Joyce Khan kicks off her new community series ‘EXTRAordinary People’ by talking with Master EFT Trainer, Pearl Lopian.
Tapping can relieve emotional pain? Or someone else’s? Or curb ‘food noise’ without the exorbitant cost of weight-loss injections? Really? Master EFT Trainer, Pearl Lopian, believes it can.
The Jerusalem-based grandmother of 17 has always had an unconventional streak – you’ve only got to see her fuchsia pink dipped hair extensions to realise that. She doesn’t overstep the mark but pushes boundaries just enough to satisfy her enquiring mind and need to “be her own person”.
With husband Shimmy, she raised four children in North Manchester where they lived for 38 years until making aliyah in 2017. She stayed home in the early years of marriage but as the children grew, so did her desire to carve out a meaningful career for herself, her warm temperament naturally drawing her into social care. While working as a family liaison officer supporting parents and siblings, she set up the Manchester branch of Camp Simcha.
“Helping people was deeply rewarding but I still needed something to satiate my curiosity,” says Pearl. That ‘something’ first made an appearance in 2009 when she was introduced to a therapy that soon became central to her life and identity: emotional freedom techniques, more often called ‘EFT’ or ‘tapping’.
“I heard about a Chassidic guy living nearby who practiced EFT and went to see him. I was immediately hooked and desperate to learn how to do it. All the courses were on Shabbat but after weeks of searching, I found a woman who agreed to run a mid-week course in my house if I could find another six participants. By hook or by crook, I managed it and became an accredited EFT practitioner. About a decade ago I qualified as a trainer, and nowadays I’m known as a master trainer.
“The theory behind EFT is that we have two bodies – an energy body and a physical body which are interlinked. We see this all the time – imagine you’re rushing to an important job interview, thinking you’ll be late. You’re stressed and your heart starts beating faster. The thought creates a disruption in your energy system which affects your physical body.
“Negative experiences can stay with us. If someone suffers abuse as a child, it can affect them in adulthood. They may seek EFT to come to terms with it and live a happy life. In EFT sessions, clients recall the negative memories and by ‘tapping on the thought’ the mind quietens, allowing space for a new thought to come in and healthy processing of the negative memory.
“Studies have shown that a person’s brainwave function shifts during tapping from a beta wave state which indicates stress to alpha waves promoting relaxation, then moving into a theta wave state where deep emotional processing can occur.”
“The theory behind EFT is that we have two bodies – an energy body and a physical body which are interlinked.”
But where do we tap? What with? On what? Pearl explains: “The person taps with their fingers on specific positions on their own skin, known as ‘acupoints’ – these are linked to acupressure points in Chinese medicine – while recalling specific memories or emotions.
“Electrical signals travel to the brain – especially the areas involved with stress and emotion – and adjust the arousal in that area, altering the person’s response to the troubling memory or feeling. And the beauty of tapping is that it tends to act much faster than conventional therapies.”
You will have realised already that Pearl would not be shy of breaking new ground. She is one of a rare number of practitioners to develop surrogate tapping, and with remarkable success – though she admits to being at pains to explain how it works.
Working with the subject in absentia has become her preferred mode of practice: “It fascinates me. I mostly use it to work with parents of children who are troubled. For example, a mum of a 10-year-old girl who kept coming into her bedroom in the middle of the night, unable to get back to sleep on her own. While the mother tapped, I asked her to bring the child to mind and have a dialogue with her to discover why she was behaving as she was. The conversation brought up a time when the child was unwell as a toddler and developed a fear of being alone.
“In another case, a daughter couldn’t control her habit of pulling out her hair. The mother would tell her during EFT, ‘It’s safe to keep your hands by your side’. Within three weeks of surrogate tapping the child completely stopped, telling her mother, ‘Somehow my hand doesn’t want to go up to my head anymore’. It was miraculous!”
More recently, Pearl has pushed the boundaries further, introducing a radical new weight loss approach which she calls the thought injection method (TIM), using EFT to trick the brain and body into responding as if a person were taking weight loss jabs, reducing food ‘noise’ and appetite and enabling people to feel fuller for longer. Her six-session course, at £200 a throw, sounds like a bargain when you consider the cost of a private supply of weight loss injections.
TIM comes with none of the nasty side-effects either like nausea, vomiting, and diarrhoea – but as a method in its infancy, we have yet to judge its effectiveness. If it works, however, Big Pharma had better watch out!
