Institute for the Study of Peak States
"Methods for Fundamental Change in the Human Psyche"
Support Newsletter #14: November 24, 2008

"How EFT Works, Part 1: Making EFT Irreversible"


Newsletter Spotlight

From the Editor...
Student Support News
Upcoming Teleclasses
Training and Certification News
Upcoming Trainings
Research Team News
Clinics News
Feature: How EFT Works, Part 1: Making EFT Irreversible
            We recommend EFT
            Energy toxins and reversal
            Directly undoing EFT
            Our old Recommendations
            What happens in the primary cell
            Our current recommendations



 
From the editor...
 

Writing these newsletters, and keeping track of the mailing lists, I become more and more aware of the rotundity of the earth - and of how small it ultimately is. This is partly a symptom of our growth as an institute: operations aren't principally based on little Hornby Island anymore. There are movers and shakers on three continents and in both hemispheres; so I read of Nemi and the Australian team heading into the busyness of summer while here we're stacking firewood and harvesting the last of the apples, and sniffing the air for that first whiff of incoming frost. There is a sense of balance to it all, and a growing sense of belonging with the entire planet, rather than just my little community on the North Pacific. We've come a long way since I started playing with regression healing - and campaigning for the clear writing of training materials... - eight years ago.
 
Our Institute has a long history of using EFT and other meridian therapies as a rapid, painless method for healing traumas. We credit in part the great openness of EFT's developer, Gary Craig, for the success of our cross-over version. Our paradigms differ - EFT does not recognise the existence of peak states, for example - but Gary's generosity about sharing his methods has allowed us to evolve our own models faster and better.
 
Despite this long history, we knew very little about how EFT actually works. What is its effect on the primary cell? Why does it - very occasionally - reverse? We had been planning to check that, and publish the results here, for a long time - did I not announce an EFT newsletter a year ago? That's when the first series of tests was run, but there needed to be further verification, and, since it wasn't a top priority, the project languished on the to-do list.
 
Now a long-awaited event has cleared some time for this project:
Peak States of Consciousness Volume 2 has finally hit the bookstore shelves! It's hard to share a bottle of champagne over Skype, so the celebrations have been subdued - yes the earth is small, but not all that small... But now there is a little bit of breathing space, and projects like EFT/primary cell receive some attention. Thus, here is at last the first segment of a report on the topic by Grant McFetridge.... Grant McFetridge PhD, by the way: Volume 2 was also his doctoral thesis, and it has been accepted; so let's pop the cork off another virtual bottle and raise another toast: congratulations, Doctor Raven! 

Until next time...
Paula
 

Peak States of Consciousness: Theory and Applications, Volume 2: Acquiring Extraordinary Spiritual and Shamanic States (hardcover) can be purchased at Amazon.comAmazon.caAmazon.co.uk, or from your local bookstore. For contents, see the Institute website.


Student Support News
From Monti Scribner
 

I'm gratified to see the students working so hard within their study groups, to prepare for certification. They ask smart questions and are passionate about the work. We've come such a long way, and some of those passionate newer people have recently landed at the organizational end - lucky us! We also now have a sizeable group of certified practitioners pitching in and helping the new students toward certification.
 
The Danish group is one example of an excellent network of small study groups supporting each other, with some new practitioners connected to them. This means that only the hardest problems get referred to the advanced healers, and this leaves them more time for research projects; the benefits from that layered approach spreads like ripples on water, and benefits the whole Institute.
 

All my best!
Monti Scribner
 

 

Upcoming Teleclasses

 

Samsara has just announced that she is proposing to run a regular Q&A call, starting on Monday the 24th of November, for all Basic and Certified graduates, at 5 pm Sydney time and 7 pm New Zealand. If anyone else would like to join, you are most welcome. That would be 7 am in Denmark and 6 am in the UK, and Sunday the 23rd at 10 pm in Vancouver, Canada. If the initial teleclass is successful, we will continue on a regular basis.  The cost will be $AU20 and will be billed by Paypal. 
 
The Skype number to call is
+9900827046314016


 
 

Training and Certification News
From Nemi Nath
 

Here in Australia we have been busy getting the Institute better known in the country. Because of my frequent trips overseas, it was difficult to keep any continuity of any events. Since a month now Signe Fjord (for those who don't know her, her name is pronounced See-na) from Denmark, has joined the Australian team and together we created an Australia-wide lecture tour. Some of the lectures happened on the spur of the moment and others were planned a little longer.

We decided to focus on lectures about the new Peak State paradigm rather than on promotion of trainings or sessions. The responses we got were mixed. Some lectures were well attended, others barely made it. The content was quite confronting to many of the therapists attending; they found it difficult to let go of some of their old thinking or they tried hard to think in old ways about the new. The most commented-on item was the safety aspect. It is clear that the old conceit, that alternative methods are safe, is really dominant out there in the world and very few people are interested in entering anything that has aspects to it with safety warnings.

The other end of the scale is a snowball effect of people calling us up from cities where we have not been yet, wanting the lecture. Also some interesting special-interest groups have begun to invite us. It’s been a great learning experience to talk to so many people… and the tour continues.
 
Matt Fox has been to Australia conducting an addictions specialisation training. Again this has been a great learning process to get our work out there and sometimes I wondered if all the effort we were putting in was going to pay off. After ringing up something like 120 conventional addiction rehabilitation centers in Australia plus contacting many addictions counsellors, finally a non-government-affiliated centre showed some interest in learning new methods to work with addictions.  Matt was able to teach their counsellors (and a few PS therapists) the new techniques and apply the methods on the clients of the centre. The results after one session were obvious, and it is clear that with the right set-up ISPS addiction treatments will achieve some exceptional results. One thing that has evolved from this is that Samsara will work in the Adelaide clinic for a period of time next year and track the treatment of clients and apply a sequence of tests, so that the effectiveness of our methods can be further researched and documented.


At the soon-to-be-opened Australia Clinic, we will be running a 3-week residential addictions program in May on a trial basis to explore the possibility of a permanent program.
 
Trainings are moving forward as usual. The first group of certified therapists is about to complete their year of mentoring and that means a new phase for ISPS that is now in preparation. 

 
 
From Samsara Salier


Since I took over the administration of student certification from Nemi, it has been a very busy and fruitful time. Ten new people have joined the ranks as certified ISPS therapists, swelling our numbers to 27 people throughout the world, licensed to do WHH and Peak States work with the public. Congratulations and welcome to Wilfreid Erhmann from Austria, Myriam Pitrie from Australia, Ann Irwin from Ireland, and Anja Vraa, Anita Vraa, Leif Pederson, Mette Moller, Regine Bidstrup, Rosalina Reiter and Signe Fjord, all from Denmark.  As well, we are expecting to welcome two more Australians, who are doing their assessments within the next two weeks.
 
We also now have 47 Basic graduates registered and working hard to complete their certification.  There will be a big flurry of activity in Denmark in January when at least 8 more students will be doing their assessments. All this is putting quite a strain on the assessors, and we are experimenting with ways of doing some assessments online.
 
Quite a number of our certified practitioners are now coming to the end of their provisional year, and we are currently working on how to streamline the transition to permanent status.  It is important that all certified graduates are on the Certified Yahoo Group email list, and that you are all able to access the certified updates section on the Peak States website, in order to keep yourselves informed.  If you are experiencing any difficulties with this, contact 
Samsara [at] peakstates.com.

To the graduates of the Basic course: all certification applications have to be sent to that same email address as soon as you have decided to go for certification. You will receive the necessary documents that will help you prepare for certification. When you think you have integrated the theory and you have practiced enough sessions, you need to apply for a certification date also to 
Samsara [at] peakstates.com. It can take up to 2 months to arrange one of these dates, so please let us know in good time, so you do not have to wait too long.


 
 

Upcoming Trainings
 
For a complete list of upcoming workshops, please go to the Peak States website at
www.peakstates.com/upcoming.html.

 

 
Research Team News

From Grant McFetridge
 

The research group has been extremely active in the last few months, and I want to thank all of the volunteers whose hard work and many, many hours of effort are not necessarily obvious to the rest of the Institute. I would like to especially thank Sara Zieborak, Samsara Salier, and Thessa Belcher for the many hours they spent this fall.


As many of you know, because of safety concerns we test new processes in stages. At first, the R+D team develops it and tries it out on themselves. This is often an iterative process; it can take years. Then core Institute staff members are the next test group. We then test on selected volunteers under our direct supervision. (If it is a process that we’re going to introduce into the basic training, we may ask for volunteers during a class.) And then, we introduce the process to our certified therapists for their personal testing. Eventually, if all goes well - and it sometimes doesn’t - we’ll allow our certified therapists to use it, cautiously, with clients.


With the help of the certified therapists in Denmark, and volunteers in Poland, we’ve been testing a number of new processes. In particular, a method for simultaneously eliminating all ribosomal and chakra trauma; a Beauty Way peak state process; and an all-tribal block elimination process.
 
In the next few days, we’re going to start the next phase of testing with the Beauty Way process; testing on certified therapists. If all goes well, they will be able to use it with their clients sometime this winter.


Not all process developments go smoothly. A good example of this is the all-tribal block elimination process, one of our highest priorities. This fall we tested revision 15 on volunteers in Poland. Although it helped reduce the problem, we soon found that it did not completely eliminate it. We’re now testing revision 16 on research staff, and keeping our fingers crossed. Just to make a point, each revision was a process that we believed really worked – you can imagine how hard a problem it must be if we’re already on our 16
th attempt!
 
Certified Therapist's Manual
Part of the Institute safety strategy is to restrict most of our processes to basic certified therapists, because these are the people who have demonstrated competence in our work and a respect for our safety and ethical guidelines, and who have advanced Institute therapists for backup. Now that Volume 2 is out of the way, we are finally able to turn our attention to getting the long-awaited certified therapists manual finished. It contains a number of processes and techniques that we don’t even mention in the basic therapists class, but that are extremely important for the therapists and their clients. Hopefully, we’ll have a first draft ready by the middle of December, along with free teleclasses on the use of these new techniques. I want to say thank you to all of the basic certified therapists who have been waiting so patiently for this manual.


 
 

Clinics News
From Rob Egan
 

ISPS clinics have taken a step closer to reality with the opening of the UK clinic and retreat centre. Since September Thessa in Scotland, in conjunction with Samsara in Australia and Monti in America have been offering advanced therapy back-up for certified therapists along with advanced therapy for anyone having taken a Peak States training.  As of November the UK clinic, which has been coordinating this work, moves into a residential centre allowing both for small training courses and for Peak States graduates to come on retreat.
 
The retreat centre concept is particularly exciting as it allows the possibility for anyone having taken a Peak States course to visit on a residential basis whether to brush up on their skills, receive advanced therapy or simply take a break in a relaxing, healing environment. There is also the possibility of internships as people learn advanced techniques.
 
The centre is located 5 miles from Findhorn, the internationally renowned spiritual eco-village community. It is surrounded by rolling countryside and has magnificent views out over the Moray Firth towards the Scottish mountains.
 
Plans are also underway for clinics in Australia, Poland and Denmark. The Denmark centre has also opened in Copenhagen, while Nemi is looking to officially open the Australian clinic early in the New Year.
 
While members of the research team continue their work on autism and other serious diseases, the clinics will go ahead doing general Peak States therapy. The exception to this is the Australia clinic, which is also looking to work with partners to establish an addictions facility.
 
For any enquiries about the clinics, the retreat centre or access to advanced therapy, please contact Rob Egan –
rob [at] peakstates.com
 
The Danish Clinic – From Hanne Mygind Heilesen
The Danish clinic is open and at the moment we are offering general therapy. We are also able to offer advanced with the help of our esteemed colleagues elsewhere - thank you! The clinic has a big room well suited for groups of up to 16 for 1-2 day workshops. We are actually doing 2 workshops in the coming week, which is very exciting. There is also a smaller room where we do therapy. Also there is the possibility for out-of-towners to spend the night. Hopefully we can become a part of the research effort some time in 2009. 

 
 
How EFT Works, Part 1: Making EFT Irreversible

 By Grant McFetridge


We recommend the use of EFT
As students who have taken our training know, we
highly recommend meridian therapies like EFT for both healing and peak states work. In fact, we recommend using them first over other therapies (even WHH), because it is so fast and simple for many problems.
 
Energy toxins and reversing EFT
Gary Craig (the creator of EFT) and Dr. Callahan (the creator of TFT) talk about the problem of ‘energy toxins’ when using meridian therapies. Briefly, some people will regain a trauma after being exposed to environmental chemicals or particular foods – or the meridian therapy won’t work until they get away from the substance (or quit ingesting it). Oddly, even in the same person, different substances affect different traumas – and the substances don’t have to be allergens or toxic in any obvious way. For example, one of Gary’s videos shows a seminar where he just could not get EFT to work unless they went outside – he hypothesized that something in the room was acting as an energy toxin for nearly everyone.
 
Over the years, there was a lot of debate on whether energy toxins really exist or not. When therapy failed to work for some unknown reason, there was a tendency to blame ‘energy toxins’ as the culprit, rather than look to other reasons why the therapy may have gone wrong. Thus, in general it is a good idea to ignore the idea of energy toxins and just keep searching for core issues – after all, even if there is an energy toxin involved, different traumas are not generally affected by the same toxin, and so you will probably work around that issue successfully. Interestingly, these last few years I hear less and less about energy toxins, and more about tricks that get EFT working successfully.
 
Directly undoing EFT’s healing
By accident, in the 1990s I found out that I could directly undo the effect of EFT in some people. I first noticed it after a Beauty Way peak state process. The test subject, a woman in her forties, used EFT on the developmental trauma, and had a stable state for a week. During a kayaking trip, she was caught in a storm, came close to dying, and lost her state. Later, when I checked, her original trauma in the developmental event had returned.
 
A year later, during a WHH training, I asked a group of students to pick a trauma, tap it away completely using EFT, and see if they could figure out a way to recover the trauma – and one man did. He’d found that if he reversed the way he breathed (contract the diaphragm when breathing in, expand the diaphragm when breathing out) while focusing on the original trauma moment, he could get the trauma to restore itself. We then found that several others in the class could also undo their EFT healing using his trick, although not everyone could. For a more complete description of our tests, we refer you to the relevant website page
www.peakstates.com/UndoingEFT.html.
 
Almost a decade later, we figured out how to make ‘undoing EFT’ simpler to do. To get the trauma feelings to return, just have the client focus on the healed trauma moment, while evoking death and dying feelings at the same time. The emotional content of the trauma will return immediately, and remain. In hindsight, the reverse-breathing trick was simply triggering subtle death feelings. However, what was still puzzling was that some people could not undo EFT’s healing no matter what they did – for them, it was irreversible.
 
As an aside, this trick of evoking dying feelings may explain the energy toxin phenomenon itself. We know that during trauma the body consciousness associates sensations together in non-logical ways. Thus, substances don’t have to be toxic to evoke dying feelings; they merely have to have been present when the body felt its life was threatened. In fact, this also implies that we could restore a particular trauma by using other types of sensory stimulations (like horrible images or scary sounds) that also trigger dying feelings. Doing this might be a simple way to test if the healing could be reversed. (If you try this, let me know if it works or not.)
           
Our old recommendations about EFT and the undoing problem
We were in a dilemma after we discovered the undoing problem. EFT was radically effective, simple, and fast for most traumas and problems. Clearly, it was a powerful tool, and should be used. On the other hand, it was clear that some clients might accidentally undo the healing and get their issue back.
 
Thus, we recommended that therapists use EFT, but to warn the client that it might undo, and that they might have to repeat treatment. If the issue was such that the client couldn’t risk reversal (for example, a pilot who had become afraid of flying), then they should use a non-meridian therapy. We knew that traumas healed with regression therapies like WHH couldn’t be reversed (from ‘energy toxins’, breathing, or by any other method). However, regression therapies aren’t foolproof either: symptoms can return if the originating traumas on a trauma string were not healed.
 
In practice, meridian therapy reversals are not very common, so for the most part therapists ignore this issue and treat EFT as if the healing is permanent. Although it is a bother to repeat a treatment, this isn’t as bad as it seems, since by the end of a session, the therapist (or client) has figured out what the core issue is, and doesn’t have to go through lengthy investigative steps again. (Part of the lack of awareness about reversal on the therapist’s part may be due to selection bias – if EFT reversed, the client probably wouldn’t return to the therapist, so the therapist wouldn’t realize that it had happened).
 
Finding out what happens in the primary cell
For years we just didn’t have time to look into this issue. Finally, in 2007 at a training in Scotland, we had a chance to work with a student to see what was really going when we undid EFT. The answer was both fascinating and surprising. (Be aware that we’ve only tested the following results a handful of times, thus these results should be considered subject to change when we examine more people. However, we did the tests using different advanced therapists and different test subjects, making us feel fairly confident about the general results.)
 
EFT eliminates symptoms by affecting the trauma string structures in the primary cells (the stuck gene, the messenger RNA (mRNA) and its ribosomes) directly. This is in contrast to WHH or TIR, which actually change the trauma moment and hence, indirectly, the ribosomal gateway structure. The way EFT does this is tricky: we found that the meridian points on the head, chest and fingers cause the ribosomes on the mRNA string to shrink and disappear. This quickly eliminates the symptoms in most cases, because the symptoms were from the content of those gateway structures superimposed on the body image. If the tapping is continued,
even after there were no symptoms, more and more of the ribosomes on the chain shrink, until eventually the mRNA chain itself shrinks back to the nucleus, and then the gene histone heals. To get a visual image of this effect, imagine that you are watching a time-lapse movie, running backwards, of a plant sprouting. The leaves shrink back into the stem, the stem shortens, and then the whole thing goes back into the dirt, and “pop”, the seed is gone. This is similar to what is happening in the primary cell.
           
This process is the reason why EFT could be reversed. What we found is that the shrunken ribosome would plump right back out from the mRNA string, like a balloon blowing up, when we used our dying-feeling trick. And presto! the trauma symptoms would be back. And in fact, this trick would often make the trauma worse than it was originally – apparently the organism had some self-healing that occurs to try and minimize the problem. Thus, if the original mRNA string was still present in any form whatsoever, the entire trauma string could be recreated every time.
           
However, we found something different with the nine-gamut and karate chop points (and to a lesser extent, the fingers, especially the thumb and forefinger). Tapping these affects the gene
directly. In the case of the nine-gamut point, the effect goes powerfully upwards into the mRNA string, affecting everything simultaneously, and so is quickly noticeable to the client. Unfortunately, from an experiential viewpoint, the other hand points primarily affect the gene, and so it usually feels like nothing is happening until the gene heals fully. This is because the trauma string remains intact until the gene heals and retracts; whereupon the mRNA string is released out of the nuclear pore and quickly dissolves. When this happens, all of the symptoms suddenly vanish (assuming there weren’t multiple roots to the trauma still holding the string in place, of course). We also found that tapping on the fingers helped eliminate body associations and other psychological reversal issues that could block the EFT process.
 
To review, the head and body points start healing from the ribosome and then heal
down to the gene (by analogy, down from the leaves to the root); the nine-gamut, karate chop and to a lesser extent the fingers start from the gene and go up to the ribosome (up from the root to the leaves). The nine-gamut is a bit of an oddball – it focuses on the gene, but simultaneously affects the ribosomes and mRNA string.
 
Our current recommendations on using EFT
Summarizing, current meridian therapies are often excellent at getting rid of trauma symptoms quickly because they shrink away the ribosomal gateway structure that cause the problem. However, because the symptoms often go away before the gene histone heals and the mRNA is released, the client’s symptom from the corresponding traumas can be recovered. This problem of not knowing when the trauma string is completely healed is intrinsic with the full EFT or TFT process – clients cannot usually tell when the entire trauma string is irreversibly healed using current technique protocols.
           
To be clear, understand that these observations don’t change our strong recommendation of meridian therapies. Below, we offer two simple alternatives to simply improve on what you’re already doing. (However, realize that our work is preliminary – we will be continuing our testing. Thus, with time, we may come up with better, faster or simpler ways to deal with this issue.)
 
Alternative #1:
Just do your meridian therapy as you’ve always done - but after the trauma symptom is gone, keep tapping on the client for another two to three minutes. In practical terms, it can be difficult to keep the client focused on an issue that they can’t feel anymore, and they easily get distracted away from the trauma string at this point. (Fortunately, this isn’t a problem for our Gaia command processes, because the phrases and music keep the client focused automatically. Years ago, Dr. Pellicer discovered empirically that we got far better results on a process if the client kept tapping for at least three minutes after they had no more symptoms on a command.)
           
Test by using the dying-feeling or reverse-breathing method to try and restore the trauma.
 
Alternative #2:
A simpler, faster and irreversible approach is to have the client focus on the issue while simply tapping on the nine-gamut point, or just use the nine-gamut eye roll technique; for most, the nine-gamut point also gives some immediate symptom relief while the gene histone is healing. Continue until all symptoms are gone (this occurs when the gene is healed). Be sure to go a minute or so past the time the client no longer feels symptoms to completely heal the underlying biology.
 
If nothing appears to be happening, add the karate chop point, finger and thumb points. If it is taking more than a minute or two for any change to occur, add the psychological reversal step (or find and heal the ‘guarding traumas’ that cause psychological reversal as in BSFF). Remember, if a shortcut isn’t working, the therapist simply adds omitted steps until the client’s problem goes away. You can certainly tap on the face and body if you need to calm the client’s symptoms quickly, but this may not heal the gene histone; and so you would need to check for reversibility by using the dying-feeling or reverse-breathing trick.
 
The second part of this article, How EFT Works, Part II: Meridians and Healing, will explore exactly what meridian therapies do to cause gene histones and mRNA strings to change and heal. It will (hopefully) appear in our next newsletter.

 

We welcome your questions and comments, email: support [at] peakstates.com.
 
To read back issues of this newsletter, go to:
http://www.peakstates.com/Snewsletter.html 
 
Copyright 2008 by Grant McFetridge

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