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How often do you find yourself to be stressed or anxious? As an introvert, you may tend to experience these things a little more because you may have negative self-talk, imposter syndrome, or you tend to be a people pleaser. If you lock away your emotions, it can cause physical pain like neck tension and jaw pain. You could do many things to combat your stress, anxiety, trauma, or physical pain, but one tool that helps you deal with your emotions in a powerful and healthy way is EFT or tapping. Let’s take a deeper look into the world of EFT and what it has to do with your emotions, your mental and physical well-being, and how it can help you to heal your body.
Our guest on the podcast today is Integrative Energy Practitioner Lauren Fonvielle. She guides her clients on a journey of self-healing to break through physical, mental, or emotional obstacles that keep them stuck and hold them back in life or business. She believes we all have the answers within, and sometimes we need a little help accessing them.
In this episode, Lauren and I dive into:
- How experiencing her own stress and anxiety led to becoming an Integrative Energy Practitioner
- What EFT is and how it can help you
- Experiencing EFT or tapping for yourself
- How EFT can specifically help with your emotional well-being
- …and much more
Becoming an Integrative Energy Practitioner After Experiences of Stress and Anxiety
This work started for Lauren when she began experiencing a lot of anxiety and stress and started seeking ways to feel better. This had initially started when she was going to training as a yoga instructor, where she was exposed to many different types of energy work. She became a Reiki practitioner and learned all about meditation and sound healing. This happened to be about the same time she was introduced to EFT or Tapping. It helped her to better manage her stress, anxiety, and physical pain. So naturally, she started sharing these tools with friends and family and started offering them to other people, allowing her to guide her clients through releasing the thoughts that aren’t serving them.
What EFT or Tapping Is and How It Can Help You
EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique helps you to find freedom from your emotions. It is gently tapping on specific body points while simultaneously acknowledging your emotions. When Lauren describes it, she compares it to acupuncture because it is more widely known. When you go to an acupuncturist, needles are put in at certain points of the body, but with tapping, you apply light acupressure to some of the same body points. It has been shown to help reduce the amount of cortisol (the stress hormone) pumping through your body.
In addition, it helps bring awareness to some of the emotions that you lock away or have been trying to avoid. As you hold space for yourself and tap into your feelings, it helps you move through those emotions rather than run from them. For example, most people don’t want to experience intense emotions like anger, sadness, or frustration, and avoiding that can sometimes lead to chronic pain. With that, Lauren can help her clients peel back those layers and get to the root of what is going on to feel better in their bodies.
Experiencing and Practicing EFT or Tapping For Yourself
EFT or tapping hasn’t always been mainstream knowledge. Still, it has become more commonplace because of documentaries like Heal, where people talk about tapping in it, and the Tapping Solution app. It is one thing to talk about EFT or tapping, and then it is another thing actually to experience it for yourself. The perfect way to take the first step into it is to start practicing EFT or sign up for one of Lauren’s workshops.
So, how much time should you spend tapping, you ask? The more you practice something, the more likely you can use it during times of stress and anxiety. Lauren encourages people to tap regularly, even if that is just for a couple of minutes a day. It makes it much easier to utilize later on when you need it most. When she works with her clients, it will usually be an hour session one day a week. Then her clients can tap between sessions if they feel like they need to, but there is no right or wrong way to do it.
How EFT Can Specifically Help Your Emotional Well-Being
Tapping can help with various conditions from anxiety, stress, overwhelm, limiting beliefs, PTSD, and chronic pain. It may come off as too good to be true to tap on yourself to help with all of these different things, but it comes down to the different experiences that make up your life and impact your present. Sometimes we are cognitively aware, and sometimes we are not. For example, somebody you know says something that triggers you and sets you off; it may not be what they said that upsets you, but likely layers of experiences that are deeper than the surface level of someone saying something mean to you.
This work can be a bit like detective work to help you peel back those layers to get to the root of why you feel like you do. If you are dealing with a lot of anxiety and stress, and maybe you think it’s because of your job, or a significant portion of it is related to your job, there are other contributing factors that you are not aware of right now. Once you can shed light on some of those things, you can provide some relief.
So it is hard to say precisely what EFT will help you with, but it will help you feel better in your body. It allows you to regulate your nervous system. Some of the studies backed by science say that it reduces your cortisol levels and can take your brain out of fight or flight mode. When you feel calmer physically, you can think more clearly, which is helpful when talking about stress and anxiety.
The Connection Tapping Makes Between Emotions and Physical Sensations
The thing is that once you begin to have an awareness of your body, that’s when you can start to break out the tool of tapping. If you are beginning to feel sad, angry, or frustrated, you can start tapping on yourself and talking about what is bothering you. What comes up most of the time may not even strike you as related to what is bothering you. Your emotions need to move. They don’t like to be stuffed down and ignored, and they need to be acknowledged so that you can move through them and not let them wreak havoc on your body.
That was the experience Lauren had. She was first introduced to this for anxiety and stress and found it to help her with that first session. She also found out that EFT could help with chronic pain because it helped her with tension in her neck and shoulders and the TMJ in her jaw. Her first session with a practitioner enabled her to explore these pains, and thoughts that she felt were unrelated popped up, and she had a massive shift, and her awareness came to her. The physical pain she was experiencing has been released.
On a scale from 1 to 10, she started at an eight and ended her session at a two. It blew her mind because these things that she thought were unrelated, or are buried so deep, naturally start to come to the surface, then you can go there and explore it a little more to see what happens. You never know where tapping will lead you and what things will come up that need healing. It’s always a surprise.
It’s easy for people to correlate anxiety and feel it in their bodies, but it’s not just with stress; it is with any emotion. So, for example, with sadness, you may feel a real heaviness in your chest, or with frustration, it can be like a pit in your stomach. But, most times, there are physical sensations in your body that you haven’t connected the emotion and the physical sense. This work can help you do that.
Compartmentalizing Anxiety and Stress as an Introvert
Not every introvert deals with anxiety, but many more introverts struggle with internalizing anxiety or stress than somebody who’s more extroverted. This is because you tend to keep things locked away and close to your chest so that you don’t have to deal with them. Sometimes introverts also deal more with impostor syndrome, negative self-talk, doubts, and people-pleasing because those things are being locked away instead of being acknowledged. Tapping can help with your worries, whether it is a fear of not being good enough or a fear of bees.
There are so many different modalities that can assist you in feeling better in your body, and Lauren always encourages people to explore all of them and figure out what works best for them. Different things work for other people.
Lauren does tapping with her clients, but she also does meditation and sound healing with them so that her clients can feel at ease and feel at peace in their mind, body, and soul. You deserve it. The world right now is a stressful place, and it can be chaotic at times. Letting that external chaos in can create internal chaos, but your inner world can impact the outer world. If you can have that peace and feeling of calm and ease inside, that is 100% going to affect your external world.
You need to prioritize taking care of yourself in this way and if you can’t do it for yourself, do it for your loved ones because they’re going to be impacted by this just as much. When you show up as your best self and feel good, that affects those you love the most. It’s a healing journey from the inside out, and all the answers are within.
Lauren shared so much knowledge and insight on using EFT to help with physical pain, stress, anxiety, and trauma from internalizing your emotions. She shared how she went from having physical pain from stress and anxiety to becoming an Integrative Energy Practitioner after learning about EFT as a healing modality, what EFT actually is and how it can help you, how tapping can specifically help your emotional well-being, the connection that tapping makes between emotions and physical sensations, and compartmentalizing anxiety and stress as an introvert.
If you practice EFT or tapping for yourself as an introvert, how has it impacted your life positively?
A Breakdown of This Episode
[1:37] The process of becoming an Integrative Energy Practitioner from experiences with stress and anxiety
[2:44] What EFT or tapping is, what it entails, and how it can help you
[7:04] Experiencing and practicing tapping for yourself
[9:21] how EFT can specifically help you with your emotional well-being
[16:57] The connection tapping makes between emotions and physical sensations
[21:55] Compartmentalizing your anxiety and stress as an introvert and using tapping to find peace and calm
If you enjoyed this episode, I invite you to take a screenshot and tag me on your Instagram stories @introvertcoach and tell me your biggest takeaway!
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