A Simple Hack for Potential Bad News

Posted on by Rob Nelson

Last week I got an unexpected letter from the IRS and kind of freaked out!  My mind immediately went to “Oh no!  I’m being audited!” and the feeling of dread was intense.

Have you ever felt anxious about opening a letter or email?  Or hitting play on a voice message?

Whenever I’m faced with a situation like that, especially if the stakes seem high, I fall back on simple EFT tapping.  This may seem too “woo woo” for some folks, but I believe we can actually hack our reality this way.  

Many physicists believe there are multiple alternate Universes potentially branching out from every moment.  Naturally we’d prefer a reality with good news (and no audit, thank you very much).  But do we really get to choose?

Maybe.

There’s such a thing as Karma, no doubt. And perhaps our lives are mostly planned out before we’re even born.  But if it is possible to choose our reality, this simple trick may work wonders for you.

The Hack 
Before opening the letter, email, message or whatever, sit down and prepare to tap.  Start by measuring, on our zero to ten scale, just how upset you’re feeling.

Next, go ahead and set a timer (you probably have one on your phone). A timer is helpful because you just keep tapping until it goes off.
I usually start out with 10 minutes and if I’m not down to zero, I just set the timer again and keep tapping.

The idea is to tap your intensity down to zero, or as low as possible, until you feel neutral, or even at peace with the potential bad news.

What should you say while you tap?  Start by naming your emotions and where and how you feel them in your body: “Even though I have this cold, gray lump of dread in my stomach…”

Once the intensity starts to drop a bit, you might shift to worst case scenario tapping:

“Even if the test results do come back positive…”
“Even if I didn’t get the job…”
“Even if he’s writing to break up with me…”
“Even if I am being audited, and it’s a huge giant hassle and maybe I owe money, I want to get to a calm and peaceful place….”

Whatever your worst fears are, name them and tap down the intensity.
Sometimes it can help to throw in words of perspective:

“…I’ll still be okay”
“…this won’t kill me”
“…I’m actually safe and there are good people in my life who care for me”
“…I’m not trapped. I do have options”

The point here is to help reassure your body, to help get it out of fight or flight. This may help get more blood flowing to your frontal cortex and new solutions may arise.

It’s totally okay to be repetitive with your tapping. In fact, it might be for the best to just keep saying the same words over and over.  Again, the goal is to get your emotional intensity as close to zero as humanly possible.

At that point, go ahead and open the letter, email, message or whatever. 

Does this actually work?  Will doing this tapping avert disaster, or bump you over into a better alternate reality? There’s really no way to know, but I’m convinced its worked for me many times.

The first time I tried it I was new to tapping and facing a minor financial crisis. I tapped for 40 minutes straight until I felt a sense of peace. When I checked my bank balance there was an extra $4000. I kid you not! More recently, that letter from the IRS turned out to be some generic announcement.

Whether or not this hack has any effect on your outcome though, it will have a profound effect on you!  Wouldn’t it be nice to move through this chaotic world with a more unshakeable peace and equanimity? 

That’s a lofty goal perhaps, but this simple hack might actually help.

Copyright 2023 Rob Nelson

Interested in working with Rob?  Click here for details

Tapping into Magic

Posted on by Rob Nelson

I’m sure you’ve had your share of getting stuck in traffic, but have you ever experienced driving somewhere and catching every green light, arriving at your destination in record time? I love it when that happens!

Sometimes it seems that the stars align, luck is with us and we find ourselves ‘in the flow’ with everything working out for us. Is there a way to get more of that experience? Maybe so!

There’s a Law of Attraction ‘trick’ I really like. It’s called Segment Intending and comes from the Abraham Hicks material. The basic idea is pretty simple: Whenever you’re about to do something, spend a few moments thinking about how you’d like it to go.

For example, if you’re driving to the store, you might set an intention to see something beautiful on the way, to have a nice encounter or maybe run into somebody there you haven’t seen for a while.

If you’re about to ask a favor of someone, you might set an intention that it goes well without awkwardness, so whether the answer is yes or no, the conversation ends with a good feeling.

Simple, right? But does it actually work?

The first time I used this trick, I’d just had a call from my sister, who lives in another state. She was worried about her youngest daughter down in San Francisco who’d been very ill and wasn’t answering her phone. She asked if I’d be willing to drive down there to make sure she was okay or take her to the hospital if need be?

A little context: This was 8pm on a very dark winter night, during a massive rain storm. And my niece had moved to a part of the city with convoluted streets and terrible parking, difficult to navigate even on a sunny day. It might take hours to find her place and get to her, and what if she didn’t answer her door? What was that bit about taking her to the hospital?! I had to work the next morning!

I wanted to say “Are you kidding me? No!” but my poor sister seemed really freaked out. Before I had to say anything though, she told me ‘Hold on, I’m going to try calling her one more time. I’ll call you right back.”

That was when my wife remembered Segment Intending! We both put massive energy into conjuring up a better outcome: my sister would call back and say “It’s okay, her boyfriend just showed up at her place. She just fell asleep and that’s why she didn’t answer the phone. She’s actually feeling much better. Thanks anyway.”

And that’s exactly what happened! It worked! Crisis averted!

But how did it work? The answer to that question is a bit complicated, involving the famous Double Slit Experiment and the idea of Superposition from quantum physics. You can check out my book Hacking Reality for a deep dive, but basically it has to do with turning off our subconscious ‘autopilot’ and becoming more intentional with our experience of life. That’s where EFT tapping comes into the picture.

Trying to imagine an unusually good outcome probably runs counter to our powerful subconscious mind. The subconscious includes a vast memory bank of every bad thing that ever happened to us. Even things we witnessed happening to other people. Even things we just heard about!

The point of storing all of those negative experiences is to help us avoid those things in the future. It’s all about survival for the subconscious. Unfortunately for us, subconsciously projecting that negative memory bank onto the future tends to create negative expectations. In other words, this is the opposite of Segment Intending!

Our awareness of these negative expectations usually comes in the form of unpleasant emotions like anxiety, dread or fear. Lucky for us we can neutralize them with EFT tapping. Here’s a generic example:

Tapping on the karate chop point:
“Even though I’m expecting the worst from this experience, and I’m feeling pretty nervous about it, I deeply love and completely accept myself”

Tapping through the points:
All of this dread
I’m not expecting this to go well
It hasn’t gone well in the past
So why would it go well this time?
Oh yes, because I’m a different person!
I’m much better prepared
It might actually go really well!
This anxious feeling
This negative expectation
The bad thing already happened
This is not the same situation at all
I give myself permission to feel excited
I choose to feel optimistic about this
Etc.

You don’t necessarily need tapping for Segment Intending to work, but anytime the emotional stakes are high, even just a few minutes of EFT can help shift our reality in ways that might seem magical.

Why not give it a try today? It might be a wonderful habit to acquire!

Copyright 2023 Rob Nelson

Interested in working with Rob?  Click here for details

Nine Years of Neck Pain, Gone in 10 Minutes!

Posted on by Rob Nelson

When I first started my EFT practice, I’d been a massage therapist for many years, and every so often I’d pull out my trusty massage table to work with one of my long-time clients.

Judy had been coming to me for about nine years. She had been injured doing assembly work in a factory, and every few months her neck and shoulders would get so tight she’d end up with terrible headaches. Whenever the pain became unbearable, she’d come to me for massage and that would usually do the trick for about six weeks or so.

One day Judy showed up for a massage in really terrible shape. Her neck was so stiff she couldn’t even turn her head from side to side. She had to move her whole torso!
On the zero to ten scale, her pain was a nine! 

She was in such distress I decided we should try some tapping before the massage. I had no idea whether it would actually help—she’d once told me about seeing the damage to her neck on x-rays, but somehow I knew we should at least try it.

I had Judy tap on her karate chop point and repeat: “Even though I have this neck pain, I deeply and completely accept myself”.
The tapping we did was very basic, mostly just repeating “this neck pain” with each tapping point, though I also had her do the 9-gamut technique as well.

Very quickly her pain level dropped down to a 6 or 7. That got her attention!

We followed up with another round of basic tapping: “Even though I still have some of this neck pain” and tapping through the points with "This remaining pain." This dropped the pain level down to about a 4, then another round got it down to a 3. Judy was excited, but at this point progress seemed to stall, so I asked if she thought there was an emotional contributor to the pain.

Judy didn’t blink an eye “Oh yes!” she said, “ANGER!”.

After so many years of giving Judy massage, I’d heard the whole story of her injury many, many times! It was very clear to me what we needed to tap on:

“Even though this pain has kept me from living the life I wanted to live.”
“Even though I'm angry at my supervisor for not protecting me.”
“Even though I’m angry at the company for trying to deny my disability claim”
“Even though I'm totally sick of this pain and angry it won't get better”
“Even though I’m angry at my body”.

After a few rounds of this, her pain was down to zero. Judy was astonished!  She began moving her head from side to side, cautiously at first but then wildly swinging it around in a circle!  I have to admit, I found this very alarming, but Judy was absolutely ecstatic.  Pain free for the first time in years.

Ten minutes!  That’s all it took.  Since I still had to give Judy a massage, I’d been watching the clock and in just ten minutes we'd accomplished far more than 75 minutes of intensive massage therapy.

This was one of those genuine “ten-minute miracles” EFT is famous for. They certainly don’t happen every time, or even all that often. And expecting instant results can lead to disappointment and giving up, when sometimes persistence is vital.
But they really do happen sometimes, and it’s a truly wonderful experience to participate in that.

I told Judy that I didn't know if we'd solved the problem forever, but if it came back then she'd be able to tap on the pain as soon as it was noticeable, and before it got very bad. She loved the idea of being in control of the situation, after so many years of feeling victimized by the injury.

I saw Judy one last time, about four months later. She called for a massage and I assumed her neck had started hurting again, but she said no—it was just a little tension in her lower back from over doing it in yoga class.  Weirdly enough, I think she’d almost forgotten she’d even had a chronic neck problem for most of a decade.

So that’s the story of how I lost a regular massage client to EFT, but believe me, I’m not complaining! It’s an incredible joy to see someone heal like that. And though that was many years ago, I’ve never lost my gratitude to Gary Craig for sharing this gift of EFT with the world. 

Copyright 2023 Rob Nelson

Interested in working with Rob?  Click here for details

A Seemingly Trivial Car Crash

Posted on by Rob Nelson

Jane was suffering from dystonia (a painful and uncontrollable spasming in her neck). She’d recently left an abusive long-term relationship, and was suffering chronic pain throughout her body, along with severe anxiety and bouts of self-loathing. On disability and barely able to care for herself, Jane found herself becoming reclusive.

As we began working through her recent divorce, trauma from the past began surfacing. Major trauma, including witnessing the death of her baby brother when Jane was just 3 years old.

Like many of my clients, Jane had already “worked through” these memories in ‘talk therapy’ but had never actually found relief. Each time we tapped through a major trauma I was secretly optimistic we’d gotten to the root of the dystonia. But despite overall improvements to Jane’s health and outlook, her spasming and pain would return again and again.

One day Jane casually mentioned being in an automobile accident. In contrast to the horrendous abuse she’d suffered, it seemed pretty minor. She wasn’t even injured in the collision. Even so, I’d been reading The Body Bears the Burden, by Dr. Robert Scaer, and was eager to explore the memory.

Much of Dr. Scaer’s 35 year career with chronic pain, involved victims of motor vehicle accidents, many of whom developed serious PTSD after seemingly trivial collisions. Invariably these patients had a history of traumatic abuse as children. His work in the neurophysiology of trauma and the role of disassociation in PTSD is groundbreaking.

Jane explained that a car came out of nowhere and broadsided her own car, directly where she was sitting in the back seat behind the driver. Jane related the event with no apparent emotion, and happily told me how the driver of the other car was very polite and apologized profusely. She hadn’t been hurt physically, but did remember being a bit dazed and “out of it”, possible signs that she’d disassociated.

We began tapping: “Even though that car came out of nowhere…” and immediately Jane began experiencing very intense fear! Her whole body was shaking. She was very surprised and wanted to “leave and get away from here”. I urged her to keep tapping.

We tapped on every aspect I could think of: “that horrible sound, that BANG” and “I was trapped and couldn’t get out” and “there was nothing I could do, I was helpless” and “my body was thrown and shaken”. With each new aspect Jane would exclaim, “Yes! There WAS a terrible sound!” or “Oh my god, I WAS trapped, I couldn’t get out of my door and panicked”.

Jane was absolutely stunned that so much intensity was stored in this memory and told me so again and again. She’d had no idea this was an important event, yet the feelings we were releasing were overwhelming.

We’d tapped the intensity way down (from a 10 down to maybe a 2 or 3), when suddenly her eyes went wide and she exclaimed, “This wasn’t the first crash! There was another!”

Years before the crash we’d been working on, Jane had been broadsided, again from the left, when someone ran a red light. Once again, the car came out of nowhere and there was nothing she could do. Potentially a much more deadly accident, Jane had walked away seemingly unscathed, though in hindsight she’d clearly disassociated.

As we tapped through this second crash, yet another forgotten memory burst into awareness. Even earlier, in her early 20’s, Jane had been driving at dusk and two boys on bikes had come out of nowhere, again from the left, and passed right in front of her car. Only by jamming on the brakes did she miss hitting them.

Although no one was hurt, she remembered that the incident had plunged her into a state of deep shock for several days. This memory was much more emotionally charged than the two collisions. Jane was fixated on the idea that she ‘could have killed them’ and that she ‘wouldn’t be able to live with myself’.

As we tapped on this intense ideation, Jane was suddenly remembering the death of her brother. She cried out, “I am three years old again” and re-experienced overwhelming feelings of guilt over not being able to prevent it.

Although we had tapped on his death and those same feelings over a number of sessions, somehow this experience of nearly hitting those boys had driven the emotional trauma deep into her body. This massive dissociation set the stage for Jane’s dystonia, a kind of the compulsive turning away from what she could no longer bear to see.

This was a breakthrough session and Jane’s dystonia did fade away. That said, this was not a “one session wonder.”  It actually took a lot of courageous work over quite a few sessions to achieve this blessed relief for Jane. But still, it was an exciting and encouraging victory I wanted to share with you.

Copyright 2023 Rob Nelson

Interested in working with Rob?  Click here for details

Surrogate Tapping for a Hostile Ex

Posted on by Rob Nelson

In the aftermath of a painful and bitter divorce, Joan was suffering from such intense negativity and anger, she was in constant turmoil, her health was suffering and she was in danger of losing her job. Recently Joan’s closest friend had ‘abandoned her’, unable to endure the intractable dark cloud. 

It seems that Jake, Joan’s husband of twelve years, had become a meth addict, successfully hiding this from her for several years. Jake had become increasingly secretive and detached from her and their children. He’d also become ever more verbally abusive toward Joan.

One day she discovered that he’d somehow managed to burn through $230,000 of equity in their property!  The money had gone for drugs, and as she found out later, expensive prostitutes. She learned that he’d been cheating on her for years!

When she eventually filed for divorce, Jake aggressively contested it, forcing her to spend $40,000 on legal fees. As a terrible side note, the day Joan filed for divorce, her mother died unexpectedly!

Over the course of five sessions, we tapped away most of Joan’s bitterness, hurt and rage toward Jake, along with the unresolved grief over her mother’s death – grief that was contaminated by feelings of guilt, rejection and abandonment.

Joan quickly regained her composure and sense of humor and was able to mostly turn away from the past and begin building a new life.

About a year later, Joan came back.  She was happy about letting go of the past, but told me that every month she had to deal with Jake around the child support money.  She said it was routinely awful.  He’d bicker over petty expenses, blame her for all of his problems and verbally abuse her, on the phone and through nasty letters.

Despite the progress she’d made, Joan felt vulnerable to these attacks and re-traumatized every month.  She wanted to “get him out of my system once and for all”, and so we launched into a follow up session.

About halfway into that session, I had a very strong intuition that we should try some surrogate tapping on Jake.  At first Joan was aghast, and extremely reluctant to try it, but finally agreed to give it a shot.  I had her start by visualizing Jake near the beginning of their marriage, when things were still sweet. She said she had a very clear picture of him in mind.

With surrogate EFT, we tap as if we really are the recipient, with the goal of relieving their suffering.  It’s a bit like prayer in that sense. 

Once Joan had a clear connection with Jake, in her mind’s eye, I led her through a long round of tapping, that became increasingly negative.  For me, energetically, it was like being in a cloud of black smoke from a burning tire!

“Even though I, Jake, absolutely hate Joan, and blame her for everything, and wish her nothing but harm, I still deeply and completely accept myself”

“Even though I’m living in a dark cloud of negativity, anger, rage and hatred for Joan, and it’s all her fault I started using drugs in the first place….”

“Even though I HATE Joan, and it’s all her fault and I’m miserable being in this dark cloud of negativity….”

Then we tapped with these reminder phrases: “I hate Joan…it’s all her fault…I want her to suffer…I’m trapped in this dark cloud…I’m so angry and bitter….I blame everything on her…I’m miserable and it’s all her fault…she’s a total bitch and I hate her…she told on me to my family….I wish she was dead…I’m so bitter and lost…”

This horrible round of tapping went on and on and on. I had my eyes closed but at times Joan seemed to have a significant shift, with gasps, sighs, and exclamations. Something big was happening.  Something profound for her at least.

When it was finally over and we opened our eyes, she reported seeing everything in the room very vividly, as though everything was radiating an intense light. She felt it as a spiritual experience unlike anything she’d ever felt before.

I have to admit I myself was reeling a bit, and had no idea what to make of Joan’s report.  But when she came back the next week, she was beaming!  She said “He wasn’t nice, but he was civil.  He just handed me the check.  There was no quibbling over expenses, no put downs, no verbal abuse.  You can’t imagine what an incredible change this was”

For the first time in two years, he’d simply paid her what she asked, with no nasty note or angry phone call.  For Joan this was overwhelming evidence of success. She was ecstatic.

Helping Jake release at least some of his horrible energy, after having let go of most of her own negativity toward him, seemed to help Joan shift into an alternate universe with a much better version of Jake.  A wonderful example of Hacking Reality!

Copyright Rob Nelson 2022



Interested in working with Rob?  Click here for details

Hacking Reality for a Dream Self

Posted on by Rob Nelson

“Helen” compared her mother to Snow White—pure, sensitive, absolutely special and fine. But also very unstable and often suicidal. She said that growing up “I was there to support her to have a happy life”. Always struggling to be good enough for her mom, Helen believed that she couldn’t have any negative feelings or her mom would literally die.

Though she did her best as a child to adapt to this unbearable pressure, Helen could never actually help her mother—and her mother eventually did kill herself. A tangle of frustration, anger, shame and grief dominated Helen’s life, even 20 years after the suicide. Helen felt that “If I’m not meeting the needs of others then I have no right to be alive at all”.

Shortly after her mother’s death, Helen had a nightmare which was still very present for her. It carried powerful negative feelings and had come up again and again over the years. Helen asked if Hacking Reality could be used to work with her dream self. I’d never tried before but we decided to go for it. Here is the dream as Helen told it to me:

She was in the back of a van, being driven somewhere, and there were many dead bodies wrapped up in cloth or shrouds. One of these was her mother’s and Helen was holding it in her arms.

Suddenly Helen realized that her mother was not dead and began to unwrap her. Though she appeared skeletal, her mother glared at her. “She hated me for believing that she was dead. She said I only wanted money—inheritance. I said ‘no’ and gave her a kiss on the forehead, but she pushed my face away with her cold dead hand”.

Recounting this dream filled Helen with horror and a terrible feeling of rejection. We did some tapping just to bring the overall intensity level down.

I had Helen imagine stepping into the scene as her current self, while freezing her mother. She took her younger dream self’s hand and asked what she was feeling and was told ‘intense pain and hurt’. Asked what she’d learned about life from this experience the dream self said “There is a wall…no trust in others that they mean well”.

I had Helen tap on her dream self for sadness, rejection, hurt, the feeling that there is a wall, and a sense of hopelessness. After a few rounds the younger self (and Helen) began to feel much more peaceful and okay.

We asked the younger dream self how she would like the scene to change. She wanted her mother to react in a sane and loving way. Normally this might involve tapping on the mom, and perhaps going back into mom’s childhood to tap on one of mom’s own younger selves. In this dream memory, however, we simply allowed mom’s skeletal body to crumble into dust and asked for mom’s spirit to show up.

Immediately Helen’s face transformed—her eyes were closed but she had a look of intense rapture. I asked if mom’s spirit was there and Helen simply nodded and smiled. I gave her some time and then suggested that if there were anything she or her younger self wanted to ask or tell her mother, that this was her chance.

Helen told me her mother’s spirit was radiant, completely relaxed, loving and happy. After a few moments she said “Okay, we’re finished”. The wall was gone, replaced by a certainty that “we really love each other”.

When asked, Helen could still remember having had that terrible dream, but it was no longer present in the same way. It was distant and devoid of feeling—eclipsed by this new, wonderful picture and relationship with her mother.

47 years of pain, hurt and confusion resolved. Instead of being drained by a host of difficult intrusive memories, Helen felt that her mother’s spirit would now be present to her as an ally. There might be other traumatized younger selves to work with, but something fundamental had shifted.

This depth and intensity of healing is not unusual when we contact the spirits of parents or other loved ones—even if the relationship was troubled or the death problematic. Because we really are working in the quantum field, I believe that some part of the loved one actually does show up for the healing and reconciliation.

I should mention that for Helen this powerful dream reimprinting happened during our fifth session. I don’t believe we could have started with this. We’d done a lot of good work already to make this possible.

Copyright Rob Nelson 2022



Interested in working with Rob?  Click here for details

Tapping Away Your Inner Critic

Posted on by Rob Nelson
inner critic

Have you ever seen an old movie where one of the characters starts hearing voices?  Seems like there’s always someone wanting to call the men in the white coats, with a net, to haul the person off to the loony bin.

Ironically, I suspect most of us have a voice in our head, offering an ongoing and rather negative narration.  It’s all about how we’ve messed up, or how we’re about to.  For some people this can be pretty intense, intrusive and discouraging.

If there’s no such narrator in your own mind, consider yourself lucky.  There’s definitely a spectrum, and you’re on the happy end of it.  Yay!

Alas, many of my clients are not so fortunate.  Their inner critic gives them no peace and pretty much ruins their day-to-day life.  When I ask for examples, it’s often pretty harsh:

            “You’re going to say something stupid – they’re never going to hire you”
            “Don’t eat those cookies, your ass is huge!”
            “You’ll miss this shot, you always choke when the stakes are high”
            “What the hell is wrong with you?  How could you forget her birthday, you idiot?”

Where it gets fun (for me) is in pointing out that this voice in their head isn’t their voice.  
            'What do you mean it’s not my voice?  It’s in my head!'  
            'Yeah, but it’s saying ‘you’, right?  We don’t refer to ourselves as ‘you’.  We don’t walk into a deli and tell the counter guy “Yeah, you’d like a pastrami on rye”.  You’d say “I want a pastrami on rye”.  That’s not your voice.'

Of course, this begs the question:  If it’s not your voice, whose voice is it?  
It usually takes about 3 milliseconds to for that realization to hit. 

Most often it’s mom or dad.  Not always, but usually.  Or more accurately, it’s an internalized version of their parent.  Mom isn’t secretly broadcasting into their head from an undisclosed location! 

What seems to happen, for many of us, is that we begin to internalize the voice of our critical parent (or parents) as young children, in an attempt to avoid punishment. Even a relatively mild scolding can be a big deal for a sensitive child.

Unfortunately, some parents are actually brutal, and may have an agenda of finding fault as a justification for punishing their child. They’ll pounce on the slightest infraction or just make issues up out of thin air. And so, the rules are mystifying and it’s almost impossible to stay out of trouble.

Internalizing the voice of a scary parent may actually be an act of self-defense.  A strategy for anticipating and avoiding their wrath.  Whether it actually works or not, years later we’re stuck with them ‘living rent free in our head’.

That’s the bad news.  I suspect there’s pretty much zero benefit to that sort of critical voice.  It’s never seems to be encouraging or helpful in any real way. 

The good news is that it can be tapped away!  

I’ve seen this happen in several ways –suddenly it’s just gone!  Or the volume starts to go down.  It shows up less and less. Or now there’s an option to simply not listen, and turn away.  It might not even be that hard to do, once the intention is set. 

Here’s a simple tapping script to get you started, if you like.

On the Karate Chop point:
Even though I have this critic voice in my head, that’s not my voice and I forgive myself for ever taking it on.

And tapping through the points:
This voice in my head
This harsh, critical voice
It never says anything nice
It’s never encouraging
I’d love to stop hearing it
I’d love to have blessed silence in my head!
But even if it doesn’t just go away
Even if it never goes away
I choose to stop listening
It’s okay for me to make mistakes
I’ll always make mistakes in my life
Just like everyone else
I don’t need to be perfect to love and respect myself
I don’t need to focus on my faults
This awful voice
This harsh, critical narrator in my head
I want to get to a place where I can just roll my eyes
OMG there it is again, how funny
Until I don’t even hear it anymore

Please Note: with conditions like schizophrenia, people sometimes hear hostile voices of strangers, narrating their experience or telling them to do self-destructive things.  This is an entirely different kind of problem.  Please consult a mental health expert for any serious mental health issues.

Copyright Rob Nelson 2021

Interested in working with Rob?  Click here for details

Tapping for Fear of Heights

Posted on by Rob Nelson

Once, when my daughter was young, I signed her up for four days of nature classes in Yosemite National Park, a beautiful valley surrounded by stunning mountain slopes.

On her second day it was my turn to help chaperone the eight kids in her group.  We were supposed to be hiking up the steep Yosemite Falls trail, but a little 9-year-old girl named Anna was holding everyone up.

Anna kept saying “I’m scared of heights” over and over and that she wanted to go back down.  The higher we got, the slower she walked, until she was really dragging her feet.  Eventually our young science teacher was holding her hand and practically hauling her up the slope!

I could see the teacher was frustrated and at a loss, so when we stopped for a snack I approached the little girl and asked if she'd like me to help take away her fear of heights. She looked extremely skeptical, like I was obviously some kind of weirdo.  But I told her that was my job back home and it was very easy and wouldn't hurt at all.  

After some hesitation she agreed and I had her tap on her karate chop point, saying “Even though I have this fear of heights I'm still a great kid”.  Then about halfway through tapping on the points, a little boy next to us shouted “does anyone want my apple?” and I lost that little girl’s attention 100%! 

Feeling that I was wasting my time, I did manage to get her back and starting where we’d left off, we completed one single round of tapping, using only the most basic wording “this fear of heights” for each point. 

After a total of maybe 45 seconds of tapping, I asked about her fear now, expecting her to just roll her eyes.  Instead, in a very matter of fact voice, she said: “It's gone”.  And it really was! No more problems for the rest of the trip!

The other chaperone was very excited by this success, and asked if this EFT thing only worked on children. That made me laugh since I rarely get to work with kids in my practice. He told me that his wife Jane had a severe height phobia and I agreed to tap with her back at our camp the next morning.

Just thinking about heights in the most general way, Jane reported her anxiety was an 8 out of 10. A few rounds of tapping brought awareness of a heavy feeling on her heart.  Tapping on that sensation seemed to bring the general intensity down to zero.

Next, we looked for specific situations that had triggered her fear in the past. Climbing to the top of a ladder, to get into her attic, was a big one. Especially the sensation she might start falling over backwards. She started at about a 7 intensity, but this time it only took three rounds, which included “This falling over backwards feeling”.

And then another memory surfaced, about going on a carnival ride with her young son. Even though the ride was “only” about 15 feet high, and she trusted it enough to put her son on it, she'd been in tears the whole time and very embarrassed by her fear.

I had her tap the karate chop point and say “Even though I was so afraid of this dumb kiddie ride...” and she began to laugh.  She laughed harder and harder until tears were running down her cheeks. Her husband looked at me in astonishment. Clearly, he’d never seen her laugh like that!

I'm used seeing yawning as energy is released, but this was massive and almost a bit scary! 

We never got past the set-up statement.  Jane said all of her anxiety was gone.  I asked her to vividly imagine various scenarios—standing on a cliff edge, at the top of a wobbly ladder, etc. She said she could maybe get up to a “2” so we did one more round of general tapping and that was that.

There was a huge boulder right next to the campsite, and Jane eagerly climbed up to the top with her husband, standing on the edge as he held onto her coat.  This was over a sheer drop of about 10 feet.  Zero fear!  I asked her to imagine hanging over the edge of a great precipice. No anxiety.

This took a bit longer than Anna’s 45 seconds of tapping, but no more than an hour.  That evening Jane’s husband came to me and said he had “photographic evidence” of our success on his digital camera.

The pictures showed Jane climbing the very steep and sheer path up to Vernal Falls, standing one foot away from a vertical drop (she was still using normal caution). I was elated, but it wasn't till the next day, when I hiked up that path myself, that I really got understood how successful we'd been.  I'd have to say we were three happy campers!

Copyright Rob Nelson 2021

Interested in working with Rob?  Click here for details

On the Road to Girona

Posted on by Rob Nelson

Back in March 2018 my wife and I were lucky enough to visit Spain. After 4 incredible days in Barcelona, we’d planned to rent a car and head north, visiting some glorious medieval villages. Our first stop was about an hour up the road, the Old Jewish Quarter in Girona.

We paid a bit extra for a car with GPS, voiced by a polite but rather firm English woman who guided us out of the narrow twisting lanes of the Gracia neighborhood in Barcelona and out onto the big, modern Spanish freeway heading north. We decided to call her Gwendolyn and were very grateful for her help.

About 20 kilometers south of Girona though, our trust in Gwendolyn was put to the test. She was quite insistent that we take the next exit, despite very clear road signs instructing us to keep going on the freeway. That was weird.

But I had faith in Gwendolyn and took her recommended exit. We were suddenly on a very busy and rather narrow four lane highway, crammed with big trucks. We began heading east, away from the coast and up into the hills. The heavy traffic and curving road spiked our stress level and after a few close calls we took a sketchy looking exit to try and get our bearings.

After driving on this blasted road for nearly half an hour, Gwendolyn told us Girona was a mere hour and 40 minutes away! The screen showed us on a great looping detour up into the mountains. Yikes! Clearly there was some crazy mistake. Ignoring Gwen’s protests, we headed back the way we’d come to get back on the actual freeway.

​Sure enough, once we got back on the freeway it was about 20 more minutes to Girona. We’d just wasted an entire hour! To make matters worse, we couldn’t figure out how to get Gwendolyn to shut the hell up without turning off the GPS entirely. This was a big deal because she kept insisting we take each and every exit on the way to Girona, even though they clearly led off into the empty countryside.

I’m sorry to say that Gwendolyn’s increasingly unwelcome and seemingly psychotic travel advice provoked some rather coarse language on my part. At first this may have shocked my poor stressed out wife, but soon enough she joined right in cursing poor Gwen.

Girona was amazing. The Old Jewish Quarter is absolutely worth a visit. But I think we were both a bit haunted by the mystery of faithless Gwendolyn. Was she possessed or what? Should we try and find some Holy Water? Before continuing our journey north, we decided to investigate.

Delving deep into the menus of the GPS – layer upon layer of settings, we found the simple but idiotic answer. An option to AVOID TOLL ROADS had been chosen by someone for some reason at some point. And that big beautiful “freeway” was in fact a toll road – we’d paid a €7 toll just a few kilometers south of Girona. Lovely Gwendolyn was just trying to be helpful after all.

If we hadn’t turned around, that one hidden setting meant we would have burned an extra €20 or more in petrol and cost us a few precious hours of sightseeing. Not cool!

Can you guess where I’m going with this?

How many of us have crazy default settings we’re completely unaware of? We’re trying so hard to reach our destination, but our own inner-Gwendolyn sends us off on a wild goose chase.  When our life goes off the rails it’s tempting to blame everyone and everything in sight. But honestly, it’s probably some messed up default setting in our programming.

You might say that all of us are born and raised in the backseat of our own car. Our folks are driving. They set the course, put it on cruise control and even pre-set the stations on the radio buttons. By the time we climb into the driver’s seat and take the wheel, our lives are pretty much on autopilot.

It’s important to realize this! We can change our own settings – if we know they’re there. If we know to go looking for them. It isn’t even all that hard, really. A lot of what I do with clients is really helping them take their life off autopilot.

​So what’s your own Girona? What sort of life are you steering for? And what settings, programs, vows or beliefs might be sending you off in the wrong direction?

copyright 2018 Rob Nelson

Interested in working with Rob? Click here for details

​

The Roots of Procrastination

Posted on by Rob Nelson

Note: This article is a draft of one of the chapters in my upcoming book: Hacking Reality

You're not the boss of me!

I love this picture of the little girl, arms crossed over her chest, glaring at an adult just off screen.  You can easily guess her thoughts: “You’re not the boss of me.”

I think a great deal of our procrastination comes from an inner child stuck in this attitude of defiant rebellion. They’re confusing us with their parent!

When I decide to get up half an hour early to meditate, or to stop eating wheat, or go to the gym, I’m making that decision from my grown-up, adult perspective.  It may be all about self-care and self-love, but essentially I’m stepping into a parental role with myself.

If I happened to grow up with a demanding, critical or domineering parent, there’s a good chance my well-intentioned decision will activate a whole posse of younger selves. I’m unknowingly invoking a total power struggle. One I’m likely to lose.

Other reasons for procrastination might involve feelings of deep inadequacy – instead of rebellion there’s an intense fear of exposure by the younger self. Failure is guaranteed, so why risk everyone finding out how worthless I am by trying something new?

There can also be a fear of losing one’s place in the family system – usually the black sheep. If I try and actually succeed somehow, I won’t fit in anymore and I’ll be abandoned or driven out. I know that probably sounds really weird – who wants to be the black sheep anyway?

But remember, we’re looking at a very young younger self being activated.  They don’t know who we are. They probably register our intentions somehow as coming from a parent or teacher.  If procrastination is a big problem in your life, exploring any childhood roots might be really helpful. Much more fruitful than doubling down on the old willpower or beating yourself up.

Here are a few simple questions to ask yourself:

  • Did I have an over-bearing parent?
  • Was there an endless to-do list of chores?
  • Was whatever I did just never good enough?
  • Did I have a perfect sibling who could do no wrong?
  • Was I forced to become a caretaker for a parent or my siblings?
  • Is there a humiliating failure or defeat I’ve just never gotten over?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, there’s almost certainly at least one younger self causing your procrastination. But please don’t hate them! They need your help. And helping them will set you free.

Try this: Make a short list of memories related to your answers above. Choose one to work on right now (yes, right now – this is about procrastination, right?). Choose the one that stands out, or that has the most emotional charge when you think about it.  And then rate that emotional charge. Not at the time it happened, but right now just remembering it.

On a scale of zero to ten, how much intensity do you have? And what is that intensity about? Is it embarrassment? Anger? Guilt? Some combination of feelings?  Whatever you’re feeling, do some good old EFT tapping on it and try to get the intensity level down for that memory. In fact, try to get it down to zero if you can.

And then do so for each of those memories on your list.  You may not be able to do all of them right at once, but perhaps 2 or 3 a day until they’re all discharged.  By then your procrastination may be a thing of the past!  Literally.

One last thing – when I checked back in with Grace a week later I was shocked!  She’d actually downloaded some algebra problems off the web and had been doing them for fun! 

Copyright Rob Nelson 2018