Ep #167: Tapping for Widows: An Interview with Melanie Fay

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, episode 167, Tapping For Widows: An Interview with Melanie Fay.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St. Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. Super excited for you to meet Melanie Fay today. She is one of my favorite humans on the planet, no joke. And I love that I get to share her with my Mom Goes On members. She does two group tapping calls every month inside of Mom Goes On. She is the person who I trust the most when it comes to tapping. She loves it. She knows her stuff and I think you’re really going to learn a lot and hopefully feel inspired by our conversation today.

And then before we get into that, one thing I wanted to tell you because I caught myself doing it. So August 1^st was Hugo’s sixth deathaversary and I know I mentioned it in last week’s podcast but one thing that I noticed myself doing and I almost can’t believe I did it, because it was just so surprising to me. But I noticed myself as I was going to bed that evening and the day was over, I noticed a little voice in my head saying, “Okay, we’ve had our day to be sad, now we need to put that in a box and not be sad tomorrow.”

And oh, my goodness, what the heck, what is that about? So not useful, so against everything I teach. You can feel however you want whenever you want. And I caught myself doing it pretty quickly, I noticed the thought and separated myself from it pretty quickly. But I wanted to tell you that, one, because maybe you might be doing the same thing and also maybe you like me, intellectually wouldn’t ever consciously tell yourself that but yet maybe you have that little voice creeping into that little sneaky little thought. It just surprised me.

Usually, I always tell myself and tell my clients, “We have permission to feel however we want to feel for as long as we want to feel it.” And there’s no need to put anything in a box and yet there that sneaky little thought was. So be mindful, they’re sneaky little thoughts in your brain just because they show up. You don’t have to listen to them. I don’t have to listen to them. And however, we feel is fine. Okay, let’s get into my interview with Melanie Fay, enjoy.

                                                                                                                   

So, welcome to the podcast, Melanie Fay. I know that you sort of know that I love you. I have a feeling you don’t know the extent of how much I love you. But suffice it to say I am super happy that you’re on the podcast.

Melanie: Thank you so much, Krista, it is such an honor, such an honor to talk with you and to talk with the whole audience truly.

Krista: Yeah. Yay. So, I’ve talked a little bit about you on the podcast before. But I just kind of want to just go back as I remember it, how our paths crossed and then I’ll have you introduce yourself and you can tell people what you want them to know about you. But so long story kind of short, I have been in love with tapping for a number of years.

A couple of years ago I decided I would like to learn more and become certified. And as a part of that certification not only do you have to tap with participants, with clients. You have to get tapping done with you as a client. And I didn’t particularly want to work with someone who didn’t know what they were doing. I figured if I have to meet this requirement I’d really rather work with someone who knows what they’re doing. And so, I asked my coaching or my tapping instructor at the time if I could hire her and she said yes and we did a few sessions and then she had a baby.

And so, as she was preparing me for her maternity leave I said, “Okay, it’s not going to be you, who do you recommend?” And she said, “Melanie Fay, hands down.” She said, “She is amazing. You will love her, trust me.” And gave me her contact information. And so, then I reached out to you. I don’t even know how many sessions we had had.

But there was a certain point where it became very obvious to me that it literally made no sense for me to continue the tapping certification because your knowledge, your heart, your approach, your everything was exactly the experience that I wanted my clients to have. So, I just abandoned the certification and said, “I’m just going to pay Melanie to come in and work with my people because it is what you do and you’re so good at it.” So, kind of just for the listeners out there, that’s how this came to be.

It’s amazing to me how the universe opens doors for you and introduces you to people at exactly the time when you need them. So, Melanie now works within the Mom Goes On program but also she’s my personal tapping coach and I meet with her weekly. And she’s amazing and I refer her to everyone I know.

Melanie: Thank you, Krista.

Krista: Let me turn it over to you and how about you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do, how you came to tapping, anything.

Melanie: Yeah, thank you. So, I’m Melanie and I’d like to share with the audience how I came to tapping because no one’s more surprised than me that I am where I am with tapping. So, when I was just about to turn six years old my house burned down in a fire in California. My whole neighborhood burned down this was the start of the California, Bay Area fires. And then about a year later my parents got divorced. So, for me at a very early age it was like my whole container of reality disappeared.

It was like this unbelievable shock to my system as a six year old and seven year old. And of course, I was a six year old and seven year old and had no idea that it was an unbelievable shock. So, then I went through life, and I grew up, and I became an adult. And then somewhere around my mid-20s someone I loved, still love, had a mental health crisis, pretty huge, pretty scary, mental health crisis that lasted for several months. And I was really in the thick of the trauma of it, the fear of it, the unmanageability of it. And I used every tool I had.

I’ve always been into personal development because I’ve always believed in possibility. I’ve always known what’s possible and so personal development to me is these tools that help us be who we are or access what’s possible. So here I am in my mid-20s with this situation that’s bigger than I can handle but I’m using all my tools, everything I know and I didn’t know tapping. And I’m getting through it, getting through it, getting through it. And then this person I’m speaking about got better. They turned around, they got better and I didn’t.

I didn’t get better so the crisis was over but for me I was still in high anxiety, I was still unable to – I was functioning, I didn’t have access to happiness really, it was just anxiety. And so, with my logical brain and this is so important, with my logical brain I was looking at myself with everything I knew and I said, “Something’s off here. I’ve got to try something else, I need help and I need it now.” But at the time I also wasn’t very good at looking for help outside myself.

So, I had heard and this is what I really want to share, I had heard about tapping for several years. I’m all into personal development, I listen to podcasts, reading, several years. But because I was doing all this other stuff it was just like, okay, whatever. But here I was and I was like, “Fine.” And I bought this book, it sort of called to me in the bookstore, Iyanla Vanzant’s book, Forgiveness. And she teaches how to do tapping, and it’s Christmas, and Christmas about 12 years ago.

And I’m not okay and I stay up later than my whole family and I got this book and I’m fumbling through it. I have no idea really what I’m doing. And I just sit with it for about an hour doing the best I could. Looking back, ‘I did it all wrong’, not possible. But I did tap on the points and that night I fell asleep and the next day I woke up and this part kind of make me almost cry. I felt a peace, a sense of peace that I hadn’t had since all of that had started. And then I said again with my logical mind, “Okay. Okay tapping, okay, I’ll give you a try. I’ll give you a try.”

So, then I started to engage with what tapping is, I started to learn about it, I got more and more into it from just an intellectual perspective but also from a healing perspective, and also from a spiritual perspective. I just got more, and more, and more into it. And then I discovered all these ways that that fire that I mentioned at the beginning and the divorce really was affecting me and was showing up in my present life triggered by the trauma of what had happened to the person that I love so much.

So, it was essential in my being able to unfold, and heal, and relax from the very difficult thing that happened in my adult life. So then from there I got truly sort of in a very positive way, obsessed, I read about tapping in every form, for weight loss, for goal setting, for money trauma. I read every book I could. I thought it was so interesting because I was noticing how it was working.

Krista: And at that point you weren’t working with someone, you were just doing it all on your own?

Melanie: Yeah. Well, I was doing it all on my own, I brought in a coach a couple of times for about 15 sessions twice, different coaches. And I did a couple of group things here and there. And I’ll share about that actually, resources when we talk about resources. But basically, I was just diving in and learning all myself, and practicing, and playing, and just changing, really, really changing.

And then what happened is California started to burn again and I’m sitting in my upstate house in New York watching California burn. And I am just crying thinking about all those families and all those children who are having this experience that they maybe don’t even know how to have a container for, how to understand how it’s affecting them.

And in that moment, literally watching the news I said, “I have to be part of the solution.” I have to position myself in a way where I can be involved in the releasing of the suffering of so many people because it’s really helped me. And so that’s why I became a coach.

Krista: Amazing. I think what you’re saying is you didn’t even realize, even though you experienced those fires as traumatic, you didn’t realize the long term implication of not having addressed that traumatic experience until you were a couple of decades later.

Melanie: Yes. It’s so hard to know the ways we’re suffering until we’re not.

Krista: That is very profound.

Melanie: And I will say, that’s the benefit of other people, that’s what I, you know, other people can see in us our suffering that we can’t see ourselves but you have to be willing to trust and I wasn’t for all those reasons.

Krista: And I think you have to – when you said that your love of self-development was because of your belief in what was possible, I think sometimes we lose even our ability to imagine what could be possible because we’re so in the way that we are suffering or experiencing our world that we come to accept it as normal. And I see this so much in grief too especially because of the new normal narrative which I think is intended to be helpful.

It’s intended for people to say, “Okay, listen, yeah, you’re not going to go back to the life you had before your loss but you will get used to this new life, you can create a new normal.” And it’s literally like fingernails on a chalkboard when I hear people using that almost against what is possible for themselves. It’s kind of like saying, “Well, I guess I’ll just resign myself to this suffering or this lack of thriving that I’m experiencing because I’m so used to it and because no one else has shown me that anything more is possible.”

So yeah, you don’t even know the extent of your own suffering until you’re not suffering anymore.

Melanie: And here’s what I think is the real heartbeat inside that which is our pain and our suffering is true, it’s real. It’s like this thing has happened and we are devastated and that is true, that’s true. And what I love about tapping is we don’t have to change that that’s true. We sit with it and tap. And what I’ve found happens is as we process the emotions in that truth, that possibility that’s inherent inside us, the desire for joy that’s inherent inside us, that life, I’m going to say it, lifeforce that’s inherent inside us shows up again.

So instead of, and this is what I did, this is what I did before I knew about tapping and I had a tool like this, instead of trying to take my trauma, take my lack of trust, take my broken heart and convince it that it was worth believing in possibility. Tapping allowed me to honor my pain and this is where it just kind of it feels unbelievable, but honor my pain and then find and then just through doing that and tapping, finding the breath of freedom. The breath of, oh, the breath of real compassion, real compassion.

And with real compassion to think the heart is holding your own pain with real compassion is the heart that knows it’s also okay.

Krista: Yes. How I experience it as being authentic, being honest about what actually is going on is that it’s the honesty and the acknowledgement of what feels so true. That also allows you to move through it and release it. But no amount of talking yourself out of something allows you to release it. It just adds more weight and heaviness to the thing, and kind of subconsciously pulls you down and kind of keeps it close to you.

Melanie: And there’s nervous system reasons why we can’t talk ourselves out of certain things. And also, just I want to just create a container for if it works it works. And that also includes talking. If someone can help us see something differently and we really do see it differently then that’s real too. But the point in all this is honesty, do I really feel different?

Krista: Yeah. And you know the difference, you know when you’re trying to force something. That’s why, yeah, I think positive affirmations gets such a bad rap is because of course they don’t work when we don’t believe them. So, no amount of standing in front of a mirror and telling yourself that you’re good enough, and smart enough, and gosh darn it people like you, or whatever it is. If you don’t believe it there is a part of you that knows it doesn’t feel true. It’s never going to stick. It’s never going to shift the way that you see yourself or see your life.

So, okay, let’s kind of backup a little bit, I’m assuming that – I know we just dive in. I’m assuming that a lot of people listening have not had an experience of tapping, don’t really know what it is. So how do you describe it to people?

Melanie: So, tapping simply put as I know, Krista, you did in your first segment on this is you’re tapping on acupressure points on your face and on your torso. And when you tap on these acupressure points it sends a calming signal to the amygdala which is in charge of the fight or flight response. Which tells your whole body that whatever you’re thinking about you’re safe now. So, sort of technically that’s what tapping is. But what it does, how it helps, because it does that is really why it’s worth trying.

I heard about tapping, like I said, for three years and it’s like cool, great. It sounds to me, I’m also an artist so to me kind of boring, but fascinating. But what happens when we start to release this fear, or release this stress, or process these emotional traumas like we said before is possibility, again becomes available to us. So, the ways how tapping actually helps depends on what it’s being used for.

Krista: Yes, I love that you said that.

Melanie: Yeah. Not because we’re doing anything differently, we’re actually doing exactly the same thing but what it means to release fear or release emotion and the results because of that are infinite. So, I’d like to give a couple examples just to show. So, for example, if you’re using tapping because you would really like yourself to be allowed to have something, say a vacation, or it can be an actual thing like a vacation or it can just be the ability to relax.

The ability to take an hour off and enjoy it but every time you do your nervous system gets blasted with guilt and it says, no, no, you’re not allowed to be that happy because. That’s the thought. But the experience is this blast of guilt. We can use tapping to release, mitigate, soften or completely let go of that feeling of guilt. And the result of that is now I’m allowed to relax for an hour.

Krista: Yeah. And I think it’s releasing the guilt and also in my experience the whole belief that created the guilt in the first place, that’s to me the, you know, so it has such flexibility and possibility. It can be used just in a moment where you’re stressed and you want to feel better, in a moment where you feel guilty and you don’t want to feel it. But also, so that the whole pattern that created the guilt in the first place, I almost want to say let’s go of you.

Melanie: Yeah, I love that, Krista. And I love that you said that too because that’s one of the things that really inspired me in my tapping journey, were to learn more and more because I realized and Mick Ortner says this too about he had a neck pain. He’s a big tapping guy, we’ll talk about him later.

Krista: Yeah, and Jessica was on the podcast, I don’t know, a couple of years ago or something, his sister, yeah.

Melanie: And I love them so much. I’ll talk about that later. And I’ll just put it for me. When I saw that I could change something but I actually could change something in real time. The tapping, you can shift a feeling in five/ten minutes, sometimes less. When I saw I could do that it really got my engines going really what else is possible with this?

Krista: Yeah. Totally, I’m with you.

Melanie: So that’s one example. So, another example is, for that, that intention was I want to enjoy my vacation or I want to just be able to relax. Another intention with tapping could be I just want to feel better in this moment. And so often when we have a lot of emotional stuff going on, a lot of really hard stuff going on, we can really be in our heads. And there’s a reason for that. Because being in our bodies is just too painful or we’ve got too many things to do.

We still have to get the groceries, we still have to get through a day, we still have to do our job. And so, we’re swimming in our heads with the spiraling energy of to-do lists and fixing ourselves and all this stuff. When we tap it slows all that down and puts us in our body and helps us feel what’s actually going on, what are we actually upset about. And so, what it can do is it can shift like you said, Krista, in your other interview or segment, it can shift the pain from dirty pain to clean pain.

Krista: Yeah, because how I experience that is it can get you out of the judgment of your pain. I have a tendency to want to go to my brain instead of my body. And I think a lot of us do and it’s work worth doing to figure out how to bring yourself back to your body and back to the present moment. And so, there’s something about tapping that helps you kind of release the judgment of what’s happening in your body so that you can actually experience what’s happening in your body and that’s where emotion is experienced.

Melanie: Yeah, exactly. And so many of us, I want to say all of us but I hesitate to do absolutes. But so many of us really just need someone to be there for us. And tapping is a way, really is a way to authentically be there for ourselves.

Krista: Yeah, I love it. I love it. Are you giving the example about enjoying yourself and enjoying time? I feel like that’s been such a huge part of even the work that I have done with you over the last – I don’t know how long it’s been now, but of just continuing to reach those kind of next levels of goodness and then notice myself unable to allow them to be there without fear, worry, some sort of thermostat issue where a part of me doesn’t believe that I’m worth that level of success, goodness, abundance, whatever.

And then using tapping as a way to, I don’t want to say combat that but love myself through it.

Melanie: I’ve found a way to say it is increase our tolerance for joy.

Krista: Well, yeah, I know. I do so much coaching on that I feel like lately. It’s probably because I’ve had so much with my own personal experience with it, that it keeps now coming to me to coach others on. But I think that can be a really surprising thing that people experience. When you have such a profound loss like loss of a spouse it can be really difficult to imagine that someday you might struggle to allow yourself to let the goodness in.

Because your experience is so awful and so filled with the negative you can’t even contemplate that there would be a someday place that you might struggle as much with receiving and allowing the good as you are with handling the ‘bad’. But I see it all the time. Okay, so let’s talk then a little bit, so that’s a little bit about what tapping is and how it works, what it does. So, thinking about how you use it in the context of Mom Goes On. First of all, I’ll say tapping wasn’t something we even did in Mom Goes On in the beginning when I created it. It’s something we added.

And when I met Melanie and I knew I wanted to add more of it what we ended up doing is let’s kind of try it, let’s kind of see what it looks like to do a bonus tapping call. Not part of the core curriculum or anything but just as an opportunity for people. And so, you started coming in and facilitating group calls where people are tapping in a group. So, can you talk about that, why it works, how it works? Even for people who are familiar with tapping, they might not be familiar with the idea of group tapping.

Melanie: Absolutely. So, what I hope is the first takeaway that we even have tapping in the Mom Goes On group is just that affirmation that whatever we’re feeling is okay. I know Mom Goes On, that’s the message throughout the whole thing and when we tap we’re doing that too. And the reason why I say that is because tapping since it helps us process our emotions, sometimes if we have part of our brains that are saying, I can fix this, I can fix my feeling.

In the beginning of almost every group tapping session I try to remind all of us that we’re not here to fix our feelings, we’re here to be with our feelings, or holding ourselves in acceptance and compassion, not judgment and criticism.

Krista: Yeah. And the very nature of that intention I think is so important because most people do come into the program believing emotions are problems to fix. And one of my main goals for everyone is to switch from feelings are problems to fix to feelings are experiences to allow. And so, the whole reason we even want to fix something is because we believe it is a problem. And so, what you’re saying, maybe not explicitly but is not only do we not have to fix it, it’s not a problem. It’s just an experience.

Melanie: Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying, it’s not a problem. And it’s really, I really care about setting that intention, even talking about tapping. We are not tapping about this because anyone’s feelings are a problem at all. So, a group tapping, what is group tapping? So, group tapping is, and this is what we do in Mom Goes On, is everyone comes or you can even watch the recording later. And we work one-on-one either with one person or sometimes two people and the whole group taps along with whatever that person is focusing on.

So, if say someone is focusing on an anniversary coming up, an anniversary coming up and they’re having all the feelings about it. So, what we do is I work one-on-one with that person, again as the whole group taps along and we just do the tapping process, feel the feelings of what’s inside, anticipating the anniversary coming up. And the rest of the group before we start tapping one-on-one sets an intention for themselves of what they would like to tap on. Then they just follow along with the person that’s working with me one-on-one.

And then at the end we check-in and we see how it shifted for everyone. So that can sound really kind of far out and strange. And it was first discovered by people like me, by tapping coaches who found that as they’re tapping with other people at the end of the day they are feeling more relaxed. It’s not like a therapist who can feel burned out and bogged down, they are feeling like their emotional issues are shifting and changing. So that got some people curious.

And there’s been a series of studies of over hundreds of people now at this point doing group tapping and measuring their emotional intensity before the tapping session and after the tapping session. And across the board seeing that it had significant effects. So, we know it works through these studies. We still don’t exactly know why to the best of my knowledge. There’s theories it has to do with mirror neurons, where our brain associates our problems with the problem that we’re seeing in front of us. And then is working it out as that other person is.

I can say, so beyond these studies my own personal experience, I’ve been tapping for 12 years, I’m a tapping coach. I tap for a lot of hours a week and every now and then I do group, I just sign up for group things. And I am shocked at the level of vulnerability I find in myself, the tears I didn’t know were there, and so I’ll just say from experience in MGO, and the other groups I’ve learned and groups I’ve participated in.

There is something about being together that I’ve found personal and professional allows for a container for feelings to show up that maybe wouldn’t necessarily show up if they weren’t in group, that if you weren’t empathizing with someone else whether you’re focusing on your problem or not.

Krista: Yeah. I think it’s so fascinating to me because, so thinking about the kind of non-tapping coaching, more thought work types of coaching that I will do in a group call. There’s always so much power in watching someone else get coached and applying, even though your issue might be completely separate. So maybe I’m coaching someone on a deathaversary, and someone else on the call is struggling with something completely different, something with their kid.

There’s usually something that actually applies from coaching that is totally separate to you that you can take from the call and end up feeling like you got coached yourself. But it happens with conscious intention and thought. You literally have to think, okay, how is this person’s coaching relevant to my situation? And I even give people a worksheet to fill out to help them do that. Versus a tapping group call which is you benefit and you don’t even have to think about it.

So, you come onto the call and maybe someone like you said, someone has got an anniversary or deathaversary or something coming up. And you’re tapping with them, meanwhile someone else is tapping along and they came to talk about what’s going on with their teenage son. And it has nothing to do with anything. And as you’re tapping with them they aren’t even really thinking about what’s going on with their teenage son. They’re literally just right with you following along, tapping on the anniversary issue that that client brought to you.

And yet at the end of the session literally I’m still fascinated by it, it will feel like something shifted, you almost always feel better even when it had nothing to do with you. And you didn’t have to try to make conscious logical thought connections. It just feels almost effortless and kind of magical, too good to be true almost, but it isn’t.

Melanie: And let’s talk about, I like this word ‘magical’ too because that is how it feels. The whole tapping process can really feel like that. But what we’re doing when we’re tapping is we’re working with the mid brain. We’re working with the part of our brain 100,000 years older than our thinking brain. And it’s a part of the brain that is faster than thought. So, in this way, tapping is almost a mechanical process. We’re tapping on these points, it’s sending this electrical signal to our brain, it’s saying we’re safe. It’s saying we’re safe.

And because that part of the brain moves faster than thought, if the tiger’s coming at us we don’t want to have to think, there’s a tiger, I’m going to run. We just want to be running already. It can feel magical because the sense, the sense is stronger, faster there before we can even consciously figure it out. And then so that’s the same in the healing process or the releasing process when we’re doing group tapping, the change is happening subconsciously below our thinking level. And so that makes it feel magical, yeah.

Krista: Yeah, makes a lot of sense, yeah. But it is, I think you do have to kind of – if tapping is new to you, I think you have to let it feel weird. And I think you have to let it not make sense to you and just kind of go with that and do it anyway and try it a few times and see what happens. What do you tell people that are kind of a little bit hesitant or skeptical?

Melanie: Well, I guess it depends which angle I want to approach from. I mean there is the personal side of that it’s like I get it, I really get it. I knew by tapping for two or three years before I even tapped along. I know you did a tap along in your last segment and I would listen to segments and I wouldn’t tap along. It’s really this kind of thing is it doesn’t work until you tap, until you do it. So, my feeling is I get it, I get not trying it, or thinking, okay, it sounds sort of cool but there’s all these other things, why try? Or like who cares, I could do something else as well.

But the other kind of way I like to talk about it is either noticing how you feel right now, let’s just take a breath. Let’s just take a breath. Notice how you feel right now. Notice what you’re thinking. Maybe notice how you feel in your body and just ask yourself if you’d like a way to feel differently. And if the answer is yes, no one’s going to push you there but this is just true in my experience. Maybe it’s worth experimenting for only 10 minutes, 10 minutes.

Krista: Yeah. And I don’t think there’s – I mean I don’t know if anybody ever actually answers no to that question. But I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that most widowed moms are looking for ways to feel better.

Melanie: And there’s another thing I actually want to add to that which is if it’s scary to notice how you feel, which it very well can be because it’s like if I feel that, it will overtake me. If I feel that it will overtake me. So, we don’t want to necessarily dive into our deepest darkest feelings alone and as we’re trying to learn a new tool. But there are a lot of tapping meditations out there that are just about relaxing. The Tapping Solution app is an incredible one that will create structure for you and just learning how to tap and being with your feelings.

And just remember when your feelings, feels, and you’re tapping, you’re not doing it alone. You’re doing it with this very real signal to your brain that you’re safe. You’re not just in the ethers feeling. The tapping is grounding your brain and saying it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. Yeah.

Krista: To your point earlier about you don’t have to go to the deepest darkest. I think with tapping you want to meet yourself where you are and not push yourself beyond anything that feels uncomfortable. So even if maybe your worry was, well, if I open up to this feeling I’ll be swallowed up by the black hole, I’ll never come out. Then instead of tapping on the feeling that you’re worried about feeling, can literally just tap on the idea that I’m so worried that if I allow myself to feel this feeling I’ll fall in a black hole.

And just address where you are which is a fear of the feeling instead of going so deep that you’re actually working on the feeling itself. Or if it’s a trauma. I love all of the gentle techniques of maybe you know that you’ve had this past trauma and you know you would benefit from some healing around it. But the idea of talking about it, thinking about it is so overwhelming or so scary, that can literally just imagine the trauma in a box at the bottom of the ocean where it can’t hurt you and tap on that.

So, there’s all these different ways of doing it that don’t feel nearly as scary as you might imagine they would feel but yet are so beneficial if you have someone who can help you do it or you know how to do it for yourself.

Melanie: Right. So, anyone who is listening who wants to try tapping but is hearing all these different things and doesn’t really know where to start, this is truly what I recommend, really what I recommend is the Tapping Solution app. I think they still have a free version. I hope they do.

Krista: They do but they’ve changed it. So, when I had, if you’ve listened, listeners if you’ve listened to the episode that Jessica Ortner was on at the time she came on the podcast it was completely free. And then if you wanted to upgrade to unlock more tapping exercises you could pay an additional charge. And the way that it works now is that it’s a 14 day trial. So, if you cancel within the first 14 days it is free. But if you want to keep going after the 14 days then you do get charged for that. So, I am a big fan of that app.

I think it’s at least brilliant even if you don’t want to pay for it. And by the way, Melanie and I have no connections. We don’t benefit from referring that app at all. But it is like you said, structured. It’s easier to follow along as opposed to just kind of reading a book and trying to figure it out yourself. And if there’s so much value in it that you want to keep it you can pay for it. If you don’t then you can learn the basics and cancel before you get charged.

Melanie: Right. So, my recommendation is either to do that 14 day trial and just try one, just try one. Or do the one that Krista did in an earlier episode. Just have a little bit of an edge of just trying it. And then all I ask, all I ask is you just notice how stressed you feel before you start the tapping or how much emotional intensity you feel before and how much you feel after. You just really want to gauge because especially in the beginning having that conscious recognition of the change inside yourself is what will encourage you to keep tapping.

Because at the end of the tapping sometimes you can be like, “I feel better”, but you don’t even realize it unless you check-in, how did I feel before and how do I feel now?

Krista: Yeah. Or conversely I think sometimes you might think you feel worse because if you didn’t write it down. And I know when you and I talk together when you tap within Mom Goes On, you’re not quite as hung up on it because, this is how I perceive it, you’re there as the witness. You can kind of tell what’s happening with the person you’re working with and you can kind of articulate it back to them if they need that. But if you’re doing it on your own and say maybe you start with anger, and your anger’s really intense.

And so, you tap on the anger but you didn’t write it down. And maybe as you’re tapping you don’t even notice it but the anger subsides or flows though. And then all of a sudden there’s something else, you have peeled a layer of the onion back and now maybe we’re into sadness. So, because you didn’t ever write down that you were angry in the first place and rate the intensity of that anger, you didn’t even notice that the anger moved through you. And yet all you notice is that now you’re feeling sad.

And so, it can be easy to think, well, it didn’t work or something has gone wrong. But really something powerful shifted and you just didn’t notice and writing down can help you notice. That’s how I see it.

Melanie: Exactly, I completely agree. And I love what you brought up because I wanted to make sure I mentioned this which is tapping is such an incredible mindful practice too. Because in order to tap we have to be honest or aware to the best of our ability of what’s going on inside us which is the core of mindfulness. So even pausing long enough to tap we are already in a mindfulness practice of what is going on for me.

Krista: Yeah, being able to articulate it, notice it, articulate it, yeah.

Melanie: Right, which is just in itself transformative and grounding.

Krista: Yeah, totally. Yeah. And one thing I do like about the Tapping Solution app is that that functionality is almost forced upon you. So, before you start an exercise you are, you know, there is a place where you cannot proceed with the exercise until you rate the intensity of what you’re feeling. And then when it’s done, I suppose you could close out of it before you actually gave it a rating but when the exercise is done then you’re offered to re-rate it and it will say, “Congratulations, you lowered your stress level by four points”, or something like that which I think is affirming.

And also prevents you from being stuck in the it didn’t work because it’s so easy to make progress and not even attribute it to the tapping or not even see it happen, yeah, so strange in a good way though. Okay, let’s see, what else do I want to know? Tapping resources, so we talked about the Tapping Solution app. Is there anything else that you love resource wise?

Melanie: So, this is what I want to say about that first which is there are many resources out there and I’m going to share several of them right now. But what I’ve found is the most important thing, I’ll just say thing, is that you connect with whoever it is. So, for me, the reason why, and if you’re listening, thank you. The reason why I was able to kind of get into tapping in that very, very difficult time in my life was because it worked, and because I’m a very curious person, and because Mick Ortner was so kind, so kind. I could just tell. I could just tell.

So, what I’m saying is I trusted him. I trusted him. And so, I kept tapping. And so, for me the resources that have really, really helped are that family, the Ortners, they have the Tapping Solution app. They do all kinds of things. They do this yearly summit where you can learn about tapping. There’s also Brad Yates, he has millions, there are so many videos on YouTube for free where you can tap along with him. But again, with him it’s just I love him. I love him. So, I’ll be having a hard time and just having him in front of me helps me, so it’s that too.

There’s a woman called Margaret Lynch who I’ve done several of her courses and she is incredible. Incredible. And she works with empowerment energy and she’s raw, and real, and wild. And she has a specific approach, which I actually don’t totally recommend for trauma. But she has an approach which is different.

And with her, what works so well for me, why I trust her so much is everything I’ve gotten from her, everything I’ve learned from her, it also was watching her change because her early YouTube videos in my perspective, you could see how she was kind of shyer, calm, more reserved. I don’t know if you felt this, Margaret, but it looks sort of intimidated. And then she’s just not that anymore. So, it’s actually seeing people change that again gave me the trust in what they’re teaching, so Margaret Lynch.

Carol Look does these incredible group tapping things and she does as lot of stuff but she does these group tapping processes, I think about four times a year, very affordable where you can experience what [inaudible] benefits might be like. And so, Carol Look’s a great resource.

You mentioned your instructor, Jackie Viramontez who has this amazing portal now around people pleasing. People pleasing, and MPaths, and things like that. And so, she has this online portal for tapping around those types of issues and also mom overwhelm and things like that. She’s really focused on that now which is just another really, really great resource. Who else do I want to talk about?

Well, and then EFT Universe of course, Dawson Church who I’m trained from. It’s just this huge database of research. So, if you’re a person that really needs to know the background of things, looking at Dawson’s work or Peta Stapleton’s work, about the science behind it, so all the studies, that’s available. But again, for me what I recommend is in this sea of resources, who does your heart connect with? Who helps you feel safe? Because if you feel safe you’ll be able to feel.

Krista: Yes. And I think that is so applicable in all modalities. So, whether it’s a therapist, or it’s a life coach like me, or a tapping coach, or any other modality, I think people tend to forget that they are the client. That they’re doing this work for them. And so how they feel about the person they are working with is imperative. And we can shop around until we find that right fit and we should. If it’s not working for us because we just don’t gel with that person or feel safe with them then it is not a good fit for us.

And that doesn’t make that practitioner bad or less than, it just makes them not our practitioner.

Melanie: Absolutely, Krista, and I think it goes back to what you said before which is we are not the problem. What we feel about the person in front of us is not our fault, it’s our experience. And in my words, our job is to take care of ourselves. So that doesn’t mean making ourselves fit with someone that we’re not connected with because we heard tapping should be good.

Krista: Right. It means advocating next. I know we talked about it last week but I had referred a friend of mine to you. I refer all my friends to you but I referred a friend of mine to you and she had been a little bit hesitant because the first tapping coach that she tried, it just really wasn’t a good fit. And so, I think how she received that was that maybe tapping isn’t a good fit for her. And then she told me that she met with you and that she was like, “Whoa, that was totally different than what I had experienced before.”

And so, it’s a matter of am I willing to keep advocating for myself, and for my future self, and for what’s possible for me by continuing to look for the right teacher, the right professional, the right fit, knowing that it’s not about right or wrong? It’s about does it feel right to me. Because then and only then can I do the work that I need to do to get to where I want to be. So good.

Melanie: Yeah, I can totally agree, yeah.

Krista: So good. Yeah. What did we miss? What did we hope to talk about that we missed?

Melanie: We didn’t talk about how tapping’s changed my life or how it’s changed the life of clients or MGOers.

Krista: Let’s do that, okay.

Melanie: Yeah. So how it’s changed my life. I thought a little bit about this because obviously it’s changed – well, not obviously, obviously to me it’s changed my life in just millions and millions of ways, I’m such a tapper. But this is what I really, really, really wanted to share. So, I like I said have been involved in personal development for a very, very long time. So, part of being involved in personal development is being very aware of yourself.

And I mean that in sort of a heavy way sometimes, you just become aware of all your shame, and big ways you’re holding yourself back. And tapping and artwork are very, very similar to me. And I could do a whole talk on that. But to shorten it I’ll just say I went to a school which is the school of my dreams, I went to several schools but I went to the school of my dreams and on a full tuition scholarship, it was incredible. And when I arrived there I came up against a lot inside myself.

And self-expression, the ability to say, “Yeah, just who I am is valuable”, which is really what artwork says, authentic artwork says, who I am matters. What I have to say about this, what I feel about the world is relevant. That’s part of what art’s about. And in order to make art you have to be able to do that. So doing that for myself and helping other people do that for themselves is literally the most important thing in my whole life.

And I don’t mean helping people make artwork, I mean helping people know that they can be who they are, that who they are is good, and matters, and relevant, and worth listening to. So, all of this is to say I used to not be able to paint in front of anyone at all. But one of the many things that happened in my life that for me it was a deeply, deeply satisfying thing was through all the tapping work not only have I been able to become a tapping coach and talk to you like this with confidence and all of this. This is who I am but it’s not necessarily who I would allow to show up in the past.

It also allowed me to become a painting teacher. And I for years taught painting, painting in front of big groups of people usually women, at least 35 but mostly in their 60s, people that were once again willing to have hobbies. And together through the medium of painting they could feel themselves, they could trust themselves, they could find out they had inner impulses that they wanted to follow which is all about what painting is. And see, I’m going to cry, there’s no way I would have been able to do that if I didn’t feel safe enough to be myself. And so that was first.

That was the first thing and then that journey allowed me to watch the news and watch everyone’s houses burning. I know that I had the inner strength to participate to be part of the solution because before that I had too much shame, too much fear. It was really, really better and safe to just stay in a cave. So, tapping has allowed me – I’m going off, I’m so sorry. But tapping has allowed me to be who I want to be like hello.

Krista: Yeah. It’s so fascinating for me to hear that from you because it’s like I’m hearing the words that you’re saying but as I have experienced you, the idea of you not showing up as I know you to show up is so foreign to me. It’s hard to even imagine that transformation because I experience you as so authentic, and grounded, and comfortable with who you are. It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when you weren’t.

Melanie: Yeah. Well, and how it showed up for me was hiding, just a lot of hiding. And the pain of being something and not allowing it and now the tool that helps you, to help you. Alright, so that was a lot. But okay, and in MGO, in MGO…

Krista: Which is what we call Mom Goes On by the way. We have this, once you get in the program we have our own little language and we abbreviate things, so carry on.

Melanie: Right. So that was a lot of emotion because it’s my own personal experience. It’s like if you can help someone, if someone starts to love themselves by 10% more the effects that has on their lives is incredible. I like to think of tapping and every shift we make as like, if there’s two dots that are overlaid upon each other, and then we start to love ourselves more or we make a small shift. And then those two dots the shift that we make sends those dots on a slightly different trajectory.

So, say those dots were just going down the same road with the same beliefs and the same feelings, and then we slightly shift the beliefs and the feelings in one of those dots. And it starts heading off down to the right a bit more. And then time happens and those dots keep going into the future, and into the future, and into the future. The farther they go down from time the more farther apart they are from each other.

Krista: Yeah, like making one wrong turn or one different turn, you set off on a road trip and you intend to follow the map and you make a one degree turn. And that one degree turn eventually ends up being, like puts you in a totally different place, yeah.

Melanie: Exactly. And that’s the same with self-love. One degree of self-love, the results that yield are entirely different. So, in MGO in Moms Go On, some of those results that I have seen have been people that have no idea what will make them happy, finding hobbies and trips that truly bring them joy. I’m not talking about I’m going to try this but I don’t feel anything. I’m talking about nourishing hobbies, a real life, filling themselves up again. I have had people find the courage to date, to find new romantic partners.

We’ve had people be able to process new losses in real time with real new levels of support. We’ve had people release guilt and fear around visiting relatives. And so then being able to protect themselves more effectively as they enter those obligations. We have had people experience flashbacks and be able to calm those flashbacks and find stability in their moments again. We’ve had people learn that what they’re feeling really is okay to feel. The process of tapping will help you feel that.

I’m going through my Mom Goes On memory here. And I want to share this part because it’s a group setting. We’ve had that experience of and I know that the group coaching does this too, the tapping will sort of make you feel despite yourselves sometimes. And when you watch someone sort of crack open in their vulnerability and there’s others there with you, it creates intimacy, community, openings for real support. So, I like to think and I think it’s true that the tapping we do every other week helps to create that sense of safety and community in the bigger group as well.

Krista: I think they feed off of each other but I definitely think that there’s always so much spoken or unspoken me too’s happening within a group. And especially because being a widow and a mom can be so isolating that we always I think tend to be our own worst critics anyway. And then when we don’t have other people in our environment to validate that what we’re going through is normal natural grief.

Then it’s really easy to believe these really un-useful stories about ourselves that we’re broken, or there’s something wrong with us, or how we’re experiencing it is wrong or bad and we should be doing it differently. And so, I find it quite freeing and comforting when I see people have a light bulb moment where they go, “She’s struggling with that too, it’s not just me.” And so, whether that happens in tapping or in group coaching it all feeds off of each experience.

And you know what too? I think everything you just said was really also only about the person who is in the program. And that doesn’t even count the ripple effect. And I think that’s my favorite part is, and this will make me cry, is knowing that even that one percent change in her, it’s like the rock in the water and all the ripples flow out and it affects her children, and it affects her family, and it affects her community. And in ways that I don’t even think you and I can probably even comprehend.

I mean I get stories told back to me about how her investing in herself literally changes what’s happening for her children. But I think it’s untold in ways that we’ll probably never know which to me is just like the cherry on top of the whipped cream, on top of the cake.

Melanie: Absolutely. And the final question that we have on our list that I’m just going to bring up which is we said, what’s your vision for tapping? And my vision for tapping is you just started to touch on it which is we have so many tools now, so many new understandings about trauma, about ourselves, and about how to think differently, how to feel differently, how to truly support ourselves. And tapping is one of those tools and every single bit of personal suffering we release, releases collective suffering.

And I truly believe just in every bit that I am is that when we release that collective suffering we’re making the world a safe place to be kind and loving. Because being open you can get hurt. But the less suffering there is in us collectively the more empathy there is, the more kindness there is and the more that empathy and kindness gets supported. And we can [inaudible] back all in a nervous system level, on a nervous system level.

So, every bit of tapping you to do, listener, every bit of tapping I do, every bit of self-forgiveness we do, every bit of self-love we offer ourselves, we truly reduce the risk of us hurting someone else.

Krista: Yeah. And I think we could probably do a whole different episode which we didn’t even really touch on, on epigenetics and generational trauma, and healing because even in work that I have done, sometimes what I realize I’m working on is not my own stuff. It’s older than me. And it sounds strange to say that if it’s never happened to you but I think we’re all to some degree carrying pain that isn’t ours. And without knowing the impact of that and without consciously understanding a way to heal it, it can be that way.

Melanie: Exactly, because pain, this might get edited out, but I’m going to say it anyway. This is what I believe, pain is from perspectives that aren’t founded on love. So, if we learn perspectives, if perspectives are handed down to us that aren’t founded on love, which they are.

Krista: Are all the time.

Melanie: All the time then that pain shows up in us because anything unloving will have a residue of pain. And that’s why all the pain we release allows for that love that is there to show up again.

Krista: To show up, yeah. We’re definitely not editing that out.

Melanie: So, it’s huge.

Krista: It is so huge and my hope and this is what I predict will someday happen is that tapping will be the go to tool. Tapping will just be the thing that everyone learns. We’ll look back on it and we’ll go, “Gosh, can you imagine that people before us didn’t have this tool?” Because it’s literally, anybody can do it, once you learn it, I will probably always work with you and if you retire I’ll find someone else, but I believe in the value of having someone else’s perspective. And I love having coaches and I love having people help me see things that I can’t see.

But I can help myself so much with this tool that’s literally free and can be done anywhere.

Melanie: Yeah, and let’s emphasize that for a second. I really did not have very much money for a very long time. So, my tapping learning was all from YouTube and books, maybe a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of books, was a lot of books. But I didn’t work with a coach because I couldn’t afford one, was the start of it. And it didn’t matter.

Krista: It didn’t matter, the same.

Melanie: It didn’t matter.

Krista: I can’t even tell you and I talked about it on episodes before but just the amount of support I was able to give my children by teaching them to tap and tapping with them when they were young. So many terrible bedtimes, and angst at night, and fear, and anxiety and all those things that I could help them let go of with tapping having never worked with a coach. And that was pre YouTube, I mean that was me having read some books. How did I even learn? I mean I know the Jack Canfield book and I know I got a lot of it from that.

But yeah, there will be a day where it’s just we can’t imagine life without it because we use it so often, that’s what I see.

Melanie: And it’s starting. They’re already using it in schools to help kids with all the stuff that happens in schools. We’re already using it in the VA, [inaudible] I think has it as their number one treatment for PTSD.

Krista: I didn’t know that.

Melanie: Yeah, it’s National Health, NIH, National Institute of Health.

Krista: National Institute for Health.

Melanie: Yeah, you can look it up on there. It’s because of all these studies it’s becoming legitimized. There’s over 250 studies around the world with it now. It’s in multiple languages. The studies aren’t happening just from this country. They’re happening all over the world and it’s because it works.

Krista: Yeah, amazing. As I’m thinking about this and I’m thinking about moms listening and wanting to help kids. I keep intending to read it but I haven’t and so I’m not sure I’m going to get the name right but what is – the Ortners wrote a book for children, Gorilla Thumps.

Melanie: Yeah, Gorilla Thumps and, yeah, something like that. That’s right.

Krista: Okay. Yeah, so clearly I’m saying this and I haven’t actually read it for myself but we’ll include it in the show notes. So, if people want to go check out that book, even though I haven’t read it, I have so much trust and respect for the Ortners that I can’t imagine it’s anything less than tremendously valuable for you as a resource with your kids too, but yeah, I think that would be a good thing for people to be aware of. Well, thank you so much, Melanie for coming on.

I know I’ve told you this but sometimes because I now have so many people that, you know, when you love someone you tell everyone that you know. And I love you so I just tell everyone that I know. And so, it’s always fun when people come back to me and they’re like, “I had a nice session with Melanie.” Or one of my friends, she was actually on the podcast quite recently, she’s a coach but she said, “It was just one of those days where I just needed some Melanie Fay.” So that’s the effect that you have on people.

And I’m just so glad to share you with Mom Goes On in the program. I’m so glad to introduce listeners of the podcast because you really are awesome.

Melanie: And I will jump in there actually, and I’m going to just say one more thing. The fact that you are saying that, when we are who we really are, we will be loved, we will.

Krista: And here’s my thought of too. If we’re not, it’s not because of who we are. If somebody doesn’t have the capacity to love who we really are it’s not because who we are is bad, wrong, flawed, less than.

Melanie: Yes, totally, both at once.

Krista: Totally. So, if people want to get in touch with you because I know they will, what’s the best way?

Melanie: My scheduling page…

Krista: Completely booked, good luck you all.

Melanie: But if you go to melaniefay.com it’s M-E-L-A-N-I-E.com that’s my scheduling page. And my email is there which is yestoyou Y-E-S-T-O-Y-O-U@melaniefay.com. You can either book a session there. It’s starting in September. Or you could email me because I’m really interested in starting some group things for people who are just learning about tapping as well.

Krista: Yeah, okay. And so, we’re recording this in July, I’m not sure when it’s going to air. But just hearing her say not until September, I guess my message is be patient. If you want to work with Melanie you might need to be patient. And depending on if you have group stuff going, but there’s demand there because she’s good. So, depending on when this airs you might be looking for a September opening and not finding one. What about social media?

Melanie: I’m not on social media.

Krista: I’m not connected with you there either, but okay.

Melanie: Yeah, I don’t have social media but what I will say is just write me, just email me. I’m really just a real person and I just want to connect with you if you feel like tapping sounds good.

Krista: And if you decide to join Mom Goes On you will get Melanie as a part of the program because we’re just keeping her forever, that’s the plan.

Melanie: And so much more too.

Krista: And so much more. Thank you so much, I love you.

Melanie: You too, Krista.

Krista: Alright, I’ll see you soon.

                                                                                                                   

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so that you can move forward with confidence.

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click work with me for details and the next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.