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Friday, April 29, 2011

Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT - Why I Know It Works

Good morning!

So, it was just a few days ago I was feeling really horrible. I'd been unemployed for five months, living with my mother, who had just finished venting her frustration with me for the last two hours. I felt worthless. I felt unworthy. I felt insignificant and undeserving of the relief I craved.

I was sitting alone on my bed, trying to feel, trying to cry, but I felt so rotten I couldn't even do that. It was the kind of self-loathing that cripples; it was as though my very soul had been severed.

I had read about EFT, and even messed around with it a little, but I didn't apply it on a regular basis, by any stretch. I decided I had nothing to lose by trying it in that moment. So I started tapping my hand, saying, "Even though I feel worthless, I accept myself." I went through the rest of the tapping procedure, really allowing myself to feel that unworthiness. When I was done, and I took one deep breath, my body - not me, I couldn't control it if I had tried - immediately began to WEEP. I cried for maybe a minute, maybe less, and then, I was done. I felt better, and I felt a little bit relieved.

The real miracle of EFT did not become obvious to me until a few days later. For I realized in a rush of understanding, that I not only did NOT feel worthless, I felt worthwhile. It felt like a new feeling, as though I had never felt that way before, and I really have to wonder if that's not absolutely true.

I know that the instant I stopped weeping, I had released all of the negative energy that I had held onto for so many years, that was causing me to feel unworthy and worthless. All that's left is a feeling of freedom and power, which has only grown since. I feel, in a word, HUMAN, for the first time in my life.

Now, I'm a tapping fool. Like they say, "Try it on everything." One of the best resources to learn more about EFT is thetappingsolution.com. You have nothing to lose except your pain.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

My Own Worst Enemy

Good morning.

A sequoia lived for 400 years. It lived through 400 winters, 400 springs, 400 summers, and 400 autumns. Each season bombarded the great sequoia with rain, wind, lightning, heat, deathly cold, storms of every flavor. For 400 summers, it grew, and for each one of 400 winters, it slowed to almost death. Every spring, though, 400 times, it reawakened, to be clobbered again by the elements of nature. What finally killed the mighty tree? Beetles ate it from the inside.

Like the 400-year-old sequoia, Man can handle ANYTHING the external world hurls at him, but his vital weakness lies within himself.

My good friend Dana Lisenbee told me this parable today, because I needed desperately to hear it. The last few weeks have been, for me, a downward spiral into my own self-loathing. I thought I had licked it; I was mistaken.

Now, I am consciously using my mind to be aware of what it is doing to itself, and to me, as a whole person. I'm using EFT whenever I feel negativity creeping into my emotional matrix. The only way to get positive is to feel your way there. EFT helps transmute the negative feeling into something positive. Negative emotion becomes trapped in the body; by tapping on certain acupressure meridian points, and feeling the emotion fully, the body can literally let go of the trapped emotion and you can move on from there. It's a technique I've known about, and used a little, but I'm beginning at last to understand just how powerful it can be. (learn more about it: thetappingsolution.com)

Another cool thing happened today: I saw the movie Revolver (2005), with Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Andre Benjamin, and Vincent Pastore, written and directed by Guy Ritchie, produced by Luc Besson. It was exactly the film I needed to see today. It's ostensibly about chess and con games, but it's really all about the ego. But it goes roundabout the subject for 104 minutes of total mind-warping, violent confusion. I highly recommend it. You'll definitely have to see it at least twice.

The ego feeds--thrives, even--on negative emotion; in fact, it may even be fairly accurate to say that the trapped negativity is an ingredient or component of the ego itself. The ego is chaos incarnate, a constant adversary of the True Self. Its greatest trick is convincing you that it IS you. The ego is a shadow that thinks it is the light, wants to be the light so badly it hurts, but it can never be. It then uses the pain, makes you feel worthless, hopeless, helpless, until the light is almost invisible, and all seems to be the shadow. But there can be no shadow without light. You are the light; the shadow that is ego is not who you are. The pain is not who you are; you are Unselfish Love, which is the Source of All Light.

Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him. I'm feeling better today; the Force will guide me. All I can do is feel Better Now. Small moves. I can do it. I am worthy, and I do deserve it.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Supper's Ready? Or, A Day Passed Over

Can't you feel our souls ignite?
Shedding ever changing colours
In the darkness of the fading night
Like the river joins the ocean
As the germ in a seed grows
We have finally been freed to get back home

There's an angel standing in the sun
And he's crying with a loud voice:
This is the supper of the mighty one
Lord of Lords
King of Kings
Has returned to lead his children home
To take them to the new Jerusalem
-Genesis, "Supper's Ready"
I have had this 23-minute epic song stuck in my head for the last two weeks, like a massive prog-rock earworm. So when the news came about the Last Supper being dated wrong, I found it more than apropos.

First of all, WHO CARES? A date 2000 years ago may have been wrong. Well, darn it, one day in 2000 years ain't a bad handicap, really. Especially considering the number of times that calendar has changed. Yet people do care, and those people won't like what I'm about to say.

The reason people care about this is, at some point after the stories were written, there were some who thought that the allegorical stories were literally true, even though they were obvious rewrites of other allegories, particularly those of Joshua from Exodus and the Persian Godman Mithras. Later, the government adopted the literal view, and volumes were written to support it, including out and out forgeries set amidst the rest of the stories, in order to fill in the gaps. After that, there was no hope left for the allegory. Wars based on the belief in the literal, historical "truth" of these allegories have ravaged the world for the last 15 centuries.

This isn't about debunking the myth. In fact, the very word "myth" has been perverted, in the interest of literalist dogma. Myth used to be powerful; it was poetry, with layers of truth laid one upon another. Now the word is synonymous with "falsehood." This is unfortunate, because there is nothing false about the myths in the Bible, except for historicity.

The Myths of the Ancient World were guideposts to the Ultimate Truth--that God is within each and every one of us--and through them, we can Awaken to that Truth Within. Taken literally, the mystical nature of this Truth is all but lost.

Awakening involves broadening the mind. Whether the stories of a man dying and returning to life are literally true or not (regardless of when they were written--in the case of Mithras, 200 years before Christ, and including many of the same events and motifs as the Jesus stories) there is no denying the stories' emotional and spiritual benefits. Millions of people have been inspired, with or without the significant allegorical symbolism.

...I guess my point is, instead of arguing over whether it's literally true, we ought to focus on how each of us connects to the stories in our own lives and hearts. The rest is just details.