Increasing your effectiveness with EFT, part 51.
Recently a few of my clients have told me they would like to feel more peaceful about death and/or less afraid of it. So that got me thinking: how can we use EFT towards that outcome? Here are a few of my thoughts of what are some of the possible areas and past and future events to explore if I wanted to work on my own fear of death (or help my clients with theirs).
As usual, one of the main ways to increase our effectiveness with EFT and ensure our tapping is targeted and focused is to go from “the tabletop” / general issue to the specific “table legs” / “movie scenes” / events supporting or holding it in place.
First of all, keep in mind this can be a sensitive issue for many people and there can be many painful and/or traumatic memories connected to it that might be best not to be worked on by yourself, but with a certified EFT practitioner such as myself or someone else. If you suspect that even just reading this article might be too triggering or overwhelming, feel free to stop reading right now (I’ll try to keep it as gentle as possible though).
That being said, I can think of two big areas people might be afraid of around death: one of them is the moment of death and/or the time leading up to it, and the other area has to do with the timeless question: “what happens after we die?”.
So, let’s pick these two areas apart and see how we can come up with specific events to tap on. It can be useful, as an intermediate step, to try to pinpoint what are some of the specific fears you might have, and then come up with specific events around that.
For example, thinking about the actual moment of dying and/or the time leading up to it, what are some of the specific fears you have? Is it that you will die alone, with no one by your side when you are at your deathbed?
In this case you could come up with a “future made up scenario” of that taking place, and tap on the feelings and emotions you notice coming up for you now when you imagine that. That would be a future event, but if we think about past events, is there anyone you know who died with no one by their side? As you remember that taking place, do you notice any unpleasant emotional charge coming up for you now? This would be a past event you could tap on (by yourself or, if it’s too emotionally intense, with a practitioner).
Are you afraid that the actual moment of dying will be physically painful? Again, you can come up with a future made up event and tap on how that event makes you feel now. Or, if you are looking for past events, notice if there’s anyone who comes to mind (maybe a grandparent for example) who might have been in a lot of physical pain (perhaps due to an illness or an injury) when they passed away.
Are you afraid you’ll die with “unfinished business” and/or not having fulfilled your purpose and/or full of regrets? You see how the fear of death can confront us with all of these issues. See if you can come up with some future or past events related to this. Is there anyone in your family who died full of regrets and/or with “unfinished business”?
Are you afraid you’ll die an “untimely death” or, in other words, not by natural causes? Is there anyone important in your life who died this way? If there is, this could be a traumatic event and best to be worked on with a practitioner.
Let’s move on now to the area of “what happens after we die?” Nobody knows for sure (at least, I don’t), but I would say that your specific fears are probably going to depend on your spiritual beliefs. For example, do you believe in some form of reincarnation? Are you afraid of reincarnating into a “worse life”? What are some “made up future events” you could come up with? If this “worse life” was a result of some sort of karmic punishment, what events took place in your life that led you to believe that you deserve that?
Maybe instead of reincarnation, you believe in the afterlife of Heaven and Hell. Are there any future events you can come up with that have an unpleasant emotional charge? Perhaps a memory of being taught as a kid how horrible Hell was and/or that you would go there if you misbehaved?
Perhaps you don’t believe in any of the above, and instead you believe something along the lines of “when we die, we simply cease to exist and our individual identity dissolves”. Does that idea bring up any fear? As you imagine that you “cease to exist” and lose all of your memories, what emotion or feeling do you notice coming up for you now?
So, you see how we can go from the global “fear of death” to specific “movie scenes” / specific events (either real or made up) so that we can tap on them one by one, by noticing how we feel about them now when we tune in to them. With EFT we can diminish and release the negative emotional charge that might be associated with each of these events, so that we can feel increasingly more at peace with the idea of dying someday.
By the way, if you suspect that a memory might be too emotionally intense and/or traumatic to work on your own, feel free to enlist the aid of a certified trauma informed practitioner, such as myself, to help you with that. The same applies if you feel like it might be too hard to keep track of all the different memories and aspects at play. Feel free to get in touch with me, even if only to ask me for some free advice or guidance on how to tap on something by yourself.
That’s it for today. I hope this article was helpful. My name is Bruno Sade, and I’m a certified EFT practitioner with a mental health background as a clinical psychologist licensed in Argentina. I use EFT as a tool to help people (who speak English or Spanish) change their negative emotional reactions.
And, I’d love to know: How would you use EFT to work on the fear of death? Do you have any questions or comments about what I wrote? Is there any particular topic you’d like me to write about? I’d love to know in the comments below.
By the way, I hope you’ll join us at the free 23 Day Tapping Challenge that started on January 1st, 2023 . I’ve already hosted a Live Tapping Circle on Thursday, January 12th, 2023, at 12pm EST, where I tapped with one person while the other attendants tapped along to borrow benefits. You can still watch the recording. And I’ll be hosting another one on Thursday, January 19th, 2023, at the same time.
You can sign up for it here:
https://community.efttappingtraining.com/spaces/7268208/content