The Map'n'Tap — clearing complex issues

A lot of times try­ing to heal some­thing can be a bit crazy. Often there are so many things that seem rel­e­vant that it's almost impos­si­ble to know where to start, let alone where to go from there.

So, what to do, what to do?

What I've found works well is to mind-map the issue out, and then tap your way through the map.

What's a mind map? Well, there's a ton of ways of doing them, but the sim­plest is just to write whatever-issue-it-is in the mid­dle of the page, then just draw lines out from there to any­thing else that pops into mind while think­ing about the issue.

From there you then think about each of those things, and draw lines out­ward, just con­nect­ing each thought to any oth­ers that pop up.

(I have a cou­ple of exam­ples below)

This has a lot of benefits:

  1. Rather than hav­ing to come up with every­thing in one go, you can just spit bits out as they come to you
  2. Once some­thing is writ­ten down, you can drop it from your mind rather than hav­ing to hold every­thing in short-term memory
  3. By focussing on each sub-issue in turn, it's much eas­ier to find sub­tle, smaller related facts that may oth­er­wise have been lost — often I've found a core issue right at the root of things only after trac­ing through 4 or 5 links
  4. Roughly speak­ing, the closer in to the cen­tre of the page, the more sig­nif­i­cant some­thing is.

Num­ber 4 is impor­tant, because in terms of tap­ping (or what­ever heal­ing method works for you), you can then start from the out­side in. In the exam­ples below, just fol­low the red arrows. You tap/heal the 'leaves' right on the out­side of the map, then slowly work your way into the mid­dle. At each point, you don't have any related issues get­ting in the way or slow­ing things up — either because what you're heal­ing is right on the edge, or because all the smaller, related issues have already been healed.

This also really helps with the need to be spe­cific, in order for tap­ping to work well.

Now with some issues the maps will come out stu­pidly simple:

map_simple.jpg

And some­times they're an absolute mess:

map_complex.jpg

(Yeah, these have both been blurred to heck & back. The details aren't really impor­tant, just the rel­a­tive messiness)

It really doesn't mat­ter too much how you do them, if you want to draw instead of write, or any­thing. It's your head, so your stuff. You're not doing it for any­one else.

The really inter­est­ing thing is — once you've cleared one map, you can redo it, and often com­pletely dif­fer­ent stuff will come up. By clear­ing off that outer layer of gunk, you can see/feel your way to deeper things, things that you pre­vi­ously wouldn't have been able to see for all the mess at the higher level.

It's a nifty tool. I've done TONS of these things in the last few weeks — and com­bined with fin­ger tap­ping, even the most com­plex one I'm usu­ally com­pletely cleared in maybe 20 min­utes. When I can look at a phrase or bub­ble & feel like it just doesn't mat­ter any more, then I just move inwards, nice & sim­ple. Even­tu­ally I'll be heal­ing the cen­tre item directly, and it gen­er­ally just col­lapses & clears with ease.

As an approach it works a treat. It's swiftly become my favourite tool for under­stand­ing & clear­ing com­plex issues.