I have to confess that until I went to college to study naturopathy as a mature age student, I had little clue as to how my body worked, or even what bones, organs or systems it consisted of.  Physiology classes, even though I found them incredibly difficult to understand, proved a continual source of amazement.  What?!  My body does all this – and all at the same time?

If I can’t quite follow the high road of Einstein’s assertion yet – “There are two ways to live your life; one as if nothing is a miracle.  The other as if everything is a miracle”  – I can at least recognise I am a miracle and my body is a miracle.  And, for twenty years I have witnessed on a daily basis the miracle transformations wrought by simply tapping on the end points of meridians, both in myself and others.

Most people have a nervous system that’s under duress at the moment. I just went through the rollercoaster of receiving a Covid alert, going for tests and the anxious wait for results.  While it may seem to be outside of your control, it’s good to know that you can actually help regulate your nervous system so it serves you better.

You have a nerve called the vagus nerve, which wanders through the body starting from your brain stem, with its two major branches – ventral vagal and dorsal vagal – being important components of the parasympathetic nervous system.

It’s like an information superhighway, feeding sensory information from the body to the brain and motor information from the brain back to the body.

It has a ‘braking system’ which is responsible for speeding up and slowing down your heart rate.  When the brake is engaged, the mechanisms of the sympathetic nervous system, which at the extreme end cause fear, anxiety, panic, start to abate and you feel the calm safety of the ventral vagal part of your parasympathetic nervous system.

There are actually quite a lot of things we can do to help this brake engage – and tapping is one of the easiest and is especially effective and fast acting.  When you feel upset or your equilibrium is disturbed in some way, tapping on the end points of the meridian (even without saying anything) helps to start the brake working – just like applying the brakes to your car or bicycle.

It causes us to feel clearer, calmer, more relaxed, looser, lighter, safer, more connected, after even a few minutes of tapping, because it triggers the vagal brake mechanism to work in a way that brings the nervous system back into balance.

And you don’t even know that your body is doing that or how!  It really is miraculous.  You could even give yourself the gift of experiencing a miracle today by doing some tapping.