Is the way that you are thinking keeping you stuck?

How we think about ourselves and our world has a huge impact on the quality of our experience, how we perceive our world and what we can do to change it.

One way of getting ourselves stuck in our thinking is to turn our experience from the fluid process of life into fixed, unchangeable blocks.

We think about the ongoing problems of our lives: difficult relationships, low self-esteem, confidence, etc as if they were tangible things.

But, unlike real objects, you can't put your relationships, self-esteem, confidence in a wheelbarrow and carry it around.

Thinking about these processes as things, seems to freeze them in place, making them harder to change. It's as if we freeze the river of our lives into unmoving and unmoveable blocks of ice.

In this EFT Cafe, Andy Hunt will show you how to recognise this stuckness and how to use tapping to melt this frozen thinking, allowing your mind to get back into the flow of life and give you more ways to change your experience for the better.

The EFT Café is on Wednesday 8th May, from 7pm-9pm at St Oswald's Hospice Teaching Centre, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE3 1EE and costs just £10.

Most of us have a list of things that we don't want.

We might not want to be unfit, overweight, disorganised, lazy, and so on. Our list of "don't wants" could be quite long.

However much we don't want these things somehow they can seem difficult to change.

In this month's EFT Café Andy Hunt will take you through a tapping process for clearing the way for you to get from what you don't want to what you do want, easing resistance to your goals and the process of getting from what you don't want to what you do want.

This EFT Café is on Wednesday 10th April from 7pm to 9pm at St Oswald's Hospice Teaching Centre, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE3 1EE and costs just £10

In this month's EFT Café Andy Hunt will demonstrate a technique for reducing self-judgemental attitudes, reduce should-ing on yourself and increase self-acceptance and compassion.

A few years ago EFT Master Gwyneth Moss invented the  tapping routine "About, To, As If" to help ease difficult interpersonal relationships. It allows you to tap through layers of difficult responses, judgements, unspoken thoughts towards that other person and develop a more empathic understanding of them.

"Reflexive Tapping" is a variation on that process which uses EFT to work on the judgements we have against ourselves, reduce the should-ing on ourselves that we do, ease our internal communications, leading to greater flexibility and more self-acceptance.

Andy Hunt will be demonstrating Reflexive Tapping at this months EFT Cafe on Wednesday March 13th. The EFT Cafe takes place at St Oswald's Hospice Teaching Centre, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE3 1EE from 7pm-9pm and costs just £10.

We speak in metaphors.

We talk about "wading through treacle", "being on the edge of something", "banging our heads on a brick wall".

Metaphors are very vivid ways of talking and writing about our experience. In fact metaphors are a very vivid way of having and understanding our experience. They encapsulate a situation in a way that would take a lot of words.

Like pictures, metaphors are worth a thousand words.

In standard EFT we usually tap on memories, feelings and beliefs unpacking our experience with words to give us something to tap on.

Rather than tap on all those words we use those metaphorical descriptions to make changes in our experience.  By working on a metaphor we are able to change multiple layers of thought, feeling and meaning without having to unpack the situation to Nth degree.

In this month's EFT Cafe, Andy Hunt will show you one way of use EFT to work with our metaphorical experience to create change in our world.

The EFT Café is on Wednesday February 13th from 7pm-9pm at St Oswald's Hospice Teaching Centre.

The beginning of January is typically the season of setting resolutions and trying to do something different.

The end of January is typically the season of giving up and going back to business as usual.

There's something about doing some tasks that makes them more difficult to do than others.

Most people would rather eat an ice cream than take exercise, even though they want to exercise and know it would do them more good, they would still rather eat the ice cream.

There is something about the way we think about tasks and goals that make them easier or harder to do.

Surprisingly, the humble adjective can have a profound effect on the way you approach the thing it is attached to.

For example: If I offer you an apple, you might feel interested, leaning forward in anticipation. If I tell you it is a delicious apple your mouth might start to water before I've even handed to you. However if I tell you it is a rotten apple you will probably sit back wrinkling your nose in disgust. The adjective, delicious or rotten, tells you how to respond to the apple.

The adjectives we use to describe things affects the way we feel about them. Sometimes these adjectives are helpful and sometimes they produce unhelpful reactions in us. Some of these adjectives might even be hidden from our conscious mind causing us inexplicable procrastination or avoidance.

If you unconciously think of establishing a new exercise routine as hard or a struggle then the chances are that you will find it hard or a struggle.

In this month's EFT Café Andy Hunt will guide you through a process to identify and defuse those hidden adjectives that make tasks more difficult than they need to be.

Bring along a task or resolution that you are struggling with.

The EFT Café is on Wednesday January 9th from 7pm-9pm at St Oswald's Hospice Teaching Centre.

Christmas can be a stressful time for many people.

You may have to spend time with challenging people when you would rather be on your own, or be on your own when you would rather be with people.

However you spend the holiday period it may bring with it stress or distress.

This month's EFT Cafe is all about being able to handle the festive stresses and strains. Using EFT to resolve any anxieties and apprehensions about the holidays and then work on being the person you want to be over Christmas.

In this month's EFT Cafe, Andy Hunt will present a new process that will help you relieve the stress and help you become your better self for the festive season.

This process is all about how to be different in challenging situations.

Important: Even though this process is being applied to the holiday season, this technique is not just for Christmas it's for life.

The December EFT Cafe is on Wednesday December 12th from 7pm to 9pm at St Oswald's Hospice Teaching Centre, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The cost is just £10.

If you are an AAMET practitioner of EFT this event counts as 2 hours of CPD.

Image courtesy of x-ray delta one

We have a problem.

Life is what it is and does what it does, but we think it should be different.

That gap between the facts of our lives and how we think it should be causes a lot of friction and suffering as the discrepancies rub up against us.

There are two basic approaches in dealing with this gap. We can try to change the universe so it fits with our preferences, or we can learn to let go of our attachments to our fictions and come to terms with the facts of the situation. We can learn to accept the reality of what's going on in our experience.

From a place of clarity and acceptance we can then decide what to do next. Acceptance is not the same as resignation. We are not turning ourselves into doormats willing to mutely endure any injustice, rather we are beginning to acknowledge the situation as it is and are willing to do what we can to change it for the better, not from a place of suffering but from the standpoint of clear seeing.

Letting go of the way it should be, for the way it is, can be a huge challenge.

In this month's EFT Café  Andy Hunt will be demonstrating some techniques that help reduce the suffering that arises from our struggle to make the world a better place by being unhappy about it.

The EFT Café is on Wednesday 14th, Nov from 7pm-9pm and costs just £10.

Image courtesy of h.koppdelaney

It can be baffling, we think that we are just one person with a clear idea of who we are and what we want and then some part of us decides to go against the plan.Perhaps you have heard people say things like this  "I want to ... but a part of me ...":

• I want to stop smoking but a part of me keeps lighting up.
• I am determined to loose weight but a part of me just wants to eat cake.
• I want to move on with my career but part of me holds me back.

You get the picture. It's as though a dissident part of ourselves decides to thwart our plans.

This month's EFT Café is all about working with these parts that we experience as inner saboteurs.

Andy Hunt will show you how to honour and heal those parts of ourselves that seem to be at odds with what we want.

The EFT Cafe is on Wednesday October 10th at St Oswald's Hospice Teaching Centre from 7pm to 9pm and costs just £10.

Image courtesy of David Reece

Resentment is a corrosive emotional response to the many injustices, great and small, in our lives.

When we are wronged, or feel wronged, by someone who is close to us or has power over us we may start to feel resentment and bitterness towards them.

Resentment is a painful emotion in itself and it is poisonous to our relationships. It may go on for years after the incident that originally provoked it. Unfortunately, resentment is a gift that gives and gives.

In the EFT Café on Wednesday 12th September Andy Hunt will take you through a new EFT proceedure to dissolve resentment and increase your peace of mind.

If you are a Level 2 Practitioner of EFT then the EFT Cafe qualifies as 2 hours of CPD

The EFT Cafe meets on Wednesday September 12th, at St Oswald's Hospice Teaching Centre, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne from 7pm to 9pm. It costs just £10.

Image courtesy of javcon117

In this month's EFT Café  Andy Hunt will introduce Picture Tapping a very different way of using EFT to work on personal issues and self development.

In Picture Tapping you draw a picture of the issue you want to work on. This will be a metaphorical representation of the problem or situation that you want to work on.

(Don't worry artistic skill is not required, stick figures and scribbles work really well in this process).

By tapping on what is shown in the image the experience of the issue can be dramatically changed in a short space of time with little or no discomfort

This process is:

• a simple way to express and work with complex situations.
• a relatively painless way of working with issues.
• discrete, you are working with a metaphor for the situation rather than the situation itself.
• fun. Most of the people who try this approach enjoy it (even those with no artistic skill).

The EFT Cafe is on Wednesday 11th July from 7pm-9pm at St Oswald's Hospice Teaching Centre.

The cost is just £10.  All materials will be supplied but if you have a favourite "drawing kit" feel free to bring it along.

Note: Although this EFT Cafe is based on Picture Tapping by Philip Davies www.phoenixeft.co.uk I have not been trained by him in it's use. This is my understanding of his process with some ideas of my own.

Image courtesy of Childrens Book Review