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Moving Toward

Holistic Wellness by

Tina Marian

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A Note from Tina

Dear Friends,

Have you ever felt stuck and unable to move forward in life, or that you can’t get a handle

on your emotions? Are you riddled with anxiety or fear of the unknown? Do you feel frustrated

with yourself because happiness seems to elude you? Have you read self-help books and tried

positive thinking, but to no avail? Well read on, because learning how to apply the Emotional

Freedom Technique (EFT), a form of meridian tapping, on yourself may be just what you have

been searching for!

I am so excited to begin this journey of self-healing with you starting with my Moving

Toward Holistic Wellness guide. After spending forty years working as a traditional nurse in the

trenches of the health care system helplessly watching it morph from a healing environment into

a sickness industry ruled by Big Pharma and insurance companies, I am thrilled to offer a holistic

alternative to conventional treatments.

My passion for this very powerful technique began over 10 years ago when I decided I

really wanted to move my nursing career in a more holistic direction and learn more about how

food affects our health. I was never very “food literate” but as I began detoxifying my gut by

supplementing my diet properly and ridding my life of processed food, I started to feel better. I

was tired of sitting idly by as people, myself included, became sicker in a bloated, corporate

health system, and I felt that there was so much more that I could do. Thus began my journey

toward holistic wellness and discovering the art and application of meridian tapping, a technique

I have used, and still use, to successfully overcome my own anxiety and emotional turmoil.

Today, I am still a nurse—and proud to be one—but I am also a Holistic Health Coach, a

Certified Abundance Life Coach, and, most importantly, my own success story. I am living proof

that there are alternate methods to overcoming your obstacles and I am so delighted to offer you

a holistic approach to achieving a healthier lifestyle. Meridian tapping changed my life for the

better and I hope to show you how to change yours as well!

To your very best health of body, mind, and spirit,

Tina Marian

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What is Tapping?

And what can it do for ME?

You’re probably thinking…What in the world is meridian tapping and EFT, and how can it

possibly help me achieve holistic wellness?!

Well, I’ll let you in on this amazing secret with a

little history and a little personal experience. The

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) made its

first appearance in the 1980s thanks to the

perseverance of great man named Gary Craig, a

Stamford alumni with a background in

engineering,—not some spiritual shaman or

woo-woo kind of guy—whose mission to bring

attention to the healing power of EFT has

awarded him our eternal gratitude.

I first discovered EFT in the summer of 2006. I had been having some anxiety that left me feeling

physically anxious, fatigued, and with a general sense of unease. At this point, I knew very little

about energy work and nothing about tapping—I was just trying to “hang in there” like everyone

else. This all changed one sunny Saturday morning when I stumbled across an article written by

Dr. Joseph Mercola all about the wonders of EFT. I soon found myself on Gary Craig’s website—I

thought I landed on Mars! Crazy stuff! People learn how to tap on points on their body and they

feel better. EXCUSE ME??? I decided to keep an open mind, downloaded the 89 page manual

provided, and read it on the beach over two consecutive weekends. And boy oh boy, it blew my

mind!

Soon enough I had learned the mechanics of tapping, quickly realizing that it offered a healthy,

natural way for people like me who felt depressed, tired, anxious, or sad to get relief. It is a

powerful, effective technique that allows you to tap into your negative emotions—in my case I

sheepishly identified my emotion as

anger—to identify the conflict in your life.

Tapping helped me to discover that the root

of my anxiety was a result of my body

saying, “Can we please deal with this

feeling?”

I had unintentionally buried my negative

feelings for so long that it manifested into

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physical symptoms—my body’s way of communicating with me. This is the problem—this is

what people do—we learn from a young age that when we “feel” an emotion that does not feel

good we should push it down, hoping that it will just “shut up and go away”. We tell ourselves a

story in our head, in my case I was playing out the “I should not be angry, that would be selfish”

when in fact the truth was that I was angry as heck!

Commence the tapping. No one was watching. I expressed exactly how I was really feeling and I

tapped on the prescribed 8 points on my head and torso, just the way Gary laid it out in his

instructions. I let it all out! I got down and dirty—no one was listening so there was no harm

done. I was just letting a little steam come out the pressure cooker. After 3 rounds—that’s like 5

minutes, tops—my anger, which I had initially rated as a 10 (worst) had reduced to about a 2 or

a 3! It was amazing and I will never forget how my energy shifted.

What had happened was that as I released the angry energy by talking and tapping

simultaneously, my perception changed allowing my mind to interpret the feeling in a much

more pleasant way. It was as if the little girl inside of me needed to have a tantrum and I had

been forcing her—without knowing—to bottle it up.

After that incident, I tried it on other problems, some old, some new, and I have continued to

experience excellent results. With that being said, I felt it would be of value to learn a lot more

about this “meridian system” that we all have.

Fast forward now. As I learned to use Law of Attraction principles and EFT in my own life, the

things I needed to create my holistic practice started showing up for me, fairly rapidly too. When

you are in the driver’s seat with your emotions and your feelings, and you know how to use EFT

to tap away any resistance, look out! The Universe will line up the people, places and things you

need to create your dream. I tapped away all of my “but I am too old to do this”, “but…” (our buts

are just our resistance, our fears). I used EFT and tapping until my “buts” changed into “why

not’s?”!

Holistic Tip #1: Take Tapping to the Test

So even though you now know the mechanics of this tapping thing, perhaps, you are still a little

skeptical. That just means it’s time to take it to the test!

If you are careful to follow the instructions to the “T” you will be able to identify and tap into

your negative feelings just as I did. Are you angry, sad, anxious, etc? Tapping will provide you

with the tools to rate, address, and conquer those feelings. Don’t be afraid to let everything out!

It’s important that you don’t hold back—be honest with yourself; you’re the only one listening

and the only one that needs to listen.

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There are 5 Steps of the EFT Basic Tapping Recipe according to Gary Craig:

1. Identify the issue: Decide what the issue is and focus on it.

2. Test the initial intensity of your emotional or physical ailment: It is important to

establish a “before” level of the issue’s intensity by assigning it a number on a 0-10 scale.

3. Complete the Setup: This is the process you use to start each round of tapping by

designing and repeating a simple phrase while continuously tapping the Karate Chop

point to let your system know what you are trying to address.

4. Complete the Sequence: This is the part of the process during which you tap specific

points while repeating a Reminder Phrase to keep your system tuned into your issue.

5. Test the intensity again: It is crucial to establish an “after” level of the issue’s intensity

by assigning it a number on a 0-10 scale in order to compare where you finish to where

you started.

The tapping is done by you on you following these

basic instructions. The points that you tap on are on

the head and torso. You learn how to find the proper

“target” to tap on and then you rate the intensity of

the emotion and start tapping while you are focusing

on and talking about that specific feeling. After a few

rounds you will feel a shift in your energy as if you

are suddenly lighter. And, that’s it! Nothing

complicated about it.

Tapping is easy to do and the steps are easy to

remember, but because we were not hard wired to

deal with our emotions this way, it can feel a little

clumsy, until you get the hang of it. And yes, it looks silly and sounds a little out there. But what if

it helps? Who cares if you can get a little more peace in the process?

By integrating tapping into your regular routine, it will begin to come naturally to you—you

might even wonder how you lived without it for so long!

Holistic Tip #2: Become “Food Literate”

Do you ever wish you could stop an illness before its

onset rather than wait to get sick? Learning more

about the food you ingest is one way to do just that.

Before I began my research into EFT and the effect

food has on people’s health 10 years ago, I felt

physically awful. I was anxious, fatigued, and at a loss

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for how to heal myself. Then, as I was driving home from work one morning I heard about an all-

natural food based vitamin mineral on the radio. I decided to give it a whirl, and felt better

almost immediately. I was amazed at how this supplement restored my energy and was inspired

to learn more about how what we put in our mouths can either do harm or good.

In my travels, I learned more and more about the deleterious effects of free radical damage

which leads to oxidative stress and inflammation that requires a lot of anti-inflammatory foods

to “tame the flame” so to speak. I realized that, along with unresolved feelings, inflammation is

the root cause of many of our physical ailments and as I started including these anti-

inflammatory foods in my own diet, I quickly saw positive, healthy changes.

I loved what I was learning about and I loved what it was doing for my health even more! This

was disease prevention! Why wait to get sick?

We all know how difficult it is to change your diet and stick to it but the harder you work to clean

up your diet, the better you will feel and the more ready you will be to take on all of the obstacles

in your life!

Holistic Tip #3: Discover the Power of Positive Thinking

Since I was in the holistic health business

someone suggested I buy a copy of the movie

The Secret, which also comes as a book or audio

set. If you are not yet familiar with the film, it

has to do with the Law of Attraction, an

interesting concept to say the least. It follows

the same logic as Newton’s Third Law of Motion

which states that for every action, there is an

equal and opposite reaction. Substitute energy

for motion and you have the Law of Attraction:

for every ounce of energy we put out into the

world, there is an equal and opposite attraction of energy back to ourselves. Like begets, like

thoughts, and like feelings actually manifest through synchronicity—Wow! Basically, if we put

out negative energy bad things will happen but put out positive energy and good things will

happen.

By using the Law of Attraction, we could actually create the life we want. Many successful people

who knew about and applied Law of Attraction principles achieved great wealth and abundance

for themselves. Perhaps, that is why it was called “the secret” because it seems there was an

effort to keep this Law of the Universe quiet. God forbid if EVERYONE learned to attract with

their thoughts and feelings to create the life they so desired.

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The truth is that you, me, and every last one of us are creators. We are magnets; we attract what

we put out there. If we put out, “I am worthy and deserving of success” and if it feels true to us,

well, the Universe will match that vibration. On the other hand if our belief system contains

beliefs such as “Success is for others, not me”, well, guess what you get?

Weight is a perfect example. What overweight person does not want to lose unwanted weight?

They try dieting, and exercising and everything else on the market, yet the weight just won’t go

away. Or they lose a few and then yo-yo up and down. It can be frustrating, yet if we just got

down to the fear—how is the weight protecting them?—they might find some relief. The topic of

weight and body image has so many emotional facets, it’s never the same for two people but the

common thread between two people with weight issues is that they have unresolved emotions,

or limiting beliefs, that they need to address before the body can safely release the weight.

That is just one example of how understanding how

the Law of Attraction operates. But you must

understand that you won’t attract squat simply by

wanting something. We all want something, right?

Who doesn’t want to make change happen, maybe

lose weight, make more money, stop smoking, or

clear the clutter in our lives? Of course we WANT it,

and we want it pretty bad! So what stands in the way

of our wanting and our receiving? It’s all about the

Resistance. It’s the power of the subconscious mind

(that huge under the water iceberg) that can hold us

back from achieving our goals, purely and simply

because of some fear that abides.

By the way, the Law of Attraction is not biased or judgmental, you just send out your frequency

and it gets matched accordingly, like a radio station. Want to tune into 98.6 FM Smooth Jazz?

Better not be sending out the signal for 99.4 Heavy Metal. Yes, you are that powerful!!

Holistic Tip #4: Remember, life is

supposed to be fun!

As I continued to be enchanted with the Law of

Attraction, reading everything I could about it, it

dawned on me that there was an effort to keep

people feeling powerless! Why didn’t we learn

about this as kids? Other than reading, writing

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and arithmetic, most of the education we did receive isn’t helping us much today, is it?

I started thinking, maybe life is supposed to be FUN! If we had more fun and felt more fun

feelings, perhaps, we find more joy and happiness in life.

With so many people struggling with their health, money, relationships, and with understanding

themselves, it only makes sense that we have forgotten the simple pleasure of having fun. So

much emotional turmoil could be avoided if only we strove to live life to its fullest, taking as

much enjoyment from it as we can.

Holistic Tip #5: We Are All Energy

We are all energy. No one will argue that point. We are all a lot of

moving particles condensed into matter. Everyone agrees that

everything is energy, and thus has a vibration, or a resonance, in

the universe. We vibrate all day long because our emotions are

simply energy in motion and our bodies have an energy system

that works perfectly in order to keep us safe and alive. It’s your

meridian system and if you look in any western medical textbook

you will observe a variety of systems from respiratory to

circulatory to endocrine to skeletal, and so on, but you will never

see your energy system included. Western medicine treats your “parts” that need to be “fixed”.

That is why we have so many specialists, one doctor for one problem, and another for another

problem. We don’t know who is in charge and that’s when things start to get scary and confusing.

Now take Traditional Eastern Medicine—which, by the way, has been in operation for at least the

past 5000 years. They don’t see you as a whole bunch of systems, rather they see you as one

energy system, and the imbalances that lie within is what they treat! The fact is that every one of

your cells that makes up the systems in your body are integrated, infiltrated, and connected by

your energy system. Stub your toe and every one of your cells knows it! Right? Laugh hard at

something funny and every cell will receive the joy as well. Our body, mind, and emotions cannot

be separated. They are really all one, and that is your energy system. Your meridians carry the

energy, and that is what the tapping is so effective for.

I knew that this energy work was the missing PEACE in healthcare. It would lead to more than

fixing the broken parts of a person—it would lead to healing! There are no “broken people”, just

lots of fear based downloads in your subconscious feeding you untruths.

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So, again, how can tapping help you?

Do you have things in life that you wish were different and want to change? Do you have old

emotions that you never really worked through? Do the actions of certain people push your

buttons? Are you struggling with weight, or body image? Do you ever just feel lost and a sense of

disconnection? Would you like to learn a self-help tool that you can use “in the moment” and not

have to wait until your next therapy (or massage) appointment?

Once you learn how to tap you will feel empowered because you will no longer feel the need to

run away from yourself. Quite the contrary. You will come to new insights and a new awareness

of who you really are and kick out the limiting beliefs that have held you back thus far.

There are a lot of energy therapies out there. For example, in talk therapy you talk about your

story, and oh you might cry, and the therapist will hand you a box of tissues, but you will talk out

your story time and time again. Perhaps, over time, you will get that cognitive shift, that change

in perception that we want but it will take much longer than necessary to get to that point.

Trust me, I have spent thousands of dollars studying all of the different treatments, but I keep

coming back to the EFT/Meridian tapping. Why? Because I am a simpleton. EFT is easy to learn,

easy to apply once you get the hang of it, and can be used anywhere on everything. With tapping

the story is not as important as the accompanying “feeling” (sadness, guilt, shame, resentment,

etc.) and it will shine the light on it! It’s called release work and I absolutely think it is the best

thing since sliced bread! Our lives can be recreated so that we feel better and better until we

start moving with the flow of life, instead of resisting it. EFT made me a new person and it can do

that for you.

If you have never heard to EFT or meridian tapping, I hope that I have piqued your interest. I

once heard a fellow EFT practitioner say, “There needs to be an EFT practitioner on every street

corner,” and I have to agree with her. So many people think “I guess it is what it is, and I just have

to grin and bear it.” I am telling you that if you change your limiting beliefs about yourself, and

learn to think better thoughts you will raise your presence in the universe and discover your

ability to attract and create your benefit, not your detriment. You, I, and everyone all deserve to

be happy, and with this technique you will feel better.

Tina Marian, R.N., B.S.N. and Certified Holistic Health Counselor and Certified Abundance Coach, has been a

Registered Nurse for 40 years and is the former Director of Psychiatric Triage at Metro West Medical Center in

Natick, Massachusetts. A graduate of the Institute of Integrative Nutrition in Manhattan and the Birchtree

Center for Healthcare Transformation in Florence, Massachusetts; a member of the Association of

Comprehensive Energy Psychology; and a member of the American Association of Drugless Practitioners. Tina

has also received in depth training in a number of different Mind-Body Therapies — including EFT (Emotional

Freedom Technique*), TAT (Tapas Acupressure Technique), Reconnective Healing and The Silva Method. Tina

just completed a year long training with EFT Master Carol Look and is a Certified Advanced EFT Abundance life

coach.