She would wake up in the morning, focused on the pain in her shoulder, rather than on her art, wondering how she could afford a massage that day so she could get to her studio and paint.
We tapped for an hour one day. The next morning we tapped for another 20 minutes. The pain has gone. After six years the pain has gone, the last physical impact from when the truck hit her bicycle and she spent weeks in a hospital recovering. Turns out it had been a tumultuous personal time anyway, even without the truck accident.
A week later we tap again, another 20 minutes, for the fear of being pain-free – will it last? Do I deserve to be pain free? Do I have to be on guard? What next? She is free now. If the pain returns she can deal with it as a pain that she has influence with – before the tapping the pain was in the driver’s seat, she was simply a passenger, responding to the pain, always responding to the pain.
What was the process? We followed what came up. On the first session we covered.
- The present physical pain.
- The accident from six years earlier and the time in the hospital.
- The challenging circumstances that coincided with the time of the accident.
After working through the events, what came up was how much energy this back continued to consume, and how she always felt in battle mode against this pain. We tapped for love and acceptance, we considered that perhaps the shoulder had been doing its best to keep her safe after the accident, reminding her to stay safe, not sure if it really happened this way, but we tapped it as a possibility, as a way of acknowledging that this shoulder has always been trying to work for her best.
That’s when the pain loosened up.
So strange to end up talking to our bodies, but that brought the relief, thanking the shoulder instead of fighting it, and now inviting the shoulder to loosen up, she’ll take care of safety from here on out, and she’ll be safer if she feels better. We didn’t force that realization, we followed it as we listened to her experiences and her emotions.
Next day, a quick session. Tapping for gratitude that the shoulder feels better.
One week later. She’d had one day when the pain had returned, “but I know why. I was lifting boxes and turning door handles at strange angles.” Now she knows she can be active and recover from regular pain, not chronic pain. We tapped for any fear remaining about the return of the chronic pain.
“I had something come up, too.” she told me during the session. “A memory from kindergarten, about choosing to be a perfectionist as a way to survive.”
I tell how this work is like an onion, when one layer gets resolved, sometimes it allows another layer to come up. We tap on perfectionism, and having a new realization, and now a new choice for how to be. There may be new layers in the future, more work to do, but this has been a powerful experience for me, watching this person’s life transform in such fast-paced steps, in a way that makes such a difference for the quality of her life.