As promised, the start of a mini-series addressing how EFT can help us avoid experiencing any of The Top Five Regrets of The Dying – starting with:
#5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
‘This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”
This idea hits home for me, and anyone else who makes self-reflection a priority, I’m sure. How often hindsight shows me I got in my own way! And now, as I learn and grow more, I catch myself in the moment or situation, and consider that EFT could be helping me go further towards being who I want to be, and where I want to be as well. I have to make the conscious effort to look at my life and acknowledge it’s the sum of my choices, not always because of fate, circumstance – or anyone else for that matter! And I have to shake things up on my own, get out of negative patterns of thinking and acting, to become more active in how my life is going.
Using EFT can help with this issue in a several ways – and I love it because the same technique is used for each of the aspects that make up this one regret for so many people! I’ve said it before, and I’m saying it again, I love anything that makes things easier, more efficient, the KISS method if you will, (while I tip a proverbial hat to a middle school math teacher who first told us to Keep It Simple Stupid!). We can also use EFT on ourselves for each of these things, but we can also help others with Surrogate Tapping (more on that some other day!). EFT can help with Resistance, Clarity/Confusion, Overwhelm, Feeling Stuck, Physical Stress Symptoms, Fear, and Accepting Responsibility. I’ll do what I can to address each here, bear with me!
Resistance – How often do we talk to someone who expresses how frustrated they are with a situation, but all helpful suggestions we offer are met with something like “yeah, but” or descriptions of how that doesn’t work for them? Ever notice you’re doing that yourself? I sure do! EFT can be used to address the resistance itself as well as the underlying issues we have leading to that resistance. Not losing weight despite how often you talk about wanting to? Wonder why you chose pizza instead of a more balanced dinner? Asking ourselves what is working about keeping the issue we dislike can provide insight about what, why, and how we are resisting the change that will make us happy. Weight loss, writing a book, tackling a project, changing relationships, anything we might resist! It’s hard to change and we all resist it in different ways or to varying degrees so it’s a great place to start.
Clarity – Sometimes we just feel a little lost, confused, not sure what we want or maybe how to get what/where we want. Use EFT! The simple technique can help clear up the confusion we have about certain situations or things, as long as the setup includes specific language to just one issue. How can we be happy if we don’t know what makes us happy or how to get there?
Stress – If you’re not feeling some sort of stress, you’re brilliant – please contact me immediately because you know the secret to life and I need it J. But seriously, we all feel it, and it interferes with choosing to feel happy. It’s distracting, stealthy, even overwhelming at times. Stress spreads to others and leaves us all feeling irritable, frustrated, unhappy, or even angry – and we respond in those ways! Even worse, we normalize stress – misery loves company! – and soon it’s a pattern we become stuck in, difficult to break. EFT can help reduce the stress for anything we choose to reduce it for. Feeling stressed makes us less likely to smile, laugh, be silly and have fun. Who couldn’t use a little more fun in their lives?!?
Overwhelm – Life can overwhelm us easily, making it difficult to know where to go from any given point. Use EFT to ease or eliminate that feeling of overwhelm that can sneak up on us, whether it’s from work, at home, or in your relationships – or all of it!
Feeling Stuck – I feel like I’ve seen the concept of “being stuck in a rut” in advertisements all over the place, and we’re all guilty of feeling stuck at times, or just being complacent. There’s no room for complacency in a happy life! Use EFT to help feel motivated, reduce that complacency, decide what you want, get over what’s stopping you and get out of that rut so you can be happy!
Physical Stress Symptoms – Stress causes physical symptoms, most of us know that. Ulcers, heart disease, high blood pressure, anxiety, migraines, tension headaches, and arguably other illness as well, all stemming from stress. How many people experiencing pain are happy? And how many of those physical stress symptoms can fall under pain? Yea, that’s what I thought, not many. I can’t even tell how many times I’ve seen “one minute wonders” for pain relief in EFT! So it’s not difficult to follow my logic here when I say Use EFT on stress for the aches and pains it causes, including the issue that is causing you the stress. If you can’t pinpoint the exact stress, guess what it is, we all have them! Work, home, relationships, kids, schedules, to-do lists, philosophical questions, feeling we’re not doing enough for someone, and on and on. Including those things in your setup language, even if they’re just educated guesses about what’s stressing you, can help us lose the stress and stress symptoms so we can let go and make the decisions that bring us true happiness.
Fear – Reading how fear can be the root of almost any issue we have was such an Aha! moment for me! Fear in general, including phobias, public speaking, etc., but also fear of rejection, failure, loss, and success. EFT is so successful with phobias and fears so use it to lose the fear! Maybe we’re even scared of being happy, and we can tap on that fear as well as addressing the underlying issue of what is working for us if we stay unhappy? What are we scared of losing if we choose to stop being unhappy and choose happiness? We’ve all heard that “there is nothing to fear but fear itself” but fear plays a very real role in our daily lives. EFT can be that quick, easy tool we use to take control back of our lives, choose happiness, and put fear where it belongs – out of our lives!
Accepting Responsibility – Uh oh! There it is. I said it. Accepting responsibility, one of the hardest things we have to do in life, no matter what the issue is. We break something and want to run away, lie about our culpability, deny it ever happened but we all need to learn to face the music. It’s even more difficult to accept that our lives look and feel the way they do to us because of our choices, our actions or inactions. How can we change anything if we don’t acknowledge a problem or desire for something different, or accept that we can make that happen? It’s easier to blame circumstances, life, other people, the economy, scarcity – anything besides ourselves. But that keeps us stuck where we are, and ultimately unhappy. EFT provides us with the ability to resolve our resistance to accepting responsibility, the fear we feel to do so, and anything else standing in the way of accepting that responsibility. And then, once we accept that we are responsible for our own actions – oh my mother I have become!! – then EFT helps us with all the other aspects discussed above, interfering with our own version of happiness.
So there you have it, EFT can help us handling the fifth of The Top Five Regrets of The Dying. Many of the same aspects discussed here will reveal themselves to be relevant for the other four regrets as well, but those will follow! Another day, another regret to prevent 😉
Tap Into Empowerment 