Your Body is a Trail of Clues

Everyone has had this experience: you remember an old event, it may be from yesterday, last week or twenty years ago, and you feel a physical response to that memory. It could be a constriction in your stomach, a clenching jaw, a heaviness on your heart. It could be a sudden surge of joy as well, or a warm feeling of safety or inclusion. After all the time that has past where do those sensations come from? Why do we 'feel' memories? And where are our memories stored?

We might assume that they are in the brain somewhere. In truth, no one is really sure. But the developing theories that research is pointing to is that memory is stored as a chemical formula; and that chemical formula represents it in our body and our senses. Even more precisely, when a memory is stored it includes 'aspects' that come from all the senses. When recalling an old memory how many times have you said something like "I can still smell the roses," or "I can still hear the screeching of the tires"? This old event is still being held in our senses as if it's happening now. Lovely memories are nourishing, but traumatic or difficult ones are depleting. Like little vampires the 'negative' sensory bits of memory are sucking the life out of your ‘Life.’ If we are experiencing them continuously, they can cause all sorts of life and health difficulties. They are also the clues that tell us that we have unresolved bits of 'emotional baggage' weighing us down. When we have a memory and we experience physical feelings associated with it, we can think of it as parts of our neurology stuck in the past. Like getting our scarf caught in the door, we're mostly out but not able to walk away. We have this forward momentum, but we keep getting pulled back. This is one of the main uses of EFT, to get our biology unstuck from the past so we can live the biggest most successful, happiest lives we can, which is only possible if all of us is in the present. Life is full of small and large traumas. The hallmarks of trauma are that:

it is unexpected and sudden (we were startled) it threatens our lives or identity it is overwhelming (we haven't the resources to handle it) we feel isolated (we feel alone and helpless) Given these parameters you can see that certainly something like a car accident or an assault could fall into that category. But, so too does the 2 year old experiencing an angry mom, or the loss of a precious toy for the first time. Our nervous systems start recording sensations the moment we are born, and perhaps even before. So, well before we have the ability to form memories, our body is sorting out 'safe and not safe,' ‘feels good and hurts,’ in an effort to maximize our survival. These form the blueprint of future reactions. Reactions that we don’t know why we have. We just take them as “who I am.” I believe all the stuck places are less “how I am’ and more “how I’ve become.” And ‘how I’ve become’ is a fluid state that can be shaped to produce better results for us.

The tools EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) uses to get the 'stuck' places 'unstuck' allow us to follow the trail of clues our body has left to show us the unresolved emotional energy. These can be: patterns of recurring or chronic pain in the body. That knee or back or shoulder that just won’t heal. Up to 90% of chronic disease can be attributed to stress, which is buried emotional unprocessed responses.

They can also show up as recurring themes in our lives: nothing ever works out for me, I can never get a good job, all my bosses have been incompetent but I never get a promotion. No one listens to me. You get the picture. Do you have a pattern that could use some improving? Are you trying to achieve a goal but can't ever get going? These are symptoms of a load of unresolved emotional energy holding you back.

These are just a few examples of how unresolved emotions might be showing up for us. We have been given a great gift in our pain and failures, if we only knew how to unwrap it! There are many ways to ‘decode’ this language of pain and maladaptive thoughts and actions. I use EFT the most. There are almost 50 tools in the EFT suite of techniques that help us to identify where the issues are, what they are, help us accept and love ourselves and release the past. It is relatively easy to learn, and use. And it can be can used it daily, even on the go. We can use it for a quick reset in less than a minute!

What EFT is so brilliant at doing is getting our scarf unstuck from the door so we can move on into the world and be our wonderful, brilliant, creative, loving, healthy, whole, light filled selves.