Meeting Gary Craig

I hadn’t really expected a reply. And yet, there it was. From Gary Craig himself. At the time, I was a newly certified EFT therapist. I had noticed time and again the respect and admiration with which my teacher spoke of Gary Craig. So, I sent this email to the master. Of course, he wrote, we could speak. I should let him know when I was available.

Our first telephone conversation followed, during which I bombarded him with questions. At that time, I already had a background in psychotherapy and alternative medicine. I had experience with psychoanalytic psychotherapy and various body therapies, and I had already spent many years trying to understand the connection between the mind, the body, emotions, and healing. I had started using EFT in my practice and had experienced its effects. But I did not yet understand how deep and how powerful this method could be.

My acquaintance with Gary changed everything.

Gary was a sweet and decent man, but at the same time he was a genius. There was something very special about the way he approached people and knowledge. He was extremely patient with me and answered every question I had, often with great detail. I had many questions because of my professional background. I did not simply want to learn another technique. I wanted to understand why it worked and what its real potential was.

Gary never seemed to be bothered by my questions. He was patient, open, and willing to explain. This encouraged me to keep asking, to investigate, and to look beyond what I already believed I knew.

At that time, I thought I understood EFT reasonably well. But I soon realized that I had only seen the beginning. Just as Gary used to say: „By applying the basic EFT tapping recipe, you do achieve results, but you use only 20 percent of the potential of EFT.“

One day, I watched a remarkable video in which Gary performed therapy for a group of approximately 40 people who were around 3,000 kilometres away from him. They were not sitting in his office. They were not even in the same place. Yet Gary worked with them as a group, demonstrating what he called Optimal EFT and the Power of the Unseen Therapist.

When I watched the video, I was amazed.

Approximately 60% of the people in the group reported an improvement in their symptoms, at least temporarily. I found this extremely impressive. But the number itself was not the only thing that caught my attention. It was the whole idea behind the demonstration.

I remember thinking: How could this be possible?

That question stayed in my mind.

I had already seen many different approaches to therapy. I knew that people could respond to psychotherapy, body therapies, and other forms of treatment in different ways. I also understood that there could be many factors involved in improvement. But what I was watching seemed to challenge the traditional idea of therapy.

The therapist was thousands of kilometres away.

There was no physical contact.

There was not even the usual one-to-one therapeutic relationship that I had been familiar with.

And yet people were reporting changes.

Of course, I immediately started questioning what I was seeing. I did not want simply to believe something because it was presented in an impressive way. I considered whether there could be an element of the placebo effect involved. In my mind, self-promotion might explain some positive responses, but I did not feel that it could adequately explain what I was seeing. (The placebo effect can explain a 25 to 30 percent improvement, but here we were talking about 60 percent.) This made the demonstration even more fascinating to me.

Instead of dismissing it because I could not explain it, I became more curious.

This was a very important moment for me.

The video changed everything. It was as if somebody had suddenly opened a door in a room that I thought I already knew. Behind that door was an enormous landscape that I had never imagined.

I began to understand that EFT could perhaps be much more than the tapping technique I had originally learned. There were deeper questions to explore: What is actually happening during healing? What is the role of the therapist? What is the role of the person receiving the therapy? And could there be factors involved in healing that we do not yet fully understand?

Gary’s concept of the Unseen Therapist particularly fascinated me. It challenged me to think differently.

I realized that I did not necessarily have to understand everything immediately in order to remain open to it. Sometimes, the most important step in learning is to admit that there are things we do not yet understand.

That was something Gary taught me, perhaps without even realizing how important it would become for me.

I knew that this was my path.

From that moment, I wanted to learn more. I wanted to understand Gary’s approach properly and not simply remain at the level of curiosity. I wanted to study it, practice it, and discover for myself what was possible.

So I started my certification with Sheri Baker, the director of Gary Crai g’s English-language center .

This was the beginning of a new stage in my professional and personal journey.

Looking back now, I can see how important my previous experience had been. My background in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, body therapies, and alternative medicine had prepared me to ask questions. I had already learned to look at healing from different perspectives. I had already experienced approaches that were very different from conventional medicine.

But Gary gave me something that was different from all of them.

He gave me permission to think beyond the limits I had unconsciously accepted.

This does not mean that I stopped questioning things. Quite the opposite. My questions became even more important. But I learned that questioning something and rejecting it are not the same thing.

I could say, “I don’t understand this yet,” instead of saying, “This cannot be possible.”

That distinction changed me.

Gary had a remarkable ability to take something that appeared simple and reveal possibilities hidden inside it. EFT tapping can look almost too simple when someone first encounters it. You tap on certain points on the body while focusing on an emotional or physical problem. It is easy to look at this and think that there cannot be much more to it.

But Gary encouraged me to look deeper.

Behind the simplicity were questions about emotions, memories, beliefs, trauma, physical symptoms, and the mysterious relationship between the mind and the body. And beyond all of this was the possibility that healing might involve something we cannot always see or measure in the conventional way.

For someone with my background, this was fascinating.

As a neurosurgeon, I had spent years learning different therapeutic approaches, and I had developed certain ideas about how therapy should work. Gary did not simply give me another set of techniques. He challenged some of my assumptions about what therapy could be.

That is why I consider him my mentor.

A mentor is not necessarily the person who gives you all the answers. A mentor is the person who gives you better questions.

Gary gave me questions.

The question from that first video — “How could this be possible?” — became much more than a moment of surprise. It became the beginning of a journey. It encouraged me to explore, to learn, and to remain curious.

And, most importantly, it encouraged me not to put artificial limits on what might be possible in healing.

After that initial conversation we had , many others followed. Besides being a mentor and a person who opened new perceptual gateways for me, Gary over time became something like a father to me. He was a person of real and deep knowledge whose path I felt challenged to follow.

Over time, our conversations became more personal. Once we were talking about music, a passionate topic of mine. No, he didn’t like The Doors. To be honest, I still can’t grasp that. Still, talking to him always had a very soothing effect on me. He knew how to respect and honour the person he was talking to. This gave me a feeling of lightness and freedom in his presence.

When I think about Gary today, I remember not only the techniques I learned from him but also the attitude he represented. He was open-minded without being complicated. He could explain profound ideas in simple language. He was patient with people who wanted to understand more.

For me, that was invaluable.

My acquaintance with Gary was therefore not simply the story of meeting a teacher and learning a therapeutic method. It was a turning point in my life.

He opened a huge door for me.

In Gary Craig’s EFT community, we would have webinars twice a month to exchange our experiences. I think I never missed a single one of them. And I remember the moment when he announced that he would stop hosting those meetings. After a health challenge a few months earlier, he was doing fairly well again, but in that moment I instinctively knew that he wouldn’t live much longer.

So, after the session, I sent him an email saying, Bye Gary — thanks for everything. This was the only email of mine he never answered. A few weeks later, I was informed that he had just peacefully died in his sleep.

By the way … this is the video. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpH36AZ35M0