Tapping Q & A with Gene Monterastelli - Get the most out of tapping and EFT

Tapping To Simplify Life

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For 18 months I lived in my car. It wasn't because times were hard, but because it was a choice. I went to see the movie Almost Famous. In the 20-minute walk home I was thinking about living the life of a touring musician and how awesome that would be.

At that point in my life I was already traveling over 100 days a year as a performer. Most of my travel was by air and my home base was Washington, DC.

As I continued my walk home from the movie I thought, “What would I need in order to live on the road and do the work I am already doing?”

The answer was simple: laptop, cell phone, clothing, juggling equipment, and something to read. That is all I would need.

“That is all I would need,” was the thought I was having as I opened my front door. I looked up at all my stuff and thought, “If I don't need this, why do I have it?” So I decided to find out.

That is what led to me getting rid of most of my worldly possessions and move into my car for 18 months.

The first two days I drove from Washington, DC to Jacksonville, FL. By the time I got to Jacksonville I realized I had too much stuff and gave a number of things away.

Being able to cleanse the things out of our lives that take up too much space is a good thing to do.

And it feels so freeing.

I am not recommending that you sell everything you own and move into a car, but cleaning house and simplifying is a good idea.

If you are lacking motivation to simplify, just use Emotional Freedom Techniques to tap along to these quotes about simplifying found on mnmlist.com.

“Be Content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” – Lao Tzu

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupe

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein

“Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; love more, and all good things will be yours.” – Swedish proverb

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say let your affairs be as one, two, three and to a hundred or a thousand. We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.” – Henry David Thoreau

“Plurality should not be assumed without necessity.” – William of Ockham (also known as Ockham’s Razor)

“It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.” – David Foster Wallace

“The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” – Socrates

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” – Lao Tzu

“Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” – Albert Einstein

“A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” -Lao Tzu

“The simplest things are often the truest.” – Richard Bach

“Great acts are made up of small deeds.” – Lao Tzu

“He who is contented is rich.” – Lao Tzu

“Less is more.” – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

“One can furnish a room very luxuriously by taking out furniture rather than putting it in.” – Francis Jourdain

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” – William Morris

“We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.” – Lao Tzu

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci

“… in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.” – Will Rogers

“If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, then this is the best season of your life.” – Wu-Men

“Simplicity is the essence of happiness.” – Cedric Bledsoe

“Be wary of any enterprise that requires new clothes.” – Henry David Thoreau

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” – Frederic Chopin

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” – Hans Hofmann

“Eliminate physical clutter. More importantly, eliminate spiritual clutter.” – D.H. Mondfleur

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.” – E.F. Schumacker

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” – Confucius

“Simplicity, clarity, singleness: these are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy.” – Richard Halloway

“Our life is frittered away by detail … Simplify, simplify, simplify! … Simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.” – Henry David Thoreau

“We don’t need to increase our goods nearly as much as we need to scale down our wants. Not wanting something is as good as possessing it.”– Donald Horban

“People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.” – Albert Einstein

Click here to add your own thoughts and comments or read what others have to say. I would really love to hear what you think!

“There Is No Such Thing As An Emotional Action” – Is That True?

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This article came from an interview I did with Jared Tendler on performance (Improving Performance with Tapping). At one point in the interview Jared said, “I don't believe there is such thing as an emotional decision.” After a brief discussion I agreed with him.


photo by Nathan deGargoyle

Below is a longer explanation than what we got into in the interview of why I think he is right and how we can use this point of view to improve our Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)/tapping. I don't expect you to agree with me on this. Take it for what it is: food for thought. I would love to hear you feedback and thoughts in the comment section below.

How The Brain Works

Please bear with me. This is going to be a gross over-simplification of how the mind works, but it will help to explain what is happening. Even if the specifics are inaccurate, the basic principles are correct.

Our brain is a giant ball of brain cells (like I said, gross over-simplification). Each of these brain cells can be connected to lots of other brain cells, sometimes as many as tens of thousand of other cells. Information, in the form of energy, moves along these connections to create brain function such asthinking and instructing the body to move.

These connections are not permanent. Any and all of these connections can be changed over time.

When we are learning new skills we create a new set of connections based off the old connections of the brain plus the new information.

For example, in my brain right now there connections between brain cells that contain all of the information that I need to walk, but there are no connections that know how to do the foxtrot.

As I take dance lessons and repeat the steps over and over again I am taking the information that my brain already has about moving my body, such as walking, and making new connections between my brain cells to add the new types of movement.

The more often I do a movement the more connections that are made around a specific move, making it easier and easier each time to make the move in the future.

After one dance class I might have only a few connections, if any at all. After a few weeks I have a few hundred, and after a few months I might have a few million. The more connections between brain cells around a certain action, the easier this action becomes. This is the reason we can do things like walking without any thought at all.

Think of these connections like walking a path. The more people walk along a certain path through a field, the wider the path becomes and the harder it is for the grass to grow over the path. The less a path is walked on, the skinner it becomes and the easier it is for the brush to take over the path.

Also, the wider the path, the easier it is to walk down and the skinner the path, the more work it takes to walk down.

In the brain the more we use a certain set of brains cells connected (repeating the same movement) in a specific way, the stronger and wider this path becomes. While the paths that are very new or hardly used, for example new dance steps or skills we rarely use, the more quickly these paths are going to disappear.

This means that something I have done a million times before like walking is very easy, while doing the new dance step requires much more concentration because the path to that action is so much skinnier.

For this reason it takes 14 to 21 days to form a new habit. That is the amount of time it takes to create enough new paths between brain cells to make an action habitual.

The brain works the same way when it comes to remembering information. For example remembering your name is an easy thing to do. This is something you do often and the path to this piece of information is very wide and well worn, but if I asked you to name the person who sat behind you in 4th grade it would be a much harder task. This is not a piece of information you access often (if ever) therefore the path is going to be very narrow.

How This Plays Out In Our Choices And Actions

The brain/system only has a limited amount of energy to act. For this gross over-simplification let’s say that amount is 10 units of energy. The tasks that we do regularly, like walking only take 1 unit of the energy, while a task that is very new, like a new dance step, takes all 10 units.

Here is a perfect example. Think of the last time you saw someone do something they don’t normally do, like threading a needle. As they are concentrating you can almost see the gears moving in their head. It is obvious they have to use much more of their brain energy to perform this task.

I can spend these 10 units of energy in lots of different ways. I can walk and hold a complicated conversation at the same time. It might require 1 unit to walk, 1 unit to talk and ,8 eight units to think about what we are talking about. But as we are walking along and I need to think of something really specific I am going to stop walking, close my eyes, and concentrate all 10 units on to finding that piece of information that is stored in the deep recesses of my mind.

How Emotions Use Brain Energy

When we feel an emotion we also use some of this brain energy. Let’s say for the sake of simplicity the SUDs level of an emotion is equal to the amount of brain energy it is taking to feel that emotion. Meaning that if I am angry to a SUDs level of 8, then I am going to use 8 out of the 10 units of brain energy.

Let’s say that I have been working on the foxtrot long enough that it now only takes 5 units of brain energy to do the dance step. When I am in the dance studio with my instructor it requires some concentration to do the steps, but I am able to do the dance in such a fashion that it is no longer work, and I can enjoy it.

A few days later I find myself at a dance. I ask a beautiful woman to dance with me. Now I am nervous. I want to impress her and I want her to like me. My nervousness is at SUDs level of 6. Because I am using so much energy to be nervous I am not going to dance very well because I only have 4 units of brain energy left to do a task that requires 5 units.

The dance steps are no different, my ability is no different, but the resources I have to do those steps are different.
This is the same reason it is harder for us to do complicated things when we are tired. When we are tired we don’t have the full 10 units, but maybe 3 or 4. The more brain energy the task takes the sharper we need to be to do it.

How Emotions Effect Our Choices And Actions

We can see very quickly how emotion can start to affect the choices we are making.

For example, let’s pretend that I love chocolate, but I know that I can’t eat a lot of it. For me to be able to think, “I know I like chocolate, but I am only going to limit myself to one piece of high quality chocolate a day and therefore not going to eat the cheap stuff here at work” takes 7 units of energy.

As I am sitting at my desk I receive a call from a disgruntled customer who just unloads on me. They are screaming at me for 10 minutes for something I had nothing to do with. When I get off the phone I am frustrated to the SUDs level of 5.

I walk into the staff room to refill my water and a co-worker has some chocolate cake and she offers me some. It takes 7 units of energy for me to say “no”. I am spending 5 units on being frustrated leaving with just 5 more units. I don’t have the resources to make the choice to say “no” and I end up eating the cake.

These Are Not Emotional Choices

If we follow all of this to its logical conclusion we are not making emotional choices. What we are doing instead is making the best choice we can make based on the amount of resources we have in any given moment. The emotions affect the choices we make and the actions we take by affecting our environment.

Because of the natural rhythms of our system we have fewer resources available in the middle of the night: very few good choices are made at 3am. This is the reason that, as resident assistants living in a university resident hall, that we warned our students against drinking when they were hungry, angry, tired, or lonely. This is the reason that the more I practice the foxtrot, the easier it is going to be to dance it when I am nervous on a first date.

How This Information Informs Our Tapping

There are two main types of tapping that we can do. We can do “first aid” tapping in response to something that is happening in the moment as well as tapping to deal with core issues. When we look at both of these types of tapping through the lens we can see how it profoundly affects our choices.

First, when it comes to first aid tapping we can see that when we are tapping for an emotion or craving that has arisen in the moment, we are not just clearing the emotion to feel better. In addition to clearing the emotional charge we are also freeing up the energy it is taking to maintain that emotional charge. This frees up resources to make the better choices.

Second, we can use tapping to make changes to the information/beliefs we hold about ourselves and the world that are already connected to the wide paths that take the least amount of brain energy. To explain this let’s use our self-concept as an example.
There is a part of my brain that contains all of the information on what I think of myself. This contains all the information about what I think I do well and what I think I struggle with. This would be my self-esteem. There is a very well worn and very wide path to this part of my brain because I am accessing this information all day long.

Since this is the information that we always going to have access to regardless of our emotional state, because it is so easy to access, it becomes very clear how this can be problematic. If I hold the belief in this area that “I have failed before and am going to fail again,” then this will be the information that I am going to access in the most emotional situations. If this is the information I am accessing then I am not going to be making the choices I really want to make.

This creates the second opening for us to use tapping to change our ability to make choices. What tapping allows us to do is to take advantage of these well-worn paths by allowing us to transform the information at the ends of these paths. With tapping we are able to transform the limiting belief of “I have failed before and will fail again,” to “I have failed in the past, but I have learned from those mistakes and am going to make better choices today.”

The path that requires very little energy is still in place, but we have changed the information at the destination. This is the main reason why tapping can be so powerful. We are utilizing the network and paths of the brain, but we are allowing it to access information that is going to permit us to make better choices.

Conclusion

I feel it is very important that we understand not only the choices we make but why we make those choices. When we are only looking at the outcome of the choices we have made it becomes very easy to beat ourselves up. When we understand why we are making the choices we are making, based on the information we have about the world and the amount of mental energy we have to access it, it is easier for us to be easy with ourselves as well as see the path to transforming ourselves by giving us the opportunity to make better choices in the future.

Click here to read what others have to say or add your own thoughts and comments. I would really love to hear what you think!

Deserve v. Worthy

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photo by Annette Pedrosian

[In this series we examine the importance of the words we use and how changing our vocabulary can change our mind giving us opportunity for transformation. More articles can be found in this series @ Tools:Words]

“I don't deserve better…”

One of the phrases I hear frequently from clients is “I don't deserve…” This phrase comes is all shapes and forms.

  • I haven't done enough in the past to heal. I don't deserve to get better now.
  • I have screwed up so many times. I don't deserve God's love.
  • I have so much in my life compared to others. I don't deserve to more.
  • I have had success in the past and squandered it. I don't deserve to have success now.

When we are in the mindset of “don't deserve” it is very difficult for us to experience transformation and healing. There are a number of reasons for this, but mostly it comes down to the fact that when we don't feel we deserve to heal then we are not going to put the effort or take the steps necessary for transformation. If we don't do the work we are unlikely to heal.

Whenever I encounter a client who doesn't believe they deserve something I like to draw a contrast between the words deserve and worthy. In my mind deserve means to earn something while worthy means being made for something. Here is an example to make it clearer.

I work with a number of clients in a spiritual context. Very often my clients feel they “do not deserve God's love”. They believe they are not good enough, they have made too many wrong choices, or that it is just too late for them.

By using the phrase “I don't deserve God's love” they are saying (most time without thinking about it) that God's love is something they must earned. The only way that God will love them is if they live a certain way, make certain choices, or achieve certain goals. If they are incapable of living in this way then God is not going to love them.

When I encounter this I encourage my clients to reframe this understanding to they are “worthy of God's love”. God's love is no longer a prize or a reward, but instead something that we are made for. God's love is an intrinsic characteristic of who we are. This simple shift moves us from earning God's love to giving ourselves permission to allow God's ever present love into our life.

A sample tapping patter for this might look like:

Right now I am having a very hard time…I am struggling…but I choose to know that God loves me no matter what…His love is unconditional…There is nothing I can do to earn his love…Or lose his love…there are times like right now when I don’t believe I deserve God’s love…There are times when I beat myself up because I am letting God down…I choose to know that God wants nothing more than my healing to happen…God wants me to see myself with the same love that he has for me…I give myself permission to know God still loves me…I give myself permission to believe I deserve God’s love, even when I have a hard time loving myself…

This same approach can be used when we are working with issues of healing, weight release, success, and abundance just to name a few. We are made for health, well-being, and success. It is our intrinsic nature. When we are able to accept this fact we eliminate many of the self sabotaging behaviors because we are no longer fighting part of our self that don't believe it is something we deserve.

If you hear yourself saying or thinking “I don't deserve X…” tap on the phrase “I am worthy of X and I give myself permission to allow X into my life.”

Click here to read what others have to say or add your own thoughts and comments. I would really love to hear what you thing!

Tapping To Lift Your Spirits – (This Will Make You Laugh & Make You Feel Better

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I came across this video at kottke.org. Tho post simple read: “Two minutes of laughing. If this doesn't make you smile, YOU'RE A MONSTER!”.

To put yourself in a good mode just hit play and tap (or just hit play). You will smile!

LAUGHS! from Everynone on Vimeo.

Click here to read what others have to say or add your own thoughts and comments. I would really love to hear what you thing!

Guilty v. Regret

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[In this series we examine the importance of the words we use and how changing our vocabulary can change our mind giving us opportunity for transformation. More articles can be found in this series @ Tools: Words]


photo by butupa

I have a small checklist that I keep on my desk that I review before every client call I do. The list contains the steps that I most often use when helping a client transform their life. One of the most important steps is forgiveness of self.

When something doesn’t go the way we would like it is very easy for us to blame ourselves. Even when there was no possible way we could have done anything differently. A perfect example of this is when a child in placed in a situation of trauma. There is no way the child could have prevented what happened. Even with the adult self knowing this sometimes they still blame themselves.
There are other times in which we make a poor choice and afterwards we think, “I should have known better.” There are even times when we know we are about to make a choice and we know that it is the wrong choice for our higher good in the short and/or long term.

Regardless why we feel like we are to blame for what has happened the fact that we do blame ourselves for our past can be debilitating. It can undermine our ability to make choices in the future because we think we are going make a poor choice again or a part of us can feel that we need to be punished for making those poor choices. When this happens we will subconsciously sabotage any new success.

Because of these reasons it is essential to spend time working on self-forgiveness. If we do not forgive ourselves then we will never move forward because we will be an emotional prisoner to the past. When we refuse to forgive ourselves then it is like we are reliving the past moment over and over again.

There are many steps to this process, but one of the concepts I always talk to clients about is the difference between feeling guilty and regretting what happened.

Feeling guilty about something robs us of our power. The hallmark of guilt is being emotionally attached to the past moment. When we feel guilty we relive the moment over and over again, beating ourselves up as we do so.

When we feel regret about something it is instructive. I can regret the choices I have made in the past and learn from those choices. When I regret something I can clearly state I am disappointed about how it turned out and that I would do things differently if I had the chance, but in when I look at a past choice with regret I am not emotionally trapped in the moment. Instead I have the opportunity to learn from my past choice and have the ability to live in the present.

One of the struggles we face when trying to forgive ourselves is the fear that “If I forgive myself then I will forget about the past and I will make the same mistake again. I will hurt myself or others again” or “If I forgive myself then I am saying what I did was OK. To forgive myself is to condone the action.”

Forgiveness does not equal saying it was or is OK. Forgiveness does not equal forgetting.

Forgiveness equals choose to take responsibility for the past, learn from the past, and choose to be present in the current moment making new choices.

Tapping on it might look this:

I know that I have made poor choices in the past…these choices have hurt me…and they have hurt others…but it does me no good to be stuck in these past moments….it does me no good to keep beating myself up for these choices…I need to forgive myself…when I forgive myself I am not saying my past choices are the choices I would make today…when I forgive myself I am not saying I want the same outcome…when I forgive myself I am not forgetting what happened…instead, when I forgive myself I choose to take the knowledge learned from that moment…I choose to take responsibility from the outcome…but I am choosing to no longer be stuck in the moment…when I forgive myself I can still regret what happened without feeling guilty….guilt is a prison…guilt is a trap…guilt prevents me from moving forward…guilt keeps me trapped in the past…when I forgive myself I am not doing it with the expectation that I am going to be perfect in the future…I give myself permission to be easy with myself as I move forward…I forgive myself…knowing I can forget what happened…but I don’t need to feel guilty….I choose not to be trapped in the moment.

In most cases this is not all that is needed for deep self-forgiveness, but it opens the door to being able to know that it is OK to forgive yourself, by seeing that regret is a healthy way of moving forward without having to feel guilt.

Click here to read what others have to say or add your own thoughts and comments. I would really love to hear what you thing!