Tapping And Self-Care After Trauma

Welcome and Summit Overview 0:00

I am so delighted you are here today because you haven't shown up for me. You haven't just showed up for the summit. You showed up yourself. You've shown up for your own well-being. You've shown up your own highest good. You've shown up for your own, highest potential. And that's propelled statement. Just think about all the people who are just going about their daily lives, doing what they've always done and thinking what they've always thought, following the behaviors they've always followed, and not giving themselves time and space to rise up in consciousness to a higher level.

You have done that. You're exposing yourself to all kinds of ideas. Not only that, you're looking at how to alkalis some of the terrible things that have happened to you and terrible things that happen to most of us. So all kinds of damage and disappointment, both as children and adults. And yet, the record shows, the research shows that we can use those very obstacles to be a springboard for our growth. And you, by showing up here for our guests, showing up here for our community, have made that choice for you.

So I congratulate you. I'm so thrilled you're here and you're going to be so moved and touched and feel a shift in your body as we go through the process. We'll go through today. It's a really practical one. And I'm also going to remind you to have your journal close by. Always have your journal with you for each of these episodes, because what we'll be doing is we'll be having you do little mini exercises throughout. So as we hit, an interesting point as we hit some place you've been practice. I'll have you make notes in your journal, and you might do a bit of writing during the course of our time together today.

And then also you will develop those thoughts as time goes on. By the end of the summit. You'll have a whole action plan for transformation. You won't just be inspired, but you look to that inspiration into an action plan that you can apply in your life and just be inspired. And just being a listener and just take the information in is important. In one phase of learning, but applying it is another. I know I spent many, many years going to all kinds of workshops and taking long classes. I took three month classes and six month classes, and one week classes and weekend classes and virtual classes and books.

And I was thirsty for knowledge. But I know that I was actually not all that able to assimilate that and turn that into action in my life. So a lot of that went unused, went unprocessed. It didn't get turned into actual effect of change. I don't want that to be you. I want this summer to be the time when you say you look back and say, there was version 1.0 of me. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. And now I'm welcoming version 2.0. Thanks to all those great ideas that I had and turned it to action. So keep that role handy. Make notes.

Also, you can develop those notes as time goes on. I am so thrilled to welcome our guest today. She is a friend. She is a sparkling human being. Her name is Amanda Wonderland and you can get more information about her and her work and Amandawonderland.com She is an EFT and energy psychology mentor and trainer. Is also trained as a yoga instructor and trauma therapy practitioner. She has a degree in Gender Studies from the University of Texas, and she serves as a mentor for the Short Path to Wellness, a yearlong program of awakening based on the developmental stages of the great non-dual teachers.

Amanda, I'm so thrilled to welcome you here today. I am equally delighted to share this space with you in this van this time. Thank you so much for having me, Dawson. I know the vast the fabulous time and people will feel the shifts as we we work with these big issues, they concepts and practices. So how did you come to all this? Where did you come from? How did you move to it? What was your life journey that brought you to this point? Well, you know, I love this. you know, you. Play two minutes.

legacy. Lay out the blanket statement that I was a bit of a trauma train wreck when I first came into this deep somatic work that has so thoroughly transformed my life. There was a lot going on in my childhood, but it initially started in utero and my mom is belly. I was already idling high. She found out the year that she was pregnant with me, that my brother had muscular dystrophy and wouldn't live to adulthood. So while I was in her belly, she got this devastating news and had a really difficult pregnancy.

And so it felt like my whole life, my norm, my equilibrium was high stress. There was always a steady hum, just kind of a low level stress that ran my life. And so I experienced a lot of overwhelm, a lot of burnout, a lot of perfectionism, a lot of people pleasing codependent, all of these different, labels, basically, that I was suffering from. And so I spent many, many years, at least 20 years in talk therapy and tried so many different modalities. I like you as thirsty for transformation, just desperate to break the habit of being myself, and could not figure out how to integrate any of the things that I was learning.

I would use my affirmations. I would work with the Law of Attraction, but my subconscious mind still was carrying around all of this low self-worth. So finally, when I was able to bring my mind and my body together, it all clicked and the sun shone down on me and there was finally hope for a transformation for me to finally become the person that I actually, I always dreamed I could be. So that's kind of where it all came from. The stress broke me until I had no other choice but to find some solution, to allow myself some reprieve from.

I'm so glad you did, because I was reading a study actually this week about cortisol crossing the placental barrier, and the study showed that mothers who had stress in the womb are literally transferring those biological imprints of stress, like cortisol, to their offspring, and the offspring have a heightened cortisol response as a result. So, we're actually being trained to be stressed in the womb. What I'm really curious about is that when you mentioned that that shift you had

Amanda's Trauma Background and Discovery of EFT 7:00

was there like one moment there was the big epiphany, or was it a gradual series of things? What was the the key event? There? I think there was a huge moment that happened in 2016, when my entire body was covered in hives. I was working as a yoga instructor in a hot yoga studio, managing the studio as well. So there was just a lot of 24 seven on call duty work that was there, and my whole body broke out in hives and I happened to find tapping. And within a number of days, maybe two days of tapping regularly on this, my hives were completely gone.

And that was when I was sold. I was completely sold on tapping to be EFT, tapping to be the solution for me. That it calmed my nervous system enough that this evidence, this physical evidence that I could see of my stress completely disappeared. And so that was when the shift fully, fully happened. There were lots of little shifts along the way where I started to believe in my potential to become bigger and better than I was, but I didn't know how to put it into practice. I'm a practical girl. I need a step by step program, and EFT provided that for me.

So that was when the big shift happened. I'm so glad it happened for you. And when we had those dramatic healings like that, when we go from one state, we're really sick to another where we're well rapidly that will will catch our attention. And it's also been, evidence me as I've been reading studies recently, how fast that can happen. So, I'm just going to have you journal right now. Everyone just read your journals for a moment. Is there any long standing physical affliction you have that you don't think you can change?

Is there any long standing physical affliction you have you don't think even changed might be chronic pain? About two thirds of adults at some point in the US have a protracted period of chronic pain. That means usually pain are three months duration or more. So is it pain? Is it some other condition? What we find with tapping research is that people's issues, physical issues shift rapidly. Some shift completely, subject partially, but you will see and feel a change. In fact, my prediction is many other people listening will see and feel a change in this hour as they tap along with Amanda and me.

okay. So make note of that and we'll see if that that that shifts for you. So then how do you explain EFT tapping to a first time person who doesn't know anything about it yet? I basically highlight that our mind and body are one and they can't be considered separately. So when we start to treat and and notice the mind body connection and start to utilize it for our own good, that's when the transformation can actually happen. So it's emotional acupressure. We basically tap on these nine different meridian in points in our face, in our torso, while we think about some upsetting events, upsetting emotions, stress in general.

it is a stress relieving tool. And as we tap on these different meridian endpoints, it sends a calming signal to our amygdala. It sends a calming signal to our nervous system that allows us to actually snap out of the stress response, snap out of fight flight, freeze our fun, and allow us to actually create a contradictory experience to what we're actually going through right now. So even though I'm feeling all this stress, I accept myself and I'm telling my body that it can be calm even in the midst of this stress.

And as we do that, we are literally rewiring our brains. We are re, laying down new neural pathways for ourselves. And so that was the the final straw for me. When I finally found the neuroscience of it, I was like, I am 100% sold because this is how you can make fast, as fast acting and long lasting transformation for yourself. So after the hives experience where you are seeing this dramatic shift in your physical health and physical body as a result of tapping, what was the next thing you tackled with tapping?

So the hives went away, and I had enough power from that revelation to quit my job as a yoga instructor. And so the hives never came back, and I didn't actually use tapping for the next two years, I started a new job. I was very excited about it. I was a flight attendant, I was traveling, it was so exciting. And then as those first two years as a flight attendant, went on, I developed lower back pain, chronic, severe lower back pain, and it was excruciating all the time. I woke up thinking about it.

I went to bed thinking about it all day long. I had to monitor my movements to make sure that I didn't aggravate it, and so I decided to come back to tapping and again, very quickly, within a very short amount of time, it was completely gone and it still hasn't returned. So that was six years ago and I've had no lower back pain sense. So that was when I decided to become a practitioner. After I saw how quickly my pain disappeared, I wanted to help other people experience the same result. And I do find an underlying emotional trigger for the back pain I did.

There was a lot of suppressed grief. I lost my mother and my brother at a very young age and lost a lot of other relationships in my life, and I hadn't allowed myself to fully experience and process that grief. And I was holding all of it in my lower back, and I was doing everything I could to numb it. I was drinking, I was smoking, I was addicted to everything. I was in toxic relationships, anything I could do to prevent myself from feeling the pain that I didn't want to feel. And once I finally could allow myself to feel that pain while keeping my nervous system safe and regulated it.

Alchemist. And it's now become my superpower. All of this trauma, all of this pain that I went through, has now become what is allowed me to facilitate transformation in others. I know also, you've been teaching workshops and make a difference in the lives of others besides your private clients and besides your mentoring. And I love you. Just as we're talk today to feel free to share stories of people you've worked with who've experienced big shifts in their lives. And let's get a few of those those vignettes in there, people you work with who you've seen have dramatic shifts once they do that.

But yeah, you know, you're right. We we tend to mask all of our pain with these other behaviors to distract ourselves to, give us an overlay of other stimulants to perhaps distract our attention from it. And so it can be pretty scary to actually confront our pain without those things. What do you what do you tell a client who is, maybe in those same patterns you're in toxic relationships, addictions, maybe bingeing all kinds of other behaviors. How do you how do you get them going with a different perspective?

We meet them right where they're at in that moment, and we take it one step at a time. So I consider that to be my job is to hold unconditional compassion for them so that I can model for them what unconditional self-love and self-compassion will look like as well. And then I feel like it's our job just to move them one step forward. So healing for me is getting back to our authentic self, which is unconditionally self loving and authentically joyful, just like we were when we were those magical little inner children before any of the conditioning or the programing came in.

So eventually that is the goal, to get to the point where we can get back to those beautiful, flowing, crystalline blue streams of water without the rocks that have been put in there by our caregivers and society in general. So I say to them that these can sometimes feel like insurmountable issues and things that you have probably tried to attack from all different, angles in your life. But the best way for us to get to it is to create a safe space in order for you to pull them out one at a time, little by little, and work on them individually.

And the beautiful thing about the way that the brain works is that you don't have to work on all 4000 events, all millions of memories you have. You can work on a few. And the hippocampus has tags, all similar events. So you can really clear a lot more, just by focusing on one memory or one event. So I say we take it slow with self-compassion and authentic joy as much as we can along the way. Give us an example of somebody who you work with, who picked one thing, one particular event, and that was that leverage point that resulted in the hippocampus.

Then, generalizing that healing and that, that emotional release to all similar memories in their lives. So this last week, I taught a workshop at the been gathering this beautiful spiritual gathering in Portugal, and I taught on re parenting the Inner Child. And one of the memories that came up for one of the participants was that she wanted to wear this white dress when she was little and, instead of her father saying to her, no, you can't wear this white dress because of this reason or whatever, he ended up getting very, very upset, screaming and hitting her mother in response to this.

So we worked through this event in a group context, but she was able to focus on her specific event, and at the end of that, she brought in a different resolution for her inner child. So her father was able to control his temper. He was able to explain to her why she wasn't allowed to wear the white dress, and she said she had never felt that kind of connection with her father in real life. But it felt so real.

How EFT Tapping Works 17:00

And this guided visualization with tapping that she felt like years of lack of safety and fear of him, and feeling the need to be small and to not stand up for herself and make her own decisions had, dissipated. And so she had an action step. I always try to give my clients and participants action steps. How is this going to change how you show up in your life, and what's the first step that you can take toward that? And so her first step was having a conversation with her father as her adult self standing in her power, saying, this is what I'd like to have for this dinner together.

Instead of cowering and being afraid that that old event might come back or something similar. So it completely changed the way that she saw her father, her relationship with her father, and her ability to show up authentically in context of that. So that was pretty huge. Just a short hour long session and visualization. And was that with her real father? Was this an imaginary encounter? So the the event was her real father, but we went into an alpha brainwave state and got into that higher consciousness through our subconscious mind.

And she did some re parenting and brought in a different resolution for her inner child. And then we integrated it by tapping it all into her body. So I believe that time is not linear. And the things that we do to heal our past actually change the way that we show up in our present and in our future, even if it didn't actually happen in reality, as some people see it, it happened that way for her. And so that allowed her to change the way that she showed up. And I think it will change the way her father shows up, too, in relation to her.

Yeah. And just having our own brains and our own perceptions change often that shift the world around us. Yes, absolutely. That butterfly effect. Yeah, yeah. And, what do you do personally to bring yourself to elevated states of consciousness? And I've talked to you before about your self-care routine, which is a really powerful one. And let that you just share how you bring yourself yourself. So there's this one phase here, which is trauma healing. And then to create a different future of yourself, free of that trauma.

But then also there's this, this, this practice of moving into elevated states of consciousness. What do you do to bring yourself there? Yeah. I think the more pleasure we can introduce to our nervous system, the more comfortable it gets with it and the less comfortable it gets with sorrow and distress. So I have a joy list. I have a list of all the things that bring me joy, and a lot of them are the things that brought me joy. As a little girl, I loved camping, I loved playing house, so I try to spend as many nights in nature as I possibly can.

I try to earth every day. so walk outside barefoot on my beautiful garden and grass, looking out at the ocean. But one of the quickest ways for me to jump into a high vibe is to turn on some music and sing and dance. So anytime I'm preparing food or making some homemade green juice or anything, if I turn on some music and sing and dance, I'm there. It's super duper quick. I do it in my meditations in the morning as well, so I really feel into heart coherence, and I think about everybody in my life that I want to be healthy, happy, peaceful, and well, I wish that for myself as well.

So kind of the compassion meditation and I allow my heart to fill up like a balloon with everything that I love about my life, with everything that brings me joy. And there's nothing that makes the sparkles pop out of the pores of my skin faster than gratitude. So when I spend time every morning in meditation, connecting with source, and then spending the rest of my time in meditation, stating every single thing that I'm grateful for and really feeling it. Not out of rote, routine, but really feeling it.

Having that compelling sense in my body that gets me into it. I have it high vibe, super duper quickly. yeah. So here are some practices for you to note in your journal. I'd like you to just open it again and write these things down and notice the number of practices that Amanda is using to support herself. Now, she is not using some things, she is using others. She is she is experiment with different kinds of practice and now doesn't really work for her. She mentioned time and nature. That's one of them.

So that may really work for you. And I recommend that even if you live in an urban setting, that you find the closest patch of grass. And go stand there, Amanda mentioned, take your her shoes off and walking barefoot. And so that will round you right now actually have a grounding mat under the desk I'm sitting at. So I'm grounding myself even though I'm indoors. And so you can grab yourself in different ways like that. The simplest way is just to walk barefoot on, on the earth, so that may be a useful one for you.

She mentioned compassion, meditation, compassion shifts your brain. She mentioned a visualization allowing my heart to fill up like a balloon. as I think about all the things I'm grateful for, gratitude is powerful. And the classic gratitude practice is just to think of three things that you're grateful for every day and write them down in your journal. And you might think that after you've done that for, say, 100 days, that's 300 things. Are you running out of things? No, you are not. Because now you've sensitized your neural network to gratitude and you are noticing things to be grateful for that you never noticed before.

So the number of things you are grateful for actually expands, multiplies as you start to pay attention and to cultivate that gratitude practice. She mentioned singing just sing.

Healing Chronic Pain and Grief 23:00

Doesn't matter if you don't have a voice like an opera singer or pop star. Just saying the same. Let your heart pour out and in some dance, move your body. You don't have to be a fantastic dancer to do it. Just move your body however it feels natural. Feel what your body is naturally wanting to do and then move with that. Putting on your favorite music. Putting on music that inspires you, that nurtures you. It's so easy now to have that music. One of the things I'm grateful for is that I think back to my ancestors, some of whom were nobility in England 200 years ago, and they didn't have what I have, which the ability to say a few words to a device and bingo, I had any kind of music I want rich in music.

So use music to inspire you. And again, there are many other practices that are available as well. So do what Amanda does and cultivate this in your life. It is so easy to do so. These are all ways of cultivating gratitude. As I mentioned, these few make a note of them. Make another the ones you haven't tried before, and practice different things until you find, a group of these techniques that really works for you that really helps you shift. So. So thank you, Amanda, for, that that wonderful picture.

Yes, absolutely. I think everyone should have a joy list. And you can just rotate through everything. You know, if you don't feel like seeing in a dance in that day, then do something else. But I think it's wonderful to know what brings you joy and to make that a priority at least one time a day for yourself. In those meditations you do. Where do you go? What is it like for you when you're in that highest possible state to get to in meditation? I go everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. it often feels like just a white sheet in front of me, and it just everything comes together and it's all just one.

The mind ceases, the breath regulates, and everything is as it should be. I'm not questioning anything. I'm not thinking about my to do list. I'm not regretting anything I did yesterday. I am in it. I am in this present moment, connected to all that is. So that's the best description that I can give of where I go. I go to bliss, I go to less. So imagine doing what Amanda does. Imagine starting your day. She mentioned starting her day with meditation. Imagine starting your day in bliss every day.

It's going to change you and change you really quickly. So I strongly recommend you follow Amanda's practice there and just go ahead and jump in. Now. Lots of bonuses you get here on the summit, you can easily find those. You can use the notations, do them. Start there by the way, and there's no reason not to begin your day with that blissful state that that will tend to propagate itself, then into later periods of your day. You'll have a better day as a result of that morning practice. So, Amanda, as you do these things, obviously life isn't perfect.

You're still hitting roadblocks, challenges, difficulties. What are some of the ones you've had and how do you use your tools to get through them? Some of the recent ones I had is, an end of a relationship recently. So that was a difficult, kind of rug being pulled out from underneath me. And for a snap second, I started to distrust the process. But because of all these practices that have become habitual for me, I was able to hear in my mind, surrender and trust. Surrender and trust. Those are the words that I hear the most.

That's probably the slogan for my life is surrender and trust. And as a result of allowing myself to just do that, to trust, fall back into the arms of the universe, I saw so quickly the synchronicities and all the reasons that it had to happen this way, and I literally fell to my knees in tears at the beautiful elegance of these lessons that I'm learning. So even though it was painful and it was a grieving process, and it's still a grieving process, sometimes trusting the process and knowing that it couldn't have happened any other way.

Everything works together to produce my highest good, and I can see it. I can see the bird's eye view and what a gift to be able to see that. So that's a recent one. There's been a lot of grieving and relationships in my life, just because of the way I was raised around toxic family dynamics, but it was a lot of trauma growing up. There was childhood sexual abuse. I was raised in a very toxic family with secrets and denial and oppression and, there was a lot of poverty and addiction. so and there was a lot of religious overtones with all of that.

So there was church trauma as well. So a lot of that led to addictions to eating disorders, to suicidal ideations, to being hospitalized. There was just trauma upon trauma upon trauma. Losing my brother when I was 13 and he was 17, losing my mother when I was 25, and then feeling completely alone. All of those things contributed to me just basically needing to open the pressure cooker because it was so much suppressed and repressed trauma that if I didn't get some help with it, I most likely would have gone a really, really down a different path.

and so I'm grateful that it always kind of the alarm bell for me to come to my senses and say, you know what? You deserve better than this. Just because it's always been this way doesn't mean it always has to be this way. You can change how you're showing up in life. Now I want you to do another journaling exercise, and that is what is it in your life that doesn't seem like a gift? And what Amanda has said here is that she is seeing, for example, and the end of the relationship she is seeing the gift.

And that's really advanced gratitude practice. Sure, I'm grateful for being healthy and for the many blessings in my life that grateful for losses, grateful for people who disappear, grateful for addictive patterns. Grateful for people who betray me. Grateful for abuse. Really. I mean, can we live? Be grateful for all of that? So does take a moment and jot down a couple of things. And you're not the whole event that just the name of the event, and you can work on that later of things that you have a really hard time being grateful for.

I'm not saying you need to feel grateful for them now, but I am saying that in time you might feel grateful for them, and you might have a look back and have a very different story around them. So Amanda is a mature soul who's done a ton of inner work and is now able to look back and see even those terrible things. With that perspective of gratitude. We don't get there in a minute. We don't get there through hoping to do that. That's something you do after a while. And so, I just want to know how to think about some of the things in your life that are really hard to understand.

Why did that happen to me? Why was this person in my life? Why was I abused that way? Just be aware of those things and to just hold those things in, in your awareness

Reparenting and Inner Child Work 31:00

as you move along your spiritual journey, as you resolve your trauma, as you move to these higher states, you may wind up with a very different picture from the regrets that haunted you earlier in your life or that haunt you now. So let's just give you you a moment to give yourself a moment of self-compassion that those things haven't you, that shouldn't have happened to you. They were unfair. It was, a tragedy. They happened to you. They did happen to you. And as Amanda is illustrating here, you might learn to see them differently.

In the future. And again, we'll do, more consideration of this in time. But for the time being, just realizing there are those things that hurt you acknowledge them, admitting them, and putting them in this mix of issues that you work through, both in terms of trauma healing and then moving to those states of self observation and eventually to to gratitude. Amanda, that was the long list of pretty horrible things. So, in that vein, it's natural. The energy of that now, like I've seen a man in person number of times and we talked together and, you know, I've had he just don't carry any of that energy.

with you anymore. It's interesting. No, it's alchemist. It's it's the process of the work. It can be done. And that's the most exciting news that I have for anybody. It can be done. No matter what you've been through. None of us have escaped trauma. Every single one of us have experienced trauma in our lives. And it doesn't have to run our lives anymore. It doesn't have to take away our power. It doesn't have to be our excuse for not shining and showing up as our authentic selves. It can be what propels us into all of those things actually.

Is there a client you've worked with that stands out in your mind who went through a similar trajectory, who was faced with the memories and the imprint and the the aftereffects of early trauma and, had a really big impact on them. And then it was able to shift and, breakthrough. Yes. Yes, many. I actually think that the greater reason that I went through so much trauma was so that I could hold space for people with similar trauma. So I tend to attract people who have been through what I've been through, and sometimes it's almost just in the nick of time.

So it's like I deal with my own stuff. I process that, I release that, I alchemy is it. And then the next day I get a client who wants to work on that thing. So it's like they they come, I guess the student comes when the teacher is ready. So, I worked with a client who had, rampant childhood abuse like me and had no trust of any men, and, had these very limiting beliefs about, there being a lack of good men in the world and also having very low self-worth as a result of all the things that had happened to her, maybe seeing herself as only good for one thing, because that's all that she was ever valued for as a child.

And I understand that I resonate, I resonated with that, and we worked through little Little by Little event by event, core belief by core beliefs, the somatic sensations in the body, the feelings that she could feel. As you say, emotions are just labels for physical sensations. And so getting her really in touch with her body and where she was holding those things have resulted in her showing up in a completely different way with her husband, with everyone in her community, with her family, but most importantly with herself.

She no longer sees herself as that little girl who is so afraid and ashamed and has to cower because of everything that she's been through, or maybe feels like she did it to herself, or like she deserved it in some way. She's no longer that woman. She stands tall. She stands proud. She puts her shoulders back. She knows what she has to offer, and she offers it. She's now sharing it with the world in a really meaningful way. And that's just one example. I see it happen all the time. It's the most fulfilling job I've ever had to be able to facilitate these transformations and see my clients go from our first session to our final session together.

It's mind boggling. So beautiful when we go now, you met with people who are in ERP certification, learning about this powerful tapping technique you'll do together in a moment. And then also people, the short Path to Oneness, which is this developmental path of awakening, enlightenment, hitting these elevated states. What is the difference in that mentoring? And what are some of the states that people in the short path are, realizing, achieving, experiencing? The difference between EFT mentoring and short path mentoring?

very different EFT, we're focusing more on emotions. And, although I don't think that you can separate the psychological from the spiritual, but I do think that oftentimes we need to work on the psychological stuff in order to reach that freedom to go as far as we want to go spiritually. But I feel like with EFT, we're focusing mostly on the mind body connection and on helping people. Alchemist, their trauma is and acknowledge their emotions and finally accept themselves as they are. the short path I feel like is what happens once you've done all of that.

So the short path is once you've worked through your personal peace procedure and you've actually system tapped on all the things that are still hard to understand for you, the things that are hard for you to accept and be grateful for, then you're able to move into those elevated steps of consciousness. Then you're able to, achieve unity consciousness throughout the day. With every breath, you're able to remember who we truly are, why we're truly here. so the short path, I would say, is just the deepest dive that you can possibly take into your soul, into who we actually are.

and I think EFT is a wonderful way to get there. Which is have you seen in people who you're mentoring in the Short Path program? there have been a lot of things that would normally stop them in their tracks, so they will encounter things in life as we all do, and it would normally spiral them backward into feeling like they're no longer in control and they don't know where to go from there. But now that they have these tools, they have these meditation tools and these steps that they can take in order to stay connected to what's true.

it's almost like water off a duck's back. These things that they encounter in life, they recognize it for what it is. They find the gratitude for it, but without spiritually bypassing. They're not just coming in with toxic positivity.

Joy Practices and Elevated States 38:00

They're just in a different place. They're in a different frequency. They've raised their, vibration. They've elevated how they show up in life. And so things just don't trigger them as much. They're not as blocked subconsciously. They're no longer held prisoner to their unwanted patterns and beliefs and habits, and they're actually holding the steering wheel of their life. And so I think that's probably the biggest change I've seen in short path mentees. Yeah. Having the tools not spiral back. And, you know, you still have those disappointments and challenges, and yet you're just at peace and anchored in this.

The state of well-being. And you just notice those things that they aren't able to suck you back in anymore. Yes, yes, there's a divine trust that takes that takes its place. And you just remember just going to keep putting my foot down and the road will pave itself exactly as it needs to. And I can trust that everything's working together to produce my highest good. What a place to be in. Yeah, that trust that everything is working together to produce my highest good. Take a moment to write that in your journal and if you don't believe it, just write the words.

What if before it is? Yes. And what else is possible if that's possible? Oh my gosh, what else is possible for me? I love that. Yeah. What else is possible for me? What if everything were working together at my highest good. what are the the wonderful words for this is pro noia? Yes. Paranoia trade. If you're thinking everything out to get me. Paranoia is that belief. Everything is out to support me. Yes. love. It is a beautiful song that I love to sing and dance to called paranoia. It's one of my high energy mixes.

Yes, it's really good. So let's do some tapping together. I'd love to have you guide everyone through a basic tapping routine. For those of you who haven't done tapping before, this is your exposure to it, and you'll literally feel the shifts that happen in your body. So, Amanda, rural brand, you do it to see if we don't know about it, please guide us through. Okay, so we'll start really general today we're just going to tap on stress because everybody can identify with some stress in their life.

So I'd love for you to think of just a recent time that you felt stressed, maybe in the last two days, if not in the last week. Recent time that you felt stressed. And I'd love for you to give that a score. We call it a sud, which is a subjective unit of distress. So zero means I felt no stress in that moment. Ten means I felt the most stress that I've ever felt. So before we get started tapping, I want to get the grade of your stress in this moment, in the last week or the last few days, 0 to 10.

How distressing was this moment of stress for you? And then I want you to feel in your body where that stress lives. So EFT is about mind body connection getting that somatic awareness which means in our body. So where do you feel that stress in your body? My example is I thought I was going to miss my flight coming back from this festival last week, and my heart was just pounding and I felt rushed and sweaty and I needed to go. So that can be similar to what you may have felt, and notice what it feels like in your body and rate at 0 to 10, and then we'll just get started.

I'm going to keep it really general and really simple, because I want you to remember that this is a self, administered tool. So you don't necessarily have to have a practitioner to help you through this. You can use YouTube videos, but it really helps to get into a specific moment when you felt this. So I'm going to keep the words very simple so that you can do it on your own when you get home. So we'll start with the side of the hand, and we basically just tap in between the pinky knuckle and the wrist bone, and we tap very gently with the other hand.

It doesn't matter if it's your dominant or non-dominant, you can actually even tap both sides of the hand together, and you just tap it as hard as you would. If you're just drumming on a table like you're just bored, you're just drumming, so you want to feel it, but you don't want to hurt yourself. So just tapping gently. Maybe do seven times on each spot. And we start with an acceptance, a setup statement. So that includes the exposure to how you're feeling, telling the truth of the moment. And then we end it with some type of acceptance.

So we're going to say even though I feel the stress in my body and you can repeat after me to yourself. I'm open to accepting how I feel. And if that isn't true, then you can change it to say, maybe someday I'll be open to accepting how I feel. It has to be true for you. And then we do that two more times. Even though I'm feeling the stress in my body. I give my body permission to relax anyway. I'm open to the possibility that my body could relax anyway. And then one more time, even though I feel the stress in my body, I have compassion for where this came from and I'm open to feeling calmer right here and right now.

And then we move to the top of the head. So just right in the center of your head, right where that baby soft spot is, this is your governing vessel here. So we'll just tap here the stress in my body. And if you have a specific place, stay where it is. We move to the eyebrow which is right where eyebrow meets the bridge of your nose. You can tap with two fingers or one finger, but it is important that you get right on that spot right there. The stress in my chest, that's where I felt it. The stress in my heart.

And then we move on to the side of the eye, which is just right where your orbital bone is, right across from your eyeball. And you can tap right there nice, full, gentle breath as you remind yourself of this stress in your body. That moment and you experienced it this week or last. And then we move underneath the eye, directly below the pupil, also on the orbital bone. This stress in my body. Nice, full, gentle breaths. and then we move under the nose. So just right in between your nose and your upper lip tapping right in the center.

And then we move under the mouth. So right in that divot between your chin and your lower lip. The stress in my body, the stress in my stomach, the stress in my head. The stress in my heart. Wherever you feel it. And then we move to the collarbone. So you have this little clavicle or notch in the middle where your clavicle is, and then you can go down an inch or five centimeters and then we go out toward the shoulders an inch or five centimeters, and you'll feel a little meaty part there. That's your collarbone point.

This is one of my favorite points. And I tap on it anytime I feel triggered to think about what happened last week or this week when you felt that stress in your body, tuning in to that stress in your body and just tapping here. And then our final point in this nine point sequence is in your armpit. So basically you put four finger widths underneath your armpit, and it's right underneath your arm. So it's kind of where the bra line is for women. So you just tap their. And that's one round. And I'd love to just do a quick little nine gamma to see if we can get the thumbs down.

I'm just going to skip a few steps and go straight to this beautiful point

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called the triple burner, the triple warmer point on the back of your hand. So in between your ring finger and your pinky finger bone on the back of your hand, and you just tap right in between there. Nice and gentle, you can even place your hand on your chest if you'd like to. And then we take a nice, full, gentle breath as you close your eyes, tuning in to that sensation of stress in your body, and then continually tapping that point. Open your eyes and keep your head steady as you look hard down to your left, like you're looking at your left shoulder only with your eyes, and then come back to center with your eyes and look hard down to the right, like you're looking at your right shoulder.

Then come back to center with your eyes. Then roll your eyes all the way up to the ceiling, keeping your head as steady as you can, and pretend that there's a big clock in front of you. So your eyes are going to go all the way up to the ceiling and then you're going to begin circling that clock with your eyes moving clockwise to 1 to 3, stretching as far as you can to the right, and then moving all the way down to four, five, six, looking down at the ground there, and then continue moving to seven, eight, nine, stretching all the way to your left, and then all the way up to ten, 11, 12.

We'll do one more circle in that direction. We're just scraping the edge of the peripheral vision nice and slow, hitting every single number on your clock as you tune into that stress in your body. This is sending such a strong signal to your brain right now that it doesn't need to be in fight or flight, and moving your eyes all the way around in a clockwise direction, taking nice, full, gentle breaths. And then once you get up to 12, we'll go the opposite direction. So we'll go counterclockwise going to 1110, nine, moving all the way around, allowing the shifts to happen in your body, paying attention to where that stress was living.

And we'll do one more circle in this direction counterclockwise. Beautiful big eye circles stimulating delta brainwave state, allowing you to get nice and calm in your subconscious mind. And then when you get up to 12, you can blink a few times and relax your eyes. And then I like to go straight to the side of the hand where we first started. And we'll just end with a setup statement here. Even though I feel all this stress in my body, or I felt all this stress in my body, I deeply and completely accept myself and all of my feelings.

And then we take a break. We relax our hands. This is always when I like to grab a drink of water to tell, to help hydrate the meridians. Kind of move the energy through. And then we check in. We go back to that feeling in the body. And you're such. Score 0 to 10. Has anything shifted? Has anything changed? Has that movement in your body shifted to anything? Are you feeling a bit calmer? How do you feel about that memory of what happened last week or the week before, and see what has changed for you and be open to the energy continuing to move, because we've opened up your neural pathways right now by exposing you to this moment of stress.

And so this is its opportunity to come in and create a contradictory experience of calm in order for you to take it one event at a time, learning how to regulate your nervous system when it's dysregulated. That was beautiful. And I'd like to ask you as well to please post your first and last numbers in comments. Let Amanda and I know what was your first number and your second number. So if your first ever was a seven, perhaps your second number was a two, then let us know that we don't need to know what you were working on.

That's between you and your own personal growth, but it would be handy to know what your numbers are and encouraging because it's really wonderful to look at people's numbers and say, see? Well, they went way, way, way down. And you have the simple technique. You can use it again and again. You need to have you have stressed, you've made lists of things that stress you out and then work on them systematically. We actually have a whole procedure for doing that in the short part. One is we have resources on EFT universe.

We have many different ways of letting you use the left, and then you can tap along with YouTube videos. We have whole YouTube video channel. There are all kinds of ways you can you can use the EFT, you know, in your life. And the main thing is to use it so here's where I want you to not take Amanda's advice. Okay, here's what she did wrong. lay it on me. Does not want to follow her example. She got rid of her hives, and then she didn't do it again. yes. Don't stop tapping. Don't stop tapping. Even when things feel good, you can still keep tapping to integrate all of that goodness. For sure.

Yes, that's good advice. Just reach for self-help tools in a crisis. And the crisis is passed. It's like, the I'm over it. yes we do. You're absolutely right. And I think if I would have quit like I did the first time, I would be back here with chronic pain or some other chronic autoimmune disorder or something. But because I've continued, I've been able to maintain this, this beautiful norm, which I'm so grateful, is my norm now. I'm so grateful that this is how I get to live my life. And you created this beautiful, emotional, spiritual life yourself.

And so what is your vision

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for what happens next? You feel yourself being drawn to anything. Do you have a picture of what might be unfolding for you as the next step? Yeah, definitely. I'm running retreats, so right now I'm running a woman's retreat called the Personal Peace Retreat, where we work through the personal peace procedure, which we were talking about. so I love those types of experiences where we can just spend time together a week long in nature, exploring different somatic practices and learning how to be vulnerable and work through our things in a supportive community.

So I love doing retreats. I do a free tapping circle every month, the first and third Wednesday of every month, which you can sign up for a personal peace retreat. Dot com. I'm living in Europe right now. I'm living in the Azores Islands, so I'll be moving to mainland Portugal and getting a camper and traveling with my camper in Europe, and then spending six months back in America with my camper. So I don't know, I kind of want to get a pet at some point. I think it would be fun to have a little animal.

and just keep teaching. I just there's nothing that makes me come alive more than teaching and mentoring people and facilitating transformations. So I found it. I found my purpose, I found my mission, and nothing's going to stop me from continuing on with everything that's happening already for me. I'll just keep going. It's wonderful to share this with other people too. You look at people suffering and you think, that's so preventable. We have a technique, we have skills. We have breakthroughs that can prevent that.

And so I know that for me too, Amanda, it's powerful to, have it as motivation, see people suffering and think, let's offer them these tools that can help them shift. So I'm so grateful you're doing that and that. And I also all right, places like Omega Institute, there are lists, these workshops on the universe. You can find them online, find them on Amanda's website. Find the money at Universe website. For more information on the Short path, go to the Shortpath.com. Find these things that speak to you and then pursue them.

Take action, do them. And then again, as a man and I are saying recommending stick with the process. And so many of us turn to these issues, turn to these. When we have big issues, we turn to these techniques and we find a temporary way, feeling better, but then don't sustain them. We want you to be on a sustained personal growth journey where you really start to express and fulfill your whole potential. So be that person that just applies these things on a consistent basis, and then moves into whatever life is calling to you to do initially, it's usually trauma clearing that might be expressing your full potential in singing and dancing by yourself.

After a while, like Amanda, you might be teaching others to sing and dance their lives out loud as well. see. And staying actively engaged and being inspired. I really think that that needs to be more of a priority for us, because we can succumb to the doldrums of everyday life, sometimes to this adulting thing. But if we stay actively engaged and being inspired just by the smallest thing, then life becomes so much more enjoyable. Absolutely. I've also been noticing a little tendency is me to be, a little bit less happy than I might otherwise be.

I'll find some old patter, and I'm writing a simple pattern of thought or behavior or belief. I'll think. Interesting. Time to shift that. Okay. Absolutely. Observing yourself. I think that radical thought interruption and redirection is one of the most important steps on the on the spiritual journey, just to be able to hear your inner critic and how they speak to you, and replace that with an inner advocate, and also some of these old tapes that are just running in there to be able

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to observe them, pay attention to them and say, that's not mine anymore, that's old, that's remnants from the old me. And it's time for me to start integrating the new me. So there's that old you, there's the new you. We encourage you to make finding and then vibrantly and fully expressing the new you, what you do and the direction you move. There's so many tools here. There's so many techniques here, there's so many ideas here. And again, we're encourage you to look at your journal and to apply these things in your life.

Have an action plan, decide what you'll do and follow through. And then I'm so grateful to you. I'm so grateful to. You for that. I, I love when we're teaching together and we're we're both there sharing with people. It's it's wonderful. To me. Your energy is just incredibly inspiring to people. And I'm so glad you're shining your light so brightly for so many people at this point in your life, and looks like you are finding ways to expand that in the future too. I'm so grateful for that as well.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Dawson. It's been my absolute pleasure to spend some time with you today. so everyone, again, you have your list of practices, you have your notes. Please apply them. Please use these practices and then we will be moving into other themes, other possibilities, other topics. And you'll find this all works together in this powerful hole that can dramatically shift your life and give you a very different life. As you move from that one point version of yourself to expressing your full potential, that healed version of you that's able to express your full potential and the world around you.

I'm grateful you're here. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode.