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Using EFT for Gratitude

By Dr. Patricia Carrington

I am always interested in new uses for EFT that may not yet been recognized.  Many of us use this remarkable technique when things go wrong in our lives but fail to recognize that it can be used equally successfully to enhance what is already good in our lives. One such use of EFT is to increase the deeply affirming experience of being genuinely GRATEFUL.

The importance of gratitude in changing the tenor of our lives has been pointed out by many who have thought carefully about what can bring deep meaning and happiness into our lives.  Along these lines, Carol Look regularly advises her workshop participants to create a daily gratitude list on which they write down those things they are grateful for that day.  This is an important recommendation.  Today I am going to add to it by telling you about using this same concept to make this exercise even more powerful.

Before I tell you how you might use EFT to increase the sense of gratitude in your life, I want to point out that contrary to popular belief, gratitude is not easily come by–genuine gratitude that is –– despite the fact that there is much lip-service paid to “gratitude” in our society.  In fact, even for those people who are able to feel grateful from their hearts, there are many areas in even their lives where gratitude could be experienced but it is probably not.

This difficulty arises because, as a species, we are hard-wired, by natural selection over time, to be more alert to difficulties and dangers than to anything else.  Our well known “orienting response must have saved our lives many a time when saber tooth tigers lurked outside our cave-homes.  Under such life-threatening conditions it was certainly the better part of wisdom to be hyper vigilant.  We needed to be alert to even the sound of a crackling twig on the forest floor which might signal the approach of an enemy.

Given that the orienting response seems to be an important component of our inherited neurological makeup, how then can we allow ourselves to give equal attention to the positive things in our lives –– those things that bring us “good” each day?  This is clearly not as easy as we might think.

Many people agree that it is useful to be grateful, and many religious traditions emphasize gratitude as an important component of living, but today it is unfortunately most often expressed in a manner that results in only lip service.  If, for example, you ask a group of people to write down five things for which they are grateful you will soon discover that the lists that they generate will more often than not consist of what each person feels they should be grateful for.  These people will indicate that they are grateful for their children, their homes, their partners and friends, their health, etc., but they will usually refer only to large concepts.  They may very well feel grateful in their minds that they have these things when they stop to think about them, but this isn’t what makes up an actual experience of gratitude.

It is the little things in life that bring us the experience of gratitude, and it is therefore far more useful to break up your description of those things that are good in your life into small segments, into real scenes, and then “tap in” the genuine gratitude that you feel for them. We can use EFT to do this in the following ways:

If you feel particularly good about something that has happened in your life, you can “tap in” the gratitude that you feel at the moment so that it becomes a permanent part of your life (see my first article in this series which describes the process of “tapping in” the positive). This is an excellent way to increase the energy of gratitude in your life.

You are more likely, however, to use the tactic of tapping-in gratitude when you are feeling uncomfortable about.  Perhaps something or someone has disappointed or angered or offended you and therefore you presently see only the negative that situation.

This is the exact time when it is most useful to use EFT “to tap” in the positive aspects of that person or situation and thereby change what is called your “vibrational frequency”.  Here is how you can do this:

First, acknowledge to yourself your disappointment, anger, discouragement, self recrimination or whatever other negative emotion you may be feeling by incorporating that into the first part of your EFT Statement that you will repeat as you tap.  Then follow this by an EFT phrase that expresses appreciation for some aspect of the experience or person in question by acknowledging some positive aspect of that experience or person, no matter how brief or fleeting it may be. Here’s an example of how you could make use of EFT to create a true sense of gratitude if, for instance, if you were disappointed in a social gathering the day before.

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