Tapping Away the Blues and the Blahs

Welcome, readers. How are you?

I ask that in the hope that you will take a few deep breaths and touch into something truthful about yourself and your state of being. You might, for instance, check into your body, your breathing, your prevailing mood.  Are you holding tight posturally?  Are you forgetting to breathe, as in “waiting to exhale”?  How connected do you feel to yourself?  Let’s pause for about a minute to allow your internal response to that question…

OK. Now you might visualize your inner being thanking you for consciously connecting and checking in.

Last night I found myself giving us a pep talk, me and my husband. We’d both gotten into a slump emotionally and even physically. Even though my profession is energy work, I can’t always maintain my own energy optimally. It’s a challenge, especially in the current atmosphere globally, in our own country, and in our personal lives and the lives of our relatives and friends.

I’m sure most of my readers, like us, have tools they are using right now to keep themselves energized and grounded at least some of the time. And in this article I’d like to add a few thoughts that might be of additional help. If you will indulge me, here is an expanded version of my pep talk:

Hey, what are we doing? Look at us. Our shoulders are a bit slumped. Our chests are caved in. We’ve become disheartened, of course. And afraid. And angry. It keeps coming in waves; or like an avalanche of heavy dark material falling on us, threatening to bury us; or like the slow dropping of ash, putting us in a toxic fog. We have problems, inside and out. We have worries. We have burdens… AND … there is something we keep forgetting, something that’s so hard to remember in all this density. We are more than this body, this identity. We each have an intrinsic energy that doesn’t leave us. It didn’t go anywhere. It hasn’t vacated the premises. It is just blocked off. And it’s our own perceptions, beliefs, thoughts, and emotions that are blocking our access to this energy.

Inside us is this gift that can keep on giving. An imperfect analogy keeps coming to mind, that it’s like the difference between using fossil fuels, an exhaustible energy, and basking in the power of the sun, nature’s free gift to us.  Call this gift Spirit or call it Soul. Call it the Higher Self, the Inner Self, the True Self. Call it Essence. Call it Divinity. Call it Nature. Call it your Original Face. Call it God or Goddess. It doesn’t matter what you call it, just CALL IT. We needn’t spend time quibbling about the name, when all we need to do is get to it, come home to it.

So, last night after the pep talk, we decided to do some tapping together to get our life force moving.  “Tapping” or EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) is a form of self-healing which consists of tapping sequentially on certain meridian points on the head and body, usually while vocalizing or sub-vocalizing about the condition or situation or painful emotion one is experiencing.  For instance, last night we talked, while tapping, about our feelings of depression, sadness, helplessness and hopelessness.  Gradually, the cloud lifted and we felt lighter, like we could get on with things and focus better on the present.  Last year during quarantine we tapped every night to deal with our feelings of isolation and uncertainty.  It really helped us to get through it more smoothly and be especially grateful for the gifts we had, like a number of wonderful younger friends who went shopping for us!!

You can learn lots more about this fascinating self-healing tool in Nick Ortner’s book The Tapping Solution. The first chapter, for example, is a great read (uh-oh! nerd alert) and explains how, in the practice of tapping, Western sciences like neuro-psychology meet Eastern healing traditions like acupressure and acupuncture. There is also a documentary of the same name.  Another interesting resource on the subject is the book The Promise of Energy Psychology by Donna Eden and David Feinstein, Ph.D.

And, of course, there are lots of resources online.  For a quick and simple demonstration of tapping, I found on YouTube Nick Ortner’s Tapping Technique to Calm Anxiety.  Lastly, in the context of my energy work and shiatsu experience, I often lead people through extended tapping sessions to help get to the core of a particular issue and transform it. Please see my website for further information.

Tapping is one of many ways of connecting to our deep inner resources.  In upcoming articles, I’ll be talking more about energy, this great natural resource within each of us, and various ways we can work with it to recover more of our dynamism and potential.  Meanwhile, as the British say, “Bang on!”, and by that I mean shake, stomp, dance, yell, tap - whatever you can do to keep the energy moving in spite of everything.

Until next time, bless you and be well.