Still Learning After All These Years

Right: TFT Simplified

While I was on my NLP training this last spring I chanced to witness a remarkable thing. A few of the delegates were out to dinner with one of the course assistants, Kevin Laye, an NLP master practitioner with a practice in Harley Street who's also a certified trainer of Thought Field Therapy. TFT works by tapping the start-points of acupuncture meridians to alleviate a number of physical and emotional problems. I'd already heard some interesting things about it; a friend of mine had used it to instantly eliminate someone’s post-surgical pain, so I already had the idea you could do cool things if you knew this stuff.

As we sat down to dinner one of my companions, Stephanie, told me that Kevin had recently treated her using TFT. She'd been suffering for some time from myaesthenia gravis, a serious condition with a dim prognosis. I'd only met her that day, but she was as full of fun and energy as anyone I'd ever seen, and she assured me that less than a month before she'd been more or less bedridden. I was impressed; this TFT stuff was even more interesting than I thought.

Another of our party - Elizabeth - had found walking to the restaurant quite painful. She suffered from a spinal condition related to an old injury, and her doctors had assured her it was all downhill from here. She dragged one leg behind her as she walked, and she told me recently that the pain had been so bad at that point that she would walk along hoping no-one she was with would talk to her, because it took all her concentration just to get through the next step.

So after dinner Kevin remarked that Elizabeth seemed to be holding a lot of tension in her shoulders, and he did something that fixed that. She felt better immediately, and told us about her condition, never mentioning the pain, but that was evident to anyone who'd been paying attention. So Kevin did another treatment on her – total time two or three minutes for both. Then he suggested she go look at her reflection in the restaurant door, 'cause her face had entirely transformed, and she looked at least ten years younger than she had walking in.

A moment later someone said "Where's Elizabeth?" and I turned around to see her sprinting down the block. When she reached the end she turned around and ran back again. That's the point at which I turned to Kevin and said "I've GOT to learn to do that."

And that's how I came to be at Kevin's TFT training in Nottingham in June, getting certified again (hey, it happens...). I've had some successes since, though nothing to rival Kevin's dinner-table miracles. One of the most fascinating things about it, to me, is that no-one can explain why it works. That’s not to say they don’t try, but the explanations sound (to my ear at least) like twaddle. Those of you who know me know I have a low tolerance for twaddle. Just reading an explanation or description wouldn’t convince me TFT necessarily had any merit as a healing modality, but I’m not inclined to deny direct experience. Kevin is a physicist by training, and if you ask him how it works he’ll tell you “It works very well.”

Elizabeth has a slight limp, but she's free of pain, full of energy, and making her doctors scratch their heads. Stephanie, too, is still the picture of health. When her illness was at its worst she was making plans to put her 3-year-old daughter up for adoption, since she could no longer do the simplest things for her, and there was no-one else to turn to. Now she and her daughter run around and do things together, and she has a wonderful new man in her life, and plans for a healthy future.

Before I head back for Seattle in September I'll be taking another training with Kevin, this time in his method for helping people stop smoking. He has a very high success rate with a combination of TFT, NLP, and hypnosis, and he strongly advises his students to go forth and make a living helping people.

So if you see me out in Pioneer Square in Seattle dragging clients off 1st Avenue and into my office, you'll know that I've taken Kevin's advice. Hmmm... "Send me your phobics, your depressives, your hacking smokers yearning to breathe free..." Yeah, what the hell? I just might.