The Birth of Emotional Yoga ~ Daralyse Lyons
EFT saved my life. Yoga saved my soul. By combining these two modalities, creating a technique I refer to as Emotional Yoga, I have come to unconditionally love and accept myself, mind, body and soul. I realize that I can’t simply make these claims without then telling my story. But, I hope that you will suspend your disbelief as I tell you about the unbelievable experience of recovery I had when I combined yoga and EFT.
My name is Daralyse Lyons and I am in recovery from bulimia. Now. I am in recovery from bulimia now. However, for nearly 12 years I lived my life trapped in a cycle of binging and purging, a self imposed hell. I felt emotionally bankrupt and spiritually bereft. I cried on an almost daily basis. And I was institutionalized at various treatment facilities 18 times. Any help I sought was largely ineffective. I wanted to die. And in fact my bulimia felt like a slow suicide. Not slow enough though. I was fast approaching the end of my rope. I feinted multiple times from dehydration. I had seizures due to electrolyte imbalance. I lost control of my bowels (not a very lady-like occurrence). I vomited blood. And those were just the physical effects of my eating disorder.
I was killing my body. Then, I went to a yoga class. Yoga was painful for me at first. The instant I sat down on my mat and tuned in to the slow sensation of my breath in my body, tears arose. It was almost as if my body were screaming in pain, emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical. In being silent, tuning in, and moving my body, I began to release years of accumulated pain and shame. In retrospect, I have found out that emotions are stored within the body, in fact, specific body parts tend to be storehouses for specific emotions and attachments. But, at the moment, I didn’t know that. I just knew that yoga offered me an emotional release. It provided a way into my body and my heart. I went back to yoga class often after that first day. It didn’t really help me to let go of my eating disorder, but it did help me to reduce my bulimic symptoms and to have a less punishing relationship with my body.
I went to an EFT practitioner years after I started doing yoga because conventional therapy wasn’t helping me and I was still miserable and stuck in my bulimic cycle. EFT, the Emotional Freedom Technique, is best described as acupressure for the emotions. By acknowledging a negative emotion and then tapping on the end points of the body’s energetic meridians, the body’s energy system is balanced and negative emotions vanish. In my first session with this EFT practitioner, I was able to uncover and let go of a lot of my childhood angst. Unfortunately, my bulimic symptoms did not abate. But, I did experience a good deal of relief from old emotional wounds.
The idea to combine yoga and the Emotional Freedom Technique came to me when I was at the end of my emotional rope. I was literally falling apart. I’d been released from my 18th inpatient treatment after almost 7 months of inpatient treatment and had promptly relapsed yet again. I’d moved a hundred fifty miles away from my home, quit my job, ended a relationship, and changed everything about my life in the belief that it would enable me to recover. And then I’d relapsed again. I was binging and purging nonstop. And I was desperately suicidal.
I was living in Philadelphia in my own apartment. I’d moved from Connecticut because all I’d done there had been to binge and purge and I thought I could run from the disease. I should have been happy in a new place and a new life. But, instead, I’d taken the old behaviors with me. That day, I found myself sitting on my bathroom floor crying, the stench of my last bulimic episode filling the air, food strewn about my living room beckoning me towards the next desperate binge. I couldn’t stop. My bulimia was killing me. Yet, I could not seem to give it up. I wanted desperately to change. But, I was stuck. I felt hopeless and helpless and deeply afraid that I’d never get better. I also felt ashamed.
In the midst of my desperation I decided that I should at least attempt to do one healthy thing for myself even though I knew I was going to spend the rest of the day binging and purging. I crawled into my living room, unrolled my yoga mat and tuned in to my battered and broken body. From deep within my body, there arose the cries of my wounded self. That day, in the middle of my living room floor, I sat on my yoga mat in Easy Pose and felt anything but ease. The tears came. I unleashed years of stored pain and shame. I slowly unfurled my body and began going through various yoga asanas.
“Let me not run from my pain this time,” I told myself. “Let me feel what I’m feeling and listen to what my body is trying to tell me.” In tree pose, I felt the fear that I had been running from my entire life. The certain belief that my eating disorder had been my way of getting out of my fear of dying, my fear of losing myself, my fear of losing control. I sat down upon the mat and was seized by an uncontrollable desire to binge and purge. I wish I could say I didn’t give in, but I did. Yet, something about that episode was different. Yoga had brought me to the realization that I was trying to purge myself of my fear rather than my food. My body was literally screaming that it was afraid and it was only through yoga that I was able to hear its cries and listen to what my body was telling me. It hurt. I was hurting.
On that day, spurred by yoga and the pain of my last bulimic episode, I began to look further inward. I became aware that the emotion at the core of my bulimia was fear. Then, I began to ask myself probing questions: Where had that fear come from? Why was I feeling it? When was the first time I felt that fear?
Suddenly, I was seized by a violent and vivid memory from childhood. As a child, I had suffered from epilepsy. I had felt completely out of control of my body during that time and had been terrified that each grand mal seizure might mean impending death. Because my epilepsy had been long-ago remedied through the use of homeopathy and because my eating disorder hadn’t shown up until six years after I had my last ever seizure, I would never have been capable of drawing a parallel between that childhood angst I felt right when a seizure was coming on and that panicky feeling in my gut that seemed to drive me to binge and purge.
Every time I binged and purged it was to relieve that panicky feeling. And the reason I couldn’t stop was because bulimia was the only thing that worked. Yoga brought my body to that realization. But, awareness alone would not have been enough. I needed to let go of this fear and these old childhood issues. Then I thought about EFT, the Emotional Freedom Technique, and how it had helped me to let go of other things – anger, sadness, grief, loss, anxiety, etc. It had never worked with my bulimia but it couldn’t hurt to try to “tap out” my fear.
I performed EFT on my fear “Even though I have this fear of dying that goes back to my childhood seizures, I deeply and completely accept myself.” And “Even though my bulimia is the only way I can get rid of my fear of dying I love and accept myself.”
EFT allowed me to release that fear from my body and my mind. The result was miraculous. As I said, this experience occurred immediately following a session of binging and purging. I was surrounded by an apartment full of binge food, having planned on a day of episodic binging and purging. But, the moment after I performed EFT on my fear, some internal shift took place. I was rendered incapable of binging and purging. I remained in my apartment, surrounded by a bulimic buffet, but could not bring myself to binge. The desire was completely gone and has not returned. The experience was deeply spiritual and profound. And lasting. A twelve year cycle of self abuse was undone in a few moments of tapping.
My experience that day of combining yoga and EFT taught me that sometimes the body holds answers to the questions that go beyond our mental scope. I learned that through yoga we can come to feel our feelings and then through EFT we can release the energetic blockages that are causing these negative emotions. If EFT works on the discovery statement that “all negative emotions are caused by a disruption in the body’s energy system” and if the treatment for letting go of all negative emotions operates at the level of the body than it makes sense to diagnose at the level of the body as well. Thus, with the death of my bulimia, Emotional Yoga was born.
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