Return to site

Rediscovering Gentleness through AFT

This is the second post of a four-part series where I share how I rediscovered the quality of Gentleness through:

  1. The Wonder Method
  2. Aroma Freedom Techniques (AFT)
  3. Human Design
  4. Authentic Business

First Encounter

My very first encounter with Dr Benjamin Perkus (a licensed psychologist in New York and founder of AFT) was during a talk he gave in Singapore in April 2016!

me dressed in blue

Dr Perkus gave a fascinating talk about how Young Living essential oils can help improve brain health, as well as help us release painful emotions from traumatic memories. I volunteered to go upstage to demonstrate his early version of a Traumatic Memory Release Technique (TMRT). Even though the talk was held in a rather large ballroom, Dr Perkus gave me the impression of a very grounded, gentle and soft spoken person. He felt personable enough as if he was just speaking to me, yet the entire ballroom could hear him clearly. I love how he is so calm and sincere in sharing his healing insights as a psychologist and how he used essential oils seamlessly as part of his healing toolkit.

Birth of AFT

broken image

The next year in 2017 he published his first edition of AFT and that shook up the entire worldwide Young Living community. Many Young Living members use essential oils as a way to help others, and through learning AFT I got to connect with so many of them in various countries! The deep sense of belonging to a community of helpers and caregivers (some were mental health professionals, social workers, energy healers, grandmas, moms of large families, moms who take care of special needs children etc), through the common language of AFT and Young Living essential oils was what made me continue to learn from them. At this point though, I still felt resistant to using AFT more often as this technique relies on the use of essential oils and I was so used to not using any physical tools for healing.

Getting certified as an AFT practitioner

The passion of other Young Living members getting certified in AFT was so palpable, I found myself hopping onto the bandwagon to become certified too! I became certified in May 2017 (and am currently getting recertified to reacquaint myself with the newly created set of techniques under the AFT umbrella), and focused on improving my relationship with my husband as a personal AFT goal. It worked! Our passion slowly started rekindling and we found ourselves unexpectedly being parents for an upcoming third child, just as my sister found herself to be pregnant for the first time!

There was a lot of stress and fears surrounding this third pregnancy. With the help of Angie Taylor, wonderful certified AFT practitioner, instructor and birth doula, I released a lot of fears and past traumatic memories from the births of my first two boys through an AFT session. The situation shifted positively overnight after that AFT session, as my husband and I made proper plans together to adequately support our growing family. Our third boy is almost two years old now, and all of us feel so blessed to have him bring so much joy and gentle nurturing energies to our family.

Rediscovering Gentleness through AFT

What I particularly love about AFT is that it is created to gently allow our minds to

  1. Assist us in naming our negative thoughts and feelings that usually go unnoticed and hidden as we go about our daily lives. We tend to either consciously hide our uncomfortable thoughts and feelings because we feel ashamed to have them in the first place, or we are so caught up in the daily grind that we are not even conscious of how we really think and feel.
  2. Relax into an observing mode so that we can access our intuitive insights much more clearly and easily. When our minds learn to stop judging every feeling, thought and memory, we feel safer to receive and trust our intuitive insights as well.

When my mind gets too stressed and overwhelmed to do my energy healing techniques, I would turn to doing AFT step by step and inhaling the precious therapeutic essential oils.

I learned how to be gentler on my mind through using AFT.

Stay tuned for the next blog post where I share about how I rediscovered gentleness through Human Design!