Your emotions and energy will guide you to self-healing

di Susanna Lai 

During the 1990s lots of people have started practising psychological self-healing techniques in many countries of the world; Focusing, Bio Spiritual Focusing and EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) can be considered some of the most reliable and effective self-healing procedures. They belong to experimental psychology and are mainly linked to the recognition and releasing of one’s negative emotions. They are self-healing therapies, though it seems strange to call them this way since they are learnable in a few sessions and can be autonomously practised. Yet they are based on learning to listen to the signals our bodies send, as those signals enable us to get in touch with the emotions, feelings and thoughts that we ourselves have often blocked, denied or rejected.

Thus our bodies become a bridge into deeper self-knowledge, happier and richer lives and above all into healing from negative feelings and habits. Our bodies, though bound to decay in time, become paradoxically the instruments that lead us to spiritual development as eastern disciplines, like Yoga and Zen, have always taught.

Just to explain what Focusing, Bio Spiritual Focusing and EFT are, it is right to mention Bioenergetics, the experimental psychology that paved the way for them. It was developed, during the 1940s by the American psychotherapist Alexander Lowen, a student of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian physician and psychiatric, student of Freud in his turn, who is renowned for his controversial orgone energy theory. Bioenergetics combines a work with the body and the mind in order to help people to remove their emotional blocks and use more of their potential for pleasure and joy of living. Almost contemporarily other innovators, not only psychotherapists but also scientists and philosophers such as the renowned French Jesuit philosopher and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, theorized the study of an energetic psychology. Having experienced the horrors of two World Wars and the dangers of our atomic age, Teilhard wondered if there was some organic, spiritually motivated energy for life inside human beings, which could be awakened to guide them into a transformed way of living. Teilhard long advocated the foundation of an Institute for the scientific study of what he called “human energetics”. He died in 1955 and twenty years later the Institute for Bio Spiritual Research was established by Peter Campbell and Edwin McMahon, two Jesuits and psychologists of religion who developed Bio Spiritual Focusing. Their work, which includes other researchers’ studies, it is mainly based on Focusing, a psychological method developed between the 1960s and the 1970s by Eugene T.Gendlin, a philosopher at the University of Chicago. Gendlin’s Focusing gave the physical body a key role in revealing and solving the causes for emotional distress. He held that our bodies have a kind of inner-knowledge, which he called “felt sense”, that can lead us to have a different and clearer approach to our emotional issues.

Like Gendlin, Peter Campbell and Edwin McMahon think our human body has an innate knowing potential, which emerges as a spontaneous gift or surprise during the Focusing process. They have been teaching their Bio Spiritual Focusing for years – free on their website – in order to help people to release not only their memories and fears, but also their hopes, expectations, dreams and of course a lot of mental and physical energy.

As for EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), it is Gary Craig who has started to develop it since early 1990s. Gary Craig is neither a psychologist nor a therapist, but an American engineer who has been deeply interested in personal improvement via psychology since he was 13 years old. After having learned an innovative Meridian Energy Therapy, applied in psychology by psychotherapist Roger Callahan, and after having obtained an NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) Master Certificate, Gary Craig has started to develop EFT. This technique is a psychological version of Chinese Acupuncture, but it does not need needles: you just have to tap with your fingertips, to stimulate certain meridian energy points, while you are focusing on a problem. This process is of course too complex to explain in a few lines, but it is certainly very natural in its execution. Since the 1990s Craig has being organising workshops for new practitioners and teaching EFT on his website by means of free videos; EFT has spread all over the world as a result, and Craig says “I have lost count of the number of phobias, panic/ anxiety attacks, traumatic memories, guilt, grief and physical ailments that have been relieved by this procedure.”

EFT, however, has inevitably aroused criticism on the part of some scientific circles; any new theory has to face criticism or rejection. On the other hand many open-minded scientists and researchers, from international communities, are demonstrating the effectiveness of Meridian Energy Therapies applied in Psychology.

Just to clarify the EFT process, it is important to remember that energy is made up of moving particles or waves, expressed by a vibration that can be measured by frequencies. Human beings have their own energy systems and two of the most common medical tests, the Electroencephalogram and the Electrocardiogram, bear evidence for it. They respectively measure our brain and heart electric activities

Emotions and thoughts have themselves frequencies and even if we are not aware of this, we intuitively perceive when a person feel “sad, depressed” or “relieved”. If we consider a human being from an energetic point of view, we will see him as an energy field, whose vibrations indicate his physical, emotional, mental and spiritual state.

The faster and higher his frequency is the more fluently his energy flows.

Low frequency vice versa causes blocks, disease and negative thoughts.

To sum up, according to experimental psychology, the contact with our inner emotions, which have contributed to shape our mental make-up, and our energetic system balance will ensure us a healthier life.