Rewire Your Brain & Neutralize Triggers: The Healing Power of Tapping

Sometimes our most profound pain holds the key to our greatest healing. This transformative conversation with tapping coach Amy Vincze reveals how Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) tapping can help us release trauma, neutralize triggers, and find freedom from limiting beliefs—all by connecting mind and body in a revolutionary way.

Amy's personal journey began with breast cancer, which prompted her to explore the powerful connection between her thoughts, emotions, and physical health. Through this process, she discovered tapping—a technique combining ancient Chinese medicine principles with modern psychology that literally rewires our brain's response to stressors. The results were so profound that she dedicated her life to sharing this tool with others.

What makes tapping uniquely effective is its "triple threat" approach: it works simultaneously on energetic, cognitive, and somatic levels. By tapping on specific acupressure points while verbally processing difficult emotions, we can deactivate our body's stress response in real-time. Scientific research confirms this technique reduces cortisol 43% faster than doing nothing at all, while also lowering heart rate, decreasing blood pressure, and boosting immunity.

Through fascinating examples from her practice and personal life, Amy demonstrates how unresolved emotional trauma creates adaptive strategies that may have once protected us but now limit our growth. She shares remarkable stories of healing chronic physical conditions through tapping—including decades of debilitating back pain that resolved after just two hours of targeted emotional work. As Amy and Mary discuss, our physical bodies are designed to heal when emotional blockages are removed.

Whether you're struggling with anxiety, physical pain, or simply feeling stuck in old patterns, this conversation offers practical guidance for using tapping to transform your relationship with yourself. With over 170 scripts available on her Soar with Tapping app, Amy has made this powerful healing technique accessible to everyone.

Ready to tap into your own healing potential? Listen now and discover how addressing the root emotional causes of your challenges can create profound transformation in every area of your life.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to No Shrinking Violets
• 3:27 Meet Amy Vinca: Tapping Coach & Healer
• 11:21 What is Tapping and How it Works
• 21:31 Trauma, Healing and Our Life Experiences
• 30:47 Finding and Addressing Hidden Emotional Blocks
• 39:50 Step-by-Step Tapping Guide for Anxiety
• 52:15 Soar with Tapping App & Resources

Transcript

Mary: 0:05

Welcome to No Shrinking Violets. I'm your host, Mary Rothwell, licensed therapist and certified integrative mental health practitioner. I've created a space where we celebrate the intuition and power of women who want to break free from limiting narratives. We'll explore all realms of wellness what it means to take up space unapologetically, and how your essential nature is key to living life on your terms. It's time to own your space, trust your nature and flourish. Let's dive in. Hey, violets, welcome to the show.

Mary: 0:43

As a therapist who was trained in the late 80s early 90s, the majority of approaches to counseling that I was taught at the time were based in the old philosophers and psychologists People like Sigmund Freud how was your relationship with your mother? Albert Ellis quit shooting all over yourself. And Carl Rogers just listen and believe in the client's ability to figure things out. While there are wonderful aspects to these foundational frameworks that I still use today, there are also so many impactful newer approaches and, interestingly, many of them are also old, like somatic therapy, focusing on where we hold trauma in our bodies. The ancient healers for sure knew that our minds, souls and bodies are not separately functioning parts, and therapies in the 2020s are also more flexible and able to accommodate approaches that support talk therapy like tapping. I would be surprised if there are many of you who haven't heard of tapping, based on energy psychology, as a way to calm the mind and body. It's similar to the ideas of acupuncture, which itself has been around for over 2,000 years.

Mary: 1:53

Admittedly, I don't know much about tapping, but I do absolutely recognize that our emotional challenges do not solely reside in our heads. We hold our experiences, both good and bad, in our bodies. Everything is connected. So when my guest today reached out to me asking to share her knowledge of tapping to help listeners neutralize outdated narratives that limit us, I was sold.

Mary: 2:18

Amy Vincze has been a dedicated professional in the health and wellness industry for over 20 years as a certified massage therapist, nutritional therapist, colon hydrotherapist, reiki master and tapping coach. She brings a wealth of expertise to her work. Since earning her certification as a tapping coach 16 years ago, amy has witnessed profound transformations both in her own life and in the lives of her clients. She has even used tapping to heal herself from painful chronic medical conditions. As the founder of the Soar with Tapping app, amy is on a mission to make the life-changing benefits of tapping accessible to people everywhere. She firmly believes that tapping is one of the most powerful and transformative healing tools available today, and I cannot wait to learn more. Welcome to no Shrinking Violets, amy.

Amy: 3:12

Thank you for having me, Mary. I'm happy to be here.

Mary: 3:15

Okay. So what I have learned over and over from my guests is that our personal journey often inspires the work that we do. So can you sort of envision the milestone experiences from your own life that lent to your work that we do? So can you sort of envision the milestone experiences from your own life that lent to your work that you do?

Amy: 3:30

Absolutely yeah, we usually you know from our own suffering come into a new career, often later in life, right.

Amy: 3:40

Absolutely and yeah, I'm, no, I'm no exception. I'm no exception to that. Oh my God, already having a brain fart. And I just started own behavior and watch the behavior of other people and was just have always been very curious about why do I act a certain way in this situation when I see other people Like why do I get irrationally upset? But I see some other person over here really laughing it off and not thinking about it one bit. So that's why I started by, you know, doing massage and Mm-hmm me down a more serious path with it, because I really was questioning at that point why me and I don't mean that as like a shake your fist at God kind of way it was really like, no, really, why me?

Amy: 4:55

Well, I'm mostly biological, the same as this other woman over here. I have no family history of breast cancer, so why is it that I got this and not somebody else? And I didn't just want to look at things like my environment or what I was putting in my mouth. I wanted to look at all of it, kind of the spiritual aspect, the emotional aspect, what. And I really kind of focused in on the way that I think about things, because we know that whatever our thoughts are. They create chemical reactions and something physical happens in our body when we, when we think about this. If we, if we're stressed, we have stress hormones that would get released. If we're happy, we have, you know, hormones that would get released. If we're happy, we have, you know, joyful hormones that get released in our body. So that made sense to me, because I had been up until that point like a really fearful person and with a lot of self hatred, and so I just imagined all of those thoughts and feelings about self-hatred condensing and then relocating itself somewhere in my body, and it did.

Amy: 6:14

I firmly believe that that's how I got breast cancer, but that was the thing that started me down the path, and so having that realization is what made me want to start healing that part of me, that part of me that was so intensely critical, that part of me that was so intensely afraid all the time. And I recognized, when I first was introduced to it, I recognized tapping as a really powerful tool. I had like a really short session with somebody that was very excited about it, but it really sparked something in me and I wanted to pursue it immediately. So I immediately found my own coach. Very shortly thereafter I got certified myself. Very shortly thereafter I got certified myself, but I have to admit that I had limited success with it. Sometimes it went really well and other times I felt like it didn't really touch whatever the topic was that I was working on on. So then came another crisis point in my life about seven years ago, when kind of everything was crumbling around me in my life, as things do At times.

Amy: 7:33

I was about to get fired from my job. I felt like I was really failing as a mom. My relationship was suffering, my body was in pain all the time and I started tapping about. I was tapping like crazy. Like crazy for me means about a half an hour a day while I was walking on the treadmill. But my focus changed on what I was tapping on. I was no longer tapping on the symptoms of what I was experiencing.

Amy: 8:01

I went straight for core fears that were established by trauma and kind of weaving the trauma into the things that I was saying.

Amy: 8:11

While I was doing the tapping and my life opened up in a way that I could not have even imagined, like I was getting rid of fears and, all of a sudden, things that used to absolutely terrify me. I was walking through them like it wasn't that big of a deal and I was kind of stunned by my own healing and how fast it actually took place, because I was really only tapping for like two weeks and all of a sudden things really miraculously changed for me because I found the right thing to focus on. I went to the root cause of the problem as opposed to the symptoms, and that was what changed everything for me and like oh my God, I have to quit my job. I have to do this full time. People need to know that they have this available to them at all times. They can do it anywhere, anytime, and it can have that big of an impact in that short of a period of time.

Mary: 9:15

Well, it's really interesting you brought up cancer, because, first of all, we don't want to blame ourselves for when we become ill. However, a couple of things. I had thyroid cancer and to me, I have this idea that sometimes where people become ill is where the energy is stuck, which I really think, and we're going to get into this every month.

Amy: 9:36

We will give you more details about that I can take a super deep dive into that topic too, by the way.

Mary: 9:41

So I feel like that's because your thyroid is right at the base of your throat for people who don't know, and it's, I think, as I say, all the time, and I just said at the beginning of this show, I think we experience things that put us onto a path where we it informs, how we show up in the world, how we want to change the world, and this entire podcast is about taking up your space and having a voice, because I feel like that energy got stuck. I wasn't speaking up for myself, I stayed small, and the other thing that I learned, which is fascinating, I'm in a functional nutrition program right now and I didn't know that we all have cancer cells in our body. It's really what happens along the way what toxins, what thoughts, all these things, what are we exposed to? That gives those cells the ability to outgrow healthy cells, and so we have simplified illness so much. So I'm so glad you started with that, because it isn't to say if you get cancer, you've done something wrong.

Mary: 10:45

I think it's information, and I have a friend who had breast cancer and I feel like sometimes and actually many women I know, unfortunately and I feel like we are so emotionally driven as women. Where is that energy going to get stuck in our hearts? So that has always been something where I sort of had an inkling. And as I grow and hear other women's stories, stories of healing, stories of you know where and how are we carrying illness, it's like this just makes sense to me. So I want to hit the pause button on that philosophical conversation. But I would love if you would explain a little bit what tapping is and I look this up because you have EFT tapping, which is emotional freedom technique tapping. So can you explain a little bit what tapping is, how it works and kind of weave in the emotional and the scientific perspective?

Amy: 11:40

Absolutely Love to.

Amy: 11:43

So tapping is really a triple threat because it incorporates, like you mentioned, the energetic aspect of acupuncture or Chinese medicine, utilizing the 14 energy meridians found in the body.

Amy: 11:59

Obviously, instead of using needles, we use the percussion of tapping on our acupressure points in order to facilitate healing, unblock energy and allow our energy to flow. It also incorporates the cognitive aspect, because you are talking about whatever it is you want to release while you're doing the tapping. So they're both happening simultaneously and on a somatic level, you are bringing your energy back from worrying about the future, You're bringing your energy back from worrying about the past and you cannot help but focus your energy in the present moment Because you're tapping on your body, forcing your energy back into your body, which is so powerful because those three things what it's doing. It is literally rewiring your brain to feel a sense of peace and calm about whatever you're talking about, and you're actively releasing what it is you're talking about by just saying the words, saying the hard words. So we don't just focus on flowery things while we're talking. We focus on saying and releasing all of the really hard emotions about something and releasing all of the really hard emotions about something.

Mary: 13:27

That's how we get them out of our body.

Amy: 13:29

Yeah, so that's really the most powerful thing. What's happening on a scientific level is, you know, when we get stressed, our amygdala is firing, cortisol is releasing in our body and our brain is telling us it's not safe, it's not safe, it's not safe, and so we're feeling all these symptoms. And but what tapping is doing? It is telling our amygdala to deescalate in that stress response, deescalate, deescalate, and it is reducing cortisol 43% faster than if you did nothing else, which is a remarkable number. It's lowering your heart rate, it is lowering blood pressure, it is increasing your immunity and increasing your happiness levels. So when all of this stuff is happening at the same time, you're starting to feel peaceful and calm about something that has traditionally caused you stress and your body is de-escalating that stress response. It really is such a powerful combination to allow yourself to feel neutral about something that normally you get really triggered by in a very short period of time, something that normally you get really triggered by in a very short period of time.

Amy: 14:47

So normally we would start off a session by rating our intensity level. So if you have, if you really feel really hurt over something somebody did to you, we rate that zero to 10. Where are you? Zero to 10?, say, maybe I'm at a nine. I feel really betrayed, I feel really hurt by this. So we go through the tapping, we talk about all of that betrayal and what it does to us physically and what it does to us emotionally and how we can't believe that that person would betray us like that. Give them their day in court and process them, as opposed to stuffing them away or denying them or you know whatever, and kind of lost track of where my thought process was going. But okay, so then we do that tapping, honoring and acknowledging all those things. Stop that tapping round, honoring and acknowledging all those things, stop that tapping round. We take another rating and maybe it went down to a seven. So we do the tapping again and we keep doing that. We get down to about a three or four.

Amy: 15:55

That's kind of a magic number when you can start really infusing in some positive elements, things that you learned from this experience, things that you learned about yourself, about this person, about how you need to operate in the future, like life lesson type of stuff, and really kind of making it okay that it happened. And then all of a sudden you're down at a neutral zero and you're neutralized. Your feelings about that, your hurt about that has been neutralized. You know you might need to focus on sadness If there was some other aspects of that. You might need to focus on anger specifically about some aspects of that. But once you incorporate and neutralize all of those things, you can think about that event and just be like no big deal. I learned something from it. It was really important for me to go through that process.

Mary: 16:49

Yeah, so two things you brought up. When you're talking about, we're not living in the past or the future, and that's really where anxiety lives. Right, we're worried about the past or the future and we're spinning narratives for ourselves about events. And so by being in your body, even when we do grounding, it's sort of like you're adding a layer, because now you're interacting with your physical self while you're being in the moment. So it's sort of like you have doubled the effectiveness of grounding.

Mary: 17:23

And yeah, that other part as you tell yourself stories, we often, I think, make events about us So-and-so acted this way. They must not like me or they must not fill in the blank, and maybe 100%, but 99% of behavior doesn't belong to you, you know, it belongs to the person that did the behavior. So we tell ourselves these stories and feel bad about someone else's behavior, but really that's what's going on with them. So I think that it's sort of like you know you're a little bit and I don't know, you might've used this word you're neutralizing the emotion that we are creating by the stories we're telling ourselves, while at the same time you know that amygdala I love you that you brought that up I must say amygdala every other episode, because she's a drama queen, you know, and she's scanning the environment for where's the danger.

Mary: 18:23

Where's the danger? And even if it's a shadow of something really traumatic that happened, she is sounding the alarm and really the only way to rewire our brain. I mean as much as I believe in cognitive therapy, I really think we need a body component to rewiring the things that are supposed to keep us safe. But in this society now, they just overreact. They're just overreacting. So, yeah, okay.

Amy: 18:55

So with the cognitive approach alone, people gain kind of an intellectual understanding, which is helpful, but, like you said, it doesn't actually release it from the body. So we still we might know what we're doing, but we still have that same behavior. And when we can actually release those fears and those things that trigger us from our body, we don't react the same way anymore. It just doesn't land the same way that it used to, without those fears, without those triggering events.

Mary: 19:30

Because I can guarantee you that if I had certain clients listening right now, they would hear what you just said and their immediate thought would be there is no way I can talk about my experience. It was too traumatic. I can't get past the emotion. So you're nodding, people can't see her, she's nodding. So I am sure that you have had this, maybe yourself, because you've mentioned trauma, but with other people. So if that would be something somebody says to you, or they come to me and I suggest, hey, maybe you want to add on to our work here with tapping, and they say to me Mary, you know what my trauma is. I couldn't possibly be able to do that. How would you respond to that?

Amy: 20:14

Here's what I do with my clients, especially if it's something that's so triggering. We start by visualizing that trauma in a vault across the city Client is the only one that has a combination of that and we tap down the just knowing that it's there, just the awareness that it's there. They don't even have to engage with it. We tap that down and then we bring it a little bit closer. Door still closed. We tap it down and then maybe we open the door a little bit and then tap that down and then you know, just absolute baby steps.

Amy: 20:58

It has to feel safe and you have to feel like the client has to feel, just so held in those moments Because the intensity, like you know, it's so great and I don't want to re-traumatize anybody. So we go as slow as is needed and with those traumatizing events we have to take them frame by frame with the tapping. We don't generally take it as a whole, unless it's in the vault, like that. We take it frame by frame because there are so many moments where there's regret about a decision made, or shame about something that was or wasn't done, or just sadness or hurt. You know there's so many moments of intense emotion along the timeline of that event, and so each one has to be addressed, and addressed completely, before moving on. There's no getting down to a two on the scale and then moving forward. No, we neutralize it all the way down to zero, make sure you're feeling absolutely nothing about that particular thing, and then we move forward from there.

Mary: 22:14

Okay, yeah. So in the therapy world that's systematic desensitization, which is a tool we would use for phobias. So in a sense, you know, you've sort of repainted that for me in my mind a little bit, that when you have a trauma that has encoded so strongly in your amygdala that it now is something I can't think about it, I can't think about it or avoiding that place, that person, that which is sometimes healthy. But you know, I think too we need to learn to be able to function in the world. We need to, you know, heal these things in a way that we're not lopping off an entire part of life, just so we can feel safe. So I love that empowerment to your clients with you know, you're driving the bus, you know, and we're going to leave that lock on until you know. So that mutual trust in each other is really sounds really powerful.

Amy: 23:06

Yeah, yeah, it can be definitely.

Mary: 23:08

Yeah, wow. So another thing that I think is challenging, as someone who tries to sort of walk people through situations, is people that aren't sure what's holding them back. So I know you can identify right and address kind of hidden emotional blocks that people don't even know are holding them back. Can you talk a little about that?

Amy: 23:33

Yeah, I can, because that was my own experience and I think so many people fall into the trap of the idea that they don't have any trauma, and you know, trauma can look like being ignored. When you're a kid, trauma can look like having an angry parent or a sibling, and it doesn't have to be a big event or be really systematic abuse. It can be just nobody's fault, and it still happened, and it shaped the way we think and feel about ourselves, and so that's. The biggest trap, though, is that people don't want to call it trauma. They don't think I don't have a right to call it trauma, but there still is.

Amy: 24:25

It's still there, it's still it's really complex, and being able to look at that and know that that is what's triggering you on a daily basis, making that connection for yourself and really being open to the idea that, oh, this isn't a character defect, this is really just me responding to what was happening around me. As a kid, this is what I learned, this was the survival tactic that I engaged with, and it's just not serving me anymore. So being able to see it for what it is is really the key, and helping people understand and be able to own it understand and be able to own it and have it not just be a character defect but really say, oh my gosh, ok.

Amy: 25:20

And there's honestly a lot of. There was for me a lot of kind of anger and resentment that went along with the realization that, oh, it's not me, it was what happened, and so I got angry and resentful about that because it really shaped the way that I see the world and it felt like such a bummer to realize that I could have had this life without those things. So I had to work through that first work, through all of that anger and the unfairness that I've suffered because somebody else didn't do their work. But once I got to that point then it was just like okay, now the work begins. I, you know, I don't have. If I can't want to, I can choose to stay in this spot, knowing that it was never really me, or I can just get to work.

Mary: 26:09

Yeah, you brought up two really important things. You brought up two really important things and I think the first is exactly what you said it perfectly in that, you know, I think we get to a certain age and we realize what we're doing isn't working and so we can default to obviously there's something wrong with me. But I'm going to say, almost every time I have a client who's working through something, it came from survival, it came from and we'll put the frame of positive psychology because I look at people through their strengths. So if you made it this far, you were doing something to survive, and I also talk about essential nature all the time.

Mary: 26:49

So two different people in the same family are going to use a different strategy to survive. One might get angry and fight back and act out. The other one might get small and try to smooth everything over. There's so many ways that we try to find control in our environment when we're a kid. So you know, I mentioned Sigmund Freud when I was starting and he has some brilliant ideas, he has some wacky ideas, but some of those things about how we're informed by our childhood environment. We are wired a certain way, all of us a little bit differently, and then we're put into an environment to grow in life. They just stop working and I think our strengths become our detriments, and so we just need to figure out and I say just not to diminish it, but we need to figure out what are we going to do differently? Because we're not in that, you know, fill in the blank, dangerous, toxic, whatever that environment was, and you said it.

Mary: 27:52

This is the other thing that you brought up with trauma. I think you said that beautifully too, and I'm Gen X, so in Gen X it was, everything was diminished. So everybody gets bullied or you know it's not a big deal to get, you know, paddled every other day by your parents, and you know it depends how you feel about those things. But I think you know a lot of the things that we went through were very dismissed. It's like it's no big deal, just, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and go on, and sometimes I think we've overcorrected and so I try to look at it like there is certainly trauma, there's diagnosable post-traumatic stress, and we tend to think of those things as sexual assault, wartime, those kinds of things.

Mary: 28:42

But, I think of it like traumatic. There are traumatic experiences that absolutely form how we interact with the world and they're so, I think, too informed by how old were we when it happened? What else was happening? So we have to look at the context. So sometimes there might be something that you would react to much less strongly if maybe your cat hadn't just died and your best friend wasn't mad at you. You know, I think we need to put our experiences in context and, I think, have a respect for if we're reacting as if we've been traumatized by an event. We've been traumatized by an event and then we have to just figure out okay, how do I now work through it and find a way to not, as I said before, have to lop off a whole section of our being or our lives just to be able to get through the day? So those are two really important things that I think you know how we think about what happened. We're not broken. We simply developed a way to survive that doesn't work anymore, right?

Amy: 29:59

Yeah yeah, we have adapted as much as we can. And there's just comes a point when we recognize the toxicity of the behavior over time. Yeah Right.

Mary: 30:15

Yeah, and you also mentioned which happens to a lot of us that I think life's sort of like it'll tap you and no pun intended, tap you on the shoulder and if you don't pay attention it's going to start kicking you, you know, and it turns up the volume till you're like all right, I got to do something bigger here because what I've tried isn't working. Yeah.

Amy: 30:36

Yeah, for sure yeah.

Mary: 30:38

Okay. So do you have people come to you that say I'm feeling X, y and Z and I don't know why, okay, and then how do you sort of work with them to tease that out? So if I have somebody listening who's like I just feel crappy, like that, there's no light in life, I'm not sure like what's wrong. How might you process that with them?

Amy: 31:02

I like to go straight for the big, big ones. Okay, well, I want to know, like, what was the dynamic in your family, obviously, growing up? That's always such a key piece of information. But then I want to understand, like, what are your top 10 fears? And I don't just mean like fear of spiders. I mean, is there fear of not belonging, and do you have experiences that really support that? And is there a fear of not being good enough? And what are your experiences that support that? Or fear being like something wrong with you? Was there massive financial fear? Were you worried about having a roof over your head? Or is there fear of your body, because you had some massive illness when you were a kid and you don't know if your body's going to pull the rug out from underneath you at any moment.

Amy: 31:46

It makes it hard to walk through the world feeling confident when any one of those things are in play. And if they are in play, you're getting triggered all the time and it will dictate your behavior in your world. So we need to go to those root things and neutralize them as fast as possible. So that's where I love to go. That is where I think tapping can have the most profound impact on people's fears. And I want to point out, too, though, that we heal in layers, and so when we work through something like the fear of not being worthy or deserving of love, your world will expand a little bit and you'll fill up that space, and you'll expand with it and want more for yourself, and then your life will kind of require more of you as your life expands, and then you'll hit up against that fear again, and so it'll have to be worked through again, that same fear of not being worthy or deserving of love, and so we just have to deal with it in layers, and the work really is never done. But if you want to neutralize something that is really bothering you in the moment, I will always go straight to that thing.

Amy: 33:26

That's not always the approach that people love, because it's hard work, it's hard emotional work. It is not for the faint of heart. There is tremendous amount of courage that has to be just shown and has to rise up in you that you know I've had enough. I don't want to live my life this way anymore, yeah. So there has to be a lot of courage that comes into play, and I will always prop people up as much as I can and show them that it's safe to do this work.

Amy: 33:59

But I think, mary, part of the problem is people just haven't been taught how to engage with their emotions, how to actually feel. We think about these things a lot and that is always encouraged to have that intellectual understanding but we often don't know how to feel it. And when we start to engage with those uncomfortable emotions, most people will run in the opposite direction as fast as they possibly can. So my job is to really kind of help people feel comfortable with feeling those emotions, actually engaging with those emotions while they're tapping. So they're feeling all these uncomfortable things and we're tapping so that they're feeling more as peaceful as they possibly can while engaging with emotions. But that's why it neutralizes so fast. Yeah, because we're feeling them and tapping at the same time.

Mary: 35:01

Yeah, because I know I did a episode on, like, what is therapy really like and what and kind of the truths of therapy, and one of them is people will get to a certain point and they'll feel worse because you know, I call it the junk drawer. Like you have a drawer in your house where you throw everything you don't know what to do with. And if you ever open it with the intent of, oh, I'm going to organize this, you're like, oh my God, and you shut it again. So we do that with our emotions, love that analogy. And yeah, and I think for many people an emotional pain is worse than a broken leg or two broken legs. You know it's by far, yeah, yeah, because I feel like we can't get away from it. And so you know, as you're just talking this through in this process, I can almost feel that that you are. You know that holding that emotion is so painful.

Mary: 35:50

But once we have some of that control of like, okay, I'm doing these things, I'm tapping, I'm taking a little bit of physical control over that, that feels really powerful and I love too that you talked about. You know, you'll get to a point, you'll hit the ceiling and then, okay, we need to do some more tweaks, because nothing is linear. No, healing is linear, and so I think that's an important thing to realize. It's not okay. I'm going to work through this with Amy and five weeks later I'm never going to feel these things again. It's like coaching, therapy, physical therapy. You have a part of your body, so yeah, you know you have a part of your body. So, yeah, really important things to put asterisks on, and so I want to talk a little, too, about the physical issues that we have. So we kind of started with that.

Amy: 36:43

Yes.

Mary: 36:43

And I remember I used to suffer with migraines and somebody said go to an acupuncturist. So I'm like okay, Like I had no idea, like how is that connected? And I also didn't know until about a year ago that migraines are an autoimmune condition. Didn't know that. So all that is connected to nutrition and gut health and emotions and all of those things. So do you often have people come to you thinking there's a purely physical issue they have, and then how do you sort of get them to recognize there's a little bit more underneath that?

Amy: 37:18

Honestly, I don't get a lot of people. I don't think that they equate the physical with the emotional component, but there is always an emotional component to any kind of disease or physical pain. I'm not saying don't go to the doctor any kind of disease or physical pain. I'm not saying don't go to the doctor. I think taking a comprehensive approach to healing your physical body is always going to be the fastest and smartest way to approach something. So, but I do think that there is like an emotional element, even if it's from an injury and you're feeling physical pain. That physical pain is stressful and you project it out into the future and you think, oh, my God, how long is this pain going to last? When am I going to heal? And you think about how bad it was in the past, or you know. So we really need to kind of neutralize that emotional element in order to allow our physical body to actually heal the injury.

Mary: 38:21

Yeah.

Amy: 38:22

So I don't know, I don't get a lot of clients with that, but I I have clients that have come to me for something else and then say, oh, I've got this problem with a cough or incontinence or you know something along those lines. And there is an emotional element to literally everything that's happening with our body and when that gets addressed it's amazing how fast it clears up. Just tell you some of my own experiences. I had lower back pain from the time I was in college, so like 27, all the way to 45. And like it would go out and I would be in so much pain that I would have to crawl on the floor just to go to the bathroom. It was horrific and once I figured out what the emotional element of that pain was, I tapped for probably two hours and I haven't had that back pain since.

Mary: 39:24

Wow.

Amy: 39:26

Same thing with UTIs. I've had them since I was two years old, probably had thousands in my life. I was two years old, probably had thousands in my life, and when I understood what the root cause of it is, I now know that I can tap through that and not have to take a medication for it.

Mary: 39:45

That is amazing.

Amy: 39:46

It's truly amazing and, you know, if there is a even an injury that isn't healing, there's an emotional aspect to that, because our physical bodies are designed to heal. They are very good at healing when we can get our emotions out of the way.

Mary: 40:03

Yeah, yeah, Because one of the big, big things that impacts our immune system is emotion, which we don't understand. But our immune system is so fascinating and and and just amazing. But we also can interfere in unintentionally, by the way we process or don't process our emotions.

Amy: 40:24

Yes, absolutely.

Mary: 40:26

So I'm going to imagine that there are some people listening that still feel like, okay, what is this tapping thing? So if, if we let's say there's something coming up and we feel anxiety, this isn't debilitating anxiety, but let's say we know we're going to have to give a toast at a wedding and because anxiety is so common, are there certain places or ways you would tap to help yourself kind of handle that anxiety? Is that something you can describe in an audio way or without seeing you?

Amy: 40:57

Yes, I can, I can describe it. Oh, I love that. Okay, first of all, I'll just go through all of the tapping points so that your listeners can understand where we're tapping. So the first part is called the karate chop point, which is just down from our pinky finger on our hands. Like you would, you know, do a karate chop on a piece of wood, you just tap those two spots together on your hand and right here, while you're tapping, you're going to say three, even though statements, even though I'm feeling so anxious about the speech I have to give, I love and accept myself anyway, even though I'm imagining that people might judge and criticize what I'm saying during that speech and it's making me feel, it's making me breathe shallow in my body, it's making my hands sweat just thinking about it. I love and honor all parts of who I am completely, even though I'm having all this fear about that speech. I love and honor myself anyway and I honor my courage in tackling this issue. And then we go to all of the other points on our body and moving around the points as we're saying what's called repeater phrases. So the first point is right at the beginning of our eyebrows and I tap on that spot, with on all the spots, with like two fingers, just to make sure that I'm tapping in the right place. This is one area I tell people you kind of have to be a perfectionist, because if you're tapping somewhere in the middle of your forehead, not nearly as effective, okay. So right at the beginning of your eyebrows.

Amy: 42:40

The next spot is at your temple, on the side of your eye, and then under your eye, right on top of your cheekbones, and then under your nose, under your mouth, under your nose, and I'm tapping on each spot maybe six or seven times or as we're doing the repeater phrases. I'll just finish a phrase and then I'll move to the next spot. The next one is at our collarbone, and if you find the beginning of your collarbone, there's a little valley in between your collarbone and your ribs on either side of your sternum. So you tap on those two valleys on either side and then under your arm for women it's like right where your bra strap would be about four inches down from your armpit and then on your ribs, just below, like the underwire of your bra, and then on your wrists. I tap my wrists together and then the last one is up on top of your head.

Amy: 43:34

So, as you're saying these repeater phrases, you just keep moving around the spots in order. Or if you find a spot that just feels better like you just want to tap there longer than others, just stay there for a while. There's no wrong way to do this. In fact, there are many practitioners that will tap on other spots. There's nothing wrong with any of it. It all works and none of it is going to be harmful. Even if you feel like you're doing a hack job at it, you're not going to hurt yourself.

Mary: 44:04

That's one of the benefits right?

Amy: 44:05

Yeah, good to know. So then you would just go around and say, oh, there's going to be so many people staring at me. I'm going to be so nervous during that speech. What if I do something wrong? What if I stumble over my words? It's bringing up all of this anxiety in me and I just want to do such a good job. It feels like there's so much at risk by me standing up there.

Amy: 44:31

It feels really important that I make a good impression. You know, you just keep honoring and acknowledging all of the things that are going on in your mind about that event. You just keep tapping through them over and over again. Take your number down from whatever it is if it starts at a 10, you go down and down and down and you just like, towards the end maybe you start saying positive things, like if I speak from my heart, everything will be fine and everybody in that audience understands how hard it is to get up in front of a crowd and speak. They're all going to be supporting me.

Amy: 45:09

Nobody is going to laugh unless I work that into my talk. You know those types of things. It's going to feel really good to speak from my heart and connect with these people on a different level. So you just you start infusing some really positive things about it. And, yeah, take it down to a zero, stay dedicated to the process and don't leave it. You know, when you get to a five, that it will still help, but you'll still have anxiety about it. Yeah, so you need to keep working until it gets to a zero.

Mary: 45:42

And it's best to kind of get to that zero in one session Like sort of.

Amy: 45:47

No, it doesn't have to be.

Mary: 45:48

Okay, so you can kind of get to a certain point, take a break, stagger it out, yeah, okay.

Amy: 45:53

And if there's a lot of intense emotion around, whatever it is you are tapping on, sometimes your body's way of protecting you from that intense emotion will be to numb out and it will be really hard to feel anything at that point. And at that point you can either tap through what you're feeling and acknowledging that my body is just trying to protect me. These are really intense emotions and you can kind of try to work through that or you can say, okay, I've done enough for this moment, I'm going to move on and I will return back to it when I feel like it's safe.

Mary: 46:32

Okay, that's good to know, and so you couldn't see her. But the whole time you were going through that, you were continuing the tapping in that order that you talked about. So I want to talk about your app and your website, but before we do that, so if somebody's really skeptical, because you know, as you're watching someone do this, it's a very unusual pattern of behavior, right?

Mary: 46:55

It's funny, very unusual pattern of behavior, right, so I think as if you're somebody who's like, wait a minute, if you're very grounded in, like, I just need to, you know, have therapy from the neck up and think differently. This is a very all of these somatic things, even acupuncture very different way of thinking about healing our body. So if there's someone who's quite skeptical about this or feeling very unsure, what kind of advice would you give to them?

Amy: 47:21

Well, first of all, I would say that there are over 300 peer review studies that have showed the efficacy of this tool. I mean so on a physical level, on an emotional level, everything that it is showing is positive. So I know it looks funny. I know it looks funny and it feels weird. And I was even like when I first started tapping with a coach, I was really self-conscious that somebody was watching me tap on my body Like it was just a strange thing. Somebody was watching me tap on my body Like it was just a strange thing.

Amy: 47:56

But I'll tell you that the act of saying those words out loud instead of just having them as swirling thoughts in your head that can't land, is so cathartic you will recognize the benefit of it almost immediately. I've had clients many times say can I say that? I'm like, yeah, nobody's here, nobody's going to get hurt by that. If it's truly what you were feeling, you can say it, and I want you to say it. So that act alone is very, very cathartic.

Amy: 48:34

Giving yourself permission to actually say your deepest feelings is really powerful. And then I would also say, like I said before, there's no harm in trying it and if it makes you feel better, you don't have to continue with it. You know, if it just feels too funny to you, if it feels too silly, you don't have to continue with it. You know, if it just feels too funny to you, if it feels too silly, you don't have to continue. But do yourself a favor and at least try. Yeah, because you could find something that would be a really powerful tool for you. It's not for everybody, but for those people that are willing to try it, it can be the most powerful thing for them.

Mary: 49:22

Well, and like so many things, as I started by saying, this is based in things that are thousands of years old, that people started in the healing arts with these ideas, and those things actually worked.

Mary: 49:30

It was only as Western society thought well, I want something faster, and then we won't even talk about, you know, the financial part of modern medicine, but we want to be able to say I'm going to take this one thing and then in 30 minutes I'm going to feel better, and that's not how the body works.

Mary: 49:48

I mean, yeah, there's a place for that, but yeah, this, this ability to transform, literally transform neural connections, and how that amygdala is triggered or not triggered, and how we hold things that's all ancient medicine, and so I think having an open mind is important. But I wanted to address that skepticism because, as I've scrolled through social media, sometimes you'll see videos of people tapping, and so I knew a little bit about it, but not a lot. But I could see people that are very grounded in this Western idea of how you get better, seeing that and being like you know what's up with that. So I really want to address that issue and have people let's just keep an open mind and, like you're saying what is it going to hurt to try it? Because it can be, as you said, and you've had in your own life profound changes happen Huge changes?

Amy: 50:49

Yes, yeah, and if people get intimidated by the idea of verbalizing something that they, it's probably not something that they've ever really engaged with on an active way. So you don't have to talk about your feelings, maybe you just talk about the symptoms you're experiencing. My heart is racing while you're tapping. I feel really anxious and I don't know why. 99% of the time, people don't know why they've been triggered anyway. So let's just acknowledge I don't know why I feel anxious, for whatever reason, or for a million reasons, and you just keep tapping through the points. With just doing that, you're still going to lower your cortisol levels and you're still going to reduce your feelings of anxiety really significantly if you give it that opportunity.

Mary: 51:41

Yeah, Okay, so you have this sort of wrapped up into a very nice app right that people can use. I did a little clicking through your website and you have some videos, so it explained things. So what? You just to tap where to tap?

Amy: 52:20

On the app.

Amy: 52:21

There are over 170 scripts that people can just find.

Amy: 52:28

That's often for people that don't know what to say If they're just beginning their tapping journey or if they're just beginning to truly understand what their emotions are around things. It's hard to come up with the words, and so there are many, many tapping scripts there for you to choose from, but there's also videos to help people understand the most effective and fastest way to work through some of the bigger topics like depression or anxiety or procrastination, addiction, those types of things, so that you know somebody that's experiencing depression. They're not faced with choosing from 170 different tapping scripts. They know where to go to start feeling better the fastest. So, yeah, there's all kinds of instruction on there about how to do it, when to do it is anytime I like to tap on the treadmill, like I said, so I'm killing two birds with one stone, but oftentimes, if you look at me driving in my car, I'll be tapping with one hand. Last night, I tapping in bed, so I'm tapping all the time and I can do it anytime, anywhere, and that's the most important thing about that tool.

Mary: 53:46

Yeah, well, I love that it's an app, because we're so now wanting to carry everything with us, so I love that. That's very cool. So do you actually also still work one-on-one with people? So if somebody wanted to work with you directly, is that an option?

Amy: 54:00

It is an option. I have very few clients because my focus is the app at this moment. But if somebody does want to work with me, especially through specific trauma, because I don't recommend that people use the app for trauma there is no tapping script on the app for specific trauma, but I do recommend that they work with a seasoned and professional tapping coach and that somebody that knows what they're doing because trauma is it's really hard. Somebody somebody really good at what they're doing needs to hold their hand through that. So for trauma specifically, see a tapping coach approach me if you want to. I'm happy to work through those types of things with people and for the rest of it I'd say you can go to the app and you'll find your way there too.

Mary: 54:55

Well, I'm definitely going to connect a link in the show notes to your website so people can explore all of those options.

Amy: 55:02

Oh, wonderful yeah.

Mary: 55:03

And Amy, this has been so fun to talk and to talk to you and learn from you today. This is really awesome.

Amy: 55:09

Yeah, I've enjoyed our conversation a lot. Thank you so much for having me. You're welcome. I do want to give your listeners a little gift too. If they want to go to my website, soarwithtappingcom, they go to forward slash podcast dash special. They'll find a code there that they can input in the app for 50% off of their first annual subscription.

Mary: 55:30

Oh, I love that. Can you repeat that, even though we don't want you writing things if you're driving and it'll be in the show notes? Can you say that one more time please?

Amy: 55:39

Yes, it's soarwithtappingcom forward slash podcast. Dash special to find your code.

Mary: 55:49

All right, thank you, and I want to thank you all for listening. If you have thoughts on today's show, please comment or use the link in the show notes to text me directly. And if you'd like to join my email community and get my weekly musings on how nature and my garden give me lessons about life, click the link in the show notes to sign up. And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.