The evidence that it is something we should be taking very     seriously is so convincing.  It has had such amazingly good outcome results I don’t think any therapist can now ignore it.   Doctors who do Mindfulness meditation burn out less than those who do not.  Mindfulness reduces the symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome and of Multiple Sclerosis.  It helps with pain management.  Breast Cancer survivors who use it have less depression, less fear the cancer will return, and higher energy.  I could go on…

Studies at UCLA and Harvard show there are actual structural changes in the brains of people who practice Mindfulness meditation.  For therapists, it is particularly seductive that those changes are in the parts of the brain we need to support empathy with other people.

Outcome and neurological research have combined to convince me that I want some of this and I want my clients to have it, too.

So I have been trying to find out more of what it is and whether everyone means the same thing by it. And I have put a short new getting-started mini Mindfulness audio on my website www.judybyrne.co.uk (right down at the bottom of the home page.)  It is less than seven minutes long.

I had a model in my head of using Mindfulness meditation to discover how to regulate my attention and my emotions and to be aware of who I am and what my body is experiencing.  And that, as well as using meditation, doing things mindfully, with a present moment awareness of exactly what it is that I am doing, and what I am experiencing as I do it, as a part of the path.

Mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn defines it as: “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, to the present moment and without judgment.”  Trauma expert Pat Ogden says it paying attention to particular elements of internal experience (body sensation, movement, emotion, five-sense perception, cognition) considered important to therapeutic goals.

In pursuit of a deeper understanding of what it is and how to incorporate it into our work, my EFT training colleague Richard Mark and I recently went to a workshop on Teaching Mindfulness to Clients and I have been digesting it since.  At times it challenged my working  definition or Mindfulness.  It seemed to be difficult to separate it from CBT.  And it has, of course, become big in CBT circles.  One particular demonstration that seemed to blur the distinction in my head was having an agitated client retell what had upset her in a completely factual way.   No comment. No feelings. No judgment.   Just the facts.

I have just had the chance to try it on myself.   And I must say the effect it had did surprise me.

It began in the supermarket car park when I pointed out to a young woman with no blue badge that she had taken a blue badge space and there were no disabled parking spaces left free for people who needed them – like a man I had just watched get out of his wheelchair, stow it in the boot, and get himself into the car.  She did not think it mattered because there were plenty of other spaces free. She did not get it that disabled parking spaces are not just near the door.  They are also wide to accommodate people who need to open car doors wider than the rest of us to get in and out.   I am not sure how she failed to get that because her justification for using the space was that she needed a wide bay because she had a baby to get in and out of the car.

I showed her that there was parent and child parking and where it was.  She switched from : “How dare you speak to me like this when I have my baby in my arms” to being extremely personally insulting.  And when her partner came out of the supermarket, she redirected her abusive rant about me from me to him.   She left me feeling extremely shaken, angry, and with all the things I stopped myself saying running round and round my head. As they do.  (Especially this bit: Her “How dare you speak to me about this when I have my baby in my arms.” Me: “ I don’t think your baby would have had any idea what I was saying in a quiet and quite measured way but your baby has certainly picked up the feelings of your rage as you scream at me.” )

I tried imagining tapping while I shopped.  Since I had no list and was menu-planning and buying for on the hoof, it was not easy to do both at the same time.

So driving home, I told myself the story out loud in a completely factual way. I really felt so much better.  I could actually laugh about one bit of it.

My lessons?  Whether I would call this Mindfulness or CBT or telling the story Mindfully and therefore either or both I don’t know –  but it worked for me.  I am glad I had had a shower mindfully before I went.  Otherwise I might not have thought to try it.

And if I see anyone else taking a blue badge space they are not entitled to I will say something again. Mindfully, of course.

I have always thought (and taught) that it is a cardinal mistake for a therapist to think: “I know what that feels like. That has happened to me.”  Something similar may have happened to us but we never have any idea how it feels for someone else and the only possible  insight, such as it is,  comes from really listening to the clients, not from using ourselves for reference.

So the fact that I like presenting doesn’t make me feel disqualified from working with people for whom it is an ordeal.  But if I want to tap into my empathy,  I have only to think of my  own dysfunctional relationship with my DVDs and recordings.

I found myself a little while ago accidentally watching again the first EFT DVD I made.  It was filmed at my presentation at the first-ever EFT Masterclass in London in 2006. I had mixed feelings about it when I saw it again.  (Could have been better/better than I thought.) And  I was surprised how relaxed I was in front of the camera.  It didn’t throw me even when  a bit of microphone went down my trousers.   It was probably the day I discovered I am actually a ham.

But I hate watching or listening to myself afterwards .  When I originally got that first DVD,  I tapped and tapped and put it off and tapped some more.  It was weeks before I watched it.  I am still a work in progress on this.  I still dread seeing or hearing myself . It took me an age to look at my three DVDs on using EFT in Therapy and Healing the Past with EFT, even though I had had a ball making them with a great bunch of EFTers at Studley Castle in Warwickshire.  More tapping.  And still more when I got the DVD of Working with Trauma from my presentation at the 2009 EFT Masterclass.

Which is why I was anticipating the recent Innovations special weekend of free audios on the EFT Hub with mixed feelings.   I was really looking forward to listening to the other six Masterclass presenters (EFT Masters Jaqui Crooks, Ann Ross, Sue Beer, Emma Roberts, Tania Prince, and Gwyneth Moss). I was really dreading listening to myself.  I might be boring or inept or irrelevant or dull.   This might be the time I really get found out.

And now the recording is available again, free, on the Masterclass 2011 website http://www.eftevents.com .  All seven are.   Go there now to listen or to book or both.   The Masterclass is in York on October 22/23 and the early booking price lasts only until the end of August. I am really looking forward to presenting there.

But excuse me now.  I have to start tapping about that audio again.  I was just up to:  “Even though they might find me out …“

People have said “thank you” before.  But somehow this from someone I have never met, who found a recording I made a long time ago on a website and took the trouble to find my contact details to tell me that it had made such a difference in her life kept resonating in my head. And it set me thinking about a lot of aspects of our EFT work in a different way.

The facts: The recording was part of the World Tapping Summit 2010.  There had been feedback when it went out.  But I was mystified at first when I started getting a lot of emails about it again a couple of weeks ago.  I got curious and did some detecting and found that Nick Ortner (who with his sister Jessica has created the world tapping summits) had posted it on his blog*.  Under it were a string of comments.

They included: “This presentation has really made a difference in my life… This tapping and information gave me the tools to change my way of thinking and I feel very happy.” And “What a great release of sad and hurtful memories happened very quickly.”    There were many more.  And the email I quoted above was not the only one I had from complete strangers not asking for anything.  Just taking time and trouble to say: “Thank you.”

It really is humbling to discover that something you have done has had such an impact on people you do not know and never will in countries you will probably never visit.  It reminded me why I think doing therapy is the best job and the greatest privilege in the world.  It also reminded me why this is such a great time is to be working in it.

A lot about the virtual reality of 21^st century life is, I believe,  pretty psychologically damaging.  Instant everything is changing how we function in our relationships, and in our own inner lives.  Usually it is not changes for the better.  But this, it now seems to me, is the upside.  To be able to have an idea about what might be useful for people, to record it, to have it out there – in no previous age could it have got so far so fast and been able to be helpful to so many.  That is true for so many of us who work in ways beyond the limitations of  traditional therapy-in-the-room.

I have always felt the phenomenal spread of EFT – Gary Craig’s newsletter attracted half a million subscribers in less than 20 years – could only have happened in an age of instant Internet.  It  is a therapy tool for and of its time.  Paradoxically so, since it is based on such ancient foundations.  The idea of meridians goes back 6,000 years.

I am just so glad that I got past the this-is-too-whacky-for -serious-therapy barrier.   And that so many others have done and are doing so, too. But then we were lucky.  When we felt skeptical about it or silly doing it or scared that our colleagues would think we had lost the plot or afraid that our clients would think we were too lightweight to be credible, we could tap and move on.

Thank heaven for EFT.

*You can find the recording it via http://tinyurl.com/4yksgxl

EFT founder, Gary Craig , formulated Borrowing Benefits after practitioners noticed that when they tapped with clients they got rid of things of their own.  Since good practitioners deliberately put their own stuff elsewhere while they are working with clients this seems truly remarkable.  But most tapping practitioners will tell you the same thing ..

My first experience of Borrowing Benefits was in a group f 15 EFTers who went together to California back in 2003 to do advanced training with Gary Craig in his own home.  The deal was that, as Gary did not want to come here, we would go there. He would teach us free and  he would demonstrate what he was teaching us by working with us one at a time while everyone else tapped.  He would video the sessions for the Borrowing Benefits series of DVDs he was putting together at the time, ready to launch the concept worldwide.  (In the end, only one session from that week made the cut. The others were cursed by sound problems. )

I have always suspected Borrowing Benefits might be at its most efficient when the tapping had a theme that was relevant to everyone in the group, even if the specific aspects were not.   And so it has proved in a series of sessions I have just finished.   I have done them with two people wanting to work on issues about eating, weight and body image.  They both tapped on what they wanted to clear, as well as what the other did, and found it surprising how often something changed even when they were just joining in with the other person, rather than staying their own path.

I have recorded the sessions so others can also use them tap along with these two clients as a way of clearing their own related issues.  They come with  a bonus free eWorkbook which is not a programme , but a way of provoking thought about the theme.  Experience tells us that we borrow benefits most efficiently when, even though  we are not focussing on our own stuff at the time,  we have paid some attention to it before we put it back on the back burner.

If you would like to try them, the link to my tapping shop is http://www.judybyrne.co.uk /products.htm.  If you decided to try them I would appreciate any feedback you are willing to share.

Masterclass update.  The EFT Masterclass 2011 now has a Facebook notice board you are welcome to join  (http://tinyurl.com/6g9yx6r) if you want to be kept posted about developments.   The latest is that, besides presentations by me and six other EFT Masters – Sue Beer, Emma Roberts, Ann Ross, Tania Prince, Gwyneth Moss, and Jaqui Crooks,  we are using the eighth session for group mentoring.  Which means you can ask anything you want to know more about from any or all of us.  ( I wonder if any question will get seven completely different answers.)

The Masterclass is in York on October 22/23 and if you want the best accommodation deals don’t leave it late to book.  York is a popular half-term destination, even when it doesn’t also have a Masterclass to offer as well.

When I teach EFT Level 2 I ask people to complete a number of sentences so we can look at the beliefs that are running them and where they came from.   One of the sentences is:  “Rich people are… “  Further back in history I worked with  hypnotherapy students on setting up a practice.  In both contexts, I have run up against a wide range of negative beliefs about therapy and money.

Many feel there is a contradiction between helping people and being given money for it.  They are drawn to use EFT as practitioners or to be hypnotherapists because they want to help people.   But they still need to pay mortgages and eat.  Often what I find is that there is a real inner split between the need to earn a living and a distaste for making money from helping people in distress.

I have had to work through it myself. Probably I am still not really there.  I know, in my head, that I have spent a fortune on training courses, books, DVDs – way beyond what any financially savvy business would invest in training one person.   I have spent more money on promoting EFT than I would really care to add up.

Taking money from people who spend time with us can still trigger a lot of  “Am I worth it?” no matter how much time, money and thought we have put into being the therapist we are now.  At the end of the session, there is nothing we can put in a carrier bag and hand to a client and take away.

When therapists work with clients what they sell is their expertise, their energy, their time, their close attention, their intention.   The outcome is the client’s.   If a client decides, as some do, that they would rather put up with what they have than make the  changes they need to have things other,  that is not a failure of the therapist, or the therapy method, or the client.  It is a choice. It is the client’s prerogative to choose.   I am sure my students get sick of hearing me say: “Let go of the outcome”   When we don’t, we start unconsciously steering clients where we think they should go, rather than letting them find the way they want.

I thought I had all this fairly sorted  after all these years   But I had a reminder this week that we are always still works in progress.  It came as a shock that I had such a visceral reaction to an email  which said: “When we become a money-making scheme the point is lost.”   It was not an abstract thought. There was more.  it was clear it was  accusing me.

It was provoked by a newsletter in which I told subscribers they could see a free video of abundance expert Carol Look talking to Jessica Ortner (of the World Tapping Summits team)  on attracting more income  (http://tinyurl.com/3zrw9gh if you want a look).   I try to make sure former students and other subscribers to my newsletters know what is out there free at different times.

In my head, the value of this particular content to my newsletter subscribers would be greater because so many therapists have so many blocking beliefs about earning that they would benefit from clearing.   I also thought that, as they are all EFT fans, they would be interested to watch Carol Look.

Naive perhaps.  I did not see it as encouraging readers to make greedy money.  But I believe the labourer is worthy of his/her hire. The person who sent me the email reproach seemed to read it as my way of encouraging therapists to use EFT to rip people off.

Excuse me, now.  I need to go away and tap.

If  you have a website you probably know that the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK now has the same power over what  we have on our websites as  they did over what we put in hard copy ads in magazines and directories.  So far, so good.  No one wants untruthful claims to be blessed or even ignored.  Decent, honest, legal…  sounds fair enough.

But is it so black and white?

Having started out left-brained, proof-needy in a deterministic Western scientific mould, I do understand about putting our proof where our mouths are.  It is not okay to make wild claims without evidence of efficacy.

But what I have also come to understand in my long journey from left brain to right is that many therapies are not good material for traditional Western scientific proof.  Good science demands that we treat every subject in an experimental group in exactly the same way.  Good integrative therapy demands that we treat every client in our practices in a different way, determined by our informed guess about what will work best for each person who walks through our office door.

So that is the first stumbling block to the otherwise sound idea that we have to “prove” our therapy works.   And it is why people coming from a hard science background find it difficult to accept our kind of evidence as genuine proof.

The second is placebo.  Until a few decades ago, doctors did not have a lot more to offer  many of their patients than a good bedside manner and a sugar pill in a choice of colours. (“No, doctor. I find the red ones are much better for me than the blue.” )  Now it is illegal to prescribe a placebo.  We have to be transparent.  Medications must  list all known side-effects despite the nocebo effect, and not only on hypochondriacs.  Drugs companies also have to reveal the studies where their drug did little better than placebo – or risk Freedom of Information exposure.  

I favour transparency.  But a little bit of me regrets the loss of this systematic harnessing of the ability the body often has do its own healing, given the right conditions.

For right conditions read “sugar pill” or “therapist reassurance.”  Our therapeutic equivalent to the sugar pill is what we tell clients we can do.   When a client  rings or emails to ask if we have had experience of dealing with a certain condition and what results we have had, honesty demands that we tell them that what happened last time doesn’t not predict what will happen when we work with them.  Or they will ask: “Does EFT work for …. “ What they want to hear, and might also have enough of a placebo effect to make the difference is: “Yes.”   

Despite my awe of how humans can do placebo and my desire to harness it in my work, I have always felt compelled to say something like:  “Everyone is different .  I cannot give you any sort of a guarantee about you.  But I am willing to try it you would like to.“    And I add: “In any case EFT doesn’t work with conditions. It works with people who have conditions.”   I am sure I have lost clients to a better sales pitch.

But is even that enough?   Now, hard on the heels of the change in the law, some scientists have  been competing to see who can report most alternative therapists successfully to the Advertising Standards Authority.  And some therapists have been sharing their concerns about suspected attempts at entrapment.  When you have an unusual but identical enquiry several times in a few days, you do wonder.

If I am truthful and careful and measured in what I say I can offer do I have anything to worry about?  Yes.  I do. It is this.  I find I have started to read emails and listen to calls from prospective clients not just with openness and honesty  but  with suspicion.   And I hate it.  It is not where I want to be in my relationships with clients or prospective clients  – reading/hearing  a story and wondering if the author has invented it to try to trap me.   

I believe I am decent, honest, legal.  But am I a better therapist  for having to be so careful that I might offend a group of scientists with an agenda to protect clients from therapists not conforming with their view of the world?   

MASTERCLASS UPDATE

New developments on the EFT Masterclass 2011 on October 22/12 in York:

 You can book now at the best price and pay in instalments from now until September.  To do it go to http://www.eftevents.com .  While you are there click on my page. I have added a podcast of How to turn EFT your inner critic into your tapping buddy and a pdf on Working with imaginary memories. Both free.

Other presenters are:  Sue Beer, Jaqui Crooks, Gwymeth Moss, Tania Prince.  Emma Roberts, and  Ann Ross,   There are pdfs or podcasts on some of their pages already and more being added all the time.

On one hand, it is a technique so easy-to-learn that everyone can use it to deal with stress, anxiety, unwanted emotions.  Its  developer Gary Craig gave it freely to the world.  I, too, have an obsession with telling as many people as will listen how they can use it for themselves.  I scarcely dare say this but I think my app for iPhone and touch iPod is now working as it was meant to.   Not only de-glitched but revised.   So if you tried to download it and failed, do try again.  If you did download you might want to update. It is free. (http://tinyurl.com/4mhey68). Unfortunately for the moment it is not being offered for iPad.  That is a whole other story.   Hang on while I go away and tap about that …

The other face of EFT is a powerful, subtle transformative  tool which skilled and experienced therapists can use in their work so it becomes, for clients, less painful, faster, more thorough, more relevant to their lives outside the therapy room and more lasting than therapy might otherwise be.

It is because we know so well that it is a continuing journey that the EFT Founding Masters have an annual Masterclass in the UK at which we share learnings from our journeys.  Each Masterclass been different in character and flavour.  And the sixth – in York on October 22 and 23 – (www.eftevents.com) will be no exception.  This one will have seven  of us presenting to the whole group.  No difficult choices between options for people who attend.

Unfortunately, there are difficult choices for presenters.  For me it is an annual dilemma.  Every year there seems to be so much exciting new stuff  from my reading and thinking and studying other therapists’ ideas and – and this is the biggie –  learning from teaching others and working with clients – that I never quite know how to encapsulate it into a presentation with a theme, a focus, a time-limit and a good chance that it will be useful to many other EFTers.

EFT for dealing with trauma is one of my passions.  I did a presentation and a workshop on working with trauma with EFT at the Manchester Masterclass in 2009* It was about having a therapy framework for trauma, not just thinking we can tap it away.  I think trauma – “everyday trauma “ as well as the big stuff – underlies so much that brings people into therapy.  Fortunately it is also one of the things EFT does best

But I think we are, to quote Gary Craig, on the ground floor of the healing high rise. And that some of what will take us up to the next one is not how we tap but how we are when we tap.  This means going beyond the personal peace plan/personal therapy to clear as many of our own issues as we can before we work with others.  This is about peeling away another layer of the onion and learning much more about who we are and how to be how we would like to be in therapy sessions.   And what’s sauce for the therapist is sauce for the client as well.  It is about teaching clients more than how to do a round of tapping.   This is why I have been looking at Mindfulness, both for me and for how it fits with working with trauma clients.

I also think we have an obligation to keep up with discoveries that may be relevant to what we do.  I think new understandings in neuroscience also have a lot to offer us in the way we approach doing therapy.  This is not about how we tap but how we make informed decisions about what to tap on.

So I have two different strands to my thinking about how to move my own trauma work to the next  level – and maybe how to shape my Masterclass presentation.  One bolt-on is Mindfulness.   The  other is neuroscience, or an understanding of developments in neuroscience and their implications for us.  How does each deepen our understanding both of ourselves and of how EFT can be most relevant and most effective?

The next stage for me, is to decide whether to talk about one or both and if one only, which one.

Please feel free to tell me what you think.

*  I have a DVD of the Manchester presentation and accompanying resources handout available to buy.  I have also made DVDs on dealing with all levels of negative memories.   You can find them on www.judybyrne.co.uk

When I was a young(ish, well new) therapist, the work had enormous immediate rewards.  There were clients who left feeling you had shared their journey as they turned their lives around.  Clients would sometimes send a Christmas card with an update on how they continued on this new track.  Clients came referred by previous clients with high expectations that you could help them in the same way.  Doing therapy is such a privilege. People you have never met before allow you such intimate access to their secret inner lives.

I love that. It still happens. I had a message on my answering machine the other day from a former client saying a day never goes by that she does not think of the work we did together as she does something easily and comfortably that was pretty much an impossibility for her before we began.

Now my work has added another dimension. This virtual world is a community which embraces people whose lives I discover I have somehow touched without ever meeting them – another great privilege.  Things like being a presenter in the World Tapping Summit 2010* at the end of last year and in the Trauma Telesummit last month**  Things like taking part in EFT special broadcast weekends on Practice Building and EFT for Weight.***  I get emails from people I may never meet saying how much something I said helped them to move on or opened up a rich seam of new possibilities for them.

I just went on YouTube to see how many hits my DVDs introducing EFTand explaining the EFT tapping points have had (30,000 and 15,000 respectively).   Being lazy I just put in a search for my name and other things popped up and surprised me.  I have presented at events for which I did not have the filming copyright so I keep turning up where I don’t know I am.  Or people email to ask me questions about something I said on a DVD and leave me wondering: “What DVD?”

Now there are two very contrasting additions to my work coming up.

There is my new EFT app for iPhone/Pad/Pod (touch) which, after some teething troubles, should be working better and for more people when the revised edition is released in about ten days.  The first seemed reluctant to talk to anything less than an iPhone 4.  It is at this minute being given a good talking to.  That was never its brief.  My hope is that it will take EFT to many, many more people, most of whom I will never meet, but who will discover through it how we can all tap into this great self-help and therapy tool.  Maybe once in a while one of them will email me and tell me it was useful to them.

The second is joining with six other EFT Masters to run and present at the EFT Masterclass 2011 in York, on October 22/23.  I have run one on my own and one with two other masters.  Now we are seven.  The event is booking already on http://www.eftevents.com.   It will be mega in EFTland with EFT enthusiasts, practitioners and trainers getting together to catch up on what we are up to in our work, to learn from one another, to network, to share, and to have fun together.

I have a fantasy about this person who downloads the app, is intrigued, learns more, become an EFT addict, comes to the Masterclass and introduces himself or herself to me and tells me that is their story.   It could happen. In this infinitely networked age, it really could.

* For the 2011 World Tapping Summit go to: http://tinyurl.com/645dqsm There are some great free videos up there right now.
**The trauma telesummit is  http://tinyurl.com/47tcqtl
***These and lots of other audios are to be found on http://tinyurl.com/4tb43uf

Getting the EFT word out there in every way I can has long been my passion. I love doing workshops both for people who want to use it in therapy and people who just want to use it for themselves.  I have put videos on YouTube to help people get started.  I have written a free How to Get Started eBook.   I have put that and lots of other resources on my website.  I have presented to conferences on EFT and its uses in the UK, the US,  Switzerland, Australia.  And now I have made an app and made it free hoping it will spread the word even more widely.

You may be reading this blog on my app.  If you are it is no longer in the Apple review queue.  If you are not but would like to be able to, you can get it from iTunes or via the link on the home page of my website. It is for iPhone, iPad and touch IPod.  (If you have it, I would love feedback on it.  Suggestions will help shape the first upgrade. )

EFT seems a natural for an app.  It is so much a therapy tool of the 21^st century that apping tapping  was the obvious next step.  Right from the start  EFT was of its time – a paradox for a therapy that can trace its roots back  with reliable carbon-dated evidence  5,500 years.  That’s how long ago we know people had the idea of points on meridians being relevant to what they were suffering and using pressure or bamboo splinters and later needles on those points.

Yet EFT – or Emotional Freedom Techniques –  would never have taken off at the speed that it did without the Internet.  Gary Craig had the inspired idea and a passion for spreading it.  He trained in TFT – Thought Field Therapy – and almost immediately began to devise and then circulate EFT,  his own somewhat simpler take on it.  EFT feels to me more client-centred and self-help-friendly.   The procedure doesn’t get in the way of the two-way therapist-client bond that is so vital to successful therapy.  It also empowers clients to take it off as a tool to use for themselves outside the therapy room and after therapy ends.

What Gary had going for him was that he was not only therapeutically creative but a good marketer and that meant  he was Internet savvy.  No one who was not could have built up a newsletter circulation list of more than half a million in less than 20 years.  EFT is huge and still growing.

I confess to having taken more than a little persuading when I first came across EFT.  I could see it worked.   But I did not really get why tapping on points on the energy system should have such a profound effect.  And then, when I pondered what proof we have that we have energy systems, the penny finally dropped. We do not have energy systems.  We are energy systems. Einstein said a long time ago now that everything was energy.   It took humans a while to realise that that meant us, too.