Miss Blue asked me a great question in my post: Is it Possible to Stay on Track in Recovery? How?

In the post, I was answering a question from the amazing D, who has done NLP to help balance her thoughts and stay grounded in her recovery.

NLP
NLP stands for Neuro-Linquistic Programming. It is a set of techniques in behavior, attitude and guiding principles that help you eliminate negative beliefs and create the thoughts that will serve you in living joyfully.

With NLP you basically learn what behaviors, attitudes and principles create success and model them.

Most people will find that there is at least one (and probably more!) areas in their lives where they have been successful. You take from the areas where you’ve created success and model them in the other areas of your life — realizing that what we think about something is based on “filters” of past experience. Those filters often limit us from being our best.

I have never done NLP myself, but have studied it a bit because it relates so much to the rest of the energy work I am doing.

Check this site out for more on NLP.

EFT
EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique (or Emotional Freedome Techniques, as founder Gary Craig calls it).

With EFT, you tap on parts of your body that are emotional acupressure points (just like acupuncture, but without the needles!). While you are tapping, you say a series of statements that help you combine mind and body energy to release, forgive and reframe an issue you are dealing with.

Whenever I feel that stuck, heavy, triggered feeling, I do EFT and I find that my energy feels like it’s moving all around my body. It helps break up the energy.

I’ve sometimes done 3 or 4 rounds of tapping if I’m really feeling stuck — and it’s felt like a miracle to me because the energy becomes unblocked and released.

I’ve experienced the same thing in Ashtanga yoga class — walking in depressed and after about 5 sun salutations, feeling a gentle joy take it’s place. The idea with energy work, body work, yoga, meditation or any practice is to release our minds from negative, dark energy that keeps us stuck, depressed and addicted.

I love EFT because it’s easy to learn and do on your own.

It’s fun to learn from a pratitioner and then you can learn how to create your own successful EFT scripts and do it anywhere & anytime you need to shift your energy.

RET
RET stands for Rapid Eye Therapy. While I had heard of this before, I didn’t truly understand it until I started studying with Carol Tuttle .

Rapid Eye Therapy is a technique where a certified RET practitioner helps you release stuck negative energy through a series of statements combined with using a wand while you blink your eyes rapidly.

During the session, you will move your eyes to different areas to get at the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual centers of your body. There may be other energy work, like aromatherapy and stress reduction while y ou are there.

Carol Tuttle is a RET and energy therapist, so a lot of what she teaches incorporates RET.

For example, if you go to her website and scroll down to the bottom right, you can find information on “eye patch therapy.” This was my first experience with how our eyes relate to our brains.

Putting on an eyepatch, you can calm a part of your brain.

When I get anxious or stressed, with swirling thoughts in my mind, I can put the eyepatch (looks like a pirate eye patch) over my right eye to quiet my left brain.

This also works if you have trouble sleeping.

The eyepatches are very inexpensive and Carol sells them on her site. I carry mine everywhere and even bought a bunch to give away to friends!

My Recent Experience with RET and Clearing Generational DNA
Miss Blue also asked about my comment in my last post on clearing 6 generations of eating disorders in my ancestral DNA.

Yes, I know, it sounds WEIRD!

However, think about our physical bodies. We inherit a genetic blueprint from our parents, who got theirs from their parents and so on. Since the body and mind cannot be disconnected….Well, let’s start with that:

Research tells us that things like depression and eating disorders, often considered psychological problems and referred to practitioners who deal with the MIND…sometimes exclusively just the mind — are hereditary.

We carry genes in our DNA that predispose us to things like, low serotonin or problems storing tryptophan in our bodies (the essential amino acid that we MUST get from food and converts to serotonin).

These PHYSICAL predispositions may become “turned on” and we end up with an eating disdorder or depression.

Now, suddenly, we are sent to a psychiatrist for a MIND problem. hmmmm….something is missing here in my opinion.

In my work as a coach, I’ve found that most people with health issues have emotional issues to work out. Once they start addressing both, they recover — start to open up and live joyful lives. There’s more to it than being a successful coach — and it’s the MIND-BODY connection.

When we work with someone who helps us engage our MINDS and BODIES in healing simultaneously, we can FEEL better. FEELING better needs to happen in both the mind and body.

Anyone who has chronic pain (like I did) can tell you how hard it is to feel joyful when your body hurts. Mind effects body and body effects mind. If you have negative, damaging thoughts for too long, they find their way into your body. Science is already showing this by the studies on stress.

We know from science that stress is 80% or more of the reason for doctors visits. We know that stress effects a whole axis from your adrenals (just on top of your kidneys) to your brain (hypothalamus and pituitary). Between these points are all of your digestive and vital organs.

And we know from Bruce Liption (biologist who wrote Biology of Belief) that each single cell in our bodies are affected by our thoughts.

Eventually, our mainstream medicine will catch up to ancient medical practices like Ayurveda and Chinese medicine. Our bodies effect our minds effect our bodies.

Now for the Generational Part
When you learn EFT and other energy or spiritual work, you often come up against the idea that we all chose into our life & experiences.

The goal is that we live the same pattern over and over again until we clear it or move beyond it.

Some of us are here to clear it from our generational DNA (heal the pain that has been passed down from generation to generation), so that we can live our own (and our children’s and their children’s) lives better.

Think about it this way: my father had an abusive father, but he did not abuse my sister and me. He worked on his tendency to get very angry and cleared it. I think my mother really helped him with this and by the time he was 40, I felt like he was a much calmer and more centered man.

I was not an abused child because my father cleared that from his generational patterns.

He didn’t use EFT or RET, but he did do other energy techniques and my mother was there to support him. Growing up, I remember them meditating, doing yoga and other types of energy work. They believed in power of mind and law of attraction.

I learned these concepts young…I’ll do another post sometime on why I “forgot” them or didn’t truly understand how to apply them in my life.

Generational DNA and Eating Disorders
When I had my RET session, my RET practitioner (who is very gifted and intuitive) saw 6 generations of DNA in my ancestry. Based on what I know from my family history, I can trace back eating problems in 4 generations: my mother, my grandmother and her mother.

I plan to ask more questions and see if I can trace it back further, but that’s not so important to me.

The main thing is that no other generation (my great-grandmother has passed) — my grandmother or mother — has cleared their issues with food. They kind of fit in with the general societal issues for females and binge eating, so it doesn’t seem like as big a problem for them as it ended up being for me.

But I see the problems and I saw it all my life. An anxiety, a low level of fear, an inability to stop eating.

The fact that I cleared it feels significant.

The idea in generational clearing is that as I shift this energy, it starts to clear the energy that my mother and grandmother (and probably my sister) feel as well.

So over the next few months, I’ll be watching for shifts and see what happens!

In any event, if I were to go on and have children, I would give them the gift my father gave me…not repeating a generational pattern that had existed for many years.

Cool huh? Out there…yes, but with nothing to lose, it was fun to try. Plus, I noticed a solid feeling of comfort in my solar plexus, where I used to often feel “butterflies” of nervousness over the smallest of things.

I loved my RET session!

Other Energy Work – Medical Intuitives
My favorite energy worker of all-time is Rhonda Lenair. She is very powerful and helped me get started on my path of recovery.

I haven’t had time to write yet about my last session with her, but I will over the next few weeks. She’s amazing and she always helps me see more of who I am, feeling calmer and more centered each time.

If you could see how scared and closed I was when I went to see her (at least it’s how I felt inside…terrified to be living) and how I am now, you’d wouldn’t believe it.

She is truly an angel on this Earth and I am forever grateful for taking a chance and trusting that seeing her would help me. Sometimes, it takes time for energy work to find it’s way into your system. Your mind-body-spirit starts to clear things and life gets topsy turvy for a bit.

At those times, it’s easy to think, “that didn’t work at all.” And yet, as things continue to shift, you find that not only did it work, but it was one of the most profound things you’ve ever experienced. That is the miracle of life. Sometimes the things we don’t see are much more powerful than the ones we do.

Your Own Energy Work
I encourage everyone to pick a type of energy work that you feel drawn to. Go with an open mind and see what happens.

Find a practitioner that someone recommends…I’ve been to some I wouldn’t recommend and others who are amazing! Don’t let the less gifted practitioners ruin it for you! Get a referral from someone you trust and try it out!

Or start with EFT, which you can learn and do for free. I recommend a practitioner in at least the first session, but after that, go for it on your own!

I’d love to hear from you about your experience with energy work!

Practitoners I Love:

  • Rhonda Lenair - medical intuitive specializing in healing addictions
  • Kym Nichols - Rapid Eye Therapist in Utah (does phone sessions too) – Kym’s website does not do her justice — she’s amazing!
  • Dr. Herb Yolin - Dentist who combines dentistry with energy work (he has helped me tremendously with my teeth, IBS, getting sleep and healing stress related tension with a laser that helps with addictions and pain): Dr. Yolin is teaching a seminar on energy work in the Boston area — check it out!
  • Elizabeth Turner - Reiki Master in London, UK. Elizabeth is an incredible woman and a very gifted coach and healer.

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