(*Acknowledging that Australian author and EFT trainer Jenny Johnston already has a book out of this title, its an awesome title for this chapter!)

I was having a phone/Zoom conversation with my friend Debra who does QHHT, Dolores Cannon’s interesting technique that goes into past lives and other interesting places. When Debra asked about my EFT certification training, I offered to do some tapping so she could appreciate this powerful technique. I asked if she had any fears or phobias, and she immediately came up with “I hate snakes. If someone even mentions that they have a pet snake at home, I get the creeps.” Perfect for EFT I thought. So we established her base line discomfort on snakes, what it was she disliked about them, and started doing some tapping. After a few rounds, I kept Debra tapping on the collar bone point and asked her to say her own words to describe what she was feeling. 

Debra: “I feel like I’m in a pit, surrounded by poisonous snakes.”

That got my attention. When the client’s own words describe something that is a degree of complexity above the presenting situation, my thoughts go to a past lives issue rising to the surface. In Debra’s case, being afraid of snakes lead to a feeling of being attacked by snakes, with the added details that the snakes were poisonous and being trapped in a pit. 

Now for the last year or so in my MeetUps, we have been doing group journeys using a positive emotion as a bridge to the past life. This has worked extremely well, 80-90% of the participants are accessing a past life AND the positive emotions that drew them to that particular life. But in Debra’s case, tapping in the present on fear of snakes brought up a deeply uncomfortable emotion and accompanying physical sensations, so I decided to try using this negative emotion as a bridge to a past life experience. With no induction, just following the emotion, Debra was able to feel the body that was going through a nightmarish experience. She described her clothing as a white wrap-around garment, and there were 2 large men on either side of her carry/dragging her forward. She described trying to use her feet to slow them down “like the Flintstone’s cartoon (great 60’s reference)” until they got to a hole in the ground. Since we both had an awareness of what happens next, I told her to go backwards in time to the events that led to this situation. She saw herself as a servant girl tasked with pouring the wine at a fancy feast. When she was approaching her “master’s” place at the table, she accidentally spilled some wine on his sleeve and watched in horror as the stain spread as the cloth absorbed the dark red wine. There was no yelling, just a simple wave of the hand and 2 men appeared at her side and dragged her away. Then she found herself at the edge of this pit. We tapped on her fear at what she new was about to happen, and I did not feel the need for her to go through the whole sequence of being attacked by multiple snakes. So I moved her forward to the events just after she left the body, and we had an enjoyable between lives session where we examined how this applied to her present life. 

We were both astonished at what just happened; Debra because she learned the power of EFT tapping when confronting physical and emotional traumas, and myself, because I just used a negative emotion brought to the surface by EFT tapping to access the core issue behind that fear, which as I expected was in a past life. I have now completed a series of sessions all starting with EFT tapping on current issues that lead to a core issue from a previous incarnation. Progress and a new (but unconventional* and off label") use of EFT tapping!

*For the record, I still do classic EFT sessions that don’t lead to past lives. It is only when the clients own words lead the way that we pursue a core issue from a previous life.