Monday, November 25, 2013

Wonderful Quote (and Reminder)

Saw this in Facebook just now, from Jack Canfield (one of the Chicken Soup for the Soul: Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit authors) :

Major improvements take time. They don’t happen overnight. If you make a commitment to learning something new every day, getting just a little bit better every day, then eventually – over time – you will reach your goals.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Using EFT to Uncover Blocks

I've been trying to use EFT/tapping each day lately. I'm not sure if I'm remembering to, but I did today with some interesting results.

Before even getting up this morning, I asked myself: What's an issue that's bugging me right now? The first thing that came to mind was that I'm frustrated and confused about how to fit in time to make more money. I lost some of my income recently, I've been very busy with my kids and dealing with my daughter's overstressed/possibly depressed issues and then have all this stuff to do. I haven't been playing Facebook games like I was before the tapping sessions I last posted about though. (Oh, I've played Candy Crush saga twice I think, one of those when I was on the phone with my mother! :P)

So, while I can see that playing computer games was definitely taking away from my time to work on other income sources, I haven't been playing computer games and I'm still not spending time working on these things I know (ok, hope) will bring in more money.

In any case, I assessed my stress level about it as being around a 6--that I was frustrated and confused about how to fit in time to make more money. (Then the random thought came in: Attract it! Now that I think about it, was the thought about attracting more money or attracting more time? Hm...)

I went through a round of tapping. I wish I could remember more clearly what I thought/said at each point so I could share a script here, but I don't. Along the lines of:

The frustration and confusion in my body.
This frustration and confusion
About not knowing how or what to do...

After the first or second round, I questioned myself:

How do I let go of what I don't need to do and how do I know what to let go of? This was in relation to my getting caught up in researching what to do about teen depression, supplements, foods, etc., as well as other things. I assessed the tension level on this one as being a 5.

I got interrupted at this point and had to continue the session a couple of minutes later. When I tuned back in, I felt resistance in my stomach and chest rather than just stress. I forgot to assess the level of resistance. I tapped through this and realized behind the resistance was fear. On that round, I uncovered that the fear was my block, and it was blocking me to keep me safe.

Safe from what? I went through a whole round and didn't know. Then it came to me: success. I was afraid of success. I then thought of one of the videos I had seen with Nick Ortner (I don't remember now if it was through an email they sent or on the tapping site) where he had asked the lady to think back to her earliest memory related to it. Well, mine is from grade 4: I had just moved and while nobody made a big deal of my high marks before moving, all of a sudden, doing well, excelling above everybody else (which I had been doing before but it just really wasn't a big deal) was a bad thing: one boy in particular had an issue with my doing so well and he and his cohorts would harass me because of it. (I can feel the tension in my body now just bringing this memory up again!) I remember for a science test thinking I might have gotten 100%; I went back and deliberately changed one of my answers to the wrong answer. That was how badly the negative comments affected me.

This fear, this tension, it's still in me after all these years. Grade 4... That was 30 years ago.

When I remembered this and started tapping on it, I started crying. There I was, at that point in my ensuite in front of the mirror, tapping away and crying over this!

Does this mean that not finding time (or not making time or not using time) to work on these other things is directly related to this memory? Not necessarily. But it can be one block. A block I'm going to have to work on some more. While I knew I'd carried a bit of the belief that excelling brought negative attention, I did not realize it was in me to the point of causing me to cry!

I didn't do a final tension assessment, which you are absolutely supposed to do (I will get better at this, I hope!), but I felt much better. And since doing that, I've made a quiche for my daughter (with eggs with omega-3 and bacon--she loves bacon and it makes her feel great--and she needs an easy lunch for later and hates sandwiches and is just plain tired of everything else and can't decide anything easily lately), I've gotten the cat litter done, I've written out a list of things to do and gotten this post done. And it's only 9 am. Good start to the day. :)

Have you tried tapping? Care to share your story?

Saturday, November 16, 2013

If You Haven't Tried Tapping Yet...

I am amazed.

Truly!

I just can't believe how quickly tapping (EFT) has helped me. For weeks, I'd been unmotivated, not really getting much done. Resistant. Playing lots of computer games.

I did a number of tapping sessions yesterday. As I tend to do when an interest gets sparked, I got a little obsessive. lol. I spent hours reading websites and watching videos and doing more tapping. I actually found one tapping script for clutter and tried it, but it didn't leave me with the positive feeling at the end that the author of the script had felt. If anything, I was more aggravated by the clutter and just the stuff that needs to be taken care of in the house (not necessarily clutter, but useful things that need proper "homes" within the home) so I went back to the format I learned from The Tapping Solution, which helped me feel much better. And then I finally reached a point where I decided it was late enough in the evening, time for a little treat while watching TV and/or playing a computer game on my laptop. This is when the effects of the tapping really started to show.

In the mood for popcorn, I headed to the kitchen and pulled out my air popper. While the margarine (Fleischmann's dairy-free non-hydrogenated!; not as good as the Becel Vegan, just fyi) was melting, I looked and saw the dishwasher light on, telling me it was ready to be emptied and saw the dirty dishes in the sink. Now, normally--and I mean pretty much every evening, not just Friday evening, in the past decade or two--I would have just left the kitchen as it was and tackled it in the morning. Or I would have begrudgingly made myself do it as part of some goal. This time, it was simply, "Hm, I want the kitchen clean." And I cleaned it. No resistance. I'm still amazed because I so often feel resistance to cleaning the kitchen (although, yes, I still do it regardless) and there was none. There was no temptation to leave the job incomplete. I even put away the popcorn popper.

Perhaps a bit of background information on me will help to get the full impact of this change:

When I was little, under the age of 9, I liked everything just so. I took great pleasure in arranging the jewellery on my dresser, keeping everything nice and tidy.

Then, we moved. In the middle of my grade 4 school year. I was torn from the only friends I ever remembered having and was very attached to. And knowing what I know now about childhood depression, it is pretty clear that I fell into mild depression as a result. How that played out was, in part, my lack of interest in having things nice and tidy. I just didn't care about it anymore. It was like night and day. My mother, naturally, didn't understand what had happened. How could I have gone from being super tidy before we moved to a complete slob (at least with my room) after we moved? I recall her getting frustrated to the point that, more than once, she took a big garbage bag, put everything laying around in it and said the bag was going to be thrown out on a certain day so if I wanted any of it, I'd have to put it away properly.

My room wasn't always a mess, though. I kept flitting between enjoying keeping it clean and just not caring. It really has continued bouncing back and forth that way ever since with my bedroom and many things, with my bedroom tending to be at least a little untidy more than not. Although not entirely: Now I do care again, the only moments I really don't care are when I'm absolutely exhausted, but I feel so overwhelmed with the sheer amount of stuff to do, or I have just blinders on that I don't really see the mess in between serious cleanings. (This makes it sound like my house is a pigsty; it isn't, but it's got its fair share of stuff not put away and just plain clutter.)

Our poor little apple tree

It's a blustery, blizzardy (sure, that's a word) day out there and I would normally be spending such a day playing on the computer the way my husband is playing on the PS3 while he waits for the snow to calm down before snowblowing. While I have been on the computer a lot, it hasn't been to play: caught up on some messages, took care of transferring funds from a prepaid phone to a monthly plan, and other useful things. Like working on this blog post. I've also done some non-computer things like driven my daughter to work in this nasty weather on the nasty roads, made my way to the grocery store and back, had lunch and, yes, kept the kitchen clean again. I haven't played a single Facebook game yet today. I don't even really have the inclination to, yet every other day this week I used up all of my lives in Candy Crush Saga and would play a bit from some other games first thing in the morning. Or even get (non-Facebook) The Sims 3 going.

But back to my point. I have, for the past 30 years, essentially, pretty much lost the joy of keeping things clean. Oh, sure I wanted everything clean, but I had mostly resistance to the idea of actually cleaning things. Or just feeling completely neutral and just doing it because it had to get done or should get done. If there has been a time even in the last 20 years where I approached my kitchen on a Friday evening (or any late evening) the way I did last night, I can't recall it. And it was effortlessly done. I hadn't set a goal or planned to do it, I just did it. And I liked the final product.

Do I dare add that this morning, before anybody else was up, I grabbed up the dishes that others had left after I'd cleaned last night and I put them in the dishwasher? No resentment, no resistance, just, a feeling of I want the kitchen clean. And, yes, it made me happy to make it clean. :)

Maybe you don't have a clutter problem. Maybe there is some other issue affecting you. Either way, if you haven't tried tapping yet, I highly recommend checking out The Tapping Solution site. Check out the articles and videos and start tapping. You could be amazed!

Friday, November 15, 2013

Becoming Procrastination-Free

This blog, as all of my blogs, has not turned out how I intended it. I come here to put my thoughts down on paper, to share things with others who are like-minded, but I set myself goals (like the 100-day challenge :( ) and don't see them through, including such goals as writing in my blogs daily (not EACH blog daily, but just each day on A blog). There are all kinds of things out there that help people and the recent one that has been an eye-opener is what I would like to share with you today. It has provided such a sense of peace and clarity that if I can make this a daily habit, I think it will do me wonders.

What is it?

Tapping!

Tapping is a term used for what you do during Emotional Freedom Technique (aka EFT) sequences. You are tapping your fingers on various meridian points. I was first introduced to this by a DVD I stumbled across at the library, The Tapping Solution (available at The Tapping Solution).

Just following along with them was amazing and every now and then since watching, I would think to do some but I felt like I didn't really know what I was doing and didn't remember to do it most of the time. The idea of doing it never completely left me and I ended up putting a hold at the library on the book by the same name. This page The Tapping Solution Book Page has all kinds of information on the book. Basically, it's a guide for everything you need to get started in tapping, as well as different situations where tapping can be useful. There are also things like identifying beliefs and blocks. It's so good!

I did not get a chance to finish going through it (well, is that true? I probably had plenty of time but used it elsewhere) before it had to go back to the library, but it just resonated with me. This is a book I have on my Christmas wish list now. Or I might not wait. ;)

A breakthrough today came from watching an interview with Nick Ortner on The Aware Show. Just tapping through with them, I, again, felt the relaxation and decided this is something that I need to add to my daily routines because I can instinctively feel how it will help me. I found Nick on Facebook and followed him and found a great post on things to make sure you are doing when tapping. One thing he said was to do it for 15 minutes at a time. Okay, so I set a timer and decided I wanted to address the feelings leading to procrastination lately. My procrastination level has been HUGE. Tapping through things and writing down each step of what I was addressing was just amazing.

I started off looking at my frustration with my procrastination, in terms of cleaning and writing and just not getting any work-related things done. This led to dealing with feelings of being overwhelmed with there being so much to do, which then led to the feelings of being confused about where to start, how to know what to work on. I then felt sadness because I felt like I wasn't living up to my potential and was being a bad role model for my kids (who would've thought addressing procrastination would get so deep??). I started asking myself why, why did I procrastinate like this? Why did I need an outside-imposed deadline? Why did I wait until it had to be done? Here I am, nearly 40, and I've only, today, identified at least part of where my procrastination comes from: it was a coping mechanism in my childhood, a way to avoid having to do things I didn't think I should have had to do (I was asked to do a LOT of things that, to this day, I still feel it was unfair to ask of me that much, but that's a whole other issue, one I may need to address in tapping!), to protect myself from demands and whims. I waited until the last minute for school things a lot of the time because I could say, "I have homework," and it would be true because it was there, waiting to be done, but not getting done. I developped a habit of waiting until the imposed deadline was upon me and still do this today with so many things. I still have work to do on this to deal with the feelings surrounding this all--even now, I feel stress in my stomach thinking about some of this--but it has, at least for today, helped me turn some things around. I've already made better food choices this morning than I have been this week and I'm sitting here writing a blog post! Do you know what I've been doing all week instead when I'm not busy with children or things that have deadlines (like making supper by a specific time)? Pretty much playing Facebook games. I even played Facebook games while making supper last night. I admit, I played a Facebook game this morning while listening to the parts of the interview where there wasn't any tapping going on, but I haven't touched the games since and just want to keep moving ahead with my different goals, which I feel I will have to tap on again as the stress rises into my chest with the thought of not knowing what to pick next to work on. I actually believe that feeling this stress is a good thing because I think I've been just burying it all week, hiding it behind Facebook games!

In any case, if you feel you have blocks, feel stressed, anxious, need to work on achieving better health, better financial state, anything, if you are looking to be blocks-free, stress-free, I highly recommend you look into EFT/tapping. Check out The Tapping Solution website and see all the stuff that's there, for free, to get you started: what it is, basic instructions on how to do it, videos, research information,  EFT articles and so much more. And anticipate I will post again about progress made with this technique. :)