The TAT® Story – by Tapas Fleming
Both in my own life and as a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine, I had often wondered how to get myself or a patient out from under the negative influence of past events. However much therapy, meditation or other forms of healing a person did, certain issues never seemed to get resolved once and for all.
Tapas Acupressure Technique® (TAT®) came to me after taking a nap in my office one day. I woke up with the thought of a particular acupuncture point and how it could be used for healing a person’s whole system. I was specializing in allergy work at the time, using a combination of acupressure and acupuncture, based on the methods of Dr. Devi Nambudripad of Buena Park, California. The acupuncture point is called Urinary Bladder 1 (UB1) or “Eyes Bright” as it is called in Chinese.
I immediately began to incorporate this point in my treatment of allergy patients with great success. After several months, a new patient told me, “My T’ai Chi master told me to use that point with one other for headaches and other problems.” Although my insight was based on my training and experience as an acupuncturist, this simple confirmation of my own experience meant a lot to me. I added the third point the T’ai Chi master mentioned.
After another few months, on a drive to work over gently rolling hills in Northern California, I was contemplating the fact that the occipital area of the brain is the vision center and that the points I was using for treatment were related to vision. I thought that perhaps if I included the brain’s vision center in the treatments I was doing, it would enhance the treatments. It did. An entire layer of complication in my allergy treatments (combining an allergen with other substances in order to achieve a complete clearing) was no longer necessary with the addition of placing the palm of the hand on the occipital area of the head. The healing was more complete with less steps.
What I have discovered from using TAT goes beyond what I learned as part of my professional training. I discovered in my acupuncture practice that our bodies, not just our minds, have memories. Not just our memories, but the memories of our ancestors. If we stop and think about it for a minute, it becomes obvious that our bodies are the product of our parents’ bodies. We look like our parents, and often have similar health problems as our parents. Well, to take it many steps further, our parents’ bodies came from their parents’ bodies, whose bodies came from their parents’ bodies, and so on for a long, long way back. The color of your hair and your eyes, the shape of your hands and feet, your bone structure, and some of your health problems are the legacy of both your recent and ancient ancestors. Just as car manufacturers base new models on a long line of previous designs rather than reinvent the wheel, you are the latest model of your ancestry.
Again, I did not come to this conclusion through study and thought, but through experience in my clinical practice. For example, I was working on a patient who was allergic to dust. As I was treating her I “saw,” you might say psychically, a farmer pushing a plow and breathing in copious amounts of dirt. Big clouds of dust rose all around him as he followed his plow. Without mentioning the complete image I was seeing, I just talked to the patient about the dust of the land where she was living, and in her conversation to me she revealed that she came from a long line of German farmers. What was coming to me from her body was what I would call the cellular history of her present life in this body. Our bodies have living histories which we could call cellular memory. When an ancestor experienced something traumatic, that memory seems to be stored and passed down at a cellular level.
I was inspired to explore cellular memory more deeply when I worked with a patient who, by her early 30’s, had been in nine car crashes which she hadn’t caused. She had suffered a concussion and other major traumas to the head, and was suffering from constant neck and headaches with a couple of migraines a week. The story I “saw” was about a young boy of eight or so who was in a mountain cabin with his father. A crazy mountain man came in and killed his father, smashing his head open. When I mentioned this, my patient was silent for a few moments, then told me that her father had fallen, smashed his head, and she was there when it happened. She then told her sisters about what had come up, and her sisters told her that they knew of two men in the family who had been murdered by people smashing their heads in. The sisters also talked about the fact that their young children had already suffered an inordinate amount of concussions and blows to the head in the course of their growing up.
I began to realize that I had been given the gift of seeing the history of the cells of a human body and a way to heal the traumas that had been passed down from generation to generation: TAT. What I learned from working with many friends and patients in the first many years of my practice is that when the story and held stuck energy of those cells is heard while a person is in the TAT pose, they release the stored trauma they have been holding. The cells are then able to rejoin the organism they are part of and get on with this business of living. Using TAT, a person doesn’t have to have a conscious or psychic vision of what happened. The TAT pose itself along with your focus on a trauma creates a connection between the cells’ memory and your function of vision. You “re-view” the trauma and it is integrated in a few moments.
Over the second decade, what’s become clear is that we become identified with moments in time and parts of us keep living as if that moment is still happening. We also have moments in time and viewpoints from our ancestors that constantly inform us about “what’s real” in our lives. They’re all feeding us information which may or may not be useful or relevant and, typically, is coming from a perspective of fear.
When we’re no longer identified with those perspectives or events, the parts of us easily integrate into the here and now. The views of ancestors quit influencing or limiting us. The result is that all the energy, feelings and behaviors that were stuck simply vanish and we’re left with an abundance of energy and happiness in the here and now. We feel way better!
Now In the third decade, TAT continues to evolve as our community works with clients and ourselves. As we find new information that makes our approaches to healing more effective, we share our discoveries. TAT is often described as “elegant”. I think that’s because it’s simple, it works and it simultaneously sets us in a spiritually-centered place within where we naturally feel an expanded sense of ease and peace. I find it a huge pleasure to teach TAT because it is so empowering and liberating and supports us in creating a vibrant, healthy life full of meaning and fulfillment. I love seeing us happier.