“Every man mistakes the limits of his vision for the limits of the world”

Arnold Schopenhauer

What is EFT?

EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) is a process that enables you to feel equanimity in the face of negative emotion. It can enable you to reduce the intensity of a negative emotion until it is no longer there. It is based on the contention that the source of negative emotion is a disruption in the body’s energy system. By energy system, I refer to the system delineated by the Chinese nearly five thousand years ago.

The purpose is not to eradicate negative emotion altogether. It does not seek to make us artificially happy all the time. Sadness, fear, anxiety and other negative emotions are a rich and valuable part of the flow of life.

The negative emotions EFT works with are the habitual states of mind governed by fear, anger, depression or other emotions that impair the way we function.

A simple invaluable tool

To use EFT you hold an emotion or issue in your mind whilst tapping on or near the ends of series of acupuncture meridians. The meridians that may have been dysfunctional in the face of the issue are stimulated into becoming functional and the negative emotion dissipates.

EFT can be applied to fears, phobias, poor functioning resulting from traumatic experience, depression and in fact anything that has an emotional component. It is essentially a self-help technique and as such not a replacement for treatment of serious mental illness. However, for the average person negotiating their personal mountain it is an invaluable tool that can shine a light on the limiting fears and beliefs that obscure their path to fulfilment.

How it was discovered

EFT came about after a psychologist named Roger Callaghan made a surprising discovery. He had been working with a woman with a severe water phobia unsuccessfully for about a year. She couldn’t watch it on TV and was afraid when it rained. She experienced nightmares, headaches and nausea as a result of her fear.

In one session she complained of an upset stomach. He had been experimenting with energy therapies at the time and decided to tap on the end of her stomach meridian just below the eye. The result was startling. She looked at him and said “It’s gone” She went and splashed water on her face then went down to a pool and approached it without fear. In one instant the phobia was gone and all the symptoms with it. It was one of those 'right time, right place, right intervention' moments.

He saw the connection between the energy system and negative emotion and began to experiment with other people. He used the muscle testing of Kinesiology to determine which of the 363 acupuncture points were not functioning in each person and through tapping whilst the person held the relevant experience in their mind was able to eradicate fears, phobias and other negative emotions very quickly. He devised a number of tapping formulas for a variety of emotional states and a means to enable people to focus their mind on the problem in a way that bypassed the secondary gains that sometimes stops people wanting to get rid of their problems. He called his system TFT or Thought Field Therapy.

One of his students was a man named Gary Craig who realised that the technique worked very well if a person tapped on the ends of the fourteen main meridians. This took away the need for diagnosis, greatly simplifying the process. He developed the way the technique was taught and has made it freely available through his website www.emofree.com. The beauty of EFT is that once learnt, people can apply it by themselves. EFT has grown in poularity exponentially due to it's effectiveness and ease of use.