To most of us, peace on earth sounds unrealistic. How is it possible to have peace when there’s so much war, crime, injustice, violence, accidents, and disasters happening all around us?

How can we possibly have peace when people are starving and kids are dying of hunger and adults of AIDS? When there’s a pandemic and economies are contracting?

The thing is….

We only have control over our own inner lives. We can’t change what’s happening around us. We can’t even change what’s happening in our own lives most of the time. We could loose a job, our health, our money, a relationship.

We can however, create peace in our small part of the Universe. Peace starts within. Wars and violence in our own ‘universe’ stop when we create peace in our own hearts. Peace ripples out. As the Heartmath Institute has found, our hearts (and the emotions going through them) has a profound influence on our own health and those around us.

You may have heard Gandhi’s words: “BE the change you want to see in the world”.

How can I create peace in my own life?

Gary Craig, the founder of EFT, has made a really remarkable tool available to create peace in our inner worlds. It’s available to anyone who cares to use it! He calls it The Personal Peace Procedure and writes the following about it (Gary writes so eloquently that I’m taking the liberty of quoting):

“The Personal Peace Procedure is not just a way to “feel a little more peaceful.” Properly understood, this technique should be the healing centerpiece for every person on earth. Every physician, therapist, spiritual counselor and personal performance coach in the world should be using it as a leading tool for helping others (and themselves).

In essence, the Personal Peace Procedure involves making a list of every bothersome SPECIFIC EVENT in one’s life and systematically EFT’ing their impacts out of existence. By diligently doing this we can pull out every negative tree from our emotional forests and thus eliminate major causes of our emotional and physical ailments. This, of course, propels each individual toward personal peace which, in turn, contributes mightily toward world peace.

Most of our emotional and physical problems are caused (or contributed to) by our unresolved specific events, the vast majority of which  can be easily handled by EFT.” (Gary Craig, creator of EFT)

How to apply The Personal Peace Procedure

If you’re a more visual person, go to the video here and come back for the finer points.

• Buy a notebook or journal. I use one that is easy to carry with me. Or, a phone with a notes app will work great.

• Make a list of every event you can remember that still causes you some intensity when you think about it. now. There is good cause to believe that if you can remember it, there might be something worth looking at!

• You should find at least 50 to start with.

• Pretend each event is like a movie and give each event a short ‘Movie Title’. For instance, “My teacher slapped my hand in front of the whole class when I was 8”.

• Write down just these titles in your notebook (in other words, you don’t have to describe the whole event in detail, just a title will do).

• Next to each, write down the emotional charge when you think about this event. Rate it on a scale of 1-10, where 0 is “no charge” and 10 is the most intense you can get.

• Take one event per day and tap for it from every possible angle you can think of.  All the emotions you feel, all the pictures, images, smells, sounds and reactions you can think of. Rate your intensity as you tap, and ideally you want to get to a “0” intensity about this specific event by the time you complete your tapping session for this event.

• If you work on only 1 event per day, in one year you will have cleared 356 diseased trees from your emotional forest! You will most likely start to feel a lot more peaceful in your everyday life. Look out for the differences – sometimes the changes are so subtle that you might not notice them immediately.

Tips and Tricks for working with your own Personal Peace Procedure

I have been working my own Personal Peace Procedure for a while and I also teach my clients how to work on theirs. From feedback, we’ve found these points to be helpful:

You might feel overwhelmed by this long list by the time you have completed making your list. That’s normal! The first thing you can tap for is “Even though I feel overwhelmed, I am open to the possibility that I can do this in small bite-size chunks, and maybe it could even be fun!”

You might want to make a list of only 10 in the beginning. Start tapping for the one that calls for your attention. This way at least you make a start.

Sometimes a related event (Event B) pops up while you’re busy tapping for Event A. Write only the Movie title of Event B at the end of your Personal Peace Procedure list. Continue to work on Event A until it’s at a ‘0’ charge. It’s best not to switch events. Make sure each event is completely tapped down before continuing on to another event. This is a more thorough approach and will get clearer results. The next time you tap, you can work on Event B, rate its intensity and tap it down to 0.

I have kept a diary in the same book in which my events are listed. Every time I select an event, I tick it and write the date next to it. At the back of my Journal, I write the date again and the name of my movie title. I then make notes as I work, noting down important emotions, thoughts, realisations and cognitive shifts occurring. It’s a really nice way to see the progress you’re making.

I’d love to hear from you.

Have you started your Personal Peace Procedure yet?

If not – what’s in the way?

And I want to make sure you know that’s okay. No judgment, it’s just information. Is it knowledge (know-how), not knowing where to start, overwhelm, thinking it’s impossible anyway, or something else that’s preventing you from starting?