Emotional Freedom Technique: Tapping Into the Qi

Even if you are in the midst of being treated with acupuncture or other methods of healing, it’s always useful to find ways to help yourself in between treatments. Emotional Freedom Technique is a deceptively simple use of common acupuncture/acupressure points that you can learn in just a few minutes, and that can be used to mitigate just about any kind of emotional or physical distress.

That last sentence probably sounds a little overenthusiastic at best, but I’m serious. The founder of EFT, Gary Craig, says, “Try it on everything,” and I do find that it helps in most situations. Many times the symptom quickly disappears, but even if it does not, the person at least feels less upset and more in control of whatever is going on.

EFT started as a treatment for emotional problems, but as people experimented with all sorts of issues, it was found that physical illness could be treated in the same way. This should be no great surprise, since EFT is intended to do exactly what we do in all of Oriental medicine, balance the person’s Qi.

Craig formulated the “EFT Discovery Statement” as follows: “The cause of all negative emotions is a disruption in the body’s energy system.” He adds this corollary: “Our unresolved negative emotions are major contributors to most physical pains and diseases.” It isn’t necessary to know exactly what caused the original disruption in order to start treating. You begin with a brief statement of what the symptom or problem is, and if tapping with that statement in mind doesn’t bring relief, you try working with various aspects of the issue until you feel better. Often, once you begin the process, you find that you are automatically led toward deeper issues, possibly things you had never been aware of before. Rather than just talking about those issues, staying in your head, you are bringing your entire system into alignment and clearing the trouble from body, mind, and spirit. It is common for patients to find a quick resolution to problems they may have been dealing with unsuccessfully for years in talk therapy.

There are some possible variations in the EFT process, but the basic procedure is simply a matter of tapping on points close to the surface, covering all twelve main meridians. The points are not necessarily those we would think of as the strongest—for example, Stomach 2 rather tha
Stomach 36—but they are the ones that are easy to reach and over bony areas, so that a deep stimulus is not necessary. Since the treatment hits all the meridians, you don’t have to know how to diagnose anything. Points are named in a layperson-friendly manner, like “side of eye” or “beneath nose.”

Tapping may be uncomfortable in some situations, such as a headache, so a person may wish to rub or just touch the points instead. It’s possible even to simply “think” the points without doing anything physical, which is helpful when one is in public.

EFT is quite often used for addictions, as well as for post-traumatic stress, phobias, anxiety, and depression. I have had some success recently, both for myself and with patients, in heading off upper respiratory infections. Perhaps most intriguingly, EFT can even be used to treat at a distance, as we can do with Reiki and other types of energy work.

I would like to encourage you to check out this powerful, versatile, and enjoyable method. A free manual and tons of information are available at www.emofree.com.