Do you have recurrent sinus and lung infections? If so you may have grief stuck in your body. I am going to be presenting a breakout workshop at the 16th Annual Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP) Conference on 5/30/14 in Phoenix, AZ, on “Energy Tapping and Acupuncture for Physical Symptoms of Grief,” based on my August 2013 Reality Sandwich blog and the excerpt below from Chapter 14 of Let Magic Happen: Adventures in Healing with a Holistic Radiologist. This approach can be combined with the Transforming Symptoms as Metaphors technique in the Let Magic Happen January 2014 blog to create a unique healing method which I will be presenting in an all-day Greensboro AHEC workshop on 4/2/14, “Symptoms as Metaphors: Using Imagery and Emotional Freedom Techniques.” If you would like to begin working with this method now, a 22 minute video of the group experiential exercise from my February 2013 Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship presentation is available in the Let Magic Happen store now for $4.99, the same price as the ebook.
Tapping Our Hidden Potential excerpt:
The importance of the metaphorical approach in my own life came home to me in a powerful way via a seemingly insignificant symptom. One Sunday, Dagmar and I went to the movies in a slightly chilly, drafty theater, and I felt myself coming down with a cold afterward. In Chinese medicine, a viral infection can be thought of as a “perverse wind invasion,” an interesting metaphor in itself. Based on this principle, we recommend a lot of useful cold remedies to patients at OHS. When I felt myself getting a cold, I used as many remedies as I had available. After doing EFT on myself, I drank fresh, steaming, ginger root tea while taking a hot bath to sweat out the perverse wind. Then I took a few dropperfuls of Echinacea tincture. It all worked, and I woke up the next morning feeling refreshed and healthy.
Unfortunately, by bedtime I discovered I had a mild but nagging case of post-nasal drip that generated an annoying cough. Most frustratingly, the coughing kept me awake. After doing some EFT on the symptoms with no results, I decided it was time to look it up in Louise Hay’s book. The metaphor she listed was “Inner crying.” This didn’t resonate with me in the least. “No, not me,” I said. However, nothing relieved the coughing, so I moved downstairs for the night to give Dagmar some peace. Although I felt all right the next day, my dripping and coughing continued unabated for two more nights. By now, my resilience was breaking down.
The third night I found myself getting desperate. By two in the morning, I was coughing so hard I felt like I had broken a rib. Finally surrendering to my not knowing what to do, I started tapping like mad on “I have no @#$% clue why I have this terrible cough.” Suddenly, out of the blue, or rather out of my suppressed unconscious memory, I flashed back to the movie we had watched, which was Shall We Dance. This movie features Richard Gere taking ballroom dance classes from Jennifer Lopez as a manifestation of his midlife crisis.
Gere tries to hide his secret passion for dance from his family, but his teenage daughter sees right through his façade. Aha! I immediately saw that Gere’s daughter in the movie reminded me of my own daughters, who I was not seeing that often since my divorce a few years earlier. I started doing EFT on “I really miss my girls” and cried deeply for a few minutes while tapping. It was about three o’clock by then. I got up and sent them both e-mails in the middle of the night telling them how much I missed them. They thought that was a bit unusual, to say the least. However, my inner crying was gone, and so was my post-nasal drip. The cough disappeared, too, and I slept soundly the rest of the night.
