Dawson Church – EFT Explained

Content by: Dawson Church

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week we welcome Dawson Church to the show. Dawson is an award-winning author whose best-selling book The Genie in Your Genes has been hailed by reviewers as a breakthrough in our understanding of the link between emotions and genetics. His follow-up title Mind to Matter, reviews the science of peak mental states.

He founded the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare to study and implement promising evidence-based psychological and medical techniques. His groundbreaking research has been published in prestigious scientific journals. He is the editor of Energy Psychology: Theory, Research, and Treatment, a peer-reviewed professional journal and a blogger for the Huffington Post. He shares how to apply the breakthroughs of energy psychology to health and athletic performance through EFT Universe, one of the largest alternative medicine sites on the web. In this particular episode we discuss the strategies and science behind EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques).

Audio Version

downloaditunesListen to Stitcher Questions we ask in this episode:

  • What are the principals behind EFT?
  • What is EFT best used for?
  • Do I need a trained therapist?

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Full Transcript

 Stu

00:03 Hey. This is Stu from 180 Nutrition and welcome to another episode of the Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness and human performance in an attempt to counter the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long lasting health. Now, I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have, I certainly do. Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That’s right. We’re into wholefood nutrition and have a range of superfoods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website. That is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay. Back to the show. This week, I’m excited to welcome Dawson Church.

Dawson is a health writer and researcher who has edited and authored a number of books in the fields of health, psychology and spirituality. In this particular episode, we focus largely on EFT, which is emotional freedom techniques and specifically the science and studies that support it. I learn a huge amount during our chat including strategies, which may help me overcome my fear of spiders. Fascinating stuff. Without further ado, let’s get into the show. Hey, guys. This is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I’m delighted to welcome Dawson Church to the show. Good morning or good evening, afternoon Dawson for you. Sorry. You’re in a different continent, aren’t you?

Dawson

01:31 All of the above, Stuart.

Stu

01:35 Brilliant.

Dawson

01:35 Different part of the world.

Stu

01:36 Exactly. Well, we are connected which is the most important thing. Thank you again for your time and before we get into the questions today, I would love if you could just tell our listeners that may not be familiar about who you are, a little bit about your work and what you do and why you do it?

Dawson

01:54 Sure. Well, I’ve been intrigued by energy healing for many, many years. When I was a teenager after high school, I went and lived in a spiritual community where I learned energy healing and learned meditation, so these things are part of my awareness for a long, long time, but what I found really exciting starting in the 1980s where meditation was first being studied was the accumulation or empirical evidence that things like practices, like compassion, like mindfulness, like meditation, like acupuncture, acupressure, all of these seemingly esoteric energetic practices have direct effects and initially the research was on the psyche, so is on anxiety and depression, pain, but now, we have the tools like MRIs, and EEGs to actually drill down and see if they’re affecting us physiologically, dramatically.

For the last many, 20, 25 years, I’ve been collecting evidence, I’ve been writing books, I’ve been running clinical trials, I’ve been doing social projects all to try, and raise the profile of energy medicine in primary care. I wanted in veterans administration hospitals, I wanted in primary care clinics, I wanted in psychotherapy offices. As we get to realize and understand just how profoundly this affects our wellness, I believe it has a place at the frontline of medical care so that’s really what my passion is now and that’s why I’ve written … My earlier book is called, “The Genie in Your Genes,” about epigenetics and now this new book, “Mind to Matter,” about how our brains and our minds literally are having drastic effects to our bodies and the world around us.

Stu

03:33 Fantastic. Very excited to talk about a lot of this today. Last year, we had the pleasure of interviewing Bruce Lipton and that was profound for me because he connected the dots for me in terms of thoughts and then the physiology that actually occurs in the body, which was just groundbreaking to realize that we can literally switch on and switch off hormones in our body that have a cascade of effects on our overall health. Very, very interesting but today, particularly interested in EFT. We’ve had a number of request from our listeners as well. I wanted to know more about this because I can see that it’s well-studied, and it seems to be quite a powerful technique. I just wanted first stop if you could tell us a little bit about EFT, what is it and what are the principles behind it?

Dawson

04:27 Happily, yeah. I wrote the book, the third edition of EFT manual and the manual has been used in earlier editions and recent edition for research for about 20 years, and there are over now a hundred clinical trials that show it’s effective for anxiety, depression, pain, PTSD, phobias, and various other problems. What EFT is essentially is it borrows elements from affirmations and also from cognitive therapies. We have firm things that we’d like to be true, but then its really unusual element is acupressure.

Stu

05:01 Yeah.

Dawson

05:03 While you’re saying things, either focusing on the problem or focusing on the aspiration, you then are adjusting the body’s energy system through the application of acupressure on seven to 12 acupuncture points, and you do it by tapping usually your veins. We’ll touch them briefly, apply light pressure to the acupuncture point but typically, you’ll see people tapping like this while they are working cognitively on a problem. It’s really remarkable what happens when we do EEG studies. For example, we can see that when people … Just for example, we work with one veteran and he had this terrible memory and the memory was of his best friend being killed in Vietnam.

Stu

05:43 Yeah.

Dawson

05:43 He had this memory for over 40 years. He had a lot of guilt. He had survivor skill, which means he learned. His buddy got killed and for so many years now, he had this vital skill. The day it happened, so he ran the event in his mind but the difference was he did it now while tapping all these years later. As it was before, the event brought enormous waves of grief and anguish and anger and sorrow. Now as he tapped, he found all that going down. A particular event was that he’s always been on patrol with his friend in Vietnam and he was walking on the right. His friend was always on the left but that day, they switched places, his friend was on the right, he was on the left and so his stories at Vietnam had been, “He took the bullet meant for me.” As he tapped and remembered all the details of this terrible tragedy, he had this flip in his mind. He suddenly said, “I just realized just the way I wish I could have died his place, he would have wanted to die in my place. He gave me my life.” He had this complete … In psychology, we call that a cognitive shift. You have people having this massive shifts in the way they see things. He still has the memory but no longer does he have all the emotion attached to it. We see in MRI studies and EEG studies, all of the emotional parts of the brain calm down. People remember the bad things still, they no longer though are haunted by all the emotions that accompanied them once they use this acupressure-based technique to release all that stuck emotional energy and then they can start to flow and get on with their lives. This is essentially what it is, is acupressure, along with affirmations and some tools from cognitive therapy.
Stu: 07:24 Okay. In terms of best use or perhaps most common use, that was an example of PTSD, what would be the most common use or perhaps the most successful use, do you think in any of the [inaudible 00:07:39]?

Dawson

07:40 Yeah. Common use and successful use are two things to look at. One is when it comes to successful use, EFT is spectacularly successful at memory-based problem.

Stu

07:51 Right.

Dawson

07:51 If it’s being beaten up by your older brother when you were four and five, and seven and 12, and you have memories or you are molested when you were a child or when you had a terrible car accident or whatever tragedy you have in your childhood, EFT is spectacular. You’ll find that people just go from a 10 out of 10 in terms of emotional triggering down to a zero or a one very quickly often in just moments using EFT. Also, with phobias. There are three randomized controlled trials of phobias. Height phobia, claustrophobia, aquaphobia, agoraphobia and they showed usually in one treatment session often under an hour, people’s phobias go away and they’ll never comeback. It’s really successful for phobias and really successful for memory-based things. Where it is partially successful is problems that are strongly physiologically-based, for example, if you have something like … For example, a non-union bone fracture. It might help trigger the binding of that bone. Will it make the non-union fracture go away completely? Probably not. Things like tinnitus, ringing in your ears.

That’s a highly neurological condition, or highly genetic conditions. Well, often we find that even with genetic conditions, people have like MS for example, people make significant progress with EFT but you don’t often see them just going away completely. Pain, physical pain, for example, the research shows that on average, two thirds of the physical pain disappears with EFT in a few minutes of tapping but the remaining one third does not, so that might be genetic, it might be medical, it might be organic. You apply EFT to the stress-based and the emotional-based part of pain. One guy I’ve worked with had pain from about … I told his story in my book, EFT Manual, and he had pain for a two-week old fracture of his leg. He’d been on a car crash, broke his leg. This ache was an eight out of 10. I thought he wouldn’t be a good candidate for the EFT. I didn’t want to work for him initially but he was really insistent on doing EFT with me as big public events, so eventually I’ve said, “Okay. Come up here.”

I’ve worked with him thinking that EFT probably won’t be very effective here because he’s just broken his leg. He’s in a cast. He’s on crutches. It’s a purely physiological problem, but it turned out he had anger toward the other driver and he had frustrations about his hospital stay and he had resentment toward his wife who’ve made him drive his car that night. He had this fear that his leg wouldn’t heal properly. All these emotions. We’ve tapped at all of those and so his pain went down to a two out of 10 and it turned out that all the rest of the pain was emotional. Much probably when we think of this physical pain, it’s emotional. The doctors, the physicians that I know use EFT, even nurses use EFT report these kinds of shifts that their patients’ levels of triggering go way down.

Also, it’s extremely successful for weight loss, and usually in like a meta-analysis done by the University of California showed on average that when dieters lose weight, they succeed losing weight but if you look at their weight over the course of the following two years, they not only regain all the weight they’ve lost, but they gain that more weight. With EFT, we’ve done several clinical trials and the pattern there is they do lose weight after they learn EFT. After that, they lose an average of one or two pounds a month. After a year, they’ve lost an average of 10 kilos after they finish the EFT program. With EFT, they do not regain the weight, all the research evidence says they keep on losing weight. Weight loss, pain, psychological problem, sports performance. A lot of people, a lot of Olympians for the last Olympics were tapping. I can guarantee at the World Cups going on right now …

Stu

11:45 Yeah.

Dawson

11:45 The Italian team, I’m pretty sure is tapping. The Brazilian team I’m pretty sure is tapping.

Stu

11:50 Yeah. I think the Argentinian team would definitely be tapping right now. That’s for sure. Wow. That’s fantastic. I’m intrigued to hear about phobias as well. Very interesting because I have a phobia. I am frightened to hell with spiders.

Dawson

12:09 Oh.

Stu

12:09 It all stems from a story when I was younger, so that … Yeah. Fantastic to hear about that, because I live in Australia and some of the spiders are bigger than your hand. Yeah. They lurk everywhere. Fascinating. Then secondly, it’s linked with science, which I love and scientific studies, and it’s used professionally. Great. Fantastic. It certainly gets my huge tick of approval as worthy of much further investigation. I guess my next question is, can I just randomly go and google EFT and experiment on myself, or do I need to go to a trained therapist for success?

Dawson

13:00 Yeah. The answer is both end. Most people can try it with themselves and they will very quickly find it works certain things, but then there [inaudible 00:13:10]. We train people in the research-based method. Because EFT is on a trademark or copyrighted term, there are a lot of people who would say they’re doing EFT or using EFT and we find out that all they’ve done is watching YouTube video or two and then they say, “I do EFT.” We believe that people do need rigorous training and they need certification, so we call people who have been properly trained and certified experts in clinical EFT, and that’s the form of EFT that’s been used in the clinical trials of EFT and when practitioners are trained in that form of EFT, they tend to be successful. For superficial issues, usually you can get some relief by going on YouTube, finding a channel. We have like 120 videos on our channel.
Just tap along with me on some issue, but if you’re stuck, for example, in love relationships and if you’re repeating the same relationships issues over and over and over again, if you’re stuck in your weight loss journey, weight loss can be find as a difficult one because EFT is really effective for cravings. When people go to our live workshops, we have lots of live workshops in Australia as well as in Europe and in the US, other parts of the world and people go to our live workshops. We do an exercise with them and at the end of day two, where we expose them to the foods they crave and even measure their cravings and their cravings for chocolate, for donuts and for bread and for pasta and for sweets and for crisps and all this stuff, it goes down by an average of 83% in just a half hour tapping.
Do this tapping and their cravings just go away. They leave the room that day and there’s just chocolates [inaudible 00:14:46] all over the room because no one would want [inaudible 00:14:48], so it’s effective for that. Again, for really effective long term weight loss, we do recommend you work with a practitioner because often it’s linked to childhood abuse, it’s linked to childhood deficits, you didn’t get what you wanted when you were a kid. Now, you’re projecting those on an emotional means out of food. It does take the advice of an expert usually to help you find those early events and then work with them safely without having [inaudible 00:15:14] reactions or getting traumatized, re-traumatized by your old, old memory. It depends. Easy things, sure. Go to YouTube channel, tap along, you’ll find it usually is effective. For something that is a persistent issue in your life, get a practitioner who specializes in that, work with them and they’ll do an effective course of therapy and then see that change.

Stu

15:37 Great. Fantastic. Could you just run us through the processing, because I’m guessing by now, you’ve got lots of our listeners intrigued and amused, confused. Where do we start and what do we do?

Dawson

15:56 Stuart, I’m so glad you have a spider phobia.

Stu

16:01 Oh my. Oh, dear.

Dawson

16:03 Because on our website, a main video we have there has a video from Channel Five in the UK, and the reporter had a fear of spiders. She just would run screaming from the room whenever there’s a spider in the room. After tapping, she’s holding a huge tarantula that covers her whole hand that’s walking around her hand, she’s saying, “Oh, what a beautiful creature this is and how soft its hairs are.” She was staring there herself and can’t believe. This is [inaudible 00:16:32] of tapping. Imagine there’s a spider in the room right now.

Stu

16:37 Yes.

Dawson

16:38 Then, rate your degree of emotional triggering on a scale from zero, no triggering to 10, you’re about to run screaming from the room.

Stu

16:48 I would be right up there at eight.

Dawson

16:51 Okay. Where in your body do you feel the eight?

Stu

16:56 I would say probably in my upper body, so there are lots of tension. Definitely lots of tension.

Dawson

17:03 Tap …

Stu

17:01 Definitely lots of tension.

Dawson

17:03 Tap over here on this point here. Say out loud, “Even though I feel this tension in my upper body …”

Stu

17:11 Even though I feel this tension in my body …

Dawson

17:16 “I deeply accept myself.”

Stu

17:18 I deeply accept myself.

Dawson

17:20 “With this tension.”

Stu

17:22 With this tension.

Dawson

17:23 “Without this tension.”

Stu

17:24 Without this tension.

Dawson

17:26 “This tension might get more intense.”

Stu

17:29 This tension might get more intense.

Dawson

17:31 “This tension might get less intense.”

Stu

17:34 This tension might get less intense.

Dawson

17:37 “Either way …”

Stu

17:38 Either way …

Dawson

17:40 “I completely accept myself.”

Stu

17:42 I completely accept myself.

Dawson:

17:45 Now, take two fingers and tap on the top of your head. Take two fingers and tap where your eyebrow meets the bridge of your nose. Just tune into that tension in your chest. In fact, say out loud, “Tension in my chest.”

Stu

17:59 Tension in my chest.

Dawson

18:02 Tap on the side of your eye. Tension in my chest.

Stu

18:05 Tension in my chest.

Dawson

18:07 Let’s make it even more intense and say, “Intense tension in my chest.”

Stu

18:12 Intense tension in my chest.

Dawson

18:16 These are all … Tap below your eye, below the pupil of your eye. These are all the endpoints of acupuncture meridians. We’re apply acupressure to these points. We deliberately invoke the fear. What we see on MRI scans is that the fear [inaudible 00:18:28] the brain, just totally calm down when you do acupressure or acupuncture on these points. Tension in my chest.

Stu

18:39 Tension in my chest.

Dawson

18:42 Tap on your nose. Tension in my chest.

Stu

18:44 Tension in my chest.

Dawson

18:46 On your chin. Tension in my chest.

Stu

18:49 Tension in my chest.

Dawson

18:50 That point where your collarbone meets your breastbone. Tension in my chest.

Stu

18:55 Tension in my chest.

Dawson

18:57 Tap a little bit closer to … Tap with both hands if you can right over here, right about there. That’s right. Tension in my chest.

Stu

19:05 Tension in my chest.

Dawson

19:07 The last point to tap is just about four inches below your armpit. Just tap over here. Tension in my chest.

Stu

19:14 Tension in my chest.

Dawson

19:16 One more time over here. Tension in my chest.

Stu

19:20 Tension in my chest.

Dawson

19:23 What color is that tension, Stuart?

Stu

19:27 Black.

Dawson

19:28 Black tension in my chest.

Stu

19:31 Black tension in my chest.

Dawson

19:33 Might get better.

Stu

19:35 Might get better.

Dawson

19:36 Might get worse.

Stu

19:38 Might get worse.

Dawson

19:39 Either way …

Stu

19:41 Either way …

Dawson

19:44 I’m here now.

Stu

19:45 I’m here now.

Dawson

19:47 I’m safe.

Stu

19:49 I’m safe.

Dawson

19:50 I accept myself with this tension.

Stu

19:53 I accept myself with this tension.

Dawson

19:56 I accept myself without this tension.

Stu

19:58 I accept myself without this tension.

Dawson

20:01 With or without this black tension in my chest.

Stu

20:05 With or without this black tension in my chest.

Dawson

20:08 I deeply and completely accept myself.

Stu

20:11 I deeply and completely accept myself.

Dawson

20:14 Top of the head. Black tension.

Stu

20:17 Black tension.

Dawson

20:19 Eyebrow. Black tension.

Stu

20:21 Black tension.

Dawson

20:23 Side of your eye. Black tension.

Stu

20:26 Black tension.

Dawson

20:27 Under your eye. Black tension.

Stu

20:30 Black tension.

Dawson

20:31 Under your nose. Black tension.

Stu

20:33 Black tension.

Dawson

20:35 Chin. Black tension.

Stu

20:36 Black tension.

Dawson

20:38 Collarbones. Black tension.

Stu

20:40 Black tension.

Dawson

20:42 Under your arm. Black tension.

Stu

20:45 Black tension.

Dawson

20:47 Side of your hand. May go away.

Stu

20:48 May go away.

Dawson

20:52 May never go away.

Stu

20:54 May never go away.

Dawson

20:56 Either way, I deeply accept myself.

Stu

20:59 Either way, I deeply accept myself.

Dawson

21:03 Take a deep breath. Imagine there’s a spider in the room and score yourself on that scale from 0-10, with 10 being panic and zero being it’s just an insect.

Stu

21:19 It’s strangely nowhere near an eight. It isn’t. It would definitely be at least half of that. Could I feel myself holding one in my hand right here? Probably not, but I certainly wouldn’t feel … It’s definitely not an eight, which is very strange, because I do have quite vivid memories of a spider episode when I was younger.

Dawson

21:52 How old were you then?

Stu

21:55 I went to a Catholic primary school.

Dawson

22:04 Tap [inaudible 00:22:04] tell me the story.

Stu

22:04 I went to a Catholic primary school, and I would have been five or six. It was run by nuns.

Dawson

22:14 The head. Keep talking.

Stu

22:18 I remember going into the sister’s office, and she used to go on missions all over the world and went to Africa, and there were a group of us, about three children in her room, and she said, “I’ve got something to show you,” and we said, “Oh, okay. What is it?” She brought out a little wooden box, and it was about the size of a cigarette box, and she said, “Hold out your hand.” We held out our hand, and she opened up the box and placed a tarantula on my hand. At the time, there was another sister in the room, and because we were all quite squeamish, she held our hand and said, “No, no. It’s fine. It’s dead. It won’t hurt you, but just feel it on your hand.” Of course, tarantulas are a big spider, and I was five years old, and it was bigger than my hand, and I just remember that spider on my hand and quite terrified, and from that point on, it was quite awful. That’s essentially the story.

Dawson

23:51 That’s an episodic memory. It’s [inaudible 00:23:52] to you to remember the memory, and even if it’s, whether it’s a spider, whether it’s somebody you loved earlier on in your life disappearing or abandoning you or dying, whatever the memory is, as we tap on these points, you just see the emotional temperature of people go further and further and further down. You’ll still remember the event at the end of it, but you won’t have that strong emotional charge around it. What’s your emotional charge right now, 0-10?

Stu

24:18 It’s super low, two maybe, perhaps, super low. Fascinating.

Dawson

24:26 See, the thing is, the reason I’m so passionate about this work, Stuart, is because imagine if you were 94 years old, and I was visiting you in a wonderful place where you’re retired to, and maybe you were still unable to go outside of this place because you’re afraid of spiders or you still have that phobia, and it’s compromising your enjoyment of life.
I know one guy was in a retirement home. He had a fear of heights, and he had missed all kinds of opportunities, all through his life, because of the fear of heights. I imagined … I talk about this in my books, as well, how we have a fork in the road in terms of our emotions and our healing, and at each moment, we are either going to choose the path of healing or, if we keep on repeating that same old conditioned response, we simply reinvent our future based on our past, and so if we tap, meditate, release all of that emotional charge, we then have a future that’s not conditioned by our past. We then can enjoy places much, much more than we would if we kept on being fearful of those things.
I love to see people just take a whole long list … In our Veterans Stress Project, we have veterans bring in a list of issues to a coach or a therapist. They have 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 bad events in their lives like that event in your headmistress’ office, and the coach will just tap with them on each one. They’ll go from an eight or a nine or a ten down to one or a two or a zero, and then they have emotional freedom, and it’s just so moving to watch people just release all those old emotional issues from their lives, and then they can plan, they can enjoy their lives, they can develop their whole potential. That’s what EFT is all about.

Stu

26:12 Fantastic. Absolutely fascinated. I have a question regarding everyday stress. We live in a world now where our stress levels and cortisol levels are peaking for most of the day because we’re bombarded with everything in terms of emails and text messages, and we’re on our mobile phones, and we tend to not really stop and enjoy the moment. If we don’t really know why we’re feeling stressed, but we’re at work and we’re just feeling stressed, without being able to tap into a memory of sorts, to try and figure out why we’re stressed, are there strategies to be able to just calm ourselves using EFT?

Dawson

26:56 There are. In the EFT Manual, I talk about them, and when you don’t remember an event, when [inaudible 00:27:04] into an event, when you have many events, when … There’s a concept in trauma therapy called the Trauma Capsule, and essentially what happens when people are young and they can’t deal with the problems in their lives and their families, they encapsulate these memories in what’s called a trauma capsule, and they bury them in the muscles, bury them in their subconscious, and that’s how they cope with being in their dysfunctional families. If you have somebody with 10, 20, 100 Trauma Capsules, how do you work on those? We have specialized techniques for those. They’re in the EFT Manual. We introduce simple tapping early in the manual, but then, later on, we get into issues like that, when you have too many memories, we have intense memories, we can’t find the memory, when you have a category of events that’s very similar to each other. When you have birth trauma, for example, I worked with somebody recently who had womb and birth trauma, and she didn’t have any cognizant memories, but her parents had told her about this highly stressful childbirth.

I actually was on another show this last week, and the woman there had just guided a mother through birth two weeks before using EFT, and this mother, using EFT, had no stress, had very little pain, was dancing and singing through her whole labor. The labor was very smooth and very easy. This is her first birth, and she dilated, she gave birth very quickly.

All kinds of things shift, and there are techniques, specialized techniques, for all of those situations.

Stu

28:43 Fantastic. In terms of children versus adults, can we start our children tapping if they’re connected to any form of emotional trauma?

Dawson

28:59 If you have children, I recommend you go take a four-day professional workshop. We have those. We have those in the Gold Coast. We have those in various parts of Australia. We have them in Europe. I just got back from France. I’ll be in Germany and Holland and the UK and Denmark and Portugal in a few months, and we have them all over the US, all over South America. Take a workshop because we talk in one module there about the developmental stages of children, about how to apply EFT at each developmental stage. It is so powerful for kids to grow up not traumatized. I have three kids, and it’s just amazing. I had to spend 30 years of my life, roughly from age 15 to age 30 just doing a lot of psychological and spiritual work trying to recover enough from my own childhood traumas to have some kind of a life for myself; 45, really, is when my life began. Pretty much 30 years was cleaning up the mess I inherited zero through 15. I didn’t want to have my kids live that way. My kids, they’re in their 20s, teenage years. My eldest son, when he was 16, he was raising funds to build schools in Malawi-

Stu

30:14 Oh, wow.

Dawson

30:14 The poorest country in the world. [inaudible 00:30:15] all kinds of social projects. It’s amazing to live with un-traumatized kids. It works wonderfully, but you apply differently for a newborn, for a toddler, for a child entering school than for kids in school, teenagers and young adults. It has different applications, and we learn all those in our live EFT workshops. That’s our four-day EFT workshop, very, very powerful workshop, which trains you in applying clinical EFT both to yourself and also with others, whether it’s children or coaching clients or therapy or medical clients.

Stu

30:53 Excellent, excellent. Before we wrap today, we’ll ask you about where to go to obviously to find out all of the best resources for this, as well, but I had a question regarding other modalities that might enhance the effect of EFT, and I’m thinking, first off, as meditation, as an example. Would it be better for us to try and enter a calm state by utilizing meditation or any other strategies before starting with our tapping?

Dawson

31:26 I personally find that the combination of meditation and tapping gives the best results because meditation sets up a baseline of calmness in your life. You can wake up in the morning … I talk a lot in my new book, Mind to Matter, about brainwaves. We have six primary brainwaves. Wake up in the morning, you’re still at alpha, which is the middle brainwave, and you have access to the lower two brainwaves, theta and delta. You wake up in the morning, and you can really use that state of being a little bit drowsy, you’re just coming out of sleep, an alpha/theta/delta state, and if you meditate in that state, you can get very, very deep very, very quickly. I also have a bunch of free meditations, which I’ll give you a link to in a moment, and when you use those free meditations, they will bring you into that state, and you use them in the morning when you wake up. That sets up a baseline of well being. Then, where EFT comes in handy is when things happen later on. Now, it’s 10 o’clock in the morning, you’re having a meeting, it’s stressful, it’s tense, things aren’t going well with some colleague at work, you get an email from a client that is a problem. Maybe you’re in customer support, and you have a customer support ticket that makes you upset, you get bad news from a friend, whatever it might be, whatever upsets your emotional equilibrium later in the day. That’s when you tap. Just take a minute, two minutes, three minutes. Tap, reduce the emotional stress, and then move on with your day.

Then, for issues, for longstanding issues, like sports performance, like business, like money, like weight loss, you go see a therapist, bring your list of problems, work on them systematically, and release all of the emotional energy that’s bound up in that set of conditioned behaviors you have.

That’s the way I use both meditation and EFT. I am a real believer in those. In my new book, Mind to Matter, the subtitle is The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality, and it’s all about the science behind the stuff. It has over 400 studies that I quote in the book, and they show how meditation, acupressure, acupuncture, these energy techniques, they’re having massive effects on things like stem cells, stem cell regeneration. You need to do three things with stem cells. We need to regenerate, they need to multiply, need to have lots of them, they also need to migrate, and they also need to adhere to damaged tissue and regenerate it, and I show there are different frequencies we generate in meditation that literally trigger stem cell multiplication. We make more stem cells. Other frequencies in our brainwaves, meditation, trigger the migration of stem cells to the sites of injury. A third frequency stimulates the adhesion of stem cells to damaged tissue, and they repa-

Dawson

34:00 … We’ll see stimulates the adhesion of stem cells to damaged tissue in the repair of that. So, there are all kinds of these methods that we can use and they have a powerful effect on our health.

Our telomere length, there’s research showing that telomere length is directly affected by certain frequencies we generate in meditation. And, an EFT research shows that it triggers the expression of over 70 genes to do with longevity, to do with metabolism, to do with stem cell repair, to do with nerve cell repair, to do with memory and learning, to do with cancer tumor suppression. All these things as a result of meditation, and acupressure, and other energy techniques. That’s why this is so … An advocate of the things they make an enormous difference in your health and your longevity.

Stu

34:46 Well, I think that that is a separate podcast for sure because I’m very, very interested in that. Do you have a question just regarding that as well. You’re talking about frequencies and having the optimal frequency for the proliferation of stem cells. What about the adverse effect using external frequencies in terms of electromagnetic fields, for instance. Wifi, cellular frequencies. Would that have an adverse effect? Could that shift us in the wrong direction?

Dawson

35:25 Some of them do. Some of them do have an adverse effect, but it turns out that our cells are extremely sensitive to micro frequencies and micro currents.

Stu

35:37 Yes.

Dawson

35:37 And, actually not that sensitive to macro effects. And so, things like the EMS we’re worried about. I can tell you your cells respond far more to negative thinking. If you have negative thinking that produces beta brainwaves, high frequency beta brainwaves and high amplitudes of those high frequency brainwaves. And, that suppresses cell repair and regeneration.

You can be doing far more harmed herself by negative thinking in terms of … We look at the brainwave profiles of people who are doing negative thinking and they make lots and lots of that high amplitude beta and that is having … I mean … And, in the book “Mind to Matter” I review all of this research. And, it has a drastic effect on cellular health.

So, yes. There are frequencies that harm us. In I think chapter four of the book I review the research, which there 175 papers published between 1950 and 2015 which review the effect on various frequencies on cells. The majority of them are actually beneficial. A few are harmful. That section will tell you exactly which ones are harmful and what we find is far more harmful are these micro frequencies that are generated by things like poor relationships.

If you have conflict in your relationships, you’ll make a lot of high beta that will suppress alpha beta and delta. And, all of those tila mirrors generating and stem cell generating effects of those frequencies.

So, it turns out it’s very surprising what the research tells us. And, one of the things about science that I find Stuart is that people say, “Oh, this is hurtful. This is harmful.” I’ll give you an example. I may make myself unpopular by saying this, but I was reading in a health newsletter last week and the headline was, “Link Between Autism and Vaccination proven” that was the title.

Stu

37:31 Right.

Dawson

37:31 And, it was an article that was reporting on a study published in The Journal and it showed that there was a link between vaccination and Autism. They found 29 cases over the course of the last 40 years in which there was suspected link between a child who became Autistic and him getting vaccinated.

What they failed to say in that article was that over that time period, hundreds of millions of children have been vaccinated with the Measles vaccine and have not gotten measles, and mumps, and rubella, and all the other stuff they get. So, it’s protecting the lives of literally millions of children who haven’t gotten sick. And, they found 29 cases out of those millions in which there was believed harm.

So, we need to really look at, drill down, and look at the science. What is the good science? What is the junk science? And, I try and make all this stuff really meaningful to people in my books. And, science will tell you there’s so much bad information out there that if you’re trying to lose weight, if you’re trying to become fit, if you’re trying to have a good long life just looking at all the stuff on the web, there is so much misinformation out there.
First of all, there’s an oversupply at deluge of information, but a lot of it is incorrect and he need the good science and you need to follow that. See what will really work. Weight loss, for example, I spent years of my life trying to lose weight. 30 years or so unsuccessfully on the Atkins Diet, and Weight Watchers diet, and the South Beach Diet, all of these things. I then really dug into the science. I discovered that most of the advice I’ve got was totally wrong.

I found there were seven things that work. The evidence based. I use those. I lost 50 pounds pretty much effortlessly and I kept it off now for almost 10 years. So, you need … Science is your friend. You need to know the good science and then guide your health decisions based on that and not by all this fear mongering and just your manipulation that’s out there on the web.

Stu

39:28 It is really tricky as well because fear mongering, absolutely … And, almost global paranoia. Especially, where we’ve got these blasted smart phones and we wake up in the morning and we switch it on. And, within the first 15 minutes we’ve read 20 or 30 articles that essentially reprogram our mindset for the day. It tells us about doom and gloom and everything that’s going wrong in the world. And after speaking to the likes of Bruce Lipton and John DiMartini, and everybody under the sun, we realized that there is a huge connection between our thoughts and our wellness.

And, yeah. I’d be very fascinated to speak to you more about your book then in a separate podcast because so much can be done with a shift in the mindset. Crikey. Yeah, it really is an interesting world, isn’t it? It’s getting more technologically advanced every single day. But, I don’t know whether it’s actually in our best interest to keep abreast of the latest news and to keep plugged into the latest gadgets. I really don’t.

Dawson

40:35 Like, you wouldn’t go and eat all the junk food there is out there. In the same way, don’t consume news. Don’t consume junk information. Don’t consume low quality inputs, metal inputs into your life. The music you listen to. Like, I just downloaded seven tracks already today, one, for the inspirational music. And, that’s what I’m gonna play for the next little while till I get bored with it. And, I’ll download some more inspirational tracks. Download some inspirational podcasts like this one.

And then … What I recommend people do too, is don’t wait till you feel bad and then try to rescue yourself. Download that podcast, have it right there at your fingertips before you feel bad. That way when you do feel bad, you have a plan that you formulated in advanced where you’ll go and hit that.

The other term I’ve heard recently, I thought it was really a provocative term for all that fear mongering. Someone called it, “Fear Porn”. Fear pornography. Like, you know, this compulsive focus on the negative. And, it will do you no good. There’s so many positive things to focus on. You know, 100,000 airplanes flew and didn’t crash today.

Stu

41:35 Yes. Yeah, don’t worry about the one that did crash five years ago. Yeah. Absolutely. Just touching back to Eft. I was intrigued about the timing, in terms of how … If we were going to practice EFT daily, is there an optimum time length? Would it be two to five minutes? Would it be five to 10 minutes?

Dawson

42:06 Well, I advocate … And, we trained to do this in our live courses as well, and it’s also found in my EFT mini manual, I’ll give you that link in a moment to download that free. So, what we recommend is that when you’re starting out with the EFt that you make a journal, write in a journal, and you list the things that have really been formative influences in your life. The events that have really hurt you, or disturbed you, or bother you. And then, you tap on three or four those every day. So, in your case will be the box with a spider in it. And then, it might be something else that happened in school. And, usually we find Catholic school provides a very rich vein of capital material.
Even the worst Catholic school.

Stu

42:06 Okay. Oh, dear. It’s funny.

Dawson

43:00 You make a long list of things to happen and then you tap on three to five of those every morning. And, you’ve started to clear yourself. And, what’s supposed to happen then is a field effect. And, there’s some illustrations in these books of are electromagnetic field that extends about 15 feet or 3 meters away from the body. It’s a big, big, big field and that field starts to shift and change.

We can measure how different it looks using an MRI or using an EEG. Or, using other kinds of electronic devices. And so, your field starts to change after you’ve tapped on 30, 40, 50, a 100 events, doing it proactively that way. You’ll start to feel much, much better.

Stu

43:40 Right.

Dawson

43:40 And so, it’s worth doing whenever you feel upset, whenever you feel emotionally triggered. It’s also handy a technique because unlike EMDR … A lot of therapists use both EMDR and EFT and they’re equally effective, that research shows. EMDR thought is usually best done in a therapist’s office where the therapist can guide you through the EMDR session.

EFT, you use yourself because usually aren’t triggered when you’re in the therapist’s office. Usually you’re triggered when you’re with your coworker who has got enough habit that bothers you. When you’re with your child, or with your parent, or with your whoever it is that that annoys you.

And so, EFT is a little portable technique you can use anywhere when you’re emotionally triggered. And, the thing is we we say in our live workshops that the problem is almost never the problem. You are not triggered by the thing that’s happening right now. You’re already triggered by the thing right now because it looks to your mind. And, again, we talk about the hippocampus in the Midbrain, how it’s a match between current sensory information and traumatic events of the past.

And, if the thing, if the spider today looks like the spider in her office, then your hippocampus makes a match and you’re an 8 out of 10 right now. Same thing with people who say things that annoy you. Same thing with with any event that triggers you. So, we have you do when at the moment you’re triggered. If possible, go back and find the event that happened early in your life and tap on that. Usually, then you’ll get a [inaudible 00:45:06] effect and the current event annoyance will go down as the past event annoyance goes down to a zero.

We also find that cortisol, your main stress hormone, drops precipitously with ERT. In a randomized controlled trial that we did, we found that people’s cortisol levels dropped by a quarter in just an hour of tapping. In another one week trial we did, we found that their baseline cortisol dropped by 37 percent in a week of meditation and tapping, while they’re immunoglobulins, salivating immunoglobulins, your main immune function marker, rose by 131 percent.

So, drop and stress hormones, massive rise in immune function. So, all kinds of good things happen in your body as well as in your mind and your psyche when you tap. So, we recommend you tap whenever you’re annoyed, whenever you’re triggered, whenever you feel that tension in your chest, whatever it might be, a physical signal. Tap then. Release your stress. And then, maybe later on bring it to a therapist and tap on those bigger issues like relationship problems, or weight loss, or performance, or money.

Stu

46:11 Fantastic. So, where can we go to learn more about EFT? Where should we direct our listeners?

Dawson

46:18 Download our free mini manual and that is at tapping, the word tapping, gift, G-I-F-T, dot com. And, when you go to tappinggift.com, you will enter your name and we’ll email you the mini manual and also give you a link to it. We’ll also give you a link to my favorite form of meditation, which we’re now researching and showing that it lowers blood pressure, lowers resting heart rate, also raises immunoglobulins while lowering cortisol. All kinds of physiological effects it’s producing.

So, you’ll get a link to the meditation. You’ll get the EFT mini manual, both those things at tappinggift.com. Also, it give you the link to the website where veterans can go to get free EFT sessions. So, people who are traumatized can go there and work with the practitioner at no cost. And, it also gives you the 10 other nifty little links, our weight loss program, our relationship skills program, our first aid program, and a whole bunch of other things all at that tappinggift.com link.

Stu

47:15 Fantastic. Thank you so much. It has really been a pleasure to talk to you today. And, I’m gonna persist with this strategy as well for spiders as well because it would be nice to venture out into my garden shed and not feel like I’m in a scene from Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark. But, what’s next for Dawson Church? What have you got coming up?

Dawson

47:44 Well, I love doing what I do. I do lots of podcasts like this one. I do lots of live workshops. I do a lot of keynote speeches. I write quite a bit for different publications. I just love sharing this. I’m just passionate, Stuart, about … If I didn’t do this and you had your fear of spiders til you were 97 years old, that’s me. I can make a difference that way. That veteran who regained his life back offering tapped on his best friend dying in Vietnam. That guy who got his pain to drop form an eight to a two and liberated all the those immune factors to heal this body. Powerful. So, I just love doing what I’m doing. And, I plan to keep on doing it to at least the age of 100 and [inaudible 00:48:29]. I’m just so absolutely turned on by this. And, it’s a fact of science. It’s not like … And, I’m not just saying this is a good idea. There is solid science facts for absolutely all of this. And, sciences is a wonderful guide to how to find the best possible life for yourselves. That’s really what I had planned to keep on doing.

Stu

48:50 Fantastic. I am … Yeah. I’m certainly energized that infused to want to find out a lot more about this, but specifically because it’s backed up with science. And, now I know that there is … I think science has a lot of catching up to do where the mind is concerned, but we’re just starting to tap into that, excuse the pun, right now. But yeah, very, very excited. And, how can we get more of Dawson Church? Where would we go?

Dawson

49:17 If you go to that tappinggift.com website it will give you my schedule, where I’m traveling. It will also give you certified practitioners if you’d like to work with somebody. And, it will also give you links to my books and my research as well. All the research on EFT, which there’s a great deal. So, that same website tappinggift.com will give you all those links to my personal stuff.

Stu

49:40 Fantastic. Thank you very much. We will share those links across our audience and I look forward to spreading this podcast as far and wide as we can. So again, thank you so much, Dawson. Really, really appreciate the time today.

Dawson

49:55 Thanks for your wonderful work, Stuart. And, thanks to you all playing it too.

Stu

49:58 Well speak soon.

Dawson

49:59 Yeah.

Stu

49:59 Bye, bye.

Dawson Church

This podcast features Dawson Church, PhD, who is an award-winning author whose best-selling book The Genie in Your Genes (www.YourGeniusGene.com) has been hailed by reviewers as a breakthrough in our understanding of the link between emotions and genetics. His follow-up title Mind to Matter, (www.MindToMatter.club) reviews the science of... Read More
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