This week I was reading an article on Magic Buttons Bear and how it can sometimes be easier to get to your own issues when tapping on "someone" else (projecting out instead of looking within). I thought I would give it a try so I grabbed my old stuffed Pink Doggy (which might be a rabbit, we've never been sure) and headed into the meditation room for a trial run. My topic was my cold sores.

It seems that every month now at ovulation time I get a cold sore. I used to believe that cold sores (in my case) only came up when I had, as Louise Hay says in her amazing book "You Can Heal Your Life", "festering angry words and fear of expressing them". I was even willing to stretch the concept to include that maybe it was just ANYTHING I was afraid to say to anyone. Well, these past couple of months that doesn't seem to be the case any more as I may be a bit tired these days but it's really nothing to write home about and I'm certainly not afraid to saying anything to anyone at the moment.

Anyway, I decided I would use Pink Doggy as my surrogate to work on "hormones causing cold sores" as that seems to be the case these days so I sat down to explore the idea. I took Pink Doggy's paw,looked at his face and imagined that he had a cold sore. I tapped his karate chop point and said:

Even though he has this ugly sore on his lip, he's a great doggy.
Even though he has this cold sore on his lip caused by hormones, he's a great doggy.
Even though he has this ugly sore on his lip, he's a great doggy.

As I tapped the reminder phrases I just used free flow and let spontaneous words come up to the surface. Doing this I found it was true, that it was much easier to see things "out there" than it was to see them "in here".

Reminder phrases (I went around quite a few times before stopping, changing the wording at almost every point and I also changed back to first person wording without noticing): Ugly sore, very visible, crying out, making itself known, hormones wanting to be heard, hormones making themselves known (note: I'm 45, menopause is expected to begin some time during the next 5 to 10 years - but I hadn't consciously done the calculation - and then these next words just popped out), fear of menopause, fear of being like my mother, fear of the black hole, fear of depression, bad menopause like my mother, don't want to be like my mother, don't want to spend 10 years in a black hole, terror at the idea of a 10 year depression.

At this point, I had a flash realization that my body type is nothing like my mother's and our hormone reactions are, in general, very different. My body is more like the body types of the women on my father's side of the family which, in my mind, means I'd be more likely to have the same or similar symptoms as them. In fact, I will simply have my own type of Kelly menopause and the more I tap on it, the more likely that will be true and that I will reduce or completely relieve all symptoms of my menopause when the time comes.

I did tap a few more rounds on some things related to fearing menopause in general but I can't remember what exactly (look up EFT and the APEX effect for more info on THAT phenomenon).

I don't know how the cold sores will fare in the months to come but this one didn't develop more than it had yesterday when I began my tapping and it's already beginning to heal.

I guess for me, the biggest revelation was the Pink Doggy tapping test. I really found that it WAS helpful to look "outside myself" for my problems. I was able to see them more clearly once I had projected them onto the toy.

Give it a try. Tap on anything, a stuffed toy, a doll, a drawing of a face, even another person if you have one handy that will sit still for you long enough. :) You may find it's surprising what comes up when you allow yourself to see "you" from a distance.