Cleaning House

I'm having a hard time cleaning my office. Can I use EFT to help from being distracted and just get the job done?

One of my clients recently, "Julie" was about to start packing up her office as she quit her job as she was moving on to set out to follow work that was her souls longing. I offered the following suggestion, "Before you clean your office sit in the middle of the mess and tune into the mess. See if it has anything to tell you about how you feel about the transition you are going to make. If there are any emotions that arise from this, simply pay attention to them. If any of them are undesirable emotions, take some time to do EFT on them before you start to clean the office." Often the emotions we feel about a person, place, or situation is really what we feel about ourselves projected into the world. The thought being we can't make a change in the world until we make the change in our self, even if the task is as small as cleaning an office.

He is what she later wrote about the experience on her blog:

"Yesterday I received some wisdom from a friend regarding the only item on my to-do list this week…cleaning and packing my office. His advice was to tune myself in to the mess, let it speak to me, let any emotions related to the mess come to the surface and pay attention to them, acknowledge them, and then clean them.

"Having said that, I completely disregarded his advice when I got to the office this morning because I had done an amazing job on the drive in convincing myself that the state of my office is clearly about a lack of shelf space and couldn’t possibly be emotional, a reflection of myself, etcetera, on any level.

"Forty minutes into my cleaning and packing project all I had done was rearrange piles. Not one paper clip was packed. Not one piece of paper tossed in the recycle bin. I plunked myself onto my pleather sofa, took a few deep breaths, and started to tune myself in to the space around me. And it began to speak. My bookshelf told me one thing. My desk told me another. The enormous box of Christmas lights whispered that I am really afraid that by choosing to leave my current job I am going to be left with a giant void of laughter in my life if I don’t spend time with teenagers on a regular basis. Who knew Christmas lights were so insightful? The wall in front of my desk covered in pictures, quotes, and notes, spoke very clearly about the struggle of managing long distance relationships. Little by little I was able to acknowledge and clean the feelings around cleaning my office…and as a result I made a serious dent in packing things up. By the time I got to the stack of paintings leaning against the wall, my perspective had completely shifted. (Sometimes we don’t want to hear what things, situations, or relationships have to say.) But now I was ready, even eager to keep moving forward. I will admit that I was tempted to take the artwork and spread it out around the room but I had at some point chosen to stack them in a pile way back when and needed to pay attention to that.

"So I did.

"And this is what was revealed…

"Don’t be afraid. You are an artist in bloom."

Now, did the mess, the desk, the walls, or the paintings really talk? They talked no more or less then when I ask my clients, "If the pain in your knee could say something, what would it say right now to you?"

Did the information come for outside or with in? In my mind it doesn't matter, but by tuning in and listening Julie was able to find emotions she was feeling about her transition. Before they were sitting under the surface. They were hiding (or she was just refusing to hear them). By tuning in a different ways (admittedly a very different way) she was able to get more information about feelings that needed to be healed before she could move on.

From time to time I suggest this to my clients. The process is very.

1) Sit in a place you spend a great deal of time (office, kitchen, bedroom, or car)
2) Tune into the area around you
3) Ask if the car/desk/table/wall could say something, what would it say.
4) If something arises do EFT. It is not so much a matter of doing EFT on what you were tuning into, but what ever emotion has just grown in yourself.


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I am doing it all WRONG!

It is hard for me to get motivated to do EFT because I am afraid I am going to do it wrong. What can I do?

Trying new things is always hard. We are use to being able to do things wells. Most of us, as adults, don't have to learn many new skills. Because of this, when we are faced with learning a new skill it is uncomfortable.

To learn a new skill it means we have to admit we don't know something.

To learn a new skill it means we are going to fail on some level because we are not going to get it right the first time.

When we were small children learning to walk, we failed lots of times. Each time we failed there was the consequence of falling down. And we did this a lot.

Not only that, we learned to walk in front of our family, who saw us fail time and again, but we could finally take a few wobbly steps on our own.

Luckily we weren't self conscious at that point in our life. Failure did not deter us. Having others see us fail did not deter us. We simply wanted to walk and we were going to do what ever it took to do it.

As adult, it is not as easy. We don't like the feeling of failure. We don't like knowing we are not very good at something. We REALLY DON"T LIKE having others see us struggle at something.

Because of these feelings there is a part of us which will try (and often succeed) in talking us out of trying new things. This part of ourselves is trying to protect us from the feelings of failure and embarrassment of looking bad in front of others.

These feeling are fine to have, but if we let them control us we will never try anything new and we won't grow.

It is no surprise that people have a hard time doing EFT on their own at first.

First, EFT it self is so mysterious. It is a modality that is outside of our normal experience of the world. (What do you mean tapping me face will help my fear?) Because it is so foreign to our experience, it must be something that is very hard to master.

Second, typically when someone learns EFT, they learn from an experienced EFTer. This person seems to come up with just the right phrase at the just the right time. It appears that picking the right phrase is a difficult skill to be mastered.

Speaking as someone who has done EFT for a long time, when I am working with clients I am often guessing right along with the client as to what phase to use next. With experience I have gotten better at figuring out what path to head down. But I don't always know what I am doing.

The reason I am able to do this, is because EFT is so forgiving. There is no way that you can do EFT wrong. If you do a round of tapping, getting no progress, the round it not a failure. Instead the round has given you information.

You now know you might need some water in your system, that you are psychologically reversed, or you need more specific phrases. You are one step closer to success because you have more information.

It also didn't cost you very much to get this new information. It only cost your 45 to 60 seconds. With this new information, you can then start a new round of tapping.

If you struggle with feeling you are going to fail when you do EFT here are some phrase you can use to start your session.


I know EFT is a powerful tool.

I have seen it work in my own life.

I have felt it in my own body.

I have heard amazing stories of all that it can do.

But I worry that I am not going to do it right.

It is still something I don't understand.

It work get when I was working Gene.

He is really go at EFT.

But I am not as good as he is.

But I choose to know I can't do this wrong.

Even if I use the wrong words.

Even if I tap the wrong points.

There is not penalty for doing this.

I only waste a few second of my life.

Each time I do a round of tapping I get more information.

Making the next round of tapping more successful.

I give myself permission for the next 20 minutes to make mistakes.

Because making mistakes is the only way I am going to learn

I am not very good at EFT right now.

But the only way I am going to get better is if I try and make mistakes.

This is how I learned to walk, and talk, and drive a car.

At the beginning those things were really hard to do.

But with practice I got better.

I am going to do the same thing with EFT.

I am going to try, because it is in the trying that I am going to learn.


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