Monday, May 11, 2009

Tapping: The Reset Button

Recently I ran into one of my former patients in a grocery store parking lot. When she asked me what I was doing these days, I told her that I'd incorporated BodyTalk into my practice. After a short description of BodyTalk, in which I mentioned that the Cortices technique in BodyTalk might help her son's asthma, she remarked with amazement that she recalled tapping on her own head as a child to stop her wheezing.
You might have noticed that some of the newer treatment modalities involve tapping: there's EFT, which works on emotions, there's NAET, best known for allergy elimination, and BodyTalk. Aside from the tapping, all three modalities seem very different.
Why do they all use tapping? Well, for starters, tapping has been around in indigenous cultures for centuries. Tapping wakes up the body and the brain and helps bring about healing.
Think about your spine. Inside your spine—and surrounding your brain--is cerebrospinal fluid which, according to osteopaths and craniosacral therapists, moves in its own rhythm. In NAET and BodyTalk, we are gently interrupting this rhythm to change our relationship with a substance or to call the brain's attention to something. The interruption of this rhythm is communicated to the brain and other places in the body via the cerebrospinal fluid and spinal nerves, which travel up and down the interior of the spine and emerge out of each vertebra.
We've all had a similar experience when we've contracted a case of the hiccups, which miraculously disappears when someone comes up behind us and startles us...and the hiccups miraculously disappear. We've just been reset, and our diaphragm no longer spasms with each inhalation.
It's like having a conversation with a friend, and just as you're in the middle of relating how your boss gave you so much work to do, someone runs up and interrupts you very loudly by shouting something in your face. Your mind goes blank. You can't remember what you were saying.
The same thing happens with tapping. As you tap on your head (or as your practitioner taps on you), causing a gentle interruption of the natural rhythm of the cerebrospinal fluid, your brain is surprised enough to be able to change its relationship with that substance, as in NAET. Or as in BodyTalk, your brain notices a lack of communication between your lungs and your spleen that has been causing coughing and phlegm for the past two weeks, and re-establishes the connection.

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