Just Like Nana
Dive into the journey of Just Like Nana, a podcast passionately exploring ancestral trauma, generational healing, and the profound ways our family's past shapes our present mental and holistic health. Amie Penny Sayler shares captivating, research-based fiction stories of her grandmothers' lives and features insightful interviews with leading mental health and wellness practitioners.
Learn how to break cycles of trauma passed down through generations, understand family dynamics, and cultivate a regulated nervous system. Ground yourself in your history, honor your ancestors, and find your own path to trauma healing.
New episodes every Friday. Learn more at https://justlikenana.com/
Just Like Nana
Amy Vincze
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Amy Vincze, EFT Tapping coach and creator of the Soar with Tapping app, discusses the benefits of an EFT Tapping practice and how it can help heal ancestral trauma.
Amy also explains the importance of engaging with uncomfortable emotions, instead of always forcing a focus on the positive.
About Amy Vincze
Amy Vincze has been a dedicated professional in the health and wellness industry for over 20 years. She's a certified tapping coach and has been for more than 16 years. She has witnessed profound transformations both in her own life and in the lives of her clients as the founder of the Soar with Tapping App, Amy is on a mission to make the life-changing benefits of tapping accessible to everyone.
In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
- Target the Root Cause Over the Symptom: Treating symptoms like overeating or procrastination can be like placing a temporary band-aid over a gushing wound. True, permanent healing requires moving past surface symptoms and engaging directly with the originating core belief systems.
- Understand the 3-in-1 Power of EFT: Tapping combines physical percussion on ancient energy meridians (like acupuncture without needles) with cognitive reflection and deep somatic grounding to bring your mind (which often focuses on the past or the future) completely into a safe, present moment.
- Down-Regulate the Amygdala 43% Faster: When your subconscious tracks a perceived threat, your brain triggers a rapid surge of cortisol. Percussive tapping acts as a somatic override, signaling your inner guard dog to stand down and clearing stress hormones 43% faster than doing nothing at all.
- Access Ancestral Portals for Lineage Healing: Deep structural wounds—such as rigid, inherited programming about cultural expectations and gender roles—can visceralize in your body. Somatic tapping helps open an energetic portal to resolve these blocks, shifting the lineage pattern for yourself, your children, and the ancestors who came before you.
- Lean Intensely into Uncomfortable Emotions: You cannot bypass heavy states by rushing toward shiny, fake positivity. True emotional processing demands that you safely sit with emotions for roughly 90 seconds, acknowledging and feeling them until the intensity drops enough for your brain to accept a positive pivot.
Resources
- What is EFT Tapping?: https://eftinternational.org/discover-eft-tapping/what-is-eft-tapping/
Connect with Amy Vincze
Website: https://soarwithtapping.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soarwithtapping/
App on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.soarwithtapping&pli=1
App on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/soar-with-tapping/id6449354621
Connect with the Show
- Website: justlikenana.com
- Share Your Story: If you have a family story or trauma you’re exploring, reach out via our website for a chance to be interviewed.
Connect with Just Like Nana's Website.
A proud member of the Feminist Podcasters Collective.
Theme music by Carter Penny.
EFT Tapping and Unlocking Your Energy Meridians with Amy Vincze
Amie Penny SaylerHello, everyone. Welcome to Just Like Nana. I am your host, Amie Penny Sayler. So excited that you're here today to learn about tapping with my very cool guest. We have some serious Amy energy going on today. My guest is Amy Vincze. And Amy has been a dedicated professional in the health and wellness industry for over 20 years. She's a certified tapping coach and has been for more than 16 years. She has witnessed profound transformations both in her own life and in the lives of her clients. As the founder of the SOAR, that's S-O-A-R with Tapping app, Amy is on a mission to make the life-changing benefits of tapping accessible to everyone. She firmly believes that tapping is one of the most powerful and transformative healing tools available today. Super excited to talk with her. Before we jump in, I'll just give a little PSA for the day that if you have a grandma or a grandpa or a great aunt or a great uncle or just someone who's maybe a little older than you who lives near you, this is your invitation slash reminder slash ping to maybe just say hi, see how they're doing, see if they have a story they want to tell you. There's so much knowledge, wisdom, information, hilarity contained within those stories. So enjoy. Welcome to Just Like Nana, Amy. Really happy to have you here today. Thanks for being here. Oh, I'm thrilled to be here, Amie.
Amy VinczeThank you for having me.
Amie Penny SaylerWell, we love to start if you have a favorite or powerful story about your grandma and what you called her.
Amy VinczeI called her grandma, and this is a really good place to start. I think what sticks out most about me from my grandma is not a particular story, but uh it is just that she like she went through a lot at a very young age. She had two young children, and then her husband, my grandfather, died because he fell off a roof, broke his neck when he fell. And you know, they had a farm, and she's got two young kids, and so she had to sell everything and then moved out to California, where we are now. And it just seems like at this stage in my life, when I've got a youngish daughter and a family, like I just can't imagine that happening. That just sounds so difficult and so heartbreaking for everybody. For the kids, my mom was only three, and you know, my grandma was fairly young, so that's just a lot to carry at a very young age.
Amie Penny SaylerAbsolutely, it is. She sounds like a very strong woman. She was. She was. She was awesome. Can you describe your work for our listeners and then along that path, how you came to it?
Amy VinczeSo I am an EFT tapping coach, and I do
Amy's Background and Work
Amy Vinczeindividual sessions with clients, which is probably my favorite thing to do. But I also along the way, I felt like I wasn't really reaching enough people with tapping. Because to me, tapping is the most powerful healing tool available today, especially as at something that people can do on their own, and it has very minimal cost to it, if any. So I just wanted more people to have access to it. And at the time when I was researching how to do that, there wasn't a lot, there was only like one tapping app out there. And what they offered wasn't really what I offered and what I felt like tapping was capable of. So I just decided, well, I have to do this. Like people need to know how deep this tool can go and how powerful it can be to transform our traumas and our fears into something that feels really great. And we can kind of lead a whole different life if we want to. That's what I do. I've got this app and I've got my individual clients that I love working with. And I got into it because I've always been kind of attracted to the self-help part of life. And I think part of it was that I always thought that I needed to be better. And so I was looking for ways to heal myself. And so I'm, you know, a massage therapist, a colon hydrotherapist, a nutritional therapist, all these things. But when I found tapping, I was just introduced to it by a friend. And I immediately recognized it as a really powerful tool and something that was going to be meaningful to me. So like I immediately jumped in, found my own coach, and got certified. And that was 17 years ago now. It's been a love affair with tapping ever since.
Amie Penny SaylerI love that, that the intensity hasn't died through the years. You're still really passionate.
Amy VinczeWell, I have to say, too, that in the beginning I had limited success with it. Like sometimes it would just fall flat and I'm like, this didn't do anything. And then other times it would feel like it was really powerful. But I have recognized over the years that how you tap and what you focus on is really the most important thing. Meaning that if I'm suffering with
The Power of Tapping
Amy Vinczesome symptoms like procrastination or overeating or something like that, when I was tapping before, I would tap on the symptoms themselves. And then I started recognizing that there was a lot more going on underneath the surface, that the symptom was just pointing out like a deeper root cause that needed to be dealt with. And so now I only tap on the root cause. You know, I might mention something about the symptoms and how it shows up in my day-to-day life, but if I want to really heal myself, I go straight to the root, straight to where everything started, whatever belief systems I am focusing on that are causing this behavior in my life. And that will inevitably do the trick and help me to heal in a whole different way. It's kind of like, you know, if I'm focusing on the symptoms, I'm putting a band-aid over a wound. And sometimes that's totally necessary because you can't go function in your day when you've got a gushing wound. But at some point, you need to go back and like disinfect, and you need to put some stitches in, probably, and you need to really focus on the healing of that wound instead of just placing a band-aid over it, and then it will heal properly.
Amie Penny SaylerI love that analogy. It's so powerful and true. So let's just take a step back. Can you give us the 101 on this is EFT tapping, this is what it is,
Mechanism and Benefits of Tapping
Amie Penny Saylerthis is how it works somatically. Give us a little bit of an explanation on that.
Amy VinczeSure, I'd love to. Tapping is a really powerful combination of three different modalities. The first of which is energy therapy, and it's just like acupuncture. Acupuncture uses needles on acupressure points, and we use the percussion of tapping. So it's stimulating the same energy systems, the energy meridians in our body, just like acupuncture does. We just do it in a different way. So there's that aspect of it. And then we add in the cognitive therapy aspect because while you are tapping on each of your energy meridians and acupressure points, you are vocalizing and talking about whatever it is you want to release. So if you're experiencing a lot of sadness, then you're tapping through the points saying, I feel so sad. I feel like my heart is really breaking right now. And then you can focus on the causes of that and why it makes you sad, you know, all of those things. So actively talking about it helps to release it from your body. And then there is the somatic therapy aspect that you mentioned, because tapping on your body can't help but kind of gather all of your energy back from worrying about the past or gather all your energy back from catastrophizing about the future. And it really siphons it down into this present moment. Because in this present moment, you know, 90-90% of the time, you are safe and you are okay. It's our mind-taking time travel, either in the past or the future, that's making us stressed out usually. And in this present moment, everything is typically fine. So it's doing all three of those modalities. But on a biological level, when we get stressed, what happens is that, you know, our subconscious mind is kind of always scanning the horizon, looking for dangerous things that we need to avoid. And so when it sees something, 99% of the time our conscious mind is not aware of it, but all of a sudden we are amygdala, the stress center in our brain gets triggered, and we go into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode. And we don't even know it. We just know that all of a sudden we feel anxious. And so we've got a rush of cortisol in our body, that stress hormone, and we feel agitated. Sometimes we get like faster heart rate or shallow breathing. I mean, there's a million ways it can show up for people. But what tapping does is that every time you're tapping on your acupressure points, tapping on your energy meridians, you are signaling to your amygdala over and over and over again, like that it's okay to stand down. This guard dog, it's okay to relax. Like everything is actually fine and safe in this moment. And your mind is kind of time traveling all the time, focusing on what's scary about the past and what's scary about the future. And when we bring it into the present, everything is usually okay. Like I'm sitting in this chair, nothing bad is happening at the moment. And it's okay to let your mind and body relax. So when it's doing that, when the tapping is telling that, giving your amygdala that signal over and over again, it is kind of grabbing cortisol back from being all over your body, and it does it 43% faster than if you had done nothing else. And it's lowering your heart rate, it's lowering your blood pressure, and it is increasing your immune response. So it's doing a lot of things. It seems like this really simple activity, but a lot of stuff is going on underneath the surface. And there have been over 300 studies done showing how efficient and how effective this tool is. It's really fast too. For example, something that might take years in talk therapy. Traditional talk therapy could take, you know, weeks or months, depending on how much time you dedicate to it. So it's really fast. I can tell you that I've I've worked through things with just things that I had
Personal Transformations and Client Success Stories
Amy Vinczelower back pain for years. And so bad that I'd have to crawl on the floor in order to go to the bathroom. And I tapped for maybe two hours, and I haven't had back pain since. That was like almost eight years ago. So it's really significant how much this does with such a simple activity.
Amie Penny SaylerIs part of the power that it's just, and you've mentioned this a few times, it's really just focusing all of your energy in this is the present moment.
Amy VinczeYes, but what's also really powerful about it is that it is it does a great job of neutralizing old fears. For example, if we I had some trauma, my dad left when I was little, and I attached all kinds of meaning to it, and my little girl like didn't really heal very well from that. So with some focused tapping, like tapping on that event in particular, and my little girl's response to it and how scared she was and how she turned it into the idea that she's not good enough, and that's why he left, sort of thing. So, with some focused tapping on that, I can now recall what happened with complete compassion for my dad and what he was going through, and for me and what happened as a result, and for my little girl. Like my little girl right now, when I imagine her, she's totally happy and really playful. And that's something that when I pictured
Ancestral Trauma and Healing
Amy Vinczeher before, she never was. So it really changes entirely my perspective about trauma and how it affects people because I was able to actually remove it from my body by verbally acknowledging it and honoring it over and over again.
Amie Penny SaylerWhen you were telling that story, I wanted to offer your three-year-old little girl a hug. And as you kept telling the story, I realized, well, she doesn't need it. She's off playing, she's perfectly fine.
Amy VinczeRight, right. Yeah. Yeah. It's been quite transformational. And that's just those are just a couple of the things that I've worked through that I've worked through with my clients that have been really powerful transformations. Yeah.
Amie Penny SaylerAs you know, at at Just Like Nana, we also talk about and we focus on ancestral trauma and healing. And kind of that, you know, and there are many explanations. There's epigenetics, there's a spiritual component, there's a relational, you know, with your family line, and then I think energetic. And so I would love if you can, just to kind of address that, sort of what your experience and your understanding of that trapped or blocked energy is like in the body, and then how tapping helps that, and then also how that can trace back to ancestral wounds that really we didn't even experience in this lifetime, but have carried through.
Amy VinczeI absolutely love this topic. I think it's so important. So I'm really glad and happy to be doing this podcast with you about this. I haven't done any research about this. What I know is from my own experience and just kind of what feels logical to me about ancestral kind of wounds and healing around that. And the first thing I want to bring up is kind of the physical aspect of what people say is hereditary, you know, different diseases and different like conditions that we can come up with in the body. And I just want to say, especially for moms, but dads also, I think, you know, when we have a certain energy and a certain way of thinking and a certain level of fears and our neuropathways are very kind of ingrained in us, and our conditioning and our programming is very ingrained, we cannot help but kind of like it permeates every level of who we are, including cells and including sperm and including ovum, you know, the eggs and like all of those things. So to me, it makes sense. Like if you were for decades, you know, you've had a certain trauma or way of thinking about life, and then you've been like marinating all of your cells and all of your bodily fluids in this belief, and then a little life starts to grow in you, and then for nine months, that little life is not only marinating in it, but it's being made from the cells that were marinating in it for decades. It's like it makes perfect sense to me that of course there is a hereditary aspect because of just having so much intense exposure to that way of thinking and being. So, like I said, I don't have any research to back that up. But on a spiritual level, I feel like it's really important.
Amie Penny SaylerThank you for that perspective. And I think so much of what we know is okay, we can base some on some empirical data. We can base some on this has been my life experience. And some things are more intuitive, or you just sort of know it in your bones. Even though you can't say, well, here's the picture that shows that's exactly, you know, watch how this works. Here's a video. Um, but it doesn't make it any less true. So thank you for sharing that.
Amy VinczeAnd I will tell you just from my my own experience on an emotional level, I've been doing like a lot of deep work about what it means to be a woman and what's the right way to show up as a woman. And I I'm saying that in air quotes because I think that there's been a lot of conditioning and programming about what a good woman and what an attractive woman is out in the world today. And there was a point in my work with my own coach where I just had an intuitive hit that this was very much an ancestral issue. That, you know, I was picturing kind of these really stern and stoic Scandinavian women staring at me, saying, you know, if you go out and make a lot of money, you're not going to be attractive to your husband. You know, they need to be needed and they need to be the ones to provide. Like these are the roles we have in our life. And if you do anything to upset that balance, then you're risking your safety and your daughter's safety. Like there was a really visceral reaction to me doing that work that I felt this intense connection with that ancestral line. And once I did some tapping around that, then I just felt totally free. And I felt like I was changing the pattern not only for myself and for my daughter, but I was changing it for them too. Like somehow it was healing their wounds as well. Like my mom's and my grandmothers, and you know, all of these Scandinavian women, they felt lighter about it. I don't know if it healed them all together, their souls, but it felt like it did something deep. Amy, I have chills. You do. I do.
Amie Penny SaylerI feel like I'm I'm going a little bit deep on that one, but no, it's resonating so much, and you can just hear in your voice how meaningful that was to you. And I just again, this kind of goes back to I don't exactly have a video I can show to prove to everyone, but what I do know is that we are so connected in ways that we do not even begin to understand.
Amy VinczeYeah, I truly believe that. And I think for whatever reason, tapping, in my opinion, feels like a magical tool that can bridge these time gaps and these generation gaps and do so much deep work that you might think is untouchable because of course they're dead. Like, how am I gonna back and fix that? But it still does the work, it does what it needs to do.
Amie Penny SaylerYeah, I I'm almost envisioning like a little portal that you open up through the energy of the tapping and what it allows you to access.
Amy VinczeYeah, yeah. Oh, that's a great way to visualize it.
Amie Penny SaylerWhat are we missing about tapping that we haven't talked about yet that we should be addressing in this discussion?
Amy VinczeI think one of the most important things that
The Role of Emotions in Tapping
Amy Vinczepeople really get stuck on is the idea that I need to be focusing on positive things in order for this to work. And it's really very counterintuitive because when you start doing tapping, you know, if you're if you're focusing on how horrible you feel about a betrayal or something like that, we don't go to the shiny, happy emotions first. That is not where we want to stay. We want to stay with the emotions. We're actually helping. Helping to process the emotions by feeling them. So we lean into the what's uncomfortable, and we acknowledge and honor over and over again how betrayed you feel. Like it just broke my heart so much. I had trust for this person, and they hurt me in a way that I don't know if I can ever recover from it. And I don't know if I'll ever be able to trust them again. Like we just acknowledge and honor over and over and over again these really intense and uncomfortable feelings. And that's where people get very, I'm gonna say nervous because we have never been encouraged to engage with our emotions this way. I mean, it wasn't even that long ago, Amie. Where we women were being committed if they showed too much emotion of any kind, especially if they got too angry or, you know, whatever. But too much, anything other than adaptable and accommodating was considered wrong. So talk about an ancestral aspect to this. There is a portion of all of women in particular that feel the fear of engaging with these uncomfortable and taboo emotions. We would love to just have have the shiny, happy feelings all the time, but it's not human. Humans have a whole range of emotions. And when we don't express them and we don't feel them, then they stay stuck in our body and they will cause physical problems and energetic problems until we release them. And for men too. I mean, it's not just isolated to women, but for men, the only emotion that they are allowed is anger. And anything else would be considered a weakness. So we all have, we're all stunted emotionally, basically, from our history. And we need to be able to lean into those emotions and engage with them, move through them and get to the other side. And fortunately, tapping is a very fast way to do that. So the amount of time that you need to spend in the emotion while you're tapping is like less than 90 seconds. But it's so foreign to most people and it feels so wrong that it's too scary to go there. So when, like if you came and said, I want to work on this feeling of betrayal, and I'm right now on an a level from zero to 10, I'm at a 10. I feel really bad about this. I'm gonna stay with those negative emotions with you and those, actually, I don't, I don't like calling them negative emotions because I don't think any emotions are negative, but I'm gonna stay with those uncomfortable emotions with you until your number starts coming down. And when it gets to like a three or four, then I mean, we're just doing round after round and continuing to acknowledge and honor. And when we your number gets to a three or four, that's when you can start questioning your belief and your feelings about this and start infusing more positive ones. Cause at that point, your brain will believe it. Anything before that, and there's a part of your brain that's going, no, no, no way, that doesn't work. But once you move through those emotions and basically give them their day in court, then it's so much easier to let them go. So that's where people get hung up. And I've even had people say, Oh, this is so toxic. I guarantee you it's not. We have just never been encouraged to lean into this part of who we are. I mean, we are multifaceted beings, right? Spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical. And we are encouraged to lean into all aspects of those except emotions. And I think that's where we've really paid a price. I think that's why we have kind of emotional crisis, as you will, like in the world today, so many more people with depression, so many people with anxiety. And it's because we've avoided this aspect of who we are too much.
Amie Penny SaylerYeah, and we just don't have skills around it.
Amy VinczeNo, no, we've never been taught how to engage with these emotions. My mom didn't know. It wasn't something that even her generation dealt with at all. But a little bit, but my grandma, hell no. And my mom, maybe a tiny bit. But now we're in a different age where we're we're being encouraged and we're learning a lot about what we can do with this. There's a lot of possibility open to us now.
Amie Penny SaylerI really appreciate that. And I will say, through my sort of decades of different healing modalities and growing spiritually and becoming more comfortable with myself and that whole experience, it's really only recently that I've started to just something kind of clicked. You know how you
Amy’s App
Amie Penny Saylercan kind of know something, but it doesn't like seep into your entire being and all of a sudden a switch goes off and you just miss a light bulb moment, you know. And I just realized, oh, I'm scared of my feelings. And I think that I'm a two-year-old who can't handle them. And actually, I have a whole huge skill set and toolbox here. So it's going to be okay.
Amy VinczeYes. Oh my god, that's so powerful. It's like your little girl just takes over. Like when you get anxious or your your stress center is triggered, your little girl takes over, and she doesn't have those skills, but your adult self does. Right. And that's where you need to kind of make the distinction, right?
Amie Penny SaylerSo tell us more about your app, please. Like where we can find it, what it's called, what it helps with, all of that.
Amy VinczeYeah. Um, it's called Sore with Tapping, S-O-A-R. And you can search with in the Google or Apple Play Stores for it. So I designed it to go deeper. I designed it to go down to those root causes. I mean, there's plenty of tapping scripts in there that will help deal with surface issues because people just need to be able to sleep and they need to be able to get through their day. But I wanted to give people the options so that they can start to heal themselves from things like anxiety completely. I wouldn't it be great to just not have to ever get anxious again. Wouldn't it be great to not sink into a depression? Like people need to be able to heal this part of themselves, and it shouldn't have to cost them thousands of dollars going to a psychiatrist or a talk therapist of any kind in order to do that. So there's lots of videos explaining how to work through like the bigger issues like addiction and depression and anxiety and procrastination, those kinds of things. But I'm also starting working on like a series, different series. So if there's a part of you that feels like you're not enough, there's a series of seven tapping scripts that'll take you from start to finish on what it looks like to go through that about looking at the fear itself and where that came from, but then also focusing on the fear of losing your identity around being like a super helpful and giving person. And then there's the fear that maybe you'll be accused of being arrogant if you start to change your identity because it's been established for decades, and people only know you a certain way. So there's a lot of steps through that process, and so it's meant to take you from start to finish. So um, there's 160 different tapping scripts, like ranging from everything from fears and phobias to sleep and goal support, but I'm adding content all the time. So it's like my favorite passion project. There's also some meditations on there, things that help with like inner child and visualization, stuff like that.
Amie Penny SaylerJust the breadth of what you're talking about sounds absolutely incredible. And I will be checking it out about five minutes after we're done talking. Oh, I hope so. I hope so. So thank you for that. And I think too, I just want to comment on something you said, you know, when you were talking about like the depression and the anxiety and things like that. I think sometimes where we get tripped up too is that we think, oh, okay, I won't have depression, so I'll never feel sad again. And no, like all emotions are meant to experience it's just not staying in that state for insert your time frame here, whether it's months or years or decades.
Amy VinczeRight.
Amie Penny SaylerSo kind of learning to move through some of that.
Amy VinczeYeah. And letting go of the expectation that your life is and you are supposed to be happy all of the time. Like it's just that's not realistic. And life goes up and down, and that's how we learn and grow. And it's okay to like want to hold on to a happy moment, but it's also okay to surrender it and know that at some point you're gonna get low again, and then you're gonna learn some lessons, and then you'll come back up again. And it's just a roller coaster of a ride, this whole crazy life thing.
Amie Penny SaylerExactly. And appreciating that, yes, brains work differently and chemicals work differently, and all of it together, it's a big, huge, you know. I'm imagining a ball of yarn that's just all messed up from a kitten or something, you know. It's very complex, but that this is a piece that can begin to help.
Amy VinczeYeah, I it's hard not to kind of judge where we're at and judge where other people are at in the process. Um, but I all I always go back to the idea that everybody has their own journey. They just do. And um, they'll get like other people will get to where they need to go. And my focus needs to be on me and how I show up to my life and what how I want to be and relate to other people and relate to myself, like and that just takes a lot of pressure off. If you're if you just have to focus on you, then that takes a lot of pressure off.
Amie Penny SaylerI'm thinking of how amazing the world would be if everyone just focused on themselves instead of worrying, but this person is doing this and that person's doing this other thing. Yeah.
Amy VinczeYeah, yeah. And our our incessant need to control our kids and what they're doing.
Amie Penny SaylerAnd well, we will, of course, link you know, your website, the information on your app, all of that in the show notes, and just so appreciative of
Final Thoughts and Encouragement
Amie Penny Sayleryou putting this out there into the world for it to be a tool that people can access and you talking with me today. So thank you. Oh, I really loved our conversation.
Amy VinczeThanks for having me, Amie.