Trauma happens. Daily. To many. Those of us who have been suddenly exposed to terror, horror and shock, those of us who have lived in it for extended periods of time, all of us suffer at least some degree of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Sufferers of PTSD — even veterans — are not always correctly diagnosed and are even more often not treated. However, those who do receive attention do not always reap sufficient benefit from conventional treatment.
Sometimes it takes a child to say what no adult will — the emperor has no clothes and the medical field has no cure for PTSD. The conventional mental health system offers diagnoses and medications, but the mere labeling and numbing of symptoms does not equate to genuine healing. Terror and horror persist in the hearts and minds of victims and witnesses, both. The good news is,
All healing is essentially the release from fear.
Healing is always certain.
We can do it ourselves. Fact is, we must. No one else can. Here is where we start. Here is where we learn to release the fear that has tied our minds and bodies into knots. Here is where we learn how to let go of fear.
We learn the principles of self-healing. We practice with ourselves and one another. We address one memory, one pain, one tense muscle at a time. Soon we are free of the shudder, the revulsion, the horror, the past. We feel real peace again. We have taken back our lives.
The two videos in this post demonstrate emergency relief for anxiety using acupressure points for stress. This might come in handy as you are reading, learning, practicing, addressing issues, and releasing them. Get these two helpful stress-release tools under your belt and then scour and devour the rest of the healing methods here on this site. Any one of them might be enough to heal all your wounds. But one might “speak to” you more than another. Try them all.
As we release fear, we feel safer; as we feel safer, others will feel safer around us.
Until you make the unconscious conscious,
it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
– Carl Jung
All healing is essentially the release from fear.
– A Course In Miracles
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) does exactly what it says: it is a simple, easy way to release fear. It is a deceptively simple, yet effective tool for healing the mind, emotions and even the body.
To keep it simple, let’s call everything that is not at ease and peaceful, “fear”. Pain and dis-ease indicate a lack of ease, a lack of peace, and we can often track disease to its origin in fear.
We react to fear by contracting muscles in our body; we fight, flee or freeze. Synonyms for “fear” might include shock, terror, horror, dread, panic, anxiety, anger, rage, fury, sorrow, grief, angst, overwhelm, boredom, loss, frustration, irritability, loneliness, broken heart, longing, desire, jealousy, regret, envy, revenge, or any other feeling that is not peaceful and loving. Fear enters the mind, the body reacts by contracting. After that, if the fear is not released, it remains lodged in the muscles and even the cells of the body.
“Fear” is not our original condition – love is. Look into the eyes of any baby who was gently born and not circumcised and you will see eyes overflowing with unconditional love, aliveness, enthusiasm, and joy. Babies who have not been terrorized by intrusive medical procedures, drugs and scalpels, are relaxed. They can fall to sleep in a moment, no matter where they are or what is going on.
Yet a baby who was poked by sonogram, whose birth was medically induced, who was cut out or pulled out of his mothers, whose umbilical cord lifeline to mother was cut before he had downloaded his full allotment of oxygen and blood, who had monitoring devices attached to his head and body, a baby who was separated from his mother at birth and fed cow’s milk, not breastfed, a baby who was exposed to any number of unnecessary procedures such as blinding lights, heel pricks, injections of toxic chemicals into his pristine bloodstream, a baby who had surgery such as circumcision or open heart surgery… This baby, on the other hand, had a head start in the accumulation of fear. He learned to contract and withdraw, to distrust and expect betrayal.
After birth, fear messages are sent directly and indirectly, intentionally and unintentionally, from family members, friends, school, religion, television, movies, society; we make decisions based on things that happen to us and to others, etc and we carry all this fear forever – on our shoulders, in our stomachs or chests – until and unless we let it all go. We carry unconscious fear in the subconscious and the subconscious is the body. Muscles we tensed up long ago when terrible things happened, still hold the tension. They are the spots where we feel pain, tension, weakness. The good news is, we can let it all go and EFT is a very helpful tool in releasing fear. Letting go of fear is letting go of tension in the body and most disorders, disease, are caused by stored fear, tension.
Emotional Freedom Technique is the most effective way I’ve found to quickly and easily loosen and release uncomfortable bodily sensations from the mind and body – both ancient and current.
EFT is also called “tapping”, and you will be tapping on acupressure points to relax the inner organs that have been holding the “fear” you want to be free of.
Steps for using EFT to release fear:
1) Identify a feeling or attitude that causes you discomfort, a “fear” you want to release. Put it into words. If you cannot find a descriptor for it, just identify it by its location in the body. Examples might be: sense of anxiety, pain in my stomach, tension in my shoulders, anger at my mother.
2) Give it an intensity score. Zero means it does not bother you at all, ten means it is very much present, in your current awareness, and is occupying your mind and giving you pain and discomfort at this very moment. The goal is to use EFT until the intensity is gone and the score moves to zero.
3) Make it into a statement:
Even though I have this
[pain in my stomach],
I deeply and completely love and respect myself.
This statement serves a few purposes:
Naming the emotion or locating a feeling in the body is an important step in letting it go, for you are no longer unaware of it – you are now conscious of it. You have given the “demon” a name.
You can only release something that you already “have”. If you are unaware of a feeling, then you do not “have” it; it “has” you. But once you have it, you can release it.
“Even though” minimizes the importance of the “fear” you have named. It says that this “thing” that has been burdening you for a very long time is now inconsequential and you are ready to let it go.
To say that you love and respect yourself, even though you have carried this feeling, is a way of saying that you forgive yourself and love yourself enough to live without the burden.
4) The simplest way to perform this “exorcism” on yourself is to repeat the statement in #3, above, and tap 8-10 times on each acupressure point (see diagrams below). Some start by tapping on the side of one hand (karote chop point, in diagram below), using the palm of the other hand, and repeating the statement a few times, adjusting it for accuracy, if necessary. Then, starting at the top of your head, tap each point several times while repeating the statement. Some people shorten the statement after a few repetitions to the ‘complaint’, such as:
Even though I have this [sense of guilt], I deeply and completely love and respect myself…
Even though I have this sorrow, I deeply and completely love and respect myself…
Even though I have this sorrow, I deeply and completely love and respect myself…
this sorrow… this sorrow… this sorrow…” – concluding with,
Even though I have this sorrow, I deeply and completely love and respect myself.
Now it is time to re-evaluate the intensity score you gave to the emotion in the beginning. On a scale from 1 to 10, how intense is the sensation now?
Some issues will resolve in one short round. Others may require several rounds, alternating tapping on both sides of the body. And some very old – or very fresh – issues may need to be addressed several times for several days. The good news is, it will all go away and stay away, once you have tapped it away. A little bit of attention now prevents years of discomfort in the future.
Here are two helpful sheets that you can access at any time from your phone or computer to remind you of how to use EFT:
“All healing is essentially the release from fear.” – ACIM
Hypnosis can be a powerful tool for good — or for ill. Hypnotic suggestions program your mind, which is essentially the hard drive of your body computer. We have all been programmed to believe what we believe, to see ourselves and the world as we do.
Some love the color red; others hate it. Some love dogs; others fear them. When we came from the womb, we were simply open and receptive; fear has hypnotized us all and imprinted us all with different programming.
Fear is an especially effective means of hypnosis. A trained hypnotist might suddenly push you off balance or clap loudly next to your head… for he has learned that fear puts the subject into a trance of shock. Once in trance, suggestions can be made that will go deep into the mind.
Someone may be an excellent hypnotist and have the best of intentions, yet not know what you personally need. Only you know. Only that part of you that is below the conscious mind knows what you have been through and what you need to hear to heal the past.
This is why I recommend de-hypnosis. We need to be de-hypnotized from all the trauma we have known — from our creation until the present. Once all the trauma is gone, we are naturally restored to our innate peace of mind, joy and unconditional love.
When you are very relaxed, your own inner wisdom can show or tell you what you need to know to heal your life. It works every time. It is very efficient. It never harms.
Mental health can be very simple. You are not crazy; nobody is. Nothing is irrational once all the facts are known. Healing merely requires learning how — and then doing it. All dysfunction, explored, points to a common source: fear.
You have but two emotions: love and fear. All healing is essentially the release from fear.
Sometimes secrets are intentionally kept. On birthdays we don’t want our friends to know what we are giving them because we want them to be surprised.
Sometimes wonderful, velvet memories are kept secret because they are intensely private and personal. We do not care to share what they are because they might be misunderstood and not cherished by others as we cherish them ourselves.
But then there are the prickly or even stabbing secrets that hurt us then and continue to hurt us now. Those secrets are best aired and released. Read the rest of this entry »
To make our healing work very simple, it helps to think of the light switch on the wall that is either on or off. If we agree to call our inner emotional states by two terms, either love or fear, then our progress will be rapid.
Just as one is never just a “little” pregnant — you are also neither a “little” in love or fear. You are either relaxed and happy and aware of love — or not. You could think of the inner human state simply as, “love on” or “love off” — and we call “love off”, for want of a better term, fear. Read the rest of this entry »
Lester Levenson, was a physicist and engineer who lived from 1909 to 1984. He inspired The Sedona Method, and the Release Technique. At age 43, he was told he only had weeks to live. He lived 40 more years because of what he learned about healing himself.
Lester, like us, liked simplicity. He said “KISS” means Keep It Simple, Sweetheart. And he did it. There is nothing complicated about what he taught — and yet it is extremely powerful and helpful. Two people took the ball for a touchdown after Lester died: Larry Crane and Hale Dwoskin.
Re-evaluation co-counseling is a peer counseling system. RC has been very helpful for a lot of people. I consider it to be a “big chunk” tool. It lets you know that tears, thrashing about and shaking are not “bad” but are natural ways the body discharges emotion. I have seen it work miracles. Read the rest of this entry »
An exquisitely simple yet powerfully effective ancient Hawaiian healing method…
More than thirty years ago, at the Hawaii State Hospital, there was a special ward, a clinic for mentally ill criminals. It was a violent, dangerous, dreary place. Read the rest of this entry »
