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Improving the ability to laugh with EFT

Important Note: This article was written prior to 2010 and is now outdated. Please use my newest advancement, Optimal EFT. It is more efficient, more powerful and clearly explained in my free e-book, The Unseen Therapist™.  Best wishes, Gary

Note: This article assumes you have a working knowledge of EFT. Newcomers can still learn from it but are advised to peruse our Free Gold Standard (Official) EFT Tutorial™ for a more complete understanding.

Hi Everyone,

Laughter is well known to be a first class medicine and Karylee Bonta emphasizes this in her article. Note how she taps for "whatever comes up" on her way to getting results.

Hugs, Gary


By Karylee Bonta

While considering a statistic I had read or heard, that children laugh on average 200 times a day and adults average 20 laughs a day, I was struck by the probability that I don't manage even 20 laughs most days.  I've also read about laughing clubs, which I believe are very popular in Japan and probably other places. Norman Cousins, author of Anatomy of an Illness, overcame a serious connective tissue disease by laughing at funny movies and books all day and taking large doses of Vitamin C.  Initially 10 minutes of belly laughs led to 2 hours of comfortable sleep, on a regular basis.

Prevention magazine tells of research in which the blood vessels of volunteers laughing at a funny film clip dilated the blood vessels 22% while a war scene caused the blood vessels of other volunteers to constrict 35%.  I've watched my toddler fight fatigue by bellowing with laughter at nothing. Ardath Rodale, in another Prevention article, writes, "Studies show that humor and laughter reduce stress, lower blood pressure, boost our immune systems, give our hearts a good workout, create instant relaxation, and make us feel good."  Then a friend told me she considered $250 plus travel expenses for a laughter yoga class the best investment she'd ever made.

We who use EFT every day know that we are the better for eliminating stress, becoming more relaxed physically and emotionally, and letting go of the negative in our lives. I wondered what might be involved in my apparent inability to laugh. So I decided to tap on my own apparent lack of humor, as a means of gaining the health benefits associated with laughter. I have a poor memory for specifics, so I muscle test to identify ages when things happened, levels of intensity sometimes, and good wording for EFT statements.  I started with:

Even though I take life too seriously, I choose to see the humor and fun in life…

Even though a lot of humorous incidents and moments go right over my head, I want to become aware of them…

After about 30 minutes of tapping on these I began to feel like scrunching down to avoid being hit on the head.  I couldn't come up with a specific incident that would make me feel this way, but I then started tapping on:

Even though I was punished a few times for laughing when someone thought I shouldn't, I'm a grown-up now and it's okay to laugh.

About 10 minutes later I had the sense of having fun running and suddenly hitting a wall hard.  So I changed to:

Even though I was stopped dead in my tracks for being relaxed and having fun at age 12, it's okay to relax and have fun now.

This process continued and I changed statements for several additional aspects. After an hour and a quarter my level of intensity came down several points on all of the issues above.  At this point my mind got fixed on:

Even though people who EXPECT my cooperation don't reciprocate and it isn't fair… My level of intensity here was a 9 on a scale of 0 to 10. I'm not sure how this is related to being able to laugh, but I worked on this for an additional 20 minutes.  As a result my level of intensity came down further on all of the above statements. 

Something else clearly was involved, and I didn't know what it was.  So (for those who think there must be the perfect words to deal with a problem) my next statement was:

Even though something else still stands in the way of my enjoying fun and laughter, I completely accept myself. I had muscle tested that my level of intensity was 7 out of 10 on this phrase.  After 45 minutes of tapping on this brought the level of intensity of all the above phrases to zero out of 10.

A few weeks passed while I tapped on a variety of other subjects, including a pulled muscle in my left side from coughing excessively from a cold. While tapping for relief of this pain, additional aspects of laughter having negative consequences came up. I tapped on:

Even though I sense laughing is a danger and it ties into this painful muscle… My level of intensity went from 7 to 4 out of 10. For all of these statements I tapped or rubbed primarily on the sore spot, under arms, on all five fingers, and karate chop point because these seem now to be where I need the most relief.

Clearly this isn't finished yet, but I am definitely finding more to laugh at most days.  My daughter suddenly began asking me, "What's so funny?" about happenings in her movies, comments that made people laugh, and other events.  I've had to try to break down humorous events to a toddler's level of understanding multiple times a day.  I definitely laugh at her antics more, too.

Some excellent, funny, and  family-friendly films are:  It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines; My Man Godfrey; Scooby Doo; Munsters; Cary Grant, Bing Crosby, Irene Dunne, and Jean Arthur.

Karylee Bonta

FOR MORE EFT HELP ...

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