For someone familiar with using positive affirmations, Emotional Freedom Technique seems to be completely contradictory.
The principles of manifestation, the saying ‘Where attention goes, energy flows’, ideas of positive visualisation, assuming the identity of the one you wish to be, not empowering negative beliefs, staying focused on an outcome, and others are principles which are apparently contradictory to how EFT works.
For this reason, some people think it better simply not to do EFT.
Logically, this makes sense, as there is an apparent contradiction and so a choice to be made.
However, there are a few good reasons to understand these tools as being complementary, rather than contradictory. Shadow work goes hand in hand with seeing the light, the big error in spirituality is always to become too enamoured with one side or the other and so become unbalanced.
The first point is that it’s not a good idea, if it’s even possible, to build a house on a swamp. Any structure needs good foundations, as you can put the strongest wall onto wet ground, but it will simply sink and topple.
For instance, repeating an affirmation of, ‘I am abundant and money flows quickly and easily to me’ on top of strong beliefs that ‘Money is bad’, ‘Wealthy people are selfish and evil’, and ‘I am good’, is going to introduce an internal contradiction, in which case the strongest beliefs win. These are usually the ones buried deep in the subconscious, acquired through culture, ancestral programming, trauma and other inaccessible realms. Which is why, positive affirmation simply does not work, most of the time.
Secondly, I reassure my EFT session clients that I have never opened up a belief or emotion which has not been integrated before the end. Any internal program, emotion or belief is always discharged through the work and so is not left reinforced. We find what is already there, most usually delete it completely, or at the very least significantly reduce the energy it carries and the impact it has.
Thirdly, by its very nature Shadow work is repellent if you are not used to it. Unwelcome beliefs and emotions are by their nature unwelcome, so we are used to being repulsed by them and avoiding them any way we can. Denial, avoidance, distraction, these are the common responses to our shadow.
Positive affirmations and daydreaming about that new house or car, is simply more appealing than cleaning the toilet, so the internal emotional reaction of repulsion does lend weight to thinking that EFT, or any other shadow work for that matter, is a bad idea and that we really don’t need to do it.
Shadow work by necessity entails a degree of ownership, and we don’t want to be associated with the crap. However, to extend the metaphor, doing the cleaning improves the odour way more than simply spraying more air freshener!
The phrase of ‘leaning in’, which has become popular is a very useful reframe and very helpful one in the spiritual community, because it invites exploration of discomfort in order to grow. It suggests aspects akin to yoga, where we find an edge, and sit in it until the muscles relax. When you get used to the practice, it becomes a very welcome one as the relief comes very quickly and is the takeaway experience.
Fourthly, EFT rests on very strong spiritual and metaphysical foundations. Ho ‘oponopono, the Christic teachings of Jeshua as shared in ‘The Way of the Heart’, and more common-sense principles of forgiveness and cleaning up our psychic creations, relationships, and self-talk, all contain the principles at work in EFT, or vice versa.
The setup phrase: ‘Even though I am/have ____, I deeply and completely love and accept myself’, contains the essence of self-forgiveness, integration, or atonement/At One Ment.
There is very deep work occurring here, which goes far beyond and much deeper than making an affirmation or visualisation.
With this type of shadow work, we can literally wipe the slate clean of deeply distorted programming and what then takes its place, can and will be a natural, responsive, healthy, unique set of behaviours and beliefs which are more in alignment with higher truth and your innate and God given energy field programs. These are the ones which for instance we can observe as the positive aspects of personality seen through The Gene Keys, Astrology or Human Design, or other useful typology systems.
You could say that in the moment of doing EFT, we step in to work with God, as God, for God, to be the loving awareness of presence, to receive everything without judgement, simply to allow a new choice to be made which is in greater agreement with truth, source, higher-self values and understanding, including the principle that on the higher dimensional levels, all is one.
From that new place, we have a much greater degree of free will and so then can use some of the other tools which work at a shallower level to our hearts content, and which then will be simply more effective.
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