Introducing "Educational Tapping" for confidence and negative self-talk

The form of “tapping” that I am presenting here is my interpretation of a process initially developed by Gary Craig, that he called EFT, or the “emotional freedom technique". This remarkably effective technique for addressing emotional issues and negative self-talk tends to be viewed as a form of therapy, or even "alternative medicine". This casual capture under a kind of "medical model" does a great disservice its to power and usefulness, particularly as an educational technique.

It is unquestionable that the value of the procedure lies is in its power to give us control over experience, and to enable the better management of experience - and experience is what education is all about. John Dewey rightly focussed on the centrality of experience in education. Education involves cultivating experience in the service of growth for the sake of further growth. For education, properly understood, we have two tasks. The first and most obvious is to seek and cultivate experience in such a way that growth for the sake of larger and more encompassing growth can occur.

The second task, which is a corollary of the first, is that we must clean up or undo the harm that can be done through experience and what we unwisely or unfortunately might have made of it, because our purpose of growth can be thwarted or undone by mistakes that we make in our handling of experience, or from our lack of preparedness for handling it well. In our interest in enlarging our lives and their fulfillment through growing our experience and capitalising on it, we must not romanticise it. Experience can do us harm. We can make out harmful things from it. And it can persist and undermine our educational efforts. We often talk as if more experience is to be preferred over less, but this simply isn't true. It isn't a matter of the quantity of experience; it is a matter of the quality.

EFT was very much Craig's thing, and he has been determined that anything done under the name “EFT” must follow his own strict methodology and training. In time, many of his followers wanted more control over their own application and its development, and a larger community has evolved, operating under the general description of “Meridian Tapping”. There is much innovation and specialisation in the community that has resulted.

My own discussions of this process refer to “educational tapping”, and I also use the phrase “tapping into reason” because I have two agendas. Firstly, I want to break with that idea that the process is necessarily some sort of therapy, and that it should be acceptable, let alone desirable to assimilate it under a therapeutic or medical model. It is clearly a tool that almost any of us might use for ourselves, and its scope of use extends far beyond issues that can, or should, be reduced to the "medical" or "therapeutic".

Secondly I want to promote a much more genuine and thoughtful idea of education than is commonplace today. I want to restore the idea that education has to do with taking charge of ourselves - that it should not be understood as something we "do" to other people, but that, at base, it has to do with what we might want to do for ourselves; what we should want to do, simply because we respect ourselves, and want to live worthwhile lives that are our own.

Since education has so much to do with who or what we can become, as human beings, the ideals that animate it should be of great human significance, but in our time they have been reduced to things that are quite unworthy. Education, for most people, simply equates to schooling and school teaching, and the purpose of schools is now little more than job training and certification, under a general umbrella of conformity and control. We say that it should be about life, and about critical thinking, but it isn't. It is, indeed, somewhat sinister. It is what we would do to prepare slaves – high-tech slaves of our modern age, but slaves, nonetheless.

Education, at its core, needs to be about good living – about the learner taking charge of their own lives and their own good. We expect that of everyone, but we do nothing at all to provide for it educationally. It should be what education is about, and though getting a good job might be a part of that for most of us, it should be a subordinate part, defined by the priority of living well. If our lives, understood in a larger sense, aren't fulfilling and satisfying, then the career, at its best, won't fill the gap.

To take charge of one's own life – to develop a good one that is our own – requires us to take charge of our own education – making our own decisions about our own learning, and developing our capacities for critical thought, particularly about life. We must learn to reason well. As a part of doing this we must manage or eliminate the effects of bad learning – things that destroy or impair our ability to acquire knowledge for ourselves, to think well and to make good decisions.

Education, when viewed in this way, is, in the end, an inside job, and we have to take charge of it for ourselves. This means that we need to understand education for ourselves, and it also mean that we need to have sound tools for the management of our own minds. Educational tapping has a major role to play here. It is easy to learn the basics, and to go on to acquire considerable personal skill. It is harmless in itself, given a willingness to take responsibility in the process. It is remarkably effective as a tool for assuming educational self-control and self-management. And the learning resources are freely available, as they are here. 

There are a host of reasons why, in the best of all possible worlds, we will grow up with emotional baggage – judgements of thought and feeling embedded strongly enough to distort what we attempt to think or do, or incapacitate us in one way or another. Fear, anger, hurt and bitterness, shame and embarrassment can pass through us and leave us when the occasion for the emotion is passed, but they can also become lodged within us, to emerge again and again when we perceive some similar cause in the world, or even when we recall past experience.

Unpleasant and predictable events can take us by surprise, and they can bend our whole response to some life theme; hundreds of things – many of them social or interpersonal - can sap our sense of ourselves, our confidence, our sense of worthiness. It may even be that most of our everyday learning difficulties, and our inabilities to take from experience the true educational worth that is there to be taken, or to achieve the peak performances that we would desire, are the result of learned fears and anxieties that stand in our way. In our time, no education that purported to address the key issues of good living could set the significance of these phenomena to one side.

In our time, however, a few techniques have emerged that show promise of giving us power to address these issues. In my experience, “tapping” stands far above the rest, and it has the special advantage that the best of the rest can usually be engaged while we employ the procedure – combining the power available, and speeding up the whole process dramatically. Just from my own experience, tapping, particularly when it incorporates the better of the other techniques, is the silver bullet for emotional distress and destructive self-talk.

While the process of tapping enables us to tap away negative emotion, and negative belief, it doesn't make us stupid. It frees up and enables the reason that we already have, creating space in which our reasoning can improve. Many of us know, “intellectually”, that our reactions – aversions and fears – are “irrational”. Part of us knows better. But the irrational fears, aversions and beliefs have control, because they have been set in place on an emotional level. Eliminate or disable them, and we can more readily do what we know is right, or pursue ideas that we have the better reason to believe.

Gary Craig pointed out many years ago (and he had cases) that tapping away a fear of heights doesn't result in the conviction that we can jump off tall buildings – let alone heighten the desire to do so. Due caution and common-sense are not impaired. What goes is the irrational fear; not the genuine knowledge of the world, nor the prizing and the joy of life that it is, indeed, apt to reveal. That is how tapping can be such a useful tool in education. And even philosophy.

Philosophy requires courage. It is about being willing to doubt, to tolerate uncertainty. No good trying to do philosophy if you are afraid of the intellectual dark; of the intellectual unknown and unfamiliar. And many people are.

So do you fear exams – have “test anxiety”? Afraid of the essay topic? Think you are dumb or stupid, and your mind is a blank, just when you need ideas? Afraid to mix with those “smart” people, because of how they might perceive you? Afraid to speak up in class? Or do you find yourself apt to put others down, or seek attention because of some insecurity? It might be hard to confront that. But life could well be much more comfortable and more effective without even these things, and there is a very good chance that they can be addressed.

Perhaps you are finding the reading just too hard? Got a presentation to make – have to talk in front of all those people? Perform in an interview? Do you have “imposter syndrome”? I do know about these by the way. I have ticked most of these boxes myself.

What about sports performance? Do you "always" make this mistake? Does it come into your mind just as you have to perform - you anticipate what you are likely to do wrong - and so you do it?

The effectiveness of emotional or meridian tapping appears to come from the way that it intervenes directly in the unity of body and mind. You tap on your body while you evoke a feeling, or a thought that brings feeling with it. The body and mind are bound together in the process. The range of mind-body issues that can be addressed is huge, and this is why Gary Craig used to encourage "trying it on everything". The scope means that, of course, it does have therapeutic and medical applications. But this virtue of scope shouldn't be turned into a vice - restricting its use either to the educational or the therapeutic.

This is just to remind that our interest here is not medical, and that where medical applications might seem indicated, the normal recommendation to seek qualified medical advice should always apply.

#education #edchat #educationandschools