On a recent flight from San Francisco to Denver, just before take off, I saw two young parents trying to comfort their baby who was clearly distressed. She was really beginning to squirm and fuss.
Compassion (along with the prospect of being trapped for hours near a screaming baby) motivated me to do surrogate tapping.
Keeping my eyes on the unhappy child, and tuning into her energy as best I could, I began discreetly tapping my finger points—as if I were the baby:
“Even though I don’t know where I am, and my ears feel funny, and there are strangers all around me, and I’m scared, my mommy and daddy are here and they love me and will keep me safe”
I tapped through the points with reminder phrases like “my ears hurt…it feels funny in here…it’s too crowded…people are looking at me…but my mommy is holding me…my daddy is here too….etc.” Within a few minutes the baby had completely calmed down and was snuggling in to take a long nap. The parents looked very relieved. Was it my tapping that changed the picture? While I can’t really know for sure, it certainly did no harm.
Surrogate tapping simply means tapping for the benefit of someone else, as if you actually were that person. Because we are all connected energetically through the quantum field, distance isn’t really a factor. We can tap for someone thousands of miles away.
One summer evening I was relaxing in my back yard when the dog next door began to whine and howl. Our neighboring town was doing their annual fireworks show and I could hear the booms and cracks quite clearly. Unfortunately so could the terrified dog. His frantic barking was soon joined by another dog nearby and then a third one across the street. They seemed to be setting each other off, getting more and more hysterical as the fireworks exploded in the distance.
Without much thought I began tapping for the dogs:
"Even though I'm so scared of the loud sounds, my master loves me and will protect me and I'm safe"
"Even though the other dogs are scared too, so it must be something really bad, my master will keep me safe"
"Even though these sounds are freaking me out, I'm going to be okay and my master will protect me."
I tapped around the points saying "these loud sounds" "so afraid" "these scary sounds" “my master loves me” and so on. Within two or three rounds of tapping, even though the fireworks were still going off, all three dogs were completely quiet. It was like flipping a switch.
There was no doubt in my mind that the tapping had worked. Some people are uncomfortable with the idea of surrogate tapping. It seems a bit like Voodoo—trying to influence some unwitting person at a distance. And don’t you need to get their permission? When someone asks me that question I ask them back "Do you feel you need permission to pray for someone? Is so, then don't do surrogate tapping."
For me, there’s a tangible difference between wanting to help someone feel better and trying to manipulate or control their behavior. It’s true that I wanted that baby to not cry and for the dogs to stop barking, but the entire focus of my tapping for them was about helping them feel safe and loved. The change in behavior was secondary.
I once had a client whose son was planning on joining the army. She was very upset about this. She asked if we could do surrogate tapping on him to get him to change his mind. I had to say no. That’s clearly manipulative. Instead we simply tapped on her own emotional intensity.
This same client had problems with her ex-husband, who had become a meth addict. He really seemed to hate her and went out of his way to make her life miserable. She had to see him every month to get the child support check and every month he was extremely nasty.
We’d already tapped on her negative feelings towards him, clearing them over a series of sessions. So I agreed to do surrogate tapping on her ex, to try and help him release his anger, hatred, jealousy and rage. In a case like this I do ask permission from the recipient’s higher self. I simply visualize a traffic signal and see if we get a green light. We got the green light.
Somehow I tuned into this man’s energy field. His suffering was terrible. I led my client through some long and very intense rounds of tapping for him—as him. Mostly about how much he hated her, how she'd ruined his life and he wished she were dead! It was NOT pleasant stuff, but eventually we both felt a real shift.
The following week my client walked through my door with a radiant smile. She had just met with her ex the day before. He wasn’t friendly. He didn’t apologize to her. But he was civil and wrote out the child support check without argument or invective. After two years of bitter antagonism—to her it was a miracle.
Certainly her ex has a lot more work to do. His meth addiction is a serious problem and a few minutes of surrogate tapping isn’t going to make that go away. But something seemed to shift for him. Maybe it was a start.
The idea of tuning in to another person (or animal’s) energy field at a distance, and healing it through intention, may seem unscientific to some. But then, not many of us really understand the insights of quantum physics yet. Even though we don't have a clue how our smart phones work, we’re happy to use them. I certainly don’t know enough about quantum physics to explain how surrogate tapping works.
But science is built upon experimentation and observation, not dogma. Why not experiment with it yourself, and observe the results? If surrogate tapping really does work (and I’m convinced that most people, with a little practice, can do it successfully) then it’s a wonderful way of expanding our healing work into the world.
copyright Rob Nelson 2011
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