By Daniel J. Benor, MD

Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances. 
                     -Bruce Barton

Addressing new tasks 

We may have hesitations in approaching new tasks. Never having mastered them before, our mindset may be one of tentativeness or lack of confidence in our success.

I recently bought a bottle of skin moisturizer. It has a dispenser at the top of the bottle. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to get the dispenser to work – despite repeated twistings, turnings, unscrewing the top to see if there was a seal blocking it (no such thing!), pushing, pressing down on what appeared to be the plunger-dispenser, prodding, pondering and puzzling over this challenge. I gave up. And this is unusual for me, as I have a gift for pattern recognition and can usually look at a mechanism and figure out how it works. I finally approached Maria, one of my neighbors, who immediately twisted the top slightly to one side and squeezed the bottle, showing me how it operates.

Thinking back over this experience, I realized that I had never before opened a new dispensing bottle. I had used soap bottles in public places and in friends’ homes where a similar dispensing mechanism was a pump that required my pushing down on it to get the soap out. Someone else had set it up to work. My mind-set with the moisturizing cream bottle led me to expect this to be a similar mechanism, and I could not get it to work that way. I had twisted the spout around but had not squeezed the bottle at the same time. Being new to opening such bottles, I did not think of the mechanism that Maria showed me.

Confidence following success

I met a woman named Sheila in Findhorn, a community on the North Sea in Scotland where they talk to plants and get them to grow amazingly quickly and to amazing sizes despite a short growing season. We were sitting on a lawn for a seminar and Sheila chortled as she displayed the 4-leaf clover she had found. When we complimented her on her good luck, she responded, “It’s not luck. I can find one every time I look. The most time it has ever taken me is about an hour.” We were somewhat incredulous, but she explained that she could succeed every time because she absolutely knew she would succeed.

I’ve spoken with people who were similarly successful in making sales in various commodities – from books, magazine subscriptions, cookware and cosmetics, and on to bigger items like cars and homes.  I’ve met athletes who seemed able to excel in any sport, and musicians who could pick up almost any instrument and play it passably well without prior practice. These people just knew they were going to succeed and so they did.

Confidence in using TWR: Whole Health – Easily and Effectively® is similar. As we find that it works, we have greater confidence and fewer hesitations about using it and it works even better, and can release increasingly difficult issues.

Over the years I have been teaching people to use TWR for pain and stress relief, my confidence as a therapist and teacher of therapists has grown enormously. TWR has surpassed all my expectations. I simply know that it will work, and it does.

Often, people ask me questions like,

“Is it better to tap on my eyebrows or on my arms?”
“Is it better to tap for a longer time at once or for several shorter periods through the day?”
“Is it better if I use the affirmation you recommend or the one that EFT recommends, since I’m used to those?”
“Is it better to focus on a single issue or to combine a bunch of related issues together?”

They are a bit startled when I answer such questions with a simple “Yes.” The fact is, TWR works best for each person in the way that is unique to their personality, life experiences, beliefs and disbeliefs, and so on. TWR works best when it is personalized to your preferences. And I want to encourage people to gain the confidence in their own abilities to explore and sort out the ways TWR works best for them.

However, I also recommend exploring a variety of ways of using TWR, so that you discover those which work best for you. It is also handy to know several different approaches with TWR because different issues may respond differently to the methods used.

As people use TWR, there are layers and layers of increasing confidence:

The more you use TWR, the more confident you get that you will be able to deal with any challenge in your life. Problems and challenges become invitations to learn more about yourself, to free yourself from burdens of buried feelings taken on when you felt incompetent to deal with them and therefore buried them in your unconscious mind – where they remain, festering and waiting for you to release them.

Case Example:

Trudi grew up in a strict Catholic home where her parents constantly criticized and discouraged her creative and artistic abilities as being frivolous and useless for earning a living. Her father was a very strict disciplinarian and did not hesitate to reinforce his rules with corporal punishment. Her parents pushed her into attending nursing school. While she earned high job performance ratings in the hospital and was acknowledged to be bright and to have a lot of potential, she never achieved the promotions everyone told her she deserved, and she never felt settled in this career.

After suffering for a dozen years, Trudi extricated herself from a marriage with a man who was physically and verbally abusive. She felt helpless to deal with her parents when they cut her off because of the divorce. She struggled for several years as a single mother for two young boys, and struggled increasingly with her lifelong issue of being overweight. She was enormously relieved when she met and married a very warm and supportive man.

She was surprised to find herself in a serious depression several years following her mother’s death – when Trudi had had almost no contact with her for years. She was further surprised to find that the feelings behind her depression were much deeper than the grief which had triggered her to seek help.

TWR felt to Trudi like peeling a very large onion. There were layers of hurts and angers towards her mother and father beneath the depression; feelings of being inadequate to meet her parents’ expectations; lack of self-confidence in her job performance; and, deeper yet, anticipations that no one would or even could really love her.

Though initially skeptical, Trudi was surprised at how quickly and easily the TWR relieved her festering depression, and at the other layers that surfaced – as she gained confidence in her ability to deal with difficult and painful feelings and self-doubts. As her expectations of success grew, her unconscious mind released deeper and deeper layers of hurts. Again, Trudi was surprised when she realized that as a child, her parents’ constant criticisms had led her to ‘armor’ herself with excess weight. Her inner child had reasoned that it was less painful to be rejected for being overweight than for being unlovable.

TWR was able to help Trudi deal with these deeper issues, much of the work being done on her own, with just a little guidance – once she understood the method and her confidence in using it grew and deepened.  

The confidence gained in using TWR on themselves is one of the best ways for people to learn to deal with the inevitable layers of challenging issues in their lives.  Another way to gain this confidence is through learning TWR in groups, where you can observe other people succeeding in dealing with their own issues. I am always grateful when teaching in classes and seminars, or when demonstrating on air, when a brave person volunteers in front of the group to deal with a difficult issue. This convinces others in the group or the audience that they can succeed in using TWR for their own problems.

You can watch the demonstration YouTube and listen to some of the radio interviews to experience some of these encouragements to succeed in using TWR for yourself.

Your feedback on this article is welcomed.

Dan
[email protected]

You may reproduce all or parts of this article in your journal, magazine, ezine, blog or other web or paper publication on condition that you credit the source as follows: Copyright © 2008 Daniel J. Benor, MD, ABHM   All rights reserved. Original publication at WholisticHealingResearch.com where you will find many more related articles on this and similar subjects of wholistic healing.