According to Gary Craig, founder of Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), we all live in a Palace of Possibilities.
This “palace” is a huge mansion with multiple rooms which represent all of our potential.
However, many of us only use a small part of this potential because we choose to dwell in only one room.
Why?
Defining Our Own Limitations
Because all those other rooms are for all those other people, not us. They are for those who are richer than us, more intelligent, more ambitious, more sociable, have more education, nicer homes, better jobs.
You get the picture.
They are just not rooms we are comfortable in and to occupy them would put us outside of our comfort zone.
Thus we stay within our room, inside those walls which define us, because those walls are familiar to us and safe. Besides, those walls have writing on them… writing we read every day.
What do those walls say?
Similar to archeologists who explore cave paintings to describe and define the history and environment of those ancient people who painted them, so do we do the same.
Those walls are filled with our history and our experiences, our successes and our failures, our can’s and our can not’s, our finished and our unfinished projects, our choices, our beliefs about our environment and the world and how it works, and our beliefs about all the people in it…including ourselves.
Should we attempt to leave this room we occupy with its writing on the walls, we get pulled back into our comfort zone because it’s…
- too risky
- we don’t belong outside this room
- what if we do something wrong
- we don’t have enough experience
- besides, our parents may disapprove
- we may fail
- someone may laugh at our effort
- worse, we could be rejected, ignored, unloved, abandoned.
Better to play it safe.
Better to stay within our comfort zone, these four walls and the familiar writings.
How do our self-limiting writings get on our walls?
Limiting Beliefs
All those experiences that go into making us who we are, put them there.
Our parents’ warnings, our teacher’s remonstrations, our religious beliefs, our peers’ reactions and so on, hypnotize us into believing what eventually become our “truths”, and so we define ourselves by those “truths”.
But sometimes these “truths” are not all limiting.
Sometimes we learn lessons from them.
For instance if you become careless while driving a car and accidentally begin to drift over to the next lane just missing colliding with another car, that experience gets written on our walls. Consequently, we become more cautious while driving.
Or perhaps as a child we got too close to an oven and burned ourselves, so we learned to stay away when it was on.
Though these experiences were negative, they had positive outcomes.
We learned positive lessons about safety.
Everyone’s lessons and writings are different from ours because their experiences are not ours.
Some of us may have had repressive, fearful parents and this got passed down to us. This repression and fear may have been passed down to our parents by our grandparents who received it from their parents.
Sometimes the writings within families remain for generations and just get added to by generational differences.
Others of us may have families who encourage curiosity and experimentation, thus, inquisitiveness becomes ingrained in us, something to which those of us brought up with repression cannot relate. Consequently, what’s happening here is that what is ingrained in us becomes our reality.
“My Consistent Thoughts become my Reality”
As the premise of EFT says: “The Cause of all Negative Emotions is a Disruption in our energy System”, and according to that theory, we have a negative thought which causes a short circuit in our energy system, resulting in a negative emotion, i.e…
Negative Thought…..zzzzzzzzzzzzt…… Negative Emotion
Thus, we get the writings on our walls, or, our reality.
This truth about thoughts becoming our realities is what all psychology and psychotherapy techniques and processes, as well as energy healing and hypnotherapy techniques, are based on.
What is it that all these mental health processes have in common?
The common thread among them is they attempt to change our behavior by changing our thoughts. When we change our thoughts, we change our realities, usually away from negative stereotypes written on our walls to more positive ideations.
More positive ideations translate to positive behavior.
How do we affect this change?
We use EFT.
By consistently using EFT, we interrupt the short circuit, changing our negative emotion into a more natural, peaceful one.
In effect, we change the old, worn, useless writings on our walls and replace them with new, more useful truths and realities.
The EFT energy healing model is a useful and successful tool that can easily fit into our daily schedule. It requires no external devices to work. All one needs is a few minutes of quiet time, your fingertips, and knowledge of the location of the meridian points to tap on.
So, go ahead. Face that negative emotion and tap it down!