I do recommend making your acquaintance with tapping by starting with whatever fear, anger, phobia, or trauma is most pressing to you now, both to see how amazingly well it works and to clear out issues that might be clamoring for your attention loudly enough to drown out your direct experience of the emotions involved in White racism. Or you might want to start with the simple terror of what might be lurking in your subconscious, or even your annoyance about being introduced to this modality.
The first time I tried tapping, for some reason the most pressing issue I had was a distant memory of a school monitor yelling at me when I was seven years old, which terrified me; as I recall, the phrase I kept repeating while tapping was, “She yelled at me!” Not long afterward, as a gift from the One Love just to show how well the tapping worked, a person with a well-earned reputation for a formidable temper yelled at me in front of God and everybody, and, feeling not the faintest fear, I calmly backed them off—much to the awe and amazement of everyone present, including me.
Once you’ve learned the technique—and it’s simple—you can use tapping in many situations, and to clear out many different fears and phobias, along with anger and even hate. It might require a certain amount of what we can call emotional literacy—being able to match the feelings with the words—but it’s flexible enough so that it works perfectly well if the feeling we’re addressing seems to morph from, say, hate to fear, or fear to terror, or fear to anxiety or to rage, as we proceed through a round of tapping.
Shifting and clearing out the energy inside ourselves this way makes it unnecessary to seek reassurance from other people, or even to imagine that other people are responsible for how we feel. There are many tools, of which this may be one of the most efficient, to help us be responsible for our own feelings and our own serenity. We don’t need other people to make us feel okay—as if they could.
Tapping is also a great tool to keep handy in all kinds of circumstances. In community organizing, “cool head, warm heart” is axiomatic. It’s hard to think clearly when we’re angry or frightened, because then the blood flow to the thinking-clearly parts of our brains tends to be greatly diminished. As a direct message from our bodies, anger and fear can be healthy visceral reactions to injustice, telling us that something is wrong. They’re like an alarm clock waking us up. Once we’re awake, we don’t need to keep the alarm going all day long; once we’ve gotten the message, it’s a cool head that can strategize dealing with that injustice. When I was engaged in struggle with the landlord over a period of years, had it not been for the many years I had already been practicing a spiritual discipline, I would certainly have been every bit as angry and scared—and much less effective. I didn’t have this practice at my fingertips then, but it would have been great if I had.
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