Lorne Brown:

By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown, I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.

Welcome to another episode of the Conscious Fertility Podcast. Today we have Dr. Craig Weiner and Alina Frank talking to us. They’re really involved in tapping and I’ve had a few guest experts so far on the podcast. So it’s interesting that this is a common modality that’s being used in healing and in the fertility world now, and tapping as an EFT, Emotional Freedom Tapping. And they’re the directors of the EFT Tapping Training Institute and they’ve been training and mentoring and certifying thousands of practitioners using EFT Worldwide. And Craig is also director of the Tapping Out of Trauma Continued Education Seminars. And Alina and Craig, welcome to the show. And the reason I wanted to talk to you is that you have this focus on trauma. So I’m really glad we’re going to have a chance to sit down and talk today.

Craig Weiner:

Well, it’s great to be here, thanks for the invitation.

Alina Frank:

Yes, thank you for having us. This is a great topic that we love talking about.

Lorne Brown:

Because so many of the women and the men, but predominantly the women, they’ve actually have said that they come into my practice saying, I have fertility trauma, going on saying these unsuccessful cycles created trauma or a miscarriage or worse, a stillborn have led to incredible trauma. And so I want us to talk about all of the above and maybe there’s some solutions or resources available to our listeners, but some are just joining in for the first time. Maybe we can start off by explaining what EFT is, because I know that’s one of your expertise, the modalities like you like to use and why you both have become involved with EFT.

Craig Weiner:

How about we started with, you’ve had some of our colleagues that are wonderful on the podcast, and so everybody describes it a little bit differently, has a little take on it. The emotional freedom techniques have been around for 35 years now. Quite a while. It was developed by a fellow named Gary Craig. It’s built on the shoulders of [inaudible 00:02:50] therapy and other types of psycho energetic techniques, et cetera. So what it’s come to be now that’s being very well documented and researched and validated is that it’s a form of what we’re referring to as a cognitive, somatic energetic approach. It involves what one thinks, one’s thoughts. It involves one’s emotions, it involves the body, it involves the energetic system. So it’s a form of tuning in, it’s a form of awareness and witnessing. It includes the somatic stimulation of different acupoints on the body that have been researched.

And so there are a variety of body of techniques that fall under what’s called EFT for self-regulating on one level when one is upset, stressed, anxious, fearful, et cetera, depressed, et cetera. So we can use it on ourselves as a self-regulating technique, which is really important. But also when done skillfully, especially with a trauma-informed EFT practitioner, is being able to then work with past experiences and traumatic and adverse memories that are affecting one’s current state of wellbeing. So there are a lot of mechanisms of being looked at about how it affects our hormone systems and our energy systems and the use of physiological mechanisms for how it all works. I don’t know that we’re going to need to get into that today so much, but when one uses EFT, the primary form of the physical and energetic stimulation is the tapping on the different points, the physical stimulation that looks something like this.

And that’s why most people call it tapping, but EFT is really much more than tapping because physical tapping can be done on all kinds of [inaudible 00:04:32] acupuncture. A lot of different forms can use a tapping stimulation. So maybe that’s just a beginning starting place. As far as how we came to it, well, your journey was certainly before mine.

Alina Frank:

So before I became an EFT practitioner and then an EFT trainer, and I studied with the founder Gary Craig. I had a doula practice in Washington DC and I helped senator’s daughters go through their experience of having a child and processing labor delivery and becoming a new mother. And that’s when I first got a hint of just how powerful the mind body connection really is. And I remembering one occasion where there was a woman who was scheduled to have a home birth and had an emergency C-section instead. And what happened was there were a lot of complications and she had postpartum blues, at least she hadn’t been diagnosed with postpartum depression. And the baby was really inability to thrive. I mean, it was really a challenge and she was suffering. And I thought I put her through a little meditation processing the birth.

And there were some comments that the surgeon was saying during the birth where she was expecting this wonderful, loving, home centered birth experience and she got a doctor who was talking about hockey. And when she was able to go through that meditation and ultimately forgive and release everything that she was holding onto about that experience, she got better immediately and so did her baby. And so I knew there was a connection. What brought me to EFT was my own experience of having a stillborn. And after the stillborn, I developed an autoimmune condition and I knew that the two were connected. And I spent 12 years trying to find something that would help me. And I came across EFT and it made a complete sense to me that what was happening was the unprocessed grief and trauma of that experience.

And that’s how I found EFT. I went on to become a practitioner and really I specialized in sex and intimacy and I had to work on that and my own history quite a bit. And I was able to ask for a divorce and then clearing out anything that prevented me from manifesting my ideal romantic partner. And then this guy stepped into my life and the rest is history.

Lorne Brown:

She’s pointing to Craig, not me by the way.

Alina Frank:

Yes. So that’s the history. And then Craig had asked me to speak about EFT in his chiropractic office and in a town of 786 people, I thought I knew everyone. And then lo and behold, when the timing was right and I had healed enough in that arena, he showed up. So that’s our story.

Craig Weiner:

And I was doing what you were doing, was pre podcast. They were live, I was for years as a chiropractor doing gatherings, presentations on a variety, wasn’t focused on fertility, I was focused on all different healthcare modalities, I’d been involved in many. And I had always been presenting different kinds of interventions, like what you’re doing and learning along the way. I’d heard about the EFT thing back then. I was pretty skeptical about it to be honest, but I didn’t know much. I just randomly decided to be skeptical about it because people were over the top saying how it could help everything under the sun, which makes me skeptical. I looked to see if there was anybody in my community that did this thing, there was one person. I invited that person to my office to speak to me in presentation. Life hasn’t been the same since I ended up marrying her.

Lorne Brown:

So it brought you together. And that similar history is because I learned EFT in the early 2000s. And like you Craig, I was embarrassed to use it at times. There wasn’t a lot of data then, now there’s some good data. But just some of the things that you would see doing this with people was pretty wild. Later on, more purposeful and you get more skilled at it. And in my practice, it’s one of the tools I like to use as part of my approach, what I call the conscious fertility work I do. It’s just one of my favorite modalities because of its ability to do that exposure therapy, as you shared, you activate that negative charge of promotion. There’s that cognitive restructuring and then the somatic tapping on acupuncture points. And you start to tie in some of the other research, polyvagal theory, Waking the Tiger’s Tail.

The book about emotions are trapped, get trapped in your body. The body keeps the score. I’m giving you guys all these book titles, but they’re showing that emotions, negative emotions can get trapped in the body and they create resistance. And we are part electrical systems. And when you have a lot of resistance in electrical system, the things don’t flow, energy doesn’t flow. And when you lower the resistance energy flows. And I often wonder or think that EFT, because it can lower the resistance on these negative charges in the body. So I was talking about those books. Body Keeps the Score, Awaken the Tiger. The idea is that these traumas get trapped in your body. And tapping on these acupuncture points is interesting. A lot of these points, these sinu channels is how you get to release because it’s in the tissue. And lowering the resistance then means more energy flows. In Chinese medicine we say chi flow resistance, we’d call chi stagnation. And when there’s flow, there’s health.

And so there’s many ways to describe it. I’m just really curious to see how you guys are using it in your practice. And then Alina, you shared something where you said it and I just want to know if it’s okay to go back. You talked about you had a big trauma in your life, you lost a child. And I’m curious, what was the process with EFT and where are you today? Because Eckhart Tolle used to say or he says in his book, when you find that presence, you can be at peace in an unhappy situation. It’s not like it’s gone, the memory’s gone, but it doesn’t create this incredible emotional trigger inside of you. So I’m curious because there are listeners here that have had miscarriages and there are listeners here that have had losses like you have and I just to speak to them because it’s not something I’ve experienced, so I can’t go there with them.

Alina Frank:

Right, right, right. And before we came on air, I was listening to how wonderfully you were describing your approach of being conscious and how consciousness work is a big part of your philosophy. I felt like my stillborn was particularly traumatic because I had gone through a year of preparation. I had done all kinds of cleanses. I had changed my diet radically. I was meditating every day. I was doing special kundalini yoga for the pregnancy and for labor delivery. I had my guru at the time come up with a special meditation for each of the trimesters. And I knew the minute I got pregnant, I could feel it energetically that I had conceived. And then lo and behold, what? No, this can’t be happening. I’m losing this child. I’m went in for, was having contractions, I went in to get a sonogram and they couldn’t find the heartbeat.

And I had to go through delivering a child who wasn’t alive. And that was so upsetting to me and so traumatic on so many different levels, including being angry at God. And so when you asked me what was that like? It was layer upon layer upon layer. And it wasn’t just one moment, it was many moments. It was the moment that my milk came in at the hospital and I didn’t have a child to feed. It was the moment that I was told I would have to stay in the maternity ward with all the rest of the new moms and the babies and all of that surrounding me. It was there when my partner who was on a business trip in New York at the time that it happened and he wasn’t there to support me. So there were all of these different events that made up for that trauma constellation that I had to work through.

But I really can say without a shadow of a doubt that on the other side of it, I feel it was my greatest gift because it led me to my life’s purpose, which was to show others this work. But I was in deep denial about what was going on and the level of grief that I was feeling because our society pretty much says get on with it, try again. You go out and you have another baby and you’re young, no big deal. And so we really don’t spend enough time educating people about what it is to experience trauma and that, I don’t know, as a single person that hasn’t had trauma. And so we need to honor that that’s part of what we do, how we grow and evolve. There’s post-traumatic growth as well as post-traumatic disorder and dysfunction. So part of our evolution is to go through some of these challenging things, but it’s how you deal with them, how you process them, looking for the gifts without doing a lot of what we see culturally as spiritual bypassing and toxic positivity.

Lorne Brown:

And so that was your experience then, you took what was a traumatic experience and post-traumatic stress disorder and then through your work, and EFT was part of that work, you transformed that into post-traumatic growth syndrome.

Alina Frank:

That’s what-

Craig Weiner:

It sounds awful simple when you say it that way.

Lorne Brown:

But it wasn’t simple.

Craig Weiner:

But it’s not layered and years and it didn’t happen quickly.

Alina Frank:

But when I did find EFT I had tried everything right up to that point. And so EFT was the one that got it, like you said, out of my body, out of my tissues, out of my energy system.

Craig Weiner:

Let me just ask you, I’m taking a step back from that, which I don’t know, the period of time after the stillborn, but before the diagnosis, were you in living the traumatic loss? What was that like for you or did it go underground? What was that?

Alina Frank:

Yeah, it was totally underground. It’s just my nature and the way that I’m programmed. And we can go back to conditioning, how I was raised in early childhood that just suck it up and soldier on.

Craig Weiner:

You didn’t develop the condition of PTSD, you certainly suffered the trauma and had effects, but just to elucidate further, mostly how it showed up for you was not an ongoing grief.

Alina Frank:

No.

Craig Weiner:

Now was an ongoing depression for you whereas for others that might be. For you it showed up and it manifested physically in a condition that you sensed intuitively was the manifestation of the unresolved grief and trauma of that. And then spent years and years trying to address that physical connection to the emotional trauma unsuccessfully until, for you, EFT was the unlocking because then you ended up having to go back to and finally really revisiting and healing so much of those pieces of what happened.

Alina Frank:

Right, exactly. That was the process.

Lorne Brown:

So Alina, intuitively do you think that you developed autoimmune conditions because of all this negative charges, emotions trapped in your body? That was your intuitive?

Alina Frank:

Yeah, I was diagnosed six months after the stillborn.

Lorne Brown:

And you don’t have to answer this, but do you still have those conditions now? Have they resolved as you resolved some of the emotional stuff from your life?

Alina Frank:

Yeah, so I am asymptomatic.

Lorne Brown:

You’re living physically free of all those symptoms, which is what you wanted, right?

Alina Frank:

Absolutely. And went on to have two beautiful children. I’ve assisted a number of women with infertility trauma and like you said, pregnancy loss is related to that. So we can get into how that shows up for women.

Lorne Brown:

Yeah, I’d like to know that. And also your style of EFT, I’m curious. I usually share that when I do conscious work in my practice, I’m blessed that I’m an acupuncturist so I get to use some acupuncture with my EFT, so I get to help elicit that parasympathetic and get people sometimes in a commerce state, which can be helpful. But I do often say or say, are you willing to be uncomfortable? Because with EFT, you’re not doing a bypass, you actually have to be in these unpleasant emotions, which isn’t easy. And is that your experience with how you guys train and use EFT in your practices?

Alina Frank:

And I’ll say yes, and the more trauma informed and trauma educated I became, I realized that you didn’t necessarily have to feel it hard to heal it. There are a number of gentle techniques and distancing approaches that really help, especially when we’re dealing and processing serious trauma.

Craig Weiner:

And I have to imagine as an acupuncturist and anybody that’s working with trauma mindfully and successfully, there’s often the desire by somebody that’s had that to rip it out and be done with it and move on from it. And I totally sympathize and have compassion for the desire to be done with the source of suffering. However, the healing of trauma from many of the authors that you named, and many more, says that the only way to really heal from trauma is with an environment of safety, is at a slower pace. And so there is often discomfort of being with and being present with and dealing with and acknowledging what’s there. Our job isn’t to make it harder, our job to rip off the bandaid, our job to dive into the worst thing that happened right away. In fact, those would be the opposite. That doesn’t provide a sense of safety.

So sometimes as somebody in the healing facilitation position, whatever that role is or profession is, working with trauma often requires education and explanation of the pacing and the timing. Because you’re working with the person on a conscious level, but you’re also working with less conscious parts of them that are tuning into how safe they feel given this environment with you as a male that may look like the obstetrician that they had or things that are often unconscious as well. So always keeping our energetic pulse meter on for how is their body responding to the conversation to what we’re talking about. And maybe it’s happening too fast, we need to slow it down and we need to provide some more distance or come from another approach. So absolutely it can be uncomfortable, but not necessarily painful, but uncomfortable.

Lorne Brown:

That’s key. That’s why I like to use the word, are you willing to be uncomfortable or are you okay with unpleasant feelings? And I think we’re aligned this way that things happen slow and steady. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.

Alina Frank:

Yes.

Lorne Brown:

In my practice often we use some modalities like inner child work. My style is I don’t look for the problem in inner child work. People are like, we could go look for it. I’m like, no, I’m trained as a clinical therapist. So sometimes when we’re working on a current event and we find the feeling, it’s as simple thing as I’ll just ask just like when that’s how much I search, that’s it. And sometimes something pops up and if it doesn’t, we stay with the current event. You said something about being trauma informed and I’m curious and it’s a good point to mention now, do you guys have training with that? Because there’s practitioners listening and I just thought we could add that to the show notes because I think this idea of trauma is becoming very common now.

Gabor Mate latest book, the Myth of Normal talks a lot about this and we’re hearing more and more about how a lot of the addictions and a lot of the problems we see today are a result of trauma. Big T trauma, Alina, you had big T trauma, doesn’t matter how sensitive you were born into this world or how not sensitive, that’s going to affect you. And then there’s small T trauma where some people are really sensitive and they were picked up late from daycare and now they have abandonment issues, right?

Alina Frank:

Right.

Craig Weiner:

Yeah.

Lorne Brown:

I rambled for a second there. I’m going to bring her back in. Do you guys offer a material on this about being trauma informed? Do you have any offerings that we can let our listeners know right now about that?

Craig Weiner:

So, great question. It’s actually interesting. One of my colleagues this morning, a psychotherapist said, I was speaking with somebody lately and said it’s more important that we’re, maybe we should call it self-regulation informed rather than trauma informed. I said that’s an interesting take. I don’t know that I agree completely, but I understand the point. As facilitators, I think being trauma informed for me means that I am always aware of when something is happening for somebody where trauma may have played a role in why they’re acting that way, why they’re feeling that way, why they’re behaving that way, why they made the choices they did that way as Gabor says, the clothes you wear to be trauma informed are often a result of trauma. And I remember the first time I heard that, I thought, okay, that’s getting a little much now, don’t you think?

Well no, I don’t think that because whether I wear something that’s tight-fitting, where I wear something that’s bright and showy and gathering of attention, all the choices I make and how I present myself to the world are based on how I feel about who I am and the way the world might perceive me, which is often the result of childhood trauma. So being trauma-informed, I don’t think that there’s an endpoint. I think that it’s an ongoing source of understanding and perspective that helps me to have more compassion for myself and others and understand why people are doing the best they can at any one moment, even if they can’t see that. It raises the specter of the importance of the ongoing sense of creating rapport and safety for healing to happen because trauma requires that physically, energetically. The work that we teach right now to practitioners and therapists and licensed mental health care because it’s really through a tapping lens.

There is a pre-retirement of having some foundational EFT work done. So when you go to tappingoutoftrauma.com, the name of the course we teach, there is some prerequisites just because a lot of it is EFT infused and therefore teaching to somebody, teaching to a group in which 20% of the people don’t know EFT, it’s not. So people first come through an EFT training, us and other different organizations that we talked about, Peter and Dawson and other, they can come through any of the organizations with the foundational EFT knowledge. And then we have a tapping out a trauma course, that my vision was and the EFT world was to bring in the work of Peter and Bessel and Steve Porges and all that to integrate more of those, not generic, but non EFT trauma understandings and methodologies and bring them in. And then we start to work specifically and another level of medical trauma and sexual trauma. Each of them have their own flavors and approaches.

Lorne Brown:

Oh good. And let’s just say that website one more time so we know where to find that on.

Craig Weiner:

Yeah, it’s tappingoutoftrauma.com, and if you go on there, there’s archives of a lot of the interviews that we’ve done on EFT trauma and veterans and trauma on grief and trauma on. So a lot of different topics, there’s lots of free interviews there as well.

Lorne Brown:

So since you both had, there’s some personal experience and then professional working with women and men for fertility challenges and they have stress, can you talk a little bit about how you see the connection between stress and infertility or if you think there is one?

Craig Weiner:

Good question. Because on one hand, if you just look at the published research, it’s not an absolute yes or no.

Alina Frank:

Right, there’s not a direct line that you say, oh, that equals that.

Craig Weiner:

So there’s inferences. I mean, for example, I was just doing some research before the interview just to see what else might be out there and new. And there was a study I was looking at that was, I think it was about 350 women that were getting treatment for infertility and half of them suffered from signs of depression. Three quarters of them suffered from signs of anxiety, not necessarily diagnosed. And so they’re looking at trying to make these relationships between why such high numbers and percentages of people that were coming in for infertility had psycho-emotional stress related symptoms that was happening in their lives. And so they start to look at, all right, well what are the things that are happening that we can correlate and we can look to, for example, high levels of stress associated with decreased levels of estrogen and progesterone.

We can start to look at high levels of stress associated with cortisol, which starts to affect the HPA access, which affects the genital [inaudible 00:26:10] the genital system, the reproductive system. We can start to look at the relationship with increased cortisol levels with follicular development, follicle development. So there’s a lot of connections between the physiological sequelae of stress and things that don’t support ease of fertility. But there’s not a ipso facto, I mean for many of us it’s obvious we can start to see the connections between stress and delayed periods. You can start to look, so many of these are so well known from a western medical model still being clearly articulated I would say.

Lorne Brown:

Yeah. So it’s not a straight line and it’s hard to measure because what we’re learning is it’s not the event, it’s not the stressor, but it’s how the person experiences the event. And so a lot of the research is do you have stress at home work, all that. It’s how the person is going to experience it. And there are some studies showing stress shows a delay in pregnancy and they were measuring cortisol levels. And then I don’t remember the other biomarker, but there was another biomarker they’re looking at through salivary testing. And if you’re hiring these biomarkers of signs of stress that they did see a delay into pregnancy.

Craig Weiner:

Might have been some of the immunoglobulin, like immunoglobulin A is one that’s tested in salivary. There’s one thing that you said there that I just want to really underline. It’s not the stress as an objective measure that’s happening for people, but it’s their subjective perception. And on one hand that’s really useful and helpful to know because if we look at EFT, two people got fired from a job, two people were left by their spouse, whatever it was, and one person has a significant amount of resilience and capacity to be able to move forward and another one doesn’t. When we start to look at EFT, I’m not necessarily working with what happened happened, the stillborn happened, but it’s one’s relationship to that experience, to those memories, to those events, as you say, that EFT can help. So it’s not like I can take away the stillborn happening memory, that’s still there, but it’s the relationship to it. It’s the wisdom that’s gained to it. It’s the residual negative emotions or obsessive thinking about, those are the things that EFT can help so beautifully with.

Lorne Brown:

Yeah, I find it helps with emotional resilience because you now have tools to transform. I use words like transform, metabolize, integrate these experiences, these emotions, and you can make this even more practical for the audience. Like your period comes or you have a negative IVS cycle or you get pregnant and it’s chemical only and you don’t make it to the ultrasound. I mean the list can go on. You guys do see in the research some connection though between stress and fertility. It is cyclical because infertility leads to stress. I always think of stress just in general on the system makes all diseases, can aggravate all diseases. There goes that resistance goes up and so we lose that balance of homeostasis. Joe Dispenza says it nicely, another teacher of consciousness, when you’re stressed, your resources are being mobilized for survival. You don’t have as much resources available for healing, creativity, reproduction.

And then when you’re in homeostasis and you feel safe or you said it perfectly, that’s the feeling. Do you feel safe? No longer stress or no longer alarmed, the resistance goes down, then resources become more available for health, creativity and reproduction. So is that how you understand it? Because that’s my way of understanding the stress infertility connection as well.

Craig Weiner:

That’s what helped me when I first was skeptical about EFT, it was like, how can EFT help all these different things? It didn’t make sense until I looked at what do they all have in common? Well, if I perceive my relationship through the lens of feeling stressed about it, if I perceive my work, my vocation through, if I perceive my health, if the same pair of glasses is all, they all make me stressed. So if I can develop a tool or system or approach that decreases my stress levels to that, no matter what I’m looking at, whether it’s my health, my relationship, my work, my money relationship, my pregnancy attempts, et cetera, then my body has a greater capacity to start to heal as it’s not being diverted toward mobilizing survival, all the other ways that it can be.

Lorne Brown:

And then just going from stress or trauma, just how you’re seeing this in your practice then and how you’re supporting men and women and just any tips for our listeners using EFT and then maybe we can go into the distinction between a facilitator and doing self EFT as well. So let’s make it practical for our users and our listeners. Practical in the sense that there’s different styles, like in my practice usually they’re getting some acupuncture and laser when I’m treating reproductive health. And then the conscious work that I bring in with it, to me the EFT I’m using it as just a tool in my, I have a system of what I call notice, accept, choose again. And I may start with the Byron Katie inquiry for perception shift and we’ll ask questions and then when they go into that third question, how do you feel when you think that thought often then I’ll use that to bring an EFT and then I’ll EFT the feeling. And then I’ll come back into the Byron Katie inquiry.

Some of you may not be familiar with Byron Katie, but her four questions and then I continue on. So I just use psyche, EFT, Marissa’s Rapid Transformational Therapy, all these tools that I have, hypnosis, I have my notice exceptions again, and I’m just bringing in tools as the guide, as the facilitator to help the individual. They’re doing all the work and the transformation and I’m just bringing in whatever tools I have to help with that. That you talked about at the beginning, Craig, about we have that exposure. We’re restructuring cognitively and we’re using somatic. So I’m use body tools. So I’m using all of this to support them. I’m curious as somebody who like your focus is EFT, is it like an hour of EFT that somebody’s doing?

Alina Frank:

It’s been a few years since I’ve worked with clients because my focus is now on mentoring, training and certifying practitioners. But when I did work with clients, it was for a minimum of six sessions. And so the first initial sessions, it was a way to have them experience EFT, have a good experience of EFT, see how their body responded to EFT and doing that safely and building rapport along the way. So around this particular issue, it’d be more about how do you feel about having this issue? And so that was the safest place to go. And then as we went on, I would get their history of pregnancy, their menstrual cycle, any sexual injury, which I found to be a key component with infertility. And then doing things like addressing what we call in EFT, psychological reversal, also known out there as secondary gain.

If you imagine yourself pregnant and you imagine you going around for nine months carrying a child and then going through labor and delivery, do you have any fears? Do you have any concerns or does all that feel great? All right, now imagine that you’re pregnant and you’re going through labor and delivery and you have a child and you’re surrounded by your friends and your family member and your significant other. Is that all good? Is that all great? Or is there talk, is there negative thoughts that come from those people? Is there some resistance?

Craig Weiner:

Is he really going to be there? Am I going to be doing this all on my own?

Alina Frank:

Exactly.

Craig Weiner:

What’s going to happen if da, da, da, da? So we want to think about just the joy. Yes, I want to get pregnant, what I want, I want, I want, but tuning in it’s not always only positive.

Lorne Brown:

I consider this, these are often unconscious programs or beliefs that people may not be aware of, like in the work, curious if you have found this. But sometimes it comes up that they realize they’re having this baby for in-laws.

Alina Frank:

Yes.

Lorne Brown:

Or their partner and they actually don’t even want a child.

Alina Frank:

Yes.

Lorne Brown:

Or they’re afraid to have a miscarriage because their mother had a miscarriage or they actually already had a miscarriage or they had a parent that was abusive. They’re afraid that their partner’s going to be like their dad.

Craig Weiner:

Yeah, that iceberg, the part that’s floating above the water, just a small part usually, which is a lot floating underneath that. It’s not necessarily conscious just as you said, but it’s in the safe exploration that’s facilitated that allows some safety to be able to say those things out loud. And even for the subconscious to bring them.

Alina Frank:

Right, exactly. When the psyche feels safe, it just reveals those things that are connected. Even something like seemingly unrelated of how guilt, still having guilt over an abortion.

Lorne Brown:

That is a very common one. Guilt and regret because they’ve had an abortion, now they’re having trouble getting pregnant.

Alina Frank:

Exactly.

Lorne Brown:

We have an alignment here because I share my structure of notice, except choose again, I have this structure of using my tools, but it’s really CNAC, choose and then if the negative feeling comes up, go into notice, accept, choose again. So I usually start off like you is, well, can we imagine what it’s going to be like and just let them dream about having the baby? Some people can dream and love it and that’s the work. But most people, something comes up, a thought, a negative thought, why they can’t have it or why they’re worried about it. And then that’s where this work, I call conscious work comes in and then all we’re doing is cleaning up the field. We’re cleaning up these negative beliefs.

And as I shared, I think of it as we’re lowering the resistance to chi stagnation, so there’s more flow. And one of our episodes with Dr. Ryan Dean Lewis, she talks about the Chinese medicine idea of fertility requires receptivity. And so when you lower this resistance, when you release these emotional charges, you lower the resistance, you allow receptivity. And so this is that, the sage like traditions like Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, Buddhism, that I think is coming back into favor in our day and age.

Craig Weiner:

Adding onto to that, I like where science and spirituality mix. And if you take Dr Porges’ work and probably behavioral work, it’s in that state that when we can reach and stay in a ventral vagal state more often, that I can be in a place of play and imagination and resourcefulness and receptivity that when we’re in survival and fear and reactivity, that’s very far away. That’s not an easily achievable state. So when we do all the things that we’re talking about and using all the tools that you’re mentioning and we’re talking about and clearing out the field of the past trauma, I can be more present. I can have access to those resources. I’m more open and willing to explore. I can start to be in a state in which my system can be more receptive emotionally, physically, energetically, pregnancy wise. So I love that the phrase of receptivity there because I think it’s metaphorically on target.

Lorne Brown:

And Alina, we interrupted what you were sharing about how you used to work with somebody. And so I heard six sessions at least. So six sessions to get things going. Are you giving them, are they doing stuff on their own? So do they learn to do some self-care on the home or is it always just with you as a facilitator?

Alina Frank:

I would assign, I would teach everyone how to do just basic EFT on themselves, but also between sessions, homework could be things around noticing. For example, what happens when you have sex with your partner and you’re going through infertility treatments because the lack of connection, the lack of deep, soulful, meaningful, I’m here for you, we’re connected, goes out the window with infertility treatments many times. And so it’s like how can you bring that closeness together? What is it that you’re going to need as a unit? What would you like to experience instead of just the clinical side of things, the homework can involve things like that. Noticing and dreaming and what would you like?

Lorne Brown:

You’re reminding me because so many of the programs that people have are similar. Everybody thinks they’re so, we all think we’re unique and special, like guilt and shame. I haven’t met anybody that doesn’t have guilt and shame as one of the programs. The story looks different. But you just said something about the intimacy with your partner, and here’s one that’s come up and I want to share it because people are going like, oh, it’s not just me. There are so many men and women have shared that having intercourse, orgasming, they feel guilty and shame. Two reasons, one is a religious background, so they’ve been told sex is dirty. The other one, and often it’s for men, but women as well. They’ve been trying not to get pregnant so long that now when they’re having sex with their spouse, it’s still, even though it’s their spouse, there’s a program that they’re feeling guilt around orgasming inside the woman for the man or for the woman receiving, having been orgasm in.

So just to share with you guys, we’re more of the same than different. And so guilt and shame, and I don’t know if you’ve seen that in people you’ve worked with, but that’s something that comes up and it’s just amazing, right?

Alina Frank:

Yeah. I’m just remembering a case of someone that was struggling with fertility and we came upon a memory of her being in parochial school. And when they were discussing menstruating, the nun who was teaching this said, you need to think of it as your womb crying tears because it is not fertile with a child. And so I mean crazy warped connection that just came out of nowhere. Another one where the source of infertility, when we went through seeing yourself pregnant, she said, “Well, I have this thing about vomiting. I really have this feeling I can’t eat too much because I feel full and that might make me vomit, but I have this phobia, phobic response when I see someone vomit.” And I say, “Well, isn’t that interesting, then you wouldn’t want to deal with morning sickness or baby spit up.”

Lorne Brown:

Right, right.

Alina Frank:

And so those things that we don’t think are connected are there. We’re talking about belief systems, it could be as simple as a belief system that I never get what I really want. That could have happened in third grade when you didn’t get-

Craig Weiner:

It has nothing to do with pregnancy.

Lorne Brown:

It’s interesting because when I heard you say something, and again from my experience you had said that oftentimes they’re talking about scenarios early in their life that has nothing to do with fertility or pregnancy. And so my session starts off with the fertility and pregnancy when we do conscious fertility work, but I can say by the third session, sometimes earlier, but no later than the third session, we are no longer working on the fertility issue. They have found something earlier in their life. Now the story looks different, but the feeling and the belief program is the same. And when you distill it down, whether you’re man or woman, whether you’re rich or poor, whether you’re prestigious success or not, it really distills down to I’m not enough. I’m not smart enough, I’m not pretty enough, I’m not thin enough, I’m not lovable enough. It really distills down and doesn’t matter I have people on my table worth several hundred millions of dollars and I have people that are trying to buy food and pay rent and I’m not enough.

Craig Weiner:

No, it’s the human condition. That is the core belief that’s just at the heart of so many of the variations, but somehow I’m not enough. That almost always forms in the first five to six years of life that as you said so beautifully and aligned with our work is you begin with somebody with what they’re ready, what they’re presenting with and what the current complaint is and how it’s affecting them. But then hopefully within a few sessions, safety and rapport has been established. They’re starting to, their psyche is starting to offer deeper roots of where this problem started. They haven’t necessarily made the connection that they have anything to do with each other. And often these beliefs, as we call them, don’t feel like belief, they feel like facts. I mean, they’re not experienced like a belief, they’re experienced like, no, that’s true. That’s actually who I am or what I can and can’t do. You don’t understand.

Lorne Brown:

Yeah. When you have that program, you will find all the evidence you need to support that belief from program, always.

Craig Weiner:

Exactly. And the core of whether we’re using EFT or an associated technique called matrix three imprinting, we’re always going back to those earlier times and experiences that were big T, little T adverse, significant emotional events. Because in those times when we’re young, very core decisions were made about the world is safe, I’m safe, it’s not, I’m lovable, I’m not. And those very, it’s like the brain really concretizes and hard-wires those perspectives in that then of course get revalidated over and over through a lifetime that reinforces the truth that that’s just true. That’s the way the world is and I can’t even see outside of that.

And then they affect things like our health and our ability to get pregnant, et cetera. Never realizing the connections they make. And that’s the difference I’d say for most people between the skillful self-regulation and self-tapping that’s beautiful in the moment and really can be incredible first aid work for relieving stress and anxiety and pain. But for often seeing that which we don’t see on our own, skillful practitioner, mirroring, witnessing, allows that safety for my psyche to start to bring forth material that I didn’t even think was connected to this. And I know you have to know that because that’s what happens.

Lorne Brown:

Yeah. Thinking of one of the authors we talked about earlier, Eckhart Tolle who wrote the book, the Power of Now, EFT to me is a how to now tool. To me it gets you into the present moment. It gets you out of the regret in the past and the future. Get into that feeling and then gives you something to do, to tap on it. And then now you’re in that presence and in that present moment, that’s when you have the ability to consciously choose to either remove yourself, change or improve. And he says, if you can’t remove yourself or change or improve the situation, if you can continue to surrender what is, except what is, that doesn’t mean you have to like it, it doesn’t mean that you resign to it or you prefer it just in that moment this is what is, I feel this way. You can be at peace in that unhappy situation.

Alina Frank:

And a perfect example of that, which I’m sure you’ve heard about in your practice, when you hear these stories of people that give up, okay, I’m done. And then they get pregnant or we’re going to start the adoption process and boom, they get pregnant.

Lorne Brown:

When they fully surrender and not try anymore.

Alina Frank:

Exactly.

Lorne Brown:

Normal resistance.

Alina Frank:

Yes.

Lorne Brown:

Here’s something interesting on that. So I have a metaphor for that. To me it’s like, because we’re asking you to surrender, can you surrender? And so then what happens is they pretend that they’re giving up to get the baby, but that doesn’t-

Craig Weiner:

I’m surrendering now. I’m going to go surrender.

Lorne Brown:

No more acupuncture. I’m not going to take my supplements. Okay, we’ve got to go to the beach and we’ve got to get drunk, right? Because I’m surrendering.

Craig Weiner:

I’m surrendering.

Lorne Brown:

That’s not surrendering. That surrendering is because they’ve been brought to their knees, so they had to surrender. You’re throwing your arms up in the air and you’re saying, go ahead, help me. That kind of surrender. What we’re sharing is that you can surrender with purpose, with intention. So it doesn’t have to be suffering. It can be a joyful experience versus being brought to your knees. And the metaphor I’d like to share is you’re in the shallow end, your arms are going all over the place and you’re exhausted because you think you’re drowning in the shallow end because your knees are bent, you’re getting exhausted, and eventually you just can’t do it anymore and you stop trying to stay above water.

And as you just finally give up, your knees hit the bottom of the shallow end and you realize your nose is above the water and you can breathe. That’s the suffering part of surrendering to give up. We talk about they quit, they give up. The intentional surrendering is I’m in the shallow end, I’m panicking because I’m in the shallow end, but right away I realize I’m in the shallow end and I stand up. So EFT is you standing up, in my opinion. It’s allowing you to stand up in the shallow end versus having to go months or years until you finally just quit. And then you have surrender, and then you have receptivity.

Alina Frank:

Yeah, that’s great.

Craig Weiner:

I think so inherent in what you’re saying is even at the foundation, like in every round that we’re tapping, there’s a measure, depending on the phrase that we’re using of you know what, I’m pissed, I feel this guilt, whatever it is that we’re experiencing, and yet I still accept myself.

Alina Frank:

Or accept this [inaudible 00:47:26] right now.

Craig Weiner:

Or I accept that’s how I’m feeling right now because that’s how I’m feeling right now. So the phraseology may change depending on the moment. I may not be able to accept myself with the shame, but I can accept that I’m at least feeling that feeling right now. Or I’m open to the possibility that I can accept myself someday, even if I can’t right now. And so that repetition of naming that elephant in the room and that’s saying, even though there’s an elephant in my room, I still accept that there is.

And so I think that that witnessing and that self-compassion and that bringing to the present moment, I was just working with somebody the other day goes, how come when you do it works so much better. And so that’s not necessarily all the case, but a person often holds so much of their own self-criticism and self-judgment that I need to feel bad in order to do better thing, and I don’t hold that for them. I can hold a space that I can accept you just as you are in this moment without judgment. And often that’s not as easy at first for them to get to that place. But when they do, there’s a place that’s moving towards surrender, but it’s at least it’s acceptance. It’s like, okay, yes I am. That’s what I feel.

Lorne Brown:

I want to unpack what you said there because that’s the difference between having a facilitator do it and then you’re doing the self EFT, is that when you do it on your own, it’s easy to have the judgment and therefore not accept. But while you’re doing it with a facilitator like yourself, Craig, they start to sense that you’re not judging them because you’re not. And the words and how you’re facilitating, they start to feel that safe space and that because you’re not judging them, you create the space where they stop the judgment as well and that allows them to be into that acceptance. So I never realized why, because people in my practice too say it works better often when you do it with me than when I do it on my own. I still say, you got to do it on your own.

I like how you said this because you just brought awareness why that’s helping. Because I’m not judging them. I don’t believe in their story. I used to think, I still think this part, it’s like we’re both in glass jars and I have my label on the outside of me, so I can’t read my label. And you have a glass jar and yours on it, you can’t read yours. So we need each other. So that’s why you have to have facilitator sometimes to read your label for you to help you. But I really like what you just made me realize is because you’re holding the space and you’re not judging them, energetically or just they get it, and that gives them the ability or permission to accept themselves. And when we do it on our own, it’s easy to get that inner negative talk going where we’re not really accepting ourselves. So you just gave me a hallelujah moment.

Craig Weiner:

Happy to help with that. Yeah. Thank you for bringing so many of the pieces together too. I love the integration of when we draw it together, the different understandings, the different systems, the different leaders in our field. They all come through us as practitioners and we integrate them how we do and the analogies and the stories we tell and the metaphors, and I enjoy yours just as much.

Lorne Brown:

Well, and I know you guys use it on yourselves every day, as do I, right? We’re walking the talk as we share, facilitate and teach. Alina, so I understand at least six, often more for some people, but six. So it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Your sessions, would they be normally like an hour? Is that a normal time for a session?

Alina Frank:

Yeah, typically an hour.

Lorne Brown:

And do you, because some people do positive tapping afterwards, well, how do you do it? Is it working on the negative charges? Do you do a positive tap for people as well? I’m curious.

Alina Frank:

No, because I think that it’s too easy to fool yourself into thinking that, okay, we’re done. And I also feel that our natural state of being is to be healthy and safe and intelligent and creative. I think that things get in the way. And so as long as we address those things, our true nature can come up to the surface. So I don’t think we need all of that.

Lorne Brown:

You just bring down the resistance and then they’re good.

Alina Frank:

Exactly.

Lorne Brown:

Then the flow is back, then there’s a receptivity, right? You removed the resistance. So now things start to flow.

Craig Weiner:

I like the story you told with a piece of glass. I think it’s a beautiful metaphor.

Alina Frank:

If you cut yourself with a piece of glass and it’s still embedded in your hand, you’re not sitting there going, oh, the loving skin is so wonderful and knows what to do. You just have to take the piece of glass out and allow the body to do the magic. And so that’s what we’re doing is getting rid of that interference.

Lorne Brown:

So you pull out the glass. As you wrap up, maybe my listeners will find this funny as you, my son, my training, clinical therapy, the work I do, of course he’s my child, so he’s gone the other way. I only like conventional western stuff. He’s a teenager, he’s at summer camp. The doctor there I know well is a medical doctor, but he’s into the whole heart work and chakras and he takes one of the seven-year-old boys who sprained his ankle to the infirmary and the doctor looks at the little boy and says, “Can you bring up love in your heart?” “Yeah.” “Make it more.” “Yeah.” “Now I want you to take that love and direct it down to your ankle.” Okay. So he does that and he goes, “Okay, in three hours if your ankle doesn’t feel better, come back and see me.” And my son just shakes his head and leaves. He goes, “I can’t believe this.” He goes, “This is a medical doctor?”

Craig Weiner:

Where’s that cap? I want it.

Lorne Brown:

And I tried to explain to my son, I go, there was nothing for the child to do for his ankle anyhow. If it was bad in three hours, great. But I go intention and he was like, because it’s so reminded him of the work I do at that age. He was just like, ah.

Craig Weiner:

I mean our teens went through the same thing.

Alina Frank:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Craig Weiner:

Teenagers, EFT did not exist for the gap between this age and this age. It was [inaudible 00:53:19] Until there wasn’t anymore. And then all of a sudden, then their girlfriend, their boyfriend.

Alina Frank:

Not my girlfriend.

Craig Weiner:

Right [inaudible 00:53:28].

Alina Frank:

Happy with this friend is got problems with his [inaudible 00:53:30].

Craig Weiner:

Yeah. Yeah. So that’s okay. They’re going through their teenage time.

Alina Frank:

Yeah, that’s healthy.

Lorne Brown:

As we wrap up, is there anything you want to share with the listeners and then anything we can put in the show notes as well, but just something to share with them, whether it’s a resource or a story or anything that you thought, I hadn’t asked that you thought would be important to share with our audience?

Alina Frank:

No, I think that if people want to check out the EFT training that we do, just go to efttappingtraining.com or tappingoutoftrauma.com. If they’re looking for some of the science, we created a documentary and go to the scienceoftapping.org if it’s something you’re interested in.

Lorne Brown:

Yeah. Perfect. All right.

Craig Weiner:

And one of the things we do is Alina trains a lot of practitioners for working with intimacy and sexuality. So we’re always a good resource if you’re looking for a practitioner in your area who’s somebody who works with this in my area or is licensed or can work on Zoom. So we have a lot of resources that we’ll refer people to when appropriate.

Alina Frank:

And now you’re one and you’re not too far from us.

Craig Weiner:

No.

Alina Frank:

Go up to meet you one day.

Craig Weiner:

Would love next time we’re in Vancouver to connect.

Lorne Brown:

Yeah, so off camera, we found out that they were in my city in Vancouver. We don’t live too far away, so we are definitely going to meet up in person for sure.

Craig Weiner:

That’s wonderful.

Lorne Brown:

I love that. So thank you very much Craig and Alina for joining us today and thank you for our listeners for tuning into another episode of the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Speaker 4:

If you’re looking for support to grow your family, contact ACU Balance Wellness Center. At ACU Balance, they help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low level laser therapy, fertility acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the ACU Balance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to acubalance.ca. That’s A-C-U balance.ca.

Lorne Brown:

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne Brown official. That’s Instagram, Lorne Brown official, or you can visit my websites lornebrown.com and acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.