Tap Into Transformation | Jess Wilkins-Cooke

"Life is about change. Sometimes it's painful. Sometimes it's beautiful. But most of the time, it's both."

We’re joined by Jess Wikins-Cooke, founder of Tap Into Transformation, to explore how Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) can unlock a world of emotional healing and self-discovery.

Jess shares her expertise on tapping, explaining its role in managing stress, overcoming obstacles, and fostering personal growth. Through candid stories and practical insights, she reveals how this practice empowers individuals to navigate life’s challenges with resilience and confidence.

Discover how a simple, hands-on technique can make a profound difference in your daily life. Tune in for an inspiring conversation about transformation, connection, and wellbeing.

Reach out to Jess via:
https://tapintotransformation.co.uk/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tapintotransformation/
https://www.facebook.com/tappingintotransformation
https://www.instagram.com/tap_into_transformation

If you would like to feature as guest on a future episode of This Place, Our Voices, submit your application via our form: https://bit.ly/podme

"This Place, Our Voices" Credits:

Host: Elyssa Germain
Produced By: OneZeroCreative https://www.onezerocreative.co.uk/

Transcript

In this episode, we speak to master trainer, and advanced EFT practitioner and mindfulness teacher, Jess Wilkins Cooke. Jess is the owner of Tap Into Transformation and joins us to share her insights and expertise. Hi, Jess, thank you for joining us.

Hi. Thank you for having me.

So, what exactly is EFT and, mindfulness?

So, they're separate things, definitely, but very linked. So, for me, mindfulness is kind of a practise, because it is a practise, of connecting with yourself in the present moment. There's lots of myths around mindfulness that it can be quite complicated, that it's maybe something that only a small number of people know how to do. But I'm really glad to say that in recent years it's become a lot more about being accessible. We're all busy. So, mindfulness is about bringing that connection back to ourselves in everyday life, where we might just be racing around with the kids and with work, and everything that we all have to do in a day. So, mindfulness is about slowing that down a little bit. And EFT is an amazing somatic technique that lots of us have heard of, and you might know it as tapping, but lots of us, and I certainly didn't actually know what it is. So, EFT is a combination of kind of putting pressure on acupressure points in the body. So, some of those points are going to be similar to what you'd see in acupuncture. and we combine that with cognitive techniques. And so, this kind of, what appears to be simple happening on the body really has the power to change our thoughts and feelings and behaviours 

 People will have heard of acupuncture. Tapping isn't something I'd come across. Is it related, is it a less invasive option to that sort of thing with pressure points?

So, it's often called acupuncture without the needles for that reason, because there are some similarities. They're definitely different practises, though. I think uniquely with tapping, you can do it yourself, so you don't have to wait for a practitioner. And I came to TAPP in, many years ago as a client and I'm really happy to say that when somebody suggested it to me, I actually laughed out loud. I thought it was ridiculous. So, I love working with sceptics. it's absolutely acceptable and you don't have to believe in tapping for it to work for you. That's great. But, yeah, you can actually use tapping for yourself. So, I always use the analogy of, say, for example, tapping works beautifully with fears and phobias so say, for example, you're scared of driving. In a one-to-one session with a practitioner, you can start to tap with those feelings and work them back. Because that fear, you weren't born with it, it came from somewhere. But it might not be so simple as, for example, I had a difficult experience in a car and now I feel frightened of it. Even if that was the case, you could use tapping. But if it was a bit more complex and you weren't really sure why you had it, we can start to tap that back and understand where it came from. And our job is not to think our way out of it. But actually with tapping, we're communicating with the body. So, every time you have a thought or an emotion, we kind of learn those languages, we're taught to notice them. But you'll actually find, you can test this with anything. If you think about someone you love, think about someone who winds you up, you'll find that with that thought and emotion there comes a sensation in the body as well. That's what we work with, with tapping. So, if you had that fear of driving, we could start to work that back and think, okay, where does this come from? Ask the body and the body's going to start to shift and change that sensation. And that gives us some insights. However, if you didn't want to go that far, you just wanted to give yourself a little bit more calm and ease as you get in the car every day, then you could learn how to do taping for yourself in the moment, less than five minutes, and you would make a difference. Because tapping communicates with part of our brain that debates the fight or flight response. So, we can notice really a dramatic reduction in anxiety a lot of the time, which has been researched and there's hundreds of academic, peer reviewed papers now about the benefits of tapping. But I very much welcome scepticism because I understand it. It's not something that we're taught. And I would love to get this technique out there as far and wide as I can, because even if you never choose to come to a practitioner, it can make a transformational difference in your everyday life.

So even if you're not an anxiety sufferer to a detrimental level, even if there's something that, you know just makes you feel slightly uncomfortable in everyday life, this is a technique that people like that can use as well?

Absolutely. I mean, people often ask, what is EFT for? And I would say it's easier to answer, what is it not for? And the answer is, not very much. So, we know, it has been studied and proven to be really effective when we're talking about things like anxiety symptoms, depression, chronic pain, symptoms of PTSD, also fears and phobias and cravings because there is usually an emotional need under those. So, things like stopping smoking or unhealthy eating habits, sleep. So certain things have been studied, and we can do some really focused work with limitations that people are experiencing, whether that's personally, professionally, in relationships. But sometimes you'll find me tapping because I'm a little bit annoyed that I'm, you know, I'm late for something or something happens. It just throws me a little bit or maybe I've got a little bit of insecurity about something or tapping is actually although we do a full round in a session, there's lots of shortcuts. So, I might be thinking standing in the queue at Teo and thinking oh, I really need to do something and you know, finding myself just feeling a little bit of stress. So, I'm just going to tap and just bring that down. And what that does is it gives me cause. We know we don't think our best in the middle of stress and anxiety. We don't work out the next best options. That's not where we're making our best decision. So tapping is that tool just to as we're talking about with mindfulness. Because the link between mindfulness and tapping is that you have to lean into what's here. So, to be able to tap with the way that I feel, I have to notice I feel that way. So, I have to be able to acknowledge I'm a little bit stressed out right now. So, I need mindfulness to be able to do that. How does that feel in my body? What are some of the thoughts that are happening? Sometimes that's really uncomfortable to do because for many of us we've learned that we push away negative, uncomfortable emotion. None of us choose it I would imagine, but we lean in a little bit and then we can start to. Once we open the space to accept what it is, we allow it the space to kind of move and shift. But I always say scepticism absolutely welcomed. Give it a go and see how it feels

It's definitely not going to do any harm and just giving it a try.

Absolutely not. No. The worst thing that's going to happen I think is nothing. It's worth saying that with EFT when we're working on something big and sometimes we don't know it's big, sometimes we might have. We might be working with something that feels smaller, but actually it's a gateway into something bigger. So, if I'm a bit nervous about an event I'm doing and I'm doing some tapping, I might uncover that actually I have a bigger belief about myself and what I'm capable of and that might be difficult for me. Or, I might be tapping with driving and I might have a memory come of that difficult time in the car. So, it is possible that things might come up while we're tapping that we didn't expect. That's why whenever we're doing complex work or anything that's long standing, we need the support of a practitioner. I'm a trainer, I'm a supervisor, I'm a practitioner, but I have practitioners that I go to support me to do my own work. So, we need to make sure we use an EFT safely 

And that's not a reason for people to shy away from it. My initial thought there would be, well, if I start doing this, what might I uncover? But that's a good thing because you are finding the source of something that is bubbling under the surface and you don't know when that's going to come out that might cause bigger problems in future. So, if you find it and deal with it, that's actually better than ignoring it.

Well, that's one of the reasons why I said the worst thing that's going to happen is kind of nothing. Because although those things can happen and it's quite rare, but it can be overwhelming, or it can be surprising when we find an insight coming up and it can be upsetting. Actually, I would say, as you said, that's just showing us what's already here. So, for me, that's part of moving forward, that's part of the process. And sometimes the process can be uncomfortable, but it's a little bit like climbing a mountain. Sometimes it's about putting one foot in front of the other, sometimes it can be painful, sometimes it can feel like a long way. But we do it because it's a beautiful view. And certainly, for me as a client, my world was very small. I was very limited. I was quite triggered by these kinds of techniques at first I found them because they're so powerful and, because I wasn't used to having a felt sense of my body, it really took me by surprise how impactful it was, because I always say with EFT, I try to do 90 minutes with people that in our first session, that I can teach the tapping points. And so that we can work out how we work together and then have time to do some focus work. With EFT, I've never had anybody beyond the fence after one session. So, it's not something you have to do for years and think, I wonder if this is working. Really, it's felt, it's experienced. And so that was very, very new for me and sometimes a bit unsettling. and some of the things that I came out I didn't know were there. But actually, now my life is unrecognisable from what it was in terms of my support systems, my work, my fulfilment, my confidence, my acceptance of myself when I don't feel confident, but most importantly my self-regard. Because I think that that is where pretty much everything begins. And EFT is an absolute game changer when it comes to that. Because those kinds of beliefs, ultimately with EFT, we work with beliefs and experiences and often our experiences are forming our beliefs. That's why we believe that change is always possible.

Is there anyone that EFT is not suitable for? I can't imagine there would be.

I don't think so. I think that however you want to use it, to whatever degree and to kind of whatever layer, you can benefit from it. I mean it might be that you think, well, as a client I went in and I made a promise to myself, must have been about 15 years ago, that I wanted to walk through all the rooms in my mind freely and comfortably. Cause I felt like there were a lot of shut doors that I was running away from. And it's very, very difficult as we know, to run away from anything that you're carrying with you. And I vowed that I wanted it to be bright and breezy in there and just feel like somewhere that I could be comfortable because I have to live there. So, I chose to do that deeper, focus work for a long time with practitioners. You might not want to, you might just want to tap for yourself so that you can get in the car or tap away that craving to support you with healthier eating. Or maybe, I mean you can tap positively as well. You can use tapping to enhance the positive mood. So you might set yourself up with a morning routine that includes a little bit of tapping. It works beautifully as well with children. Children respond really well to it. My kids are 3 and 4 and they use it, my son uses it independently, so he does it for himself and it's self-regulation, so. And on top of that they kind of find it fun like, oh, what colour is that feeling? Where is it in my body and it's an opportunity to talk about what they might be feeling as well. So, there's so much you can do with tapping. and one of the lovely things as well is often when we are looking at some of that deeper, more focused work, it's things we don't want to talk about, even if it is with a professional and you don't have to. So, there are really, really gentle ways of doing tapping. If you've got memories that you don't want to talk about or anything that you just don't feel comfortable saying, you can still use tapping.

So, tapping can be useful for all manner of issues or positive experiences. What have you helped people with within the past that tapping has brought them through what they were dealing with?

There's been a huge range. So personally, I was supported with kind of chronic anxiety and really difficult past experiences, which now they kind of used to. I used to have invasive thoughts about memories. You know, we. You sometimes get an image that pops into your mind that doesn't happen anymore. Those things, they can't blindside me because if they come in, they feel like a memory, not that thing that I don't want to think about. People have come to me for taking a leap from say, being employed to being self-employed. I have worked with quite a lot of clients who have chronic pain or chronic illness because EFT can really support with physical pain in the body and also all of those emotions that come with it. So, the frustration about things that you may not be able to do or things that feel different than they used to, and uncertainty about the future, things like diagnoses can really be supported. Any kind of transition EFT can really support. So, I've supported with the endings of relationships or conflicts between people. I'm also an adoptive parent and I work with adoptive parents, but also parents in general to connect with themselves and their children because often those are, the same thing. So often we find as parents that certain things trigger us in our children and we're not sure why. Or I've heard from a lot of parents that they're finding that they're very, very angry and they weren't expecting it, or something is causing a problem in the home, and they just can't seem to work it out. It's a great clue that EFT can help anything where we feel like this is really familiar, this feeling in my body, or this is really disproportionate or I'm just not sure why I behave that way or where these thoughts are coming from. It's a great clue that EFT can help because often we find that there are parts of it that we learned or it reflects the belief that we have about ourselves. So, things have roots and that means that those roots can be pulled up. It's very, very gentle way of doing it. But it just means that even if somebody says, oh, that's just the way I am, you'll never hear me say that anymore. Because it could change if you wanted it to. That's my belief and that's been my experience. Even the belief that nothing can change can be tapped with.

We've mentioned sceptics already, but I can absolutely say that there will be people listening to this now that think it's a load of rubbish. However, I would also remind them that we don't know half about how the mind and body works. I don't think even the most knowledgeable person about the human brain would have the confidence to say, absolutely not, because we just don't know everything.

Yeah. And I, I think what's key, because I've had a client very recently, a new client, who I always say to people, because you can kind of get a feeling for it on the. Because I offer a free half an hour call. So, I normally have a chat with someone before they come. And I think because people go, oh, is this sort of snake oil? And then they think that you're sort of like a snake oil salesperson. So, they're kind of like trying to look around the answers that you're giving and stuff. And I think it's as simple as that. Like give it a go. I don't believe that probably anything is for everyone. So, I'm not kind of attached to that. But I mean, he came to me for a session, and he was just really shocked about the sensation that he felt in his body. But I'm not there to prove it. I'm there to share it. And then it's received, how it's received, because I know it works, and it works differently for different people. So, you might have a session with somebody where it feels like you kind of go from 0 to 100 and they experience a lot of insights very quickly. Or it's like any kind of reflection or conversation we have with ourselves. Depending on where we're at, it can take longer. or we can kind of go roundabout way. Or it can be. It depends on the person. I've met lots of sceptical people, but I've never had anybody tell me that they didn't feel anything after A session, but it might well happen and it wouldn't change my opinion of EFT. And I often say as well, I direct people who are feeling sceptical and just want that little bit of - What actually is this though, to somebody called Dr. Peter Stapleton, who is an amazing Australian psychologist who is leading the way in the academic research around EFT. So, there's lots of meta-analyses now, there's lots of s. I think it's 300 plus papers specifically on EFT. But it's not to forget that EFT is part of an umbrella. So, some of the techniques that use acupressure points have been around for thousands of years and have already been studied.

So EFT specifically has hundreds of papers on it, but actually it's linked to lots of other interventions and I don't know how recently, but there's been a study done where they believe they've actually found the vascular system in the body that acupressure points are working with. So, they are looking at the physical side of things as well. But yeah, I think that side of things is coming. And, there's a lot more scientific evidence for what EFT actually does. I know that there are studies that have looked at the changes in the brain before and after EFT through MRI scans. So, there's lots of physical studies. But it is so demonstrable that I teach EFT often in introductory workshops where we kind of tap together as a group and people have an experience of that. So, I get the. Is this snake oil? But I'd say, who is it benefiting? Because for me it's changed my life completely. I was a person who struggled to leave the house and now I stand on stage, and I talk about EFT. And the only difference between me then and me now is I lost a lot of limiting beliefs. And how did I do that? I did that through EFT. So, it comes from passion, but. Absolutely. I never sell it, I never push it on anybody. I think you'll feel if it's right for you. But my question would be, are you determined to think that it's snake oil or can you introduce a little bit of curiosity and give it a go. 

Fantastic. and you mentioned there that you do a free half an hour consultation. Is that the best way for people to contact you to start with, to find out a bit more?

Definitely, yes. So, I offer that free call for any of my services because I know how important it is to gel with the person that you're choosing to support you. So, there's no obligation there at all. That's just a chance to have a chat about what it is you want to work with, what EFT is and if you feel like it would be a good fit. So, we just have a bit of a virtual cuppa and a bit of a chat and then I work one to one with clients and I have a therapy room right in the middle of Central Chester. And I also work online, which again has been studied in EFT and has proven to be just as effective because remember, you'll be tapping on yourself for yourself. So we tap together, but kind of it's not me administering it it's you. And then I'm also a trainer, so I teach level one, level two and level three EFT. So, level one is a lovely comprehensive course to help you feel really, really confident about eft. What it is lovely small group, plenty of practise and from there you can go on and do a level two and level three, which is practitioner training. And then I supervise the practitioners that I train, and I also work with organisations to do introductory workshops, staff wellbeing sessions around mindfulness or eft, and usually a mix of both. My background is in support work and also in the criminal justice system. So, I'm very, very passionate about bringing EFT to places where it might be really needed. So, I'm looking at building some partnerships with public sector organisations and, local charities as well so that I can support their clients.

Brilliant. So how do people find you online? What do they need to search for?

So, I'm Tap into Transformation. You'll find me at https://tapintotransformation.co.uk/ and I'm also on Instagram as https://www.instagram.com/tap_into_transformation. And you'll also find me on Facebook as well or on LinkedIn. So, I'm all over the place and very happy to have a chat with anybody because I live and breathe EFT really. And so, I'm always very, very happy to share it 

And it doesn't matter if, they're not local to the northwest. If anyone's listening to this, Scotland, London, even out of the country, which we have had already, which is really amazing. They can contact you as well. Your work has no borders?

Absolutely not, no. And Zoom is a great medium for EFT. I've got lots of clients who aren't local to me.

Great. Thank you so much for your time today, Jess. I'll definitely be finding out a bit more.

Thank you so much. It's been lovely to be on.