My ‘bottom up’ approach

As a coach I used to use a ‘top-down’ approach. This quite literally means engaging the client’s head, brain, or mind, in other words what’s ‘up top’ for them to gain insights into their thoughts, patterns and emotions. This was useful, as clients learned more about their own behaviour, recognised patterns and as a result their self awareness grew. After all, on the other side of awareness lies the opportunity for change!

However, in many cases the conscious awareness and understanding about their patterns and behaviours didn’t actually help clients to make lasting change. Sometimes that simply wasn’t enough.

It might be useful to have the awareness that you are emotionally eating, when you reach for that third piece of cake, but that awareness doesn’t necessarily stop you from eating the cake.

Knowing intellectually that it is statistically safer to fly in a plane than to travel in a car, does not stop the person who is afraid of flying from feeling the fear. That person might still have a racing heart, sweaty palms and a knot in their stomach, even while making the booking.

Now, as an EFT practitioner, I use a ‘bottom up’ approach helping my clients cultivate greater awareness of their internal states and physical sensations. This is important, because fear, unease, hesitation, reluctance, doubt, sadness, worry, sheer terror, and many more emotions that stop us from moving forward the way we want to, they don’t ‘live’ in our rational mind. They ‘live’ in our subconscious and are felt in our bodies. Talking about them, or being aware of them does not automatically mean we can no longer feel them.

EFT or Tapping quite literally includes the body by tapping on the acupressure points on the primo vascular system, which in turn sends calming signals to the brain. It is this combination of ‘exposure’ by tuning into the felt sensations in our bodies and the issue at hand, while at the same time calming the ‘smoke alarm’ (the amygdala) in our brain, that allows fears, old patterns, beliefs, trauma memories and phobias to be released from the entire system.

It is this release from the body and the mind that allows people to move forward in their lives. Now they are free to achieve their goals, follow their dreams and reach for possibilities, because they are no longer held back by known or unknown internal barriers.

For me this has meant I can calmly look out a plane window and be at peace, while flying. In the past I would not only have avoided booking a window seat, but have also experienced crying for a whole three hour flight with internal terror, and not knowing why.

I can now make brave and bold moves in my business, like speaking at conferences, no longer getting stuck feeling the desire to do something, but being too afraid to go after it, being held back by a thirty year old trauma that I thought (!) I had dealt with.

Eating a healthy diet is the norm now, I no longer have to use ‘willpower’ to curb food cravings. I simply don’t have them anymore, I have tapped them away.

This is what I want for you. I want you to feel and be free to follow your heart’s calling. I believe that our heart’s desires point us toward our purpose in life, and when we can follow these desires, (our calling) easily and freely, we can live happy and fulfilled lives.