si dawson

experiments in self-improvement

Month: November, 2008

How To Tap All Day (& Not Look Like A Nutcase)

EFT is a pretty useful tool. The only downside is that whacking yourself in the face in public tends to make you look a bit crazy.

And we don’t want that, right?

Now, you can tap with your mind – focus on each point in turn, and simply imagine the tapping process – & that does work pretty well, but here’s another way.

I picked this up from EFT down under – a couple of local blokes with international renown. I thoroughly recommend downloading their free report (it’s all of about 4 pages long) – tons of good info in there.

Anyway, not trying to steal their thunder, but this technique is super useful so I just had to spread it a bit further. How simple is it? Well, you just whack your thumb against the edge of each of your fingers in turn – 5 to 10 times on each finger – just between the tip & first knuckle. Keep looping around to your heart’s content! Like this:

giant_sky_hands.jpg
Fear my giant sky hands! fear! feeeeaarr!

Of course, you have (I hope) two hands, so for even more impact, you can do it on both hands at once.

How does this compare to regular tapping? Well, I’ve found that if I’m shifting something big or complicated, then regular tapping kicks slightly more ass, but this is super useful, and effective about 80% of the time. A lot of times this has already shifted enough that I only have to tap one of the “regular” points in order to clear the bigger stuff anyway.

The other big advantage – because it’s the kind of thing you can just do in the background while you’re doing anything else, it is really useful for clearing out a ton of those niggly background thoughts. You know, the kind of noise that just jiggles around, but isn’t necessarily big enough to really put your finger on (umm). After a day of doing this – just a few loops now and then when I remembered, without focussing on anything in particular, I felt a ton of background noise disappearing. Funniest thing was, I couldn’t even figure out what I’d lost, just that things were clearer, & I felt a lot calmer.

I also find that because I can tap much faster with my fingers, I can cycle through a lot quicker, so I’m shifting things much much faster too.

Since this style of tapping is so unintrusive, it’s the kind of thing you can idly do while you’re on a bus, walking down the street, writing with the other hand, whatever. Best of all, without anyone really noticing, or getting yourself chucked in the loony bin.

It’s super handy. Heh, as it were.

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    The 4 Most Powerful Phrases In The World

    I read a while back about a therapist in Hawaii who practised something called Ho’oponopono (took me weeks to learn how to spell that reliably).

    Annnnyway, the way the story goes, this therapist, Dr Len went to work at an ultra hardcore insane asylum. The staff turnover rate was crazy high, and the patients were so violent that most of them were pretty much shackled up. Not a nice place.

    So, Dr Len starts working there, and never sees a single patient. He just sits in his office, all day every day. After a few months, the shackled patients were being allowed to walk around freely. Others were coming off their medication. Staff absenteeism & turnover dropped to zero. After three years, all the patients had left & the place closed down.

    Yes, an asylum for violent & criminally insane patients closed down because everyone was healed & there was no-one left to treat!

    Needless to say, this pretty much got my attention. What the hell was Dr Len actually doing in his office?

    Well, he looked at the patient’s files, looked within himself to see how he created that person’s illness, and then healed himself. As he healed himself, the patients got better.

    No, I didn’t mis-type that. He healed himself, and the patients got better. You can read more about Dr Len here.

    The next question, of course, is how did he heal himself? Actually, it was very simple. He just looked at what needed healing inside himself, and said four things (the basis of Ho’oponopono), over and over:

    • I’m Sorry.
    • Please Forgive Me.
    • Thank You
    • I Love You

    So imagine my surprise when I was recently reading “The True Power of Water” by Masaru Emoto. You may remember Emoto (what a great name!) – he wraps bottles of water with words, and then photographs the crystals that develop (or don’t).

    Given that we’re 70% water, I figure it’s probably worth paying a little attention to what he has to say on the subject.

    Now, Emoto has spent decades trying different words, different languages, all to see the effect they have on water. His basic discovery is that negative words (whether written down, sung, or thought at the water) result in ugly looking water, whereas positive words result in beautiful looking water structures.

    Which I guess also means that whatever we’re bombarding ourselves with is more than just affecting our brains, it’s actively changing 70% of our physical bodies.

    The really interesting thing though?

    Guess what the single most beautiful crystal he ever found was.

    water_love_gratitude.jpg

    The water that was wrapped in words for “Love” & “Gratitude”. That’s right – I Love You, & Thank You – or two of the magic four phrases from Ho’oponopono.

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      Half A Ton Of Muscle With A Brain The Size Of A Cat

      It seemed like a nice day for a drive in the country..
      country_idaho.jpg

      A real My Own Private Idaho kind of day.

      A friend of mine has stables north of the city here, holding a cadre of these:
      country_ferrari.jpg

      Yep, that beautiful beast will set you back about the same amount as a brand new Ferrari. It doesn’t go quite as fast, but has a hell of a lot more prestige – I guess that’s the trade-off you make. It’s going to be ridden by one of the top 3 dressage riders in the world at the upcoming ‘Equitana‘ – the largest equine event in the southern hemisphere.

      So here’s what it looks like from the driving seat:
      country_drivers_seat.jpg

      Excited? You should be! I know I was.

      Struggled a bit changing gears & couldn’t find the volume control, but other than that it was alllll good.

      Oh, and here’s an action shot:
      country_action_shot.jpg

      Yes, that’s what happens when I give a noob my camera. You’ll just have to imagine it’s me being awesome. Hey well done! In your mind I’m amaaaaazing! *laugh*

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        What IS Me?

        For years, I’ve figured that if I thought about who “I” was, it would look something like this:

        in_out_1.gif

        Food in, everything else out. Input, Output, all pretty straight forward.

        Thing is, there are some obvious flaws in this.

        I can observe my thoughts happening, so obviously, I am not my thoughts.

        Nothing new or startling to that particularly revelation.

        Also though, I can see my emotions happening. Often times, as a direct result of the food I eat for example. The key question is – “how often do I choose which emotions to express, and how often is it more like they’re just happening to me?”

        So maybe I’m not my emotions either.

        Now sure, I can definitely change both my moods & my thoughts by altering my environment – the people I surround myself with, the food I eat, and so on. I can also alter both consciously, but there’s a huge difference between ‘automatic’ or background thoughts & using my mind as a Rational tool. There’s also a difference between the vast majority of emotions I have (since I can’t speak for anyone else here), which more or less wash over me on a daily basis, and if I very deliberately “choose to be happy now”.

        Most emotions & thoughts are things that are happening to me, not things I’m necessarily consciously choosing. So maybe ‘Me’ looks more like this:

        in_out_2.gif

        Of course, as Tolle points out, any use of the words ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘myself’ etc are generally just our ego trying to assert control. There is, however, an important question here:

        Who am I?

        A while back, I stumbled across some Yogic talk like this.

        Which really got me thinking about what that core, that real essence of ‘me’ness actually is.

        It’s pretty obvious this isn’t a novel idea – Hinduism (which has been around for ohhh, 5-8000 years or so) has this concept of Advaita Vedanta – that your atman is part of Brahman. Very roughly, this translates to our soul is part of God/The Universe/whatever. From a quantum physics perspective, us as individuals being part of a universal whole is (more or less) predicted by Bell’s Theorem (more readable explanation here – under ‘The Physics of Interconnectedness’). For the moment let’s ignore the intentionality or not of a universal whole (ie “Is the metaphysical ‘God’ the same as the quantum physical ‘Universe’, or even ‘All possible universes'”), since it’s largely irrelevant to this discussion. Having spent wayyy too long in the Catholic church, I’m also hesitant to use Christian terminology in a discussion like this, since it brings an enormous amount of baggage with it too, but we’ll let that slide for the moment too.

        All this talk of souls & God, atman & Brahman was merely a catalyst. It got me thinking.

        I can change my speech, my actions, what food I eat, my thoughts & emotions. This is more or less what I’ve been doing extensively for the last few years now. While this has caused me to change enough that it’s pulled me away from certain ex-friends and ex-girlfriends, my primary fear was that I would lose myself altogether.

        Oddly, almost the complete opposite has happened.

        If anything I’ve become more ‘me’, but the best of me. Many of the emotions, thoughts & behaviours that I had thought were ‘me’, simply weren’t. I’m just the ‘me’ that’s been there at the core of my life – now more consistently, and with less baggage stacked around the outside. Fortunately, I guess, it seems that the actual ‘me’ is less of an asshole than I’d always figured I was. Changing the inputs on the above diagram has really helped with that (gigantic-hint-to-19-year-old-Si: minimise caffeine & booze. OMG yes!)

        So maybe there’s something to this “We’re spiritual beings have a physical experience” thing. Maybe we really are just here as ‘spirits’, ‘energy beings’, ‘souls’ (whatever-the-hell terminology works for you), hanging around here on earth in meat-sacks, our bodies, doing what we do. Hanging out, having a beer (or a green juice), getting to know one another & generally palling around.

        All the things I thought were me aren’t, and the more I clear away, the more truly I seem to find who I really am. And the really good news? All of the negative crap? That was never me. The miserable emotions, thoughts, eating habits, speech & behaviours. All those I can (& mostly have) let go of, and I’m still ‘me’ without them.

        No, it really does seem – from watching myself change – and from seeing those who are further down the path than I, that the more you change, the more you remain the same – except now it’s just the best of you.

        There really is nothing to fear, & it feels just like coming home.

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