What we think and feel are only a small part of our total self- awareness and wisdom. The unconscious mind is readily accessible through the body and often the best and only indicator of what is really going on for us. Muscle testing is a collaboration between the tester and the subject to get a sense of something that is outside conscious awareness.
We each have a built in bio-feedback mechanism called ideomotor cues that help us access useful information about what our system is experiencing while thinking about a problem. We access these cues by using muscle testing.
If we are sabotaging our progress in life – why are we doing that? We can think of these ideomotor cues as tools for gathering information to learn why we self sabotage.
These cues can come from a bodily ‘felt sense’ as well as from intuition, hypnosis, dowsing, penduling and muscle testing. In Energy Psychology we generally use muscle testing as the main way to check unconscious information, often with surprising results.
Our muscles lock in the presence of information that is good for us, true or pleasant to think about and unlock in the response to false statements, stressful thoughts or environmental stressors. For example: Did you ever have someone ask “Are you sitting down? I have some bad news to tell you”. The reason for this is that muscles will unlock with bad or stressful news.
Muscle testing is not a test of strength. Using your outstretched arm we will simply gauge the relative firmness of your muscle while you are thinking of the presenting issue. This doesn’t mean your muscles actually get weak at such times only that the electricity moving through the nerves gets interrupted so that the muscle momentarily does not function at its best. We can use various other muscles if necessary and may also have a client touch certain points on the body paired with certain statements to check the muscle a different way. We may also do some eye movements, humming or counting in order to gather as much information as possible.
Muscle testing also allows both client and practitioner to observe the results of the testing without any perceived outcome biasing the results. It also gives us another perspective about our own inner wisdom.
Blocks to healing or self- sabotage maybe hidden for many different reasons. For example the female client who desperately wants to lose weight but was once attacked may resist losing weight as staying large will keep away male attention and keep her ‘safe’. As the prime directive of the unconscious mind is to keep us safe and help us survive and it will do this at all cost. Muscle testing can help reveal these, often deeply hidden, blocks.
Once we have gathered the information from our unconscious via muscle testing the client and practitioner can work together to create a path to well-being.
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Kate Munden
Kate is a trauma and embodiment specialist. She is a TRE & EFT Supervising Mentor and is on the Executive Board of EFT International (formerly AAMET) and is a Comprehensive Energy Psychology Practitioner, DipPsych, Master Hypnotist, Master Practitioner of NLP and Time Line Therapy (accredited by the ABNLP) and has been an intuitive body & energy worker for 30 years. While she works with any problem state she specialises in the sensitive areas of Post Traumatic Stress, emotional abuse, chronic pain and anxiety.
