Untamed: A Free Spirit’s Journey to Peaceful Healing

There are few things I love more than Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) and healing through the Five Elements of Traditional Chinese Medicine. EFT is a wonderfully simple technique where you tap acupressure points on the hands and face with your fingertips. This gentle practice lowers cortisol levels and helps you move through emotional triggers and difficult feelings with more ease. You can tap on past events, present challenges, or future situations that make you feel worried, anxious, or overwhelmed.

Tapping with EFT has supported me through many chapters of my life. It helped when I felt anxious, when I struggled with insomnia and panic attacks and during times when everything felt upside down. It was also a steady companion when I made the bold decision to leave my career in international politics to become a shiatsu practitioner and holistic life coach.

In my groundbreaking course Tapping Through the Five Elements, you’ll be introduced to both EFT and the Five Elements, combining them to address the emotional and health patterns you’re ready to shift.

This weekend is for you. Whether you're simply looking for a powerful yet accessible tool to support your own wellbeing or you're a (health) professional wanting to expand your toolkit to support others, you'll find real value here. You might work in HR, management, therapy, coaching, or any role where emotional awareness and transformation matter.

The EFT weekend is a celebration of these beautiful practices. What makes it even more special is the time we’ll have together: three full days to connect, explore and go deeper on this healing journey. And I truly can’t think of a more beautiful place in Belgium to host this than the farm of Bois-le-Comte.

I look forward to seeing you again — or perhaps meeting you for the first time — during the upcoming EFT tapping weekend, 15th to 17th August 2025.

I’m excited to share a sneak preview of my soon-to-be-published book, Untamed: A Free Spirit’s Journey to Peaceful Healing – How the Five Elements Restored My Health and Purpose for Living.

Chapter 1) My personal journey through the Water Element
HOW I CAME TO BE A PRACTITIONER-GUIDE-HEALER

The crisis was my calling, because it all started with a panic attack.
I was sitting in the university library reading, when my heart began to race.
It felt as if I’d just run down the road, except that I hadn’t.
For the past few hours I’d been sitting there, reading and trying to shape my arguments for a paper on post — war reconciliation.
I closed my laptop and tried to breathe. For a second I was wondering whether I was losing my mind. I looked around to check if anyone noticed what was going on within me, as I was flushed by an intense sense of fear and shaken by waves of anxiety.
When my heartbeat didn’t slow down, I quickly went down the stairs into Russell Square, a small park in London, hoping the fresh air would help, which it did. As I stood there in the park, staring at the trees and trying to regain my calm, it became clear to me that it was time for change in my life.
It was the year 2004, the world was commemorating the Rwandan genocide.
Ten years beforehand this small African country had been ravaged by widespread crimes against humanity. I was a student in London, studying for a Master’s degree in transitional justice, the part of law that looks at the question of how to construct lasting peace after war crimes and crimes. against humanity have been perpetrated.
I didn’t know it at the time, but it was exactly this question – how to reconcile and build lasting peace – that would become central to this phase of my life.
It’s just that instead of looking at the fragmented world and finding the strength to do my part to help it heal, my life pushed me to first look within and address the symptoms I had been trying to ignore. But that came later.
I wasn’t well. This much I knew. For months I had been unable to sleep. My room was covered with books for all the university essays and papers I needed to write. I was feeling stressed out of my mind and no longer knew how to meet all my university deadlines. In addition to my studies I was working for a human rights organisation, liaising with members of parliament to support human rights defenders in unstable or emerging democracies in the so-called South.
Due to the lack of sleep my mind wasn’t functioning properly and every night I was lying there, worried sick with the mounting exhaustion about how I could do both my job and perform well in my studies. I was no longer able to concentrate, the feeling of tension and anxiety was continuously overwhelming. I needed all my strength just to appear “normal”(whatever that means) and to keep going. The name of the game was to stay in the game, no matter at what cost. I had no Plan B, because I never thought I would need one.
I felt terribly lonely and increasingly I had the impression that my inner world was some kind of parallel universe that I needed to keep secret, while trying to navigate my fragmented day to day life. I tried to ignore all the mounting symptoms, the exhaustion from my insomnia, the panic attacks, my anxiety. The ongoing fatigue lead to me feeling increasingly more distant to all aspects of my life, perhaps even cynical towards my work and studies in general. I was emotionally and physically drained. Due to the ongoing tension in my body and mind I could no longer relax and recuperate. I was feeling increasingly lost and scared, and less anchored in the life I was leading. It took such huge effort just to get up from another bad night, feeling tired, simply full of dread of how to get through the day, let alone master it. I never felt like I recuperated and my whole life just was like one long and tense episode after another. Going to work and to uni involved long journeys on the underground.
In addition, my parents were divorcing that year and as if that wasn’t enough my relationship with my long-term partner had ended.
Secretly I began to despair, because I was at a loss as to what I could possibly do with the situation I was facing.
As I stood there in the small park breathing, staring at the trees and trying to feel safe again, I understood that I could no longer go on like this. Something had to give. It’s just that I didn’t know what. I had no idea what constructive change could possibly look like.

What I didn’t know at the time, was that these were my clear signs of burnout.

Everyone’s burnout is different, in terms of the symptoms that appear, its duration and intensity. It can be as diverse as sleeping disorders, mounting irritability to emotional upheaval, lack of concentration, anxiety and for instance visual disorders. And yet, there are some commonalities. My burnout symptoms started off with ongoing insomnia. Try as I might, I could not go to sleep. I was lying awake for hours, sometimes throughout the entire night. Adding to this came intense and ongoing anxiety of how to manage all the professional and academic demands.
It was too much to handle and I felt a clear loss of joy in life. Then came the panic attacks, followed by constant dizziness.
I came to understand that I needed to put things in place that would help me heal. While ceasing everything I was doing seemed impossible, I reached the point in which not stopping seemed even crazier, as I knew that I would start to destroy myself in so doing. The silver lining of burnout is that, although it feels impossible to stop the whirlwind of tasks you're juggling, eventually things get so overwhelming that you’re left with no choice but to change the very behaviours driving you into the ground. Eventually, your symptoms become so overwhelming and prominent that ignoring them is no longer an option.

From my experience today of working with people in burnout, I've learned that seeing your reality as a complete impasse, an unsolvable dilemma is a primary symptom …

More to come!

With love,
Irene
www.irenenolte.com
Here you can find YouTube tapping videos of mine!