EFT and meditation for a broken heart

By Irene Odmark-Hall, EFT-ADV

Two and a half years ago I came across EFT, and have been an avid tapper ever since.  I read the Newsletter regularly; there is always so much there to inspire me in my own healing and in my work with clients.

I read an article by Eric Robbins in the Newsletter, where he mentioned the Holosync meditation tapes.  They are based on a unique technology where tones of different frequencies are presented into each ear through stereo headphones, thus inducing a deep meditative state.  

I decided to give it a try.  At that time my life was in turmoil.  I had just ended a loving but hopeless relationship with the man I had wanted to spend the rest of my life with.  I felt disappointed.  I was full of grief.  All my old abandonment issues were tormenting me.  The only good thing with the breakup was that it gave me the opportunity to deal with my “old stuff” and with no man around I had the time to spend an hour a day meditating…

Listening to the CD’s was like balm on my tormented heart.  The sound of falling rain and crystal bowls was beautifully soothing, and healing in itself.  But on a deeper level something else happens when you meditate: having the brain in a deep alpha and theta state for a suspended period of time pushes the brain to develop and reorganize.  In this process it also releases old material. Memories, thought patterns, and emotions come to the surface and fade away.  Or, as one becomes conscious of them, one can choose to work more specifically on them and so speed up the healing process.

I soon realized that Holosync and EFT is a powerful combination.  Often a strong emotion, or a poignant image, would emerge when I was meditating, and then I’d do some EFT on it right there, just in the middle of the session.  And the problems would dissolve more easily than without EFT because my usual, logical way of thinking would trip me up.  I could access deeper levels of myself in the meditative trance state induced by the meditation.

I have always had a strong, healthy heart with low blood pressure, low pulse.  But after this last break up something happened.  I started to get these weird palpitations, it felt as though my heart wanted to escape out of my body.  At first I attributed it to age, menopause and all that, and so didn’t worry about it especially.  But at the back of my mind I had this nagging thought: Perhaps this is what it feels like to have a broken heart?  Or perhaps, even worse…?

One evening as I was meditating my heart went wild, thumping away at turbo speed, and for the first time I felt scared.  So I started tapping:

Even though I feel really scared about my heart thumping away like this…

Even though I feel scared about these palpitations, after all, my mother did have a heart attack when she was my age… and I realize I’m not my mother…

My heart calmed down considerably.  I decided to investigate a bit more:

Even though my logical mind doesn’t know the reason behind these palpitations, I trust my subconscious to know, and to make that information available to me…

Tap, tap, tap.  All of a sudden I felt really sad and lonely.  I had a good cry as I continued tapping, saying out loud some of the things that came to my mind:

I feel so lonely … I really miss my hopeless sweetheart … he was the passion of my life … I really do miss him … it feels just like when I was a little kid … longing for my Mum … I’m the loneliest, saddest little girl ever … I feel so lonely … my whole life is so hopeless … I am so hopeless … I’m just as hopeless as he is.

The sadness slowly eased.  Towards the end I included the 9 gamut procedure (I find the 9 gamut especially helpful when I’m sad or upset) and it kind of snapped me out of my deeply emotional state.

Then I saw an image appear in my mind’s eye: my heart.  It was a dark, reddish brown, dry and shriveled up like an old passion fruit.  What an apt image – when the passion went out of my life, my heart shriveled up - it just lay there and I felt a deep sense of hopelessness mingled with compassion.  Poor old heart … poor old me.  And just the slightest flash of anger.  I didn’t have time to start tapping on either hopelessness or anger, because the images had a life of their own.  All of a sudden I noticed a huge knife lying there, next to my heart.

Without thinking I grabbed it, raised it and forcefully cut my heart in half.  There it lay, revealing its secret.  It was full of red, juicy seeds, like a pomegranate more than a passion fruit.  But at the very bottom of the heart fruit the seeds were dried up and moldy.

Even though the bottom part of my passion heart is dried up and moldy…

Even though parts of me feel old and shriveled up I deeply and completely love and forgive myself and anybody else who has a part in this…

Even though I feel rotten and dried up, I love every little bit of myself and I choose to focus on the parts of me that are juicy and alive…

Suddenly there were little green tendrils growing out of the blackened seeds.  They grew quickly, and soon my broken heart was wrapped in green shoots of sweet-peas holding it together.  There was even one little bud, about to burst open, and I knew the flower would be white.

All this happened very quickly.  I felt intuitively that the black and dried up parts of the passion fruit were the parts of my heart damaged in childhood, where love was in hard supply and never given unconditionally or in the form I needed it.  And that was also the reason why I often got involved with men who didn’t really give me what I needed even though (or perhaps because of it) I loved them passionately and without boundaries.

However, I made a quick mental note of going into all that later.  At the moment I was fascinated by the black and the red seeds, wanting to have a second look.  I gently parted the green tendrils and pried my heart open again.  Then I lifted it up and tilted it and a tarry, gooey liquid poured out from the damaged parts.  I poured and poured, for a long time it seemed, tapping continuously all the while.  Finally the oozy liquid only came in drops.  And gently, I let the two halves of my heart be held together by the green shoots again.

A deep calm settled over me, and I finished the meditation session with a sense of gratefulness and serenity.  No palpitations at all.

As I woke up the next morning my heart was calm and quiet.  I just lay there enjoying myself, looking at the sunshine pouring in through the windows, feeling happy.  Suddenly my heart took an extra leap, but much less violently than before, and I didn’t really know if it jumped for joy or just out of old habit.

I got out of bed knowing what I had to do: move more, take more exercise.  To actually exercise my heart I chose a yoga set called “The essence of self” which includes a lot of exercises for the heart.  Through the following weeks I did my yoga, went for walks, meditated focusing on my heart, and did EFT on the images and thoughts that arose.  I checked in on my heart now and again, tilting it to see what came out.  Gradually the black liquid lightened and turned amber.  At the end of another two weeks the liquid was a creamy honey colour and my palpitations were gone.

I would like to say they were gone for good, but sometimes they come back.  Then I have to do some more detective work.  I ask myself: What is there in my life now to bring them on?  And then I use EFT on the answer. It has been an interesting process, keeping my palpitations at bay.  Now I can hardly feel any at all.  But when they do turn up I know I have to listen carefully.

I am learning to listen to what my heart tells me.  And it tells me I don’t need to stress myself out in order to be loved, that I am a passionate and attractive woman anyway, and that I have many powerful tools in my toolkit to help me live a loving, healthy life.  Meditation and EFT are two of them.

Irene Odmark-Hall, EFT-ADV