I’ve been emailing with someone who is trying EFT with a dog and that gave me the idea to write something about it here.Clicking on the image will take you to a book that outlines a very simple EFT method that you can do directly on the spine of dogs, cats, goats, whatever!

EFT is short for Emotional Freedom Technique and it is quite an amazingly effective method of working on physical and emotional problems of all sorts. I’ve been using it for several years, chiefly for myself and other humans.

You can get lots of information about it online at www.emofree.com, a site which is a real labor of love of Gary Craig.Other people have a number of other sites, but this is the mother lode. In a nutshell, you release blocked energy by tapping on different acupuncture points, mostly on your face. It’s hard to believe how effective this can be but it is. Gary Craig has hundreds of accounts of its benefits on his site.

For myself, the most dramatic change I’ve experienced was when my  husband Kelly fell off a roof and we didn’t know for a while how badly he was injured. I did really well while the ambulance was coming and we were going to the emergency clinic, but once the crisis was past, I fell apart. (Kelly ended up with a broken rib and has completely recovered.) I did some EFT for both of us around that time and it really helped.

EFT with Our Cat

I’ve used it a little with animals. Here’s my favorite story so far: Kelly and I had acquired Misty, a young cat, in Mexico. She had turned up in a friend’s patio after being chased by another cat. She took up residence there but our friend was allergic and we took her.

Her favorite place in our house was under the bed. We knew nothing of her history but the life of a street cat can be imagined.We left Misty in our rented house there, our landlord taking care of her, while we went back to the US for a while.

When we came back to Mexico, we ended up buying a house in another area, Lake Chapala. We took Misty to our new house. Misty continued to hang out under the bed–perhaps even more than before as now she had to contend with our LarryDog in the house with her.

After a couple of weeks, I decided to do some EFT in surrogation for her. So I said “I am Misty and even though I feel safe under the bed, I also like lying on the bed.” I said this three times while doing what’s called the karate chop (details on Gary Craig’s site) and then I went on to tap on the meridian points, first while saying “only safe under the bed” then moving on to “I’m safe on top of the bed.”

After doing this briefly, I had a subjective sense of a shift. But would anything really change?

It sure did. That very day, Misty spent hours on the bed, up in the pillows as far away from the edges as she could get. When LarryDog (who has lived with cats for years) went over to give her a friendly greeting, she hissed and he backed off. Within a week, she was Queen of the Bed. She still is.