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Tapping into Creating an Amazing Future with Matrix Reimprinting

For the tenth anniversary celebrating the birth of Matrix Reimprinting, we decided to take some time to explore the idea of re-writing your future. As tapping enthusiasts we are all well aware of the idea of re-negotiating or re-writing your past. This is a critical component of healing our past, the ability to “hold” how we consider the negative events of our past, extracting the lessons and wisdom but releasing the regrets and suffering of the past. But considering the future is a whole different ballgame.

If you are like us, you may thin k about and even dream about your future, where will you be in five, ten or even twenty years? Perhaps you are spending too little time visioning that or perhaps you spend a bit too much time in the daydreaming phase of moving forward without taking targeted action steps. We can see this commonly with many of our clients who don’t have a roadmap to their desired future or else we observe them having given up too soon on a cherished dream. We may think they they quit a bit too soon into realizing their dream just when a little more work would have everything fall into place. Let’s look at the notion of creating a future in which your dreams really can come true..

Most of our waking hours is spent attending to the details of what is unfolding before us, handling all the things that need our attention in our current life circumstances. We may not be fully present to all the details of the moment, but our attention and energy gravitates to the immediate tasks in our lives. When the toilet overflows you stop whatever you are doing and fix it or find a plumber. Your children have a long list of school and sports activities and your day is easily filled by making sure they all get accomplished. Your dog needs to be walked and your bills need to get paid. Sure, all of these things need to get done. But what tends to happen is that our daily to-do lists fill up every minute of our day, edging out any possibility for dreaming, and visioning something more. This ever-expanding, ever space-filling tendency squeezes out any opportunity of time for sitting still and creating our inspired future.

However, just beginning to allow yourself to dream, of considering the home you’ve always wanted with a view of the ocean, of being in the relationship that makes your heart sing, of having the financial means to travel as you wish…often giving yourself such permission can have a boomerang effect filled with what are commonly called “tail-enders.” These are the automatic responses that are elicited by the consideration of an expanded life…the little voices that creep into your head saying “You can’t really have that!” “You don’t really deserve to have it that good!” “Who do you think you are to ask for the stars!”

Yet, if we cannot even allow ourselves to dream of a grander future, the likelihood is negligible that it will occur. We think we need to seek out these automatic negative responses with the enthusiasm of a dog sniffing out a scent. After all, if they are in our consciousness and are there road-blocking our dreams, doesn’t it behoove us to place the spotlight on them so that they can be removed so that we can move right past them?

That’s easy to say, dream your dream and then notice your resistance to it. Witness and feel that which bothers us, gnaws at us, distracts us from the life we were meant to live. But that is what EFT is all about, it’s the honest declaration of where you are right now, in this moment. This is one of the reasons we love the EFT tapping setup statement – it acknowledges and offers us acceptance of exactly where we are and what we are feeling right now. By witnessing what distracts or stops us and tapping on it, we can own it, integrate it and this allows us the ability to step forward in our life with a lesser stress, more freedom and offers us a greater possibility of living the lives we know deep inside is possible for us.

But even beyond the EFT tapping, there is another way of going about this process of claiming your fabulous future that you deserve and that is through the act of putting pen to paper and writing it down as a first step. It turns out that writing is a great way to get started with moving forward in your life as it will help you to gain perspective, sort out emotions and organize your thoughts about your past and clarify the future you want. Psychologist and writer Sherry Hamby, Ph.D. suggests these writing prompts to look at your past in this way:

  • I am thankful for all the experiences in my life. However what shaped me into who I am today was….
  • I will never forget the lessons I learned when …
  • The events that caused me to change directions in my life were….

After you’ve written about that and have gained clarity about the past you can more skillfully examine the big picture of your history, and what got you to where you are today. Notice how all those prompts are not directed at generalized concepts and abstractions but rather they are the stories of specific events that make up your life. This is exactly what we do with EFT and Matrix! After you’ve taken some time to journal on these events, if there’s any negative emotions left regarding any of these events you tap on them using EFT or Matrix.

The next step in rewriting your future is to consult with your future self. Using the Matrix protocols, tap on your finger points while imagining yourself in the future. Is that picture strong and clear? Is that image grainy and weak? Do you see your future the way you’ve imagined it would be or are there things that surprise you? If the images are positive, take the time to imprint them. After you are done with the exercise be sure to write down notes about what you witnessed. Some writing prompts that are helpful:

  • What was so different about me in the future was….
  • There was a connection with my future-self and my now-self in that ….
  • The clue(s) I uncovered about what the steps are to get to that future are…

If your future images were not positive, then you’ll need to find out why. Writing prompts to assist you with this include:

  • What I saw about my future that wasn’t positive was….
  • I know that that negative scene is part of my pattern to ….
  • If there’s another way to see this negative scene as a gift what might that look it….

One of the ways we’ve seen resistance towards action steps occur with our clients is through a lack of intrinsic motivation. It turns out that studies show that if your goals are intrinsically motivated then you are likely to reach them because you’ll be more inspired to take action to make them happen. Intrinsically motivated goals are those things that you want just because they bring you joy. Extrinsically motivated goals are those you set to make other people happy. Often because you want to avoid a negative consequence or want to get a positive reward.

Alina worked with a client who wanted to make more money in her business. By doing these exercises and using tapping the client discovered that she had wanted the money because others (especially her parents) were measuring her success based on her income. Once she found out about that extrinsic motivation, she tapped on releasing that and the fears she had about changing that goal and she was able to find truly intrinsic values and motivators for growing her business. Within 6 months she surpassed her original goal of making several thousand dollars more a month.

Authors: Alina Frank and Craig Weiner Certified Matrix Reimprinting and EFT trainers