Maybe the strongest feelings about Black or White people are varieties of anger. It’s okay to start there, too, if it makes the fears more consciously accessible. Or it could be the other way around: starting with fear and then addressing anger.
These diagrams, adapted from the website www.emofree.com/nl/eft-tutorial/tapping-basics/how-to-do-eft.html, show the tapping points for the most basic tapping protocol. For much more information about tapping, you can consult this website, which is enormously helpful, or any of the other websites about this practice. This protocol is simple and just as effective as more complex ones.
The main points are identified as follows:
Top of the Head (TOH)
Beginning of the Eyebrow (EB)
Side of the Eye (SE)
Under the Eye (UE)
Under the Nose (UN)
Chin Point (Ch)
Beginning of the Collarbone (CB)
Under the Arm (UA)
Side of the hand (KC)
These points are easy to find: all of them are tender.
The points on the hand are helpful if things aren’t moving as much as we’d like. That point on the thumb will come in handy later, in chapter Eight.
The side of the hand, called the “karate chop” point (KC), is where the practice starts, by tapping that point with two, three, or all four fingers of the other hand—whatever works best for you—held together while repeating, three times, “I deeply and completely accept myself, even if I have this fear of Black people.” Then, using the same tapping technique, starting with the top of the head (TOH) and working our way down through all the other points on the body—beginning of the eyebrow (EB), side of the eye (SE), under the eye (UE), under the nose (UN), chin point (Ch), beginning of the collarbone (CB), and under the arm (UA)—and ending by going back to the top of the head, we can simply repeat “this fear of Black people,” changing as we feel it to “this terror of Black people” or “this anxiety about Black people” or even “this anger at Black people.”
Yawning or sighing while tapping is a good sign: energy is shifting and clearing out. And once there’s a real shift and clearing with regard to fear of, or anger at, Black people, it’s time to do the same sequence, substituting “White” for “Black.”
If you tap on both of these things in close succession, you may very well be gifted with an amazingly enlightening and liberating—and total—paradigm shift.
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