Everyday Bliss

I wanted to create a few videos on EFT tapping for Trauma relief for my Healing4Haiti project, but realized, my gosh, they’re already out there! Here’s a survey of several, with no endorsement for these practitioners but giving thanks for what they’ve put out.

The first, from the master himself, Gary Craig – and boy, what a great clip this is – followed by a very interesting video on dissolving the freeze response. Then in the lower set of videos, more addressing specific traumas. The first one of these goes out especially to my extended family, though we can all make use of this young man’s story of clearing a heavy authoritarian figure’s harshness. Tap along as you watch, and your own issues, whatever they are, will resolve as well. Keep tapping, it does work! 

“Doggone our families! Why can’t they just ‘get’ us sometimes?”. Lia, who’s been mentoring with me for several years was quite cross over her sister’s unwillingness to use EFT to deal with her marital breakup. Lia had cured her sugar addiction in coaching with me using EFT and wanted badly to help her sister, Martha.

Martha felt EFT was “too weird” however, and wouldn’t discuss it further, telling Lia “that stuff’s okay for you but it’s just too way out there for me”. Lia was frustrated, sick with worry for her sister (which we tapped on) and didn’t know what to do next.

I can SO relate.

When I first started to share energy coaching with my non-energy-savvy family, they raised their eyebrows, laughed, politely patted my hand and said “it’s great you found a hobby, dear”.

Most of us have had friends or relatives roll their eyes at one another and been the odd duck out in more traditional circles when we try to share energy transformation modalities.

But there’s a great way you can get people into the joys of living a clearer, happier life through energy work. And that is….

Drop the jargon.

Don’t say one acronym – not ETHOS, not EFT, not BSFF or any of the hundred others you might know.

In fact, don’t talk about the tool at all.

Just casually talk to your friends or family members about how they feel. And as you’re speaking with them about what isn’t right in their life, as they are in the depths of the “Dang it, if only I’d have had the guts to….” or “It just KILLS me that I didn’t…” or “I can’t stop thinking about it, and it’s driving me nuts!”

Ask: “How would you rather feel?”

This usually stops people in their tracks.

“Huh?” they’ll say “What do you mean?”

“I mean, what would you really want to feel like, if you could drop this feeling of (hurt, anger, betrayal, jealousy, guilt, shame etc.)?”

Then listen and be really open to what they are telling you without the NEED on your part to fix them, or what’s going on.

Your dropping the need you have to make it all better for other people is HUGE!

When I realized this, and simply listened without attachment to the other person’s outcome (and we’re talking about people I’d gladly give my life for, dear friends and family members), all of a sudden, THEY became more open to what I had to say about HOW to make their situation better.

Then, when they’ve told you how they’d rather feel, acknowledge what they’ve said and ask them:

“Would you like to get a little bit of the way to that place right now?”

If they say yes, then if you practice EFT for instance, get them to tap their HAND points as they tell you their story. Importantly, get them to rate their SUDS or intensity of feeling BEFORE you begin tapping.

And chances are, you’ll get them a good piece of the way down the road, not just a little bit, but it’s a good clean-energy practice to under-promise and over-deliver. That way, folks you’re working with get that extra bit that makes them feel like they got a bonus for free. And that’s something we all love. 

It’s important to start off with something they won’t immediately dismiss as weird looking or “too much to remember”. Using just the hand points addresses a large amount of the person’s intensity level without the overwhelm the whole EFT “recipe” can bring new tappers.

You tap, and tell them just to follow what you’re doing as they tell their story. By and by they’ll be on autopilot, tapping their finger points and karate chop point and telling their story.

As they tell their story, tail enders will come up, guide them to tap on these using just the hand points as well.

When they’ve been talking and tapping for about five minutes, ask them to rate their SUDS or intensity level again.

Most will find a few points shaved off, if not more. I’ve had family look at me with surprise on their faces and say bluntly “I thought all that stuff was just [*steer manure*], but I’ll be doggoned, this [*manure*] really works!”

Now, they enthusiastically tap with other family members who think they’re just as cuckoo as I am.

But they feel better about themselves and their lives. And I don’t care if they think I’m cuckoo, as long as we all feel the best we possibly can.

Because, and this is another important lesson, especially for newbies, the better we feel, the more better feeling experiences we attract.

And that’s a story for another day.

I hope this has been helpful. Let me know how you’re teaching your family to use the energy methods you know and love – you can put a post in the forums or in a blog on the ETHOS Community at:

http://ethosmethod.ning.com

Or feel free to leave a comment on this post below – use the handy-dandy tools in the orange bar at the bottom of the page to keep up the conversation!

Happy Valentine’s Day to you & a lovely rest of the week!

Warm Blessings,
Maryam

If you haven’t yet encountered Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT, you’re in for a treat. If you’re an old hand, you’ll still enjoy this “spiritual documentary” (a la “The Secret”) style introduction to what EFT can do, and features some of my most esteemed colleagues. Really beautiful work – pass this one along to your friends and families. And, as Gary is retiring March 1st and has said he will be taking his website down, if the link at the end no longer works, you can download a free “EFT Quickstart” from me, here (will open in a new window)

http://maryamwebster.com/eftbasics/

EFT Works Great for Pain

I know. I used it to help me end years of chronic pain from a broken back, and to heal those tissues and  even grow new bone. Oh yes, you really can. EFT is a really great introduction to energy magic for people of all ages, cultures and belief systems. Pass this one on too. You can use a sophisticated Energy Coaching technique called “Borrowing Benefits” to tap along with Gary here as the pain is tapped out. Just think of your own pain for a moment, then let it go and use the lady’s set-up phrasing and reminder phrases. Tap right along. Get over it.

GREAT back pain release video

This one is from Robert Smith. He’s a wonderfully intuitive EFT practitioner and teacher. Beautiful NLP related interventions and submodality shifting for you NLPers in the community. Enjoy this video and especially if you had back pain like I did, this will be a welcome relief. Again Borrow Benefits, as you tap along with Robert and the lady with horse related issues…and a big pain in her back that goes away in a really interesting process:

Can KIDS do EFT? You bet’cha! (they’re a lot smarter than we are, y’know?)

I’ve taught children young as four how to tap with EFT and though I don’t have one, I highly recommend a Tappy Bear.  (I turned my childhood bear into such a happy tapping guide a few years ago) They’re the BOMB for teaching EFT to kids! Enjoy this wonderful video from Karin Gustafson teaching a little boy how to tap with a homemade tapping bear. The giggles alone are worth listening – and Borrowing Benefits – through the whole video. For those who don’t resonate to “I’m a good boy” – “I’m okay and feel grrrrreat!” is a good substitute.

Come claim your FREE “The EFT Way To Market Your Services: More Clients, Money & Fun in 2010″ intro class at http://eftmarketingschool.com You’ll learn more in this FREE CLASS than you will in any other, AND GET COACHED ON YOUR BUSINESS. More genuine “take-action takeaways” than you’ll experience any other place.

Why You Need To Take This Class Now

Gary Craig, the founder of Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT, is retiring after many years, and taking his massive, resource-crammed website down. Latest reports say he has put off his retirement from January 15th to March 1st due to the overwhelming amount of requests for a little more time to copy website materials and shut down the business. I for one have benefitted tremendously from Gary’s work and want to tender a personal “thank you and well done – rest well deserved”. Without EFT, there would be no Energy Coach Institute and I would not have been able to create the profession of Energy Coaching!

In this week’s tribute to Gary’s work, my colleague Pat Carrington brought up that people were upset over the fact that Gary’s fantastic marketing skills that would no longer be available to the community. “Who will teach us how to market our businesses when Gary is gone?” she cites one client as saying.

Just as I took up the challenge to help Gary market EFT along with several other top tappers and EFT Masters five years ago, I’m taking up the challenge today to offer this kind of training to you, the EFT Practitioner.

Gary and I both trained in the same neurolinguistic programming business marketing methods, and I have additional experience as a professional industrial psychologist researching what makes products & services sell, plus training in Guerrilla Marketing, in how to Get Clients Now and Book Yourself Solid. These are only three of the over thirty service business marketing programs I’ve taken in the last ten years.

I’ve spent probably fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars to learn these secrets and now, I am going to share them with you in a unique program created especially for EFT Practitioners, Coaches & Therapists – a unique blend of time-tested techniques you simply CAN’T learn elsewhere.

If you’re ready to stop practicing at it and get really good at your business – good enough to take lots of time off, be there when you want to for your family, take liberal vacations, buy whatever you need without worry and all the other things you may have been putting off, go over to:

http://eftmarketingschool.com

and GRAB YOUR SEAT FAST. We have two FREE classes that begin next week, so hop to it!

You may practice ETHOS, EFT, ZPoint, BSFF, EMDR, HeartMath or a variety of other energy therapies. You may practice as a psychotherapist, health educator or as a coach. But did you know that the energy psychology all these methods are based on has been researched and accepted by a number of professional organizations already?

(As a shoutout to my own Certified Energy Coaches – you need to know this, please read)

According to the author’s online course the tenets of his paper Energy Psychology: Review of the Preliminary Evidence, have been accepted by the National Board for Certified Counselors, Association of Social Work Boards, and the National Association for Alcohol and Drug Addiction Counselors. Great news!  Now if the APA (which is taken to task in the paper) would listen, we’d all be one big happy family.

What generative energy, space and consciousness would it take to have the techniques we all know work, accepted world-wide by the “powers that be”? What would it take to shift the axis away from those ultra-conservative organizations and individuals who would stifle, hold down and repress information that could, if they would only open to it, accelerate and advance not only their careers, but the results of every client they help?

Hmm…interesting thought… 

Here’s an abstract, with a follow link at the bottom. Read the whole paper. It really is most illuminating. And deep thanks to energy psychology pioneer Dr. David Feinstein for his wonderful work

Paper Abstract

Energy psychology utilizes imaginal and narrative-generated exposure, paired with interventions that reduce hyperarousal through acupressure and related techniques. According to practitioners, this leads to treatment outcomes that are more rapid, powerful, and precise than the strategies used in other exposure-based treatments such as relaxation or diaphragmatic breathing. The method has been exceedingly controversial. It relies on unfamiliar procedures adapted from non-Western cultures, posits unverified mechanisms of action, and early claims of unusual speed and therapeutic power ran far ahead of initial empirical support. This paper reviews a hierarchy of evidence regarding the efficacy of energy psychology, from anecdotal reports to randomized clinical trials. Although the evidence is still preliminary, energy psychology has reached the minimum threshold for being designated as an evidence-based treatment, with one form having met the APA Division 12 criteria as a “probably efficacious treatment” for specific phobias; another for maintaining weight loss. The limited scientific evidence, combined with extensive clinical reports, suggests that energy psychology holds promise as a rapid and potent treatment for a range of psychological conditions.

Read this paper here

About the Author:

Dr. Feinstein is a clinical psychologist who has done pioneering work in the areas of personal mythology and energy psychology. Author of 7 books and over 50 professional papers, he has taught at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Antioch College. His multi-media Energy Psychology Interactive self-study training program was a recipient of the Outstanding Contribution Award from the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology. He is a member of the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology. Connect to Dr. Feinstein at his website, here.

There’s nothing for revealing the truth like a chat with a girlfriend. I was talking this summer to my bookkeeper and gal pal Paula about how much we loved our lives and why others we knew didn’t. Paula said to me “You know Maryam, people just want to feel good about themselves. But in this economy, and with all the violence going on in the world, they just don’t. What can we do to help people out?”

Why don’t people love their lives? It’s a question that has driven many of us (me included) into therapy, coaching, spiritual studies and years of self-examination. For many here, it’s what has driven us to divorce, separation and anxiety-driven lifestyles.

We talked some more about how much of what appears in our lives is illusory, and how people sometimes buy into illusions that make them miserable. People are going through some very hard times caused by those illusions right now and misery is widespread. The rough truth of this caught my attention – this is something I can help with, I thought.

I examined my life to determine why, other than the obvious,I loved my life when many with far more in the way of possessions and prestige seemed so miserable. I came to some valuable conclusions that I wanted to share with you, as I believe just examining these issues in your life can make you so much happier. I am presenting these as coaching questions for you to use alone or with a mastermind partner or coaching buddy, and to pass on to those whose happiness you care about.

Powerful Coaching Questions
To Start Loving Your Life Again

1)  If you shed the false illusions you live under, you’ll be a lot happier. An example of a false illusion might be “If s/he falls in love with me, my life will be perfect.” That makes YOUR emotional state dependent on the whims of someone else. Who may never fall in love with you, or if they do, may turn out to be a nightmare.

Same thing goes with “When I win the lottery, I’ll finally be happy” or “When the divorce finally comes through I’ll be happy”. Why wait? Choose to be happy today, regardless! Happiness is available to both princess and pauper. What we think of as externally-created emotions are ALL self-generated chemical combinations cooked up inside your own body. YOU have the power to change your emotional state simply by choosing what you want. So ask yourself: “What is True about this situation?” All of it? None of it? 15% of it?

What is yours, take responsibility for and change. What comes from someone else, give back.

To do that, ask of unwanted emotions: “Who does this belong to?”  Is the illusion self-created, or another person’s that you’ve bought into? Women are tremendously sensitive to energy. Oftentimes the angst, sudden anger or even menstrual cramps you’re feeling don’t really belong to you, but come from your neighbor next door or a stranger you passed in a crowd.

Our bodies are giant tuning mechanisms for Radio Station Y-O-U. What you give the most attention to in your thoughts will broadcast outward energetically and will attract back to you similar emotions, situations and people. One of the things your body does naturally is to “pick up” other people’s broadcasts of negative emotions, pain, or symptoms. This too is an illusion, because these feelings aren’t really yours. Asking “who does this belong to” helps you realize – and drop – other’s expectations and energy.

2)  You don’t need to know the answer to any of these questions, just keep asking them and the change will happen. If you learn to live in the question, without hardening and fixing your expectations around “the one true answer”, you’ll be happier because answers come more abundantly. Bellyaching about how bad things are or saying “this is just the way it is and there’s no point in hoping for better” only keeps you in the rut you’re in.

When you say “I wonder what it would take to start my own business?” instead of griping about not having one, you free yourself to go find out what it would take, get funding if necessary, study up for professional exams and so on. Use “I wonder what it would take…” to defuse the natural human tendency to gravitate towards the negative.

3) If we know the right questions to ask, we open up even more possibilities for happiness than ever before. Here’s an absolute barn-burner of a question to ask – and not be attached to any answer or outcome of:

“What generative energy, space and consciousness can I be to manifest ______________?”

Then say: “Anything that wouldn’t allow that to happen, I uncreate, dissolve and release it completely” and let it go.

If you have difficulty letting things go, I created a quick and easy consciousness bringing method that features healing of “issues” as a welcome side effect. It’s called ETHOS, it works beautifully, invisibly, and is entirely free to the public. You can download the whole method and participate if you like, in our online support community at: http://ethosmethod.ning.com

Put these questions to work and I guarantee, you’ll be happier, open more options in your life and witness amazing things happening that you never would have expected – gifts from nowhere, funds you forgot you were owed, old friends calling you’d wondered about just this morning and more. I’ve even seen miracle cures when people simply stopped needing to know the answer and rested contentedly in the arms of the question.

Try it, you’ll see!

And if you want more structured support around getting happy please do join our “Ethos For Loving Your Life Again” class in September. Bonuses & $70 off until September 1st. Read about it here:

http://maryamwebster.com/ethosclass/

And if you’d like to reply to this article with your experiences, you can do that in the contact form below. I’d really love to read what you have to say. B-)

Learn To Love Your Life Again: The Tools, Techniques and Coaching To Get and Keep You Conscious, In Joy and Aligned With Your Highest Purpose Every Day

This is a Four Week Online Class with BONUS 5th Week in a private, state-of-the-art online eCampus, with Forums, Community Center, Audios, Videos & extra Resources. Facilicated by Maryam Webster, creator of the Energy Transformation and Healing Open Source Method.

Class takes place ENTIRELY online, and at your OWN PACE. You will have access to this class FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR and can download its resources, or listen/view online if you like

Using Maryam’s Everyday Bliss Process coupled with the powerful tools of energy therapy and The ETHOS Method in particular, you will learn these power tools:

• Grace Under Fire: Drop stress like a hot potato, the second it starts
• FightFear.fm: Keep the fear off your “radio station” to avoid attracting bad things
• Comfy & Clear: Get Conscious and Stay that way – be comfy inside your own skin!
• Trap Mapper: Avoid the 3 common traps that suck us back into unconscious misery
• Outsmart Your Own Brain: Short-circuit your primitive biology to stay Conscious
• FastChange: Hate your thighs? Your job? Your relationship? We’ll deal with it!
• Bring On Abundance: Wade out of financial muck using ETHOS in this EXTRA program!
• Fire Your Inner Executioner: Free yourself from those inner voices that torture you
• Painbody Pulverizer: gain immunity from the hateful situations it attracts
• Calm Children: Use ETHOS with your Children to deal with their issues & aid school success
• Goal Magnetizer: Use ETHOS in a startling new way to realize goals you never have been able to before

In addition, you’ll grab THREE  juicy bonuses that make up an entire SECOND CLASS in how to improve your life & success rate in every way:

• Maryam’s 9-Day Spiritual quick-read Self-Improvement Program: “Just For Today”
• The bombshell “Unquenchable Ethusiasm” by Napoleon Hill, which contains simple yet profound directions on how to get happy again. If you haven’t read this amazing work, it’s the foundation of “The Secret” and most other New Thought teachings.
• A TWO HOUR 5th Week of ETHOS Coaching over the most common issues participants have

Investment in Your Consciousness and
Happiness with Lifetime Access: $197
Invest now:

The astute Dr. Judith Orloff gives good advice on energy drainers and funky family members you may not want to deal with. This is especially for Shelley’s friend Donna – check this out.

Below is a post I made to a high-level email list of advanced energy coaches and therapists. It answered a colleague’s question regarding Emotional Freedom Technique:  "What is the intention of the tapping? To reduce SUDs, eliminate distress, or enhance mindfulness?"

But back to  SUDS, distress and mindfulness.

Hello my friend, thank you for asking. 

Intention is one of the main reasons I’ve found in my research, why certain methods don’t work well upon occasion, or don’t work 100% all of the time. (yes, even those ones many of us hold near and dear to our hearts).

What is our intention as practitioners? As petitioners at the gate of forever?

In not choosing, we choose. In choosing not to make intentions, we make intentions. I believe knowledge of some of the inner workings of the universe and how we affect it all the time by our thoughts, beliefs and intentions, is crucially important to knowing how to work any method.

Intention is a natural clockwise/counterclockwise conjugate spiral energy flow that as far as I know, runs much of our experience if not all of it.

Think of a Moebius strip with positive energy running down one surface and negative energy running up the opposite surface. You try to connect the two ends. Attraction/repulsion factors of the differing valences cause the strip to twist and bend into the familiar infinite loop. Bent back upon itself, the ends meeting where like attracts like, it is possible to fasten such a strip.

Such is consciousness, for it folds and bends back on itself as well, seeking the familiar, repulsed by the unfamiliar.We often get lost in those folds and end up snoozing down at the bottom of one of those bends in the strip of consciousness. That’s how routines get started and encoded into imperatives. Mindfulness and intention are sovereign remedies, plus the knowledge that we are truly, without Limits. And can have an infinite variety of things that we desire, including elevated levels of Presence, abundance and joy.

This all may be a crock of manure and not true of course but…it appears to be working for me…I’ll bet it works the same way for a whole lot of us here.   

And Mindfulness = Presence = The Ultimate Resource State from which all magical things might be accomplished. And become quite mundane.

That being said, as myself and a small but devoted band of colleagues developing the new ETHOS Method, (about which you’ll hear in the August 18th ACEP teleclass <hint: I’m giving the class>) have found that the Ultimate Resource State is what I/we call the Unlimited Self. I pondered very deeply *why* certain personal development methods didn’t work well sometimes. One of the reasons that I found is that many of them come from the point of view of us needing to be fixed and of healing. Not that these aren’t perfectly valid occupations, but fixing and healing are like slapping a bandage on the problem and never getting to the real issue from which said "problem" distracts.

We only have one Problem at the root of it all. That problem is, that we are endorsing the absence of awareness of our Unlimited Self. And the more we endorse or give energy to something, the more of that thing we get. Conversely if you desire the polar opposite of a bad situation, that too will manifest. Basic energetic dynamics.

But we most certainly are not in need of being fixed. We are already standing blindingly close to that perfect self – our Unlimited Self.

Most humans stand a bit outside to far outside awareness of this template of their Unlimited Self, unlike animals who live so much more honestly than we. You look at a dog or a cat and it fully embodies the joy of being fully Present, fully alive.

A cat is guaranteed never to give thought to its grocery list: "three mice, one pitcher of cream, four scoops kibble, two bags litter – check, check, check and check. Now…where on earth do you suppose they keep the herring?" A dog or cat will never go so fully out of consciousness as this – and as humans do on a consistent basis. I advise my students to study animals for pointers on their spiritual growth. They’re much wiser than we in such matters.

So in short, in creating ETHOS, we are predicating an energy transformation method on the premise that self is already perfect and not in need of help or fixing. This predicate and our main goal to re-embody and live life through our Unlimited Self, has been of phenomenal use in increasing effectiveness and reducing recidivism in clients who may in time come to take back their problems – a common difficulty in all therapies (energy therapies included).

And yes, this is an intention, but also a realization, and active participation in reality as each of us chooses to fashion it.

More on this shortly. And if you’d like to be kept aware of the news, changes or want to be involved, check out our very new (and still being populated – be an early adopter!) ETHOS website: http://ethosmethod.com