Return to Home Page Return to Articles & Documents
While being able to sit down and do EFT or Focusing on our own as issues come up is so important and empowering, it can also be really beneficial to have a healing buddy to work with on a regular basis. One of the great things about all these tools is that your healing buddy doesn’t even have to be in the room with you – it can be anyone anywhere in the world, on the other end of the phone or a Skype or MSN line.
When we are working on something important to us, it’s easy to get bogged down in our own process, and to hit roadblocks that seem impassable. Sharing what we are working on with a healing buddy can really help us to find other avenues to explore with our healing. I’ve recently been working on a big issue for me, and tapping and Focusing on all sorts of things that could have been contributing to the issue. However it wasn’t until I was talking on the phone with a friend who also does EFT for herself one day, and she asked me a question about how I was feeling about something, that all of a sudden a thought popped into my mind of a possible contributor to the issue. As I explained it to my friend, all of a sudden a whole series of thoughts unravelled around it, and in the end I had to get off the phone and go and do some work with them, because I was very close to tears (a common sign for me that I’m onto something big.) Two hours later, I had unloaded an enormous amount of sadness, guilt and grief that I had obviously been unwittingly carrying around for years, that had just recently been triggered by something I had read. The next day, the physical symptoms that had accompanied the issue began to fade.
Most people have heard the old adage “A problem shared is a problem halved.” Well it may well be that the problem is more than halved when you have shared it with a healing buddy who is able to reflect back to you what you’ve said, and suggest other possible leads from their perspective. In the example I gave above, I hadn’t seen that guilt played a role at all, and I initially resisted the idea when my friend suggested that I might be feeling guilty about something. But I made a note of it anyway, and sure enough when I tapped on the possible guilt, a floodgate opened and all sorts of feelings tumbled out. Sometimes just having the perspective of someone removed from a situation can open doors that lead to healing, which are obscured from our view because we are too close to them.
If you would like to have a healing buddy, but don’t know anyone who is doing any of these methods who you could work with, consider joining one of the Yahoo groups that support people doing different methods of healing. If you would like an EFT buddy you could try posting a request on the TapIntoHeaven group or on one of the EFT Forums. And if you would like a buddy, but something is holding you back from getting out there and finding one, consider Focusing or tapping on your feelings around this, and any limiting beliefs that you might have that are standing in the road of you finding a healing buddy!
If you do decide to work with a healing buddy, here are a few tips that can help you (and them) to be a good partner for healing:
· Remember to speak quietly and be supportive of whatever comes up. Your job is to listen and help your buddy find their own answers, rather than to be a practitioner and try to solve their problems for them. This honours your buddy’s ability to find their own answers.
· Reflect back things that your buddy has repeated several times, or that seem to be especially charged, when they are talking with you. They may not even be aware that they’ve said something once, let alone several times, and your reflecting it back will help them to see what they can focus on with EFT or Focusing.
· Consider introducing some humour at times to lighten things up – doing our healing is a serious thing to do, but that doesn’t mean we have to be serious the whole time, and sometimes lightening the tone a bit when someone is feeling bogged down is just what is needed to help them to relax and allow the answers to float up from within them.
· Don’t ever tell someone any of the following “you shouldn’t feel like that”, “that’s not true”, “no I don’t think that’s important”, “ you need to get over this” – they all invalidate how the person is feeling, and risk making the person feel small or stupid or a myriad of other things you don’t want them to feel as their healing buddy
· Don’t even consider trying to analyse or try to discover the “real” reason for how your buddy is feeling. Leave the EFT or Focusing process to do the sorting for them!
· Don’t ever argue with your buddy when you feel that they are expressing something that you think is irrational. A lot of our beliefs are irrational, but arguing with them logically is like trying to reason with a 2 year old having a temper tantrum!