Tapping Into Emotion:
The Healing Waters of Chiby Adam Jacobs
We are in a far different relationship with our thoughts and emotions than we have believed. Less as inventors, we are more like collaborators with the collective unconscious, receiving its thoughts and emotions. We eventually form attractions to certain frequencies and they become our home. We then want to invite the same guests over and over for our fireside chats.
We are, as Ph.D.s George Pratt and Peter Lambrou analogize, radios. In their broad book, “Instant Emotional Healing: Acupressure for the Emotions,” Pratt and Lambrou explain with toothsome practicality how you can change radio stations even when the knob has oxidized and become encrusted. It’s an easy, crunchy read; if the book is a shake long, the practice is gold. Even in our age of instant this and instant granola, we new-agers know it’s not all industrial; many miracles are in a moment.
Besides instantaneity, one of the strengths of Pratt and Lambrou’s system of Emotional Self Management (ESM) is in its self-empowerment. While you can visit the authors in their offices in San Diego, CA and receive a thorough treatment—including balancing disorganizations in your unconscious fields—you can also do it yourself.
The significance of ESM is to heal “stuck emotional states that seem to result from some form of traumatic experience,” Dr. Lambrou explains. As he delineates further in the book, “The interaction of the thought energies with the meridian energy system is believed to be the source of emotions, or emotional distress… Each type of thought seems to vibrate at a specific frequency and affect specific meridians in the body. Thought fields created by strong negative emotions appear to deliver a shock to the system, causing blockages in the meridians.”
Their work, while decidedly Western in tone and approach, is based on traditional Chinese medicine and its conception of meridians or energy rivers in the body. The authors found their way from the Middle Kingdom to the States on the shoulders of George Goodheart, founder of applied kinesiology, and Dr. John Diamond, founder of the Diamond Path of Life and originator of the Acupuncture Emotional System. “Dr. Diamond’s approach,” Dr. Lambrou relates, “was to identify which organ systems and meridians correlate to which emotion using neuromuscular feedback and applied kinesiology.” For example, according to Dr. Diamond, the heart is the meridian of forgiveness and its healing affirmation is “my heart is filled with love.”
In traditional Chinese medicine, the emotions of each organ turn into each other as the body’s life energy, or chi, flows through the meridians. The heart’s Joy leads to the spleen’s Thought. As Thought keeps forming, it implacably turns to the lung’s Worry and Sorrow as surely as the sun sinks into night. We inevitably feel the sorrow from dividing our world too much; too much is painful to our knowing all-ness.
This is natural. Thus, the ESM treatment for obsessive thinking uses the lung meridian, transferring energy into its calming emotional circuit to create balance. Like its forefathers of acupuncture and acupressure, ESM organizes itself around the fireworks splayed out over the body like dots along the energy flows of the meridians. These are sacred sites—here lies Sedona, or here lies Machu Picchu. Indeed these points have holy names: Gates of Consciousness or Bubbling Spring. Through the simple practice of tapping these points with your own fingers, ESM cracks open our façade and opens “the floodgates for the trapped energies to flow freely and self-correct.” Anyone who thinks there is only one place in the body worth stimulating is in for a serious treat.
There are different “tapping” procedures for a wide range of deep emotions, such as grief, trauma, or rage. As I enthusiastically read last week, I used their techniques for relaxation and their tapping sequence for anxiety and guilt. I was pleasantly surprised. With an assumption that this technique would be superficial—reinforced by the authors’ simple language—I nonetheless found that these taps went deep. I felt layers of emotions peel off as danker, older ones from my child-home surfaced. I was mesmerized. The authors explain that much like “an onion only reveals its top layer at any one time, emotions may stack up one on top of the other, so that only the most intense or recent is noticeable.”
Anxiety, as a golden rule of thumb, is a predictor of deeper, scarier emotions. Dr. Lambrou describes that “anxiety is often a top level emotion, meaning it’s the thing people experience and are aware of. So many people come in because of anxiety for one reason or another, and actually have a level of anger they are not aware of. A lot of our upbringing, especially in Western society, doesn’t allow children to be angry.”
This is why, in the last chapter of their book, Drs. Pratt and Lambrou use ESM with children. They teach us how to calm “stresses from building up to the point where the child becomes trapped in an emotional loop that she can’t quickly break out of. The procedures can nip habits in the bud that, unchecked, might carry into larger and more complex problems in adulthood.” For example, Miguel and Lily’s child, Javier, a patient of Dr. Lambrou’s, was inconsolable during tantrums. Is the cure to punish the child, threaten him, or place him in time-out? Much to the chagrin of our Western logic, this is how ESM heals: you tap on the side of the child’s hand and say, “I love you, Javier, even when you are angry and upset.” And it works—Javier calms down.
All the work of ESM starts with love and acceptance, whether for a 2-year-old child or a 65-year-old father. Dr. Lambrou, in his decades of experience with psychology and medicine, tells me that “the healing power of love cannot be overemphasized. It is a powerful force in nature and human experience. Perhaps one of the most powerful components of the therapeutic process is unconditional acceptance—appreciating and loving a person even if they don’t change.”
And that’s precisely what ESM heralds us forth to do in our self-therapeutic work. In a book so dedicated to help and change, it is realistic to hear that where we start with all our sticky, totalizing problems is in deep acceptance.
That wise woman of love, Mother Teresa, said that in this life we can do no great things, only small things with great love. Is there no smaller act of kindness than to tap your forehead, and no wiser healing than to do so with currents of great love?Adam Jacobs is unemployed and still writing. Contact him at bowofrain@gmail.com. His friend, Michael Ahn, is the artist of the article; his portfolio can be viewed at http://michaelahn.wordpress.com. Dr. Peter Lambrou, Ph. D. is the co-author with Dr. George Pratt, Ph. D. of Instant Emotional Healing: Acupressure for the Emotions. Their next book, Code to Joy, will be on healing core belief systems. Look for it next year through Harper Collins. Dr. Lambrou holds a private practice in San Diego, CA and is Vice-Chairman of Psychology at Scripps Memorial Hospital. His Web site is www.PeterLambrou.com.
