DAY 13, DAY THIRTEEN ALKALINE YEAR USING EFT

DAY THIRTEEN                 ALKALINE YEAR

USING EFT TO BANISH  STRESS

 Today held a lot of stress for me:  an insurance appraiser was coming at 8 AM and the house was a mess!  For  my lavender business (orcaslavender.com), I’d cut, five days ago, enough stalks to fill  a lot of “sniff bags,” sachets that people sniff to ward off stress.  Instead of hanging them in the garage for several weeks to dry, I’d opted to  leave them out in the sun for a couple of days, then separate buds from stalks by hand, letting them dry in a huge stainless-steel pot.   Although I’d been able to spend six hours on the project, about a sixth of the cuttings still rested on a white sheet on the dining room table.

Unable to sleep, I got up at 4:15 AM and cleaned the kitchen, set Rachel Rhoomba, our trusty robot vacuum cleaner, to work on the living room,  and by 5 AM was fully awake and able to clean up the lavender project.  Work, for me, is one way of managing stress; I didn’t want to eat anything at that hour.  The soothing scent of the lavender helped, too.  By 7 AM, I woke up my husband and our house guest.  Both of them like to fix their own breakfasts, so I made mine:  previously-cooked emmer  stewed with raisins for 10 minutes in rice milk.  

Aiming not to bore you with routine details, I’ll say only that I got into a nagging mode about—what else?—the garbage run to the island dump being, in my opinion, long overdue.  Both men pitched in to load the car and my guilt set in; I probably didn’t need to be as bitchy with them as I was.  After lunch I took the dog on a long walk around the nearby lake, which had a calming effect  until . . . a friend unloaded a lot of yucky problems onto me.  The friend is ambivalent about choosing a therapist and  would in my opinion benefit from working out the “stuff.”  After a lot of listening and a few suggestions, I interrupted the  extended monologue to explain that, while I have psychological training, I am not, at present, a therapist, and suggested that it would be a good idea to save the juicy stuff for someone acting as a professional.  I wasn’t that nice about it.

Again, guilt!  How to break into the stress-guilt syndrome so it didn’t lead to the freezer, where I know there’s ice cream?  Well,  almonds are one substitute.  Teeth-gritting abstinence is another, but I’ve never been good at that.  Better still, is EFT.  That stands for Emotional Freedom Technique.   Its founder, Gary Craig, has a motto: Try it on Everything. 

EFT, also called “tapping,” is one of the new “energy therapies”.   Its enormous appeal for me lies in the fact that  it helps me get unstuck from negative emotions such as anger and guilt.  Such upsets, which once I felt helpless at combating, are less frequent than they were a few years ago.  More important, for my purpose of enjoying a peaceful alkaline year, is that I can use EFT to change moods that used to lead to eating junk foods.

It’s also called “tapping” because it involves tapping on what eastern medicine--and thousands of western physicians--call the  basic meridian points.    To begin, identify an issue.  For me today the ice cream wasn’t as intense an issue as my angers, so I chose them.  On a scale of one to 10, the issue was a 10.  Then,  tapping six or seven times on the side of my hand just below the little finger, I said: “Even though I’ve been angry twice today, and feel guilty about that, I deeply and completely forgive, love and accept myself.”   Said and did that three times.

Then I tapped on the eight meridian points  with my index and third fingers, with each point receiving seven or eight taps and the initial statement: “this anger issue.”    As it often does, other related subjects popped up and I kept tapping until I felt my energy shift.  The eight points are: inside of eyebrow (EP), outside of eyebrow (OEP), under the eye (UEP), under the nose (UN), under the mouth (UM), Collarbone point (CP, just under the collarbone), under the arm (UA, about four-six inches under your armpit), and under the breast or, for men, the chest nipple (NP).

I stopped to assess my feelings about the anger, which had gone from a ten to a six but also now included feelings of helplessness about ever managing it any better.  This is common; an issue will be taken care of at one level and another pops up.  So I started the second round with tapping near the crown of my head (HP) and saying: “I could choose peace instead of this.”  That’s a wonderful old Course in Miracles  phrase that often gets me to pondering the peaceful alternatives.  Then I tapped alternately on “peace” and “helplessness.”  By the end of this second round of tapping, I was out of the clutches of anger, guilt and helplessness. Anger, guilt and inability to do anything about them were all a zero.   I know because I then did something else (writing this blog) happily!  What a relief!

You can download the free EFT manual  at Emofree.com, or purchase some of the DVDs that show Gary Craig and others helping people with a wide range of problems from overeating to fear of public speaking, some of them  with childhood backgrounds that include abuse of many kinds.   He also has co-authored, with David Feinstein and Donna Eden, the book, The Promise of Energy Psychology.

Will I never get mad at my husband or other people again?  To that I can only reply, HITHSIC, which means "How in the hell should I know?"  I do know that I can replace stress, anger and other negatives with more positive emotions, and that I'm grateful for this means of moving ahead in life.

Day Thirteen is still alkaline after all these days.  Feels good!