EFT for Creativity

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. - Joseph Chilton Pierce

I recently did creativity coaching work with a visual artist, a painter working with pastels, who was feeling blocked and uninspired. She had signed up for a four week coaching block. After our first conversation I had the sense that there was an emotional/energetic element to the block so I suggested we supplement the coaching work with an EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques or aka Tapping) session to shift whatever she was holding in her energy field that was keeping her from moving forward with her creativity.

Using deep intuitive listening I was able to help her hone in on the root of the problem. By the end of the four weeks she had switched to working with oils and has been happily creating again ever since. We were both delighted with the results and I was reminded of how powerful EFT can be in freeing us to be more creative and expansive in every area of our lives.

Creativity is a high energy state that gives you access to new ways of a looking at a problem and finding solutions. Everyone has creative abilities. They are not limited just to the arts. The ability to solve problems creatively can help you in every area of your life. And creativity is not the domain of just a few gifted individuals. Everyone is born with the same capacity to be creative. It just needs to be cultivated and encouraged. Our creative self is a tender, vulnerable aspect of ourselves associated with the spirit of play and our inner child, who can be easily traumatized. Most of us were not encouraged to develop this part of ourselves and many of us were actively discouraged with creativity being considered frivolous and the domain of the starving artist.

EFT can help in releasing blocks and limiting beliefs that get in the way to accessing our creative potential and the joy it can bring to our life. It works by tapping on the major acupuncture meridians while focusing on the problem to release the energy of negative emotions and traumas held in our energy body that keep us stuck in self limiting patterns. Once the energy is release the problem is resolved permanently. It can be effective on a wide array of issues including health, relationships, phobias, prosperity and, of course, our creativity.

EFT and the Science of Stress Relief

While there has been lots of anecdotal evidence on the effective of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) on alleviating a wide range of conditions, there is now a growing body of scientific research explaining how and why it works.

EFT combines Eastern medicine, using the main acupuncture points for stress relief, with traditional Western psychotherapy. Rather than needles, in EFT you use your fingertips to tap specific acupuncture points while talking through a range of emotions or traumatic experiences. And science has shown that tapping on the points is as effective as using needles.

Dawson Church, Ph.D., who has been researching the science of EFT since 2002, explains that "tapping on these points sends signals directly to the stress centers of the mid-brain" which are not controlled by our front lobes, the conscious part of our minds we engage in conventional talk therapy. In addition what makes EFT so powerful is that it is able to access the amygdala, an almond-shaped part of our brain that triggers our body's reaction to fear initiating the "fight, flight or freeze" response.

By reducing stress and reactivity, EFT helps with any problem that is stress related including sports performance, business and finances, as well as most disease.

Church estimates that 10 million people worldwide have used tapping, and what's so exciting is how incredibly quickly it's alleviating issues like depression, anxiety, insomnia, physical pain, even serious illness. It has even been shown to be really effective in treating war veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

In a recent study with Dr. David Feinstein, Church has been able to confirm that tapping on specific meridian points has a positive effect on lowering cortisol levels. Known as the "stress hormone," cortisol is integral to our body's "fight or flight" response. Originally intended to help early humans survive sudden, short lived danger like an encounter with a lion, regular release of cortisol as we seem to be doing in response to the ongoing stress of modern life is thought have serious impacts on our physical, mental and emotional health and make us more vulnerable to everything from cancer to heart disease.

In the study looking at EFT's effect on cortisol, 83 participants were separated into three groups. The first group was guided through an hour-long EFT session, the second group received an hour of talk therapy, while the third, the control group, received no treatment. The group that did an hour of EFT demonstrated a 24 percent decrease in cortisol levels, while the other two groups showed no real change. The EFT group also exhibited lower levels of psychological symptoms, including anxiety and depression.

What I especially like about EFT is that it is simple to learn and use on yourself. You can use it immediately in any situation where you feel stressed or anxious to calm yourself and get a clearer perspective on how to best handle the situation that is triggering the stress.

Update: At the end of 2018 the U.S. Veteran’s Administration approved EFT as effective treatment for PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and Kaiser Permanente (the largest HMO in the U.S. established guidelines in it’s journal for working with EFT for PTSD. EFT continues to be more widely accepted because it’s been proven to work on an array of issue.