EFT for Fibromyalgia, page 10
Under Arm: Why bother?
Sample Setup: “Even though I have attempted many times to get rid of these emotions, they’re still here. I don’t know if they’ll ever go away, and I deeply and profoundly accept myself.”
Sample Reminder Phrase: “Nothing worked. Why should this be different?”
Again, you can say the Reminder Phrases at each point or you can alternate.
Sample Setup: “Even though I have attempted to get rid of this pain time and time again with much heavier therapies than EFT and it’s still here, I deeply and profoundly accept myself. I’m terrified (or afraid) that it will never go away.”
Sample Reminder Phrase: “Already tried to get rid of it and it’s still here. Terrified (or afraid) it might never go away.”
Sample Setup: “Even though I’ve done my best to get rid of this [name what “this” is; be as specific as possible] and it’s still here, I deeply and profoundly accept myself. I’m afraid it will get worse, my body is so out of control. I deeply and profoundly accept myself anyway. And I accept that sometimes I don’t accept myself.”
Sample Reminder Phrase: “Done my best and it’s still here. Body is sooo out of control and I’m afraid it will get worse.”
Sample Setup: “Even though I am so afraid to love again, maybe I have learned some things, maybe it doesn’t have to be the same way again, and again, I deeply and profoundly accept myself.”
Sample Reminder Phrase: “So afraid, so afraid, so afraid to love.” “Maybe I’ve learned—maybe it can be better. Maybe–maybe not.”
Sample Setup: “Even though I’m terrified to go into this again—nothing else has worked, why would EFT work, I deeply and profoundly accept myself.”
Sample Reminder Phrase: “Terrified to go into this again. Nothing else has worked—why would EFT work?”
Sample Setup: “Even though I’m terrified to quit my day job and just go for it, I deeply and profoundly accept myself. Other people are full time EFTers—why can’t I do it?”
Sample Reminder Phrase: “Terrified to quit my day job and go for it. Others do it, what’s wrong with me?”
This is also a good time to use “parts” EFT. With this technique, you address both parts of yourself in the same EFT round. You address the part that wants to heal and the part that is afraid to heal or for some reason doesn’t want to heal. Instead of separate rounds, you combine them, which is often very powerful. Please incorporate your own words whenever you can. Here is a generic example:
Sample Setup: “Even though a part of me wants to release this, a part of me is terrified to go there again and feel all those feelings. I deeply and profoundly accept myself anyway.”
You might want to alternate this Reminder Phrase even if you haven’t done so before: “Part of me is terrified. Part of me wants to heal.”
Adding Forgiveness
After doing several rounds of EFT, you might want to introduce forgiveness. The timing of this is individual and you can use your intuition to know when to add it. You might say something like:
“I forgive myself for any contribution I may have made to this problem/issue/whatever you want to call it.”
You can expand forgiveness to include something like:
“I forgive whoever may have played a part in this.”
If you believe in God, you might add:
“I forgive whoever may have played a part in this, including God.”
Add the forgiveness phrases wherever you want. You can add them as a part of the Setup Statement or at any or all of the rest of the EFT points.
Specific Traumas or Issues
Doing this work will most probably lead you back to the specific events or traumas that you wanted to heal in the first place. Remember, attempting to heal them in the past is probably why you have the “Why Bother” Syndrome. Start by working with your “Why Bother” phrases and see where they lead you. As you release “Why Bother,” you can then do EFT with much more motivation on those issues and problems that you wanted to heal to begin with.
Shifting Your Old Conditioning
If you have the “Why Bother” Syndrome, and you are still reading this, it may be time to take the chance and see for yourself if EFT can shift those old conditionings. Of course, we base our truths on past experience. With the arrival of EFT, however, so much has changed that it is not valid anymore to give up and say, “This is just the way it is. It is too big for me to change.”
We can now take those issues and problems that we thought we had to “cope” with and simply do EFT. Chances are we can do a lot more than cope. Chances are we can release the chains to our past and move toward our Palace of Possibilities. If you are not familiar with Palace of Possibilities, please see EFT’s website (www.EFTuniverse.com) for an extensive manuscript on using EFT for positive affirmations.
As with all issues, there are times when it is helpful to seek a professional practitioner. Most EFT practitioners I know do telephone consultations daily, so geography need not play a role in your choice of a practitioner. About 95 percent of my current clients work with me via phone consultations; I have clients in both the United States and Australia. In my experience, these work as well as in-person consultations. One telephone client in the United States said recently, “I didn’t know intuition could fly halfway around the world. This is great!”
My Journey out of Fibromyalgia with EFT
By Kristina Lukawska
A year ago, on Christmas Eve, I started to experience severe pain in my joints and muscles. They were heavy flu-like symptoms. After a few weeks of constant pain, I went to a doctor and I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.
I was in pain almost all the time. I had a few good days followed by a few bad weeks. I used to be a very active person, rarely watching TV. Suddenly I came back home from work, often early, and I spent the rest of the day in bed watching TV or sleeping.
Even worse than the pain was fatigue. It was nothing like normal fatigue. I often had problems walking; each step needed conscious extra effort from me. At times lifting my arm or leg was like lifting heavy weights. I stopped doing many things automatically. Many activities, even really small ones, like getting a cup out from a shelf, needed special effort. I could be exhausted after brushing my teeth even though I washed them sitting down. I had difficulties putting on my clothes. It was such a challenge to get ready for work in the morning. I felt like I was a hundred years old.
I felt embarrassed; I did not know how to talk about it with my family and friends. I was probably afraid that they might tell me that I am overreacting, that it’s all in my head. I started to go to different alternative practitioners and they kept telling me that I have chosen my fibromyalgia. It did not help; it just made me feel guilty. I tried different diets including fasting and I had some relief but after a while the pain and fatigue would always return.
Around May, a friend of mine told me about EFT. I printed the manual from the web site and I signed up for a upcoming seminar. I went to a three day seminar in Chicago and my intuition told me that this was going to be the method for me. The most attractive part was the fact that I could do it myself, that I didn’t feel powerless. At the seminar I met Andy Bryce and I asked him to work with me. He seemed like a very considerate and compassionate, gentle person. He has been working with me over the phone for the past five months and my life has changed amazingly.
Even though the whole process, which brought me to the moment where I am now, is important, there are a few steps that I feel are particularly worth mentioning (stepping stones).
The first one was the session when Andy sent me his love energy and helped me experience the love. It was the first time I was completely freed of pain. It gave me strength and faith that I could be healed. After that I noticed a big shift in my energy. I stopped being fatigued most of the time. I also noticed that it was getting much easier to listen to my intuition.
Next, we began work on my core issue, which was my guilt, and sense of responsibility for my mother’s suffering, and the belief that “I must suffer in my life.” So Andy suggested to tap on, “I believe that I must suffer a lot in my life” and, “I didn’t deserve to be healthy and happy” and, “I don’t believe I can free myself from suffering.” I also tapped a lot for affirmations like, “I’m willing to open my heart to myself” and, “I love being healthy.” Especially important for me was “I’m grateful for this pain gift which brought me understanding and compassion but I’m willing to learn from joy.” I also tapped on experiences from my past associated with this.
At the end of September, when I was at a Buddhist retreat, I started to feel a sharp pain under my left shoulder. After a while, the pain became more and more nagging. Since I have had fibromyalgia my sleep was shallow, especially in the mornings, after 2 to 3 am. So, now, with this new pain, I woke up dozens of times throughout the night. I was growing increasingly frustrated; I was tired and desperate to get some sleep. The more I tried to resist the pain, the more it persisted. I woke up every hour to struggle with the pain. I started to tap on, “I’m willing to receive the message that the pain gives me.” After a while I found out that I needed this pain; I sometimes greet it with gratitude. I almost enjoyed my wakeful nights; it helps me practice holding my attention on my breath. And again Andy suggested to tap on, “ “I’m grateful for the message this pain gives me and I recognize the fear behind it but I’m willing to see if my path to enlightenment can be filled with joy and gratefulness.”
In November I went to Toronto for the Energy Psychology Conference. I attended the workshop led by Steven Vazquez and for a moment I was freed of the pain while the presenter was working with somebody suffering from fibromyalgia. Completely intuitively I asked Steven for a private session.
At the session I asked him to work on my specific back pain. We reconstructed the lineage from which the pain had come. The links brought me through the retreat and suffering to my childhood, World War II, my parents and my mother’s depression. A few times he asked me to stand up and kept his hands hovering inches away from my body while we were talking. We spent some time talking about my mother’s suffering. I wanted to free her from her pain and misery. The pain under my shoulder was getting more intense. He asked me to I give my mother back all the hurt in a symbolic way. I did it and I felt an enormous relief.
A few moments after that I felt immense happiness. I started to laugh and I laughed with all my heart. I stopped laughing as I felt this huge wave of joy coming toward me. I felt like the gate to the Universe had opened. I saw two different spaces. I felt I was in both spaces. I felt pain in my back but it felt very different. It did not bother me at all. It was just something I once called pain. I was completely free of hurt. Everything seemed to be lucid and transparent.
After a while I felt an even deeper wave of joy. I felt an amazing hoop vibrating around my heart. This new space had opened up for me and I felt infinitely and entirely free and complete. I did not feel joy, I was joy. And everything else was joy. There was nothing before or beyond. There was no time. There was pure and absolutely perfect joy. Then gratitude emerged and I was so very grateful to Steven who was sitting in front of me. I hugged him and I felt profound gratitude to all sentient beings, to my teachers and my family, my neighbors and all the people I used to be afraid of. It was endless gratitude.
My session was over and I returned to the conference. For the next few days I was filled with blissful joy. I felt such amazing lightness in my body. The pain began to vanish and each day there was less and less of it. After a couple days I slept through the whole night with no pain. After ten days I was completely freed of the pain.
My life has changed dramatically. I am freed of my past. Now Andy helps me work to create the future I want. I would like to be an EFT therapist and trainer.
I am deeply grateful to Andy Bryce for improving the quality of my life, relieving my pain, and helping me become more compassionate towards other people as well as myself, helping me be more receptive to my intuition. I am NOT a victim of fibromyalgia anymore. I took ownership for whatever has happen in my life. I experience pain at some level but it doesn’t bother me. I know that I can take good care of myself and I am going to be completely healed.
I am profoundly grateful for helping me to open the gate to my new life—a life full of adventures, surprises, love, joy, connections, and responsibility without guilt.
Isn’t this a wonderful story? I trust that you feel great hope as you read it. Imagine that what you’ve just read isn’t Kristina’s story; it’s your story. Imagine that in a few weeks, you’re emailing your story of healing from fibromyalgia to the EFT newsletter editor for publication and sharing with others, just the way Kristina and the other people in this book have done. The fact that they made this progress demonstrates that it’s really possible, and that the next miracle just might be you.
Persisting Through the Cycles
In this chapter, we’ve reviewed the concept of the healing cycle. If you weren’t aware of this phenomenon, you might become needlessly depressed when faced with minor and temporary setbacks in your heath. You might also become unreasonably elated at minor and temporary improvements. If you’re aware that both of these patterns are small brushstrokes in a bigger picture, and that the pivotal point of healing happens imperceptibly, my hope is that you’ll be encouraged to persevere on your healing journey. You won’t be fazed by the little downturns; you won’t attach great weight to upticks. Instead, you will, as Rudyard Kipling advised, “meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.” This gives you a huge amount of freedom—you can keep plugging away at the EFT routine throughout the entire span of your healing process.
6
Moving Forward
You now have all the information you need about how EFT can help you heal from fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, as well as Lyme and other autoimmune diseases. It only remains for you to build tapping into your life so you can begin to watch your symptoms decrease and take your first steps toward living free of pain and exhaustion. With what you know already, you are equipped to start integrating EFT into your everyday routines. The tapping scripts you experienced in chapters 1 and 3 are enough to get you going.
You can use daily tapping on whatever issues arise for you, as they arise. You can also use EFT’s Personal Peace Procedure (as described in chapter 2) to systematically clear all the traumas from your past, which you have been carrying around with you all these years and which are likely contributing to your health problems, perhaps profoundly. Following either of these routes will produce positive—or even miraculous—effects on your health.
You may, however, prefer more guidance. There is a wealth of tapping guidance available to you from a range of sources: EFTuniverse.com, DVDs, EFT practitioners, tapping groups, and, most specific to your health condition, the online program that serves as a companion to this book—the EFT 12-Week Program for Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue (www.FibroClear.com). In the twelve weeks of this detailed program, you will tap through the challenges most frequently associated with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue.
The following are some of the most common challenges that people with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue face. The FibroClear program (www.FibroClear.com) takes you through specific EFT protocols to address each of these challenges in turn.
Pain Reduction
Vital to reducing your pain is gaining a complete understanding of the what, where, and when of your pain: What increases or triggers your pain? Where in your body is your pain focused? When in the day or night is your pain at its worst? The answers to these questions comprise your pain profile, which provides you with a road map for reducing your pain. When you know the factors that contribute to the pain, you can take steps to reduce or avoid those factors and schedule your activity for your best times of day. By managing your pain, you halt the downward spiral of pain and exhaustion, as each compounds the other. Your pain profile will also guide you in the timing and focus of your tapping for pain reduction.
Self-care is another important tool in reducing your pain. To provide effective self-care, you need to look at all the areas of your life—work, relationships, finances, physical exercise, diet, relaxation, and fun—and consider which ones are lacking balance. Which areas are you neglecting or overdoing? Which could use nurturing?
Here is a quote from one of the success stories of reducing fibromyalgia pain with EFT: “Mum feels so much better that she is now considering at some point in the future joining a gym for some gentle exercise. She has also not required any of her daily painkillers for forty-eight hours and counting. This is a massive breakthrough, as prior to doing EFT, her mindset was one of ‘I can’t cope without my co-codamol’ and ‘I’m never going to get over this.’ Now, as she says in her own words, ‘I can now see light at the end of the tunnel.’”
Stress and Emotional Upset
There is a strong association between high stress levels and fibromyalgia/CFS. Studies have demonstrated that when patients improve their stress levels, their physical symptoms improve as well. People with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue often have psychological conditions such as anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Stress can exacerbate these conditions as well as your pain and fatigue.
You may not be able to change the circumstances of your daily life, but you can change your reactions to those circumstances. Emotional upset is a stress reaction and raises your overall stress level. Tapping on your emotional upset can help you manage your stress and reduce the psychological and physical symptoms of your illness.
Think about the emotional reactions you had over the past several weeks. Are they clustered in one or several areas of your life—work, family, other relationships, finances, or health? Where is your biggest cluster? The area where your emotional reactions are most concentrated gives you a clue as to what emotional issue to tap on first.
