About Lena Chen - My Journey with EFT

My Journey with EFT

A Newbie’s Skepticism

“Tapping on meridian points to clear away negative emotions? Hmmm… not sure if this stuff works. Can’t be that easy right?”

These were some of the thoughts that went through my mind when I first encountered EFT in April 2007 during a 2 day Energy Psychology course conducted by the Social Service Training Institute (SSTI) in Singapore. While I considered myself open-minded, I found myself feeling both intrigued and doubtful about this technique that was almost insultingly easy, and yet claimed to alleviate and even treat multiple problems, from headaches and chronic pain to phobias, PTSD and anxiety.

As I was having flu that day and attracting attention with my elephant sneezes, I was chosen to be the demo participant. To my surprise, a few rounds of EFT immediately lessened by running nose and grogginess. However, later in the day, the symptoms returned and became worse than ever. Still, the fact that EFT temporarily alleviated my already full-blown flu caught my attention and I went home after the course, feeling greatly exhilarated and enthusiastic about trying EFT out for myself, my family and the clients I see in the counselling centre I worked in.

Yet, by the 2nd week, I gave up. Even though EFT helped to reduce my husband’s stomach pains and some of my own minor physical discomforts, I experienced only about 50% success rate which was just not good enough for me.

Despite the fact that I was not fully convinced about it myself, I tried to teach my clients EFT as well, hoping that my clients would have more success with it than me. Unfortunately, my first EFT client, a teenage boy, gave me this “are you kidding” look when I showed EFT to him. While he obligingly went along, his sniggering made me cringe inwardly. Furthermore, we were tapping on his confidence in exams, which I did not know how to measure properly at that time. Hence, we could not validate the results of the tapping on the spot, and I was too embarrassed to do any more rounds of tapping with him.

The next few clients were either skeptical or did not practice it at home, and I could not blame them since, like them, I was also skeptical and not very disciplined in practicing it. Needless to say, my faith in EFT quickly ran dry, and I dumped it aside as another one of those tools that everyone claims to be good but somehow doesn’t work for me.

Second Chance

Luckily for me, 2 months later, I met an online stranger, now a good friend, who knew EFT. I shared my experience with EFT with him and he suggested that I do EFT on my skepticism on EFT. Well, talk about irony! But his explanation made some sense, that my skepticism towards EFT could be some sort of unconscious resistance towards my own healing and I decided to follow his suggestion, since it only took less than 10 min to tap a couple of rounds. “Even though I don’t think EFT really works, I deeply and completely accept myself…”

I also checked out the original EFT site created by Gary Craig at www.emofree.com which was chock full of success stories written by laypeople and professionals with high credentials, including MDs, psychologists and nurses. I found Gary Craig’s free 79-page manual, where he wrote about how he discovered this technique, was astounded by its results, and decided to present it in a readily accessible form to the world through this manual and videos. There was also a full description of the technique and I realised that maybe the technique didn’t work for me because I often missed out the very first step which could be critical if I was unknowingly self-sabotaging myself on those issues.

Whether it was the tapping or the wonderfully informative website, I cannot tell. The good news was, I did start using EFT for myself and my clients once more.

Fortunately for me, soon after, I met a client who not only loved EFT and practiced it with greater enthusiasm than I ever did. She also got amazing results with it and delighted in giving me all the details, which I listened to with great amazement. I have much to thank her, because from there on, I had more confidence to use EFT with other clients. Of course, with practice and more practice, my skills in using EFT improved, which snowballed my confidence even further, and in no time, I was completely hooked onto EFT.

Encouragement From The Universe