Sarah Tobin is a real life angel. She’s warm and calm with empathy by the bucketload. She’s tapped her way to good feelz and positive vibes and she’s intent on tapping you too. Clearing that energy and unleashing the potential within you, me and she. But it wasn’t always the case. Back in 2014 Sarah and her husband Dave suffered the tragic loss of their daughter Alice after complications during childbirth.
It wasn’t until she was pregnant with her second boy Casper that she turned to Emotional Freedom Tapping. Flashbacks and a later diagnosis of PTSD made it hard for her to move on. Over the years she tried it all – reiki, acupuncture, talk therapy and yoga, but it was tapping that helped her move past the trauma of her experience and live a life filled with joy (most of the time).
She has since trained in Tapping and Matrix Reimprinting. This is so that she can help those suffering from baby loss, birth trauma, miscarriage and ongoing negative emotions. Though Sarah works with Mums, tapping is relevant for all kinds of difficulties.
“We’re not made aware of how our brains work”, says Sarah. “The conscious, the unconscious, the importance of positive thoughts, the limitations of negative thoughts”.
And she’s right, we’re not. It’s not until you start digging that the world opens up. So often we’re stuck in a fixed state of mind, that we don’t consider an alternative but human potential is huge. There’s a shift in consciousness. We’re waking up to the possibility of change. Becoming conscious is the first rung on the ladder. And Emotional Freedom Tapping is one way of tapping into this. Much of the dis-ease we feel in our lives is a result of trauma.
“Trauma” Sarah says, “is a any distressing or disturbing experience. When a trauma happens we do one of two things – create a limiting belief or make a decision. In the instance of a car crash, a belief could be ‘the world isn’t a safe place’, whereas a decision would be ‘I’ll never get in a car again’.” Our beliefs create our thoughts and our thoughts create our emotions, “but most of the time we don’t understand where our beliefs come from, we can’t link it to anything. We often make an unconscious decision in a moment of trauma that we’re no longer aware of. And most of this is done at an unconscious level, that’s why we don’t remember any of it.
Once that’s programmed into our brain, we seek and attract similar situations. What we focus on we create. If I have a belief lurking around my unconscious, my subconscious is screaming ‘the world is not a safe place, I’m going to bring more danger to you’. This is just how the brain works, it’s how we process trauma.”
It becomes a limiting belief when you stop being able to do the things you want to because of it.
Those negative emotions, that negative energy is what leads to self-sabotaging behaviour that keeps you stuck. Negative emotions are felt through a disruption of the body’s energy, with physical pain and disease a result of them. Health problems create feedback – physical symptoms cause emotional distress, and unresolved emotional problems manifest in physical symptoms. Therefore our health must be considered holistically – you can’t treat the symptoms without treating the cause and you can’t treat the cause without treating the symptom.
The body is composed of energy. If you restore the balance of energy, you quash the negative emotions and the physical symptoms caused by disruption. Emotional Freedom Tapping does this by hacking the energy centres, and going straight to the part of the brain the subconscious lives. By ‘tapping’ on acupressure points we send signals to the brain to stop amygdala activity.
Tapping reduces the level of cortisol produced by the brain
It turns off the area of the brain that looks after fear and at the same time it creates new neural pathways in the brain, tracks that bipass existing thoughts, so that you can let go of what it is that is no longer serving you. In a nutshell it reduces the intensity of the emotion associated with past traumas so that you can move on.
An offshoot of EFT is a practice called Matrix Reimprinting and this is aimed specifically at targeting trauma stored in the body. “When we experience trauma a part of us splits off and stores all the emotions we felt at the time, that way you never fully experience trauma. It’s held separate from the body.”
But if unresolved we never truly process the trauma and it lurks around our unconscious mind, the beliefs formed wreaking havoc in our lives.
In order to move on from the trauma we need to process it but this needs to be done in a safe space.
“When we do matrix reimprinting we specifically try not to take on the trauma. We take measures to send you back into the trauma with armour to help you navigate it, with a protective bubble around you. You’re not there to relive the trauma that you once experienced, we’re just here as an enabler to help you let it go.”
Sarah works specifically helping Mums overcome limiting beliefs and birth related trauma
“We are conscious beings from the moment of conception, we tap into their energy system. The Mums negativity is felt by the baby the whole way through pregnancy. That includes stress, negative thoughts, not to mention the labour itself. The birth process triggers final development in the brain of the child. This stage also triggers the downloading of all the good ‘vibes’. If there are any complications here this can be disrupted, creating to all kinds of trauma for Mum and baby.” And Sarah can vouch first hand for that, that’s why she’s made it her mission to help as many Mums as possible to move on.
So if Emotional Freedom Tapping takes a fraction of the time and cost of traditional talk therapy why haven’t we heard of it before?
It all seems a bit ‘airy-fairy’, a bit too good to be true. And it’s this attitude exactly that led to huge investment in research with Harvard Medical School leading the charge. A recent study confirms the effect of tapping on the amygdala. It also reported a 25% drop in the level of cortisol in the blood after tapping. Solid research to back up it’s poweress. And it’s impact is becoming more apparent with people turning to tapping in their droves for weight loss, cravings, anxiety, creativity and productivity. Oprah, Louise Hay, Deepak Chopra and Jack Canfield all celebrate the benefits of EFT, and maybe it’s time we tapped ourselves to freedom.
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