In my post What is Tapping and How Can It Help You?, I explained that tapping is a tool derived from Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT. Essentially, the theory of EFT is that negative emotions are caused by disturbances in the body’s energy field. By identifying the negative emotions that are causing you distress and tapping on certain points on your body, you can gain nearly instant relief from symptoms of anxiety, depression, or just plain negative thinking.

As I said in the post, I had immediate positive results with tapping as soon as I tried it. Over the past few months I have watched more of the videos at Tapping.com and lurked in the forums on its companion site, TappingForum.com. I learned that there are more ways to apply tapping than to just relieve a high level of stress or anxiety. In fact, it seemed like others have had great results using tapping to eliminate all types of negative beliefs – even some that they weren’t even conscious of until they started to explore them in more detail.

I decided to go a little deeper in my exploration of tapping, and the Tap Yourself Free E-book available at Tapping.com seemed like a great place to start.

What is It and What do you Get?
Tap Yourself Free is actually a package of three E-books that are designed to introduce you to the tapping process and give you concrete ways to apply this set of tools in your daily life. It also includes access to a private forum for ongoing support. Currently the package sells for $39 U.S. and is available as an instant download. The author of the books goes by the name Magnus and he is the same person that appears in the instructional videos on Tapping.com and is also active at TappingForum.com. Let’s dive in a little closer and look at each of the three books.

Tap Yourself Free is the main book in the package that provides the bulk of the background and instructional content. It is a 134 page book that goes into a lot of detail about the effects of emotions on happiness and well-being as well as the physiology behind tapping. It includes explanations about our bodies’ energy meridians, even going so far as to suggest that skeptics use an electronic detector pen (a common electrician’s tool used for determining if a wire is “live”) on their own tapping points to see the electric field present in those places. This book references the videos available at Tapping.com in several places and uses them as fundamental instructional material to really teach the mechanics of the tapping process. However, it goes into much more detail about the causes of specific problems and ways to resolve those problems. The main chapters in the book are:

1. Introduction
2. Emotional Literacy
3. Releasing
4. The Road Map
5. Dealing With Your Problems
6. Living the Good Life
7. Wealth
8. Finding Love and Healthy Relationships
9. Health
10. Spiritual Matters
11. Physical Healing
12. Tapping the World (Tapping for World Peace)

Tapping Guide: Manual, Exercises and Worksheets is just what is sounds like. It’s a 52 page book that includes more information on the mechanics of tapping as well as a series of worksheets to help you work through specific problem areas such as happiness, confidence, and forgiveness. Each worksheet consists of a series of questions designed to help you draw out the specific incidences and emotions that are causing you distress.

The Science of Getting Rich with Tapping Guide is a bonus book that includes the complete text of The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles accompanied by a series of tapping exercises designed to draw out negative feelings about wealth. The Wattles text is a classic personal development book dating back to the early 20th century. Magnus uses the text as the basis of an exhaustive list of questions the have the potential to clear almost every block you could have against taking the actions you need to improve your financial situation. It may seem unlikely that you have negative beliefs about making lots of money, but this book explains how we often view “rich people” as “jerks” and lots of other Very Bad Things.

How Do I Use It?
I downloaded Tap Yourself Free on January 4 and immediately read through all three of the E-books because I wanted to dive right into the tools. In retrospect, this probably wasn’t the best way to go about things. I would recommend reading through the main Tap Yourself Free book and then working through the Tapping Guide, addressing the issues most effective for you. After you’ve taken care of some of the issues lower on Maslow’s hierarchy, such as anxiety, stress and depression, then it would be more appropriate to move onto issues of accumulating wealth.

Magnus suggests that it can take a hundred rounds of tapping to clear away enough negative emotions to start really feeling different. I’m quite sure I haven’t made it through 100 rounds of tapping and I’ve already noticed a substantial difference in my emotional outlook. I expect to feel even better in the near future because of the mental shift I’m making in my use of the process.

Up until I got the E-books, I had been using tapping in a reactive way. For example, if I was feeling stressed out during the day I would close the door to my office and tap a round or two until I felt better. After reading through the E-books, I realized that I can use tapping proactively to work on issues that keep me from being as successful as I’d like. In particular, I’ve been working on confidence and procrastination. The Tapping Guide has been very helpful in these exercises and I’ve actually printed the whole thing out and take it along with me in my bag. I’ve also watched some of the videos on Tapping.com a few times to familiarize myself even more with the tapping process. When I have some free time, or I’m ready to wind down in the evening I tap a couple of rounds of questions.

Does It Work?
I give Tap Yourself Free an 8 out of 10 for effectiveness so far. In the three weeks that I’ve had the E-books, I haven’t even scratched the surface of all of the negative beliefs that I hold. In a lot of ways this process feels like peeling the layers of an onion. I may identify one negative emotion such as, “I don’t want to work on this project because it is boring,” tap on it and realize that part of why it’s “boring” is because I don’t understand part of it. Then I’ll tap on my fear of not being able to learn the skill that I need to complete the project, and so on.

One thing I need to keep in mind is that the E-book package is just part of the whole set of resources that Magnus has made available at Tapping.com and the TappingForums.com. My plan for going forward with this toolset is to continue to watch the videos that relate to my target issues and to ask questions in the forums when I get stuck. It’s a really exciting process that I think will make a great difference in my life as I work with it more.

Why Does It Work?
To be perfectly honest, I have no idea why tapping works, and neither does Magnus. As he writes in Tap Yourself Free:

There are people who would prefer to wait for scientific papers explaining how tapping works before they will try it. It’s a shame because these tend to be the sort of people who stand to benefit most from using it. Direct experience of tapping is enough to convince most people that it does something…

It’s possible that it’s just a placebo effect, although I doubt that because I’ve had consistently good results with the process. If it was purely a placebo effect, I would expect that some times it would work well at random times and not well at all for other situations. To me the most scientific explanation for the immediate physical effects of tapping is that touching those specific pressure points releases negative energy in ways similar to acupuncture, but without the needles

Who Should Buy This?
I really believe that Tap Yourself Free has been effective for me and that it will continue to be a positive addition to my personal development tool bag. I can completely understand any skepticism about the process. For people who are at least willing to give it a try, I recommend that you watch a couple of the introductory videos at Tapping.com and give it a chance. Probably the best time to try tapping is when you are feeling a particularly strong negative emotion such as fear or anxiety. If a couple of rounds of tapping has you convinced that you want to incorporate more tapping into your life, you may want to purchase Tap Yourself Free.

I specifically recommend this E-book for people who:

• Want to feel more positive about life.
• Have bad habits they would like to break.
• Struggle with procrastination and lack of motivation.
• Have tried meditation but found it too time intensive.
• Really want to take their personal and professional lives to the next level.

Share Your Story
I would love to hear from other people who have used tapping – successfully or not. Also, I’d love to know about other products that people have used and what they thought of them. If you have a story to tell, let us know about it in the comments below.

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