Video Review: Tapping for Your Type

Co-written with Kacie Berghoef

We have something special to share with you this month. Psychotherapist and leadership coach Rachel Alexandria has released a series of videos that introduce a powerful process to heal our Enneagram types’ wounds. Introducing Tapping for Your Type!

Tapping, or EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), is a kind of acupressure that uses points on the body to access your energy and ability to self-heal. By using your fingers to tap on specific spots such as the top of your head or side of your hand, you stimulate your body to shift stuck energy and clear emotional blocks. Tapping can be used to address many kinds of challenges, from anxiety to chronic pain to trauma. This video series is the first program to pair it with work on, in Alexandria’s words, our Enneagram “type challenges, limiting beliefs, and stuck patterns.”

There’s a video series geared toward each type, with a free demonstration video focusing on core issues (accessible on her site and via YouTube) and a subsequent set of videos focusing on the type’s common challenges with work, social issues, relationships, wellness, and spirituality and life path. Alexandria also encourages viewers to watch videos for their connecting points and wing, giving them a wide array of tools to address the stuck patterns they run into from day to day. If you’re butting heads with your boss, the work video would be a good one to come back to; if you’re grappling with questions of meaning and purpose, the spirituality and life path video will likely offer some gems of guidance.  

We’re both new to tapping, and Rachel Alexandria’s straightforward introduction makes it easy to dive in. Her videos show you a number of pressure points to tap and demonstrate the process. Thanks to their clear visuals and demonstration, any new practitioner can quickly tap along. The process works through a set of statements, repeated aloud and anchored in the body through tapping on a particular acupressure point. Each one follows an acknowledgment of a particular, type-characteristic challenge, such as “Even though I feel like I have to rebel against authority,” with words of self-acceptance or release, such as “I deeply and completely accept myself.” The result is more affecting and grounded than using affirmations, and the videos encourage listeners to look at their pain directly and delve into healing head on.  

Alexandria’s innovative approach has both breadth and depth, touching on a spectrum of challenges that each Enneagram type may encounter and offering validation and insights that can often be emotional. We highly recommend it for anyone who looking for a somatic tool to work on wearing their personality patterns more lightly and easing the chatter of the inner critic. You can check out the whole series here.