Ann Hince A Pathway to Insight


Audio Episode

 


In this interview, Ann Hince discusses her experiences with EFT or tapping, a technique that involves tapping on specific points on the body to release stored emotions. She shares her personal journey of using tapping to address traumas and emphasizes the importance of releasing emotions for emotional freedom. We discuss the concept of stuck energy and the power of tapping to release it. We also talk about the connection between physical and mental health and share personal experiences of how tapping has helped Ann. The interview emphasizes the importance of awareness, releasing tension, and personal growth. We encourage trying new things and being patient and loving towards oneself. Resources are mentioned for further learning, and the meeting concludes with gratitude and an invitation to subscribe to the podcast.

Action items

  1. Participants are encouraged to try tapping as a technique for releasing stored emotions and addressing traumas.
  2. Participants are encouraged to be patient and loving towards themselves as they explore tapping and other techniques for personal growth.
  3. Participants are invited to subscribe to the podcast for further learning and resources on tapping and emotional freedom.

Bio:

When Ann was 19, she woke one morning to find her mother dead in her bathroom. Twenty years later, the tears from that trauma were still just under the surface. Ann found a simple technique that helped her release these emotions - but she went further and can now put her awareness inside her body - and has changed the bone structure of her skull and grown ½ an inch at age 55. Ann has found that seeking out our truth, what we truly feel, and accepting those feelings, is the key to inner peace.

Ann Hince

[00:00:00] Ann Hince: So, yeah, with mine, um, uh, let me, I'll go onto the third step and then I'll be able to explain it more fully. So it's just a deeper and deeper level of awareness, right? We talked about that. So, as I did more and more of this releasing of the sensations, at some point I noticed that I could keep my awareness inside my body after the tension had released. Which is a really weird thing to say, it was a really weird thing to experience and it's really, uh, quite challenging to explain. But imagine you have a toothache or a stomach ache. You can pinpoint with your senses where that pain is coming from, right? But once the pain has disappeared, you can't feel it again.

[00:00:42] You can't sense that area again, you don't know where it actually is. I found that I could put my awareness back inside my body. And I've never experienced it before, didn't know what I was doing, but I just started playing with it, right? So I, I could do it once and I found I could do it again and then well, what do I do now?

[00:01:01] So I started trying to move my awareness around inside and I found that I could do that. So I could find a place with tension and a place with no tension. So I'd, I'd focus on the place with tension, I would hold my awareness on it, just accept it, and it would shift a little bit.

[00:01:25] Ed Watters: To overcome, you must educate. Educate not only yourself, but educate anyone seeking to learn. We are all Dead America, we can all learn something. To learn, we must challenge what we already understand. The way we do that is through conversation. Sometimes we have conversations with others, however, some of the best conversations happen with ourself. Reach out and challenge yourself; let's dive in and learn something right now.

[00:02:15] Today we are speaking with Ann Hince and she is the author of A Pathway to Insight. She is a spiritual teacher, she is also a public speaker. Ann, could you please let people know just a little bit more about you, please?

[00:02:33] Ann Hince: Hi. Sure. Yes. Um, there's lots to it, we'll just do a little bit for now. So, yeah, I'm, uh, I, I'm from England originally,

[00:02:41] I live in California and have done for 30, um, 30 odd years. And I've developed some abilities now that I didn't know were possible at all before, so that's what I'm sharing now. I only call myself a spiritual teacher because I believe the concepts I'm sharing are spiritual. I'm only an author because I happen to write a book about my story and, uh, yeah, so there I am.

[00:03:08] Ed Watters: That, that is a very special thing to do when you share with people through your own thoughts. And a book is very important because it's gonna be there for people to enjoy. Uh, the, the book, it's interesting. You've had a very interesting life. You found your mother deceased, I had similar thing with my father.

[00:03:37] I had to find my father dead and it wasn't in a very pleasant manner. So I relate with what you are feeling when you say that you found your parent, it, it is shocking. The way you deal with this, you found a special technique, E F T. I'd like to really dive deep into that because it, it's interesting and I wanna know a little bit more about how that works. Could you tell us, number one, how you found the technique and why you decided it needs to be incorporated in all of your life?

[00:04:25] Ann Hince: Sure. Yeah. And I'm finding my mother was kind of the culmination of many different traumas that I had had throughout my life. And you know, we get programmed in those early years of life of how to deal with things.

[00:04:36] And my family was programmed in not dealing with them, so we just suppressed everything. We didn't really talk about it at all. Yes,

[00:04:44] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:04:44] Ann Hince: I think a lot of us do that. So,

[00:04:47] Ed Watters: Yes.

[00:04:48] Ann Hince: I didn't know there was any other way of going about life other than just keeping it hidden. So I actually had to go through a lot of life until I got to the point where something was revealed to me. It's like, oh, I really need to do something about this. And that didn't happen until I was in my late thirties. So I'd gone through all my twenties, I had a lot of digestive issues I think from all that, that trauma that I'd held inside for all those years. And I was always looking outside of myself to fix that. And it, in my late thirties, I had what I call a business altercation.

[00:05:24] There was a couple of other mothers at school, my boys' school, they told me I'd done something wrong. And I was this really scared mother inside and these were these self-confident, self-assured authority type women telling me I'd done something wrong and my mind just spun out of control. Like, just went over and over what they'd said and what I'd said and what had happened.

[00:05:48] And I, my mind couldn't let it go. It was three days of I couldn't sleep because I just went over and over the same thing. And it was in that, at that point that I realized I don't think this is normal, right? I don't think normal people would react so intensely to something that really wasn't that much of a big deal. And that's when I realized it was a little bit like how I would react when my dad would tell me I had done something wrong.

[00:06:14] So for me, that was the first little opening into the idea that maybe my childhood was still affecting me to this day. So it was around that timeframe, I went to a doctor's appointment. I don't remember why I went, I know it was nothing to do with emotions or any of my past, but he happened to realize that I was more stressed than I should be because I was a stay-at-home mother with two young boys.

[00:06:41] He knew my boys, he was another parent at school, so he knew life shouldn't have been that stressful for me. But he asked me on a scale of zero through ten, what my stress level was and I said it was an eight. And then he asked me why and it was that question that made me realize, oh, it was finding my mother dead on the bathroom floor when I was 19, which is two decades before, because the tears were still just under the surface.

[00:07:07] And he happened to know this technique that's called EFT, short for Emotional Freedom Technique. And it's also called tapping because what, what, what we're doing is we're tapping on specific places on our body as we're talking through something. So he tapped with me about my mother's death for about 15 minutes and I walked away from the appointment being able to tell the story in my mind for the first time ever without the emotions arising.

[00:07:35] And that was the first time I realized that we keep those memories and those emotions stored physically in our body and that we can let them go. So that was my first experience of EFT. But I didn't necessarily believe that, you know, one time was going to change my life other than letting go of those stored emotions from my mother's death, which was really, uh, important.

[00:08:00] But I went home that day and I went online and I learned everything I could about it. It's very easy to learn, it's very simple, you can learn it in 5 to 10 minutes. And it was given away by the person who developed it, Gary Craig, for free so anyone can go online and learn how to use it. But I wanted to check it out,

[00:08:18] I was an engineer, I was a software engineer, I have that kind of mind frame. I don't wanna waste my time doing something that I'm not sure was gonna make a difference. So I wanted to try it out and at the time I had a 17 year old cat at home who would, just been told his kidneys were starting to fail and we needed to give him a daily saline shot.

[00:08:38] And the first time I gave him that shot, my hand was shaking so bad. I knew I wasn't gonna be able to do it every day cause it was just too stressful for me. So that was my first experience of tapping myself. So I tapped about the fear of hurting him, my cat, I tapped about my hands shaking, and I tapped about every emotion and every memory I had from all the injections I had had over the years because I lived around the world and we have many, many injections.

[00:09:08] And the next day when I gave him that shot, the needle just slid right in. All that fear I had been holding inside the day before had totally disappeared. And that's when I realized two things, I realized it's deceptively powerful. It looks a little silly, to be honest. You feel a little silly tapping on yourself.

[00:09:27] But that's when I realized it really is powerful. And that's when I realized that the freedom I was looking for, that freedom, the peace that I was looking for was on the other side of that fear. And that's where I wanted to go. So that's when I realized how important it was and, and that's when I started using it on a daily basis.

[00:09:49] Ed Watters: That's pretty interesting. So Ann, the highlight there is controlling your spin, your thoughts, your [00:10:00] emotions, all of this, and it's heavy. I mean, we, we deal with that around here daily and we work hard to try to understand reality and truth. And this actually stops that spin once we develop ways, and it doesn't matter if it looks silly or, you know, if you're standing on your head spinning about and you find truth and wisdom in that, more power to you. The, the vehicle of approach,

[00:10:34] it comes in many ways and many people have to find their own approach to solving these underlying issues that are actually hidden within all of us. I suffer from many of them and I'm working hard on my myself daily now to uncover those hurts that I didn't even realize I had as a boy, as a child. And, and that uncovering,

[00:11:03] like you've state in many of your talks and, uh, areas, it's like an onion, peeling away the layers. How long did it take for you to stop judging yourself based upon all of these little things that you've done in the past?

[00:11:27] Ann Hince: Well, it's certainly an ongoing process, right? It is,

[00:11:30] Ed Watters: Yes.

[00:11:30] Ann Hince: it is peeling the layers of the onion, and each time one is released, another one will pop up and, you know, you're getting deeper and deeper each time. So I, I started, you know, the hardest thing is actually noticing, right? Actually being aware of when we're getting emotional, right? That, that's the first step because we get so caught up in our emotions. So, you know, maybe one day I would notice one time, okay, look at me, I'm getting frustrated now, right? And then I could tap about it and bring myself back to peace.

[00:12:02] And the, the key, what I, one of the big things about EFT compared to a lot of techniques is that we're actually accepting our truth. We're accepting how we're feeling, we're not trying to suppress it, we're not trying to change it because it's in the acceptance is when the release happens. So if I'm getting frustrated I will tap on a phrase like, okay, I'm getting frustrated now,

[00:12:26] right? And allow myself to feel that frustration because it's simply stuck energy. So once that's released, I come back to the present moment, I come back to peace, and then I go on with my day. So I started doing that and over a period of days and weeks, I found myself becoming more peaceful and less reactionary,

[00:12:46] right? So there were, there were changes there, and I wanted more and I wanted it faster. So

[00:12:52] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:12:52] Ann Hince: what I did was I wrote down every memory, every emotional memory I could think of my whole childhood and my life up to that point. And it was several sheets of paper, as you might imagine. And I tapped through one each night for about an hour to an hour and a half each night.

[00:13:08] And as those months went by, my whole being started changing, right? My mind started to become quiet and I didn't even know that was possible, right? I'd lived with this very busy mind, and I think a lot of us do, we don't know what it's like to have a quiet, peaceful mind. And I started to experience that, right?

[00:13:29] And I started to realize, when it was quiet, I realized that the noises in my mind, the words, the voices, the, you know, the criticism I would say to myself and to others were actually programmed words and phrases that I had programmed into myself from my dad in childhood. And I would just repeat them over and over again. But I couldn't actually see that until they were gone.

[00:13:56] Ed Watters: Yeah. You know, I interviewed an, uh, individual, Lois Hollis, and she talks about the inner critic and that shame/ guilt that the inner critic just pushes at you all the time. Uh, it's fascinating, you've, you've really got to understand that you're in control of everything inside of you and

[00:14:23] Ann Hince: Yeah, it's not even, I would say control, like control's not the word I would use, right?

[00:14:29] Ed Watters: Okay.

[00:14:29] Ann Hince: Because those voices are there, the inner critic is there

[00:14:32] Ed Watters: Right.

[00:14:33] Ann Hince: and it's, it's being programmed inside of us. So what I would do is I would catch that voice. Okay, what is it saying? Whatever it's saying, I would tap and accept it because it's just stuck energy, right? So if I'm feeling crappy right now, or um, you know, I just did something stupid.

[00:14:52] I would tap on those phrases, I'm so stupid, look at me, look at what I just did. And I would allow the energy of those phrases, those words, to release from the body. And once they've been fully accepted and released, they don't show up as much.

[00:15:09] Ed Watters: Yeah, that, that's kind of really the concept that she was pushing also. The narrative is the same, that inner critic, you know, you've gotta make friends with them and you know, naming it and understanding it, finding out what, the why. You, you stated earlier that why, that is so big in everything that we do. So uncovering those layers and each time we come to a new layer, there's different releases with different types of emotion flows to those releases. How, how do you define those and how do you separate the layers? Because I think that's very important to do is separate the layers so you're not just one big ball of here, eat this onion.

[00:16:12] Ann Hince: Right, which is why I wrote down all my childhood experiences and I just tap through one event at a time, right? So one event might have multiple different layers to it, and certainly my mother's death did, right? I didn't, I hadn't released it that first time with the doctor, I'd released the first layer, right? And as we do more of this work, we're opening up the subconscious mind and more memories, more aspects will, will bubble up that had been stuck below and then we work on that one. You know, so to, to begin with, there might be anger, right?

[00:16:46] And then you'll, you'll tap on that and maybe the next day you'll think about it again. And it's like, okay, I feel really guilty, and maybe that's what you'll work on next. So you just allow it to happen, right? You allow the layers to come up and it's very much a layer by layer process, right? So now I'm deep in the body, but uh, those early days, I was just working through those childhood things and seeing what comes up.

[00:17:08] And what comes up in a day-to-day basis is also related, right? So if, if I'm angry throughout the day, I can feel that anger and accept that anger and tap on it and let the anger pass through. But it also might remind me of some event in childhood where I felt the same anger, right? Those connections will start to bubble up,

[00:17:32] you'll start to notice them more and more. So then if you remember an event from childhood where you felt the same type of anger, you could then tap through that memory from childhood and allow that to go. And as you work through those, then that anger doesn't need to come up as much because it's no longer stuck in the body, right? And as you work through more and more, you become more peaceful because you are not triggered as much.

[00:17:57] Ed Watters: So you're, you're like justifying your experience instead of ignoring it and kind of putting it in a closet. You, you really have.

[00:18:07] Ann Hince: Yeah. I don't even know that justifying, you know, it really helped me when I got to the place of realizing that emotions are just stuck energy, right? It's been stuck in us from childhood, when we suppressed it. We didn't feel comfortable saying our truth, right? So we held ourselves back. That energy got stuck inside of us and we keep replaying it over and over again. And when we feel it and we let that stuck energy go, it's gone, right? It doesn't need any justification, it's simply stuck energy.

[00:18:38] Ed Watters: Yeah. So another big thing that I've experienced myself is trying to identify the stuck energy and digging deep enough to identify why we have those initial feelings. I call them trigger points, you know, we're triggered and then we find ourself in this state of mind that we should be fine. We were just happy as all heck, and here we are, a word, or a smell, or something, triggers and finding out what that trigger point is, what's a trick for that?

[00:19:20] Ann Hince: In my experience, it's just feeling it, right? There doesn't necessarily have to be a reason other than that it's happened before, right? That it's stuck energy from before. One time, the very first time we, we got that stuck, right? We stuck that energy and then we, each time afterwards we're triggered again, right? So all we have to do is feel it, what does that trigger feel like, right? What emotion comes up? Maybe, maybe it's a smell, maybe it's a sound, what feeling does that bring up in the body?

[00:19:52] And then we tap it out, right? The, the, the emotion, if we can give it a name or if we can give it, um, a description, we tap [00:20:00] it out so that we're back at peace. The next time we're triggered, we're not going to be triggered as intently. Then we do it again and the next time we're, again not going to be triggered as much, and eventually after a few times, it's no longer a trigger. It's hard to believe

[00:20:17] Ed Watters: Okay, so

[00:20:17] Ann Hince: when you first hear it.

[00:20:18] Ed Watters: Yeah. Yeah. So you, you say it's not meditation, but in a, in a sense, it, it could be defined as a meditative, uh, way of handling emotion. Uh, so you don't meditate at all, but this is how you calm your brain to think about things. The tapping on these meridian points, what does that do to help you calm the mind so you can move on?

[00:20:58] Ann Hince: Well, the tapping itself, I believe, is releasing stuck energy from the nervous system of the body, right? It's been stuck in there. The tapping somehow, and I don't think anyone knows quite how at this point, but it's that tapping, the physical action of tapping on the ends of these meridian systems, actually releases the energy that's stuck or the emotion that is stuck inside of them, right?

[00:21:21] So that there's a physical component to it. In terms of meditation, EFT was just my first step, right? I, I realized that what EFT is doing is opening up the subconscious mind. And as that happens, our awareness expands. Now we use that word awareness quite a lot, I know you've used it, um, on your podcast before.

[00:21:41] Ed Watters: Yes.

[00:21:41] Ann Hince: In terms of self-awareness, there are, there's a depth to self-awareness. And, and this is, you know, why I'm sharing my story because I didn't know this before. So,

[00:21:51] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:21:51] Ann Hince: our awareness expands. So when I started out this process, I wasn't aware of how I felt during the day. You know, if someone asked me, how are you feeling today, Anne?

[00:21:59] I would always say I'm fine, right? Because I wasn't aware of how I felt, but as I did more and more tapping, right, I was checking in my, with myself during the day. I, I was noticing what emotions I was feeling. So, I, I became aware of my emotions, but then as time went on, I became aware at a deeper level of the physical sensations underneath the emotions, right?

[00:22:22] So we'll use a phrase like, and you know, I'm angry, or I'm frustrated, or I'm sad. But what we're really describing is the tension we're holding inside our body as we're, which we then describe with that word, anger or frustration, right? So for me, frustration feels like tension across my abdomen, my solar plexus, right?

[00:22:43] And when I started out, I was not aware that I was holding tension in my abdomen when I was feeling frustrated. But as I tapped more and more, became aware at that level. I happened to be in a group at the time, we were studying a book called A Course in Miracles. And the, the guy in the group, every week he would say, you don't have to meditate, it's just about feeling your feelings.

[00:23:04] Well, I did my EFT along with this group, you know, outside the group. I was starting this journey with EFT and as the weeks went by, I realized I was becoming emotion, aware of what my feelings were. So one day I thought, okay, I'm gonna try and do what he says, he says it every week, he must mean it. And so I thought, okay, I'm gonna try and feel my feelings. What does that even mean, right? It sounds so simple.

[00:23:31] Ed Watters: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:23:32] Ann Hince: So I was doing the dishes one day and I thought, okay, let me try and feel my feelings. So I would have to catch a thought that I was thinking that had an emotion involved and for me it was normally a fearful thought. So it might be something like, okay, I'm afraid of making this phone call,

[00:23:47] right? So I would think that thought and I would feel where that fear was inside of my body. For me, it would be my solar plexus. And so I would try and focus on it. How do I feel that fear in my solar plexus? And I would notice that if I moved or if I took a deep breath, I, I would lose my focus on the fear,

[00:24:05] I couldn't feel it. So what I did is I would hold myself like a statue and I'd even stop breathing, right? I'd notice where that fear was, I'd feel it. And then I'd stop right there in my breath and I would hold my focused attention on that tension in my solar plexus. And I would even talk to her, it's okay,

[00:24:25] I wanna feel you, I wanna feel you, I just wanna allow you to be felt. I wanna acknowledge you because you've always been suppressed. So right now, I wanna feel you. And at some point I would need to take a deep breath, obviously, and I would notice that that fear would have subsided somewhat. So then I would think the thought again, I'm afraid of making this phone call.

[00:24:47] I would feel it again in my solar plexus and I would feel it again. I would stop, hold myself like a statue, feel it, and it would subside a little bit more. So then I would do it over and over again with the same thought until all that fear had dissipated. And then it was free, that thought was free, and I could go ahead and make that phone call and there would be no fear left inside of me.

[00:25:10] So this felt like a deeper level of awareness. So I didn't use EFT as much at this point, right? I'd, I'd done that phase and now I was moving to a deeper level of awareness. And I used this feeling your feelings on a daily basis. And then in the evenings, instead of working on my childhood, which I had done before, now I would lay on the sofa

[00:25:31] and I would bring collective traumas to mind. You know, something like 9/ 11, we all had our own personal experience of that event, right? So I would bring that memory to mind and I would feel all those feelings, those emotions, those sensations, and allow them to release from my body. And I would think it again and I'd do it over and over again, releasing this burden, right? That I'd been carrying, that I think we all carry from those events.

[00:25:59] Ed Watters: Yes.

[00:26:01] Ann Hince: And you know, over time, you know, things are improving, right? Life's getting more fun, I'm feeling lighter cause this burden is releasing. And you know, I just went on with life but now at a deeper level of awareness. So that's what I talk about as the second step in, in, you know, if you hear me talk or you see my book, right?

[00:26:19] I talk about three steps, so that was the second step. So people who are already aware of those physical sensations could do that step right now, right? It's easy to do, it doesn't even look as weird, right? Cause you're not tapping on your body, you're just feeling those sensations.

[00:26:37] Ed Watters: Yeah. I like that awareness, being aware of what you are. You know, every aspect of that. You know, you talk about the way these things affect your body, you talk about your spinal curvature being straightened and it's a continuing thing to work on fixing your body itself through these techniques. I experience fibromyalgia and it, it's basically chronic pain throughout your whole muscular system. And they, they

[00:27:25] say it's a basket disease, you know, nobody knows what causes it and all. But really this is what causes it, the inner things that you're holding that you have to release. I've, I've noticed it as I've been peeling these layers from childhood. I thought it was just since my wife and I got together, but it's extremely embedded in

[00:27:54] what I was raised in, these things. And the more I am able to tune in and find out those experiences that I have forgotten and just tried to forget. But I can't forget, like you have stated, they are always coming back to the surface. By identifying them and addressing them and being aware of that emotion, that's been huge for me and it's been life changing, altering for me. Talk to me about your experience with that body changing and healing event.

[00:28:38] Ann Hince: Sure. Yeah. I mean, absolutely. We might think these things are just in our mind, right, our memories, but they're actually stored physically in our body. So if we have things inside of us that we don't want to look at, doesn't mean it's not there.

[00:28:53] It's still just dis ease in the body. So if we really want to address it, we have to look at it and let it go. So yeah, with mine, um, uh, let me, I'll go on to the third step and then I'll be able to explain it more fully. So it's just a deeper and deeper level of awareness, right? We talked about that. So, as I did more and more of this releasing of the sensations, at some point I noticed that I could keep my awareness inside my body

[00:29:20] after the tension had released. Which is a really weird thing to say, it was a really weird thing to experience, and it's really, uh, quite challenging to explain. But imagine you have a toothache or a stomach ache, you can pinpoint with your senses where that pain is coming from, right? But once the pain has disappeared, you can't feel it again.

[00:29:43] You can't sense that area again, you don't know where it actually is. I found that I could put my awareness back inside my body. And I've never experienced it before, didn't know what I was doing, but I just started playing with it, right? So I, I could do it once and I found I could do it again [00:30:00] and then, well, what do I do now?

[00:30:01] So I started trying to move my awareness around inside and I found that I could do that. So I could find a place with tension and a place with no tension. So I'd, I'd focus on the place with tension, I would hold my awareness on it, just accept it, and it would shift a little bit. And then I would do it again and again and again.

[00:30:22] So now I'm doing it at a deeper level, what I was doing with the EFT, right? The EFT was working with words, then the feeling, the feelings was working with the physical sensations. Now I'm actually working with tension directly inside the body, so it's a deeper level of awareness. And I kept doing this, I'd find some more tension and just release it. And over many, many months I was actually able to put my awareness inside my head, which was eyeopening to me because there was so much pain and tension.

[00:30:52] The pain in my left cheek was unbelievable and the forces that I could feel pulling my bones out of alignments were just massive and I had lived 50 years, right? I was born with my right foot up against my right shin and had physical therapy for the first six weeks of my life. But I believe that experience actually twisted my whole body and that's why I had scoliosis and I had lived with these forces

[00:31:19] pulling my bones out of alignment, but I had not been aware of them, right? They had been working inside of me all those years, but it took this really deep inner work to actually become aware of them. And then I, now, at this point, I have this technique, right? So I can focus on it. The pain in my left cheek, I could only hold my awareness on it for like a second or two to begin with cause it was so painful.

[00:31:43] But I would just do that and it would release a little bit and the next time it would release a little bit more. So over the months and years my whole skull structure has changed. My skull bones, I could feel them relax, right? As I was releasing tension in what I believe is the connective tissue. Now I can put my focused awareness inside my tooth roots inside my bones, but at that point, I was still releasing tension in I believe, the connective tissue. And I'd actually feel the skull bones relax.

[00:32:14] But I didn't know at that time what was happening, right? I felt like things were changing, but it wasn't until I had X-rays taken just through orthodontic work that I could actually see that my eye sockets have aligned. My jaw was way off to the side, and it's much more centered, and my neck is straighter than it's ever been in my life.

[00:32:34] And I've grown half an inch at the age of 55, right? So I, I know things are shifting and I know the power, right? We have so much power inside of us to release this dis-ease inside of us if we only do the work.

[00:32:50] Ed Watters: Yeah. And, and that's, that's supernatural really. You know, being close to 57 now, myself, I was just commenting to my wife earlier today,

[00:33:03] I've, I've shrunk three inches. So as you age, you don't grow in height. So it's incredible that you, you have found a way and a technique to take these forces and release your spine and kind of let it come back into a more natural state. Uh, I find that fascinating and, and the more I work on myself, I, I kind of understand more about what people are talking with me about when I have these conversations.

[00:33:41] And I think that's very important for people to connect and share their ideas and their concerns for not only our physical health, but our mental health and our social health. Every aspect of our lives tends to be a challenge and we need to put that awareness directly on all of it.

[00:34:03] Ann Hince: Right. It's all connected, right? Everything is connected. That's one of the, the things I've learned from this, right? It started out working with words and with memories, but that's connected to the physical dis-ease that's stored on the inside and, and I believe it's connected to our spiritual life on the inside too.

[00:34:21] Ed Watters: Yes.

[00:34:21] Ann Hince: So yeah, it's all connected.

[00:34:24] Ed Watters: Yeah, everything's connected Ann, and you know, the more you are capable of just releasing your own thoughts and opinions about a technique or, uh, a motive or whatever we, we tend to grasp it a little better. And if, if, today it seems like everybody's at everybody's throat and you know, everybody's got a new method and it's better than this method,

[00:34:55] uh, I say incorporate any aspect of learning into your daily routine as possible. It's all about that ever, never ending growth. You know, we're, we're getting up to the age where we have more time now to think about these things instead of that spinning mind of a young person where you, we've gotta get it done, we've gotta go do this.

[00:35:25] And, you know, that's a big deal in life and learning to let it all go, that's pretty remarkable. How, how, how do you suggest people get started in something like this if they have doubts or, you know, they, they have some questions about it?

[00:35:53] Ann Hince: Yes, staying open is very important and realizing

[00:35:56] Ed Watters: Yes.

[00:35:56] Ann Hince: we don't know what we don't know, right? I, I use that a lot

[00:35:59] Ed Watters: That's right.

[00:36:00] Ann Hince: when I started this journey. You know, if someone else has a different experience and then maybe it's okay, right? May, maybe they're right and maybe I'm wrong, right? That, that can certainly help, right? Um,

[00:36:13] Ed Watters: Yes.

[00:36:14] Ann Hince: to me, with the, the beginning of my journey, right? It was really important for me to have an experience where I could see that it was working, right? So for me, that experience with my cat was huge, right? So that was a very simple thing I worked on and I could see that it, it was working. So that allowed me to believe in it and to start going with it. Yeah. Also, having the x-rays, right? The x-rays was huge, right? Okay, it's like I'm not making this up, right? I can see that something has changed.

[00:36:44] Ed Watters: Yes.

[00:36:44] Ann Hince: Other people can use that too, right? If, if you look, wanna go to my website, the x-rays are there, you can look and see how powerful this work is. And you can use that to help encourage you along the way. But along the journey, the first part was actually noticing that I was emotional, right?

[00:37:02] As you said, we're very worked up that these days, we're very divided over so many issues. But that's all emotions, right? If we notice how divided we are and we notice what we are feeling about the other side, right? We're probably frustrated with them or we're angry with them, those are our emotions. And that's where we have control,

[00:37:22] we have control with our emotions. We can work with them and allow them to pass through, right? So if I was really angry with the other side, I could tap on how angry I am with the other side. And it's like, I hate that they think that way. What's wrong with them, right? Any words that come to my mind would be the ones that I would tap on,

[00:37:42] allow, allow the emotions behind those words to dissipate so that I can come back to peace. And believe it or not, compassion and understanding arises once we've let go of those emotions. And we become able to see things from the other person's point of view, right? And there's a lot of people out there who cannot see, they cannot walk in someone else's shoes. They can't see from another person's point of view and this work allows you to do that.

[00:38:12] Ed Watters: Yeah. I think that's extremely important that we work on ourselves just for that, that empathetic value because that's where you truly find joy in a, a relationship where you can identify and really truly feel what is happening.

[00:38:31] Empathy, I, I found out there's levels of empathy and understanding. And really to empathize, you really have to understand what true empathy is. Uh, it's not just trying to put yourself in the other person's shoes, uh, it's got so much more value to it than that. The, the feelings that you can actually, it's like you were talking about,

[00:39:03] we put this signal off, people feel that, like that, instantly. Once you walk into the room, your physical structure, it's putting off a signal. It's body language, and that's huge. And a lot of times if we focus, we can feel that. And that is the key, this awareness that we're seeking. Uh, Talk to us about that, a little bit, about that journey.

[00:39:40] Ann Hince: Yeah. I, I totally believe that we are emitting a signal all the time, right? Every second of every day we're emitting a signal and we're attracting that based on that signal. So our signal, a lot of people talk about signals or, you know, they talk about the law of attraction in terms of manifesting something. But, but it's working all the time, right? [00:40:00] Whatever we're,

[00:40:00] Ed Watters: Yes.

[00:40:01] Ann Hince: we're feeling, what, however, we're being, it's not just our thoughts, it's all of us, right? It's, it's our gender, it's our size, our shape, our clothes, our hair, it's everything about us. But what I realized, right, through being able to put my awareness inside my head and feeling that tension in there and that pain, I realize that the biggest part of our signal is what we're holding onto

[00:40:26] from our past that is stored mostly in our connective tissue. But we just are not aware of that, right? So if we are walking into a room and, and picking up on someone's signal, we, we don't know what part we're picking up on, right? Cause the whole history is stored in their body. Yeah.

[00:40:46] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:40:46] Ann Hince: And if that's affecting us, right, there's, there's different ways of, of being in that position. If, if our signal is strong, right? If we've done a lot of this inner work, then we can stand in that place and not have them affect us, right? But if we've not yet done this work and their, their signal, which might be, you know, frustration or anger, if they're tuning in, if we're tuning into them because we've got that inside of us, we are actually not gonna feel that great around them,

[00:41:16] right? So, our signal is really important. And if we wanna change our lives for the better, we need to work on our own signal, right? So if we actually do walk into a room and someone's angry in there and we are picking up on that and we are feeling fearful, we can work on that fear, right? If we work on that fear and we let that fear go, then we can stand in that place of them being angry and us not being fearful, right? And can you imagine the difference that would make?

[00:41:48] Ed Watters: That's power.

[00:41:49] Ann Hince: It is, yes.

[00:41:53] Ed Watters: And that's really what we all crave and seek is personal power. So that personal development is very important and our signal does matter immensely. And I notice everywhere I go, I look at people and I, I feel the atmosphere, if you will. If it's really tense, I'm out of there. You know, I, I'm not gonna put myself in there because then I'm going to absorb some of that. And

[00:42:26] Ann Hince: only if your signal is not strong, right? But the other way of doing that, now, now I don't suggest people do this like if it's a dangerous situation, but, but if it's not, right, and it's just an uncomfortable feeling, if we actually feel that discomfort and allow that discomfort to be felt, then it will dissipate, right?

[00:42:49] And then we can stand in that place of it being a dis, an uncomfortable situation and feel strong still, right? So that's kind of a way of breaking through barriers, right? We have this energetic barrier, and I know people talk about putting up, you know, barriers, right? And that can be a good thing in maybe, in some situations. In my mind, we want to actually feel that feeling that's there and allow it to be felt and dissipate so that we don't have to put up those barriers.

[00:43:21] Ed Watters: Yeah, I agree. You know, as a young man, I, I would even go into the store and be hostile for no reason. Just I, I have to enter this place that I don't like to be in and I let all of that emotion carry me through my day. I made my wife's day rotten, I made myself's rotten. And now that I'm understanding that, that I don't have to feel uncomfortable because of what is around me,

[00:43:56] I can actually feel at ease that I'm okay and I can be here. Now if somebody's being physical, I, I am definitely gonna try to exit stage left. But yeah, that uncomfortable feeling, especially as a young man, and having all of these things in your head that you don't really know what's happening in your life, it's just happening. You feel lost and finding that structure to stand in that place, like you said, that's powerful.

[00:44:32] Ann Hince: Right. And the other aspect of that is, you know, I remember being kind of in that place too. I, I wasn't really angry but I was very suppressed, right? I was, I would keep myself small, I would keep myself out of trouble cause I hated people being angry with me, but I wasn't aware, right? So as I let go of those layers and layers and layers, I became more aware. So now I'm actually more aware of other people, right? So I can feel what other people are doing, I can feel, I can sense where they're holding themselves tight, I can sense how well they're breathing into their body, right? If someone's lying to you, they're not going to be breathing deeply into their body because there's part of themselves they don't want to see.

[00:45:15] Ed Watters: That's right.

[00:45:16] Ann Hince: So we can pick up a lot more cues now than ever could in the past, right? So it's, that, that makes

[00:45:22] Ed Watters: Yeah.

[00:45:22] Ann Hince: life fun, right? Being able to experience life on that deeper level actually makes life a lot more fun than it ever was. So there's a lot of people out there that I know, you know, they, they don't know whether it's worth continuing, right? There's a lot of kids who just feel lost, but I want them to know there's so much more depth to life that is available to them if they do this kind of work. It's just much more fun to be alive.

[00:45:50] Ed Watters: That's right. That's what Dead America is. You just encapsulated everything in one sentence, feeling dead in America and lost. You can change this, and that's really what we're doing here today. We're stepping up and letting people know there is a way to do this, just find it for yourself. Don't let people tell you how you feel. Find out for yourself who you are and how you actually feel. And don't be afraid of it because it, it's yours, you own it.

[00:46:29] Ann Hince: And it's just stuck energy.

[00:46:32] Ed Watters: That's right, it's stuck energy. Uh, Ann, any call to action for our listeners today?

[00:46:40] Ann Hince: Start noticing how you're feeling during the day, right? Just become aware, step back and say, oh, look at me. Look, I'm becoming frustrated, or I'm becoming angry, or I'm becoming sad. Just, that's the first step to self-awareness. And it's not always easy to do, we just get caught up in it. But, but see if you can notice during the day, and that's the first step for sure.

[00:47:02] Ed Watters: Yeah. I, I like that. And I, I a hundred percent concur. If you step up to the plate and you work on yourself, things are gonna change, it, it doesn't happen overnight. Be patient and loving to yourself, that matters the most. How can people find you, get in touch and get connected with you, Ann?

[00:47:27] Ann Hince: Sure. I have my book, A Pathway to Insight, which has all the different steps in detail so anyone can pick that up and do all these steps. I also have a YouTube channel, which has a demonstration EFT of, a demonstration video of EFT and a demonstration video of feeling your feelings and several other videos on there. So you can, you can just look at YouTube and do this work too. It's all available for free. I also have my website annhince.com, which has the x-rays on, so you can go and check that out. And I have a public Facebook page that I love posting things and explaining things on there.

[00:48:02] Ed Watters: I love what you're doing and I think what you're doing is very compelling to people looking. Look at it and see what it can do for you. Don't, don't knock it until you try it, that's the moral of the story here.

[00:48:21] Ann Hince: Yes.

[00:48:22] Ed Watters: Ann, it's been a delight talking to you. It's fascinating, and I wanna say thank you for being part of the Dead America Podcast.

[00:48:30] Ann Hince: Thank you. It's been a great conversation.

[00:48:36] Ed Watters: Thank you for joining us today. If you found this podcast enlightening, entertaining, educational in any way, please share, like, subscribe, and join us right back here next week for another great episode of Dead America Podcast. I'm Ed Watters your host, enjoy your afternoon wherever you may be.