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Using EFT to Create a Storehouse of Positive Memories

By Dr. Patricia Carrington

Gary Craig has suggested that with EFT we are on the ground floor of a healing high rise, and I am certain that the positive uses we have found for EFT so far are but the tip of the iceberg. In this series of articles I will be sharing with you some new uses of EFT that I have been using with my clients and myself, and about which I am very excited.

Today I will tell you about a method by means of which you can consolidate memories of fleeting positive experiences that may occur during the day and otherwise be ignored, and then reproduce these same experiences later on so that you can resonate with a feeling of well being, goodness, optimism and appreciation any time that you want to.

I think you would agree that this is a desirable outcome. If you happen to be familiar with the work of Abraham-Hicks (The Law of Attraction), or the popular version of their viewpoint presented in the recent movie ?The Secret? (see references at end of article) you will understand why changing our ?vibrational level? (the emotional tone of our lives which includes the tone of our entire physical being) is fundamental to creating the life we want. What is intriguing about this is that I have found that we can use EFT to help achieve this goal!

Even if you don?t accept the concept of vibrational levels (some people don?t), you will probably agree that being able to change your responses to life events so that you experience them differently, with relish and delight and a new sense of meaning, is something to be desired.

I have recently been using EFT to create a virtual storehouse of positive memories which we can draw upon at any given moment to change our emotional state whenever we want.

This storehouse of ?captured? positive experiences can be created through the use of EFT, then later be made available to us again, by using EFT at another time.

The positive memories that are stored by this process do not consist of words, sentences or mental images alone, but are made up of deeply-felt and compelling experiences that EFT can bring back to us whenever we need them.

The experiences that are captured in this way are those precious fleeting moments in our lives that we may actually come into contact with far more often than we realize, but which, in the usual hassle of life, often pass by so rapidly that we barely notice them, if in fact we notice them at all.

The demands made upon us in modern life can engulf us so fully that we find ourselves responding to our days negatively as we try to fight off the distress that not being able to meet all these demands creates in us ?? and of course we can never come close to meeting all of them! As a result, we often forget that we have within us the possibility of an amazingly deep joy in living.

The exciting news is that we can use EFT to shift our awareness so that the side of ourselves that revels in life for its own sake becomes far more available to us than it is at present.

To show you how this process works out in action, let me give you an example from my own life.

On a cloudy morning about a month ago I awoke to the sound of a soft pattering of rain on my window pane. It was a delicate sound, and I have always liked the sound of gentle rain. However, my tendency, like that of many other people, has been to listen to it for perhaps 15 seconds or so, and then get up and go about my day because there is ?so much to do?.

On this particular morning, however, I decided to use EFT in the new way I had been experimenting with.

I wanted to fix this experience in my memory using EFT. To do this, I created a short phrase that summed it all up for me:

?The sound of rain on my window.?

Without using any elaborate EFT statement, in fact without using any negative statement at all (there was no ?even though?? phrase) and without the use of self acceptance affirmations or Choices statements, I repeated that one simple phrase at each tapping point, starting with the inner eyebrow and ending up on top of my head.

This is, of course, is the Short Form of EFT, but you can do this using the long form or any other EFT variation.

The process went like this:

Inner eyebrow: ?The sound of rain on my window??

Outer eye: ?The sound of rain on my window??

Under eye: ?The sound of rain on my window??

and so on for one complete round.

One round of EFT was all I did, but at the end of it I felt an unusual sense of peace. The sound of the rain pattering on my window pane had now assumed much more importance because I was ?tapping it in? with EFT.

A deeper awareness

Tapping on this experience also seemed to have sharpened my senses because I was now aware of another sound, one I had not noticed before. It was that of a single raindrop repeatedly tapping on an iron chimney which extends from my bedroom through the roof, connecting an old stove in my room to the outdoors.

The sound was hollow and seemed to reverberate like a distant bell. The drop (it was actually a series of consecutive rain drops) was tapping intermittently at its own pace and had its own rhythm. I decided to ?capture it? for my repository of positive fleeting moments, so I tapped on the phrase:

Inner Eye: Sound of the raindrop on the chimney?

Outer Eye: Sound of the raindrop on the chimney?

Under eye: Sound of the raindrop on the chimney?

Under nose: Sound of the raindrop on the chimney, taking its own time?and so on.

I was impressed by the fact that the raindrop so clearly took its own time. I could not force it into my rhythm but had to allow it its own pace. As I continued to tap, I was aware of an increasing acceptance on my part of the drop?s pace and its unpredictability, of allowing it to be outside of my control.

The more I tapped on the sound of the single rain drop against the metal of the chimney, the more it seemed to have a beauty of its own. I didn?t want to leave the room, but to stay and listen to it.

Even finer awareness

Then I became aware of a faint sound in the distance of Canadian Geese honking in the early morning, a sound I frequently hear when awakening but usually pay little attention to. I now tapped on:

?Sound of the geese in the morning?? for one whole round.

EFT ?Haiku?

My experience on that morning was meditative, gentle, and brought me close to all around me. The EFT phrases that came to my mind reminded me of a Japanese Haiku poem. If you are familiar with Haiku, you know that the poet who constructs these poems works within a strict grammatical form most of which is lost to us in translation. However, the spirit of Haiku is translatable and consists of simple everyday experiences which have been isolated as precious moments, much like the ones I had been noticing.

When we read a Haiku poem, however, it only speaks to us if we ourselves resonate to the experience that it describes. When it is effective it is because we respond to it much as a tuning fork responds to vibrations from a nearby instrument.

A Haiku poem comes to us from the outer environment, however. It has been created by another person, whereas when we capture a fleeting second of our own life using EFT for this purpose we preserve our own personally meaningful experience.

Shifting our attention

During the day that followed, when things around me became hectic and tasks of the day demanded my total attention so much that I was becoming tense and hurried, I would repeatedly stop and commence a round of EFT, saying to myself one of these simple phrases I had tapped into my memory in the morning, as in:

?The sound of rain on my window.?

This use of EFT reminded me that there is a totally different dimension of living that has nothing to do with the pressures of the day, one which is outside of schedules and in a sense outside of time. This is a dimension of life where my own experience is so deep and so full that it eclipses everything else, and EFT can bring it back to me when I need it!

Later in the day I experimented with visual images as well as auditory ones, using EFT to embed them deeply in my memory. I was driving my car in a light fog when I decided to do this because traveling on a highway in a fog is not ordinarily a desirable circumstance and I wanted to change the impact of it upon me so I could function at my best.

Accordingly, I pulled over to the side of the road to use EFT. I could see the cars ahead of me through the mist, a string of little red tail lights that wound along the highway in front of where I was parked.

Tapping on the positive aspects

I decided to tap mentally on the mist and the lights, I wanted to use EFT on the positive aspects of driving in a fog rather than on the inconvenience or potential dangers of it, so I tapped on:

?The mist on the highway?the mist on the highway ? the mist on the highway??

As I did this, I became keenly aware of the drifting nature of the mist and of the little jewel-like lights twinkling through it.

I found myself becoming much less tense and I knew that I would be able to drive much better when I resumed the trip.

The lights began to look extraordinarily beautiful to me. Something had happened when I had used EFT to preserve this experience ?? it had sharpened my total awareness.

Next, I noticed that the mist seemed to extend almost infinitely into the distance. It was an amazing effect, one well worth preserving, so I mentally tapped on:

?The mist reaches to infinity,,, The mist reaches to infinity...?, repeating this phrase at each imagined EFT point.

When I resumed driving ?? even though the fog was still present ?? I now enjoyed the drive.

Later when I was back home, I physically tapped on many of the positive experiences I had stored away during the day, repeating the same or almost the same phrases as I had used originally.

Doing this called forth a vivid reliving of each experience rather than a formal memory. The feeling tone, the emotion, the thoughts that had grouped themselves around that experience, all were available to me once again. The tapping was actually recreating these experiences. They had become a powerful inner resource.

?Tap in? your own experiences

I will be sharing more of my observations about tapping-in positive experiences with EFT in the next articles in this series. In the meantime you may want to try this method yourself. If so, here are the steps:

First, notice what is actually happening around you.

Next, select a fleeting experience that you want to capture, much as you would take a snapshot of a physical object in order to preserve it. The experiences you will use for this purpose will probably be simple ones, small details of life that you might ordinarily ignore.

When a fleeting moment occurs that seems worthy of retaining for later use, put it into a few words that have meaning for you, such as:

?The light coming through the petals of the orchid??

Or, ?The quietness of my breath as I let it slowly out??

Or, ?The way my reading chair cradles me??

Then ?tap in? this experience using EFT.

As you do so, the experience will become a valued personal resource that you can draw upon at any time. If you like, jot down the phrases you create in a notebook or write them on cards to keep with you and take out and use any time you feel you need to get back to the original positive state. I encourage you to experiment with this new method, as I am doing.

References:

Esther and Jerry Hicks ( 2006). The Law of Attraction. Hay House, Carlsbad, Ca.

?The Secret?. Movie available on DVD (2006). Amazon.com.

EFT Master, Patricia Carrington, Ph.D.