The Science of Tapping: Healing Trauma Through the Brain and Body

Introduction to Emotional Healing and the Functional Edge 0:00

We need to get serious about emotional healing. It is our huge leverage point over global warming. People who are emotionally secure, not stressed in their hearts, in love with their bodies, and love the people around them, are inlove with the earth and they don't hurt the Earth. So it is a big leverage for global warning. Welcome to the Functional Edge. I'm Dr. Julia Ward, and this is where science meets real-world strategies for living healthier, sharper and stronger. From uncovering hidden environmental toxins to unlocking peak performance and mental clarity, we cover it all.

Ready to take control of your health and thrive? Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to the Functional Edge podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Julia Ward, medical director and founder of Balanced Body Function Medicine. Today, we're honored to welcome Dr Dawson Church to our show. In this episode, Doctor Church will be sharing insights on emotional freedom techniques, nervous system regulation and the connection between unresolved stress, trauma and chronic illness, offering practical tools to support both emotional and physical healing.

So stay tuned for an engaging conversation that promises to empower and inspire your path to wellness. Dr. Church, thank you so much for joining us. It is so good to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So you've been a major voice in bringing EFT or emotional freedom techniques into both clinical and mainstream awareness.

Dr. Dawson Church and the Origins of EFT 1:28

What first drew you to this work and what convinced you that it was more than just a stress relief tool? In my teenage years, I was very depressed, suicidal, a pretty miserable young man. I wound up living on a spiritual community for many, many years and eventually also got into psychology very heavily. And I saw people making progress and I especially liked Gestalt therapy, it was my big favorite therapy. and I'd see people making progress. And then when I learned energy therapies, which was in the late 1990s, early 2000s.

I suddenly saw people who had made incremental process with Gestalt and other forms of talk therapy, making extremely rapid progress, so I began to focus on what the nature of these therapies were that was producing these rapid results. And also, as our first experimental results came in, I was just absolutely astounded by how big the shifts were. Like in one study, with healthcare workers, we worked with doctors and nurses, and we eventually had about 215 people in that study. And we, in one day of doing energy therapies with them, we saw a reduction in anxiety and depression of 45%. We saw reduction and physical pain in about a half hour component of that day by 65%. So these were all the charts results.

And that's when I realized like 2004, 2005, we have to get these into primary care. That's going to take research. So I began to focus on the clinical trials that would require to validate these methods and get people interested in these therapies to some degree. And when you try a simple method like EFT tapping, acupressure, or diaphragmatic breathing, these are really simple entry-level kinds of therapies, but you feel how much they change you, then you're motivated to go and use more, do more and then open up the whole suite of available therapies.

So it's really a start to these installment therapies, but they point the way toward what's turning out to be a revolution, not just in medicine but in epigenetics and our whole understanding of unlocking our human potential. Right. Well, for those new to EFT, how would you explain what is actually happening in the body when somebody is tapping? So EFT is using your fingertips and tapping on acupuncture points. And there are over 300 of these on the body, but there only about 14 of them that are really critical.

So what we do in Eft is we have people tap or rub these points and what do we observe clinically? is those rapid reductions in triggering. Like one young veteran I worked with, he had served in Iraq and I was working with him and while I talking to him at a conference center, somebody walked into the room and this woman who walked in had a water bottle and she just finished her water and absentmindedly baseball, the water bottle like this, and this veteran was ready to dive under the table. He was so triggered by that sound.

So we worked on that, all the triggers that he'd heard and smelled and seen in Iraq. And within about a 30 minute time period, he could listen to that same sound again. and have zero reactivity. So it works really, really quickly. When we test people in clinical trials, six months or a year, even two years later, they are no longer triggered. And when we hook them up to EEGs, we find that when people are emotionally triggered, and this is not just somebody who's traumatized. This is everybody who has an emotional reaction.

We all have emotional reactions to something or someone. And when that happens, the emotional brain, that limbic system of the brain. The midbrain gets really lit up on an EEG.

How EFT Works in the Body and Brain 5:38

You can see it turned red on the EE. When we tap while a person's remembering that firefight, That terrible divorce. That heart crash. that big life disappointment. when they tap and we have booked up to an EG and they have this red, highly lit-up limbically brain and as they tapped that triggering just reverses. Within a few seconds, it's absolutely uncanny to watch this on a brain scatter and see somebody just get completely calm. Then you ask them five minutes later, oh, how do you feel when you think back to the car crash and the sound of tearing metal and sound or screeching rubber and smell of blood and all of these sensory channels and they're at a zero for emotional triggering.

They're remember them all. That's called memory reconsolidation, where you have now a memory of the physical facts of what happened. You don't lose your memory. And you still remember all the bad stuff of your life. It's just that you're no longer going into hyperdrive. If you are going to fight or flight, you aren't going in to the stress reaction. When we look at what happens in the body in terms of stress hormones, the HPA axis is no long activated. People are no more popping out cortisol and adrenaline.

Their cortisol levels shift. In one clinical trial, huge five-site, triple-blind, randomized controlled trial I published in the oldest Psychiatry Journal in North America's President's Journal, we found that cortisol dropped dramatically baseline cortisol in one hour. So it's having a big effect on your body when you shift your mental processing, all of the downstream effects of stress are no longer apparent in the body. That's what EFT is tapping on pressure points. What it is doing is regulating the stress response to the brain, which in turn has epigenetic effects in So in functional medicine, we often see patients who are doing everything right, but there still aren't healing.

How do you see unresolved emotional stress or trauma fitting into that picture? It is the big elephant in the bedroom. And I really, I mean, a lot of functional medicines doctors are aware of the role of stress. In fact, functional medical doctors, are far more likely to be aware the of role stress than conventional allopathic doctors. And so a lot of them are aware of that role. And we actually train quite a few of him every year in our training program. So they are where the role of stress and what we recommend they do is remove stress from the equation and then see what remains like, for example, in Look, and the pain studies, there are about 20 studies measuring EFT for pain.

We find that pain goes down by about two thirds. And this is even chronic pain that people have had for years and years. It's wonderful to see chronic going down two-thirds. That means you only have one third of the pay left. But that pay is organic pain, so you're going to need an intervention for that. One of things we actually have to train people is we find we train retrain practitioners in EFT and they get so blown away by these results I'm describing that they then think that, oh, these energy techniques are going to be able to tackle every problem and you still need great medical care.

You still may need the medication. I worked on myself for various things and one of them was high blood pressure. Did all the nutritional interventions, did all of the recommended natural interventions for high blood pressure, brought my blood down quite a bit, used tapping, wanted on some more isolated medication. So you really are wanting to see all this holistically, use emotional things for stress and remove stress as a driver of disease. And that way you're going to get rid of a whole huge number of things.

And you still have to exercise, you have you to eat well, You still may need a supplement, or you may still need medication. So that's a balanced way to see this. It's not like there's one right approach over here. We need to use all the wonderful suite of inventions that are available to us, and then get the best of all possible worlds. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so you've described EFT as a way to, quote, turn off the stress response. Can you walk us how that impacts physiology at a deeper level, including like hormones, inflammation, and immune function?

Yeah. So our bodies evolved over millions of years to respond to threat. This was a highly adaptive, adaptive is just a word used in biology to mean that it's helpful to you. It helps you survive. So the stress response is highly adaptive. When you are crossing a busy street and the car swerves toward you, you jump out of the way. And that's an adaptive stress-response. when somebody is really mad at you. You have a rise in blood pressure. you have rise and respiratory rate. We have all kinds of things happening in your body.

and that is very useful to be able to deal with a real threat. The problem is that us human beings, we not only responding to real threats, we're responding imaginary ones all the time. So I think of my phone and I read the news and there's all this information about war and erosion of democracy and the big corporations are doing all kinds of things that may not be in my interests and all of these reasons to be worried. Now there is zero threat to my survival from any of this, none of it is going to kill me.

But I am driving my level of stress high by that. That's an external influence. Also internal influences, I'm not thinking about the car that almost hit me. I tell my kids about it over dinner that night and I have a stress response as well. Chronically, like that young veteran, he got back from Iraq eight years ago. He is still stuck in that high level of stress response and chronic stress produces absolutely enormous downstream effects over time on the body.

Stress, Trauma, and Chronic Illness 11:49

It suppresses bone regrowth that suppresses, for example, we have muscle loss, bone loss we, have skinny elasticity loss. We have loss of volume in the memory and learning centers of the brain. All kinds of bad things happen under chronic long-term stress. Our bodies are meant to cope with short- term stress, no problem. If you keep thinking about the bad stuff in your life, the prime example is people in adverse childhood experiences study and they're Again, that one negative thought won't kill you, but over time it will, because their lifespans were 20 years shorter.

So that stress, unresolved childhood stress looping, and again, it's literally is a loop of the brain. It just is the thoughts of brain where there is no threat to your survival, Degrades all of the cellular function in your body and you died 20 years early That's a huge penalty or and so that's why we are so Intended teaching people stress reduction techniques not natural DFT Meditation breathing time and nature. There are many of them. Yeah, you have to use super fast. It takes one minute to do a round of tapping these acupressure points and then you can literally feel the effects in your body.

So that's what you want to be focused on is how do you release that stress and that you'll feel better. You don't feel these natural there's the eventual balance in your body I'll watch people I'm tapping with they'll start to suddenly breathe deeper and they've been constricted in their breathing and suddenly as the stress falls off as it shifts in our brain as those maladaptive cycles are broken their whole body starts to respond and in gene expression What we see is amazing. Genes are only about 15% of your genome is fixed.

Other 85% percent of it is dynamic. It's shifting your response to all kinds of things. Your diet, exercise levels, nutrition, but your thoughts are a huge driver of gene expression. And we've seen gene expressions literally shifting in some studies I've done within seconds. Within literally, we did one study of veterans with PTSD and we saw that gene expression in absolutely critical genes that are responsible for regulating inflammation and immunity was significantly, dramatically upregulated by just 10 one-hour sessions.

And these people with high levels of chronic PTSD accompanied by chronic pain and all kinds of other medical issues as well. And so these techniques are revolutionary in their ability to shift all of those kinds of downstream stressors. And again, then you have adaptive stress, which is fine when you really have to run from a tiger, but you are running from the paper tigers in your mind. Yeah, yes. Well, that kind of leads me into my next question, which is, how does EFT compare to the other nervous system tools like breathwork, meditation, or vagal toning?

It's quicker, better, and more durable. I did one randomized controlled trial comparing it to breath work. And we found that both breath and Eft had the same effect on patients right after treatment. So pre-post, they both declined. anxiety, depression, other forms of stress declined equally with breath work and with EFT. But in three months, the breathwork patients were right back up near where they'd begun. EFD patients, it was flat. They hadn't increased. So Eft has durable results. It affects all long term.

I use all of those things. And I meditate every day. Meditation sets a fantastic baseline that it takes a while. in MRI studies we find it takes people about 15-20 minutes to achieve a really stable state of well-being and meditation and they then start to have these non-dual experiences where non duality is when your local consciousness merges with the fields of infinite consciousness that drive the universe and so now your a local individual consciousness is surrendering its anchoring in your immediate circumstances, your body and your mind, it's merging with infinite consciousness.

And this is a really amazing phenomenon that meditation is able to produce. EFT can't do that for you. That is something you have to sit with for a while. You're focused on breathing, you're moving into these higher states of consciousness, and that is having, again, massive effects on the body. Telomere length, these are your anti-aging markers, your main markers of aging are telomeres. They're these end caps of your chromosomes. And in meditators, rather than shrinking in normal aging, they start growing again.

in Alzheimer's patients, regions of the brain that have been shrinking begin to get bigger when they use an effective form of meditation. So these meditations have used absolutely stunning effects in terms of cognition, in term of memory retention, brain volume, the great volume studies to show you get a bigger brain from doing this and not just a big brain, generally a very big in all the right areas like memory and learning and emotion regulation. I have a book called Spiritual Intelligence, which is all about meditation, Alzheimer's, using meditation and triggering these changes in brain health.

So you need meditation. And it's going to take you maybe 30 or 45 minutes in the morning to do that. That's really useful. When you're in a middle of a busy workday, you can't go and spend 40 minutes when you are dysregulated. But you've been sure to tap. You can tap for one minute and that will return you to that good baseline. So all of these practices work together. Time and nature works together, wonderful social connections work, together loving touch, loving, caring connection with people around you.

Nature is so absolutely full of benefit for people. Even research shows that comparing people in japan doing forest bathing for two weeks compared to people of new york city where the closest patch of land that's anything like nature is listed to stand piece of grass in front of the local church well if they go stand there in that voltage stamp size pieceof ground in fron of local churches on that grass they get many of benefits for those people doing forests bathing So nature is incredibly healing all of

EFT vs. Other Nervous System Tools 18:18

these things are valuable but the two baseline practices are meditation in the morning to trigger all these kinds of effects in your body and your sense of well-being and connection with something larger than yourself and then when you get annoyed, irritable, triggered in a day which we all do I mean I still get triggered I've been doing this for 50 years, plus a nice trigger sometimes. That's when you would attack and release that, see return to that baseline as quickly as possible. Don't hang out there in cortisol, land, inflammation, poor immunity.

You want to bring yourself back to a good baseline quickly, and EFT does that. So there's growing research behind EFT, including studies showing changes in cortisone and mental health outcomes. What do you feel is the most compelling evidence right now? I think the most compelling evidence is actually the evidence that comes from outside of the English language world. And there are over a hundred English-language studies published in English Language Journals, but there a whole bunch of studies, over 100 studies.

Published in Pakistan and the Philippines and Egypt and Turkey and other parts of world and difference between those studies in other non-English language journals and those published in English language, journals is that in those countries, clinicians can work with people in hospital, which is really hard to do. It's very difficult to get past the gatekeepers and people at hospital are there's a whole bunch of reasons why it's hard with them in developed countries. But in these developing countries where there are those barriers and also there aren't the medical tools available that are available here.

In the US, there is something like 40,000 MRI scanners, high resolution MRIs. So these doctors and nurses don't have all the equipment we have, so they are really focused on their patients and they're getting EFT to them. So the studies there show that in diabetics, their blood sugar normalizes, and it's just amazing. It normalize quickly in people with preoperative and postoperate complications. Those are dramatically reduced by EFT, hemorrhaging, hospital readmission, all of these things. So these are people who are in hospital or a serious condition.

Cancer patients, for example, dramatically better outcomes. I did one study with colleagues at Tel Aviv University in Israel and we looked at melanoma patients and dramatically huge drops, drops of over 70% in their levels of emotional triggering around the fear of recurrence of melanomas. So that's the most amazing research is showing it. It affects our biology. You know, we think of psychology and biology as two separate things. What I talk about in spiritual intelligence is that they're one thing and we see the effects of consciousness change directly in biology in the form of gene expression, full of neurotransmitter sentences, enzymes, all of these things are showing up as we shift our awareness, just shift your consciousness.

and brain growth, neural growth. Some of the research shows dramatically enhanced neural-growth. The cortex of people doing these techniques gets bigger, the hippocampus gets, bigger the emotion regulation circuit gets. And there are four key circuits that actually start to grow in your brain. Emotion regulation, compassion, control of your own obsession with your worries and ability to relate to the rest of the world and the universe, and emotion regulation. All of those circuits get bigger when you do this.

So those studies, which are mostly being done outside of US, are just amazing and show how we can really start to shift the burden of disease with what we think of as being psychospiritual interventions. Yeah, that's amazing. Critics often question the mechanism behind EFT. How do you personally think it works from a neurobiological perspective? Yeah. And the criticism that we don't understand how it works is very common in Elion and Mensen because like, you know, 500 years ago, people were scraping willow bark off willows trees and grinding it up in a mortar and pestle and giving to people with headaches and took away their headaches.

Like we had no idea why willower bark worked. Then the Bayer Company isolated aspirin in the 1890s and suddenly we have something that was white, pill shaped and in bottle. We called it aspirin, and they popped this willow bark extract and it went away in their headaches. But we still actually had no idea how it worked. It wasn't until years after that, about 100 years, that we discovered how aspirine worked, so it was this long lag between finding how things worked and the mechanisms of action that show why they work.

So we now have done enough research with MRIs, with epigenetic studies, studies of epigeneric markers. There are these things called microRNAs that attach to genes. And when you, for example, people who are depressed, major depressive disorder, have a pattern of these micro RNAs attached to certain genes and so we know that this pattern of impaired gene expression because these these are kind of like bubble gum that sticks to a zipper. The zipper can unlock unzip because it's got bubblegum stuck to it.

That's what those microRNAs are doing. We now know that when we tap with people, those micro RNAs just pop off a zipper and the zipper unzips.

Research, Mechanisms, and Clinical Evidence 23:58

So we know epigenetically how it works. We know neurologically how that works, we now hormonally how works and most of these studies have been replicated. And that's a big thing that maybe people who don't geek out on science don' know about. But there's what's called a replication crisis in science where we see an experiment like there Amgen, a big cancer drug development company, took a series of about 70 key studies in cancer research and tried to replicate them. Do them again, do the same study again.

And they couldn't replicate most of them, so there's a replication crisis where most researchers can't even replicate studies they've done themselves a second time. So with EFT, we see many of these studies successfully replicated. often not not only once but twice. And so we are showing these mechanisms of action to be there. Cortisol limits baseline cortisol drops dramatically in people who tap and that's been shown now in several studies. So those are the mechanisms. What is all this dropping?

brain function is changing, hormones and neurotransmitters are shifting, gene expression is altering, and then these epigenetic tags, microRNAs, non-coding RNAs are being shifted by EFT. That's the how it works in the body. That's great. And I think you're absolutely right that Western medicine does get really hung up on mechanism of action, even though we don't always know the mechanism have action. You know, for example, like anesthesia or ozone therapy. But we still use it because we know it works.

So yeah, that's that great Do you think that the tapping points themselves are essential or is it a therapeutic effect coming more from exposure and cognitive reframing? Topic points are essential because there have been a lot of studies and acupuncture of shab points versus real acupunture points and they just show unambiguously that the points themselves have a, well for one thing, when you grab a little, I have little device in my office over here called a galvanometer. And you can run it over your skin, and it's going to measure areas of very, very high conductance.

So it runs over you skin. Nothing happens when it hits an area of high-conductance, it beeps. And it produces a beep when an incidental punch point, because those points have very low electrical resistance, high inductance and so we know that those are important for that reason. And then there are also studies comparing EFT to, for example, really great therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy. And it finds that they have the same effects as cognitive behavior therapy, but in much less time. So when you engage the body, any therapy that engages the buddy is generally going to work better than one that engage is the mind only.

Because when you tell yourself that you're safe, looking out, I've got this looping trauma going through my mind. I can't stop it. And I say to myself, Dawson, like the other day, we had a breakdown in one of our websites and it was really a huge problem. Oh, it I was just triggered by it, did my tapping, but I'm still somewhat triggered. By it and I. Was worried about this, this problem in the website. So I said to. Myself, also, don't worry about. This. You can't do anything more than you've done already.

The tech guys will fix it. Don't think about this anymore. Keep you up at night. Well, I work at the night thinking about the website. I couldn't put the web site on my mind. Just trying to convince the mind with the mine is usually futile. Doesn't work. And so you have to convinced the body that you say that's why tapping is going to help, breathing is gonna help. Anything that helps you anchor this in the body. Tell the buddy you're safe and suddenly the mind is able to get over it. I'll tell you, you see this and Extreme situations we're working now.

We're doing we do a lot of volunteer work any of the universe working working out of people in Ukraine and These are a little bit children. They're incredibly traumatized by having grown up in four years of war and so How do you how do work with them and these are effective things? You can't tell them don't think about the sirens. Don't about to drones. So worry about that. Yeah, I Well, you'll be safe. The mind cannot convince the body of that. But the mind can convince them of it. Because when they tap, their level of fear goes down.

They still will take appropriate evasive action for real threats, but they are no longer consumed by imaginary threats. So that's the benefit of this. You can't get yourself, think yourself out of the stress response. And you can tap yourself or breathe yourself and meditate yourself. So you've worked extensively with trauma, and what patterns do you see in how unresolved trauma shows up as physical illness? Well, the ACE study, Adverse Trial of Experiences, showed that adverse trial of experiences result in higher amounts of all the big killers of adults.

And the people of the ACU study their median age was 57. So these traumatic events happened in their lives a half a century earlier. And now they're showing up at the doctor's office with cancer, heart disease and obesity and all kinds of other physical issues half a century later. So there is this big, big link between early adversity and adult disease. And so that's why it's so essential to go and work on that. And again, that health plan differential is 20 years. They're now dying 20-years early.

Vietnam veterans die early, they have sky-high rates of cancer, heart disease, and other diseases. So you want to really intervene and, work that stuff that bothers you. Work on your childhood. We have a whole module on our website where we have people guide them into a billion working either with a therapist or alone on their childhood events and cleaning up all that ancient trauma. Don't let it shorten your life, don't become one of those statistics of people who dies 20 years early because of it.

So it's so important to practice early intervention and then get there and release the effect of that on your live. Then suddenly you'll have a much better and healthier downstream life. And we find that in people who do this when they're in their sixties, seventies eighties their brains start regenerating, their body shifts dramatically, there are symptoms often are going to reduce.

Trauma, Physical Disease, and Complex Illness 30:48

So it's never too late to do that whether you're young, whether your old, it really pays to focus on trauma, release it and see the shifts that are happening in your body. And for someone with chronic or complex chronic illness like Lyme, mold or autoimmune diseases, where do you see EFT fitting into the healing sequence? There are a lot of, we have about 5,000 stories written by people who emailed them into us on our website. And quite a few people had one of those chronic diseases, Lyme, CFS, another big one, mold susceptibility.

Now again, these are real things. It's not like you've got to tap and then you're slowly going to just tolerate your moldy environment. You have to remediate the mold. where you have to deal with the real thing. The Buddha said, if you're hit by a poisoned arrow, don't sit down and start meditating. Pull the arrow out and say first. Yes. You want to make sure you deal in with any physical components that there are there. But there's that line you want make that you've dealt with, the bacterial infection that may well have.

So has that been dealt? But if psychologically you're strong, your belief is strong in your body's healing abilities, it shifts all kinds of factors in you body and you engage all of those healing potentials of your Rather be resourceful and resilient once the toxins removed once you pull out the poison arrow You've had body as a healing the body this naturally wants to heal it is not healing something's wrong find that something wrong and then out leashes healing abilities and Then reinforce them with belief with prayer.

I've worked on any book now and I'm looking at all the factors that Reinforce healing, gratitude, optimism. These are all things that influence gene expression. There's research showing all of these things are shifting your gene expressions in a positive direction. So you want to engage the power of optimism, social connection, prayer, time in nature. All of those things to support your healing journey. If you're getting the best medical care, I mean, sometimes if I had to eat McDonald's hamburgers for every meal three times a day and live in the middle of a steel cage in a concrete jungle.

But I was allowed to tap and think positively versus if I had the best possible environment, I have finest organic food, if was living in my country, had best water, best air, access to a wonderful nurturing environment. And it is a stark thought experiment, which would you choose all these wonderful lifestyle factors or none of them. But when you have none, of those lifestyle, factors, you get positive thinking and energy treatment. And in the other condition where you had this beautiful environment.

You're a negative thinker. I can tell you your negative thinking is doing far more damage to you than any of those other restrictions that I mentioned. So I would choose living in the urban jungle and eating McDonald's if I was allowed to think positively, because it's having an absolutely massive effect epigenetically on yourselves. And I see people doing all of these things. See some of my biohacker friends. To me, like I just listened to a new book that just came out like the last month by a couple of famous fire hackers and just a great book about all kinds of supplements you can take and things you could do.

Wonderful, but I thought these people were like, going and picking up teaspoons of dirt and putting it into a pile and seeing the pile get bigger and every trip with a teaspoon of dirty they're walking past a mountain of wellness and that's emotions and spirituality. Those things produce absolutely massive cascades of well-being. And we're focused on all of these little tiny things that really can help us a little bit incrementally. But if you have spiritual intelligence, like for example, there are videos on YouTube of a Tai Chi master who's been cultivating these spiritual values his whole life.

He's 114 years old. Is doing Tai chi, is doing martial arts, he has full range of motion, He is a lively guy. So that's what you really want. That's the mountain of wellness that is available to all of us and it's free. Just meditate. That's awesome. If someone is completely new to EFT, what is the simplest way they could start using it today? Just go to my website, download the free EFD mini manual, go into the back page, there's Eft on the page and tap and just give it a try. Also, at the at back of each chapter of my book, Spiritual Intelligence, I have free meditations and tapping routines.

You just go the last page of the chapter, it says, deepening practices, There you'll see it'll give you a link, go to the website, you will download a tapping script. You'll download the meditation all for free and then use those things. And you can very, very quickly find that you feel the difference in your body. Like the first time you tap, usually it doesn't take more than once usually people to feel. The difference because they're again, their respiration is deepening. Their muscles are relaxing.

It's totally mechanical. They don't have to believe it's going to work. There's no placebo effect. I tell people who believe it's not going to work and they tap and the very surprised to find out the results. So the simplest thing is go to my website or look at the, again, this is the last page of each chapter of my book, Spiritual Intelligence. It has a link, free link to meditations and tapping routines. Yeah. Okay. And what are some of the most common mistakes people make when trying to do EFT on their own?

Well, you can do EFT on your own for a lot, and it's useful for releasing your everyday stress. We do not recommend people do it if they have PTSD or complex trauma, because that can very easily result in emotional flooding and you're getting into far more deep, hot water than your crypto handle. So work with a trained certified clinical EFT practitioner we have over 500 of them on our website they are incredibly well trained and capable they know how to work with psychological trauma so that's a mistake people make is thinking that oh it doesn't work for my fear of flying I mean fear flying so super easy to cure we just hardly ever takes more than one session phobias of small animals, bees, mice, spiders, things like that.

It's really easy. So you'll apply and fight it easy for many, many things. If you have deep trauma, go work with a trained practitioner. The second mistake people make is they think that because it worked well on this thing, it's going to work well on everything. And it doesn't work that well, on certain things. Like for example, I found the tinnitus, it does not work very well. Tinnitis is this ringing in the ears that people get sometimes. I mean there are stories on the website of people getting over tinnitus with tapping but I work with people and it's been a very mixed bag so some things I think are are just harder than than others things that are strongly genetic for example and be harder to work long-term pattern of money self-sabotage

Where EFT Fits in Conventional Medicine 38:48

relationship self self sabotage weight and diet people are going to get much further much faster tapping with a certified practitioner for weight loss for example we have many clinical trials of people losing weight. And the cool thing about EFT weight losses you go there and work with that practitioner you lose you know not a lot usually five ten pounds they get a month but all of our clinical trials show that a year later people weigh less, two years later they weigh, less three years they they waste the less they keep on losing after they're initially at the experience work with a professional don't try and figure that one out by yourself you'll get your goal way way quicker so long-term persistent problems, usually much better work with an expert coach or therapist than you are yourself.

Those are some common pitfalls is working with trauma, make sure you have a practitioner when you work for the persistent problem, makes sure that you all work somebody and then don't think it's going to solve everything because you may still need like I need my blood pressure medications. Don't get into denial about needing functional medicine. Yeah. And if you just break some things, it won't work for other things that are mechanical, physical, biological. Yeah, how do you envision EFT being integrated into conventional or functional medicine practices in the future?

I recommend it be integrated by being the very first line of treatment. For example, in South Korea, they have something called the National Health National Health System, NHS, and they approved the EFT in 2017 after a long official process. And so oftenly the doctors there will have people tap to start with. So a chronic pain patient comes in. The first thing they do is tapping and then they bring their pain down. Then they treat the remaining pain appropriately. I think that should be the first that we do.

What is the emotional, spiritual, psychological, life history contribution of trauma to your problem? And if we just, for example, try and treat a person's pain, maybe the pain's 8 out of 10, and we're trying to medicate away 8 of the 10 pain when six of those eight points are psychospiritual, that's an inappropriate use of medical treatment. So we want to bring down the psychological part with EFT first and then when it's down to whatever's raised, two or three, then we address that. That's one way of using it.

There are many, many other ways. It should be used preoperatively, postoperative. Research has shown it dramatically improves both sensor results. It should be used as a placebo consciously. For example, if I take supplements every day and so I hold my supplements in my hand and I visualize them helping me. This is a placebo effect. So I'm reinforcing those supplements with placebo. I might tap and hold that so we can consciously use it to reinforce the effects of treatment. We can use it to remove the fear of treatment.

So I've now been diagnosed with something, maybe a serious disease like cancer in my cancer study, or maybe, you know, a chronic disease. Maybe I'm just going to diagnosis of osteoporosis or osteoarthritis or something like that. Now I have diagnosis anxiety. Well, that diagnosis, anxiety is driving my cortisol up. which is compounding my osteoarthritis. So many diseases. Chronic cancer patients have elevated cortisol and they have chronically depressed DHEA, which means cell repair hormone. A lot of that can be adjusted by EFT.

That's the leaf that stress, remove stress from the equation. What's that left? You'll get appropriate treatment for this. And if you if your worried, your doctor will think that you're just a whatever you may think about, whatever, you think your daughter thinks of you using alternative treatments like like EFT, I can almost guarantee they don't they're going to support you. Doctors so love seeing patients walk into their office, patients who are taking care of their own well-being in every possible way.

We're coming to the doctor where they need to come to doctor. 80% of primary care business, there is no identifiable organic disease. And what is a doctor supposed to do? You haven't taken care your stress for the last 30 years. Now you walk in to your doctor's office and say, fix me. Your doctor is going to be profoundly grateful if you're tapping. Yes, yes, agreed. So what excites you most right now in the field of energy psychology or mind-body medicine? I want to see these therapies go worldwide.

in a big way, and I want to see them become woven into the fabric of our culture. In Rwanda, after the genocide there in 1994, this horrendous genocide when almost a million people were hacked to death with machetes, in this horrible civil war, there were hundreds of thousands of children who were orphaned. when their parents were killed. And so after the war, there were these orphanages set up to warehouse these kids, and these were not happy places. These kids were traumatized. They had very little treatment.

So volunteers, tapping volunteers began going to Rwanda about five years after genocide and working with these genocide orphans. What began to happen? is that tapping began to spread through the orphanages and then into the society and since long tapping in Rwanda. And if you read anything about Rwandan the last 30 years since the genocide, it's staged a remarkable comeback. Is it a perfect country? Not by a long shot. Isn't way better off than if that psychological trauma and that reconciliation hadn't happened.

It just shows the potential in one country of what can happen when there is the start of emotional healing. We need to get serious about emotional healing. It is our huge leverage point over global warming. People who are emotionally secure, not stressed in their hearts, in love with their bodies, and love the people around them. are in love with the earth and they don't hurt the Earth. So it is that big leverage point for global warming. It's an enormously rich point, for higher quality relationships.

When you have relationship tension and stress, like I had a meeting yesterday and it didn't go well and there was some friction in the meeting. And so it immediately off to the other meeting, it happened to be with a colleague of ours who is a tapper. I said, before we start the meaning, can we tap together? So we did. Suddenly, my level of stress has dropped way down. So rather than me carrying that stress the rest of the day, now I'm shifting. Imagine if every corporation did that. If every workplace had tapping, if ever medical center had a tapping.

We did a randomized controlled trial of nurses in COVID wars in 2020 during the height of COVID epidemic. and they got way less anxious. Their mental health improved dramatically in one single online tapping session. It should be available to all medical staff in every treatment, in ever primary care setting. So I want to see it spreading. I don't want tapping to become so normative. Like 20 years ago, let me tell you, Julia, when I would walk down the street tapping, people would stare. Now I walk down the street tapping and nobody gives me a second glance.

People are tapping, I notice people tapping. I go to New York City to teach sometimes and I'm walking through the subway tile on this. And I see somebody tapping or they're doing this, stroking these acupressure points over here.

The Future of Emotional Healing and Global Impact 46:38

Tapping is becoming normative and i want it to spread. In schools, the research in schools there are now over 40 studies of eft for school children they get much calmer their anxiety depression drops Dramatically their social interactions get better and their grades improve and so they have much better lives as a result So I'd love to see tapping in every school globally This is going to reduce global conflicts because people who are injured and wounded in their early life go on to injure and wound other people, you know, we're all outraged by the war that vladimir putin started in ukraine that I can assure you that Dr.

Putin probably was horribly injured as a child and probably growing up and being a KGB officer didn't help at all. So taking these people and then working with them towards becoming a global phenomenon. It has the potential to shift international disputes, it has potential shift the workplace environment. homes and families, elder care, respect for other people, and respect the earth. It's going to have a massive effect on us globally as it begins to spread. And so that's my vision for the future.

That's wonderful. I love it. So after all your years of research and clinical work, what has surprised you most about the body's capacity to heal? That's another great question. And there are several things. One is that when you feel good. So when do you tap? When do meditate? when Do you breathe? Where do spend time in nature? Whether you have your children or your parents and you'll feel better, you will feel in your body. It's not just a mental feeling, it's a physical one. And what is really interesting is that that means that all kinds of things are happening in your body.

It means your cortisol is dropping, your adrenaline is droping, gene expression is changing, epigenetic shifts are happenning. So we don't actually need to put you in an MRI or give you a gene analysis. We know all these things correlated with you feeling better. That's one really intresting thing about the body, How you feel just how you Feel is a really good indication of your health. So pay attention how You feel in my book spiritual intelligence. I recommend you do a quick body scan every day.

Just do scan of Your body ask yourselves how they feel. That's a remarkable thing. Your bodies your body cells are talking to you every Day What happens if you don't listen? is they have to give you a little nudge, maybe a bit of a sniffle. Then if you still don't listen, they had to dial up the volume. Oh, that big ignoramus up there isn't hearing us. We have make a bigger ruckus to get heard by that brain out there. So then it gives you pain. What do you do? You go find a painkiller and suppress it.

now the body really has to start working hard. It's going to give you symptom after symptom until it's screaming at you and that's when you get that long-term serious diagnosis. So don't ignore your body, love your, body tear at your every day because it is how you feel in your. Body is a proxy for your overall well-being and your buddy is just a healing machine. You just stop hammering it with negative thinking and negative emotion, it'll just heal at a speed that'll make your head spin. The body is such a precious thing we get to have.

We are just consciousness and mental beings. You want to a glorious experience in your body. It's just wonderful to see people who are 60, 70, 80, and they're just living life to the fullest. That's really what we're meant to do. Yeah, I love that. All right, well, finally, if there's one message you wish every patient struggling with chronic illness could hear, what would that be? Start with self-love. and belief in healing so before you do anything but there are lots of things you can do which we mentioned here on the show but just start by loving yourself julio and i work with people who have chronic illness and they start telling you what they're thinking inside their heads I cry because there is so much hardness there.

There's self-blame for having the condition, there's fear it's going to get worse, this fear of treatment, There is fear, of all kinds of there, is resentment. there are just so many negative emotions there When you learn clinical EOT, we train you to tap along with your clients because you need to discharge all of the emotions that that working with wounded people will bring up in you. And so just moving into a place of self-love is so important where you don't blame yourself, you know, shame yourself.

You just breathe and sit with yourself and love yourself you're doing your best. Your body is doing its best and just give yourself a break. All of that self criticism, that negative self talk, it's not helping. and EFT and meditation breathing all these things can help reduce it and just that basic stance of I deserve a wonderful life my body is doing as best as I'm doing my best I love myself that's the basic EFD mantra is you tap on your side of hand point and you say I deeply completely accept myself just the way I am so you aren't driving yourself to change you are saying I will love myself when I get better I'll be fine and then I love my self you're saying

Self-Love, Healing, and Closing Resources 52:28

no just exactly the where I have with all my flaws imperfections diseases body conditions I just flood myself with love Yeah, I love that. That's amazing. It's beautiful. And what is your website so that people can get more information about and all those wonderful resources that you spoke of earlier? Yeah, so go to my my name Dawson d-a-w-s-o-n dawson gift g-i-f-t dot com and they can download the eft mini manual Tap yourself on some issue just try it right away. It takes five minutes to download The manual look to the back page and then use that tapping diagram there and you'll just feel your body right way There's also free meditations on there.

There is a link to mine new book spiritual intelligence by all means use the links in the back of the book and it says deepening practices, use those deeping practices. Read the Book, Use the Books, tell people about the books. Spiritual Intelligence again is this wrapper for all of these practices and they again are producing these profound effects on the body. And chapter 2 is all about Alzheimer's and about how it improves. Alzheimer's brains and cognitive decline. So, I mean, the randomized control trials coming out showing this now that literally patients with Alzheimer are regrowing their brains with meditation.

For that reason alone, it's well worth being aware of. dorsengift.com for downloading the basic stuff and then spiritual intelligence. Okay. Awesome. Well, thank you so much and thanks everyone for joining me on the functional edge. I hope today's episode gave you fresh insights and practical tools to level up your life. If you found value in this conversation, I'd love for you to hit subscribe, share it with someone who might benefit and leave a review. It truly helps us reach more people and continue to bring meaningful root cause health insights to those who need them the most.

For more resources, updates, and behind the scenes content, visit drjuliaward.com. Until next time, stay strong, Stay healthy, And keep living on the functional edge. Thank you for joining me on the Functional Edge. I hope today's episode gave you fresh insights and practical tools to level up your life. If you found value in what you heard, don't forget to hit subscribe, share the podcast with someone who needs it, and leave a review. It's the best way to support our mission of bringing powerful health solutions to more people.

For more resources, updates, and behind-the-scenes content, visit drjuliaward.com. Until next time, stay strong, Stay healthy, And keep living on the functional edge.