The Mosaic Life

Overcoming Stage Fright & Unlocking Potential with EFT Tapping

• Laura Wagenknecht • Episode 1

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This episode of The Mosaic Life with Laura W features the incredible Carisa Holmes, a musician, author, and EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) tapping practitioner. Get ready to dive into the fascinating world of EFT and discover how it can help you overcome fear, anxiety, and self-doubt to achieve your goals.

Carisa shares her inspiring journey from aspiring pop star to empowering others through EFT. She reveals how her own struggles with stage fright led her to discover the transformative power of EFT and how it can help others break free from their limitations.

We explore the science behind EFT, how it works to regulate the nervous system, and its effectiveness in addressing a wide range of issues, including PTSD, addiction, phobias, and even food cravings. Carisa guides us through a simple yet powerful EFT tapping exercise, demonstrating how it can quickly calm the nervous system and promote a sense of self-acceptance.

This episode is packed with valuable insights and practical tools for anyone seeking to overcome fear, anxiety, or self-doubt, whether it's on stage, in a networking meeting, or in everyday life. Tune in and discover how EFT tapping can help you unlock your full potential and shine brightly!

#eft #tapping #emotionalfreedomtechnique #selfacceptance #nervoussystemregulation #overcomefear #publicspeaking #stagefright #themosaiclife #laurawagenknecht #mosaicbusinessconsulting

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Mosaic Life with Laura W. I am your host, laura Bogdan-Knesht, and this show is presented to you by Mosaic Business Consulting. A mosaic is a bunch of pieces that, when put together, make up the whole in a really beautiful way. This show discusses the various pieces of a business throughout different industries and how these pieces, when put together correctly, can help develop a smoother, more efficient and effective running of your business. To reach me, contact Laura at mosaicbusinessconsultingcom.

Speaker 1:

And today's show is going to be a little bit different because I understand that Carissa is going to make us do a little bit of stuff work on our own here. So, anyway, today my guest is none other than Carissa Holmes, and I am so excited to have her on here. She's a musician, author, speaker and certified accredited emotional freedom technique or EFT tapping practitioner. Her mission is to empower people, to heal and inspire them to create, and I got to tell you it's just amazing what she does. So her greatest joy is writing and performing music on big stages such as the Electric Forest Music Festival and intimate community gatherings. I like that idea where it's a small group of people, but when off stage, carissa helps professionals overcoming the fear of public speaking, stage fright and networking nerves so that we can perform and present with more confidence. So welcome to the show, carissa, it is absolutely great to have you here. More confidence.

Speaker 2:

So welcome to the show, carissa. It is absolutely great to have you here. Thank you, laura, for having me. I appreciate it. I've had a chance to listen to some of your previous episodes and I really love your interview style and it really is kind of like you're giving people the grout they need to pull their mosaic together and really make it form. So it's wonderful. Thank you, oh, thank you.

Speaker 1:

It's very generous. I am kind of curious, though. You know when, when people start doing something like what you're doing, I'm always wondering what? Why choose that? You could be choosing how to teach, how to sing, you know, or something along the lines. So I'm curious what got you into this? And you know why, become an EFT practitioner?

Speaker 2:

Right, it's such a good question because it wasn't an active choice of mine. I really thought that I was just going to be a pop star. I got very close to that. I was working with major record labels when I was young. I was told I was next in line to be signed and everything was lined up and how it was supposed to be and it was just funny how everything kind of fell apart and you know, all these very unlikely stories kind of unfolded and I'm like, why is this happening?

Speaker 2:

And it was because I was meant to help others and just being on stage as a pop star, I mean you could say that it helps, that music can be medicine, but I was meant to really help people unpack what is preventing them from shining and becoming their own star. And it's, frankly, much more gratifying work for me to be. I get on stage, I sing, I have a great time, it's fun, it's medicine for me. But I can also help someone else to get past the same thing that I went through, which was unbelievable amounts of stage fright, to the point where I would have freeze responses where I couldn't do anything. Once I got past the freezes, there was a whole lot of crappy performances, frankly, because I was so scared and I was shaking and you're shaking and you're a singer, your voice shakes.

Speaker 2:

everyone can tell you're nervous and you know, I did so many poor performances before I finally got to the point where I was free. I said you know what I got to help other people that are dealing with this as well.

Speaker 1:

Well, it's fantastic and I can't imagine how many of the entrepreneurs and solopreneurs or business owners that I know that have to speak often either in networking meetings to pitch or to talk to others, etc. Or to get on stage or give a workshop or something along those lines, and I'm wondering, you know how helpful this could be for them. But I'm also wondering if you can describe for me or tell me more about what is EFT. You know, it's one thing to hear the words, but what does it? What is it?

Speaker 2:

Well, eft is the emotional freedom technique. It is a body mind modality. It's a somatic release. Therapy is somatic means of the body. So we are using our fingers to tap on meridian endpoints on the face and the body and the hands. These are the same points that an acupuncturist uses and puts a needle into when we get acupuncture. But we're just using tapping no needles, thankfully and we're stimulating those meridian endpoints and it helps to release whatever it is that we're just using tapping no needles, thankfully and we're stimulating those meridian endpoints and it helps to release whatever it is that we're holding or fighting or repressing within ourselves which is causing the inner conflict which is the core root of stage fright.

Speaker 2:

We're at war with ourself and when you're at war with yourself, you can't win, no matter how it turns out, unless you're coming to a place of harmony and agreement. There was no victory there. You just suppressed a part of yourself so that you could move on and do whatever task you wanted to do. So EFT helps bring us to a place of self-acceptance, of helping the part of us that feels unsafe and is generating the stage right, helping that inner animal feel safe so that it's not pulling us back from expanding and getting onto that stage at TEDx and giving a speech or going to a networking meeting and not feeling nervous and awkward in the corner, that inner animal, helping it feel safe, we can expand with ease and grace.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so how do we do that? You know how does that process work, because it sounds like it's not just about tapping and meridians, which I would love for you to describe. What is the meridian? But you know just what is it that? What does it do for us? That then leads us into something else.

Speaker 2:

What we're talking about here and this is one of the one of the three kinds of main things we can do to help ourselves is practicing nervous system regulation. Eft helps tremendously with that, and what nervous system regulation is is what we used to call stress management Back in the eighties. We'd say you need better stress management, and we didn't know that it's about the nervous system being regulated, meaning you have the capacity to bring yourself back to a neutral, rest and digest state Once you have been in fight, flight or freeze for some reason hopefully a good reason but you have this capacity to shift and come back to your natural state, which is neutral, and we're not constantly staying in this hyper aroused, hyper vigilant, stressed mindset that our society unfortunately fosters a lot of having that capacity just to come back to neutral, and that is how EFT helps us with regulation. That is the number one thing that can help prevent and bring that stage fright down, when the nerve system understands how to handle high sensation without getting stuck in a fight flight response.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and it sounds like it can also then help with things outside of stage. Fright, I mean. So what are some of these things that you know I can't? I just can't imagine that it's just for this. So what? What else can it help with?

Speaker 2:

There's plenty of research and there's a searchable directory. It's actually a really good search engine. On EFT internationalorg website you can read about all the research and the clinical things that have been done with EFT. It's really good for PTSD. They've done a lot of work with veterans and PTSD. I helped healed myself from CPTSD using somatic techniques like EFT along with therapy. It's really good for addictions, phobias. Phobias can go away surprisingly quickly with EFT. It's a form of exposure therapy, but that helps a person stay calm while they're being exposed, so it works a little faster. It's also really good for food cravings. I have none Right, I'm thinking about the chocolate bar on my kitchen counter. It helps the emotional drive to want to eat, to comfort oneself for something, or an habituation toward eating a certain food. It breaks that programming up and makes it a lot easier to change your habits. For so many things we say in the business it's a joke. Just tap on everything, like go to the doctor when you need to, but also tap on everything. Tap, tap on your way there and see.

Speaker 1:

Wow, and, and so you were saying how it can help us regulate our, our system. But what is what else you know? How else can it help us? How, like I can only imagine. Okay, so I'm regulating my system. Yeah, does it stop there, or is there?

Speaker 2:

more. There's much more. It's a really good way to unpack conditioning from our childhood, unhelpful subconscious programming. All of the things that drive who we are and our behavior are not in the little part of our conscious mind that's above the water. It's like the iceberg analogy. It's the 90% that's under the subconscious programming that creates our day.

Speaker 2:

Eft is a way to become aware of the patterns that we're seeing in our life, where they're coming from, what beliefs are driving these patterns, and using EFT and this is really something that should be done with a therapist we're not real good at seeing ourselves, you know it's like you can't see the forest for the trees. Plus, we deserve support. You know, especially if there's trauma involved, you need someone. Pack all that programming. You can take the emotional charge off of events that happened early in your life that are driving unwanted patterns because you're stuck. There's this emotion that's stuck or there's this programming in your subconscious that it's not safe to speak up because uncle Robert, you know, hit me in the back of the head when I spoke up one day. You know it's things like that from early in life that tend to get stuck from our formative years and EFT with a practitioner can really effectively help you unpack and break down those emotional kind of crystallized things.

Speaker 1:

Wow, really cool and and so you know you talk about EFT and the techniques, and you've talked about hitting the meridians, which again okay.

Speaker 2:

You can kind of like an energy pathway in the body. They have. Now that our scientific equipment is a little more advanced, they have been able to detect these meridian endpoints with equipment. There are areas where electrical resistance of the skin changes fairly dramatically from the rest of the body and, sure enough, those are the points where the meridians are opening up onto the skin. So we at least have some scientific awareness of these points that have been in other systems. Like traditional Chinese medicine, people could see the meridian. You know they were had the clairvoyance to be able to. Oh well, I see this line going from here down to your stomach. That's the stomach meridian. We don't exactly have a way to kind of map things out scientifically yet, but there is at least this acknowledgement. These are very real. Insurance pays for acupuncture because it works. It's like, yeah, that's coming to the point where we can scientifically see and validate these things that the sages and the practitioners of older systems of medicine have been telling us about forever.

Speaker 1:

So wow, Great, great, yeah, and so maybe you could help us and demonstrate a technique that we could use and and understand a little bit more about what this is in practice. Right?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. We can kind of do a shortened version of a technique that I share with all my students and clients. It's called tap and breathe. Essentially, you would tap through normally, you would tap through all the end points and at the same time that we're doing that, we would take on a breathing pattern where we're just taking a gentle inhale. Really deep breaths can actually worsen stage fright, so that can be bad advice. When someone tells you to take, just take a bunch of really deep breaths, it's a good way to have a panic attack, trust me.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly no, no former therapist, so I get it.

Speaker 2:

It's just a gentle, normal inhale, but we extend the length of the exhale because when you have this leisurely exhale, you're stimulating the vagus nerve in such a way that says we're safe, everything's chill, there's no saber tooth tiger around here, or I wouldn't be breathing in such a relaxed way. That's one of the reasons why singing is so good for you, because a singing is extended, exhales all over the place and we're also using our voice box, which the vagus nerve innervates the larynx, and we're also using our voice box, which the vagus nerve innervates the larynx. So we're creating these vibrations with our speaking or singing voice that also tell the vagus nerve calm down. That's why some people will talk nonstop when they're nervous, because they can't stop, and it's a way for them to soothe vagus nerve. Fascinating.

Speaker 1:

That sound. Yeah, you learn something new every day. I swear, this is awesome. This is great, um so fantastic. So, yeah, walk us through this.

Speaker 2:

This sounds great so we'll just do two points that are kind of easy to describe. I know not everyone can see me due to differences in visual ability, but also because some people are just listening to the podcast rather than the video. So we'll just use two points that are easy to find. The first one is called the self-acceptance point and it's right on the heel of the hand, beneath kind of your pinky knuckle. You could see that little line in your hand. That's the precise spot. You don't have to be precise, as long as you're getting the general area, you got the point. So you could tap with your fingers or you can bring the heels of both your hands together If you want to do it like that, and you'll get the spot. And this is called the self-acceptance point because when we start any EFT session and we're going to use words, we would say, even though I have this nervousness or this sensation or this tightness in my stomach or my face feels hot, I accept myself anyway, any kind of self-affirming statement I'm good, I know, everything's all right.

Speaker 2:

I trust whatever you want to say.

Speaker 1:

I'm like.

Speaker 2:

I accept myself. Boy, that was a tough one and it can be hard to say. I've had people work with me in their first few sessions. They'll just start to cry when they try to say that they accept themselves. So it's obvious I accept myself anyway.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's just not resonating girl.

Speaker 2:

Or I like for people that say I don't want to accept myself, say, even though I don't want to accept myself and I have these feelings that I don't want to accept myself, I'm willing to give myself some time right now, because that's what you're doing. I'm willing to learn how to accept myself. That's what I started with. I said I don't want to, I don't accept myself. What does that even mean? But I'm trying. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that, you know self-affirmative.

Speaker 1:

And while we're at this, point, and there seems to be a pace that you've got.

Speaker 2:

There's a helpful pace. It really you don't have to focus on this part if you don't want to, but there's a frequency. I'm kind of going tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. That frequency seems to be very natural for most people. When they're tapping it's around seven to eight repetitions per second and that just so happens to land in the theta brain state. That's where we go when we're in meditation, when we're being really present with ourselves, when we're deeply relaxed. So it's kind of the pace that someone who's doing a journey work with you or a shamanic type work, they will drum at about that pace with the medicine drum. It just helps us to go into that meditative state. It's also when you listen to binaural beats. A lot of them are at seven to eight hertz, because that puts you right in that theta. So you can tap that pace if you want, if that feels good, and it's just fun to know that, maybe why you're drawn to that speed. Yeah, Just curious.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So we would just take now a gentle inhale nothing dramatic and exhale Like you're blowing candles out for one, two, three, four, good, now that we know the drill. Inhaling once more, just gently, and exhale, blowing out the candle One, two, three, four, five, maybe, Okay, and inhaling just normally and exhaling normally, we're going to come to the other side other hand, if you'd like to, if you have that capacity. Switching from left to right bilateral stimulation helps both sides of the brain to engage with what we're doing and just helps everything to happen. So we're just inhaling once more, gently, and exhale. This time we're going to hum to stimulate that vagus nerve. If your hum is not quite that long, it's okay. I'm just a singer, so I'm used to holding notes out.

Speaker 2:

Inhaling once more and exhale Good, and just follow a natural impulse. If you have a natural impulse to stretch your arm or to move a little bit, following our natural impulses helps the nervous system regulate as well. So, coming now to the second easy point, to find, it's at the top of the head. Following our natural impulses helps the nervous system regulate as well. So, coming now to the second easy point, to find, it's at the top of the head, there's a convergence of meridian endpoints there, but there's one primary one that we're going to hit and if we just pat the top of the head you'll get it and you can move your hand a little around a little bit If that feels good. We're just going to inhale once more gently.

Speaker 1:

Does anybody ever get an injury from this.

Speaker 2:

Anything could happen, I suppose, but it's not likely. Inhaling, this is pretty simple and easy, and just exhale, hum, again Inhaling. Even though I have this whatever tension, stage fright sensation, I'm working toward accepting myself. I'm giving myself this time. Look at me, I'm trying. I appreciate myself for trying whatever you want to say, and with tap and breathe, you don't have to say words, but you can if it feels right. Nice, inhaling once more and one last hum. Wow, we're pausing our tapping. Just notice how you feel it's pretty amazing actually.

Speaker 1:

You know there's there's a physical sensation of a calming sensation, and it's not extreme. It like, oh, I was anxious and now I'm not anxious at all, or anything like that. Or I was tense and I'm not tense at all. It's more gentle, it's just a gentle difference.

Speaker 2:

Right, it doesn't insist upon itself, but it definitely invites the body to let go of being in that chronic fight or flight and be like, hey, remember, this is where we live, this is our real home. And then the nervous system says, oh, and that was after just what a minute? I say five to 10 minutes, and that will really get you settled back in that calm and centered state and it won't. It's not like taking a depressant or a tranquilizer, where it will tranquilize you out of being able to be excited and present that you've regulated. You're not constantly hyper aroused and hyper vigilant, you're just prepared for anything because you're in neutral.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and and you could. I can sense what that would be like if I were in freeze mode and it it forces your brain to come out of that a bit.

Speaker 2:

Right, and so this into the subconscious and the programming and conditioning from childhood. There's more to unpack there, obviously, that someone would want to work with a practitioner and or a therapist train who's trauma-informed if you want to work through those types of things, but on your own tap and breathe is so effective and has so many positive benefits in the moment when you're feeling nervous, or even if you're not. If you just do that every day, you're helping train your nervous system that, hey, you know how to shift. Remember here's how to come back to neutral, even though life is, you know, inviting you to be stressed out in every other moment about every other thing. We weren't wired for a world that's this overstimulating, like it's a bit now. Frankly, especially for women, we are definitely wired differently. We are more sensitized to stress as an evolutionary advantage. So it's super important for women to have some kind of daily practice that helps your nervous system. Remember your normal neutral setting instead of this.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I know not of what you speak. What's that? I can't thank you enough. This has been fantastic, but I want to know if somebody wants to reach out to you and find out more and chat with you, how can they contact you?

Speaker 2:

My website's a great place. It's your perfect songcom and you can engage with my free resources. I have a free overcoming stage right and and nerves course that people can kind of get their feet wet. The tap and breathe exercises there in its entirety. I have an online course as well, and I also have a contact form. If someone has questions for me or just wants to chat about EFT, you can get ahold of me that way and book an appointment. I also have a YouTube channel. That's quite it's quite a potpourri. I'm definitely a polymath, so there's a number of different things you can find on there. You can find some of my music as well as EFT videos, and that channel is Creative, Conscious Living, so you can get to my YouTube that way by searching that or my name. I usually pop up from my name too.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so we've got um, your perfect song, um creative, conscious living, and Carissa Holmes, yep, perfect, perfect. So there's lots of ways to find you, which I love. This is fantastic. It has been such a pleasure. I'm just so sorry that it's over that fast, so this has really, really been great. Thank you so much for sharing and taking time out of your busy schedule to be with us today. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, laura. I appreciate the opportunity to share, you know, to help anyone to break out, break out of that, that animal that's holding them back, and move forward with grace and ease and confidence.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, Thank you so much and and I want to thank you, the audience also for listening to the mosaic life with Laura W and um, I hope that you have a great rest of your day and try and use some of these techniques to improve your day. Daily days, daily activities each day. So anyway, thank you again, Take care.