(starts @ 24:26)
Karate Chop: Even though ‘mess happens’…
…I accept myself.
Even though I will accumulate certain things… …for a time…
…and they may even be messy… …that’s okay.
I’m still a good person… …if I have some piles.
Eyebrow: I have piles.
Side of the eye: I will again. Under the eye: That’s okay.
Under the nose: They’re different.
Chin: I want them to be vibrationally different. Collarbone: They are just things moving through.
Under the arm: What if I don’t get emotionally upset about it? Top of the head: That would be different!
Eyebrow: That would be great!
Side of the eye: Letting it be what it is. Under the eye: Sometimes it’s messy. Under the nose: It’s not my preference. Chin: It’s not my preference.
Collarbone: I don’t need to beat myself up about it. Under the arm: That would be helpful.
Top of the head: I accept myself.
I accept myself…
…and I’m open to finding it surprisingly easy to make decisions… …and clear my clutter.
Rick: Deep breath. Ahhhhh…
Carol: Energetic again. If you don’t want to do it from an inspirational
place, and that motivation and “I have to…”, and put it on that list of chores - gosh, how does that work out for people? Not well…
Rick: I found that sometimes, when you just look at the mess and you tap
you spit, and you tap and tap and tap, and you let yourself be upset about it - I’ve done that on computer errors.
Carol: Mmm-hmm.
Rick: I’ve done it on dirty clothes behind a door. I’ve done it on cat hair
and dog hair. I’ve done it on big piles of junk mail. Anything that I have allowed myself to be honest about how irksome it is - what a mess, what a pain - it has changed it forever. It has never gone back to being as intense. When I’ve been a little bit more polite about it - “Even though I really wish that this stuff wasn’t behind the door…” - No.
Carol: It’s not true.
Rick: “Even though it’s horribly insulting to me that people will not put the
dirty clothes in the hamper LIKE I DO, and that makes me feel SO ANGRY…” Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap while you’re sitting there, while you’re looking at it, while you’re picking it up. Guess what? It took the emotional charge out of it. Now it’s just what it is. There’s not a big emotional tie to it once you have been honest about how you feel about a particular pile of stuff, a particular thing that happens. It could be dirty dishes. I know somebody that hated doing the dishes because her husband had promised to do the dishes before they got married, and then he never did the dishes. So the dishes would pile up until the pain of having the dishes there was higher than the pain of doing it, even though he said he was going to. Now, by tapping on the underlying emotional noise of “He doesn’t love, respect, or keep his promises because he’s not doing the dishes,” guess what? They just became dishes. While sometimes she doesn’t get them done every single time, there’s not the same emotional strain. You’re not getting
poked. I encourage people, as you look at stuff - certain things in your life - ask if there’s this emotional component. What does this thing really mean to me?
Carol: What does it really represent?
Rick: What does it really represent? If you’re getting really, really, really
intense about five pieces of dirty clothes, chances are there’s an emotional component there. As you get down into that and use EFT on that, then it’s just five pieces of dirty clothes.
Carol: It reminds me of a client of mine who was so far into debt that all
the bills would go in the drawer, and she just couldn’t open the drawer. In the beginning, it wasn’t about the dollar amount. It was about shame, and “How could I?” and “Am I spending too much?” and “This is a secret.” All
these emotions would come up in her when she would get the mail. She would take unopened bills and throw them in the drawer and say, “I’m not dealing right now. I don’t have to have that problem right now.” There were so many emotions that had nothing to do with money, actually, and nothing to do with the $25 bills and the $200 bills. We really had to ‘unpack’ that and say, “How does a bill from ComEd actually become such a problem emotionally and energetically?” Once you can ‘unpack’ that, like you’re saying, if it’s dishes or a particular pile - we’ve all had piles of things from work that we don’t go near for a while. What’s in it? What’s the monster? What’s the snake underneath the pile? It’s just a pile of paper…
Rick: The reason it’s the pile you’re avoiding is that there’s an emotional
component to it.
Carol: Right.
Rick: It could be a priority. I won’t be quite so bold to say that there’s
always an emotional component. But if it’s being noisy, rather than just
matter-of-fact… “It’s on my priority list, but it’s way down the list. I’ll get to it.” If there’s emotional noise when you look at it, address that with EFT.
Carol: Mmm-hmm. We want to also encourage people on the way to go
about this. You could listen to CD number 2, then number 4, then number 5, then number 3, then number 1. Let’s say I have had a problem forever, and it’s totally cleared up - well, not totally. It has cleared up considerably in the last couple of years. I didn’t look at a pile of clutter and say, “Oh, that’s bothering me,” and tap on that, which is a brilliant thing to do. I should have. I just kept working on my emotional issues around anxiety and what’s going on in my life, and an outcome of that was this inspiration and strong, strong desire to clean things up, throw out, shred, give away. But you can go about it any way - you can start by looking at the corner of your office and tap. You can do it that way. There are many angles and doors in to clearing this problem. It is interesting - I never used the props that were right under my nose, which were my piles in my office and my piles of clothes and my piles of papers. I never did that, but, of course, it’s a wonderful way that you and I use EFT for all sorts of problems!
Rick: Yes, like our Pain Relief With EFT program, we look at the physical
stuff as a doorway into the emotional and at the emotional stuff as a doorway into the physical.
Rick: With clutter, you can look at a pile and say, “What does this remind
me of? What is the emotional component of this?” You can look at an emotion and address that with EFT and suddenly your physical world changes. Either way, both work with EFT.
Carol: Yes, both - and there are other ways as well. Now, let’s revisit the
downside/upside question. As you know, it’s our favorite question. Again, for those of you who still feel confused, or “I haven’t quite figured out what’s going on around the clutter,” or “Yes, I still have it. It’s getting a little
better, but I don’t understand it,” what I always ask is, “If you got rid of this problem, would there be a downside? Would there be some unexpected ‘ooooh, I didn’t want that to happen, even though I said I wanted my clutter to go away.’” I was thinking of that, Rick, when you said “I stay busy” when you were tapping with me. The busyness means I don’t have to deal with my clutter. Well, does the clutter mean you don’t have to deal with an emotion?
Rick: The clutter then becomes the insulator. “I stay busy to avoid the
clutter, and the clutter allows me to avoid my relationships…
Carol: Right.
Rick: …my problem with anyone.” I have a problem with my boss. We see
that a lot. It’s a good psychological method that I think is very cluttered. We set something up as the big, hairy elephant, and it really isn’t the big, hairy elephant. It’s just the one that we decide to focus on so that we don’t have to look at the big, hairy elephant.
Carol: Like my client, who, in the process of quitting smoking, said, “Oh,
okay. Now I know why I was smoking!” I said, “What happened?” She said, “I’m thinking of my father 40 years ago when he died, when I was a kid.” I said, “Oh, I didn’t know that”, when I first met her. She didn’t know it because she had been smoking since she was fifteen. So this smoking problem that her life was built around - “I have to have them, I need to have them, and my friends have to smoke, and I’m not going to quit, and I am going to quit, and I tried to quit” - had nothing to do with smoking. It was all about grief, but she didn’t know that until the smoking went away. So if you’re so filled in your mind and in your vibration with “I hate myself with the clutter. Look at that. Look at that. I’m a mess. I’m a loser. I can’t fix this. I can’t find this.” - what’s actually underneath that? How are you using it? How does it serve you? What’s the upside? What’s the
downside, if you got over it? If you sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and ask yourself that question: “The downside of getting rid of my clutter is that then, I would (fill in the blank)” - you’ll come up with
Rick: It may not make sense. It may not be logical. That’s a good sign.
Our primitive brain often makes decisions that are not logical, especially if it’s made when we were two, or three, or seven, or fifteen, or thirty-five. By asking the questions, you are opening yourself to intuitive guidance for a doorway. A doorway. That is all you’re looking for - a doorway into the energy around your clutter.
Carol: Just a little ‘a-ha’. Just one ‘a-ha’. Another great question to write
down and ask yourself - and leave it blank for a while if you can’t answer - “I’m afraid to let go of my clutter because…” and just sit with it. Be peaceful and quiet about it. Most people never say, “I’m afraid to let go of my
clutter.” They come in and say, “I’m overwhelmed and I can’t let go of my clutter.” No one says, “I’m afraid to let it go” because that doesn’t feel “up” in our consciousness.
Rick: A coach asking that question can open your awareness to that
underlying core issue. I remember asking that question of a client, and after the initial answer was, “I’m not afraid of it.” I just said, “If you were afraid of letting go of the clutter, what might be the reason?” I had her picture the room not being cluttered. She immediately said, “Oh, my - I’d go back to being on eBay all the time.”
Carol: Ah! Interesting.
Rick: She had filled up enough space and spent enough money that if she
were to get rid of the stuff, all of a sudden an old pattern she felt would re- emerge. But she was keeping it under control by the pain. The pain of the clutter was so predominant that it was providing an “Ugh! Well, this feels better than that.”
Carol: Wow.
Rick: “It feels better to keep that pain than to go back to fighting over
items on eBay and buying a lot of stuff that didn’t even get opened.” She didn’t even realize that she already had purchased something just like it. This was a serious issue for her, so when that door opened, yeah - there were many of the energies we talked about before around scarcity and
security that had to be addressed before she could even begin to think about taking stuff out of that room.
Carol: I’d like to do another one on scarcity. I know we addressed this a
couple of CDs ago, but that idea that “There’s not enough” and “I have to hold on” - I think that’s under a very high percentage of clutter issues and
clutter challenges. There’s a sense of “I can’t let go of that - I might need it.” “Oh, there’s not enough of this.” Someone came to me and said, “There wasn’t enough love in my family.” She was able to identify that, and she said, “I didn’t get enough love there, so I feel the need to hold on.” Now, she had done enough work on herself initially, so that she knew that’s where it came from. But many people think, “That’s not where it comes from! What do you mean? That’s not about scarcity of love!” But if you keep ‘unpacking the layers’, it’s often about something vitally important to us.
Rick: We all know that gifts are something that we get and give as an
exchange of love energy. An absence of that can make a child feel very insufficient and insignificant. That energy came up with a client the other day, where they very powerfully remembered the Christmas where there were no presents. That scarcity feeling - you only have to go to your refrigerator once when you’re a child, and there’s no food in it and you’re hungry, to want to hoard food.
Carol: Right.
Rick: Your primitive brain will say, “As long as you can, in some way, if it’s
possible for you to hoard food, then let’s do that.”
Carol: Mmm-hmm.
Rick: If you threw something out once, and then were roundly criticized for
having thrown away something (quote) “perfectly good” that you might… “You see? You needed it!” Right? That activates the need to hold on to this stuff.
Carol: It’s funny - I had an incident. It doesn’t feel emotionally connected
at all to anything for me in this clutter, but it was a perfect example. I put my favorite charm, a necklace pendant. I wrapped it up in Kleenex and put it in one of those old film canisters (I was doing a lot of photography at the time), and I threw it out. I saw the Kleenex and just threw it out. Days later, I went, “Ooooh! My necklace is missing!” It came to me - it’s almost like I woke up in the morning and it was that sense of panic: “I threw something out - I threw something out!” And I had worked on that, so it went away, so it didn’t feel like it was connected to my current clutter, but it’s an example of how you can make a mistake and hold onto it and have it manifest in a different way in your life.