Currently I am completing a Master’s program in Spiritual Psychology. They have a site you can look at. The curriculum for this program was developed and refined over the years by Drs. Mary and Ron Hulnick. One of the main tenants of the program involves the idea that we can heal our past, and that we do so by, as they say, by “bringing love and healing to the places inside of us that hurt.” They have developed a step-by-step process that one follows when he/she wants to attend to a certain memory or relationship that they have found, or are currently finding, upsetting. When a student is going through this step-by-step process, we say that she is ‘working her process.’
One of the steps in this process involves Compassionate Self-Forgiveness of Judgments. The theory goes, I believe, that we maintain or hold onto our pains from the past because we are somehow still judging ourselves in some way now in relationship to that situation or relationship. After doing this work for 1½ years, I’ve found that this theory definitely holds true for me. Whenever I have ‘worked my process’ around anything at all, I have eventually found feelings and beliefs that are somehow judgmental of myself. Until we uncover and acknowledge those judgments, there will be something still holding us there in the past. Another way of saying this is: As long as we don’t acknowledge what’s really still there in our consciousness around the situation, then we are somewhat in the dark in our attempts to heal and let go and move on.
I continue to appreciate how EFT fits in so well with this whole idea of Self-Forgiveness. Roger Callahan and Gary Craig, the originators of EFT, knew that an integral part of any true healing involves an acknowledgment of WHAT IS TRULY THERE FOR YOU, RIGHT NOW.
Because of the whole movement towards ‘thinking positively’, many of us have come to believe that we are supposed to bypass our actual painful feelings or blocks, and somehow magically rise above them. Well, although I believe that the positive effects of EFT often appear almost magical or miraculous, those effects generally only occur after the person has done the first step of truly acknowledging that painful place inside of themselves.
In fact, the quickest resolution to any problem, EFT-style, is always arrived at by first really stating out loud those feelings, beliefs or blocks that the person is experiencing right now, at the beginning of the session. From there the practitioner and the client create The Set-up Statement. We can create an example of a Set-Up Statement right now.
Let’s say that a person is going through a divorce and is feeling very distraught about it. Upon further conversation we find that she knows that the divorce is the best choice for her based on the circumstances, but that she still “can’t help feeling that I have failed at something important.” We would begin with the Set-Up Statement first, which would be something like:
“Even though I feel that I have failed at something important, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.”
Within the EFT protocol, she would be either rubbing the ‘sore spot’ (as it is often called) or she would be tapping the ‘karate chop’ point AT THE SAME TIME as she is saying the above Set-Up Statement. And she would say that statement three times while doing the physical rubbing or tapping.
In the EFT Protocol there are steps that follow this one, but at the moment I am focusing solely on this one in the hopes of really impressing upon you that this step is not only effective, but also very meaningful and relevant to a larger idea that I believe is an integral part of all healing, no matter what path you take to achieve it.
The Set-Up Statement is a way to say once and for all to yourself, YES, THIS HAPPENED AND I AM OKAY WITH IT.
And it is also a way to say to yourself, “Yes, this is the way I feel and it’s okay that I feel this way, and in fact, I am lovable and and perfect RIGHT NOW.”
It is a forgiving of oneself. It is a releasing of the past.
We so often think things like:
“If I didn’t feel this way then my day would be better.”
“If I didn’t have this problem, then I would be okay.”
“If I made more money, then I would feel good about myself.”
“If I didn’t have this disease, then I would feel healthy.”
“If I hadn’t made that mistake, then things would be okay now and I would be happy with myself.”
These are all conditional statements. If we have thoughts like these in our head, then we are not actually caring for ourselves in the way that we really deserve. If we have thoughts like this in our minds, then we are waiting for some future time before we will let ourselves feel good about ourselves.
The practice of EFT allows a person to discover, and ACCEPT, exactly where he is RIGHT NOW. And not only does he discover and accept, he actually even goes so far as to LOVE HIMSELF in the process of what he sees as his living an imperfect existence.
No experience is a mistake. Nobody deserves to suffer, no matter what. Even if someone has done something ‘terrible’, if you really look at it, and you really allow yourself to see the reality of that person’s situation, you will recognize that that person was already suffering when they committed that crime or did that thing that hurt someone else. Their own self-doubt, self-hatred, or simple lack of acceptance for themselves caused them to be in a state of mind that allowed them to hurt someone else without remorse, or at least without the ability to stop themselves from doing so.
I pose the idea that it is only when we are not forgiving ourselves, do we not forgive others. And that, when we don’t forgive others then we remain disconnected from them. But the disconnection starts with ourselves. And until we allow ourselves to forgive ourselves for our pasts, and forgive ourselves for having judgments against ourselves in the present, there will always be something in the way of us experiencing the kind of bliss that’s actually available to us.
Let’s finally give ourselves a break and move on and into the kind of lifestyle where we worry about nothing, feel badly about nothing in the past, and experience the present with a kind of healthy openness that it, and WE, deserve!
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