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Deepak Chopra, MD
"EFT offers great healing benefits."
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Fresh grief and a double benefit
Hi Everyone,
Ann Adams touches us with a tender story about "Joan" and an early experience with tapping. In this case, healing was accomplished for both the healer (Ann) and the healee (Joan). That, to me, is the ultimate aim of proper healing. It reminds me of a stanza from the Wedding Song that goes....
"Whenever two or more of you are gathered in His name,
There is love.... There is love....."
Love, Gary
Gary,
Joan was my first experience with any ‘tapping’. This was even before I received the EFT tapes. In my ignorance, my first experience was nowhere near as thorough as my intuition leads me now. However, it is a good example of the slogan: JUST DO IT. It also shows that while our own stuff can get in the way when working with the pain of others, we sometimes heal ourselves.
Ann
During Thanksgiving weekend of 1999, "Joan’s" fiancie "John" was killed in a freak car accident. Joan was with her parents for the holiday and had not gone with her fiancie on the hunting trip as she ordinarily would have done. Joan and her parents were in a cabin in the remote woods. Unfortunately, the traumatic news was given to her by the state patrol.
Joan and I had worked together for many years. I was very worried about her as she had suffered from depressive episodes for 20 years. I went to John’s parents’ home to meet Joan and offer whatever comfort I could. Her devastation was especially painful for me as my husband had died very unexpectedly a few years before. My own pain was still high.
I had just learned about the ‘tapping stuff’ in a brief introductory seminar about meridian therapies. I knew very little and hesitated to use my limited and untried knowledge in what I considered a very delicate situation. But as Joan continued to cry for hours I asked if she would be willing to try a new ‘relaxation exercise’ I had learned. She agreed.
We were in a spare bedroom away from the crowd of people and I tapped along with her as we went through the sequence several times. Her teenage daughter, lying on the bed, watched her mother calm down for the first time in 12 hours. Her daughter then began to talk about ‘John’ and as she, too, cried and talked about what he meant to her, I tapped the points on her for several minutes. She then fell asleep on the bed.
The next day I returned. Joan had been refusing to eat. Her voice was barely a whisper and she was so pale I thought she would faint. We tapped together again. Her color immediately improved and she was able to speak normally and eat some lunch. We tapped together some more the next day before the funeral to calm her.
I wrote the tapping sequence down for her and urged her to continue. I would call her once a week and check on her. She continued to cry and the calls were painful for me as well. Although I mentioned tapping, I did not want to push her about EFT. In the meantime, I had received the EFT tapes and had devoured them. I practiced on dozens of volunteers. By February I had seen amazing results on a wide variety of issues.
But I was still fearful of working with fresh grief. After all, there are so many issues and aspects in a recent death. And isn’t grief a necessary process, I rationalized. Only later did I realize it was my own grief holding me back.
Joan and John had planned to be married on Valentine’s Day 2000. The day arrived and her co-workers called me concerned about Joan’s emotional state. Joan had been crying all day and so I agreed to go to Joan’s house that night. She was sobbing as she told me she had cried for several hours every day since John’s death. I told her I had learned a lot more about EFT since Thanksgiving and that, damn it, we were going to use it all night if necessary. I could not bear to see my friend hurt so.
And so we began to tap. This time using every "Even though . . ." statement I could think of. And, since I had experienced such a loss myself, I could think of plenty. Much of the time I not only had to say the set ups for Joan I had to tap on her as she was absolutely unable to do it for herself. We talked and tapped for literally three hours. As she became able to tap for herself, I would tap along. Finally she calmed enough to say she could go on to sleep.
Joan called me two days latera and told me that she had slept all Valentine's night. She said she woke the next day still feeling depressed but did not cry and was able to complete a work task. She slept pretty well the second night, too. But she excitedly told me that the most amazing part was that second morning at work she literally felt the depression of many months lift. She said it was a physical sensation.
It just left.
She said she had never experienced such relief from any depressive episode that quickly and was convinced that it could not have been cause by anything BUT the tapping. (No apex problem here.)
The depression has not returned. There certainly are lots of aspects to any loss and Joan had many issues to resolve. She still cried at memories, but now it was for minutes--not days. After the Valentine's Day experience, Joan became an avid EFTer. She dealt with many painful issues surrounding John’s death and their relationship. She handled the anniversary of his death and Christmas without depression and without the excessive crying. She is grateful for the opportunity to have loved and been loved by such a man. She says that many people never get that chance even once.
I watched the change in her with awe. But I watched the change in me with even greater awe. As I was helping Joan with her loss, I realized I had also resolved my own.
Ann Adams
