One of the archetypal stereotypes of a student house is a pile of washing up. A stinking heap of cutlery and crockery, the remains of food dried to a concrete hardness, lying in a bowl full of grey stinking water.

Not a pretty sight.

Imagine for a moment that the experiences of your day are like the meals you have had.

On some days life may have been so good you even licked the plate. It’s more likely that some parts of your day would have been more palatable than others. What is left on your plate at the end of the day?

In the old days before EFT, NLP and other techniques you would not be able to clean up from the unpleasant experiences of the day. The residue of those less than satisfying experiences would be stuck in your memory. A new layer of mental grime every day with no way to clean it off. Day after day the dirty dishes of the mind would have to pile up and fester.

This accumulation of mental junk will take its toll. Each resentment, disappointment, unpleasant interaction or negative experience leaving its trace in our minds, adding to our supply of bad feeling ready to be triggered at some time in the future.

“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow; our life is the creation of our mind.”

The Dhammapada

Our responses to life are conditioned by our past experiences, or at least our reactions to our past experiences. If your boss irritated you yesterday, the remains of that irritation is available to you to add to todays irritation when you are with your boss.

Up to now we have had to put up with what life gave us. Now we have effective ways of working with negative experiences to remove the emotional residue stuck to them. If you are using EFT you can tap out the junk, the unhelpful feelings, you no longer need.

Why not defuse resentments, animosities, misunderstandings, disappointments and other daily vexations on the day they happen and not let them fester? If we clean up today’s mess we can start the tomorrow with a cleaner slate (or plate) and be able to respond to life’s demands with greater freedom and resourcefulness.

Three steps to letting go of the day

1. At the end of the day, review the events of that day in your mind’s eye.
2. When you get to one that has a negative charge on it – use your technique of choice to neutralise the negative emotions. Some events might be baked on and take some effort to remove, but it’s worth it.
3. Then continue with your review, knocking out the emotional charge on each difficulty as you go until the day is just a day. If you do a thorough job you can leave the day’s junk behind.

If you have had a really tough day then either tackle the worst first or write down the ones you have time to do.

What happened to us will still be there in our past, just as a washed plate it still a plate. But the stuff that’s on it, our conditioned responses can be cleared off, either all at once or over time.

Two benefits of clearing up negative emotions at the end of the day:

1. On that day you will probably get a better nights sleep because you won’t be chewing over what’s gone on the day before.
2. Over time if you do this regularly the events, interactions and triggers that used to upset you will start to lose their power over you.

It might take some time to set up clearing up after your day as a habit, just as washing the dishes after a meal can be a chore. But in the long run it’s easier to do them at the end of the meal than leave it till tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that and then have to work with a big mess later.

Image courtesy of miss pupik

It’s just two weeks to The Geography Of Possibilities Workshop in Newcastle with Bill O’Hanlon.

I was surfing the web and found this video clip of Bill talking about what he calls Inclusion or Possibility Therapy which forms part of the Geography of Possibilities workshop.

We still have places available to see Bill. Until the end of August the workshop fee is just £195, rising to £225 thereafter

Book your place here.

The Newcastle EFT Practice group the EFT Café starts up again in September.

• September 8th - Irritation Tapping: We all have things that irritate us, people do things that get on our nerves or rub us up the wrong way in some way or another. In this EFT Café we will explore ‘Irritation Tapping’ process developed by Steve Wells as a way of using these irritations as guidelines for us to develop ourselves (and reduce the effect of the irritations).
• October 13th – Identity Relief: We all have ideas about ourselves, who we are and what we are like. These identity beliefs may be helpful or a hindrance to us. In this workshop you can learn how to use a new EFT process to quickly dissolve unhelpful identity beliefs we might have about ourselves such as ‘I am not good enough’, ‘I am lazy’, ‘I am overwhelmed’ and more.
• November 10th – Working With The Shadow: Carl Jung the psychiatrist and contemporary of Freud came up with the idea of ‘the shadow’ – the disowned parts of ourselves. These aspects of our experience were hidden away from view to please our parent’s family and friends. In spite of it’s name the shadow may contain positive and negative aspects of ourselves. In this workshop you will learn how to use EFT to work with disowned parts of ourselves.
• December 8th – The Compassion Triangle: In this workshop we will use EFT to help ease interpersonal conflict, making us calmer and more resourceful in dealing with difficult people – Just in time for Christmas!

Each EFT Café is from 7pm-9pm at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre in Gosforth and costs just £10 for two hours training and supervised practice.

Note: You do need some experience of EFT to attend these workshops and if you are an AAMET EFT Practitioner each EFT Café counts as 2 hours CPD credits to help you maintain your accreditation.

This is a video segment of a longer interview with Tal Ben-Shahar a Harvard lecturer and researcher in Positive Psychology (the psychology of what is right with us and how to get more of that).

In this five minute piece Ben-Shahar talks about:

• The importance of accepting our feelings whatever they might be.
• The benefits of having quality time with our friends and loved ones.
• Physical exercise and mental health.
• Gratitude and why it’s good for you.
• The importance of simplification.

It’s a short piece but well worth a look.

You can find more of the interview on the same site.

The Tapping Points

UPDATE: THIS COURSE IS SOLD OUT

Not to be out done by IntegrityNLP I have a little bit of my own summer madness going on here.

On Saturday August 21st I am running an Emotional Freedom Techniques Level 1 training for just £35 (that’s less than half price).

EFT is a simple, yet very effective, healing process that uses your body’s built in stress relief system.

By tapping with the fingertips on the ends of acupuncture meridians you can reduce, or eliminate, all types of negative emotions including fears, anger, phobias, grief, traumatic memories, stress and anxiety.

EFT can also relieve many physical conditions that may have an emotional component, such as headaches, muscle stiffness, pain, food cravings, smoking, itching and nail biting.

To find out more about what EFT can do for your emotional wellbeing, or to book a place on the course, click here

P.S. If you want to use EFT as part of your therapy coaching practice you need an EFT Level 1 as a precursor to the EFT Level 2 / AAMET EFT Practitioner certificate.

]]> http://www.practicalwellbeing.co.uk/2010/07/11/half-price-eft-level-1-training-in-newcastle/feed/ 0 http://www.practicalwellbeing.co.uk/2010/07/11/integritynlp-summer-sale/ http://www.practicalwellbeing.co.uk/2010/07/11/integritynlp-summer-sale/#comments Sun, 11 Jul 2010 09:19:09 +0000 Andy http://www.practicalwellbeing.co.uk/?p=1279

Usually great summer deals are the province of furniture and car showrooms, but IntegrityNLP has two of its own for you this summer.

You will need to get cracking, both deals finish at the end of July.

1st Great Deal: Extended Early Bird Discounts

We are extending the early bird booking date for Bill O’Hanlon’s Geography Of Possibilities Workshop in Newcastle and our September NLP Practitioner Trainings up until July 31st.

2nd Great Deal: £350 off NLP Practioner Training!

If you have been thinking about attending an IntegrityNLP Practitioner trainings we have a very special deal for you.

Sign up for the Bill O’Hanlon Geography of Possibilies workshop before July 31st costing just £175 we will give you a discount of £350 off our full IntegrityNLP NLP Practitioner training starting in September.

That’s 22 days quality training for just £820!

Remember, you have to book your place on Bill O’Hanlon’s Geography Of Possibilites workshop before 31st July or you lose the discount.

Book Online

This is a preview to a new documentary about Milton H Erickson – The Wizard Of The Desert. I’m looking forward to seeing the whole film he was a fascinating man and therapist who said he invented a new therapy for every client. The body of his work and the diversity of the people who follow his example are a testament to the flexibility and power.

Bill O’Hanlon who features briefly in the film clip will be presentent a two day workshop on The Geography Of Possibilities on September 11th and 12th.

There are three broad ways that people try to change their lives. The first is hard, the second is popular, the third gives you your best chance of happiness.

1. Change The Universe

Image courtesy of xamad

If we could only change the world to fit in with our expectations. Make it sunny for the picnic on Sunday, make the person you fancy feel the same way about you, get the right car, live in a perfect house and so on, and so on.

Unfortunately this is the hardest trick to pull off, the universe is a big place and very difficult to organise. Yet many people still want the world to come into line with their desires and get very upset when it doesn’t.

2. Change Yourself

Image courtesy of kevindooley

The next way is to change ourselves to measure up to the standards of the day. This approach often gets called self help.

On the face of it this seems like the right thing to do. If only I get thinner, richer, more confident, have a better speaking voice, more ambitious then I will be happy and everyone will like me. Perhaps we need to get rid of the things we don’t like or think other people wont like. If only we can get rid of the smelly, gangrenous bits of our personality then we will be more likeable and happier.

Unfortunately this can be a never-ending treadmill. You will always be able to find something else to improve, something else that needs fixing. Just one more thing then I’ll be fixed.

It’s perfectly understandable that we want to be better people, to develop or enhance our skills. The question is what is motivating that drive, is it an innate desire to be the most that we can be or is it to escape the worm in the apple that tells us that there is something wrong with us, something deeply flawed that we need to escape from.

3. Accept Yourself (then change if you need to).

At first glance this appears to be going in the wrong direction. Shouldn’t I be working to fix all the things that are wrong with me? If you have the idea that you are broken then that is the real problem, the itch that can’t be scratched by one more diet, a different supplement or inspirational book.

Alice tells you she is fat and is disgusted with herself. George tells you he is very critical and ashamed of himself. Sally tells you she is lazy and will never amount to anything. Being a good friend you might listen to these declarations of failure and think that the problem is all about fat, criticism and laziness.

In fact the real problem with these sentiments, the glue that holds them in place against all efforts is the judgement that follows. A better place to start is with disgust, shame and self-criticism.

The first parts of those declarations could be called problems but they are also being used as a stick for each friend to beat themselves up with.

The real problem is the idea that you are broken, bad, defective, evil or a failure. If you come from this point of view then you will have a huge amount of resistance to overcome and even if you lost the weight, became less critical, or more energetic you would still have the self-aversion waiting in the wings to find another stick to beat you with.

Image courtesy of anindo ghosh

If you come from the point of view that there is nothing ‘wrong’ with you then you can make whatever changes you need to make because each problem is just a problem. There is no evil identity to support, no problem personality to maintain. Change, if it is necessary, becomes much simpler because the problem is not an opportunity to give yourself a hard time.

Basically there really is nothing wrong with you. If you think that there is, it is because you have been taught that there is. No one is born with self-aversion or shame you need to be taught, by life or, more likely, other people.

If you looked on yourself as someone to be helped rather than blamed or punished, who would you see? How would you feel about them? What would be different?

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness concious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular”

- Carl Jung

A friend of mine, who I was trying to help, remarked that I wasn’t taking her difficulty seriously because I was trying to fix it rather than acknowledge it. On reflection I think she was right.

Just to emphasize the point the universe, in the shape of Bill O’Hanlon, sent me this:

DEEP LISTENING: How to connect with and take seriously people who are suffering
Bill O’Hanlon, Bill@billohanlon.com, http://www.billohanlon.com

* Sit with the person’s pain and suffering with compassion instead of offering positive stories or trying to fix, give advice or suggestions. Be willing to do nothing, just be with, acknowledge and honor the person, their pain and their suffering. Just having told one’s story can often be powerfully therapeutic.

* Attend to the person’s story and experience rather than your own idea.

* Be aware of the bias many of us have and our culture has toward redemptive stories. Do not try to change, rewrite, reframe or invalidate the person’s non-redemptive, non-happy ending stories.

* Give credit for small or large efforts, endurance or strength in facing challenges without being patronizing.

* Keep one foot in acknowledgment and one in possibilities, but do not insist on always speaking the possibilities.

* Avoid platitudes:
Everything will work out.
God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.
You are going to be all right.

* Avoid glib explanations:
Why did you create this?
I wonder what you are meant to learn from this?
What part of you needs or benefits from this pain?

* Speak to the complexity of the situation by including seeming contradictions:
You can’t go on suffering like this and you don’t want to die.
You want to give up and you don’t want to give up.

Frank, Arthur. (1998) “Just Listening: Narrative and Deep Illness,” Families, Systems and Health, 16(3): 197-212.
Kleinman, A. (1988) The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and The Human Condition. NY: Basic Books.
Kushner, Harold S. (1981) When Bad Things Happen to Good People. NY: Avon.

Bill O’Hanlon is presenting his Geography Of Possibilities Workshop in Newcastle on September 11th and 12th.