Pam Burns-Clair is a dear friend of mine and a licensed Marriage & Family Therapist. Here she recounts an amazing incident, which shows the power of Meridian Tapping to calm the electrical storm of a seizure:
I showed up, arms full of food and moving boxes, to help my friends prepare for an upcoming move due to hard times. My friend—I’ll call her Sadie to protect her privacy—called out from the bedroom. She’s been suffering for months from a mysterious neurological condition that doctors can’t identify that involves frequent seizures, numbness, and other debilitating symptoms—very disruptive to her normally high powered multi-faceted life and career in the arts.
“You’re here just in time for a seizure.” I had taught her EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) tapping a few days before. With that cue, I plopped my things down & plopped myself instantly on her bed where she was not yet agonizing but looking scared. “Let’s tap…” and she joined me, imitating my movements.
We started with the set up “karate chop”: “I feel a seizure coming on… I feel a seizure coming on…” several times, followed by “…and I completely love and accept myself.” As the wave of symptoms intensified for her, we simplified and moved along to: “I’m tapping above my eyebrows”—lingering there at the brain’s frontal lobe, “I’m tapping on the side of my eyes… under my eyes…above the mouth…” alternating with: “I feel a seizure coming on.” Where normally I would have stopped when we completed the round at the gamut point (between the last 2 fingers on the top of the hand), restating “I completely love and accept myself,” she clearly needed to keep tapping to stave off the seizure. She uttered, “I’m scared…” so we continued, uninterrupted, with the karate chop setup and switched the language to that statement: “I’m scared…I’m really scared…I’m so scared…” as we moved through the circuit of points, still alternating with “I feel a seizure coming on,” as we proceeded along the points. We included the statements she uttered: “My feet are so itchy…I’m tapping to stay awake…tapping keeps me awake…” (because when her seizures come on she feels a powerful urge to give in to sleep and this is contraindicated). She admitted that when she’s going into these seizures she sometimes reverts to primitive “dyslexia” language—which was my cue to keep it really simple. I “tapped into” the line from Nemo where Dori chants in her sing-songy way, “Just keep swimming…swimming…swimming” so I inserted that spontaneously, which made Sadie chuckle and she blurted out, “I’m laughing! Laughing is good!” So we switched to “Just keep tapping…tapping…tapping…”
We tapped round after round without stopping—at times she varied the tapping by moving her feet back and forth against the bed sheets or tapping each of her fingers against her thumb (she had recently been told by a nurse friend that fine motor movement as well as gross motor movement prevents the brain from going into seizure)..she tapped the back of her neck spontaneously when we were tapping on the head points…
And then she broke out of it: “This is amazing! It’s going away!” There were both tears and laughter, and she spontaneously uttered, “I’m learning to love myself as much as I love others!” This felt major for my friend who has been historically SUCH a giver and a generous spirit with her circle of loved ones. So we tapped on that. A little later, another eureka: “I feel itchy only in my left hand!” So we tapped on “A little residual itch in my left hand.” She liked the more sophisticated language as she was recovering, in contrast to the need for primitive “I’m tapping tapping tapping…tapping above my brows” approach that we had taken early on in the process.
And then we were done! The seizure had passed, there were tears and hugs and reflection. This was clearly a first and she was elated and empowered. She got out of bed, shared her experience with a friend in the other room, then with her husband who was very pleased to hear and see her so relieved, victorious and functional…and then her appetite came on, which had been suppressed the last few days.
Since that session Sadie emailed me that she staved off on her own another onset of a seizure in the car—I assume she was the passenger, but she shared the experience of tapping to stave off the seizures with her neurologist and he is supportive. He said, “It’s certainly preferable to giving you more medication,” and gave the green light thumbs up!
“Just keep tapping…tapping…tapping…” will become our joint mantra.
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