Our guest blogger and EFT Master Rue Anne Hass, M.A., C.CHp. has extensive experience with fibromyalgia, chronic physical and emotional pain, abuse, trauma, and working with the issues that arise in a highly sensitive person. She believes that anyone with a chronic condition probably has a sensitive temperament. She is also very interested in using EFT to transform the “emotional inheritance” that is passed through generations in a family, showing up in our limiting beliefs, behaviors and symptoms. Rue has been in private practice as an Intuitive Mentor/life path coach in Madison, Wisconsin since 1986 using what she describes as “profoundly light-hearted strategies for unsticking stuck stuff.”
A former university teacher, over the years she has sought out broad and deep training in psycho-spiritual philosophy and therapies. From 1974-1981, she was a staff member of the Findhorn Foundation, an international center for spiritual and holistic education in Scotland. Find out more about Rue at www.IntuitiveMentoring.com
Most marketing is based on lack and the human sense of unworthiness. We can feel that the seller is playing on our fears and doubts to get us to buy their product. I feel that myself. Even as I am wrinkling my nose in distaste, I am still reading down that endless page of promises and testimonials about how this product will finally make me feel fulfilled, rich, competent and happy, feeling drawn in against my will.
I suspect too that if we could float down inside the marketer, him or herself, we might find an echo of the same presupposition: I need something outside my self, like the approval of lots of people, and material evidence of my success in the world, like lots of people buying my product, to feel good about myself.
So the first step in “spiritual marketing” is to go inside ourselves, with love and acceptance, to learn how to hold our own sense of lack and unworthiness in a deeper, more whole way.
Marketing is really about relationship. The first relationship is with our selves. When that relationship is in place, everything we do can arise from love and delight. Whatever we are offering emerges from us as a gift, a blessing.
At a spiritual level, all we want for everybody, including ourselves, is right there in EFT: I deeply and completely love and accept myself, and you, and the world. I offer you my love in the form of this service. You offer me your love in the form of your money, which you have earned from doing whatever you do in love.
Marketing is just loving! So what are we to do about our fears? They are real. They are pervasive. I want to have an EFT practice, but I don’t know how to put myself out there.
I spend a lot of time making to do lists, I have accumulated lots of great marketing ideas, I have big plans, but….I end up going back to refining my to do lists! I am sabotaging myself! I am afraid to take action.
Does this sound familiar? Spiritual sensitivity attunes us to our fears even more deeply than it may for others.
We have two kinds of fear that sabotage our becoming a successful EFT practitioner: We are afraid that we will fail: we will not know enough, we might “screw up,” we might be rejected.
Or, just as potent, we are afraid that we will be successful. We think to ourselves, “I will be overwhelmed, I won’t have time for myself, they will expect even more of me, I might not have what it takes.”
We all have a measure of this fear. You have probably heard or read of well known performers who admit they are a bundle of nerves before they take the stage. And still, they take the stage and wow the audience.
What is the difference between shy, un-confident, nervous us, and someone who is successful at stepping past their fears and allowing themselves to shine?
The answer lies in what I call “Forecasting.”
When I am going to travel somewhere I get on weather.com and check out the local weather forecast. We do the same thing mentally all the time, as we contemplate taking actions in the world. Often we are predicting bad weather! Fortunately, predicting cloudy, gloomy, stormy life-weather is just habit, a well worn neural track in our brains. It is quite possible to clear our inner skies, lift our inner barometer, adjust the thermometer, and let our inner sun shine through by changing our forecast about our EFT practice—and we can do it with EFT!
What is your deepest, most compelling reason to have an EFT practice? The best rainmaker for a parched inner climate is to ask yourself, “Why do I WANT to have an EFT practice?” We assume that the problem is in our ignorance of “How To.”
But from working with many practitioners who are effectively keeping themselves from being successful in their chosen field, I have noticed that the problem is in the “Want To.”
There may be an inner conflict going on, and it makes us sabotage our best efforts. Some of us have strong admonitions from old family beliefs and experiences against even “wanting” anything for ourselves at all. Whatever has created this conflict in us, we don’t make the calls. We don’t give the talks. We don’t do the networking. We don’t write the articles. We don’t put our brochures and business cards out, or we are procrastinating about creating them. We don’t hold classes. Or we do, and when only three people come, we count that as a failure, and are afraid to put ourselves out there again.
Personally, when I ask myself why I want to have an EFT practice, these are the thoughts that come:
• It is a really good way for me to honor the deep intention in me to be useful in the world.
• I am so curious about how people have come to be who they are, and here I have carte blanche to ask and wonder together with them.
• I love using my intuition, and doing EFT sessions are a great opportunity to practice, with instant feedback.
• Feeling a deep inner connection with other people a few at a time is really nourishing for me.
• I actually like what I think of as the “inner snowboarding” quality of an EFT session – the “not knowing” where all this is going, the opportunity to just be on my toes, present in the moment, trusting my instincts, co-creating the emergence of something new with my client.
• I LOVE inviting the strong, radiant creative inner presence of the person (that I can see and sense but that they have lost sight of) to step forward into their conscious awareness and into their lives as a generative force for good.
I am talking here about my intention.
Intention is about “inner attention” – what you put your attention on. As we are learning from many directions these days, what we put our attention on manifests in our world. A clear intention puts Universal Creativity into motion, for better or for worse.
So—what is your deepest, most compelling reason to have an EFT practice? Now—forecast this in your life! Yikes, you say—how do I do that?
I don’t think you have to know the details – the how’s. I believe that it is enough to hold this intention in your being, almost like a prayer. This shapes who you are, what you project into the word. Your inner shape invites and directs Universal Creativity to form the world around you, according to your intention.
I worked recently with a woman who is a psychologist who is feeling very bound by the rules and presuppositions of her profession. As she deepens further into EFT, what she really wants now is to establish herself as an EFT practitioner. She wants to begin by offering therapy groups where she does EFT with the participants. Her fears are stopping her from setting any of these groups up.
She is forecasting:
-If I use EFT in a group will I get into trouble with the APA (American Psychological Association)? The group may not happen the way I want it to. People will drop out.
-It will fail, and then I will feel like a failure. I’m not good enough to do this.
We began our EFT work by using these phrases as set-up statements. We have done quite a lot of work already on early, specific incidents in her life that were the source of these forecasts, so where it felt appropriate we referred to those times as we tapped.
I asked her to talk to me about her deeper intention in offering these EFT groups.
She said:
• I can reach more people. • I can offer more of a healing effect for them with EFT than with straight psychology. • I am fulfilling my purpose. • When I do a group like this I am enjoying what I am doing.
I asked her to remember group situations that had worked well for her in the past. I invited her to feel into her body experience of those situations. What was she aware of? Her description was wonderful, and was an even better indication of her deeper intention than her words had been (our bodies always know best…). She said:
I feel an electrical feeling around me. It sizzles! I almost feel like I can move in and out of a different dimension, an inner awareness where I know more, things are clearer. If I let it happen, and I don’t get scared, it magnifies for me. I feel like Spirit starts to talk through me. In my regular psychology practice, I think I am more in my head. I am thinking about the problems. I am worried that I don’t know enough. I am not as receptive to this heightened inner spiritual state that I can enter when I am working with a group with EFT. Getting scared of this powerful feeling and these insights is a big issue for me. My fear shuts that inner awareness down.
We tapped for her forecasts and her fears. I wove in many of the phases and sensations above in her words into the second half of the set up statement:
…I accept myself, and I accept how I feel, and I choose now to create experiences for myself that allow my inner knowing to emerge…
If I let it happen it magnifies for me… I love that electrical feeling all around me. That tells me I am pointing myself in the right direction… I feel like I am fulfilling my purpose… I love reaching more people and offering a healing effect for them… I choose to keep my real intention for holding EFT groups in my mind, and I choose to disconnect now from my old gloomy forecast. I will deal with APA issues if and when they come up. It wouldn’t even be the end of the world to let my professional certification go, if it means I
can now do what I love… I will cross those bridges when I come to them… I am not going to let those old fears stop me from creating the destiny that feels right for me…
This psychologist is now offering groups successfully! She is clearly on the path away from the confining expectations of her professional world. After several sessions like this, where we worked with her fears and forecasts about “putting herself out there,” she has become more confident of her ability to be who she really is. She trusts her own inner awareness. I can feel Universal Creativity at work in her. She is taking many steps towards allowing herself to manifest her healing intentions.
She is forecasting good inner weather! Her sun is coming out…
Again: Intention is about “inner attention” – what you put your attention on.
Our fearful forecasts actually create stormy inner weather for us, which translates into our lives and our actions.
What we put our attention on manifests in the world. A clear intention puts Universal Creativity into motion. It will create whatever we focus on.
When we put our attention on what is deepest and truest in us—our best love and intentions, and forecast that, we are offering a healing blessing in the world, just by being here and doing this?
I love that thought!
Rue Hass (EFT Master) with The Shift Doctors (Tracy Latz MD & Marion Ross PhD)
http://www.IntuitiveMentoring.com
”Profoundly light-hearted strategies for unsticking stuck stuff” Author
http://www.IntuitiveMentoring.com/EFTBooks.html
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Thoughts on Spiritual Marketing—the Fear of Putting Yourself Out ……
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