Health

EFT can be used to greatly relieve the emotional aspects of cancer from diagnosis through treatment and living beyond cancer. At ChangeCamp 2009 on June 27th I’ll be giving an hour long presentation where I will describe how EFT can be used to:

• Recover from difficult appointments and medical procedures so that you don’t lie awake at night reliving unpleasant news or experiences.
• Prepare for upcoming appointments so that you can be calm, collected and resourceful rather than a bag of nerves.
• Neutralising unhelpful beliefs about cancer and it’s treatment. Such as the often held belief that ‘cancer is a death sentence’
• Resolve problems about different aspects of medical treatments such as needle phobias, scanner claustrophobia and anxieties about difficult medical procedures.
• Benefit the carers and partners of cancer patients, helping manage their stress and anxiety and giving them some simple ways to help the patient through their cancer experience.

This session is appropriate for cancer sufferers, carers and for medical staff and other professionals who would like to ease the emotional burden of cancer.

To find out more visit www.changecamp.co.uk

Image courtesy of Wolfsoul

Masha Bennett a skilled EFT and NLP practitioner is running  courses for people who would like to use EFT in their work with addictions. The courses are at a variety of levels and include an introduction to EFT so no prior experience is required.

In her description of the course Masha writes:

Our EFT Training courses provide indispensible practical tools for all addiction workers, including drug and alcohol practitioners, as well as other health and social care professionals: nurses, GPs, psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health practitioners, social workers, psychotherapists, counsellors, groupworkers, probation officers, youth workers, prison staff. They are also suitable for carers of people suffering from addictions or compulsions.

The courses are running in Manchester on February 25th & 25th

If this is an area of work that is important to you I thoroughly recommend Masha and her work. To find out more visit  www.eft4addictions.co.uk

Image via Wikipedia

The NLP Cafe run by IntegrityNLP is starting the New Year in style by taking one of the most important aspects of life very seriously! Laughter!

This laughter workshop is hosted by Keith Adams of Voluntary Aspirations.

The event will be fun, stimulating and you will laugh out loud a lot. There are a maximum of 18 places so be sure to book in advance to get in for the laughs.

“Life today is very stressful. More than 70% of all illnesses have some relationship to stress. The best way to reduce stress is through laughter – its the best medicine and the least expensive. Research shows that laughter decreases stress hormones. Epinephrine is lowered both in anticipation of and doing laughter.

There is more. Laughter therapy helps to increase antibodies – its good for the immune system. Laughter stimulates heart and blood circulation. It is claimed that one minute of laughter is equal to ten minutes on the rowing machine. It also tones facial muscles and expressions – people look younger and are more fun when they laugh.

Laughter is socially bonding. It stimulates the creative side of the brain and leads to clear thinking. ”

Keith Adams

Time & Place

The workshop will be on Tuesday January 20th from 7-9 pm with all refreshments provided for just £10.00.

St. Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre,
Regent Avenue, Gosforth,
Newcastle upon Tyne, NE3 1EE

You may remember I wrote about how I prepared to make a long overdue dental appointment more bearable by using EFT. Today I got an unexpected opportunity to see how long lasting those preparations were.

I was due a checkup this morning. I went expecting to get a quick once over to check how my fillings were holding up and to be sent on my way. To my surprise the dental hygienist asked me to put on the safety glasses, had my sit in the chair and approached me with one of those fearsome scraping implements.

I had no time to prepare I just had to ‘lie there and think of England’. Funnily enough it wasn’t that bad, I was fairly relaxed and the scraping, gouging & polishing all happened without too much difficulty. It wasn’t comfortable I definitely wouldn’t book it as a birthday treat but I survived quite well.

However I did have quite a lot of distracted and anxious thoughts during the process. As I look back at the check-up I would give the experience a score of 6 out of 10 for discomfort. For the purposes of an experiment I’ve decided to treat it as a ‘traumatic’ experience and apply EFT to relieve the memory.

Using the ‘movie technique‘ one of the most useful techniques in EFT. First it clears up the memory, second I think it will soften the reaction to those triggers in future dental appointments, so I will be able to relax and ‘enjoy’ the experience even more.

I started with the general statement:

• Even though I have this check-up memory, I’m all right, I’m OK.. etc, etc

Using it to soften the overall charge on the memory, then I went through the memory step by step neutralising the following aspects.

• The dental hygenist handing me the protective glasses – 4/10
• The hygenist leaning over me with the scraper – 6/10
• The whine and heat of the ‘water drill’ as it scoured away the tartar – 6/10
• A pain at the base of my front teeth from the ‘water drill’ – 6/10
• All the worrying thoughts in my mind about ‘What will happen if …? ‘- 8/10
• The fact that I didn’t like it. – 8/10

Finally I replayed the scene to check that it was free of emotional charge, which it was. In three months time I have another appointment and I’ll be interested to compare how comfortable I am at that session compared to the last one.

It would be nice to think that just one session of EFT (or anything else) will completely resolve a problem. Sometimes it does, there are many tales of ‘one minute wonders’ on the www.emofree.com website, but many times we need to do a little bit, notice the results, do a bit more, notice the results and so on until we get to the outcome we want.

I don’t know if I’ll have got all the aspects of the visits to the dentist situation sorted out but I’ll find out in three months, and if I haven’t that just more information to help me get to a better result the time after that.

Ben Goldacre a doctor and writer has just completed a fascinating two-parter look at the strange world of the Placebo on BBC Radio 4.

Starting with the story of Eliasha Perkins in the 18th Century and his ‘Perkins Tractor’ a device reported to provide miracle cures by taking away bad electrical influences. It’s funny how bad electricity/magnetism/energy seems to be a popular theme in complementary/alternative therapies. The Perkin’s Tractor provoked one of the first attempts at evidence medicine by Dr John Higham 18?? who conducted a blinded trial of the Perkins tractor and found that the effects could not be accounted for by the tractor itself but by the attitudes and beliefs of patient.

From this start Goldacre covers the effectiveness of the placebo effect in pain control, mood disorders and many areas of medicine. As a strong advocate of evidence based medicine some of the evidence seems quite improbable.

• Placebo inhalers causing bronchio constriction or dilation depending on what the patient was told.
• Heart pacemakers that were not switched on having the same effect as active pacemakers including physical changes in heart muscle.
• Placebo treatments provoking the production of dopamine in the treatment of Parkinsons disease suffers
• … and so on

It’s an impressive track record for inert substances. The Placebo effect – perhaps it should be called effects – seem to depend on a mixture of conditioned response, beliefs, expectations for the patient and the kind of ritual associated with the therapist/doctor giving the treatment.

In the second episode he continues the exploration of the effects and the relationship between the placebo effect and alternative medicine by way of shamanism and sham acupuncture. Finally he discusses the ethical dimensions of balancing the placebo effect and informed patient decisions.

Ben Goldacre has a bit of a reputation as a debunker of alternative medicines in his (excellent) Bad Science column in The Guardian, but rather than being a hostile sceptic of the field his open minded and thoughtful approach is very engaging. It’s a fascinating introduction to the improbable word of the placebo and how we might make better use of it.

Both NLP and EFT have processes for resolving allergies through ‘psychological’ means. Tim Halbom demonstrates the NLP Allergy Process in this video. It’s an excellent demonstration of a subtle process that seems too simple to work training someone’s system to respond to the allergen in a neutral way.

The warmer weather prompts me to repost this article by my good friend Masha Bennett

Having been a horticulturist in my “past life”, I would like to include some leafy and flowery thoughts to contribute to your happiness and well-being. It is well known that gardening can be therapeutic – but no tips on digging or pruning in this article, you may be pleased to know! Instead, I will try to share my ideas on how to get the most enjoyment and pleasure from your own (or someone else’s, for that matter) garden.

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