One of my favorite parts about tapping is how flexible it is. It is flexible in terms of the issues you tap on, how long you tap, how deep you go, and what you say. What most people don't realize is that it is also flexible when it comes to how you tap on the points, which points you tap on, and in what order you tap on them. This week on the podcast, I share lots of different ways you can tap and how you can get deeper results when you play around with them. Support the podcast! Http://tappingqanda.com/support Subscribe in: Apple Podcast | iPhone | Spotify | Pandora | Amazon Music | iHeartRadio | YouTube Why I Tap in a Random Order Why are you tapping like that? Those were the first words the person sitting next to me in a coffee shop said to me on Saturday, and she said it with a questioning tone and almost disgust. Today I want to share exactly what I was doing while tapping in that coffee shop, why I do it that way, and why I think it is so effective. One of the things I have become is comfortable tapping in public. Part of that is because I live in New York City, and if I happen to be standing on a street corner doing a little bit of tapping, I'm like the eighth weirdest thing on that street corner, so nobody notices. For the most part, people here let people live and let live. Most of the people I encounter aren't ever going to see me again, and I am tapping to make myself feel better in the moment, so I really don't care that much. When I'm doing work and my computer is processing something, like compressing audio or creating an output, I'm just waiting, so I will start tapping. That's exactly what happened. Every Saturday and Sunday morning that I'm in town, I go to a coffee shop right around the corner, Devoción. I sit in the corner with a beautiful cup of coffee below a giant wall of plants and a giant skylight, and I do some work. On this particular morning my computer was processing something, and I was waiting on a download. They don't have internet on the weekend, so I was using my phone as a hotspot, which takes longer than I like. So I just started tapping, jumping from tapping point to tapping point without saying anything. That is when I got the accusation: why are you tapping like that? My first response was actually excitement. She wasn't asking why I was tapping or what that thing was that I was doing. She knew what tapping was, and she knew enough about it to question my style. As someone who has spent almost the last two decades trying to share tapping with as many people as possible, that was a good thing. The reason she questioned it is that I was hopping from point to point in what appeared to be a random fashion. When you have been taught to do something one way and someone else does it differently, it makes you ask questions. Maybe not as directly as my New York friends, but it does. Most of us were taught to start at the eyebrow and go from point to point, or to start at the tippy top of the head, or on the side of the hand. After going through the body, we might hit the liver spots or the fingers, but it all looks super organized. The reason I don't follow that pattern is that it looks organized, but it's actually a random pattern. Every tapping point is associated with a different meridian. We go eyebrow, side of the eye, under the eye, under the nose, chin, because that is the next closest point. I've actually tried it, and it feels more natural to work top down. Tapping on the collarbone, then chin, then under the nose, then under the eye feels like work with each tap, whereas coming down the body just keeps lowering and lowering, and that is easier than working back up to the top. So it makes sense that we tap that way. Why do we do that? The predecessor to EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques, as most of us know it, was something called Thought Field Therapy, created by Roger Callahan. In Thought Field Therapy, you tapped in a particular order for a particular issue. There might be one sequence where you go collarbone, eyebrow, under the eye, side of the hand, and another where you go index finger, under the eye, tippy top of the head, under the nose. There are a number of prescribed sequences for certain issues, and when you're working with a client, you can muscle test your way to something more useful. Many of Callahan's early students loved Thought Field Therapy and thought tapping was great, but they also recognized it was really complicated. They wondered whether they could find a single algorithm, which is what Callahan called tapping in a given order. Maybe it wouldn't be as powerful as Thought Field Therapy, but it would be much easier to teach. If you've ever tried to explain tapping to someone, you're already getting them over the hurdle of this weird thing where we tap on our bodies. Now you also need to explain that when it's anger, you tap in this order, and when it's sadness, you tap in that order. That is a really difficult thing to share with someone in a casual setting. So Gary Craig's thought was that if you hit every single tapping point and go through the sequence, eventually you will get the points in the right order. The first time through you hit the eyebrow, the second time through the top of the head, the third time through under the eye, and so on, until eventually the points land in the right order. It feels like a really organized way to tap, but it's random. As I thought about this and played with it, I realized I don't know how to do Thought Field Therapy, but I do know how to tap, and I wondered whether I could intuit my way into a tapping sequence that made more sense. So I started to play. I would ask myself where to tap, and my hand would be drawn to my collarbone. Where do I tap next? My hand would be drawn to under my nose. Then the eyebrow, then under the eye, then the side of the hand. The more I did it, the stronger the sensations in my body got. One of two things was happening. Possibility number one is that because I was being thoughtful, deliberate, and present, I was actually finding a faster way to healing and transformation. Possibility number two is that I am absolutely delusional and making stuff up, and those physical sensations are nothing other than physical sensations in my body that have nothing to do with tapping. But if we go back to the original premise, eyebrow, side of the eye, under the eye, under the nose, chin is a random order. It's organized by proximity, not by function. It's like when I go out in my neighborhood to pick things up. I go to the post office, then the grocery store, then the drugstore, then pick up laundry. That's not the order those things need to be done in. It's the order they are in my neighborhood, so it becomes a little loop. Functionally, the standard tapping sequence is random, designed around the way my body is lined up. So my thought was that if I tap in some random order, I'm exchanging one random sequence for another. Eyebrow, side of the eye, under the eye, under the nose, chin is random. Eyebrow, chin, under the eye, side of the eye is also random. At worst, I'm trading one random sequence for another. At best, I'm trading a random sequence for a sequence that my body is giving me information about, which makes it less random and therefore possibly more effective. I think of the old Yellow Pages slogan: I'm letting my fingers do the walking, tapping whatever comes next. I don't do this when I'm tapping on screen, and I don't do this when I'm teaching. For the most part I don't do it when I'm tapping with clients either, because with a client I'm having them tune into issues and figure out what's going on, and then I give them instruction. Now tap here, now tap here, now tap here. That starts to get in the way of healing and transformation. But when I'm tapping on my own, there is no distraction, and the more I've done this, the more my hand just jumps all over the place. As I evaluate this, I look at it through a few lenses. The first question I ask when I'm trying something new is how it's working. I have found it effective. Is it more effective than tapping in the sequence we've all been taught? I don't know. I think it is, but it's not making things worse. Second, I'm a really big advocate for the minimal viable solution, which means doing just enough. Sometimes when I tap, I just tap on my collarbone because that is enough. Sometimes I tap on the side of my hand and then under my nose, the side of my hand and under my nose, over and over, because for what is at hand, that is enough for me to have the relief I want. So when I'm tapping, I tap in the way that makes the most sense to me, and the way that makes the most sense is to let my hands wander all over the place. That is why she asked, why are you tapping like that? It's because I was tapping in a way she was not used to. I am not saying you need to tap in a random order. I am not saying you need to tune into your body and see where to tap next. I'm simply saying this is something I tried. In the trying of it, it feels like it's making a difference, and it doesn't cost me anything because I'm trading one random thing for another random thing. That is why I tap in weird ways in coffee shops at 7:30 in the morning, so my neighbors can question what the hell I'm thinking and what I'm doing. So give it a try and let me know how it works for you. This is not a homework assignment, and I'm not telling you it's the best way to do anything. I'd just be curious to hear what your particular experience is. And if you know a tapper in your life, you might want to share this with them so the two of you can have a conversation and play around with it together.
