ET Stuttgart Plenary Transcript

EMO At Stuttgart
(Transcript of Plenary Speech by Susan Courtney CTAMT, BA, given at the INK Energy Therapies Congress, 16. November 2002 in Stuttgart, Germany)

Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. Have you had a rewarding congress, so far? I'm very grateful that you give me your time and attention, after such a long and full and stimulating day. I am very honoured to share this platform with the father of Energy Psychology, Dr Roger Callahan. Were it not for Dr Callahan, and others who have learned from him and gone on to develop systems of their own, I would not be here with you today and EMO would not have been developed

What I'm about to present to you is the newest technique in this field. 

You might have heard one or two things about EMO by now, and you are probably wondering what it is all about. 

EMO is an easy-to-learn healing system for both self-help and professional therapeutic interventions. It is the natural way to handle our emotions and the flow of energy in your body in direct response to what happens to you in your environment in the present moment. It is also a gentle and profound way to help yourself and others to dissolve the oldest and hardest of hurts, pains and injuries they have carried for a long time. There's no reliving of old trauma, just energy being set free to once again flow as it was always designed to do. And it is re-vitalising and invigorating in the most delightful way as we re-learn how to open ourselves up to absorb the full spectrum of energies available to every one of us.

EMO is your very own personalised teacher and guide to your own individual energy system. The basic process teaches you about your own channels through which your energy flows, your own energy body's needs, wants and desires, and how you can start to fill these in a whole new way. And while it does this for us, it also extends our abilities to work with other people's energy bodies, to really understand and read them correctly. It is a reality-based, self-training process which provides the perfect bridge into the extraordinary realms of true quantum healing for those who wish to explore their natural healing powers to their full potential. 

In this very short talk, I'll give you some of the background and theory underpinning EMO, and a glimpse of how the process is done. I'll familiarize you with the principles on which it is based, and you'll see from many examples just how powerful it can be to transform emotions into energies that can be worked with so much more easily and directly. I'll talk, with the help of our wonderful interpreter Susanne Beck, for about 40 minutes and then I'll be happy to answer whatever questions you may have.

When you've heard the stories of the powerful difference this unique approach can make in your life and the life of your clients, I expect that many of you will feel as excited as I am, and so many others are, who have now decided to learn more about EMO, and that you'll sign up for the official practitioner training on Sunday and Monday, so you, too, can have the actual experience of opening up the channels in your energy body to feel the power and delight of the full range of energies the Universe has to offer us so abundantly. 

EMO was first introduced at the Commonwealth Institute in London last June and formally presented at the European Energy Psychology and Energy Therapies Conference at Oxford University in August. Dedicated UK researcher Silvia Hartmann developed this process out of her work of the last twenty years first as a ground-breaking animal behaviourist, then a master NLP trainer and general semanticist, and more recently, testing to their limits several approaches in the fast-growing field of energy psychology. I have found EMO to be a most valuable way of understanding and working directly with the subtle energy system to make many different aspects of our lives so very much more satisfying in every way.

My own first experience with EMO is a good example. About the time that Silvia was preparing to launch EMO at the first trainers training at the Commonwealth Institute in London last June, I was writing an article for the journal Caduceus and had a series of photographs taken to illustrate it. A large pile of these, I had thrown away, because they were unflattering. At the same time, I conducted an interview with Silvia to find out more about EMO. At the conclusion of that interview, she challenged me to try EMO for myself on the feelings that came up for me as I looked at those photos. The first thing remarkable thing about this is that I was actually eager to try it. And that was something really new for me. I have been working in this field for years, but as is the case for many of us, I suspect, I have been somewhat more enthusiastic about helping my clients than I am about working on myself. This time, however, after hearing Silvia talk about it and teach me how to do it, I was actually eager. So I dug through the waste paper bin and pulled out the photos. And I really cringed to see them. Such a confrontation to my vanity. Why did I wear that jacket whose lapels were so wide? Why didn't the photographer tell me my hair was astray on that side? There was no escaping the less remediable features - the heaviness in my jowls that declared that middle age was truly catching up with me, the fullness that reminded me I had not followed through on my plans to change my eating and exercise habits All of my vanities and my harshly judged flaws, I put through the process of EMO. And what was the immediate result? Within the space of a few short minutes, I could look at those photos and smile with pleasure at the sincerity, warm-heartedness and openness of the woman I saw in those photos. And they have never returned to the bin. They now live in my workspace, always available to me.

Then I used EMO with one of my clients, a middle-aged widower who had little confidence with women. After confronting his fear of rejection, and treating it with EMO, he is now so confident that he will not settle for second-best, or just those who he thinks might not reject him. He now asks the most desirable of the women he knows to go out with him. 

I hope this brief overview has caught your interest, and that you will now open up your ears, your minds, and your energy systems, so you can take in fully the principles and practice of this powerful new approach. I hope that you'll not only join me for the official practitioner training on Sunday and Monday, but that you'll enjoy using EMO as much as I do to transform any emotion into smoothly flowing, delightfully enlivening energy for yourself and for your clients.

Theory

One of the basic tenets of many energy psychology approaches is that negative emotions are caused by disruptions in the energy system. This implies that emotions are to the energy body as physical pain is to the physical body. Emotions are the feedback device for the energy system.

In medicine, we treat the disease and not the symptom. And likewise, if emotions are a symptom of an energy disruption, then we need to treat the energy, not the emotion. The beauty of this is that energy is much, much easier to work with than emotion is. How much success might we expect to have by saying to ourselves in the middle of a panic attack - "Oh let's not feel this anymore" or when someone's just had a fight with their partner and they're very upset and try to say to themselves "OK, I intend not to feel upset about this, I want to feel happy right now, and open-hearted and loving again." Not a lot of success, generally. And that's because intention doesn't move matter or emotions very well, but it does move energy quite easily. Because in the energetic realm there is no restriction. Because intention and energy are made of the same stuff, they are of the same realm. 

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, there is a saying, 'Where there is resistance or disruption there is pain. Where there is no resistance or disruption, there is no pain.' Many of you who have experience in psychotherapy and personal development work have learned that this is also true at the emotional level. Tears of grief flowing freely are surprisingly less painful than those choked back and swallowed down into a lump in the throat and a headache. 

We are fortunate to have as part of our research team, Ananga Sivyer, who has spent years researching ancient Chinese and Ayurvedic texts. When Ananga was introduced to EMO, she said, "you know, this is what the texts have always said is what we need to do, but they don't actually say how. EMO IS the how. This recalled to my mind, stories of some of the saints and gurus of India, who are said to feel absolutely everything. I have heard Sai Baba described as having all the emotions of the world expressed fleetingly in his face, and then they flow on through him. 

This brings us to the core principle of EMO and truly of all energy work. All energy workers know - what is it that energy needs to do? It needs to flow. Always. Energy needs to flow. 

And the principle of EMO is that we need energy to flow through us, smoothly and freely. And that we need a wide variety of energies to flow through us. Our energy bodies have nutritional requirements, it might be said, rather like the physical body. And to restrict our diet of energies is no more healthy than to restrict our nutrition. Either results in nutritional deficiency diseases like scurvy or anorexia and the handicaps of impaired development, physically, neurologically, and psychologically, which result.

In fact, it is the nature of complex, living systems that they grow and develop by adapting to handle increasing variety and intensity of stimuli, of flux. This is an extension of the work of chemist Ilya Prigogine, whose work won him the Noble Prize in 1977.

Prigogine's work has been extended into the field of neuro-biology by Bill Harris, founder of the Centerpointe programme for personal development using brain-wave entrainment techniques. That programme works by feeding sound frequencies into the brain to induce fluctuations of increasing amplitude across both brain hemispheres. These fluctuations give the nervous system input, or stimulus, beyond its ability to handle, the way it is currently structured. 

In order to handle these fluctuations, the nervous system is forced to reorganize itself at higher, more complex levels of functioning, evolving a new structure that can handle the input it originally could not handle. As the brain continues to receive this input, the nervous system will continually reorganize itself, in a series of quantum leaps -- some at a micro-level of functioning and some at a much more global level -- until a new structure has been created that can easily handle this input. 

It is the objective of EMO to do precisely the same for our energy systems, and we do this by allowing ourselves to take in and move through us many, many different sorts of emotions and energies, rather than trying to limit ourselves just to the "nice" ones. When we can do this, we avoid energy malnutrition, and whatever might be the energetic equivalents of scurvy and other nutritional deficit diseases. And we also clear our energy channels and stimulate our energy systems to increase the complexity and differentiation of their structures and to be able to handle increasing volumes and varieties of energies. 

We know that the energy body is both inside and outside the physical body. Can you imagine what a fully nourished energy body might look like? It could be as huge and brilliant as a star.

This brings us to the HOW. How do we do this? How do we invite and allow and assist the wide range of energies to move into us and through us and out and onwards? In the simplest way possible.

Let me show you. 

One of the great things we played with as Silvia was developing EMO was exchanging insults. What's the worst thing anyone could say to you? You're stupid! You're ugly! You don't know what you're talking about. You're an imposter. Here's how we deal with such things using EMO. I was working with one of the participants on a training course, who thought that she was pretty and intelligent, but feared most that she was shallow. I briefly described the process of EMO, and then guided her through it.

First, I said to her, "You are so pathetically shallow!" She stepped back as if I had struck her a physical blow and then sot of crumpled. I asked "where are you feeing that in your body? Put your hands there now, and understand that this is simply an energy, an energy that is blocked from its natural pathways. Can you let that go through so we can establish the even flow?" I asked. "Working with the energy behind that sensation, not the emotions, not the memory of what your father said to you 30 years ago, just the energy, and giving that energy the support it needs to soften and move and find its natural pathways out of the body, without any argument or struggle - it's just gone." 

Within moments her hands had described a pathway down from the original constriction in her chest, to her solar plexus, then out to the sides of her body and around to her back, then up her spine and out of the top of her head. Again, I said to her, "You are such a pathetic and shallow person," she barely flinched, but still found some stuck energy in her chest. Again that flowed down, around and back up her spine and out the top of her head. I said it again, and this time she actually smiled a bit, and her hands moved very quickly and smoothly down, around and back up to the top of her head. And when I said it to her one more time, she actually grinned as the energy moved so swiftly and smoothly through her that she no longer could even follow it with her hands. And she just stood there looking extremely pleased with herself, feeling happy and positively feasting on the energy of her worst nightmare of an insult. 

And, of course, we block so-called "good" energies as well as negative ones. I was very glad I was well-practiced with EMO last summer. At the end of the European Energy Psychology Conference at Oxford, I was given a standing ovation by 150 of my highly-respected colleagues for organising such a stimulating and warm-spirited conference. I could feel in myself the tendency to block that energy, or shield it out, but instead I EMOd it in and through and out and found I could stand there and just feel thrilled and delighted that everyone else had enjoyed the conference as much as I had.

Now the risk with positive energies is that we can block energies not only by trying NOT to let them in or through at all but also by holding onto them. Some people hold onto the bad experiences and memories and feelings they've had, it's true. And almost all of us try to hold onto the good times, the good feelings, the treasured good memories. And this can be horrendously damaging.

Consider, for example, the little girl, who will go on to live a miserable, sad, pathetic life without attention and love because of the one night her drunken step-father (who abuses her on a regular basis), stumbles home drunk, picks her up, sets her on his lap, and says, "You're my little princess and I love you." Whoom. The whole pattern is set and gets stuck onto men who are drunk and abusive and alcoholic and smell like that. The neurology learns that if what you want is joy and happiness and feeling loved, then that's the kind of man you have to look for. And now let that woman's life unfold and you can see what happens. It was realising the terrible damage and loss of opportunities for a satisfying life caused by holding on to the good experiences as well as the impact of trauma that led Silvia to stop thinking about emotions in terms of good emotions and bad emotions. They're just energies. 

This principle is, of course, the fundamental basis of Faust's pact with the devil. 

"Wird' ich zum Augenblicke sagen: 
Verweile doch! Du bist so schön! 
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zu Grunde gehen!" 

It's not necessarily the unconscious that does this holding on, as it was in the case of the little girl with the drunken step-father. It can be a direct command, as it finally was in Faust's case. 

For example, "I will NEVER forgive you." (And then you never can.) or with the positive emotion "I wish this moment would never end" or "I never want to be anywhere but here with you."

Another client was a lady whose husband had died 5 years ago. She was in a terrible state. And in her own words, she told exactly how she had ended up that way. "He was lying there. They told us he had about 10-15 minutes of life left. So I stopped time. And everything that is good about me is still there, with him." 

She gave a direct, conscious command to stop time, and her energy system did the best it could. It took everything out that wasn't necessary to run the body, and made that happen, leaving very little of her available to get on with life. 

So how was that lady's problem resolved and the even flow restored? What would you have to do? Rescind the instruction. And that would lead to - letting him die. As he did, in fact, five years ago. But for her, at least, he's only just died, a few months ago now, since she did this work.

Everything in the energy system has to flow. It has to be flowing. You can't kick out the rubbish and you can't avoid the bad experiences in life - people being people, stepping on your foot, or getting wet, cold or frightened, you can't avoid it any more than you can avoid the good experiences, but you mustn't shield either of them out or block them or hold onto them because it really messes up your energy system.

There are many negative effects from trying to hold onto emotions and energies, not the least of which is that we block any more from coming in at the same time we are starving the rest of our energy system from feeling the benefits of that energy flowing through and out.

This is one of the most damaging effects of blocking the flow of energy through us - not the block itself, where we are likely to feel the pain, but even more, the areas downstream, so to speak, which have become arid deserts, starved of rain or flowing water for years, and where flowers once bloomed and fruit ripened, there is now nothing but withered stalks and dry leaves. 

Another problem that can arise in working with these energies are shields which prevent energies from reaching us at all. There are all manners of energies coming in to the energy body at all times. We live in a veritable "Ocean of Energy" which is generated by literally *everything* - from the ground beneath to the radiation from the sun, the moon and the stars; every living being exudes vast quantities of energies all the time on a very wide bandwidth. 

Human beings are probably the only species on this planet who have the ability to actively and consciously "shield" themselves from certain types of energy and actually are able to reject energies that exist, and may very well be most beneficial to them. 

On the simplest level, it could be said that any time we say, "No!" to something, this is a command - a direct command! - to a part of the energy system to stop and go into reverse. Many more people show in their behaviours, their bodies, their real lives absolute evidence that they must have said, "No." to prosperity, to happiness, to success, to losing weight, to living without an addictive substance. In the simple act of saying, "No" to an incoming energy, a barrier is created to that energy which keeps it out of the system. Malnutrition is the inevitable result.

Attention energy is an *essential nutrient* for the energy body and when people don't get this energy, they fade away, go mad and they may even die. The Romanian orphans are a recent example of this. 

How can it be that this vital life energy seems in such short supply? The answer is simple and profoundly sad. This energy is NOT in short supply; rather the problem lies in the fact that individual humans do not receive and process it adequately. Indeed, the ability to receive and process attention energy from other humans is probably the most likely and directly related factor that decides on any given person's health and happiness throughout their lifetimes. 

Consider this example: When a man goes up to a woman in a bar, looks her in the eye and says, "You are very beautiful.", what kind of response on the energetic level would you expect to see if energy exchanges could be made visible by a special video camera? 

Would this energy travel across to the woman, be openly received, taken into her many systems, moving through these systems as the energetic equivalent of a digestion takes place, powering and re-charging all manner of sub-systems in it's travel, and then smoothly flow out to leave the lady in question vibrant, happy and glowing? 

Clearly, the answer to this is a resounding NO. 

Indeed, the lady in the bar may have put her shields up before the man even got close enough to send his message to her. Her reaction to the energetic wave 
traveling towards her would most likely be more shields still, as she thinks, "He only wants X from me, he doesn't know me, he's lying, I don't like him, he looks ugly, etc." ... and many more thoughts of the same kind, all of which create an impenetrable barrier to what could otherwise have been a highly nourishing energy exchange, which would have needed to go no farther at all than a simple, "Why, thank you.", for these energies to pass into her system, through and out, leaving her feeling better, more nourished, more powerful, more energised as the energies went to the Energy Body and there, fulfilled their tasks of repair , of healing, of renewal.

In EMO we have developed ways to work with these shields which respect and are careful of the protective reason for the shield, and which enable the necessary healing to take place so the energies blocked by the shield can at last be allowed in, to serve their natural function of nourishment and stimulation and to flow on through and out, restoring the paths of even flow.

I said earlier that EMO was also a wonderful teaching tool, teaching us about our energy systems and the energy systems of others. Do you have any idea how many different schemes there are which try to map the energy system? Most of us are familiar with the detailed meridian charts from Traditional Chinese Medicine. Did you know that the Thai use a completely different set of energy pathways?, and of course the Vedic texts refer to the nadis and the chakras. While modern Japanese systems such as Jin Shin Jitsu use yet a different set of energy channels, and modern acupuncture researchers (resisted mightily by the "old school") are adding new channels to the maps every year. And then, of course there are the micro-systems such as reflexology and auricular acupuncture. And the neuro-lymphatic and neuro-vascular systems elucidated by the American chiropractor Dr George Goodheart. And yet, remarkably, just like all the brilliant techniques you're hearing about at this congress, they all work. 

So we what we have available to us are conflicting versions of some very old maps of some very complicated systems. And Silvia decided that she did not want to trust these maps. That it was better to take soundings along the way since everyone has a completely individualised energy systems. In EMO, we solve this very neatly. 

With EMO, we've developed a feedback system to tell us the difference between when we're really moving energy, and when we're making it up. 

EMO is a great healing teacher, because you don't have to hallucinate or guess. All you have to do is say

1 Do you have a problem?
2 Where do you feel it in your body?
3 Show me with your hands

As a healing teacher this gives you great feedback, because you can take your best guess, and then you ask your client to show you. And you compare your guess with their reality, and you start to learn the difference between when the feeling you had is right and when it isn't. EMO teaches you to feel the difference, reliably, in your own self.

4 Then you tell the client about stuck energy, and the natural channels we all have for it to flow through and out

5 And you ask, "If we could soften it, and it expands, where would it go? Can we assist it? You assist it from the inside with your attention, and I'll assist it from the outside with mine. That makes the whole process smooth and elegant.
6 Do you think that process would continue, on its own? What if you put your hand on the place and assisted it to soften and flow?

You ask the client every step of the way - what is it? Where is it?

With EMO, we're not moving emotion, we're not moving metaphors, we're not moving 40 years of misery, we're not moving pain or anything in the physical. We're only moving an energy.

This is applicable to everything: from allowing sunsets to come into your body, helping someone who's just burst into tears - "What is that? Where do you feel it in your body? Would you like to help it soften and re-establish the even flow?

You can do that with the most long-standing problem.

Conclusion:

There are many wonderful energy psychology approaches and kinesiology techniques. I train practitioners both for the Association for Meridian Energy Therapies and for the Institute for Meridian-based Psychotherapy and Counselling in Emotional Freedom Techniques, Be Set Free Fast, Tapas Acupressure Technique, and their many important applications in everything from healing trauma to treating addictions and habits to Inner Child, Inner Parent Resolution. EMO shares with all these approaches the fantastic sense of liberation and empowerment that comes from having a self-help technique to manage painful responses both from the past and as they arise in daily life. Like the others, it gently and powerfully accelerates and deepens the process of therapeutic change, whatever the context in which you apply it. 

What I love about EMO - what it does , in my own experience, better than many other approaches, is that it helps us to relearn to use the systems we have been given to naturally process all the energies we encounter. This is our birthright as energy beings living in an Ocean of Energies. Every time we do EMO, we are clearing the channels, restoring the even flow, opening up our energy systems to be able to accept and make use of more and more of the vital energy nutrients available to us in this Universe of total abundance.

There is so much more I'd love to have the time to show you about how to make use of this great gift we were all born with but have forgotten how to use. I do look forward to teaching those of you who will join me on Sunday and Monday for the official practitioner training how best to use this for yourselves and to apply it professionally for your clients.

Thank you very much for your time and attention.

Susan Courtney

Licensed Trainer, EMO