To coincide with  the launch of "The EFT Coach" I have renamed the newsletter to "EFT& Coaching News". The format will be exactly the same, covering both EFT and coaching topics and especially focussing on ways  to combine the two.

The Spiritual Mechanics of EFT
Part 1 of 3 - How EFT relates to spirituality

I once went to a remarkable talk by a spiritual coach in which he said something that totally resonated with the fundamentals of EFT and Energy Psychology. He was talking on the subject of gurus and of people's response to them. He said (and I paraphrase based on my memory):

"You need to understand that when you respond with love and feel your heart opening in the presence of a guru, you did that - not the guru. Your response is created by you and in you. If you can feel it in his presence, then it's possible for you to feel it away from his presence too - and that's why you don't really need gurus to experience your Oneness."

Looked at this way, spiritual coaching is about not only improving the client's ability to experience their own Oneness (divinity, universal connection, what you will), but doing it in such a way that the experience and their ability to recreate it is handed straight back to them, complete and intact and independent of the coach.

Although all coaching should be about assisting a client to find their own truth, there is no field where this is so true as the field of spiritual coaching - anything else would simply be greater or lesser degrees of indoctrination. A client who seeks out a spiritual coach is saying rather explicitly: "I want to experience deeper connection with the divine, and I know I need help, but I don't want anyone telling me what to think or what to feel." And EFT offers a way to fulfil that contradiction - for the coach to stay completely out of the way while the client travels their own path of enquiry and growth.

Although someone who seeks out spiritual coaching or spiritual development of any kind is probably seeking (negatively) some kind of relief from emotional issues or (positively) to experience a kind of peace of mind, bliss or oneness, the fact is that people have as much negative baggage, conditioning, memories, blocks and beliefs around the subject of Spirituality as they do around any other aspects of their lives.

So one of the key tasks here is simply to remove what stands in the way and allow the client's true nature and spiritual response to be revealed. And the key element to be removed is fear - fear of really looking "into the void" of the self. As John O'Donohue writes in Anam Cara:

"Spirituality becomes suspect if it is merely an anaesthetic to still one's spiritual hunger. Such a spirituality is driven by fear of loneliness. If you bring courage to your solitude, you learn that you do not need to be afraid. The phrase, do not be afraid, recurs three hundred and sixty-six times in the Bible. There is a welcome for you at the heart of your solitude. When you realise this, most of the fear that governs your life falls away. The moment your fear transfigures, you come into rhythm with your own self."

We could equally say: "If you bring EFT to your solitude, then you do not need to be afraid", since it is a direct way to address all "the fear that governs your life".

In part 2: how  the EFT protocol itself embodies key spiritual concepts. 

News

"The EFT Coach" 
available now
My book "The EFT Coach - Emotional Freedom Technique for the Professional Coach" was released last week and is now on sale as an ebook at: www.eftcoach.com

It will soon also be available in softcover.  If you would like to be notified when this is available, click here.
 

Practitioner trainings now available
I am now a certified Trainer through the AMT and can now run practitioner trainings. Initially, these will be by personal request and run in a one-to-one intensive format.
 

Woodbridge Holistic Health Fayre.
17th and 18th April 2004.
Woodbridge Community Hall, Woodbridge, Suffolk.
I will be offering 20 minute taster sessions and will be giving a talk and demonstration.

Lifelong "medical" goal abandoned in one round of EFT
I wrote in January's newsletter about using EFT to validate goals ("Are your goals really what you want?"). This week I was working with a client on her Life Purpose and how that related to her choice of career.

She felt that she had always been drawn to doing "something medical" but nothing specific seemed to be fitting. Since her father had been a well respected doctor, I wondered whether her goal was being influenced by that or whether it was really her own desire. I decided to test it out using the Goal Validation procedure described in The EFT Coach.

First I asked how strongly she felt she wanted the goal ("to do something medical"). She said it felt like a 7 or 8 out of 10.

Next we applied EFT using the setup statement:
"Even though I think I want to do something medical, I deeply and completely accept myself".

At the end I asked her again how strongly she wanted that goal. She said "It's gone. It's zero. I want to sell houses".  This fitted completely with some of our previous discussion where she had showed a very clear passion for selling and also for house decoration.

This was a huge step forward in our work together, since she is now able to focus fully on taking steps towards a goal she really does want for herself and which aligns with her own passions, free of a very old feeling that she "should" be doing something else.

Gary's Corner

Gary Craig, the originator of EFT maintains an excellent website packed with real case histories. Each month I select case histories that really show the power and range of EFT.

This month:

Unrelated to any of this month's other topics, this is simply a nice simple case of applying EFT to an axiety issue, including the setup statements used.

Learn EFT now! You can start using EFT for yourself right now by downloading my EFT QuickStart manual.

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