August 17, 2016 by Thriving Now

EFT Audio Tip: Persist Until It Is a Zero

Listen (07:21) or Download MP3

Key points:

  • Five is better than 10, but zero is infinitely better than five!
  • Why? The experience of complete relief trains our energy system!
  • How can you get to zero? Persistence!
  • Story: I hate computers!

EFT can often bring almost instantaneous relief when we’re feeling an intense emotion. But one of the things I’ve noticed is that many times people stop too soon!

Let’s say you’re really angry. You start tapping and the intensity drops from a “10” to let’s say a “5.” You’re feeling good, half as intense as you were when you started. The anger is not so intense that it feels like something you can’t cope with any more. You’re feeling okay at five, and a five is certainly better than a ten. But let me tell you, a zero is infinitely better than a five!

Why? Because what we’re doing with EFT is training our energy system to experience complete relief. So we should always intend to find complete relief.

If we tap to gain relief from an intense emotion, and we stop at a five or four or even a three, we are communicating to our body and our energy system that it’s OK to leave some intensity there—some unhelpful emotion and tension.

The fact of the matter is that many of us are so unused to being completely calm and confident that a five feels really good, and a three… well, that’s maybe as low as we have ever gone. What I want to encourage you to do is to make sure that when you use EFT, you persist until the intensity that you feel is down to a zero or as close to a zero as you can reasonably get in five or ten or even fifteen minutes of tapping.

Let me tell you a story.

One day, several months after I started learning EFT, I was working at a computer trying to fix a problem. It wasn’t going well, and as I worked at the computer I started getting angry. When an error message popped up on the screen, I felt this raging anger toward all computers. “I hate computers!!” It was absolutely a “10.” The accumulated energy of everything that computers had done to me over 26 years was all coming out right at that moment.

So, I started tapping.

Even though I hate computers, I choose to be calm and relaxed anyway.

Even though I am really angry at this computer, I choose to be calm and relaxed anyway.

Even though I HATE COMPUTERS, I deeply and completely accept myself!

I was screaming at this point. I went through the tapping points, the top of the head, the eyebrow, side of the eye, etc. At the end of that first round, as I stared at the error message on the screen, my intensity had dropped from a 10 to 9, which is good since the screaming was scaring the dog.

So I tapped again:

Even though I am raging angry at this computer….

At the end of another round, the intensity had dropped from a 9 to an 8. The next round took me from an eight to a five. My heart stopped pounding, and I stopped feeling the spittle coming out of my mouth as I said the reminder phrase “I hate computers” at each tapping point. I was feeling SO much better!

It is at this point that a lot of people stop tapping. They feel that they’ve gotten “back under control.”

But what I’ve noticed is that when you stop the process when you’re feeling okay, instead of when you’re feeling great, you’re much more likely to be triggered by the same situation in the future.

So, I strongly recommend to you: continue to tap. PERSIST until it is a zero!

Even though I still have some anger toward this computer…

I did another round. The intensity went from a 5 to 4 the next round. It went from a 4 to a 3½ in the next. I wasn’t making much progress, so I really stared at the error message on the screen—the one that meant I was going to have to spend another hour wasting time to fix this computer.

I felt a little intensity building as I went through the next round, but I noticed that the tapping quickly dissipated it. I went from a 3½ to a 2, from a 2 to 1½, then from a 1½ to a ½. I did one final round:

Even though still have an itsy bit of this anger toward the computer, I deeply and completely accept myself, and I choose to be calm and confident around computers, no matter what they say to me.

I felt total relief. It was absolutely a zero.

Over the months that followed, computers gave me ample opportunity to become intense once again. I haven’t. True, I’ve gotten annoyed, and I’ve gotten frustrated at times, but that’s quite different from being angry, intensely angry. And EFT has helped even those milder emotions.

You see, when I was intensely angry, I felt that the computer—by not doing what I expected—was wasting my life. That made me feel threatened.

Such unhelpful intensity can be eliminated, and perhaps eliminated forever. Is it worth doing 10 or 11 rounds, until you get it down to a ZERO? Is it worth 5-10 minutes of your time to release an unhelpful pattern of behavior, and all the stress and embarrassment that goes with it?

You have to be persistent. You have to look for even small reductions in your intensity level as being helpful. You have to set your sights on total freedom.

One of the interesting things about this process is that when you train your energy system with what it feels like to go from a 10 down to a zero… it always remembers. It builds a strength and resiliency in your energy system that wasn’t there before.

One of the first things I noticed by applying EFT persistently to everything—every intense emotion that came up in my life—is that I could more quickly come down from peak intensity of a 10 down to a zero or nearly a zero… with just one or two rounds. But that didn’t happen automatically. I had to train my system in that skill, using EFT.

I encourage you to practice EFT each day on whatever comes up. When you tap, don’t stop at a five. Don’t stop at two. I encourage you to persist… persist… persist until the intensity is zero, whenever possible. It’s great training for your energy system. You will find yourself becoming calm and confident, no matter what. And it will help you transform your pain into optimal health so that you can truly be… Thriving Now.

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