You may have suffered some low moments, maybe friends tell you you should love yourself more, or perhaps a therapist has suggested it. You may have read various self-help books about how to find this elusive self-love, all in vain.
Whenever you look to improve your self-confidence, up pops self-love in yet another book, manual, therapy session, or workshop. "Enough already", you may think, "I have tried this self-love thing, and it's not working. Why can't I just be calm or happy without this loving myself stuff?"... And that is a really good point.
Struggling to force self-love is a futile exercise. Instead, you can try starting with letting go of energy disruptions in your mind-body that give you lower than usual self-esteem. EFT, short for Emotional Freedom Techniques, can help you do just that. It works on the principle that the cause of all negative emotions (or lack of positive emotions) is a disruption in the body's subtle energy system.
Thoughts and feelings about ourselves may change depending on how others treat us. For example, winning a prize or losing a game, passing or failing a test, the grade we get on that test, praise or criticism from a boss, how well, respectfully, or helpfully your friends or loved ones treat us. These thoughts and feelings however, are all conditional and depend on outside factors. And you may be sick to the stomach of hearing that it is not the outside influences that matter but how we feel about ourselves inside that does. But hearing it or reading about it is one thing; actively doing a method that has been scientifically proven to help people feel better is another. This is where EFT, otherwise known as Tapping or EFT Tapping, comes in.
After learning how to use EFT on yourself or choosing a practitioner who can guide and facilitate the process for you, you can release the energy disruption related to several incidents in your life. These incidents contribute to the not-calm or not-happy feelings. Once enough of them have been released, the effect can generalize over all the other incidents in your life that had kept you in that low self-esteem or not-quite-calm or not-so-happy state.
In its simplest form, as you briefly connect to the event, you say as you do the special EFT or Tapping self-acupressure on all the EFT points:
"Even though I have these feelings about this incident, I just want to feel better."
You repeat the above until that particular incident no longer has a hold on you. When ready, you move on to another. And so on. Day by day, week by week, you may be pleasantly surprised. You may have reached a point of calm or happy-ish at the very least. And that is a great start. Self love can come later. There is no need to force it. Just go with the flow and see how you feel.
© Suzanne Zacharia 2014. Of course, you are advised to consult with your medical practitioner before embarking on any course of alternative, complementary, or beauty sessions. Want to use this article? You can, as long as you credit me with it and invite your readers to get my FREE "EFT How-to for You" and regular free EFT Tapping script samples in my newsletter at http://www.eft-scripts.com/confidence-eft and http://www.eft-scripts.com/eft-books - New to EFT? No worries, just get your own copy of "EFT How-to for You" and start EFTing with ease very soon!