Hey there Friends of Eden! It is pretty common for me to talk about inner healing and its importance to our spiritual walk, but today I want to hit it from a slightly different angle. My friend Grace recently contacted me because she has been working as an Emotional Healing and Spiritual Coach. She knows I am a strong supporter of inner healing, so she wanted me to try it out and let you all know what the experience was like when working with her, what it did for me, and how you can take advantage of her services too. I’m always up for learning new things in the inner healing arena, so agreed to give it a try. In the interest of fairness to those in my life, please keep in mind that I’m being vulnerable about inner healing issues which at times may negatively reflect on other people in my life—but this has as much to do with my own perceptions or misperceptions of them as it does with how they have treated me. It isn’t my intent to dishonor anyone by writing about this, but help you see how very-real life issues can be successfully prayed-through and healed to bring freedom.
Before I go into how my session went, let me tell you about EPT ™. According to Grace’s website, WhenYouNeedGrace.com, this therapy uses a combination of forgiveness and positive affirmations (another way of saying that is positive declarations/statements) to help us heal and walk in greater freedom. The body stores trauma and pain on a cellular level, which we are often unaware of, and EPT ™ helps release those negative emotions and helps us create new, more life-giving patterns. While some could be leery of this as some kind of “new age” technique, let me remind you that forgiveness is about as Christian as it gets, and choosing life-giving confessions with our words is an age-old biblical principle which we can find echoed in Proverbs 18:21 which says “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat of its fruit.” In other words, the things we say, affirmations, declarations, and positive statements, have the ability to release life to us while negative statements, complaining, and grumbling all will release death to us in some manner. The benefit of working with Grace is that she uses these methods to help uncover hidden things in the heart. Proverbs 20:5 says, “The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out,” and Grace is definitely a woman of deep insight into the human heart. If you want to read more about EPT ™, how it works, and look at some common questions and answers, go to Grace’s About EPT page here. Now that we’ve got that covered, on to my session!
When Grace had first approached me, I recognized that I needed to identify a somewhat discrete problem, something that I thought could be addressed in a single session. While this isn’t necessary for everyone, in this particular set of circumstances I have already been working with someone consistently over time, so I didn’t want to pick an issue we were already working on. I wanted to choose something separate so I could more readily identify a difference after a single session. As I was thinking about what to choose in the week leading up to the session, I was talking with a very close friend and what came up during that conversation was me hearing myself say “Who I am is not okay.” When I heard myself say that, I felt like the Holy Spirit was putting his finger on the issue and showing me both a deep heart issue of mine, as well as something that I could more directly work on with Grace that was different than what I had been focused on elsewhere. While I wasn’t necessarily expecting one session to fix the entire life-message (which sounds deep-seated), I did believe that it was a good single-problem subject that we could work with and use as a launching place for freedom. Now, for the EPT approach in general, the client does choose the issue/problem/topic they want to focus on for that session—I just had a more specific goal in regards to identifying something I thought would be good for a single-session issue. Clients do not normally need to be that specific in what they choose to focus on.
We started the session by chatting briefly, partly because we were connected years ago when Myspace was still a thing through a mutual friend whom we both love, then got down to “business” (I make it sound like this was super clinical, but it wasn’t—Grace is quite warm and friendly and easy to talk to). She explained the basic framework for the technique/process so I knew generally what to expect, then we did a quick exercise to focus my attention more closely on what we were doing. After that, she asked me four statements to help identify my “readiness to heal”. While that might sound odd, in Nursing we use an arbitrary pain scale of 0-10 to get an idea of someone’s pain level before and after we give them medications, and this was much the same. Grace asked some specific questions to get an idea of where I was at the start of the session, so she could go back over them at the end and help us both see how effective the “treatment” was.
Grace explained that she uses something called applied kinesiology, also known as “muscle testing,” to help identify the emotion, location it is trapped in the body (even in Chinese medicine it is understood that negative emotional energy can get lodged in different organs/tissues that then contribute to physical diseases). Then she explained that the process typically involves starting with current issues dealing with that emotion and then working backwards in a person’s life, a bit like working through layers on an onion.
The first item that came up was the emotion of “dread”, which she tested was connected to my left kidney. Now, the location of the emotion may or may not matter much, in that in some instances a person can tie it to physiological problems they are actively dealing with, and in other cases it may simply be something either hidden/undiagnosed, or as is true in this case, simply not bad enough to cause an observable physical problem. Where it does matter is that from what Grace told me, the left kidney is tied to framing a problem or issue, where the right kidney has to do with solving it. In my case, the issue was one of not even feeling (emotionally) that I was able to even identify or frame how to begin solving what felt like an unsolvable problem. Fortunately for me, it actually is fixable, and Grace helped me do just that.
We briefly discussed the feeling of dread and where it came from, and identified together that it was tied to hopelessness—both that of my dad and that from my own feelings that I won’t ever measure up for him. The next step was to identify the inception point—where it all started. Interestingly enough, it began with something I’ve already done inner healing work around before—a seemingly silly event that clearly has had a larger impact on me than might be apparent at first—the Shame Banana.
What on earth is a shame banana? Let me tell you the story:
One evening, I had already been put to bed, but I was hungry, so I came downstairs to ask if I could have a snack. My dad was in the dining room adjacent to the kitchen and I have no idea where my mom was because she wasn’t down there. I forget if I suggested or if he did, but he said that I could have half of a banana, then to give the rest to him. I went back to the kitchen, ate half the banana, and went to hand my dad the rest. But, being a kid, I was playing with my food like kids do, so instead of eating half of it like an adult would, I took bites along the side of the banana longways, meaning that I literally had bites down the length of the entire fruit. Well, I did eat only half, and then went to give him the other half, at which point he erupted at me in anger (or at least that’s how it seemed to roughly-7-year-old me). I was berated for intentionally ruining the food so that he wouldn’t want to eat it, and then told me I might as well just eat the rest of it considering I had made it un-want-able to anyone else.
Well, that made me feel pretty bad at the time. I wasn’t intentionally doing anything other than getting a snack. It had never occurred to me until after he said something that eating the banana the way I did would reasonably make someone else not want it, but even when I tried to explain that, he didn’t believe me. Well, not only did I feel un-believed and misjudged, I also felt shame about eating the food (and then having to eat the rest of it) even when I had originally been the one asking for the snack to begin with. I forget what happened after that, but presumably I went to bed, and then carried the pain of the shame banana with me for the next 30 years.
Grace had some pretty simple solutions to help address this, and interestingly, forgiveness was actually a super useful tool to help do just that, something I have since used on my own and suggested to friends even without working with Grace because the way she used forgiveness was really different. It wasn’t just about forgiving my dad, but forgiving myself for the ways I responded, believed, and other things in the situation as well, helping set me free from the ways I had judged myself and created my own negative self-talk as a result of this event.
We began with forgiveness statements—first for myself. I forgave myself for:
-Believing that since my dad didn’t understand me that I must not be good enough.
-For believing that I wasn’t good enough.
Grace pointed out there that how I ate the banana was actually pretty creative, and was a creative way to address an issue—how to eat half a banana. The problem came in with shame telling me that something was wrong with me and my creative way of seeing things. I also forgave:
-My dad for not seeing and appreciating my creativity.
-Myself for believing that the way God made me is inherently problematic versus being inherently problem-solving.
While reading these, one or two of the forgiveness statements (we took these ideas and made statements of “I forgive myself for . . .”) might seem a bit of a jump, but I have for many years realized that I often see problems that are about to crop up as a result of doing things a certain way, whether at home with my family, at church, and at work, but it is often not well-received because no one likes being told that the things they want to do the way they want to do them are going to cause more problems, which is where this whole creative-thinking thing ties in. Grace helped me to reframe the matter, looking at the fact that my ability to notice problems and solve them is actually my superpower, not a problem. As we prayed through and declared these things, we did a simple breathing exercise to help release the old patterns and trapped emotional energy. Each time we did this, I would yawn—which according to Grace is pretty common, and lines up very much with similar experiences I have had with other inner-healing methods. The yawning is indicative, among other things, of the trapped energy being released.
After we prayed through forgiveness statements, Grace then did a sort of re-assessment partway through to identify if we sufficiently hit the different problem-points on the issue or if there was still more to resolve. The forgiveness portion of this is in a way a de-identifying with the problems, removing any internal agreement I have within my psyche with those beliefs. While helpful to a degree, there is another step that needs to be taken next—replacing them with God’s truth. Thus, we went on to identify some positive-affirmation statements to help replace the negative beliefs.
The ones we came up with were:
“My ability to see things differently is a gift, regardless of who receives it or doesn’t.”
“How others receive or do not receive me is not a measure of my worth—it is a statement of where they are at.”
“Free of these old patterns, my design is no longer inherently problematic. I see and bring solutions.”
I also wrote down one other thing we hit that was sort of a side-issue but still relevant, and that may speak to you.
“I forgive myself for believing that food is connected to love and punishment. I give God permission to recalibrate my relationship with food according to His original intent.”
After going through all of these things—the identification and nature of the problem, where I was at with those issues (Grace’s initial assessment questions), forgiving and releasing them, and reframing them with positive affirmation statements, we did a reassessment. We had initially looked at my level of Distress, which was an 8 and went down to a 1, my level of Elation, which went from a 0 to a 6, and my Stage of Healing (Grace would have to explain that to you because it is specific to EPT), which went from a 3 to a 7 (on a 1-7 scale).
Overall, my experience with Grace and EPT was really good, and actually I recently recommended my wife connect with her about some stuff as the person we normally work with has been very busy with other life-stuff, and I found that the work we did together was a combination of professional, Holy-Spirit-led, comforting without being coddling, and generally just helpful. I felt like Grace was approachable, easy to talk to and work with, and the method she used was one I could see myself using in the future. And as I said before, I learned some things that I’ve been able to use since then, and I’m not particularly new to inner healing.
I hope this has been an informative, interesting, and helpful article for you, to introduce you to Grace, EPT, and the kinds of things this inner healing technique can help people get free from. I have definitely appreciated the time we spent together, and I would happily do it again. If you want to set up an appointment with Grace, check out the FAQ on her website, or see if working with her is a good fit for you to help get you unstuck or moving forward in some way, her website is WhenYouNeedGrace.com. Take a look, bookmark it, and tell your friends. Get the inner healing you need today so you can be the person you want to be tomorrow. Bless you!
