How anxiety became my muse and reshaped the way I teach EFT

Anxiety did not disappear when I healed it. It disappeared when I honored it.

In 2011, after being the guinea pig for many modalities, Reiki, past life regression, EMDR, therapy, yoga, my mom sent me a video link: EFT tapping for anxiety.

After a ten-minute tap along, I felt my clinically-diagnosed-OCD-brain completely change.

Within a few months, I was boarding a plane I could barely afford to take to New York for a five-day workshop to learn the modality inside and out.

I thought I was going for myself, to heal the anxiety I had struggled with ever since my brother died at five years old.

But by the last day, I knew I would be doing this for a living.

I came back home and started sharing it with the kids I was teaching. Kids with ADHD. Kids with learning issues. Parents who were stressed about their kids being bullied.

Kids who had struggled to sit for five minutes were suddenly sitting for seventy-five-minute sessions with me.

From being a kid who went to therapy myself, I always had a problem with working with people who did not choose to be there. So I quickly transitioned my practice to serving adults who could intentionally pay and drive to my appointments.

No begging. No bartering on behalf of a parent. (But I now know how to work with THAT - and I’m teaching it next weekend ;)

What I quickly found was that I was still working with children.

The inner child trapped inside go-getter adults, creatives, and celebrities in the film industry, where I built my practice. Inside all of them was a part that was scared, afraid, doubting, comparing themselves, and on top of it, beating themselves up for having these parts at all.

Whether you work with kids or not, you are working with children - trapped inside an old mental movie that we can teach them to pause.

I used everything I learned from Level 1 and Level 2 training with these people, going to the root of the doubts, fears, grief, and insecurity, aiming to release it.

And then something happened that changed my life.

I was invited to teach at Esalen, a prestigious center on the northern coast of California, teaching doctors and psychiatrists how to use EFT in their work.

And on the first day, I woke up bloody anxious.

All the anxiety I thought I had “healed”, all the anxiety I had prepared to speak about at the training, came slamming back in.

What an imposter.
Who was I?

It was in that moment that I realized this anxiety is not something to get rid of. It is a part of me. It is the part of me that brought me here, to this prestigious center, to help so many people.

Anxiety is my muse, but we call hera different name

Without an anxious part, I never would have been devoted to learning these tools to help others.Without this anxious part, my ancestors would not have survived. They picked up on the scent of threat and ran.

And it was in that moment that I decided to ask myself a question that I now ask every Level 3 student.

If you never heal this so called issue, if it never goes away, what would you choose then?

I would choose to treat anxiety like my muse. The thing that crops up when I need to write. When I need to go inward. When I have forgotten to take self care time.

And when I go in, I learn a wealth of wisdom.

What if Chronic issues are walkie-talkie signals from your complex trauma?

I meet a younger self. Or a womb self. Or an ancestor who is waiting for someone to be brave enough to go there with them. To feel it for them, to heal it with them.

When I walked into that training, I knew I would no longer just be teaching just EFT Tapping. I’d be blending parts work (hey IFS), inner child work, and a deeply trauma-informed approach… that honors ALL feelings, thoughts, and behaviors not as things to tap away, but things to honor.

Treating chronic issues like a sacred muse.
Like a mentor.
Like something that helps us reach our highest self.

Trust me, I wanted to “heal” my chronic anxiety, but I only “healed” once I related to her like the living breathing warrior that she is.

To this day, I do not know how I led an EFT practice for five years without parts work, inherited work, and inner child work.

If I could go back and work with all of those clients, I would tell them this.

What if we did not seek to heal our “issues” or our clients, but instead changed our relationship to them?

It was in that moment, on that cliff in Northern California, when I changed my relationship to my anxiety, that it truly went away.

Not in the sense that I buried her.
But in the sense that we renamed her.

When I feel that buzz in my throat or that pit in my stomach, which I still do, I do not say, Oh God, I am anxious again. Oh God, a new layer. Oh God, I thought I healed this already.

I say,

“Thank you, little girl inside me, for sending me the walkie-talkie signal to come hang out again.”

Starting next weekend, I am teaching EFT practitioners to blend inner child work, parts work, and deeply trauma-informed approaches into their practice, so that we don’t treat people as broken or approach sessions as “healing issues.”

Instead, we treat issues as warrior skills, parts of us who learned to survive the best way we knew.

Richard Shwartz says:

There are no bad parts.”

I say:

There are only warrior parts.

That anxiety I was trying to tap away in 2011 eased when I soothed her, but she kept resurfacing year after year until I honored her, her story, her needs, and her investment in fear.

Instead of waging war against our parts (because they WILL win), we pick up anxiety (rage, insecurity, chronic illness, trust issues, money blocks) and teach them to fight a new battle.

If you know that healing does not mean a removal of “bad habits” but an honoring of where and why those habits formed…

If you believe that honoring their needs and asking for inner consent is a non-negotiable…

If you have used EFT on others for 1 year or more, and don’t want to wait another 5 years like I did…

I am teaching all the skills I use today (on myself, my kids, and clients) during a 4-part workshop series that starts Feb 7th.

this is the last week to register for this 4-part Advanced EFT Workshop.

Fully accredited.

All sessions are recorded.

Students get lifetime access to Manual + Recordings.

You can use the skills for life, whenever your inner parts send the walkie talkie signal from within.