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Combining Modern Meditation with EFT

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Combining Modern Meditation with EFT

By Patricia Carrington

Recently, I met up with someone who was familiar with my training methods and writings on meditation, and who asked me, naively, “Why did you leave meditation for EFT?  Do you think EFT is that much better?”

I was taken aback by this question; I have never stopped meditating since I first learned this method in the early 1970’s.  I have never ceased to recommend it to others whom I think would benefit from it, and it remains an important resource in my practice as a clinical psychologist.  However, EFT has now become the center of my therapeutic work.  In fact, however, the two methods combine so naturally in my practice that I had scarcely noticed how much they do so until I was asked this question.

I want to share with you some information on how meditation, quite naturally and powerfully, can enhance the effects of EFT, and how it can substantially improve the results you may get when using it for yourself or with your clients if you are a therapist or life coach.

In explaining the benefits that practicing a modern form of meditation can bring  to your work with EFT, I am reminded of the oft-quoted saying by the Greek mathematician, Archimedes, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.”  The emphasis in this statement is on a place to stand.  The fact is that if we don’t have solid ground under our feet emotionally, then any technique we apply, whether it be a relaxation method, traditional psychotherapy, EFT, or any other intervention, suffers.

EFT practitioners are familiar with the phenomenon of working with a client and being able to help that person substantially reduce their stress about a certain issue, only to have them come back the next week simply overwhelmed by new issues.  When this happens in my practice I am reminded of a child building a sand castle by the sea.  As soon as they build the castle, the next wave comes in and washes it away.  The child then rebuilds their castle, only to have the next wave wash it away again, and this happen repeatedly – it is an unending process.  Similarly, while EFT is brilliantly effective, if in addition we add the solid continuing support that meditation can supply, EFT's staying power is magnified many times and we avoid the “child’s sand castle” effect.

I will not describe here the simplified modern form of meditation that I use with EFT (I do that in detail in the Meditation Center.   I simply want to point out that modern forms of meditation such as, for example, Clinically Standardized Meditation (CSM), the modern meditation method I developed for the New York Telephone Company, are so permissive in nature that they may be subjectively experienced as almost "effortless".  Meditation of this sort is intrinsically pleasant and attracts the person to it; it is experienced more as a vacation from all cares once or twice a day than a chore or a "must".

The therapeutic benefits of simple forms of meditation are supported by extensive research (how I wish EFT research was that far along in terms of accumulation of scientific evidence!) -- but in addition to providing deep relaxation, meditation appears to help people in an area largely unaddressed by many other interventions.  It can foster communication between the person and his or her own deepest self, quite apart from that person’s interactions with others or their environment; and EFT can do this as well (see for example my article on “tapping in the positive with EFT”) and it may well be used much more extensively for that purpose in the future.

In a world where inner enrichment from any source is scarce, many people hunger for a more profound sense of self than is implicit in merely "getting along with others."  They seek an awareness of their identity as being as distinct from their identity as doing.  The inner communion of meditation as well as the quiet contemplative use of the “tapping in the positive” approach in EFT, are means of fulfilling this need in a way that promises to heal an aspect of the psyche that may be as needful as any other presently known.

A Special Form of Rest

Many people in our fast-paced society find it difficult if not impossible to truly rest during the day. 

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