Covert EFT + Mindfulness of Breathing

I’ve been experimenting this week with a little addition to the Quickie Covert EFT first suggested by Charlie Curtis. In his technique you massage the ‘gamut spot’ (the groove just behind the knuckles of the little and ring finger) while keeping your attention on a problem state or feeling. This works really nicely to reduce all sorts of negative emotions, as one of my clients reported:

But when I felt the palpitations coming on and the adrenaline kicking in I sat and [in plain sight] rubbed the point between the little and ring finger as suggested on your blog and it really helped. It didn’t clear all the nerves but helped to quash the panic reaction, I could actually feel the panic flowing away. Plus I was doing it in front of everyone without even a funny look.! That is so valuable.

Last week I was teaching an Introductory Meditation class, the meditation we’d been using is called a bodyscan meditation. In which you imagine that you are breathing in and out through different parts of your body in a sequence from your toes to your head. This style of meditation can be profoundly calming and is widely used in mindfulness based stress reduction courses. You can find a download of this bodyscan meditation here.

It occurred to me to blend a micro-EFT routine with a micro-meditation, by adding the idea of imagining breathing through the gamut spot whilst massaging it.

If you’d like to give it a go, here’s how:

• When anxiety, or some other negative emotion, arises gently massage the spot in the groove between the tendons behind the ring and middle finger. Keep your attention on the emotion as best you can.
• While massaging the gamut spot, imagine your breath entering and leaving the gamut spot and travelling up and down your arm to your chest. Don’t try to modify the way you breathe, just be aware of the inflow and outflow of the breath as if it was passing through the gamut spot you are massaging.

This process may take a little practice; holding the emotion, rubbing the gamut spot and imagining the breath entering and leaving through that spot.

Unfortunately (?) I’ve not had any stressful moments since I came up with this. However when I’ve tried just massaging the gamut spot and imaging my breathing passing through it, I’ve found that I’ve quickly entered a very peaceful and fully present state.

This is a very new technique, less than a week old, so I’m curious to know how well it works. Would you be willing to try this ‘hot off the press’ technique and let me know what happened in the comments to this post? I’ll be trying it out on myself and anyone else who’s interested, but I’d be delighted to hear about your experiences.