By Maya de Vries

Dear Gary,

I wanted to share with you the second afternoon of my last weekend's EFT Level 2 seminar where we spent 2.5 hours on Borrowing Benefits. I know that a lot of people do not use this wonderful method. However, we can do so much more than in one-on-one sessions. This report is meant to inspire!

As usual I had 12 participants in my workshop. I started with explaining the process in detail so all knew what to do. I always have an assistant who was instructed to help any participant personally if any strong abreactions should come about. My assistant was Ulli Goerres, an experienced and proficient EFT trainer colleague.

About one week before the workshop I always send a message to my participants with the request to bring along their Personal Peace Procedure list. This way I don't waste time on people having to start looking for tapping issues during the course. I told them to pick out five specific events from their list for our Borrowing Benefits session. Then they were to "tap along" with the participants on stage, the idea being to collapse their own issues during the process.

Accordingly, I did several demos up front so that others could tap along and Borrow Benefits.

Demo #1--Memory of mother's words

The first demo I did was with a man, we will call him Bill, a therapist in the area of natural healing methods. His memory dealt with a very painful remark his mother made when he was about 10 years old, playing with a friend in the garden instead of doing his homework. His mother called him into the house and said: "Remember that I almost died giving birth to you, so make sure you do better in school." Bill had severe heart pounding when he spoke about this memory. We first worked on the body sensations and then proceeded to emotional aspects of sadness, helplessness, anger and guilt, and were able to get to zero within half an hour. He was very relieved and radiant with joy.

Demo #2--A limiting belief

My second session was with a yoga teacher, we will call her Sarah, who wanted to tap for a recent issue she had with her mother. Sarah's father had died about one year ago. One year later, Sarah planned a short trip to London with her daughter, fully aware that the days she would be away included the date on which her father had died the year before. She discussed this with her mother who let her know that she certainly wasn't happy with the situation. Sarah, however, decided her trip with her daughter was more important to her and took off for London.... and got lumbago.

The belief which we worked on was: If I don't act as others expect of me, I get punished (by my own body). The interesting thing with beliefs ("writings on our walls") is that in most cases they are not logical! Sarah knew this but still reacted emotionally as if the belief were true. This session took about 50 minutes in which we treated several other aspects of this belief.

Demo #3--

The above two sessions which basically dealt with parent/childhood issues triggered a strong reaction with another participant, we will call her Sally, who professionally works with traumatized children. She was very eager to work with me in front of the group. Interestingly, the traumatic event which had made its way into her conscious mind was not on her list of 5 which she had picked for Borrowing Benefits. I made a mental note to speak about this phenomenon as part of the BB instructions before starting to tap, next time I conduct a Borrowing Benefits exercise. This way people are not taken by surprise when something like that happens.

Sally had a choleric dad who had bouts of bad temper. None of her siblings wanted to sit next to him at the dinner table because something unexpected could happen any time. Sally bravely took it upon her to take that place. She was the clown of the family. Her survival strategy included word fighting with dad, criticizing his attitudes in a way that made everybody laugh, including dad, thus taking the tension away and "saving" the rest of the family.

On one specific occasion, the tapping issue - as she put it - must have "gone too far" and - here her mind went blank. All of a sudden she found herself no longer at the dinner table. She felt the hands of her dad around her neck and heard her mother scream: "Stop it, stop it, she is tuning blue!"

When Sally came to this point in her story she went pale and said she felt cold, dizzy and ready to fall backwards. I asked Bill to sit behind her as part of a safety net I wanted her to have in case anything unexpected might happen. Sally was determined to proceed.

I worked with the Tearless Trauma Technique to take the edge off and she quickly felt better. We kept the event at a distance and worked on several aspects, one of them being that this traumatic memory had had strong repercussions on her life: One of her beliefs was that "men are dangerous" another one that "people couldn't bear or stand" her. During the tapping she had various insights.

After an hour her temperature was back to normal, her dizziness completely gone and she was crying out of compassion for her late dad, who had clearly been unable to express or receive love. I checked on her today by email and she told me that she was fine and had a profound feeling of peacefulness.

Borrowing Benefits results from the audience

During the demos the others in the room tapped along, speaking the same words as the demo persons. Each time I gave my "on-stage client" the instruction to rate the intensity. the audience did the same for the crescendo's in their movies. Between sessions I quickly checked on their general results by simply asking for the intensity number of the mental movie they were working on. There were two participants who were still in their first movie after the second session, an indication that they were working on a severe issue. In such cases I make sure I have eye contact with them now and then and have my assistant help them if need be.

Just to give you an idea of the scope of issues and mental movies the others worked on, most of which were not related to any of the issues tapped in front of the group:

"Anger at mother-in-law", "fear of violence during a demonstration in a railway station", "I almost drowned in the bathtub at age 7", "humiliation by my school teacher", "I fell off a horse", "rejection by a friend", to name a few.

Even for experienced EFT-ers the concept of Borrowing Benefits still seems a strange thing: One of the participants who collapsed all of her 5 issues beamed with joy and said: "I am at a complete zero - but I have a real hard time believing it!" All in all 36 issues collapsed in the 2.5 hour Borrowing Benefits session.

I certainly hope this report will be an incentive for more professionals to start integrating Borrowing Benefits into their work with clients. Maybe all we need to do is adjust our realities that this approach really works ... Maybe it is that easy.

With loving thoughts and gratitude to the participants of my course who gave permission to write about their experiences,

Maya de Vries