Uncategorized - Rob Nelson

Winning Reality

Posted on October 18, 2025October 19, 2025 by Rob Nelson

Do you ever think about reality? What it is or how it works? I sure do!
Not that I’m some kind of philosopher. I have more pragmatic interests, like how do we actually create the reality we want?

Many people believe that we’re living on a ball of rock, hurtling through the vast emptiness of space, having evolved somehow from pond scum. Our lives are random, infinitesimal blips devoid of meaning. Our self-awareness merely an accident of nature. Even if there is a God, humans are of no special significance. Some ‘extinctionists’ even claim that humanity is a blight, and the world would be better off without us!

On the other hand, some maintain we’re living in a kind of simulation, something like a cosmic computer game, and the programmer may or may not be God. This worldview suggests that our lives do indeed have meaning, that we may be on some sort of quest or grand adventure. Perhaps there were different types of lifetimes on offer and we chose the one we’re in now. And no doubt there were many options to choose from to customize the experience, before entering as a player.

Of course there are many other worldviews on offer, but if I had to choose between just these two, I’d much prefer the simulation model of reality. Wouldn’t you?

I'm a big fan of meaning and purpose, and definitely like the idea being able to ‘win’ the game, so to speak. I’m not exactly sure what winning might be, honestly, but for now I’ve settled on the notion of authenticity.

Another reason I’d go with the game scenario are all the strange and memorable experiences that left me questioning the reality of random chance. Here’s a rather happy one that I’d love to share.

It was the summer I turned 22, between college and graduate school. I was traveling and happened to meet a lovely young woman on the train down from Seattle. Bonnie was 25 and also traveling, but soon to fly home to upstate New York for a new job. Our three-week love affair had an actual expiration date, which made it intense and wonderful.

One day we were hiking through a massive redwood forest along the northern coast of California. We hadn't seen another living soul all that long day and our sense of being in the middle of nowhere was very strong. Then, just as we were heading out of the woods, with dusk coming on, away in the distance, coming up the trail we saw a backpacker, his big red pack shining in the gloaming.

Did I mention we were in the middle of freaking nowhere? And that this was the first person we’ve seen all day? So why wouldn’t he be an old friend of Bonnie she'd known in college back in Oneonta, NY? This was 1981, so there were only about 230 million people in the US. Perhaps four and a half billion in the whole world. So pretty good odds an old friend would just happen to show up, right?
Just an odd coincidence.

The great psychologist Jung actually coined the term Synchronicity to describe the ‘acausal connecting principle’ underlying these strange sorts of meaningful coincidences. In fact, in 1952 he wrote a whole book about it that I'd go on to read in grad school. This leads me to believe these experiences must be somewhat common. I've probably had more than my share, how about you?

For me, stories of synchronicity register as cool, trippy, mysterious, fun and fascinating. They suggest that there’s something going on beneath the surface of life, behind the scenes, so to speak. That life is less random than we’ve been led to believe and perhaps purpose and meaning might underly many (or most) of our experiences.

I realize that some folks are rather uncomfortable with this sort of take on reality. If you’ve read this far though, I’m guessing you’re of a more adventurous, open minded sort and I salute you.

So let’s get back to the idea of winning the reality game. Perhaps life isn’t just randomly happening to us, but rather responding to us? If so, it's probably responding to our thoughts, feelings and beliefs. And theoretically at least, these are things we can control.

Many of us have dabbled with affirmations and positive thinking with little to no results to show. That’s because our subconscious is where the action is, right? It's running at least 95% of our life for us, or so we're told, and mainly through our beliefs. Our beliefs are like lines of code in our operating system, and most of our limiting beliefs were formed at a very young age. They’re running at a deep deep level and more or less immune to our conscious attempts to replace them.

Adding to the challenge of creating a better life, most of us have a collection of old, stuck emotions. Feelings of unworthiness, anxiety, guilt, sadness, shame or rage can really gum up the works. In fact, I believe they act as a kind of powerful magnetic charge, keeping us stuck to the circumstances, people and experience of life we’d most like to leave behind.

So how do we win? My favorite approach these days is based on the idea of alternate realities or timelines. If these exist, could it be that we're shifting between similar versions of reality on a regular basis, maybe on a daily or even hourly basis, without even realizing it? I love the idea that the life you're wishing for is already underway. That there’s an alternative version of you actually living that life right now!

Instead of ‘manifesting’ the change you want, it’s all about raising your ‘vibration’ to match that better reality that’s already underway. Seems like a lot less work! And I think we’re already doing this. We’re just doing it unintentionally as we react emotionally to the ups and downs of life. This means we're just as likely to drift into a more negative reality that we hate than the positive one we wish for.

Can we take this whole alternate reality thing off autopilot and deliberately shift into better timelines? Yes, absolutely. The tool for this I've found is EFT tapping. I’ve actually seen it happen without even trying, simply by tapping away negative emotions and replacing negative limiting beliefs. It’s happened in my own life and for hundreds of clients.

To be clear, I’m not just talking about having a better attitude toward the life you already have. I mean, that’s a nice achievement in and of itself. But no, I mean that actual circumstances change. Suddenly there’s an extra $4000 in your checking account. Your chronic health problem is just gone and it’s almost hard to remember how bad it was. The person who was just bugging the hell out of you has somehow changed in such a wonderful way it's hard to believe.

The EFT tapping part of all this is fairly straightforward. Just tap down the intensity of your feelings about whatever you don’t like. Tap away the validity of your negative limiting beliefs. That's entry level reality hacking. Lately I've been exploring how our interwoven, overlapping relationships might influence our ability to ‘win’ by shifting timelines.

For example, we may ‘create our own reality’ but we’re also immersed in various degrees of social reality. There’s a level of reality co-creation influenced by our immediate family, our community, and the culture and society we belong to. Can we become immune to the turbulence or stagnation in the energy of those around us? Or perhaps change at such a powerful level that our family, friends and even society ripple into much better patterns all together?

There’s also the “reality” presented to us through the illuminated screens in our hands or on our walls. Are we not programmed by the programs we choose to watch, and influenced by the influencers presented to us by increasingly sophisticated algorithms? What do you think? Aside from going cold turkey and giving up our screens is there an elegant way to neutralize any negative effects so we can navigate our way into the alternate reality we’d most love?

This is the kind of stuff I’ve been working on. Definitely a work in progress. If you’d like to join me in this exploration, specifically around creating a better financial reality, I have a class coming up on Friday, October 24^th, 2025 called Money Magic with EFT. If you can't make it live, or you're reading this down the road, the class will be recorded for streaming.

I think I’ve got some really good stuff to share. A game plan for upleveling your money reality.
Here’s a link if you’d like to check out it out.

Interested in working with Rob? Click here for details

Bullet Proof Shoes

Posted on July 23, 2024July 23, 2024 by Rob Nelson

Do you ever shoot yourself in the foot? You know, just when things were starting to go well in your career, or relationship, or health-wise, you made some sort of boneheaded decision or blunder that sets you back? What’s up with that?

After years of witnessing this dynamic in my own life, and through the stories of very intelligent clients (making incredibly dumb mistakes), I think I have an explanation for this strange, self-destructive behavior.

For now, I’m calling it ‘the dreadful equation’ and I suspect that most people have some version of this program running in our subconscious. This is a work in progress, but I present it here in the hopes that this rough draft may be helpful and empowering.

The Dreadful Equation

Young children need to believe that their parents are good people who love them.

Because of the child’s absolute helplessness and dependence on their parents, this really is a NEED. Any other reality (that mom or dad are messed up, for example) is much too terrifying to even consider.

Unfortunately, lots of parents, perhaps even the majority, are in fact, pretty messed up.

Even the best parents, the ones who are really trying, are bound to have an off day now and again. And let’s face it, most parents probably aren’t trying all that hard. They’re basically doing unto their own kids what was done unto them.

So here’s how it works: As a child, if mom and dad are abusive or neglectful, my need to believe they’re good people who love me requires me to decide that I deserve the mistreatment. That must be all I’m worthy of.

That decision is my only way to balance the equation and make sense of what is happening to me.

This is a really big deal. This can set our personal thermostat for worthiness at a very young age. We know that we don’t deserve good things. Otherwise, mom and dad were wrong to treat us that way. So now we have a negative core belief that affects our overall wellbeing, and it’s pretty much immune to change.

As adults we may know full well that mom and/or dad were absolutely terrible people. Doesn’t matter. That childhood belief is still running, like a line of code deep in our subconscious operating system.

For some of us, it’s as if we’re going through life with a hidden agenda of proving mom and dad were right to treat us poorly. So, when things start going just a little too well, time to shoot ourselves in the foot again.

I suppose one solution might be to buy a pair of bullet proof shoes. Maybe you could find some online? Or better yet, you could do some EFT tapping, ideally with a good practitioner, to try and undo that original decision.

Interested in working with Rob? Click here for details

Excerpt on Romantic Relationships from Hacking Reality

Posted on June 5, 2024June 5, 2024 by Rob Nelson

Have you ever had a crush on someone? It can be pretty intense! And when a crush gets reciprocated, watch out! There are few drugs more potent than falling in love. And few experiences more devastating than breaking up.

According to Carl Jung, what’s really going on here is projection. The object of our affection seems so perfect and wonderful because we’re actually projecting our own idealized inner feminine/masculine archetype onto them. Jung called these archetypes the Anima (the perfect feminine) and Animus (the male counterpart). But honestly, the whole thing is a dirty trick!

It’s a dirty trick because it’s totally doomed from the start. Eventually, our projection wears thin, guaranteed. We start to see glimpses of the real person underneath and even if they’re actually pretty great, they’re never going to be that glorious perfect divine being we thought they were. It’s just not possible.

In other words, our rosy-pink-bubble is going to pop. Sooner or later reality sets in. If we’re wise to this dynamic, we might let it go gracefully and allow real love a chance to develop. If not, we’re apt to blame our partner (“You’ve changed! You’re not the man I married!”) then bail on them, hoping that next time ‘love’ will last.

Selection Error

Addiction/recovery specialist Terry Gorski once said the number one relationship problem is selection error. Sometimes people laugh when they hear that. It is kind of a grim joke. Gorski is basically saying that we tend to choose wrong partners and most relationships are pretty much doomed from the start.

I’m sure Mr. Gorski was really on to something, but I don’t believe it’s a selection error at all. We evaluate and select potential partners with uncanny precision. Or rather our subconscious mind does this for us. It just has different goals than ours.

Romantic relationships are the perfect venue for reenacting childhood traumas – those we experienced directly, and the second hand ones, we witnessed our parents going through. Our new partner is almost always a stand-in for Mom and/or Dad.

Meeting someone who will serve us in this way provides a curious kind of excitement. Ironically, another suitor might be hanging around who would make a genuinely awesome partner. They’re loving, loyal, intelligent, successful, and would make a great parent – but they register subconsciously as ‘boring’, unable to provide the needed drama. This is a cruel irony, and I’ve had many clients who deeply regretted rejecting such a person.

Alas, their subconscious mind had other fish to fry.

When we’re growing up, our parents’ relationship (or lack of one) becomes our template. The way they did it is the only way to do it. And no matter how uncomfortable or unhappy it was, anything else feels alien and doesn’t quite fit. For some people, being happy and content for too long can actually generate real anxiety!

As children, if we witnessed fighting, or abandonment, or cheating, or one partner was an addict, an enabler, a belittling critic or long-suffering martyr, or one parent was volatile and terrifying, or cold and emotionally unavailable – our subconscious will find just the right partner to reenact these traumas.

Sometimes it’s not really marriage problems we’re reenacting, but rather our direct relationship with one of our parents. Maybe Mom and Dad got along great, but you were Mom’s scapegoat and suffered terrible verbal abuse. Chances are you’ll find a partner to carry on the scathing.

Remember, the purpose behind all of this reenactment is resolution. The subconscious is trying to get those traumas out of your system in the only way it knows how – repetition. Unfortunately, this strategy rarely works. Maybe it never works. Instead, repetition tends to reinforce our negative beliefs – this really is all I can expect from partnership.

Of course, this whole thing totally sucks. At some point, you might make a solemn vow to never put yourself through something like that again. If Dad and the last three boyfriends were rageaholics, you’ll find someone safe for once. A guy who never even raises his voice, who actually has no access to his anger whatsoever.

At first, this might seem wonderful. Finally, it feels safe to be in partnership. What a relief. But often something weird starts to happen. Your milquetoast partner starts driving you crazy. He’s a doormat! He’s spineless! His limitations become intolerable, and eventually you become the angry partner. You may end up reenacting the same abuse dynamic, but this time as the perpetrator!

Then again, sometimes we’re tricked. Dad was a total deadbeat, so you find someone super successful. He’s really good with money and has an awesome career. Then six months in, through no fault of his own, he loses his job and just can’t find a new one. He feels so bad about letting you down, maybe he starts drinking. So now you’re leaving for work, and he’s lying on the couch in his pajamas, binge-watching Netflix.

Abracadabra, you married your father! No way could you have seen that coming. But your subconscious did.
The good news is that all of this is tappable!

Interested in working with Rob? Click here for details

A Simple Hack for Potential Bad News

Posted on January 9, 2024January 9, 2024 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.

Interested in working with Rob? Click here for details

Tapping into Magic

Posted on September 6, 2023September 6, 2023 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!

Interested in working with Rob? Click here for details

Nine Years of Neck Pain, Gone in 10 Minutes!

Posted on May 3, 2023May 3, 2023 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.

Interested in working with Rob? Click here for details

A Seemingly Trivial Car Crash

Posted on April 11, 2023April 11, 2023 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.

Interested in working with Rob? Click here for details

Surrogate Tapping for a Hostile Ex

Posted on April 12, 2022April 13, 2022 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!

Interested in working with Rob? Click here for details

Hacking Reality for a Dream Self

Posted on March 3, 2022March 3, 2022 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.

Interested in working with Rob? Click here for details

Tapping Away Your Inner Critic

Posted on June 2, 2021June 2, 2021 by Rob Nelson

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.