Using “borrowing benefits” on vague feelings of being lost

Have you ever had a vague memory that seems to be holding onto you? Getting clarity on the memory itself is difficult. While directly addressing the vague feelings may help bring insight, sometimes it doesn’t. Here is where “borrowing benefits” can help.

Borrowing benefits is an approach where you identify your own issue and then just keep it in the background while you tap along for someone else’s problem. Here’s how it worked for me.

All morning I had a vague feeling of unease that was strong, around an 8. I tried tapping on various fleeting emotions and got nowhere. I meditated and my inner guidance suggested watching one of the borrowing benefits DVDs. I chose video 8 where Andy “could never do anything right.”

I gave my feeling a name: “When I was Lost at 5”. All I could remember was being very young, standing on the sidewalk, and not knowing which way to go. The starting intensity was an 8. I could feel it throughout my body.

In the borrowing benefits process, we then set our issue aside and tap along with the video or audio. Over the 39 minutes that Gary Craig worked with Andy on the video, my intensity dropped at each of the check-in points: 8 then 6 then 4 then 3, 2, 1, and finally 0. This kind of gradual elimination of the emotional intensity is common with borrowing benefits. It is also completely painless!

In the end I did not learn any specifics on the lost feeling. Perhaps, at such a young age, there I didn’t have much in the way of cognitive self-awareness. I just felt lost. What is interesting is that once that particular memory went to 0, a number of other events, some of them far more explicit, came to mind. However, these new events lacked emotional intensity. They seemed to arise to say, “Remember when...”. And they all had as a theme “being lost.”

I believe that the memories that come up for us and cause us stress are doorways into the energy system. They arise at a particular place and time because, well, they are the doors that are unlocked and that we are ready to enter if we so choose. Sometimes they appear when we’re working with an emotional freedom coach; more often, they will appear when we are going through our day.

What I love about EFT is that it can be self-care. Yet, even with hundreds of hours of study, and my experience working with many clients using EFT, I still find it very helpful to tap into another person’s energy when doing work on my own issues. Borrowing benefits makes that process easy. If you are interested in using EFT for yourself and your family, the borrowing benefits DVD set is excellent .