Episode 41 - Introduction to EFT

Transcript

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Renee Stephens:            Welcome to Inside Out Weight Loss. I’m your host Renee Stephens and together we’re accessing the control panel of your mind, body system, bringing ease and joy to your weight loss journey and fullness to the rest of your life. On today’s show exactly how weight loss could be easy. What to do if your body is conservative with calories. And an introduction to the emotional freedom technique.

And she’s able in that case, from that mindset, to completely ignore the progress, the unbelievable, unthinkable progress that she’s made in the last two months. So we were talking about this and I said, “You know? It's really interesting about how it can be so hard.” And I know.  And you guys know that I know because I’ve been there. I suffered. I beat myself up, I stuffed my face, I ate from the trashcan, I starved myself. I did it all. Worked out till I dropped. I did the high drama stuff.

Well, what happened?  Now I am just the biggest fan of EFT. Isn’t that always the way that it is? The things that we come out so strongly against? What happened was that I had an amazing personal breakthrough with this tool when I learned a simplified version of it that that I will be teaching you here today. And I’d like to credit my friend Gina Orlando, who is a skilled hypnotherapist in the Chicago area, for introducing me to this tool.

And if that were the case, it’s as if, when we have a negative emotional charge – some kind of negative emotional issue. It could be a recent one: oh, I’m frustrated by traffic or my boss or my spouse or with myself or it could be something that’s been there for a long time. And it’s like a charge, a negative charge, that can stuck in our energy field. And what is emotional freedom technique do? It releases that negative charge so that the positive can settle right in.

Stephens:          If you’re new to Inside Out Weight Loss I want to give you a special welcome. I’m so glad that you’ve joined us and also consider, after listening to today’s episode, going back and starting from the beginning. There’s a lot of great, very important foundation pieces that are presented in the prologue and in the first episodes of this program. So I encourage you to go back and work your way through the early episodes, maybe join the Yahoo group, post a comment to the blog where I’m always asking a question or two and I love to hear from you. Great.  And to returning listeners: welcome. I’m so glad that and that you’re joining me on this wonderful journey of transformation. And as you do become more and more present in this moment, become present to this opportunity, notice that no matter where you are, no matter what you’re feeling --  maybe you’re feeling a little grumpy, maybe you’re feeling pretty darn good today, maybe it’s been just a normal day and you haven’t taken a moment to notice. Well here’s an opportunity to drop inside and check in with you.  To be present. To take a deep breath and clear the mind, allow the chatter to float away as you simply focus on the sound of my voice and the content of this show. Welcome.

Now let’s think for a moment about that statement I say at the beginning of each episode: “Bringing ease and joy to your weight loss journey and fullness to the rest of your life.” Do you remember back in The Limiting Belief episode when we talked about the limiting belief that weight loss is hard work? That belief is so pervasive. There’s hardly a person that I meet or work with who doesn’t have it.  It’s extraordinarily pervasive.  I was talking about this with a client the other day who, of course, had the belief that weight loss is hard work and her perception was that’s it hard work and virtually impossible to make a lasting change. She had this belief, in spite of the fact that she was working with me, a part of her still held on to this idea that it would impossible for her to change. Now why would it be impossible for her to change? Why the heck would she work with me privately if it were impossible for her to change?  It’s so interesting the things that we do, isn’t it? How we can be conflicted about something like that. On the one hand we’re paying someone to help us break through and on the other hand we don’t even believe that it’s possible. Well, that was the case with her. So when we looked into it we found that because she had made so many attempts in the past, to change her behavior patterns, to change her mind structure, her thought structure and she had put so much of herself into it and had so much angst, in spite of giving it her all, giving her very best, she couldn’t change. None of her attempts had produced lasting results up until now. And I say up until now because, for about two months, she has been binge-purge free. In other words, when she started with me about two months ago she was an active bulimic. Someone who binged and then purged, binged and purged on a regular basis. And I guess she purged once, early on in our work together; it was sort of a bad purge for that matter, it was kind of not very well done and she hasn’t done it since. And in fact, her binges have changed dramatically as well. They aren’t as bad, they don’t last as long as they used to be, they’re less frequent. Remember the DIFF?  She’s reduced the duration, the intensity and the frequency of her binges. All the while she’s gotten a wonderful new job that is just fabulous for her, so things are going great. And yet, a part of her persists deep inside of her that she can’t change because she has tried so much in the past.  When she thinks about making lasting change she goes back to that extraordinarily strong emotional charge of all of the angst and the disappointment and the discouragement and the suffering that resulted from her failed attempts in the past. And she’s able in that case, from that mindset, to completely ignore the progress, the unbelievable, unthinkable progress that she’s made in the last two months. So we were talking about this and I said, “You know? It’s really interesting about how it can be so hard.” And I know.  And you guys know that I know because I’ve been there. I suffered. I beat myself up, I stuffed my face, I ate from the trashcan, I starved myself. I did it all. Worked out till I dropped. I did the high drama stuff.

So what’s different? What makes it possible? And the metaphor that I discussed with my client yesterday and that I like to think about is the metaphor of using the right tool for the job.  So, for example, say you had…you needed to unscrew a screw. There was a screw that was tied very tightly in, that was screwed very tightly in to a piece of wood, it was holding it up, there’s no way you could move that piece of wood because that screw, or a series of screws  even, was completely sealing that piece of wood into where it was. And what is the tool you have? You have a hammer.  And so you try hammering the tool. Well, my goodness!  That just makes it worst. That drives it further in. You try using the other end of the hammer and try to slip it in, say it’s a Phillips screw. It’s got one of those little tiny crosses in the head of it and you try to use the big end of the hammer to turn it but that just ends up making it worse and  maybe stripping a few of the… what do you call these….that little cross at the top of the screw? You can tell I’m not a big construction person, can’t you? Anyway, so you’ve got a hammer and you’re trying every which way you can. You try and maybe take that thin end of the hammer and put it underneath the screw and maybe that works a little bit but it’s just such hard work and my gosh, you try and you try and you try and nothing happens. And then one day someone gives you a Phillips screwdriver. And you look at this thing and you see that it perfectly matches the head of the Phillips screw. The little cross on the end of the screwdriver matches the little cross on the top of the screw. And you put the screwdriver on the top of that screw and you turn it and by golly it works. It comes right out. And you twist it around and out comes the next screw and you take it to the next screw and out comes the next screw and pretty soon all the screws are out and the piece of wood lifts right off and there you are and you have the original wood.  Where you’ve been trying to get right underneath and it’s been so easy, you can hardly believe it. And you look at that old hammer and you say “You’re a great tool, but not for this job. The next time that I have a nail I want to put in, I’m picking you up. But in the meantime, boy am I glad that I found that Phillips screwdriver.”  It’s like that. When you have the right tool for the job it’s easy. So if you’re thinking, if a part of you, a part of your subconscious mind, is saying “Gosh, weight loss is such hard work and I’ve tried so many times, how I can possibly be successful now?”  Well the way you can be successful now is by finding the right too for the job. Or the right tools.  So what are the right tools for the job? How about all of the concepts and exercises that we’ve already presented in Inside Out Weight Loss? Those are the tools for the job. Those are the tools that make the job so easy.

And we haven’t taken a moment yet to set our intention for this episode.  So go ahead and let your intention arise and present itself to you.  It may be a breakthrough. It may be a small breakthrough or a large one. Because you may want your journey to go quickly or to go slowly.  A new client of mine started recently and he set his intent at the beginning of our work together and he didn’t seem to want the process to be that easy. And I so I asked him about it and he said,”Well, you know. I feel like I have to work a little to make it seem like it’s for real.”  And I said, “Okay. That’s fine.” We’re a few weeks into it now and he’s beginning to reconsider.  Now that he’s worked a little and met his quota of hard work and might want it to go a little bit more easily. So play close attention to the intent that you set because you’re very likely to get it.  Now your intent for today may simply be to relax and enjoy the ride. To let what I say sink into your subconscious mind and make your journey be easy. That may be your intent. So whatever it is allow it to arise and present itself to you. My intent, as always, is to enable you and help you to achieve yours.

Before the break, I wanted to share with you a comment from the Yahoo group that I thought was so funny. This is a reframe that one of the listeners wrote.  And she’s talking about another person who’s been on a very strict diet and she says “Even though I never went on that kind of a diet I still work out more than other people do. Why? Because my body is a sneaky, conniving… no wait! That’s not right! It’s conservative with calories. That’s it,” she writes, “my body is conservative with calories.” I just love that. What a great reframe. Conservative with calories. Efficient, is another way to say it. She could say “My body is so unbelievably efficient.”  She goes on in her message to talk about all of the incredible exercise things she can do with very little fuel and in fact, from an evolutionary perspective this was considered pretty darn cool.  Now, there are a couple ways to go about this. Of course, my perspective is that just about anything we want to change is changeable if we get ourselves into the right state to do it and use the right tools. And so there are two ways to approach this. One would be to say, simply “Well, I just want to match my desire for food with my body’s need for food.”  Do you remember when we talked about matching back in an earlier episode? That that’s what naturally slender people do. It’s not that they have the most amazing metabolisms or anything like that. It simply means that they have this ability to match their burn rate with their intake.  In other words, the more or less they burn through their metabolism, the more or less that they eat. So your desire could be to simply desire the appropriate amount of food for the amount of calories you’re burning. If your desire matches your burn rate then it’s easy for you. It’s just a matter of your desire matching. What your body needs to be naturally slender and in the case of weight loss your body will be taking into account that you’ve got lots of very easily accessible energy already on your body. So that’s one thing that you could say:  “Yes. I would like that. Wouldn’t it be easier if I just didn’t care so much about eating?”  The other thing that you could say is, “Well, I would really like for my body to burn more so that I could eat more and match that way. I’d like to increase my body’s natural burn rate.”  And in fact the guided journey that I offer, called The Appetite Adjustor, is just about bringing your burn rate and your desire into alignment so that you can be a naturally slender weight. It’s about reprogramming.  Problem comes when your desire far exceeds your burn rate. So, it’s your choice.  You can either rejoice if you have a body that’s conservative with calories. In other words, if you have an incredibly efficient body. Or you can say “Gosh. I’d really like my body to be less efficient. I want it to be a calorie-burning machine. Healthy and a calorie-burning machine.” And through the power of your subconscious mind and your intent and the tools that we provide here in Inside Out Weight Loss, both are possible.

It’s time to take a break now. This is Renee Stephens and you’re listening to Inside Out Weight Loss on Personal Life Media.

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Stephens:                      We’re back. Before the break we talked about using the right tools for the job. And we talked about matching your desire with food with your body’s burn rate. Now, I’d like to introduce you to an incredibly powerful tool that you can use on your own or with the assistance of a guide. This tool is so powerful that I teach it to all of my clients and I want you to know it.  Because not only is it valuable in your journey to become naturally slender, in your journey of increasing episodes of naturally slender, but also for any negatively charged emotional experience or memory in your life. You can use it for all sorts of things. In fact I find it the most fabulous cure for insomnia, for example. But we’ll get to that a little bit later. The tool that I’m talking about, that I’m introducing today, that we’ll be talking about for the next couple of episodes, is Emotional Freedom Technique. EFT.  Otherwise known as EFT. And I have to tell you, that when I first learned this tool it involved tapping, humming, singing, all sorts of stuff and I said “This is way too weird for me.” Honest to goodness, that’s what I said. “There is no way I’m teaching this to my clients.  I consider myself fairly mainstream and this is clearly weird.” Well, what happened?  Now I am just the biggest fan of EFT. Isn’t that always the way that it is? The things that we come out so strongly against? What happened was that I had an amazing personal breakthrough with this tool when I learned a simplified version of it that that I will be teaching you here today. And I’d like to credit my friend Gina Orlando, who is a skilled hypnotherapist in the Chicago area, for introducing me to this tool.

And while I’m giving credit where credit is due I can’t talk about Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT, without mentioning Gary Craig who has a website that I will link to on the blog at personallifemedia.com/Renée with loads of resources, case studies,  a complete free user’s manual , for Emotional Freedom Technique. Now Gary Craig is a guy who discovered this technique – I don’t remember his whole story – but I do know that he learned a similar technique from a guy who was charging a crazy amount of money for it. This guy was charging like, I don’t know, 50, 100k -- some crazy amount of money to learn this special, miraculous tool. And Gary said, “I don’t know if it can be that fabulous.” But he, I guess, had a lot of money and said “I’m going to pay this guy.” So he goes and he learns this tool and he says, “Yeah. This is pretty good. I like it. But I don’t like the idea that it’s so inaccessible to people.”  So what he did is he said, “I’m going to adapt it” and I think he improved it in some ways, he changed it so that it wouldn’t violate the terms of his agreement with this other guy and he actually made it a whole lot better and easier and more accessible and then he put it on his website. He created a website, he put it up there and he created a whole manual for it that you can download for free. And then he created all these low-cost videos, training videos or DVD’s that he said anyone who buys it can make a hundred copies of it for free. So this technique, because it’s so effective, has taken off like wildfire. And the beginnings of scientific research into its efficacy have already begun. I have found this tool to be extraordinary, an extraordinary all-purpose tool, and again, I love it because I can do it on my own and I can have a person guide me through it. Typically I find that when I’m guided through it by someone who knows what they’re doing, or anybody else, for that matter, it is more powerful. Not always but typically I find it is more powerful when I have a professional guide, someone who knows what they’re doing. But I also have tremendous success with it just on my own, on any kind of issue that might be bothering me.

So what the heck is this Emotional Freedom Technique? What does it mean? The idea of Emotional Freedom Technique, my favorite metaphor to describe it, is that it’s as if we have an actual energy field around us. So imagine that all of our emotions are in this energy field that’s around us. Pretend that that’s the case. And if that were the case, it’s as if, when we have a negative emotional charge – some kind of negative emotional issue. It could be a recent one: oh, I’m frustrated by traffic or my boss or my spouse or whatever it is, or with myself, or it could be something that’s been there for a long time. And it’s like a charge, a negative charge that can get stuck in our energy field. And what is Emotional Freedom Technique do? It releases that negative charge so that the positive can settle right in. It’s as if you had a really steamy shower stall, you know, one where the hot water’s been going a long time and the steam is so thick you feel like you could cut it with a knife and you open the door of that shower stall and all of the steam escapes and the fresh air comes in. That’s what emotional Freedom Technique does. It’s a beautiful clearing, an opening and it can be very quick. The other thing that I’d like to say before we close today about EFT is a little bit about what the heck it is. EFT uses the same energy meridians that are used in acupuncture and Chinese medicine and have been used for thousands of years. These meridians are used in things like Tai Chi and Xia Gong and all sorts of Asian traditions.  Unlike acupuncture however, where needles are used on specific points on these meridian lines, with EFT we actually tap, we tap with our fingers on these points on these specific meridian points on our bodies as we are talking about bringing up feeling the negative emotional charge.  In contrast to everything else that I do, to everything else  do, where we are so focused on the positive, the possibilities, with EFT we actually go into the negative. No why the heck would we do that?  Isn’t that dangerous?  I had one client who said “I don’t want to be saying this stuff. It’s scary to me.” And I said, “It’s really like…” I love to use the metaphor from the original Star Wars movie.  The one from 1977. I don’t know if you’ve seen that one but we just re-watched it recently with our kids and it is such a fun movie. In that movie there is this big old death star. This thing is the size of a planet and it goes around…the idea is that it’s going to go around – it’s just been completed as the movie starts, and the idea is that’s going to go around and annihilate planet after planet so that the owners of it can have universal control of all galaxies. Of course, it’s all about power. So the resistance with Luke Skywalker and Princess Lea and Hans Solo had these little tiny fighter spaceships. These things are tiny and they’re this raggle-taggle crew. They’re really nothing compared to this big honker death star. And they’re thinking, “How the heck are we going to fight this thing?” But they have a plan. Of course they have a plan. So they send their little tiny starships, fighter ships, close, up close to this death star, and they go and they get a photon torpedo or whatever these things are, and they’re going to put it down this access hole in the outside – they’re so small they can go into this narrow space and deposit this torpedo right in this almost like a gutter thing, this access hole, that goes right to the core of the death star. And then they get the heck out of dodge. And of course, it’s Luke Skywalker, trusting the force that’s able to do this, he puts it in there and when this torpedo, this photon torpedo or whatever it’s called, gets to the center and he’s out of town, the whole death star explodes from the inside out, as a matter of fact. And in that way, they release the negative. With EFT it’s like that. We go to the heart of the fear, of the negative because by going there we can release it. We can open up that shower stall and allow the fresh air to come in.

So, on the next episode of Inside Out Weight Loss I’ll actually be walking you through a round or two of Emotional Freedom Technique. We’ll see what we have time for. And I think that I will be focusing specifically on releasing the fear of hunger. Releasing hunger phobia.  Because that’s another one of those limiting beliefs that’s so common in our society. That hunger is something to be feared, to be run from, to be prevented. And as you know, if you’ve been listening to this show, hunger can actually be our friend.  So we’ll use Emotional Freedom Technique, I’ll take you through a powerful demonstration of how it works to release, in this case, the fear of hunger. I can’t wait to take you there.

That brings us to the end of our show today. Thank you for being present. If you’re interested in the products for sale on my site, including The Appetite Adjustor, go to mindforbody.com M-I-N-D-F-O-R-B-O-D-Y.com and click on products. You’ll see the links there. Also, if you enjoy this show, consider writing a five-star review on iTunes. Five star reviews boost the prominence and popularity of this show so that we can reach more people.

Go to your iTunes account or go to www.itunes.com, download the software and then put Inside Out Weight Loss in the search window. The show will pop up; you’ll scroll down and have an opportunity to add your five-star review of Inside Out Weight Loss.

This is your host Renee Stephens and I am on a mission to eradicate the weight struggle from the planet. And enable others, enable you, to release and share your soul’s gift.  Join me as we evolve the world by evolving ourselves. Take good care.

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