Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcript has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show . I’m Robin Daly, host of the show and founder of Yes to Life, the UK’s integrative cancer care charity, advocating for an integrative approach that draws on a wide range of lifestyle and complementary approaches to supplement the conventional oncology treatments currently offered by our NHS. Some of these other approaches are gradually gaining acceptance within oncology, particularly as the evidence for their effectiveness continues to build. One such approach is emotional freedom technique, or EFT for short, sometimes called tapping. And today I’m speaking to two practitioners, Aga Kehinde and Kathy Adams, both with a background in nursing and oncology, who’ve grown to depend on EFT as a primary resource to help both patients and practitioners.

Robin Daly
Great to have you both on the Yes To Life show and Aga, welcome back to you as you were on the show a couple of years back speaking about cancer coaching but Kathy, it’s the first time we met. Pleasure to have you here on the show. So today we’re going to be speaking about emotional freedom technique or EFT as it’s better known responses to EFT seem to largely fall into two categories it’s a bit marmite really I’d say there’s the why on earth does anyone think all that weird tapping stuff is going to make any difference to anything and then there’s the it’s totally amazing indispensable the best things is sliced bread kind of response so you two I think are both leaning in the latter direction do you want to have a stab at your most convincing argument for any of the doubters who may have stumbled in upon this show by accident

Kathy Adams
Okay, well, I can have a stab at it, first of all, coming from the research angle, really, that there is now a huge body of random controlled trial research papers and meta-analysis that show that EFT is really effective. So that’s a good place to start. That’s a good start.

Robin Daly
Okay, wake up. The evidence is there. You want anything to add, Aga?

Aga Kehinde
Well, yes, I mean, what else to lose if you are being given a tool with the promise that will reduce your stress level, whether you believe it in it or not? Why not to try? Try it, feel it, whether you like it or not. If you like it, go ahead. If not, move to something else. There is so much out there for you to be able to reduce the stress level, but EFT is really great.

Robin Daly
Ok, nothing to lose. Alright, fantastic. So, I’ve always spoken before but maybe I could then start with Kathy and ask you a little bit about you, your background, how you got to where we are today.

Kathy Adams
Okay. Okay. So I like to have a nursing background and I trained as a counselor when I was nursing, but I think the biggest influence for me for investigating what really heals kind of serious illness is my experience with my eldest daughter who in her childhood had a lot of ME type, chronic fatigue type illness and depression. And at one stage she was, she kind of felt really suicidal and that made me a real investigator of what works.

Kathy Adams
what’s really going to change deeply ingrained patterns of trauma and mental processes that create so much disease and suffering.

Kathy Adams
on and I suppose I found EFT therefore as part of that path and that was about 15 to 20 years ago now and I’ve never looked back and I’ve combined it with an integrative approach, with you know cancer coaching. I’m a health creation coach working with Penny Braun, the integrative cancer charity and you know various other avenues too and I keep coming back over and over and over again to EFT being my main modality and what I trust creates change in such a timely efficient way.

Robin Daly
Hmm, that’s fantastic. So your main focus is then working with people with cancer, clearly, since your training that you’ve had, which is very cancer specific, you’re working at Peddie Brown, of course, which is all about cancer. So you’re dealing with cancer patients day in, day out, by the sounds of it, and you’re giving EFT a good testimonial in relation to that, really. So that’s great. And for people who don’t know Aga, do you want to just say a bit about yourself?

Aga Kehinde
Yeah, sure. I’m still a cancer nurse working actively at St. Luke’s Cancer Center and Royal Canary Hospital. While I was nursing, I’m still nursing, I trained as a health coach and also as an EFT practitioner. For me, EFT and health coaching came in the moment of my professional burnout as a cancer nurse. I reached a stage in my career that I run out of a modalities, opportunities and ways of helping a patient. I’m a very much holistic practitioner, always been always kind of believed that I’m a holistic nurse, but it came into a point in my career that I could no longer do what I wanted to do in the way that I wanted to do it. So I needed to expand my toolbox and that’s why I came across the health coaching that helped me to come out of that professional burnout as well as then add a tapping as what I call the meat onto the bone. Now I’m working with both patients and the healthcare professionals who are like myself years ago start to experience this compassion fatigue and emotional burnout working in that space because working with patients is absolutely amazing, but we’re experiencing, we’re hearing a lot of stories and we need to be able to build our own resilience in it. And with the workload that we have from NHS, the pressure within and out of the NHS really doesn’t help in that. So having this in my toolbox really helped me and I’m really glad and in a great position that I can spread that now to both parties. I see this really as a comprehensive approach to work with patients and the healthcare professionals in cancer.

Robin Daly
Really interesting. So yes, of course, we don’t speak so much about that on this show about the suffering, if you like, of the profession in this. We hear lots of stories about how difficult it is for patients. But of course, it’s also extremely difficult for practitioners in this area for all the reasons you’ve just said. So having some resources for them, a great thing. Coaching has been the destination you’ve both headed for when you’re looking for solutions for the problems you’ve had working within healthcare. Yeah, interesting. Okay. So a bit down to the nuts and bolts now. EFT is pretty well known at this point. But just in case the listeners have got no idea what it is, would you tell us?

Kathy Adams
Okay, so in a nutshell, it’s a therapy that combines cognitive approaches, so talking about things, with a somatic approach. And that’s a bodywork. And that’s the tapping on acupressure points around the face and upper chest and the hands. So the somatic approach actually accesses what’s stored in the body. Because anxiety and trauma and fear and anger and sadness, these are little expressions of the cellular impact of stress on the body. So without a body process, a body approach, we really can’t change the way the nervous system is working and the mental and emotional and physical roots of what’s causing the distress.

Robin Daly
Hmm, that’s interesting. So many people will go for help in two separate areas, one of them being covers if you like to do with their psychology and all that side of it, mental problems, but then they might also have some physical help as well. And these things do, of course, work together, but you’re actually saying, well, let’s have one therapy that addresses both at the same time.

Robin Daly
Do you want to add to that at all, Aga?

Aga Kehinde
Yeah, I mean, I kind of look at EFT as well from the angle of self help tool. So it is a therapy and in a therapeutic space is absolutely beautiful. We’re working very, we’re focusing on the patient’s issue. We’re building that connection, making an understanding of how the stress can manifest in the body. And we help patients to reduce that stress within the session. But as a self help tool, it’s a very simple technique that you take it with you, once you learn, you can do it at any time. And it’s just really exactly what it is, it’s at your fingertips, you stimulate the acupuncture points, it’s eight points that we ask people to stimulate while they are experiencing the stress. So, you know, we see patients doing that way, they’re waiting for the scans, we see patients when they’re doing that, just before the chemotherapy or you know, when before they put the needle into the arms, and just to quickly reduce the stress. And we know already from what Katte mentioned before, from the really big amount of research, what EFT actually does. So he sends the signal into that part of the brain, called the amygdala, which is responsible for the stress fight and flight response. And if we can just stimulate the points to send the signal to that part of the brain and say, it’s okay, it’s really safe now, you are safe, you’re going to be all right. Without saying anything, that’s a great tool to have at your fingertips. We also know from the research, from the clinical research, that the level of cortisol, which is, of course, the stress hormone level, it goes down, and the biological markers, what we call goes down, so cortisol, testosterone. And also, we know the heart rate variability comes down as well, the breath pressure comes down. So there is a lot of real things that are happening on the body level that you can look at and see, okay, this is working for me. But most of all, people really within a few minutes of tapping, say, I can feel the reduce of stress immediately. So the breath gets a little bit deeper, the muscles relax a little bit, and people start as well accessing the parts of the brain when they the fight and flight response are not accessible when we stress. So when we do a few minutes of tapping, we can start thinking clearly, make better decisions. We could take information a little bit better, so absolutely invaluable tool to have with you when you’re going into any clinical settings to listen for the instruction to remember things. So yeah, I can’t praise enough for EFT.

Kathy Adams
I’d just like to add something to that, that August just said, it’s about it being a self help tool. And I think one of the things that you talked about at the very beginning, Robin, about it being Marmite and about people kind of feeling it’s weird, well, it is weird to do this. If you do it with two hands and you know, people can be reluctant to do it in a public place, but what we also can show people and teach people and actually people get to experience that even just kind of subtly touching their finger points and their thumb points and their side of the hand points, you know, if you were sitting kind of waiting for an operation, you’re waiting in a corridor for the doctor’s interview or in, you know, in a chair waiting for your chemotherapy or even having your chemotherapy, you can do EFT really subtly. You don’t have to kind of look bonkers doing this, you can actually change the way your nervous system is working and your fight and flight response in a very, very secret sort of subtle way that makes a big difference.

Robin Daly
Okay. Well, I’m sure some people have had that reassuring. Thanks. So to go on with the fact that it’s described as a self-help tool, is it essentially a self-help tool or does anybody ever give anybody else EFT?

Kathy Adams
So it’s both Robin, really, I mean, self-help tool and you can get quite skills at it as a self-help tool. I’m sure are going as, as I do, you know, we use it as a self-help tool, but there’s nothing, if you, if you’ve got a lot of distress, if you really want to explore the nature of what’s underneath the surface in the unconscious, you know, stored beyond our easy to reach kind of mind processes, then sitting with a therapist that holds the space and enables the, the person to go deeper can get to early childhood traumas, traumas during kind of, you know, teenagers and adulthood that can, can be at the root of our suffering, but also things in cancer, like, you know, the day you were diagnosed, the day that doctor told you that you had cancer, that’s a huge trauma. And I wouldn’t expect an individual to be able to tap for that. The fear of the future, you know, the impact it has on relationships and quite often guilt, fear of the future, what’s going to happen to me, the uncertainty. Those are things that really we’d want to take to a therapist in order to have a space held where, you know, powerful emotions can be released safely by being supported.

Robin Daly
Well, interesting. So there’s kind of, there’s two streams to it in a way, then you’re saying this, it’s something you could just learn. So you never have a therapist as such, you just learn it and use it as self help technique. But you could do a lot more with it if you’re prepared to work with somebody who’s skilled.

Aga Kehinde
I think it’s similar with the breath work as well, wouldn’t it? You can learn the breath work and how to kind of stimulate your breath in order to help your nervous system to calm down, but you can achieve so much more with the therapist. And just referring to what you, Katja, are saying about this, the day of the cancer diagnosis, we know that EFT has been, the biggest amount of research that actually was initiated was to work with the post-traumatic stress disorder in the army and veterans in America. And I don’t know if you know the percentage for the cancer patients, but we know that around 19% of the cancer patients are at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder versus to 5% to 15% of the military individuals. So it’s absolutely essential for us to think about it in that category, what the cancer diagnosis can really means to the society and how we’re helping people not to get that post-traumatic stress disorder, but really normalize the feelings and emotions and help them as soon as possible through the right techniques and tools to alleviate the tremendous amount of stress. And so they don’t have to get into that point to experience post-traumatic stress disorder.

Robin Daly
Well, that’s a very good perspective on things. I think that’s not widely appreciated, is it, by people who haven’t been there, that there is that kind of level of stress involved in cancer. But, you know, anybody would tell you it was involved, they’re going to war. But yeah, to know that it was far more difficult, far more likely to suffer from PTSD from cancer. Well, that’s not common knowledge at all. Um, right. Okay, well, look, you’ve mentioned a few things here and there about what’s going on when you have EFT. But, you know, a lot of the criticism of EFT, I think it comes simply out the fact that it seems a whole lot too simple to have the sort of effects that are claimed for it. So, as you said, for the sake of the doubters, there is actually quite a lot of evidence supporting the claims. So, I want to go into the evidence a minute. But first of all, does anybody, do you want to add to the things you’ve already said about how it actually works? What do we know about why and how EFT works?

Kathy Adams
Okay, so a couple of things immediately jump to mind. And the first one is really relevant to somebody who’s going through a cancer experience. And that’s the state of your immune system. The more that people with cancer get into an integrative approach, the more they understand that the state of their immune system and how the immune system works in their body on any remaining cancer cells is fundamental to their wellbeing. The immune system, of course, only functions well when there’s low amounts of stress in the body. And so reducing stress is absolutely paramount. And if PTSD is one of the main causes of stress in somebody with cancer because of the experience of the diagnosis and the trauma of treatment, a lot of the treatments are really quite arduous and hard. So that causes stress too. So releasing the pent-up emotions, the stored emotions, allows the immune system to function better. But if we also talk about PTSD in terms of that’s a memory frozen into the cells of the body. So when we have a trauma, there is a freeze response and the freeze response is frozen in the body. What trauma release therapies all have in common is something called a memory reconsolidation. And so what EFT does along with other somatic therapies is it actually changes the way that the memory is stored in the body so that it isn’t free floating in the nervous system in the amygdala and the reptilian brain, but gets stored away in the hippocampus where it isn’t then getting triggered over and over again. And that’s how EFT is really effective for PTSD.

Robin Daly
That’s interesting. So that is going on the basis that it is a therapy which reduces stress and anxiety in the body and therefore it will have that effect. So how does it reduce stress and anxiety then?

Aga Kehinde
Okay, so maybe I can jump in. So EFT, the somatic aspect of EHT, we’ll break down for two parts. The first one is the cognitive part, which we are looking at the issue that causes us a stress. And it could be anything, it could be thought, it could be thought of the future, so like anxious state, or it could be actually something happening to us that causes our body to go into the fight and fight response. So that thing that caused us to go send the signal to that amygdala, and that amygdala to send the alarm system into the body saying, now you have to go into stress. Now you have to produce the cortisol, testosterone, adrenaline. Now your heart needs to pump up. Now you need to breathe faster. All the things that are happening in your immune system need to go down because it’s not important. At the moment, you have to fight or flight, right? Your digestive system doesn’t have to work so hard right now because it’s not important. Right now, we have to fight or flight. So we’re preparing for that. So what that stimulation, which is the other part of the EFT, which is the actual tapping on the points, thus it sends the signal through the meridians. So meridians, we know that from the extensive research. So there was a study, I think it was in South Korea that a few years ago came out proving us that actually meridians are neurovascular bundles. So they are neurovascular. There’s really real thing that are there. So we tap on the points when those vascular system are actually those bundles. And we know when we tap on them, there is an electric signal sends into amygdala and calms it down, down regulate that response. So in a nutshell, you know, you can look, I always say that to my patients, you know, you look in the beast in the eyes and you’re really scared of that beast. Let’s say that beast is a C word, the cancer word, you look at that beast and you feel the fear. When you stimulate your acupuncture points, you’re still looking at that beast and not taking it away. But you don’t feel that response. You don’t feel that stress. Your body down regulates by stimulating those points. So as simple as this, down regulate the stress response. That’s why EFT is really good.

Robin Daly
Interesting. So, you know, it’s been interesting that acupuncture has had good evidence for its effectiveness for a long time now, but of course, everybody said meridias, whether they, you know, they’re not real, they’re made up, basically. And so there’s been this sort of still credibility gap, if you like, even though it’s been shared, it works. It’s like, well, come on, it’s that Eastern stuff, you know, which doesn’t even make sense. So that’s very interesting that they actually have done some research which has found there is something actually there, which is being called meridians and that they have an effect. That’s fascinating. I didn’t know that.

Aga Kehinde
Yeah. And we also, there are some studies done, so EFT has been extensively used in the work with other psychological distress and illnesses and that sort of thing. So for example, addictions and there’s extensive work done for food disorders, eating disorders. And Peter Stapleton, who is absolute leader in the research in EFT, and you can look perhaps your professor at the Bond University, they’ve done amazing study looking at how EFT affects the brain and that the lighting up of the brain activity happens and how downregulation by using EFT works. And they’ve done study when I actually see on the MRI that the tapping, the element, the somatic element, which is the tapping itself downregulates the nervous system and the responses in the brain. So yeah, there’s a lot of interesting things to look up.

Robin Daly
Yeah a lot of interesting things and so the the other side of it is is that I mean people would use this as a criticism I wouldn’t but they’d say well come on there’s lots of placebo effect going on here in this this therapy it doesn’t matter to me if it works who cares anyway I’m not a critic at placebo but nonetheless I can see that there for somebody who is needs a lot of help is presented to them something that’s very simple and they can do it themselves it really helps presented by people with authority like yourself and there’s evidence so and of course it all of that package makes for a very strong placebo effect doesn’t it so I mean what’s your thoughts on that have how large that is in in people you help

Aga Kehinde
I like the placebo effect actually, to be honest, there’s nothing wrong with that. Me too. And if that’s something that will convince people to start doing it, then that’s great because they will feel the difference. They will feel the difference themselves and there will be a difference in the biological manifestation in their body. So if they have a blood pressure monitor or the high variability monitor and they tap for four minutes and the blood pressure goes down and the heart rate pans down, nothing wrong with that.

Kathy Adams
And although I can’t speak in detail about this, there has been a dismantling study done, Robert, which shows that it is the tapping that makes the difference.

Robin Daly
that’s interesting i wanted to know about that thank you yes what what do they do and and what do they find out

Kathy Adams
Well, as I said, I can’t tell you very much about it because it’s not right here in my frontal cortex, but I know there is one that has shown that it is that it is the actual tapping that makes the difference.

Robin Daly
Right, so it made efforts to remove the placebo effect from it. Okay, well, interesting. I mean, I’m not doubting it. I think you’re onto something there clearly. It wouldn’t have been so enormously successful and popular if it didn’t do anything, for sure. Okay, so you’ve mentioned bits and pieces of evidence. We talked about the fact there’s a lot, so let’s talk about the evidence, now what there is. What effects are there the strongest evidence for?

Kathy Adams
Okay, so maybe Arden and I can share this, but if we start with PTSD, because it’s something that we’ve been talking about, there’s a meta-analysis of seven randomized controlled trial studies that showed that there’s a Cohen’s effect size of 2.96, where anything more than 0.8 is very significant. So that’s a hugely effective outcome for PTSD. And the nice guidelines say that EFT is the second most effective therapy for PTSD. So well on the way to being fully recognized by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence.

Robin Daly
That’s okay. I’ll go to and add another condition or effect that EFT can have which is well researched well evidenced

Aga Kehinde
Yeah, no, absolutely. So, well, I mean, I could just sit here and list the big ones. So the study for anxiety levels, the study for… So we’re talking about meta-analysis. So meta-analysis are where they put a lot of… they look at the same issues and they kind of compare it all together. So we know that there has been meta-analysis on anxiety, on depression, what Kati just mentioned, PTSD. So yes, there is… I mean, do you want me to go into details?

Robin Daly
No, I’m just interested in where the evidence has got us to at this point, and it sounds like it’s quite broad.

Kathy Adams
Yeah, I can add a little bit more kind of heat to the bone if that’s useful, Robin. For depression, that’s really common, isn’t it? As an issue for people who have gone through the cancer journey and dealing with uncertainty. So there is a material analysis of 20 studies that have used EFT as a treatment for depression and showed a 41% reduction in symptoms using EFT. I think that the EFT’s positive effect on our gene expression is really interesting for people with cancer. So that shows that EFT positively impacts 72 genes, many of which improve immune responses and decrease in inflammatory responses. That’s really important in cancer.

Robin Daly
This sounds very important, yeah.

Kathy Adams
Yeah. So EFT has positive effects and reducing stress. It’s got measurable reductions when we measure salivary cortisol after using EFT and also in key markers for self-reported anxiety, depression and other stress symptoms. So again, the EFT group cortisol levels drop significantly in a way that is kind of significantly statistically relevant. So yeah, there’s a few more for you.

Robin Daly
You look fantastic. Do you want to give me one story each, just from your clinical experience of somebody who you feel you’ve been a fantastic help to with EFT in the cancer sphere?

Kathy Adams
I’ve got so many! Who shall I choose? So somebody I’ve recently been working with, and I’m not going to say anything that they’ll divulge who she is, apart from the fact that a woman, but that’s 50% of the population hopefully, isn’t it? So came to me with incredible amount of PTSD. She didn’t identify a PTSD, but she had had a really difficult time through the COVID years, to the fact that she was on multiple amounts of anti-psychotic drugs and antidepressants, and she wasn’t functioning. She was kind of suicidal. She’d tried to commit suicide twice. And it was all her cancer, all her cancer trauma. It had come up to the surface during COVID. It was a time of incredible amounts of stress and retriggering for many, many, many people, the COVID experience. And what she found with our work was that it was all around three previous diagnoses of cancer and her sister’s death of cancer that had entered into depression post COVID, COVID years. And we worked together not for a very long period of time, probably about 10, 12 sessions. And I would say just about completely cleared.

Robin Daly
Amazing. So this is EFT with a therapist, basically, presumably she was doing self-help as well in between. But yeah, but you were guiding her along. Amazing. Well, that’s a quick result for a very serious situation. Okay, Aga.

Aga Kehinde
Yes, for me, and I’m going to go into other side of the spectrum. So although I do have quite complex cases as well, but that one I felt from the health coaching point of view was really, really useful. So I had the patients who have been working for quite some time through her cancer journey. So very often I do get engaged with patients at the beginning of the cancer journey and they just come in and out of this therapeutic relationship. But the most important thing we start from is to teach and well, for me, teach clients to do and teach patients to do EFT themselves. So when she came back after a few months, she was ready to have a surgery. So first, a lot of treatment, then the surgery and the second of treatment. So she was pre-surgical and so prehabitation part of time. And she was completely terrified because of her first experience of the of the surgery was wasn’t really pleasant. So she kind of lost the trust into a health care professionals into a whole process and she was petrified. So she couldn’t sleep in that affect her eating and eating affect her general performance status and all that kind of spy was on the way to spiral down. So we use tapping just to calm down the nervous system. And she was a kind of socially prescribed tapping to her on the daily basis. So she needed to do a few 10, 15 minutes tapping before she goes to bed. And so when she came back after surgery, she said the hospital staff thought she’s bonkers, but she was just lying down there waiting for this pathologist to come.

Aga Kehinde
that she was feeling calmer and calmer and calmer and she actually had the confidence to go into the surgery because she had this tool. And she’s tried all sorts of different things, you know, with the mindfulness exercise with the earphones on and the, you know, the breath work, it just, it wasn’t having that effect because she needed physically to really do something. So that’s the stimulating of the points, this physical aspect was really helping her. So she went to the surgery and her recovery was really, really quick as well. And probably wasn’t down to that. I don’t know, probably to the stress reduction. So I’m not going to take away from the stress reduction, but I’m not going to claim that, that all has been down to our working together and the tapping. But she said that it helped her first to build the trust to herself that she can manage the stress. Second to build the trust to the team that she before was completely not trusting, even though that wasn’t the team that served her before. And then afterwards, she felt that she had something in her hands that she could use to relax really quickly afterwards. So overall, that was really, really helpful to her.

Robin Daly
Brilliant. So for both of you, what do you think are the issues that you most often refer somebody to EFT as being the solution in your day-to-day work?

Aga Kehinde
So maybe I will stop, I wish everyone to be referred to EFT. Yes, really like you have a suspected cancer diagnosis by the GP, you should go and find yourself a good stress reduction tool or practitioner and maybe EFT will be like that. So that’s what I wish. But unfortunately what I get very often is a client’s finding me when they’re in the crisis. So what I get to refer a lot is people who struggle with anxieties, people who’ve tried everything else and that doesn’t work. And a lot of people who don’t want to talk, you see. So they are not very interested in the talking therapies because if they feel it will traumatize them, they don’t want to talk about the past because it’s too painful. They very often usually know what happened in life that brought them into the place they are here, but they don’t want to kind of go and look into that. So that’s the moment when the patients are referred to me or they find a way to me. And tapping really helps them to, first of all, to reduce that crisis. So immediately after a few sessions and self implementation, the anxiety reduces significantly. So they now feel a little bit more confident to actually, you know what, I don’t feel that scared. I’m looking at that beast and I’m not scared of it. So I can talk about the reasons why I’m here in more detail. So building that trust. So yeah, that’s what I get. But I would love EFT to be a part of prehabitation process for cancer patients.

Robin Daly
All right. How about you, Kathy?

Kathy Adams
Well, I’d like it to be well known and shared with people going through the cancer journey, what the symptoms of stress are. So that if you’re not sleeping very well, if you’ve got a loss of appetite, if you’re obsessing, if you’re crying, if you’re kind of getting very irritable and losing your temper, you know, just the simple kind of checklist of what are the level, where are the indicators that you’re, you’re stressed and then for that information to be given to patients so that then they can have, you know, a choice of different stress reduction methods, including EFT, including mindfulness, including breath work, but that is commonly known. What is stress? What are the symptoms of stress so that people are empowered?

Robin Daly
Right, and so is that what you find yourself doing, actually telling people, look yourself free from stress and therefore you recommend EFT?

Kathy Adams
educating people as to what is stress and what are the symptoms of stress.

Robin Daly
Interesting. Okay, well look, we talked a lot about EFT. The fantastic news now is that you’ve both been leading a series of online EFT well-being sessions for Yes to Life, which of course is brilliant, a great resource for our beneficiaries and a service that we’re of course more than happy to be offering. So how and why have you ended up collaborating over this project?

Kathy Adams
good team. We can complement each other. I’m the older one and August, the younger one, there’s different flavors with different backgrounds and ages. Yeah, I just think that we work really well together. We’re really complementary and we’re both really passionate about what we do and the efficacy of what we do. Alongside that, we’ve both got a good amount, if not heaps of experience, of holding space for the suffering of cancer and making changes in that level of distress.

Robin Daly
Right, well, you’ve already done one series of sessions. How did it all go? I mean, you got any feedback from doing it?

Aga Kehinde
I mean, definitely we’ve been really lucky. The group was amazing actually and so we get the verbal feedback at the end of the session and it was nothing more than the praise. What’s really important for us is to get that feedback of continuity. The members of the group that they want to continue with us and also they give us a feedback that they’re using it on the regular basis. They know how to use it now and they’re using it. So I think that’s really important and we’re really looking forward to starting the new one in October.

Robin Daly
I was going to say, you’re about to restart on you, so tell us about that.

Kathy Adams
So yeah, so it’s a rolling program. And what we mean by that is that we’re inviting people to come for three sessions as a minimum. They can of course come for as long as they want to come, but the minimum of three sessions means that they get enough experience to be able to take it on board as a self-help tool afterwards. I think the other thing is that we create an online community, people meet each other time and time again. So there’s that support of a common journey of people coming together and sharing their experiences and supporting each others to change their experience. That compassion in action is very powerful for the participants to actually witness each other having an expression of what’s going on for them and witnessing the change. That’s a powerful side effect of the group. So what we do is instead of going through the basics each and every time, we send out in advance a 30 minute introductory recording of the basics of EFT so that people can prime themselves in advance of joining the group so that we don’t have to keep going through the basics and that really works.

Robin Daly
Yeah. Very good. Well, very interesting to hear you talk about that group dynamic. I had a whole show talking to the amazing James Maskell about group work and how he produced the evidence to show that a group of patients together can heal each other better than a one-to-one relationship with a functional medicine practitioner. I mean, he was in favor of functional medicine as being the answer until he realized that, well, we can’t even afford this for everybody to do functional medicine. It’s much too in-depth and individual and takes too much time and resource unless you’re stinking rich, that is. He’s got onto group work and found out how amazing group work is and how it’s actually better. Because it answers much more than any of the regular conditions that people might go to the practitioner for in the first place to do with key underlying issues that really rife its society and are actually causing huge amounts of distress and ill health like isolation and poor social contacts and all that stuff, which being in a group and helping one another and seeing other people change and seeing the possibilities that are there, absolutely being part of something very important. It’s enormously powerful, so it’s a great thing. So we love doing it at YesLife because groups, we love them. Yes.

Aga Kehinde
And we share that passion with you, and putting it trauma-informed, hat-all. We know that any healing from trauma, the best, and traditionally thinking about us as human beings, we heal in the community, in the groups, and so we know that. And engaging with this post-traumatic growth together is something that we are really passionate about as well.

Robin Daly
fantastic so and if that wasn’t enough good news uh you’re actually both going to be at our annual yes to life conference in london on the 7th of october uh what have you got planned for that

Aga Kehinde
Well, so we have a workshop and that we are planning to do in that workshop. We actually want to invite everyone who thinks this is weird, the placebo. I don’t know what that is and just to come and help with us. So when we finish, we want you to come and say, well, actually that may work for me now. We’re not going to say much of what we’re going to do, but we’re definitely going to use EFT in the moment and kind of try to have a little bit of fun with that as well, because it’s a fun tool as well.

Robin Daly
Excellent. Well, look, I look forward to seeing you both at the event and a big thank you for your work with us at Yes To Life, which is enormously appreciated. We love it. It makes it possible for us to deliver really great events for people. And thank you very much for coming on the show today to tell us all about it as well.

Kathy Adams
thank you Robin, thank you for inviting us, it’s been a pleasure.

Aga Kehinde
And thank you for the great work that Yes to Life does for patients and healthcare professionals. We really appreciate that.

Robin Daly
If you want to read more about EFT, you can take a look at eftinternational.org. As we mentioned during the interview, Aga and Kathy are running a workshop at our forthcoming annual conference in London on the 7th of October. In fact, theirs is one of 16 workshops on offer that day, alongside expert talks by nutritional therapist Kirsten Chigg, integrative oncology expert Patricia Peat and Dr Sam Watts, Ayurvedic and lifestyle practitioner. Workshop leaders include Sophie True with breathwork, Britt Cordy with superfoods, Dr Shireen Kasam with plant-based nutrition, Kiran Malabar weeks with exercise and many, many more. In addition, there will be an extensive exhibition area where you can meet practitioners and suppliers with supportive resources for those who cancer. In summary, the day is going to be packed with resources to support you in finding your way forward through cancer and to build a community of like-minded and supportive people around you. Find out more about all the experts attending the workshops, the talks, the exhibitors and book your place at yestolifeannualconference.org. I’ll be there myself of course, so do please make a point of saying hello. Thanks so much for listening today, I’ll be back again next week with another Yes to Life show, so I hope very much that you’ll be able to join me again. Thank you.