I remember the first time I got in contact with an EFT website that was re-inventing the wheel by giving their own version of the EFT tapping sequence with a twist: drinking a full glass of water was recommended before starting the process in order to, allegedly, allow energies to flow better. That made me slightly uncomfortable. I began to suspect that there was a hint of dishonesty behind. Even though virtually all EFT websites pay due respects to the founder of EFT, Gary Craig, some barely acknowledge that the tapping algorithm is his creation and present their own version with just a slight “innovation” so as to enable them to claim the full paternity for their tapping recipe. The excuse of introducing a mere glass of water in the sequence seemed quite shallow.
Then I discovered that Gary Craig shared my opinion. He expressed himself clearly enough in an article published on his website (http://emofree.com/cutting-edge.htm) and titled “Why EFT is always on the Cutting Edge – and some useful perspectives”:
Drinking Water: Some promoters insist that clients must be well hydrated or else EFT’s benefits will be impaired.
I see no evidence of this whatsoever and yet it is sometimes portrayed as “the missing piece” in EFT. I have helped countless people with EFT and have never asked any of them to drink water during the process. Further, I once delivered EFT to a roomful of 500 people and got results with all but one. No one was asked to drink water.
The general idea behind this EFT/water contention is that water is essential to the conduction of energy within the body. Maybe so, but we’re already 70+% water so what good does it do to add another 1% through drinking a glass of water? Further, It takes an hour or two for a glass of water to be absorbed and thus hydrate the cells. By that time, most EFT sessions are over.
Watch professional basketball players, for example. They run up and down the court sweating profusely and take in very little water. Yet their energy still courses through their bodies in perfect fashion. Basketball is far more demanding on the mental and physical body than an EFT session and yet maintaining optimum hydration is not required for these athletes to perform at top levels.
A new perspective on this whole discussion began to dawn on me in the early months of 2009. In January 2009, I got attuned to reiki by the reiki master Ellen Sokolow. The attunement itself was a very powerful experience that propelled me across the last miles separating me from the intuitive healer I am today. Ellen shared with me after the ceremony that reiki helps you become who you are. And it didn’t take weeks before I understood very concretely what she meant: my intuition had been multiplied tenfold! Not only was I able to perceive other people’s energy with much more vividness in my every day life, but in the midst of doing EFT with a client, I could suddenly feel things they were experiencing in their bodies, emotions they were going through and see flashes of their memories before my eyes. Even with my history of being an emotional empath, I was overwhelmed by the amount of sensations and intuitions I was receiving… But the most obvious information I received had a lot to do with dehydration.
When our bodies are dehydrated, the lack of water often produces a headache. In my case – lucky me! – the only headaches I get are dehydration headaches. The brain being 75% water is particularly sensitive to a lack of water. The body, sensing that the water supply is running low, generates histamines to alert us to the impending dehydration. The histamines are accompanied by pain and fatigue. Hence the headache… (See the following articles in wikipedia and buzzle)
So the first time I felt a dehydration headache during an EFT session with a client, and a much stronger one than I was used to, 15 minutes after having drunk a big glass of water, I knew that the problem didn’t come from me. I got up and fetched a glass of water for the person I was working with. She thanked me saying that she felt very thirsty and was beginning to feel dehydrated. Ah-ah!
This experiment has been consistently reproduced. Every time I’m very thirsty, it doesn’t impede the client’s healing process. But if they are thirsty, not only do I feel it (and strongly so), but healing seems to be stopped until they drink a glass of water and let their bodies relax out of emergency mode. Usually the results are next to instantaneous: one mere minute is more than enough to dispel the headache and let the energy flow back on.
In conclusion, my opinion is more nuanced than Gary’s. It is needless to include the glass of water in an allegedly new-and-improved tapping recipe, especially since dehydration headaches aren’t that common. But when they occur, healing is stopped in its tracks just as completely as if an energy toxin was present in the room or in the patient’s body. And it might very well be the case: perhaps the histamines produced by the body to alert us when dehydration threatens act as toxins for this particular client.
At any rate, I am incredibly grateful that I’m equipped with an internal tool to unmistakably detect when this phenomenon is happening. My intuition as a therapist is an invaluable gift that keeps surprising me, again and again…
