Tapping Through

Tapping Guidelines

1. Select a focus. Your focus can be on a person, a specific incident with a person, a disturbing memory or other things that are bothering you, such as a part of yourself, a self-defeating behavior or a physical symptom. You can also focus on positive people and things as well, such as an important support person in your current or past life, a positive experience, or a positive aspect of yourself.
2. Bring up the focus, and feel the physical sensations and emotions that are stirred up.
3. Begin tapping. You don’t need to purposely hold on to the original focus as you tap.
4. Tap for approximately 30 seconds. Stop and take a deep breath.
5. Notice what stands out now at this very moment or from what emerged during the tapping: mentally, emotionally, physically, including awareness of your surroundings. Don’t just focus on awareness of your thoughts when noticing what stands out. Be sure to scan your body to include awareness of physical sensations. Don’t worry if what stands out seems unrelated.
6. Focus on what stands out and begin tapping, again.
7. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you feel some resolution or reduction of the physical and emotional disturbance.
8. You can check your level of emotional disturbance by bringing up the original focus with current physical sensations and emotions and asking your yourself, “On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is no disturbance at all and 10 is the worst you can imagine, how disturbing does it feel now?”

Note:

1. Continue tapping if you are experiencing a strong emotion until it subsides.
2. If you become overwhelmed, stop and use one of the self-care techniques to calm, soothe and ground yourself.
3. If you find you have wandered far away from the original focus, go back to the original focus along with the physical sensations and emotions that it currently stirs up. Begin tapping and continue with steps 4, 5, 6 and 7.
4. If a memory arises and stands out when you stop tapping. You may find that the memory is more foreground than the issue you began with. You can decide to stop and work with the memory exclusively or put it aside to work with at another time.

Tapping (Bilateral Stimulation) Options

1. Tapping thighs
2. Butterfly: crossing arms in front of your chest and tapping shoulders
3. Atari method: make two loose fists and press thumbs on the sides of index fingers
4. Tapping feet on floor
5. Turning head from side to side (option: breathe in one direction, breathe out other direction)
6. Swaying back and forth
7. Walking in place
8. Eye movement: pick two spots on either side of the room. Eyes go back and forth between the two spots.