A new friend on Twitter asked me this week “How do you stay so positive and upbeat?” I told her that I’m not always like that, but that EFT has made a huge difference in my life in being able to be that way a lot of the time.
My mother tells me that I was an unhappy child. I remember being unhappy as a teenager (not so much as a child, although I do remember some difficult periods), and making a few life choices as a young adult that I wish I hadn’t (I actually call my 20s my “stupid 20s”). Then my daughter was born and there were rainbows and sunshine and lollipops in my world.
Still, I hadn’t learned how to control my thoughts. I focused a lot on what I didn’t have, and I focused on how life wasn’t fair and where I felt less than. I thought if I could control the world around me then life would be good.
Welllll, it doesn’t quite work that way. No, indeedy. And I was about to learn this – big time.
Trauma occurred. In a big way. Ouch. It wasn’t pretty and it definitely wasn’t fun. For two and a half years, I tried many different ways to get out of the emotional pain I was in. I trained in and became a Reiki Master. I trained in and became a hypnotherapist. I trained in and became an Angel Therapy Practitioner. I studied gardening and created one. I got help from numerous different therapists. I meditated, and studied book after book to learn how to heal. Still, I got triggered over and over and over again.
Then EFT entered my life. I trained in and became an EFT practitioner. And during the first training, the emotional pain I had been in for two and a half years released. It was gone. I was stunned at how effective this simple tool was. And thrilled that I had learned it.
That was in 2002. I’ve been using it ever since – on myself, on clients, on students, on family, on friends, on pets, even on strangers! It is effective. It truly works.
Still, I had to learn the next phase: to think better. We are powerful creators, and we create through our thoughts. While I understood this conceptually, living it – being it – was a different matter. Know what I mean?
Slowly, I began to understand the power of my own thoughts to create my life. Not just my thoughts, but the energy – or the intensity of the emotion – behind my thoughts. I learned how to think better.
Oddly enough, it seemed the more I practiced thinking better the more I could see all the areas in which I wasn’t thinking better. sigh… At times, it felt discouraging, which I finally realized was me creating more of the same. Round and round and round the circle I went, until I began to really get ahold of my thinking process.
Consciousness is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight. Pieces of “Ah-Ha!” happen and things fall into place. We forget and we remember. We remember and we forget. And always, we move forward – even though at times it seems as though we are moving backward.
This week, I am with my 22-year old daughter, my daughter’s fiance, my mother, and my former husband. We all get along great, for the most part. Until a bump in the road occurs. Then I get to take a look again at my own beliefs, my own expectations, my own fears, my own desires, and adjust them accordingly. Or not.
I get to choose my own level of happiness – regardless of what anyone else is doing, saying, thinking or being.
Is it hard? Yeah, you bet … sometimes. But I know what’s in it for me if I stay the course and maintain my own level of peacefulness.
Am I successful? Not always. More so than I used to be. But I still get triggered by something someone else says, or does. (This very morning, I heard myself having a conversation in my head with someone that wasn’t very nice. In that moment, I realized I was creating my future by having that conversation and I had to “Stop it!”) It is in those conscious moments that we hear ourselves and change our thoughts that we then choose the direction of our lives.
What are you thinking into being?
