My Emmett Journey – part 1

I’ve been asked to write a guest blog post; that’s another first for me! What on earth do I write about? I thought I would let you know a bit about my path into EMMETT Therapy. So here goes.

I’ve been working in the NHS for more years than I care to count and most of that time has been in Adult Intensive Care. I have really enjoyed my time there but the stress of working with the sickest patients in the Hospital for such a long time began to take its toll on me. I work in a small team of highly specialist nurses where I could be at a patient’s bedside for as many hours as it took (over 24 hours at times). The bags under my eyes were so big they were like suitcases. But to feel that your work helped someone survive when they were so close to death and that you made a difference is such a great feeling and so satisfying. I got to the point of thinking where do I go from here? I looked all over the place for inspiration but could not see anything that I could see myself doing and all of the opportunities open to me seemed like a big step back. Yes, at that time, I was running a very unique team with very unique skills.

Stress took its toll and I had to have an extended time off sick away from work. In that time I started to explore complementary therapies as a possible new route to continue my caring skills.  The question was – which one and where do I start? I spent so many hours researching different therapies in front of my computer my eyes almost went square. I had so many lists and, as for questions, there were pages and pages of them. One of the therapies I came across was EMMETT Technique and still, to this day,  do not known what kept me going back to look at the information on it. There really was not that much to see but I needed to know more. I spotted an EMM-Tech day (the 8 hour introductory EMMETT course) near me run by Anneke Loode and I really enjoyed the day. We all felt changes happen and saw them change on each other. Were we all caught up in the emotion of the day and that’s what made things happen? A part of me was thinking – how on earth could this work!!!!

The world of therapy and treatment I was used to only worked if you were putting big tubes into people and pumping them full of drugs and they were in a medically induced coma. I could hear my Boss in the NHS saying “this therapy can’t possibly work – it’s too tree hugging” but still I could not rule it out.

More searching and I found the EMMETT technique being taught on horses and being a horse owner this really interested me. I signed up to do level 1 of the EMMETT4Animals Equine course and it was going to be make or break time for me and the EMMETT technique. Had I wasted my money? Was I really going to see anything happen? If I did see something change then it must be the EMMETT intervention because a horse could not have any perception about what we were doing. The horse would either change or it wouldn’t!

Well my mouth hit the floor. OMG, this really worked and it was me making it work. I could feel things change under my fingers. I could see the horse change shape. My World changed from that point; I could see lots of possibilities and wanted to see how the therapy worked on people.

Then came my experience with Lesley Salt, Senior EMMETT UK Instructor, and learning the technique on people. I was so nervous on that first weekend as I was the only person in the group that was not already a therapist. Was I in the right place? Was this for me? Others in the group were saying they could feel all sorts of things and energy changing. Those comments went right over my head at the speed of light. With Lesley’s approach to teaching, I started to relax and by the end of that first day I felt so different. I could see changes happen on my fellow students and feel them on myself.

Yet another OMG moment when I could see my life opening up to an entirely new path. Training in both the animal and human therapies seemed to flow really nicely for me. The animal stuff really taught me about using my peripheral vision to watch for changes and also for gaining the feel of what was happening under my finger tips.

The big revelation was when I began to step back and take a moment to watch the changes happen from the correction I had just made. I like to refer to it now to my clients as “cooking” time.

It’s at that point I realised I had become a therapist. My own practice as a therapist is evolving the more clients I treat; it’s such a fantastic journey and one I’m so pleased I have undertaken. The more clients I treat, be it human, horse, dog or goat, the more I want to do. To see the way someone’s face changes when the pain has gone is, for me, priceless – so satisfying and rewarding.

The world of EMMETT has given me so much already, yet I still feel I’m at the start of this journey and the prospect of even more opportunities is so exciting.

For now, I am still working in the NHS – but only for another six months – then I can retire and become a full time THERAPIST.

Tony Sherry

Emmett 4 Animals Instructor 

Emmett Practitioner, Emm-Tech Tutor

Registered Nurse

 www.echtherapies.co.uk