Nick Ortner – My Magic Breath

Nick Ortner is probably best known as the New York Times Best Selling Author of The Tapping Solution series of books, which have helped millions of people across the globe find freedom from mental, physical and emotional pain, stress, and challenges. A leading teacher and proponent of the benefits of Meridian Tapping and mindfulness, Nick Ortner is now advocating for teaching tapping and mindful breathing in schools and to preschoolers to help them deal with the escalating stresses of everyday life as well as the trauma and anxiety of specific situations.

Interview with Nick Ortner

To listen to the full interview of Nick Ortner by Sandie Sedgbeer on OMTimes Radio’s Show, What is Going OM, click the player below.

Sandie Sedgbeer:  It’s been said, Nick, that despite all our modern-day advantages, today’s children and youth are facing one of the worst mental health crises in decades.  Is this what inspired you to write your latest book on tapping, My Magic Breath, which is designed as an entry level mindfulness tool for preschoolers?

Nick Ortner:  Yeah, absolutely.  You know, those early are so formative and we can be influenced by so much around us. Kids have influences that they’ve never had before.  We tend to forget that cell phones and iPads and all these different media coming at us and social media is really very, very new and certainly nothing that I experienced.

If I think back just to my childhood, which, having just turned 40, wasn’t that long ago, none of these things existed. And it provided for, you know, a different life experience. It comes with good and bad, and what we are trying to do with My Magic Breath is to mitigate some of the bad¾i.e., not slowing down enough, not taking the time to breathe, to be present, to just be in the world.

Sandie Sedgbeer:  I recently hosted an online summit on rethinking education with Daniel Goleman, Daniel Siegel Siegel, and Congressman Tim Ryan, who secured funding in 2009 to teach mindfulness in classrooms in his congressional district. Given what’s happening on the world stage, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at the news that stress, depression, anxiety and mental health issues are on the rise, not just among adults but also among adolescents and children. But, what surprised me when I hosted this symposium – and also gives me cause for hope – is that even as people are feeling more pressured, exhausted and anxious about the future, many are responding by taking action in a new way, just like you said – slowing down, paying attention, and gaining awareness of the inner resources at their disposal through simple practices such as mindfulness and tapping.

So, what you’ve been doing for the last twelve years or more is tapping into what people need right now.  So, I’m curious to know, what attracted you to Emotional Freedom Technique in the first place?

Nick Ortner:  Yeah, great question, and I love that you mentioned Tim Ryan.  He’s become a good friend of mine and a champion in this kind of thinking.

But, back to your original question: it was about fifteen years ago that I was first introduced to EFT, to tapping. I found it online. I’d always been interested in personal development and self-help, and I’d heard a little bit about tapping before but I hadn’t tried it.  It still seems strange to me at times, even though I’ve dedicated my life’s work to it, that we can tap on these endpoints of meridians of our body, and somehow they can bring us emotional and oftentimes even physical freedom.

But, when you hear about something enough times, you say, I’ve got to give this a chance; these many people can’t be crazy, right? So, I tried it.  At the time, I was following Gary Craig, the Founder of Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), and Carol Look and other teachers. So I followed their instructions and directions and started using it in my life.

It began as a practice of using it personally, and with friends and family.  The running joke at the time was don’t say anything is wrong around Nick because he’s gonna make you tap on it.  I was just so excited about the power of this technique in so many different instances. I tried it with one person after another, and I got such incredible results time and again, and so around 2007, I started to do some coaching on the side with it, and decided to make a documentary film about the process. That film eventually became “The Tapping Solution.”  It was released a year later in 2008, and I’ve spent the last decade sharing that film, writing books and just spreading the word about tapping in any way and every facet that I can.

Sandie Sedgbeer:  For the benefit of any listeners who don’t know, tell us how and where it first originated and how it works.

Nick Ortner:  It’s got a long history, but its modern history starts around 1980 with Dr. Roger Callahan who was a traditional psychologist.  He was working with a client named Mary who had a severe water phobia.  He’d tried every traditional therapy with her over the course of about a year and a half; one psychological technique after another, with little to no results.  In fact, Mary would get awful migraine headaches from doing the work because it was painful for her to think about it and explore it.

One day, they were at his home office sitting by his pool looking at the water, doing some basic exposure therapy, and Dr. Callahan had said, ‘Tell me what you feel when you look at the water,’ and she said, ‘I feel like I have butterflies in my stomach.’  And he’d been reading about the Chinese meridian and acupuncture systems and had read that the stomach meridian ends underneath the eye. So, on a whim, or through divine inspiration, he said ‘Try tapping underneath the eye while you look at the water.  And she did so, and her phobia cleared¾I mean, in that very moment, in just a minute of tapping, her fear vanished and the butterflies, were gone from her stomach.

It’s one of those unbelievable tales that I see happen all the time with tapping.  But, you can imagine Dr. Callahan’s shock when that worked so profoundly.  So, he took that knowledge and he built upon it and developed Thought Field Therapy (TFT), which is still around and still very effective.

Thought Field Therapy has different points and different sequences of tapping for different issues, and one of Dr. Callahan’s students, Gary Craig, said, ‘You know, this is a little confusing to do different stuff for everything, so why don’t we do all the points at the same time, simplify the process, and share it with the world.’

And that’s what Gary Craig did.  So, he developed the Emotional Freedom Technique, which is the basic process that I’ve been using for the last fifteen years where we do the same tapping sequence for whatever issue we’re dealing with.

And what the latest research is showing is that beyond the meridians and the acupuncture system, where research is catching up on what ancient cultures have known for thousands of years, when we tap on these endpoints of meridians, we send a calming signal to the amygdala, the fight or flight stress response center in the brain.

So, when you’re anxious, angry, overwhelmed, or it’s the amygdala that is firing. And when we do tapping, we’re sending a calming signal, in a sense rewiring the brain, turning off that alarm system that is firing.  And that’s why it works so effectively on so many aspects of our life because so many of them are related to the stress, the anxiety, the overwhelming, the pace of modern life.

Sandie Sedgbeer:  And tapping in itself is a very mindful practice.

Nick Ortner:  It is.  You know, so many people ask me is it the tapping that does it? Is it the words you say? Is it this or that?  A couple of components, right?  When we tap, we normally take a moment to actually focus and acknowledge the issue. And that by itself is a powerful process.  That is mindfulness at play; instead of being angry, taking a moment to say ‘I am angry’¾and the tapping process normally starts with, ‘Even though…’ and you fill in the blank with what you’re feeling.  So, ‘Even though I’m angry…’ there’s mindfulness of how you feel.  I’m acknowledging it.  And then, ‘Even though I’m angry, I love and accept myself,’ or ‘I choose to relax now.’ So you’re becoming present to that feeling, acknowledging that this is the truth of how you feel, and then using the tapping process to let it go.

I think it’s that combination that is really magical when you put all those components together.  That’s why people have such extraordinary results.  People will say to me, ‘You know, I’ve been angry my whole life, but I’ve never admitted it, or I’ve never been present to it, or I’ve never acknowledged it.’  Or, ‘I’ve been angry my whole life, and I felt guilty and full of shame for being angry. The world told me not to be angry, my parents told me not to be angry, so I had to push it down and swallow it.’

Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Nick Ortner