Tapping Expert Marcella Friel ON: How to Forgive Yourself When You’re Sick

you know sickness and illness really is a path to self-love and that within every traumatic experience whatever that trauma is whether it's a sudden like what we call a capital T trauma or whether it's just been like a stressful situation that you've been dealing with for a long time every trauma contains within it some blessing some gift and some lesson you know there's nothing to feel guilty about or ashamed of all of it all of it ultimately points to love welcome to today's episode of the each live feel better podcast where I sat down with Marella frel a food and forgiveness Mentor who helps healthc conscious women learn to love and forgive themselves today's topic is how to forgive yourself when you're sick at first blush you might actually wonder why forgiveness might be necessary at all why do I need to forgive you might ask well when you listen to this podcast you you will understand that underneath every single negative and unwanted Behavior thinking pattern or painful symptom there's a story just waiting to be uncovered stories are Stories We Tell ourselves in the moment about what is happening and stories often originate in childhood there's a problem with childhood stories though and that is that they rarely accurately represent what actually happened and this is because we lack emotional intelligence as little kids so we literally make up stories about how we're unloved how we're unworthy and how we don't deserve the attention of our parents Etc now unfortunately we carry these stories around with us our entire lives sometimes until one day we're confronted with a failure or the inability to achieve something we really want such as losing weight for example it's at this point that that you muster up the courage to ask yourself why you can't achieve your health goals and that's where Marella's work comes in her grand message of forgiveness says that whatever it is that's blocking you from achieving your goals can be released through forgiveness Hallelujah that is so powerful if you're wondering how all of this is accomplished marchella has got a special method of working with women that you might have heard of it's tapping and everyone can do it so grab a tea get cozy and let's work on self forgiveness with marchella so hi everyone and welcome to the live eat feel better podcast I am here with the beautiful marchella Friel a food and forgiveness Mentor for healthc conscious women and we are going to have a discussion today about how to forgive yourself when you're sick and the many many many dimensions of that and I think you guys are going to love this so welcome to you marchella thank you so much for being here thank you Andrea thank you for having me here it's always always lovely to see you thank you so much I think the feeling is mutual food and forgiveness Mentor this is not a word or a phrase that we hear every day I would love to hear how you came to have this expertise M yeah it's a big question well gosh let's see so my background since 1998 for about 20 years from 1998 to about 20 well actually a little more more like 25 years I was a chef and I was a culinary arts instructor I taught at a little holistic culinary arts school in h the wine country in Soma County California and I was a chef and and around 2013 I was was working as a chef in a treatment facility for women recovering from love addiction and I was teaching culinary school and I loved my work I loved it and I felt like I needed at the same time I felt like I needed some kind of like a depth charge like there was a deeper level of work that wanted to come out of me and I had been doing EFT PR uh tapping I was working with a practitioner she was really amazing and tapping you know just brought huge benefit in my life and around that time I thought well gee why don't I just become a tapping practitioner and since I'm a chef I'll use tapping to help people figure out what to eat it it seemed simple enough but I really truly had no idea what I was getting into so I certified as a practitioner and then in 2014 I hung my shingle women started coming to me we were hardly talking about food at all we would talk about food for maybe a couple minutes and then we would get into stories about like childhood abuse or bullying or you know just you name it yes and there was one time I was working with a client and she said some women use razor blades I use food and it was almost like a flash I saw this phrase women food and forgiveness it kind of it was like an airplane was pulling a banner it just like kind of ran across my mind and I realized that the struggles that women have with food are it's not that they're not about the food but by the time you get to this question of like okay what are you eating and how are you eating you're already at the Caboose of the train and I'm sure you know this from your AR Andrea you know you start to get in oh yeah okay so you start to get into like the nitty-gritty of that and it's like well gee you know my mother was always dieting and she she would always tell me how fat I was and I look at pictures when I was a kid and I wasn't fat you know so there there's this underlying trauma um that that sort of expresses itself in the relationship with food and I have never dieted a day in my life I've never been overweight a day in my well actually it's not true I was a little overweight once but you know it wasn't a big deal however I I did experience multiple complex trauma as a kid and the tapping was enormously helpful for me personally so suddenly here I was working with all these really deep traumatic issues and in 2018 um after the success of a couple of my courses on on daily oh women were coming to me from all over the world like I want to work with you I want to work with you and it was like okay I don't know so I grabbed one of our colleagues who you know Mary Sheila ganella and she's a holistic nutrition nutritionist and she's an ayurveda practitioner and I just grabbed her and said okay we got to start this thing so um we started the women food and forgiveness Academy in 2018 and that's how I came to be a food and forgiveness Mentor for health conscious women that's that's the very very Abridged version you know and so you mentioned EFT not everybody watching might know what that means do you want to explain that a little bit and why it might be or is I'm sure in your experience it is but how that tool Works to get that um forgiveness and processing of trauma I mean I'm so interested in this topic it's why I wanted to speak with you because yes you know no matter what it is that we're trying to address or change when it comes to our health uh we're always coming up against roadblocks and obstacles that are internal and we may know what they are we may not know what they are all we know is that we're having trouble making the changes we want to change and so any methodology that helps somebody to get deeper and resolve those issues I feel we need to really understand and and learn more about so how does EFT work well EFT stands for emotional Freedom techniques it's also called tapping and it's also called Meridian tapping it goes by a bunch of different names and essentially what it is it's a really remarkably simple self-help tool to help to decouple the memory of a traumatic experience or a stressful situation from its emotional charge so emotional Freedom right emotions by their nature are emotion their energy in motion right you feel angry you feel happy you feel panicked you feel contented these emotions come and go they come and go come and go but sometimes when they hook on to a particular associative memory they get lodged it's kind of like a log in a stream right it just keeps spinning so why do I keep you know getting in the same job with the same boss who reminds me of my father or whatever you know yeah so what we do when we tap is we fingertip tap on points that are at or near the ends of certain acupuncture meridians while we're recollecting a stressful situation and what the tapping does is it helps it acts like a circuit breaker on the electromagnetic signal of the distress so it pulls that circuit breaker and tapping is working with the midbrain the lyic system of the brain where like that's kind of like the smoke alarm system of our brain stress alerts Stress Management it can be remarkably effective and extremely fast sometimes at really diffusing things that we've been holding on to for years wow um so you know a lot of us when we when we're kind of trying to work out our traumas you know we got to talk therapy I was in talk therapy for years it was wonderful helpful but it I never really broke broke through until I started working at this deeper level in my Consciousness you know working at this sort of more subconscious level the the midbrain is older than language and that's why we can talk about something and talk about it but it never really cracks until we we go back and we sort of open it up energetically and release it so yeah that's happing in a nutshell okay so we're accessing something at a deeper level I think that's really key so how do you access it like how do you know it's there to access and um like how do you know where to start I I guess uh maybe maybe that brings us to our topic of how to forgive yourself when you're you're sick because I know we had another slightly different topic in mind and and then you actually got sick and I got sick yeah inspired to to share this so so tell us more well what I've what I've observed Obed and what I've experienced you know what I've observed working with clients and what you know my own experience just getting really sick last week it you know it was a case of food poisoning it turned out so you know you know how food poisoning can be it can be intense and then it's gone so that was very merciful but during that time that I was kind of lying on my couch feeling like I had 10 people stabbing me in the stomach you know extreme extreme abdominal pain I I reflected on you know of course I was starting to blame myself about like oh I shouldn't have eaten that I think it was uh the culprit was I hate to say it but it was bangers and mash pub food looks like there might still be some forgiveness to do yeah could be well it's just a little embarrassing because you know I'm supposed to be this food person it's like okay well I'm seen bangers and MH I think that that's perfect we're all human and nobody should think that a health coach um is is perfect that's perfect exactly territory no we're all but I started what happened was for me I started to really tunnel down into like intense self-pity you know I shouldn't have eaten that you know I think that when we get sick whether it's a kind of a passing sickness like this or sometimes when it's a really chronic sickness because those you know chronic sicknesses can be a result of lifestyle choices that that we didn't make and we know that we should have made them but maybe we spent years neglecting our body and now here come the you know here comes the bill that the body's presenting the bill or you know maybe there was some kind of a medical map that happened you know I trusted the medical professionals to tell me what I should have done and it didn't feel right to me intuitively but I followed what they said and now here I have all these adverse reactions and consequences you know we we can give ourselves a hard time about these things so where tapping comes in you know the thing that's interesting about tapping is we don't have to rehash the whole story okay so how do we work directly we work directly we go into like the what's the body sensation here oh I regret that I neglected my body for decades okay where do you feel that in your body well gee it's a sinking in my chest or it's maybe it's like a pit like a sinking in the pit of my stomach you know there might be a story connected to it there might not but we can work right directly with those Body Sensations we can work directly with the emotions the story comes much later but there's a kind of primary experience like if we just start tapping right there you know we can begin to unlock that strangle hold of guilt or shame or self-blame and then often underneath that what really is at the core you know from the tapping world is um beliefs what we believe so you know segueing over jumping over into ayurveda for a second working with I mean just looking at your work and also working with Mary Sheila you know one of the things that really comes through in ayurveda is is the emotional roots of illness the the first instance is a what would you call it like a disturbing thought you know a cognition something a distortion of cognition then that brings an emotional charge that sends off sets off a whole uh help me with this word endocrinological the hormonal response thank you and you know then here come the hormones and they start shape-shifting their way around the belief the thought the emotion changing the chemistry in your in your blood actually right exactly and then here comes the out picturing of that with like a blood sugar imbalance or heart irregularities or digestive disturbances or thyroid malfunction or etc etc etc Etc you know so the thing that tapping is really great at is um getting going right down straight into the Boiler Room of those beliefs and the beliefs usually show up in the language of like a zero to sixy Old I'm not good enough nobody loves me I'm all alone uh I can't do it it's too hard uh you know Etc because it's in those first six years of life that we we form you know our perceptions of how we are and who we are relative to other people and relative to our world so tapping can just you know you can go right down and just clear them right out it's pretty amazing it is amazing and and I know it's amazing I still feel like it's a bit of a mystery though so I would love to like unpack that process like you say you could start with uh the physical sensation in the body which you I know tapping starts with like an even though statement right even though I'm feeling something so would you say even though I'm feeling shooting pains in my abdomen you could certainly absolutely yeah so that's an interesting point so if you have like chronic pain you know or even a temporary pain you can absolutely tap on this sensation of the pain and what's recommended in tapping is to get really really as specific as you can so I have this shooting s ation in my stomach you know just to the right of my underneath my rib cage right around my gallbladder you know and it maybe you know maybe my gallbladder feels congested or maybe I'm just whatever and describing the sensation is it burning is it tingling is it stabbing is it throbbing is it ACH you know so even though I have this dull aching throbbing right underneath my right rib cage I deeply love and accept myself so that's a setup statement you know with tapping for pain you can actually put your hand like say on that spot and just tap with the other hand amazing yeah it's lovely it's kind of like you're giving yourself raiki you know and then you just see how it is after that what can often happen with physical pain is that it will migrate yes so there's a technique in the tapping world we call it chasing the pain so it migrates over to the left side okay so then we go over to the left side and we work on that okay then it goes actually into my back okay well we work on the back you know that is so that is so interesting so oh my gosh so the very fact that it migrates suggests that it's not a physical symptom necessarily but like you said it's it's a a feeling or belief at the root why would it migrate what's the explanation if you're chasing is it uh wow interesting wind I don't know some kind of wind disturbance in the body the winds are moving around yeah we do have airs in our bodies that um facilitate movement okay so if we start with like even though I have this very specific pain what is what is the next thing you say like even though I have a Spain I deeply love and accept myself but then like what what do you actually say after that okay so when you're tapping you start with that setup statement and then you might just focus on this pain this stabbing pain and what I do is I actually bring my awareness right into the middle of that pain okay I I love this by the way I love this confronting the pain is powerful okay so the pain becomes a meditation I'm tapping and I'm releasing while I'm tapping and I'm actually taking this physical pain as a meditation you were just really taking into it exactly that's right because most of the time when we feel pain we recoil back from it we you know we don't like pain nobody likes pain so this is your it's a little counterintuitive but you go right into the middle of it and often what I will do now this is me this is not necessarily EFT Orthodoxy but I will I'll say like okay well what is like if this pain could talk what would it say if this pain had language what would it say I'm hurt you know somebody pay attention to me I need love and there we are again right with those beliefs like right with that zero to six you know say we're six years old now um wow that's powerful I had incredible low back pain for years and when I did this tapping practice and I went into it there was generations of trauma generations of women raging about how limited they were in their capacity to move in society you know so it can be very very revealing um this kind of tapping work it's really helpful to do it with a practitioner you can certainly do it on your own but often you know we can't see our own eyeball and you know like having somebody who can just reflect back to you and hold a container for you um yeah that can be very helpful so for sure I mean you have all the experience and this is the thing about tapping is that I feel like a a tapping practitioner like yourself must have incredible awareness of the way that feeling ings and emotions and Sensations work um in all of their you know different colors and variations and you know there's all these interconnections it's like um you know some level of Mastery over sort of the human mind and emotions that you know few of us even come close to understanding um I'm sure you do that so many times with people you you learn so much about how the the inner world how our inner world's work and you know that's the big mystery for most people and so I would imagine working with um an expert like yourself will be very powerful you well that's interesting Andrea it sounds kind of like I don't know if I've got all that but but you know it's interesting because after a while it becomes kind of like reading the newspaper yeah I bet so like you know if I hear somebody say it's always like that I think oh like my little beeper goes off like there's a belief okay belief alert you know oh I never it never happens like that for me oh okay oh there's a belief you know and and one question I had too is you you listed off a number of beliefs at that zero to six years old and what I'm curious about is if you sort of resolved the the charge on that belief as it related to the shooting pain in your abdomen for example right say the shoot say it started with the shooting pain in your abdomen but you actually discovered I'm not I'm not worthy underneath and you tapped on that and you you know you reduced the emotional charge what I'm curious to know is is there more than one story attached to I'm not worthy does it come up again and again for the same oh absolutely oh yeah oh sure because we can I mean it's almost like we can do like a map you know like put I am not I'm not worthy at the center and then it's like okay health and money and relationships and it can out picture in all these different Arenas of Our Lives um you know there is a little caveat here that I should say which is that you know tapping doesn't cure but so like will the tapping cure my pain no but what it can do is help to loosen up that emotional stronghold that facilitates you know what whatever other modalities you're going to use to heal that but yeah the core beliefs show up in in everything so when a woman comes to me and says for example I'm obsessing over every pound I gain I get on the scale and I gain a pound and I freak out I'm terrified of losing control of my body weight actually I was just talking with somebody today about that so then my question becomes okay well where else is that fear of losing control showing up in your life besides with what you know because the scale again you know by the time you're at the scale you're at the end of the line exactly by the time you're putting food into your mouth and you're unhappy about it there's something behind it okay got it yeah that makes perfect sense oh and so are you saying that it might be easier to understand where that belief is showing up in other parts of the life or even more meaningful than trying to control what you eat as a way to you know control that I'm guessing that's kind of what you're saying here well it's kind it's like illumination you know it's like you shine a light on it and then it it comes out in relief because you know in this culture we struggle with food we eat too much what do we do we go on a diet and a DI I mean you know this I know you know this diets are like oh my gosh you know what a train wreck waiting to happen I mean diets are so destructive to our metabolism so destructive to our self-esteem you know absolutely not the thing to do that is so interesting like yeah we know that diets don't work but hearing it from you it it's coming out in sort of like full color now you're setting yourself up to fail you're you're setting yourself up to feel guilty when you you know when you eat something you're not supposed to um you feel like a failure because you didn't actually lose weight um you're depriving yourself you're suffering um you don't you're not showing yourself love because you're depriving yourself like there's just yeah things emotionally in there is just like a Minefield you're right and you're trying to resolve the food at the level of the food right right so you know often the the the uh the question and it's very interesting because even though we know diets don't work there's still that obsession with dieting if I can only just find the right diet if I can just dial in and get the right diet now all of that said you know and I know that making Wise self-loving food choices is essential to our healing like that's not we're not saying go out and you know do whatever don't go out and eat bangers and mash don't do what I did but what what brings us to that point where we're so at war with our body such that we're trying to like break it into this mold of dieting what what what was the whole chain of CA and effect that brought brought you to that point that's where I go let's go back and then when we get a handle on that and you start to reclaim your self-esteem and your pieces of your soul start to come back in okay then let's talk about your blood sugar then let's talk about your morning habits then let's talk about okay how you know how much water are you drinking in a day or whatever yeah that's beautiful yeah aware self-awareness and the exercise of it is the fundamental thing that's necessary to really practice an ayurvedic lifestyle and it sounds like tapping can really help a person to develop that and and work with that uh more because I understand that the starting point is maybe just noticing that something's off or something isn't working or something's hurt hurting right or you know there's you're aware that there's a belief in the way or you're wondering why do I always do this self-destructive thing you could start at any of those places and then like when you say I deeply what is the phrase I deeply love and accept myself even though this thing I deeply love and accept myself so why is that important well because unconditional self-love is the antidote for everything that distresses us that's the view that's what Gary Craig the man who boom mic drop boom that's what Gary Craig the man who uh created the EFT technique you know that's that was his I never heard that before sure I mean if you think about it and you know this this Segways back this circles back around to forgiving ourselves when we're sick because you know our bodies are so miraculous they're they're they're phenomenal they're beyond comprehension in their elegance and their the the the consciousness of the body they're profound so even being sick it's the body's way of trying to bring the being back into balance and with and within that sickness within within the sickness there is a medicine and what I love about ayurveda is that the medicine is self-care you know it's the science of self-care it's the practice of self-care it's all about self-care yes it's beautiful nurturing and nourishing actions I would say so you can have you you can have self-care but if you don't have self-love then it's not not gonna work I mean the new habits are not going to stick you're not going to feel compelled to do them you're not going to be motivated you know I talk about these actions being joyful and they are like if we can I guess if the self lov's there it feels joyful but if you're trying to force it it's not going to feel joyful exactly or if you're doing it because Andrea says don't do what I say right it has to come from I I love and value myself enough to so I'll tell you a habit that I just started doing this past week is um making a commitment to myself that I do not touch my phone or any media until after I have done my morning meditation it's a game changer why is it a game Cher well because what I used to do is keep the phone by my bed wake up in the morning reach for the phone look at my you know look at my email my texts you know social media nasty yeah first thing in the morning yeah the I'm putting junk media and toxicity and then I would go meditate ah you know and then I would go meditate and and I like why was I so depressed like why okay and this goes back to forgiving yourself when you're sick like why was I just I I never I was I was going through my days like just not feeling like I could get a leg up on my energy and then I realized the first hour of the day is so sacred that beautiful pristine interval of just waking up in the morning there's an opportunity there to really create something new and here I am just going into reaction to like the world and feeling depressed no I don't touch it until my tank is full that's it and it's been about a week now and and I I can't even explain the the transformation it it's so um I highly recommend it I think there's gonna be a lot of people watching this who are gonna start that habit after hearing you share this so thank you good I hope so because the other thing that I do do once in a while I call call it technology Shabbat I you know I'll log off from Friday evening to Sunday morning and just give myself a whole 24 hours like if I'm going out I just leave the phone at home I actually leave it at home yeah so that's a that's a huge in my opinion in these days in these times we're living in that's a huge piece of healing coming into coming we are not appendages of our technology it's really important to remember that and and just I mean a simple thing like I did it today I was at the eye doctor's office and I was please wait in a chair like okay so what's the first thing most people do pull out the phone and I'm just like sitting there I'm like great myself watching my breath observing what's going on you know and I did that for a while and I was like okay I'm still waiting I'm pretty weird here just sitting here staring into space maybe I should blow my phone but isn't that great yeah and I want to connect this somehow because I feel like we glossed over that very importantance like um the message in the sickness and is there a connection to selflove and connecting to self is it that first hour in the day is there how can well the first hour the first hour of the day you're giving yourself the select portion of the day the best part of the day exactly you're giving yourself the you are giving to yourself the best part of the day the the the best time to change your habits and change your outlook and renew yourself so that's really beautiful the hidden message you know with the illness it's interesting because uh in thinking about this topic I was thinking about a friend of mine who I lost eight years ago almost eight years ago she was a sex worker actually and she had her third bout of cancer and she had vaginal cancer I had the Deep privilege she she and I trained as tapping practitioners together and I had the Deep privilege of like being with her through her cancer journey and and into her death she would lie in bed and this was kind of when you know later stages she was too weak to even like lift her hand up to tap so there's a kind of a little secret tapping you can do you just tap on your fingertips and she would just lie there and say can I love myself even with this can I love myself even with this can I love myself even with this and she said to me don't let anybody say that I battled cancer I never battled this cancer I loved this cancer I loved every moment of it it was mine it was my body I love my body I there was no battle here beating herself up for all the years of being a sex worker and oh I shouldn't have done that should and it was like no I enjoyed every moment of it I mean she was pretty amazing the connection was clear and obvious and yet she still found a way I mean that forgiveness right forgiveness and and acceptance I I love and accept myself acceptance right exactly that piece is so powerful just accepting what is and that's part of Having the courage to face it that we addressed at the beginning is it is and diving into the the pain that we're experiencing that other example yeah exactly yeah it's it takes a lot of Courage takes a lot of Courage a lot of willingness to have your identity fall apart and have a different experience yeah another reason why it's important probably to to work with an expert on some of these things because that's really hard to do it's really on your own but like thank you so much for you know taking us through this topic in such a I don't know a witty and light way I mean that's I I love tapping because it's the whole methodology just feels so light like it's it's so innocuous that that's not the word like it it's it's gentle um un assuming that's the word I'm thinking of it's like we're just tapping on energy and we're addressing things in the process and in the process it's it's basically lightening us up it's it's releasing that the heaviness of the blocked things and the emotions and and afterwards we feel lighter I have one more question for you that I actually got from a student recently I was teaching we were talking about a powerful affirming I am statement of right I am healthy I am healed I am well you know versus I want to be healthy or I will be healthy right I am healthy but that seem you know that's great that's great in all but we have to feel it right we have to be able to actually feel I am healthy and in tapping we address the negative and this was the question why do we go into the negative why can't we just skip all of that and just affirm the positive this was the question yep it's The $64,000 Question that everybody asks about tapping so even Louise Hay the grand dwanne of affirmations she said you cannot clean a room until you see the dirt that's it so there's a whole thing in tapping there's a whole practice called working with your tail Enders when you work with affirmations so if you say all right I am healthy and then this this little voice comes up and says no you're not what are you talking about you're sick as a dog you know you're not healthy then what you can do is tap on that t affirmations by their nature they're going to bring up that subconscious resistance and then that's where tapping can come right in and just clear that so that when you say I am healthy you're you're basically giving that directive to your subconscious mind and your subconscious mind says okay got it and we're going to we're going to start to like okay produce those white blood cells and we're going to start you know building that immune system and etc etc yeah but if you feel resistance to that statement that's where you tap you tap on that that's beautiful that explains it perfectly thank you so much is there anything else you would like to add that we didn't cover you feel as important I'll just say one last thing which is um you know sickness and illness really is a path to self-love and that within every traumatic experience whatever that trauma is whether it's a sudden like what we call a capital T trauma or whether it's just been like a stressful situation that you've been dealing with for a long time every trauma contains within it some blessing some gift and some lesson you know there's nothing to feel guilty about or ashamed of all of it all of it ultimately points to love and I love that I love it too a and I love you and I would love for you to share um how people can get in touch with you uh womenfood and forgiveness. comom womenfood and forgiveness. comom I hold a live event every month on the second Saturday of the month I call it the UND dieters club uh it's free come join me second Saturday of the month just go to women food and forgiveness. and yeah great and we'll include that information uh in the show notes when we publish this so everybody just check down in the description and you'll be able to find links to get you directly there great AR thank you so much uh this has been just an incredibly enlightening discussion and you gave so many helpful tips I think that people can use as well so thank you appreciate thank you for inviting me Andrea thank you so much thank you bye for now I really hope you enjoyed this conversation and I encourage you to take action on what you learned press subscribe to get more information about how to eat live and feel better and if you have some time check out this episode that I picked out for you which is the perfect followup take care and until next [Music] time