Arundhati Roy’s new memoir as EFT case study

A well-known fact about me is that I am an avid reader. I am particularly fond of memoirs and biographies because you really get to understand the complex landscape of a person.

People reveal a lot more about their inner workings in a memoir than many realise, and it is really interesting viewing this through the EFT framework of ‘limiting beliefs’.

These are what we call the sub-conscious programs that are constantly running in the back of our minds, stemming from social conditioning and our life’s experiences that we think we cannot change such as

 ‘I always attract the wrong type of partner’, or ‘I have to work myself to shreds to survive’. 

But how can we reprogram these phrases we catch ourselves thinking in moments of doubt, that through repetition have turned from fleeting, painful conclusions to the Gospel truth?

The good news is, a belief is just a thought, and thoughts can be changed.

(Hello EFT!)

Taking the searing new memoir 'Mother Mary Comes to Me' by Arundhati Roy as a case study, we find an early childhood memory where she is praised and her brother is harshly punished by their mother for the grades that they brought home from school.

“In the morning, she hugged me and said ‘You have a brilliant report.’ I was filled with shame. I hated myself. Since then, for me, all personal achievement comes with a sense of foreboding. On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room.”

This moving recollection sows the seeds for the cycles of guilt and shame that have accompanied the author through all of the accolades she has accrued since the meteoric success of her 1997 debut novel The God of Small Things. In her memoir she discusses her famous Booker Prize win (once again recalling the report card incident with jarring clarity in a life-changing moment that for many others may be pure and joyful) feeling that her success must come at the cost and suffering of others.

We see this limiting belief show up in different ways for the writer. Roy makes mention of the ongoing challenges she has experienced since the 1990s, with the privilege and financial abundance her writing career has brought to her life. A particularly difficult adjustment for someone who had spent the first two decades of her life in poverty, found her identity and power in her independence, used her voice to uplift the downtrodden and has never sought fame for herself. 

So how do we balance the passionate and fearless pursuit of our craft with the abundance that it (rightly) brings? And how do we release the guilt of having more than others around us? 

These limiting beliefs, like open tabs on the computer, tax our autonomic nervous systems and drain our mental faculties in ways we may not fully recognise. Many clients find our EFT practices suffering from burn-out, chronic fatigue and once we peel back those first layers, we often uncover multiple deeply-ingrained limiting beliefs that keep the client stuck in loops of ill health and exhaustion.

It's no wonder that many get stuck tapping on a surface level, when something much deeper is running the show.  Roy's limiting belief may be tailor-made by her own lived experience, but at its core, is very common. Many people struggle to accept success. ‘Why should I succeed when so many have so little’ is a limiting belief I myself have had to tap on.

For compassionate folk, the empath wins out over conqueror, feeling a greater sense of familiarity with the reflex of shrinking ourselves in favour of challenging our own outdated beliefs, let alone replacing it with something much more freeing and spacious such as ‘there’s enough for everyone.’ Imagine truly believing this with every fibre of your being and how differently every single one of your cells would vibrate with this knowledge. There's no limit to the wellness and abundance that this energy can call in, if it is truly believed.

The beauty of EFT is that once identified, even a limiting belief as deeply-rooted as Roy's can be quickly and elegantly extracted, bringing emotional freedom and manifold health benefits to the client.