You know you'd benefit from some tapping, so you sit down ready to get into it. You want it to work…but as soon as you start, your mind goes blank. You freeze because you can't think of the right words to use. After a few minutes, you give up, thinking you must be doing it wrong. This happens to everyone, even experienced tappers, and I want to reassure you that it does not mean you are bad at tapping. Why Your Mind Goes Blank Several things cause a freeze response. Feeling overwhelmed ...
brutal truth nobody talks about in the self-help world: The healing and transformational work never ends. Every breakthrough just reveals a fresh layer of issues to be worked through. It would be wonderful if one day I was done, but I am open to the fact that it's an ongoing process. For me, the single toughest place in the transformational and healing process is when I feel like I am starting over again. And calling it tough is an understatement. Finding myself back at the beginning is ...
When you have been through something hard, such as grief, trauma, or a season of disconnection in your life, it is easy to forget what wholeness feels like. You lose touch with the part of you that still knows peace, still feels love, and still remembers who you were before the story changed. In this episode, I talk with Sarah Tobin about what it means to remember yourself. Not in a vague or inspirational way, but as an intentional, embodied healing process. Sarah’s journey with tapping ...
When you were first taught how to tap, more than likely you were asked to tune in to your issue in some form or fashion. You might have been asked to describe where you feel it in your body, what it reminds you of, or to rate its intensity on a 0–10 scale. These are all great ways for us to focus our attention, which improves the value of each round of tapping. While these ways work well, they all assume that we can identify an issue to tune in to, even if it is something small. But ...
I know this sounds strange, but you’re not afraid tapping won’t work. You’re actually afraid it might. In this episode, I dig into a truth that has come up repeatedly in my conversations with clients and students. Even when we know how powerful tapping can be, something inside stops us from doing it as often as we could. That something, I’ve come to realize, is fear of change itself. It’s not that we don’t want to heal and to experience the change it brings. But even positive change feels ...
One of the most common questions I receive is "Can we use tapping to help the animals we love?" The answer is a resounding YES! But in order for tapping to work well, we first need to know the most useful approach. Tapping for our animals isn't just a matter of looking at our animals and tapping. While that can be useful, there are better ways to get results. This week in the podcast, I am going to share with you the surprising place it's best to start when tapping for the animals in ...
One of my favorite questions when interviewing someone about their tapping journey is, "If you could share one piece of advice with your younger self, what would that advice be?" For some reason I was reflecting on that question recently, not for someone I was interviewing, but for myself. The piece of advice that I would give to Gene-the-beginner-tapper would be to go more slowly. This week in the podcast, I share four different ways that I now move more slowly when I am tapping on my ...
Finding a balance between taking responsibility for our lives and taking too much responsibility for what is going on is a tricky matter. Taking too much responsibility may seem like a silly notion, but it can happen in many ways. One of these ways is when we refuse to allow ourselves grace or forgiveness. We recognize that we have made a mistake and then, whether consciously or unconsciously, we decide that we are not allowed to get past it. As part of our penance we beat ourselves up, ...
One of the ideas that really makes my clients bristle is the possibility that their self-sabotaging behaviors are guided by their system's well-meaning intention to keep them safe. They question, "How is it possible that my subconscious mind thinks it is trying to keep me safe when all it is doing is making my life harder?" That is a great question because it feels counterintuitive that our desire to be safe is actually holding back our progress. This week in the podcast, we explore why ...
For some issues, tracking progress is simple. I can tell if my desk is less cluttered, if I can lift more weight while working out, or if I am making more sales in my business. That is because these examples are measured in hard metrics, or in other words, cold, hard numbers. Changes that are measured in soft metrics are more difficult to track. For example, it is much harder to quantify growth in my self-esteem or confidence. Much of the transformation we are trying to achieve with ...
One of our biggest struggles in creating transformation and change in our lives is those moments where we know WHAT to do, we know HOW to do it, and we know WHY it is valuable to take an action…and yet we just don't. It is obvious what the next step is and for some reason we don't take it. Then, as a bonus, we beat ourselves up for not taking action. So as well as not moving forward, we feel bad for letting ourselves down. This week in the podcast we explore where this resistance comes ...
One of Marianne Williamson's most cited quotes starts "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." It is quoted so often because of how deeply it resonates, speaking directly to the contradiction that is part of our lived human experience. On one hand we want to live an authentic and rich life…on the other hand, our subconscious mind just wants us to be safe. This desire to be safe keeps us small because if we are small, then ...
Letting ourselves down is one of the deepest betrayals that we humans can experience. It feels like such a harsh gut punch when it is something we know we should have been able to do. After we let ourselves down in such a powerful way, our subconscious will do everything in its power, through resistance to take action so as to keep us safe. It reasons that since it was so painful to let ourselves down, the way to avoid that pain in the future is simply not to commit to something ...
The words change and improve are very close in meaning. While both are associated with transformation, they do not mean exactly the same thing. Improvement is about keeping something but doing it in a better way; change is about doing something in a new way. In the transformational arena we long for change, but in doing this we sometimes diminish the value of improvement. This week in the podcast, I explore the difference between these two ideas, when we should seek to improve or to ...
Not all stress is created equal. There are those hyper stressful times, like driving on icy roads in a snowstorm at rush hour. It is super intense in the moment and then when it ends, it is over! Then there is the low-grade stress of something that is taking a long time and is hanging over your head. The example I think of from my own life is doing my business taxes. I'm not especially good at doing my taxes because I only look at the task once a year; it is also a big deal and if I ...
One of the most consistent struggles my clients have is coming up with the "right" words. The problem is, there is no such thing as the right words when it comes to tapping. Instead there are words that are useful and words that are not. I am consistently surprised at some of the tapping phrases that end up being useful. One example is when we tap on phrases that intellectually we know to be false. When I ask my clients to tap on phrases that they know aren't true, it creates a natural ...
Grief is unlike other emotions when it comes to tapping. We can tap to step out of every other negative emotion, like anger, jealousy, frustration, or feeling overwhelmed. But grief is something that we will feel forever. Twenty years after a loved one has died, we will still feel pangs of grief. Instead of leaving grief, our relationship with it and how we live with it evolves over time. That is why we need a different approach when tapping for grief. In this week's podcast, I ...
We often refer to tapping for stress and feeling overwhelmed as emotional first aid. That is because we are applying a tool for quick relief in the moment in the same way we would use first aid for a physical injury. But there is one key difference between first aid and emotional first aid. When we are physically injured, our first thought is "I need to take care of this right now!" When we need emotional first aid, we are so caught up in our emotions that we don't realize we need to do ...
A number of years ago I was visiting my friend "Mike" and his family. Mike asked his youngest son, who was about five at the time, to tidy his room before dinner. His son replied, in the most overwrought and dramatic voice possible, "But whyyyyyyyyyyyy? I am just going to make it messy again!" I can relate! There are SO MANY tasks on my to-do list that I dislike doing and there are even some that I despise. In this week's podcast, I share some simple ways you can clear your ...
There is a huge difference between bouncing back from being tired and being exhausted. When we are tired, we simply need to refill our tank. When we are exhausted, we first have to recover from being exhausted before we can even consider refilling our tank. In this week's podcast, I share seven simple ways you can help yourself when you are feeling exhausted or emotionally drained. And the great thing about these seven ideas is that you don't have to do them all in order to bounce ...