Ask Your Body Not Your Mind

It’s an irony that your client has been brought to you by their conscious mind, while the problems they bring are usually happening at an unconscious level.

People are used to trying to think their way out of problems because their thinking mind thinks it knows what is going on and what to do about it.

However, the fact that this person is coming to see a practitioner suggests that this strategy is not working too well, because if they could have thought their way out of their problems they would have done that already. Despite the evidence, our thinking mind still thinks thinking is the way to solve all problems.

Luckily for us as practitioners, some people are very in touch with their inner worlds, they know what they are feeling and may even have valuable intuitions about what is really going on. These clients are usually easy to work with because they can ‘point’ the tapping practitioner to where they need to go.

Unfortunately for us as practitioners, some people tend to live in their heads: thinking and analysing. These clients might not be so easy to work with because, for whatever reason, they are not so connected with their inner world.

Some people are just used to operating on a thinking level, they may have highly analytical professions in which thinking becomes their default way of interacting with the world.

Other people may also use thinking as a defence mechanism to keep them out of their feelings. If you have been ’trained’ from an early age not to feel things, or express those feelings, what is really going on may be buried deep down below the level of consciousness and not easily accessible.

Unfortunately for these clients, the things that typically keep them stuck are a web of connections between memories, learned responses, beliefs, etc, etc that are hidden below the level of consciousness. This presents a problem for the tapper because the client cannot tune into their inner world because it is unfamiliar or because it does not feel safe.

How can we side-step the (over) thinking mind?

Fortunately, there are ways of dipping below the surface of the thinking mind to access useful information.

One of my favourite approaches comes from a therapy called the Comprehensive Resource Model (CRM) created by Liza Schwartz. CRM is an elaborate and powerful therapeutic process for repairing early traumas and attachments, but one of its simpler techniques is a novel way of asking questions.

So, if you want to ask a question that goes below the surface, you can preface it with the instruction Ask your body not your mind … ¹ to invite the client to access a deeper understanding of what is going on.

For example:

• Ask your body not your mind what is the most important thing to work on?
• Ask your body not your mind what is the safest thing we could work on right now?
• Ask your body not your mind what stops you from moving towards your goal?

Note that the phrase: Ask your body not your mind is an instruction, not a question itself. It is designed to direct the question that follows it to the client’s unconscious mind.

I have found this a very useful way of accessing information from clients who are stuck in the realm of thinking.

There are some useful guidelines to get the best out of this approach:

1. Use the phrase as if it were a perfectly natural part of the question. If you think about it, it’s a weird thing to say, but if you deliver it with a natural tone that expects an answer it will help the client access the information you need.
2. Do not make it a question itself, if you say “Can you ask your body not your mind …”, your client might honestly answer “No!” and then what are you going to do?
3. When you have asked the question, be quiet, it may take some time for your client to access and express the answer. Don’t get in the way of the process.
4. If you think your client might have trouble answering the question, you can add "… and, whatever comes to mind is just fine" to the original question to let them know whatever ‘weird’ answer arises (and their conscious mind may well judge it as weird) is valuable information. If the client starts their answer saying something like “This is really strange”, or, “I’ve no idea where this is coming from”, you are probably onto something important.

I hope you find this approach as useful as I do.

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