How a Sunday Picnic turned into such a Possibility!
It was day 3 of our EFT level 1 & 2 workshop on a beautiful autumn day. Our workshop participants had decided to have lunch on the grass and were scattered in a group in a celebratory sort of way.
So much clearing and opening had happened in the previous days and we were moving towards the last afternoon and closure of the workshop. There was a sense of lightness in the air and people who had only met each other for the first time 3 days previously were talking and chatting like old friends! They seemed to me to be like beautiful flowers that had all started blossoming at their own pace as they began clearing their own issues. They had arrived as closed blooms and over the three days of tapping they had begun to open, soften and show up in their splendour. It was such a heart-warming place to experience.
I was enjoying my lunch and made a comment in passing about a physical issue that was clearing up for me. I had “torn” my cartilage in my knee last year and after surgery I needed to do rehab for my knee. To my surprise I suddenly began to talk about a time in my life living in Cape Town when I had been extremely fit – walking, climbing, hiking, playing tennis as well as dancing and doing aerobic exercise at the gym at least 3 times a week.
I began to wonder how I had managed to give up on my life in Cape Town and all those wonderful activities? I was shocked to realise that I had closed the door on all that! How had I given up my daily walk down Addelerly Street to work, and the pleasure of the return journey in the afternoons, gazing at beautiful Table Mountain in all its moods! How had I stopped walking my dogs around the leafy suburbs of Claremont with Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain in the background? How had I given up the joy of regular climbing and hiking Table Mountain with a group of friends, in all kinds of Cape weather? How had I let this all go? The shocking realisation came to me that I had given this all up because of the “writing on my walls” – the unconscious belief systems that were running my life!
[Editor's Note: "The Writing on our Walls" is a concept we introduce our participants to in the Level 2 workshop. The term was used by Gary Craig, creator of EFT, as an amazing metaphor for the beliefs that we run our lives by. We're all really born into a "Palace of Possibilities" and as we live our lives, all kinds of well-meaning people put limits in place for us. Our parents, siblings, teachers, family, the church, advertising, television, radio... all of them telling us things like "you should", "you shouldn't", "you must", "you must not", "you can" or "you can't". We begin to inhabit only a little room of this palace as those limits are reinforced and taken as the truth by us. It gets to be the "writing on the walls" of our tiny little room and every time we want to do something, decide something or take action, we consult the writing on the walls that tells us whether we can/can't/should/shouldn't/must/mustn't. Fortunately these "writings on the walls" can be rewritten and we can go back to living in the Palace! Until we're aware of those writings, though, we can't change anything. And that's where we go on Level 2 - how to "rub out" those outdated writings and replace them with more empowering beliefs!]
Circumstances at that time required my husband and I to make a decision about returning to Johannesburg. The pull to return to Johannesburg and to the family was strong, as I was now a mother of a 9 month old son. My “inner child”, with all her belief systems and pain, and ever on the lookout for that perfect childhood and happy family she never had, agreed to return to Johannesburg, in the mistaken hope that she could now have her happy family.
Back in Johannesburg all the unconscious patterning of my childhood kicked in. I gave up on my life and returned to being “invisible”. I tried to find ways to make this elusive happy family that my inner child so desperately yearned for! I returned to the old familiar (family) patterns of being responsible for everybody else – to fix my alcoholic mother, help my recently widowed mother-in-law as well as trying to be the “perfect” wife and mother! How exhausting and futile that all was!
The conversation on the lawn that Sunday about a “torn” cartilage had brought to light the fact that there was buried pain, sadness and loss about leaving Cape Town and myself behind. While tapping to clear these issues I also discovered that I had other limiting beliefs about the ability of my body to heal itself at my age, 60, as well as other revealing beliefs about aging, what older people can or cannot do, inevitable loss of mobility, the inevitability of pain and effort, as well as images of some sort of immobility in later life!
How shocking to find all that and how exciting to be able to clear out those beliefs with EFT and put some new empowering choices in their place! I am so grateful for the “conversation on the grass” and as my knee and body continue to heal now in accelerated and easy ways I am looking forward to the possibility of many walks on Table Mountain!
Written by Laurie Adams
April 2012
