About a month ago I attended an online seminar about mindfulness and was introduced to the idea of “EFT”. Not knowing what it was about, the host then asked us to follow a sequence where we began ‘tapping’ ourselves. She would suggest something positive we should say (for example “even when I feel pain I know that I am healing”) and then we would tap on the side of our hand. We would then repeat that phrase, or something similar, and then tap on the top of our head. Slowly, we worked our way down our face, collarbone, down to our armpits.
It sounds like a very strange thing to be doing, I know, but I really did notice a difference in my emotions. The repeated actions felt very calming, almost like it was a self-soothing gesture.
After the seminar, I looked up EFT and found out it is stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques, and according to Wikipedia, was invented in the 1990s by Gary Craig under the umbrella of ‘energy psychology’. Wikipedia goes so far as to refer to it as a ‘frankly bizarre’ pseudoscience whose only value relates to the placebo effect.
I get that, BUT, I also found that I was tapping the same places I often rub when I have a migraine (my eyebrow and the top of my head), AND acupressure points that have been referred to me over the years by physiotherapists (such as the underside of my hand). Having done a bit of Qigong, the idea of tapping wasn’t completely unusual for me; they do it to activate the Qi, or life energy that runs through you.
[On my stretching and self-massage posts, there are videos of tapping and acupressure you can try.]
That said, it did seem odd at the time that I was tapping under my eye, nose, and mouth… those places don’t traditionally hold tension for me. The armpit tapping was perhaps the strangest of all, and only served to make me feel like I was imitating a monkey, which ruined the positive state of mind I was slipping into…. oops.
The one thing I didn’t really get during the class, or now, is the non-symmetrical nature of the exercise. I mainly have pain in the right side of my head with my migraines, so it made sense to tap that side of my face. But I also have a frozen shoulder and sore neck on the left side, so tapping inside my right armpit probably made sense in terms of completing an energy circuit, but my left shoulder seemed to be “calling out to me” to switch sides as I was tapping. It was as if some part of my mind-body connection felt unfulfilled by the process. After the host had concluded the exercise and started talking about something else, I decided to tap places that hadn’t been assigned and tapped all around my left shoulder to say “hang in there, I’m here for you.”
Here’s a picture of the locations we tapped, and a link below to the website it came from which explains in more detail what EFT is and how it works:
[Image source: EFT Tapping for Stress Relief and Anxiety (greatist.com)]
My takeaways from the exercise were to do a two-handed karate-chop (one against the other) as a soothing exercise when no one is around, and to reintroduce tapping into my morning mindful-movement ritual; but in my version I use both hands and slowly tap with my fingers from the top of my head, down across my face and neck, and then I switch to a closed fist and tap from my shoulders, down my abdomen, all the way to my feet and then back up.
If you want to try EFT tapping for yourself here’s a couple of videos you can experiment with (there are lots out there, but some do more talking than tapping!):
(4 mins): How to Tap with Jessica Ortner: Emotional Freedom Technique Informational Video (youtube.com)
(13 mins): How to use EFT Tapping to Accelerate Healing | Jack Canfield (youtube.com)
(Don’t forget all the videos I refer to are on my Youtube playlist here.)
Let me know if you’ve ever done EFT tapping and whether it works for you – I love to hear people’s success stories!
Take care, Linda x
The Mindful Migraine 
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