at 18. After liking him a lot at first shed quickly realised that he was different. Later in the conversation I told her more about tapping, and had her tap even though were too different as an example. We did a couple of rounds on different aspects of it, and mysteriously, she found herself wanting to see me again. I should point out that you cant tap someone into liking you if they dont already but you can help them remove the blocks they might have stopping them feeling it or expressing it, if they are willing.

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Tap Yourself Free Its the same with longer term relationships. If the love is gone, then its gone. But if its still there, underneath layers and layers of negativity, you can probably improve things by tapping that negativity away. When resentment between two people builds up, you are no longer dealing with each other in the moment. One time your husband gets angry and shouts at you becomes every time your husband got angry and shouted at you. It all piles up until it gets too much. Our unconscious thoughts dont distinguish between different partners, so the resentment for a particular thing most likely goes back to previous relationships, and even further back to our parents. If you dont like the way you feel when your boyfriend talks to you in a particular way, its probably because it reminds you of when your dad talked to you in that way. Eventually the aim is to make a list of all your previous partners, look for negative feelings you have towards them, and tap those feelings away. Sometimes a particular time they made you feel that way will jump out, other times it wont, you can just tap the feeling that is there now. Then imagine seeing them a chance meeting in the street, or when you see them through mutual friends, or whatever. How do you feel when you see them? Again, tap those feelings away, until you are comfortable and happy to see them. Forgiveness is a curious thing. When the strong feelings of hurt are gone, you start to see previous events in a different light. 101

Tap Yourself Free Maybe you dont excuse the other persons behaviour, but perhaps you start to understand it. It doesnt mean you have to see the other person again, and it certainly doesnt mean they will want to see you. It does free you from having the same feelings and making the same mistakes in the future. Finding the right person Plain and simple, its a numbers game. The more people you meet and get to know, the more likely you are to meet someone you like. Fate still plays a hand, but by getting out and meeting as many of the right people as possible, you can certainly stack the deck. When you meet the right person it definitely feels like they are one in a million. But if you actually count how many people you meet in between the people you look on favourably as potential partners, it turns out its more like one in a hundred. How many new people did you meet in the last month? Most peoples social circles are very insular. Going to the same bars or clubs with the same people and not meeting anyone new, or even not going out that much at all. It doesnt take that much of a shift to start meeting more people. There are new people around you all the time. Its not like you have to date them all, we tend to judge whether or not someone could be a potential partner very quickly. We may not decide that we want to jump into bed with them right away, but having decided that we dont, we very rarely change that opinion later.

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Tap Yourself Free There are plenty of resources that cover the subject in more detail, but in general, men need to make the moves, and women need to be receptive. Its a natural process, and once you have tapped away everything that stops you moving things forward, or showing interest and allowing him to move them forward, things will just start to happen. People often think too far in advance well I dont want the hassle of getting to know someone new, so I shouldnt give him my phone number. You can tap away the feeling of hassle, and then you realise that the next step is just meeting for a coffee, and that that would be a fun thing to do. It all comes down to fear, our emotions cutting us off from connecting with people. Whether we are shy or lonely or cynical or bitter, the basic error is in our unconscious mistaking aspects of replication for something that might threaten our survival. Every time you tap, you become more open to love.

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Tap Yourself Free 9. Health

Medicine readily recognises that there is a statistical link between stress and illness, and this link has been acknowledged for a long time. Doctors still do not really understand the mechanisms behind this, even though it is well understood in the alternative health industry. Intuitively is it obvious; if you are stressed, your mind is directing the bodys resources to dealing with whatever it perceives is stressing you. Your body is being prepared for fight or flight, and there are various physiological measures associated with that. If its doing that, its not directing resources to longer term health aims such as cell growth and repair, and maintaining the immune system. Your body is supposed to enter this state when it is directly threatened. Its a useful state to be in if you are being chased by a bear, an experience that, assuming you manage to run fast enough, will last a matter of minutes. When your body learns to enter this state when youre at work it becomes a problem, its not designed to spend all day like that. There is a whole spectrum of negative emotions, but they are all basically fear-based and they are all stress. They all affect your health in different ways, although its only when you feel these feelings constantly that they cause problems. Feeling negative feelings from time to time is perfectly healthy, as long as they dont stick around.

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Tap Yourself Free Do you know someone who just never seems to get ill? Do they tend to be pretty chilled out and relaxed about life too? This is not a coincidence. Not only do we feel negative emotions in the body, but they are held there too - or at least in the brains map of the body. Each feeling, and thus each negative association or belief, is connected to muscular tension. When muscles are chronically tense, this restricts the flow of blood and lymph reducing the supply of nutrients to that area and the removal of toxins from it. Simply feeling negative feelings impacts our health directly. Of course negative feelings and beliefs also influence our behaviour, which also impacts our health. Our behaviour determines what we eat and how much exercise we get. The Emotional Diet For many people, food is part of their strategy for dealing with negative feelings. Sugary and fatty foods in particular distract us from how we feel. The heavy feeling of digesting heavy foods masks whatever emotions are bothering us. If you know that you eat when you feel bad, would you find it easier to eat better if you didnt feel bad so often? There is so much conflicting dietary advice out there, its confusing and difficult to draw any sort of consensus. Im certainly not going to pretend to be significantly educated in nutrition, and if I was, I wouldnt want to add to the confusion. 105

Tap Yourself Free Your body actually knows exactly what it wants to eat, its just that most people dont listen to it. Instead, we listen to flashy advertising, and our own negative feelings as they turn to cravings. I heard that if you take a baby that is just learning to feed itself, and lay out in front of it a smorgasbord of different foods, it intuitively goes for what it really needs nutritionally. It will feed on things like freshly mashed banana, avocado, apple, and so on, but leave processed baby foods full of huge amounts of salt and refined sugar. I remember tricking my little brother into eating stuff, by pretending I was going to eat it myself and leading him into stealing it first. Endless charades like miming the train going into the tunnel of his mouth, or aeroplane spoons. It makes no sense that a child would evolve to avoid eating food that was good for it. On holiday in Ibiza I found myself eating too much fast food, and basically gave myself a touch of scurvy after a week, not taking into account that I needed extra vitamins due to the sunshine. I was walking over to meet my friends in a restaurant, and saw a stall by the side of the road selling melons. My mouth watered and I felt a deep desire to eat one. Sure enough, talking over dinner with my friend, I realised that I was vitamin deficient and that my body was trying to tell me something. I bought some vitamin C tablets (unfortunately laced with aspartame) and drowned myself in fresh fruit smoothies.

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Tap Yourself Free Look for the feeling that is telling you to eat a particular food. If there is a feeling that tells you I need chocolate or I must have a coffee, and if you characterise it as a negative feeling, then try tapping it away. If the feeling is still there (you can only tap negative feelings), then go ahead and eat whatever you want. Cravings are certainly partly physiological, but in my experience, maybe 9/10ths of the feeling is emotional. You can reduce it by tapping to the point where you can comfortably ignore it. As you tap the important issues in your life, you will probably hit many of the triggers that lead you to eat unhealthy foods. This will happen automatically as you deal with things, and you can also prioritise by looking at the feelings you get that drive you to eat the foods you see as unhealthy. Always ask one question; what feeling is telling me to eat this?, and when you can, look into the future and ask how will I feel when I have eaten it? Adapt your diet so that it gives you good feelings. Eating a heavy English breakfast used to make me feel beautifully full and satisfied. When I realised that the feelings that drove me to eat it were connected with loneliness and a need for love, I tapped them away. After that, I realised that the full feeling was just a way to cover up the loneliness feeling, and the same breakfast now made me feel bloated and tired. Emotions are subjective and relative. I still eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, but

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Tap Yourself Free in approximately half the quantity I used to! I enjoy it much more now. As you improve your diet you should find yourself enjoying food more, not less. If you dont like the idea of eating particular vegetables, try tapping on it. Even though courgette tastes bland and watery or Even though I dont like the texture of tomatoes whatever your thing is, if you tap it, your feelings towards those foods will change. Most people experience just three basic tastes in their diet fatty, sugary, and salty. As we reduce the overwhelming amounts of these tastes we start to notice more subtle aspects to particular foods. There is a vast spectrum of different spices to open up to, and you start to enjoy food more and more. The worst thing you can possibly do is go on a diet, your diet is just what you eat, and any improvement should be a permanent step forward. I have a friend who turned vegan overnight after reading The China Study, an excellent book that outlines the links between animal proteins and most modern diseases. Ive read it too, and Im sure that one day I will basically end up eating only raw vegan food, but for me its a much more gradual process. When I graduated university and started work, I was eating Macdonalds twice a day. Id have pancakes and hash browns, or an egg McMuffin there for breakfast, and a Big Mac for lunch, with a litre of Coca Cola. I eventually discovered Subway, which is marginally healthier, and now I am fortunate enough to live 108

Tap Yourself Free above a Pret a Manger, where I buy a salad or a wrap when I dont want to spend the time preparing lunch myself. For dinner I used to eat pizza, curry, or pasta, until one day I counted up the calories I was getting in a day and was horrified to find it was twice the recommended amount. I bought a steamer and got into the habit of buying oven-ready meat meals, basically a slab of meat with sauce, and eating that with thick-cut chips and steamed vegetables. I lost a stone in a couple of months, effortlessly. My policy is to eat whatever I feel like, but to work on how I feel. If you can tap away a feeling, its not a feeling you can trust to tell you what you want to eat. Exercise Similarly, your emotional state determines the amount of exercise you get. If you feel good, you are more likely to choose to walk instead of drive, when you can. Taking the London Underground every day, I tapped away the feelings that stopped me walking up the stairs instead of riding on the escalators. Its not a rational decision that stops you doing these things, its that when you think about doing them, your body remembers how tired similar things have made you feel in the past. But actually the times they made you feel really tired were times you were tired anyway, and if you get into the habit of doing those things they dont make you feel tired at all.

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Tap Yourself Free I live on the fourth floor in an apartment building with no elevator. After the first week or so I stopped noticing the stairs. I only notice when other people arrive at my front door complaining. I found it a hassle at first, and started to feel tired literally when I hit the first flight. After tapping those feelings away, now I only notice sometimes at the end of a long day out, when Im nearing my floor. A year or so ago I made a commitment to go to the gym and work on improving my body. I knew it wouldnt particularly make me more attractive to women, but I thought it would make me feel better about myself and that Id have more energy. I found it a great struggle to go at first, and I was very selfconscious when I was there, I really felt like gyms werent for people like me. Again, I tapped all those things away, and my confidence at the gym improved. I also tapped away my preconceived ideas about what it meant to me to be well built I believed most guys like that were likely to be less intelligent or insecure. I got into a regular habit of going to the gym for a while, but as I continued tapping, my motivation almost disappeared. I found that I could tap away a lot of the tired feelings and that that made my energy improve. Now that I accept myself I dont feel I have to go to feel better about myself. I am happier now with my body and my belly than Ive ever been.

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Tap Yourself Free This information might put you off tapping, it shouldnt. It might make you re-consider your reasons for going to the gym. Wanting a better body to feel more confident will never make you feel as good about yourself as tapping away what you dont like about yourself. I suspect that is the logic that leads guys to use steroids. Im working on building the habit of going to the gym again, but for different reasons I want more flexibility, and actually the release of tension will help tap things that I cant actually pin down to tap. But Im not sure I need the gym like I thought I did, so I can save some time and money if that turns out to be the case. In terms of the effect it has on your emotional and mental health, exercise is actually equivalent to tapping, or rather, tapping is equivalent to exercise. I am especially fond of a girl I saw for a while because of her relaxed attitude to life. She had the sort of mindset I had achieved through a lot of hard work tapping. Every day shed run a few miles around Hyde Park, and allowed her mind to wander around whatever it was that was stressing her. She called it her therapy. The tapping points on your fingers are mirrored in your toes, so its not surprising that exercise activates the releasing mechanism. Ive been trying to track down a story I heard about a psychiatric hospital that happened to be by the sea. They started taking their patients for a long walk barefoot along the beach every day, and found that they all started getting better.

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Tap Yourself Free Of course tapping is no substitute for leading an active life, but any time a doctor recommends more exercise to reduce stress, you can probably achieve faster results for a lot less effort with tapping. When youre done you should feel more able to walk when you could ride, and generally build more exercise into your every day life. Its up to you precisely how much you want to do, but having tapped around the subject, you can be sure you are doing it for the right reasons, and that you will be able to stick to whatever you decide. Food Allergies I love cheesecake, I love it more than any other dessert ever. Particularly chocolate cheesecake, which turns out is something of a misnomer as it doesnt always contain actual cheese. The only trouble was, one day I developed an allergic reaction. When Id eat a whole slice, Id get a headache, and then a migraine, would have to sleep for several hours and then probably throw up. Around that time I started buying freshly baked double chocolate cookies from the supermarket. I used to buy a bag of five and share them around the office, but that usually only left me with one. So I started buying two bags which left me with six! When I ate those during the course of an afternoon, Id get the migraine and have to go home from work sick. Hearing from a diabetic friend, it sounded very similar to the experiences he had before he was first diagnosed diabetic. It was 112

Tap Yourself Free obvious that I was sending my blood sugar levels haywire. Our bodies almost certainly havent evolved to take such a hit of refined sugar, and it was causing mine to produce buckets of insulin which overcompensated and lowered my blood sugar. One time I ate a slice of Rocky Road chocolate and marshmallow cake from Starbucks, hoping it wouldnt have the same effect on me, but it did. As the migraine came on, I started tapping the migraine feelings. When it got worse and I couldnt continue tapping I put on an mp3 that contains special beats that basically activate the same releasing mechanism that tapping does. I fell asleep, and woke up only a couple of hours later with a completely clear head. Being a relentless self-experimenter, a few weeks later I went for more Rocky Road and tapped away all the feelings that came up. This time the migraine hit me a lot less hard. Ive now reached the point where I can eat the cheesecake or Rocky Road without any ill effect. I tried eating a bag and a half of freshly baked double chocolate cookies, and found that they still made me sick, and in fact, they brought back the cheesecake effect. I dont know the full mechanism at work here, but Im wondering if there is an actual chemical in the cookies that causes the body to react with a migraine. Eating the cheesecake or the Rocky Road reminded my body of the chocolate in the cookies, and to be on the safe side it produced the same reaction. So my body had associated the chemically-caused migraine with the blood sugar effect of the refined sugar in the chocolate. 113

Tap Yourself Free This story should not be mistaken for medical advice, I probably should have played it safe and seen a doctor to find out if I was diabetic. But as it is, I tapped the symptoms and am able to enjoy cheesecake whenever I like. You may have similar experiences, but please consult a professional. I heard a story from my friend Will about his wheat allergy. When he eats wheat he gets a rash on his skin, and a similar effect in his throat and lungs that makes it hard for him to breathe. If he doesnt get an injection of adrenalin at that point he could have a very short time to live. I asked him if hed always had the allergy, and he said no. He had several stories about accidentally eating wheat and various trips to the emergency room. I asked when hed first experienced the symptoms, regardless of whether or not hed eaten wheat, and he told me he was playing football when he ran into a bush. He was pricked by a poisonous thorn and his body had reacted with a rash on his arm. What had he eaten just before playing football? Probably a sandwich. It struck me that maybe his body had associated the wheat digesting in his stomach with the rash from the bush. The rash is not a chemical reaction, its the bodys reaction to what the immune system interprets as a poison. Understandably Will declined to test my hypothesis as he didnt want to risk bringing on the allergic reaction.

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Tap Yourself Free An allergic reaction is not the same as a chemical one. If you pour acid on your arm, it will blister and burn, and pretty much everyones arm will respond in the same way. But allergic reactions are brought on by the nervous system. They differ from person to person because they are learned responses. If you have a serious allergy and decide to test your potentially fatal immune system response, I suggest you do so with the relevant emergency medicines standing by. You can definitely try tapping Hayfever. My friend Miranda used to get it really bad, from pollen and pollution. We did about 10 rounds on how the air smelled, the blocked feelings in her sinuses, and the emotional effects it made her feel pretty miserable. A few minutes later her nose started running like a tap, and a while later her sinuses were clear for the rest of the day. Every time you tap, you get a little bit healthier.

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Tap Yourself Free 10. Spiritual Matters When I began tapping in earnest, my aim was to rid myself of inappropriate negative emotions, and tension in my body. I wanted to clear the feelings from my past that were haunting my present and affecting my behaviour, tainting my relationships and standing in between me and happiness. As I made progress with this task, what started off as a quest for emotional clarity increasingly became a spiritual journey. I started to see parallels in many religious teachings and spiritual disciplines, and took whatever insight I could from studying them. It became clear to me that all religions and spiritual writings are different ways of describing the same human experience. When you detach yourself from any one paradigm this becomes an obvious conclusion to draw. The great teachers were just describing their personal experiences, from their own particular perspective. Their description becomes a religion when other ingredients are added, in particular cultural variations, common sense advice, and instructions to perpetuate that particular set of teachings. At this point, you will either see this or you wont. If you are attached to a particular religion, thats ok. You can use tapping in a way that is compatible with it, within whichever paradigm you like.

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Tap Yourself Free Sooner or later though, you will find your religious beliefs conflicting with what you intuitively know is true. I can only suggest that when this happens, you trust that your intuition is the divine speaking within you, leading to the spiritual truth behind the religious dogma. You can use tapping to test this. You cannot tap away a thought that is in line with spiritual truth. You can tap away a belief that is religious dogma, and you should, because it is hiding the truth from you. Popular religions all teach a variation on the idea that sin separates us from God. What is sin? Well, the seven deadly sins are Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed, and Sloth. You can tap all of those and the feelings related to them. Sin is negative emotion, negative emotion is sin. When you release negative emotion, you literally remove sin from your body and mind. I believe that this spiritual truth is the basis of the coming one world religion that has been prophesised for so long. It will cut through all the dogma and offer a direct experience of the releasing mechanism. Tapping certainly does that, and I see tapping as the next stage towards that spiritual truth. Probably a faster, easier, and even more accessible way of activating the releasing mechanism will emerge. 117

Tap Yourself Free Ive already mentioned that I eventually found tapping to be equivalent to Buddhist meditation. How about Catholic confession? This is clearly intended to activate the releasing mechanism. Christian healing, particularly the kind you see in evangelistic churches, where the preacher places his hand on the top of your head. All the tapping points are mirrored there, in some situations you can just tap that one point and activate the releasing mechanism. Once you start looking you can see how various rituals were once designed to activate the releasing mechanism, but how over time that has gotten lost in the dogma and ceremony of it all. It does not matter which way you want to look at it. You neednt even acknowledge any spiritual experience at all tapping makes you happier, brings you more into the moment, and gives you a feeling of being at peace with the world. Finding Your Life Purpose The first goal I work towards with students on my coaching programme is to help them find their life purpose. Ive read about many ideas on how to do this, including hiding away on a desert island for as long as it takes to work it out. What Ive found is that people pretty much already know their life purpose and what they want to do with their life, they just dont believe they can do it.

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Tap Yourself Free There are some fun questions to ask to arrive at the answer; one of them is if I was to give you a million pounds every week, for the rest of your life, what would you do? After the usual travelling, partying, and buying the old folks a house, most people find the answer they are looking for. Sometimes you need to distil the answer into a scalable purpose, but it is usually there. For me, right now, the first thing I think of when I ask myself that question is write my book. Thats how I can be sure that Im on purpose with what Im doing. Granted, Id be writing it on the beach in Hawaii, but at the end of the day, this is what I want to do. Your life purpose can also change throughout your life. I really only see myself helping people with tapping for the next 5-10 years or so. I have no idea what will happen after that. Until you find your life purpose, your default life purpose is looking for your life purpose. The best way to do that, apart from sitting down and thinking about it, is to get experience in different areas, travel, and meet new people. Another way to find your life purpose is to write down your top ten life goals, every day, for two weeks. They could be ambitious, long term goals, like climb Everest, or shorter term goals like take out the trash. Each day, just write down whatever is on your mind, and do not look at yesterdays list. After a week or so you 119

Tap Yourself Free will see your goals start to crystallise, and you will probably be able to draw out a theme. When you produce the daily list, tap away everything that might stop you achieving those goals. When the barriers disappear, you become more certain about what it is you want to achieve. Everyone has a life purpose. This doesnt necessarily mean that before you were born you set out to achieve certain things in this lifetime, but it does mean that your life experiences to date have shaped you, leaving you uniquely qualified to do something or be someone. When people come to me for help in finding what that might be, they always have similar demands. They want to find something they feel passionately about, something that does not feel like work to them, and something that is rewarding to them financially and spiritually. If you think that such a thing does not exist for you, try tapping the reasons why you think that and then see how you feel. Its easy to become disenchanted and bitter, and certainly, there may be much work to be done before you can get yourself in a situation where you can pursue your dream, but it is always there. Interpreting Dreams Now Id like to talk about the other kind of dreams, those we have while asleep. Emotional Literacy gives us another way to interpret them. 120

Tap Yourself Free Our minds work on reprocessing memories and emotion while we sleep, and this is reflected in our dreams. My students almost always report crazy dreams after intense tapping sessions. One time during a weekend workshop one attendee told me hed been having a recurring nightmare about being chased by various monsters. The night after the first day of the workshop the dream had changed, he was the one doing the chasing. Feelings from our past memories manifest in our life, and affect the way we perceive the world. Our dreams are like giving this process an empty canvas. Whatever feelings are floating around in our minds create the dream. An example for me is a feeling that I cant tap needing to pee! Whenever I drink too much before I sleep, I often have a nightmarish dream of looking for a toilet. So the feeling of needing to pee manifests in the dream. But when I do find a toilet in the dream, I obviously cant use it because my body knows Im in bed, and wont pee. So in my dream the toilets are always engaged, or unreachable, or too disgusting to use, or, in one rather memorable dream, on stage in a theatre in front of a large audience! Whatever feeling is there creates the dream, and it often brings with it images from the memory when we felt the feeling. So the dream is a signpost to whatever feeling or memory we need to deal with. 121

Tap Yourself Free Whenever I became stressed at work, Id have a dream that I was still at school retaking my A-levels. Id be walking around the school buildings, but it didnt make sense because I had left school years ago, and I wasnt sure why I was still there. Sure enough, when I tapped the feelings that were stressing me at work, they went back to my A-levels. Various theories abound as to how to interpret your dreams, and there are many interesting and pretty much completely useless books on the subject. All you need to do is find the feeling you are having in the dream, and trace it back. I often have flying dreams, particularly when Im feeling particularly effective in my life, like I can do anything. However sometimes Ill be flying, but there are electricity pylons I have to avoid, that stop me flying too high, or Ill be flying inside a building, or I simply cant fly fast enough. On one occasion I woke up in the middle of the night, tapped the frustrated and trapped feelings I was having from being caught in the electrical wires between the pylons, and went back to sleep, to find the pylons had vanished. Ive also found myself doing tapping on myself and other people within the dream. Theres no reason it shouldnt work just as well. Karma Just as we create our dreams with whatever emotions are floating around within our minds, we also create our lives. Ive already 122

Tap Yourself Free used the example of someone who feels insecure and acts a certain way causing other people to dislike them, thus creating more of the insecure feeling. Whenever you store away a certain feeling in your memory, you will later either re-create that feeling, or try to create the opposite feeling. Ever notice how bullies have always been bullied at some point by a bigger bully? Not only are they mimicking behaviour, they are looking to create a feeling of being powerful in themselves, instead of a feeling of being powerless. So when you tap and release the feeling, you also transcend the effect it has on you karmically. Whether or not this mechanism works across many lifetimes is anyones guess. I dont have enough experience of that to comment, but within our current lifetime, it certainly applies. If you grow up with parents who give you the feeling that money is scarce and you cant afford anything, whenever you think about money as an adult, you will get that feeling, even if you are being paid a larger salary than your parents ever earned, and dont have a mortgage to pay and kids to feed. If a guy you like leaves his girlfriend for you, even though it might feel good at the time, that feeling defines for you a reality where you are with a guy who will leave his girlfriends when presented with a better option. That will plant the seeds of worry in your mind that he might leave you for another girl, and the worry will

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Tap Yourself Free make you act a certain way, that even though you dont mean to, will probably lead him to leave you too. Karma is just a way of describing what happens when feelings get stuck. Tapping those feelings breaks the cycle, you see the world differently and stop creating the feeling for yourself. The Law of Attraction A related mechanism to karma is the Law of Attraction. The idea is that the process whereby feelings create more of the same feeling works for positive feelings too. So if you want something, find the feeling of gratitude you would feel if you already had it. Focussing on that feeling switches your mind from thinking about reasons you cant have something, to thinking about ways you can have it. This process is described very well in a popular DVD called The Secret, which is based on Wallace Wattles book, The Science of Getting Rich. Does the idea of focusing on something with a feeling of gratitude sound familiar to you? Of course it does, this is exactly what prayer is, and you can see the idea within most religions. The Law of Attraction works on a physical and meta-physical level. It certainly helps to take action towards getting what you want. However when you focus your mind and open it to new possibilities, you will suddenly notice helpful coincidences that help you towards your goal but seem entirely random.

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Tap Yourself Free For example when I first tried to use the Law of Attraction to bring more money into my life, I certainly started thinking of new places to advertise my services and new ways I could make money. As well as that though, the very next day I found a five pound note blowing in the street. That was a coincidence, of course, but its the sort of coincidence you see a lot when you start working with the Law of Attraction. Its helpful to start by tapping away any conflicting beliefs you might have with the idea of the universe working for you like that. Cultivate an attitude of Pronoia the irrational belief that the world is out to help you. When you have specific ideas of what you want to attract into your life, look for beliefs you have that conflict with the idea of that thing coming to you, and tap them away. I found this works very well with bringing the right sort of people into my life friends I can relate to, romantic interests I can connect with, and business partners. I use a vision board for this. When there is something I want to bring into my life, I find a picture of it online and paste it onto an image I use as my computer backdrop. So I am aware of the image every time I use my computer, my mind is constantly focussed on it. When I have a spare minute, I look for negative beliefs or feelings associated with having whatever it is, and tap them away.

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Tap Yourself Free The Nature of Beliefs I have previously tended to talk about beliefs as being characterised as positive or negative. In this sense there are beliefs that serve you, and beliefs that do not. There are also positive and negative emotions, which are a way of differentiating feelings that feel good, and those that feel bad. Negative emotions are those that threaten your survival, and they are stored differently to positive emotions. A belief is formed when we become emotionally attached to a thought. Because only negative emotion is stored in this way, it is always a negative emotion that is attached to the thought. The theory of Cognitive Dissonance says that stress arises when the world in your head is different to reality. When reality clashes with your internal representation of the world, you feel bad because the world isnt the way you think it is, or the way you think it should be, or just the way you want it to be. When you think a thought that represents the world differently than the way it really is, it generates a negative emotion. That negative emotion becomes attached to the thought. This means that if you believe something, thats a pretty good sign that it isnt true. Just to clarify that when I use the word believe, I am talking about a thought that you have that you are emotionally attached to. If you just think or know something, you arent necessarily 126

Tap Yourself Free emotionally attached to it. But the moment negative emotion is associated with a thought, the strength of the negative emotion is proportional to the difference between that thought and reality. So true perception of reality occurs when you just have thoughts; with no emotion attached to them. Ego Detachment and Enlightenment The network of beliefs in your mind is basically what forms the ego. Every time you tap, you let go of a belief, and destroy a part of your ego. Eventually, you wont have an ego left. I still have an ego, certainly. But at some point I stopped identifying with it. I tapped so much of it away that I started to recognise what thoughts were coming from my ego and what was really me. Its hard to understand this unless you experience it yourself. Many have tried to explain what this is like and I have read many of their explanations. But I didnt get it until it happened to me. Babies are born with no beliefs, and therefore no ego. When you let go of enough of your beliefs, and destroy enough of your ego, by tapping or other means, you return to that state. One way of describing this might be to say you are born again. Your beliefs trap you in the past they cause you to react to current situations the same way you did to previous situations, even if it is not quite appropriate. Only by letting go of those beliefs can you truly be in the moment. 127

Tap Yourself Free What is suffering if it is not the process of enduring negative feelings? You can certainly use tapping to reduce the negative feelings you feel day-to-day, and eliminate all but those that come from the present moment. One way Buddhism describes enlightenment is as the cessation of suffering. Im being deliberately woolly, partly because I dont have all the answers but also because I dont think words can do them justice. The only way for you to understand is to explore these ideas yourself. I found that tapping has helped me understand spiritual teachings that previously baffled me, and certainly went way beyond any other practical steps that were available for me to take. Wherever I am now, I still have a way to go, but I do know that tapping is what brought me here, and will continue to take me onwards, and that it can do the same for you. Every time you tap, you get a little bit closer to God.

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Tap Yourself Free 11. Physical Healing Tapping bridges the gap between conventional medicine and faith healing. Tapping is precise enough that you get consistent, repeatable results. If there is an emotional or spiritual root to a disease or illness, tapping is probably the best tool available right now for healing it. That emotional and spiritual healing may or may not be sufficient to allow the body to heal physically. This chapter should in no way be interpreted as medical advice. When I work with clients who have physical healing as a goal, it would be irresponsible to promise a cure. What I can promise is that any emotional issues they have will be improved and usually resolved, if they do enough tapping. I have always insisted that clients continue to seek medical advice from professionals. The alternative healthcare industry is full of quacks and charlatans. It is also full of people who sincerely believe they have ways to help people. Amongst all that there may even be methods that work. I personally am in no doubt that the way to cure any disease, is to stop whatever it is you are doing that is creating it. This may sound harsh, and you may not know what it is that you are doing that is causing your illness, but the natural state of the body is one of health. Any true cure restores the body to that natural state. There are plenty of exceptions to this of course, such as babies born with degenerative diseases. It may even be too late for a particular adult onset case to be reversed. Nevertheless, for the 129

Tap Yourself Free vast majority, disease is knowingly or unknowingly caused by some aspect of lifestyle that could have been changed. Your body is continually replacing old cells with new ones. We replace about 1% of our cells every day, although different parts of the body regenerate at different rates. The outermost layer of our skin sheds about a million cells every forty minutes. We have an entirely new outer skin every 27 days. The inner lining of the small intestine is replaced in less than a week. Taste buds last for about ten days before being replaced. Other organs take longer for example the cells in the pancreas can take more than a year. So your body is creating itself anew every day. Whether it creates itself in a health state or an unhealthy state depends just as much on your emotional and spiritual wellbeing as on your environment and genetics. Asking Your Body The theory goes that holding on to strong negative emotions impairs the immune system, and in the case of cancer, causes cells to grow improperly. Letting go of those negative emotions allows the immune system to do its job, and proper cell growth to be restored. There may also be nutritional or other factors at work which are outside the scope of this book.

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Tap Yourself Free Really there is no absolute way to tell what emotions are causing a particular problem. Anyone looking to achieve physical healing through emotional release should resolve to deal with every major emotional issue they have. There is, however, a way to prioritise. My friend Alexander has an interesting growth on the end of his finger, at first he thought it was a blister, but now it looks more like a wart. We sat down and I asked him to relax and take some deep breaths. I had him imagine jumping out of his body and shrinking to a very small size, and running along his arm to the wart. I asked him to imagine getting right up close to it, and holding it, putting his ear to it, and asking it how it felt. He immediately said profound sadness. I asked what sort of a sadness feeling it was, and he said he felt it in his chest, and it reminded him of riding in the back of his parents car when he was 6 and they were going through a divorce. We tapped the relevant memories, and repeated the visualisation. This time there was a different sadness feeling there, so we found and tapped those memories too. Eventually the wart had nothing left to say. Its been a few months and admittedly its still there there may be more subtle feelings to tap, or it may just take a while for the body to catch up with the emotional healing. There is no doubt though, that the wart and those emotional memories were connected in Alexanders mind. 131

Tap Yourself Free Ive used this technique with several people, and all were able to find emotions stored in the part of their body where they had the health problem. I was particularly struck by my friend Alice, who had breast cancer, she worked on a wide variety of emotional issues to tap, and reported that the majority of them were held in her breasts. She was also having conventional treatment, and is cancer free now. This chapter is deliberately short, as my focus is not on healing but on happiness, emotional balance, and success coaching. For more information, I recommend Energy Medicine by Donna Eden, and The Journey by Brandon Bays. There is also interesting information online about a Dr Hamer, and a theory called the Iron Law of Cancer.

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Tap Yourself Free 12. Tapping the Planet The world is not going to the devil, the world is going to God Wallace Wattles The world is changing now faster than ever before. Each level of advancement in technological and social progress previously took centuries, now it takes years. Its easy to look at the world and think it is getting worse, the news is full of negativity, murders, disasters, and wars. As usual that is where our focus is, because those are the things that threaten our survival. When you take a wider perspective, the good outweighs the bad. The Berlin Wall coming down, democracy in numerous countries that didnt have it before, the end of the cold war. The world is more peaceful now than it ever has been. The key is to understand history as an evolution of consciousness. My favourite example is the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet Union were deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba, which would have been their only base within striking range of the United States. President John F Kennedy ordered a naval blockade to prevent further military supplies being delivered from the Soviet Union. The world has never come so close to nuclear war. It looked like neither side would back down. Nikita Khrushchev eventually 133

Tap Yourself Free agreed to withdraw the weapons if Kennedy made a promise not to invade Cuba, and a conflict was averted. The crisis led directly to the establishment of the Hot Line, a direct phone line between Washington D.C. and Moscow, for better communications between the two super powers. It is no coincidence, that at the precise time we developed the technological power to annihilate all life on the planet, we also developed the consciousness not to do it. Tapping for World Peace Just as focussing on our personal worries and fears draws them to us, and creates more worry and fear, this process operates on a global level too. Soon we will begin clearing peoples negative feelings on a global level. This could work with tapping lead by celebrities on national TV, more likely they will be using another process that produces the same result but faster. As this happens we will develop more mature foreign policies based on understanding and forgiveness rather than fear and defensiveness. It only takes a few visionaries to lead the rest of the world, their connection with the divine consciousness connects the rest of us. It is the duty of every individual to release their own barriers to creating a peaceful future. If everyone tapped, there would be no war. 134