Farewell and Gratitude to Emotional Freedom Techniques Founder Gary Craig
Some people change an industry.
Some people change lives.
Some people change the world.
Very few do all three.
I honestly do not know who I would be if Gary Craig had not lived.
Long before I ever taught EFT, before certification programs, before professional trainings and thousands of students, I was someone struggling just to function.
I lived with debilitating anxiety. There were days when I could not leave my house.
What made it even more terrifying was that I had already seen this path play out once before. I had watched my own mother live with crippling anxiety for most of her life. She ran from counselor to counselor, medication to medication, always searching for relief that never truly came.
So when anxiety showed up in my own life, I knew one thing for certain. I was not willing to follow the same road.
Partly by choice, partly by necessity. I had no health insurance. I could not afford the conventional system even if I wanted to. But in truth, I was already oriented differently. I believed there had to be another way.
And so I searched.
I tried everything unconventional I could find. Aromatherapy. Acupuncture. Reiki. Meditation. If I heard about it and could afford it, I tried it. Some things helped a little. But nothing offered any real hope of recovery.
Then one day, shaking with anxiety at an alternative health fair in the mid-1990s, a man named Ken showed me something called EFT.
No one knew what EFT was back then.
It looked weird. It felt awkward. It was honestly a little embarrassing. And I'm sure I rolled my eyes at him.
And then something crazy happened.
My anxiety diminished on the spot.
That moment changed my life.
I later learned that what I had experienced was called the Emotional Freedom Techniques, aka EFT Tapping, developed by Gary Craig, building on Roger Callahan's earlier work in Thought Field Therapy. What struck me immediately was not just that EFT worked, but that it was accessible.
Gary was not trying to lock healing behind elite credentials or outrageous costs. His training was affordable. Shockingly so. Almost suspiciously so, given how effective it was.
So I devoured it.
As my body calmed and my mind expanded, something else happened. I felt free. Emotionally free. Not in an abstract way, but in a grounded, embodied, unmistakable way.
A door had opened.
And once it opened, I could not unsee what was possible.
EFT did not spread because it was trendy. It spread because it worked.
In the early days, licensed mental health professionals, particularly those connected with organizations like ACEP, were willing to try something unfamiliar. They applied EFT to phobias, trauma, cravings, and PTSD, often with results that surprised even the most skeptical among them.
Gary understood something essential. Healing does not belong to gatekeepers.
He had an open-hand policy. He encouraged experimentation. He gave practitioners agency, not just permission to repeat his words, but space to grow the method itself.
That decision changed everything.
Because EFT was not frozen in time, it evolved. It adapted. It met people where they were. And because of that, it spread across the world.
Gary never stopped exploring.
Later in his life, influenced deeply by A Course in Miracles and a profound spiritual experience, he developed what he called Optimal EFT. It was his way of integrating the mechanics of EFT with a deeper partnership with what he understood as the unseen.
Optimal EFT remains a quiet footnote in the broader story of EFT, but it speaks volumes about who Gary was. He followed his curiosity. He trusted his experience. And he never stopped learning and growing.
That, too, was a gift.
Over the years, I have had the great honor of helping hundreds, likely thousands, of clients personally with the Emotional Freedom Techniques. Even more humbling, I have taught thousands of students who have gone on to help thousands more.
In that way, my own legacy is inseparable from Gary’s.
Gary often said that he stood on the shoulders of giants. In my own way, I like to think that Gary is the giant whose shoulders I have been standing on for the past 28 years.
Because of the freedom he allowed within EFT, I was able to experiment, to question, to expand. That freedom ultimately led to the development of multiple EFT Techniques, Instructional EFT (IEFT), and later, to the creation of HUMAN_OS.
That evolution is part of my tribute to him. Not imitation, but continuation.
