👆 Bonus Module — The Original Basic Recipe and the 9 Gamut Procedure | EFT Course
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Free Course by Everything IFS Academy | Therapeutic Modalities Series
Bonus Module — The Original Basic Recipe and the 9 Gamut Procedure
Today we're learning EFT's first form: the original Basic Recipe exactly as Gary Craig released it in 1995, complete with the equipment that the modern shortcut later set aside. This is the version with four steps instead of five moves, with tapping points on the fingers, with a point on the back of the hand most modern tappers have never used, and with the single most eccentric procedure in the entire modality, a sequence of eye movements, humming, and counting performed while tapping, known as the 9 Gamut. The original is genuinely historical, and it is also genuinely useful, because parts of it never stopped working and some tappers never stopped reaching for them. By the end of this bonus lesson, a learner will know the complete original architecture, every retired point, all nine actions of the 9 Gamut, the charming logic behind the humming and counting, and the honest story of why the everyday version of EFT looks leaner today.
Why a Bonus History Lesson
Three reasons earn the original its place at the end of this course.
The first is completeness. The 1995 EFT Manual, the free download that carried this modality around the world, taught the version in this lesson, and millions of people learned EFT in exactly this form. A learner who knows the original understands every older book, video, and practitioner they will ever encounter, and understands what the word "shortcut" in modern EFT is actually short for.
The second is that the retired equipment still works, and the tradition knows it. The full original recipe remains the tool some experienced tappers bring out for stubborn issues, the targets that hold their number through round after well-aimed shortcut round, on the reasoning that more thorough is worth more time when thorough is what is needed. And the 9 Gamut in particular kept a reputation of its own for the low, flat moods, the gray-sky blues that resist crisp targeting, where its strange multi-channel busyness seems to reach something the standard rounds glide past. EFT International's own materials still teach it for exactly such cases.
The third reason is the story of why it vanished from the everyday version, which is really the story of EFT's character. Craig, the engineer who had already simplified Thought Field Therapy once, kept testing his own creation with the same question he had asked of his teacher's: which parts are essential? Years of observation gave him his answer: for the large majority of issues, the recipe worked just as well without the finger points and without the 9 Gamut, and a shorter procedure is one people actually use, in more places, more often. There was also the matter of public dignity, acknowledged with good humor throughout the tradition: the shortcut can be done discreetly almost anywhere, while the 9 Gamut involves rolling one's eyes and humming a children's tune, which limits its venues considerably. So Craig made the extra equipment officially optional, the streamlined form became the standard he later consolidated as Gold Standard EFT, and the original moved to the shelf this lesson takes it down from: not discarded, but reserved.
The Four-Step Sandwich
The original Basic Recipe has four steps, and the tradition's own nickname for the architecture is the sandwich, for reasons the order makes obvious.
The Setup. Identical to the setup this course taught in its own lesson: the "Even though…" statement, repeated three times, delivered at the Karate Chop point or the Sore Spot. This piece never changed from 1995 to today.
The Sequence. A full pass through the tapping points with the Reminder Phrase at each, exactly in the spirit of the modern round, but on a longer route: the original sequence ran from the eyebrow down through the body points and then continued onto the fingers, ending at the Karate Chop point. The added stops are taught in the next section. One genuinely surprising historical note belongs here: the Top of Head point, the customary crown stop of the modern sequence, was not in the original at all. It joined later, after the finger points had already begun fading from everyday use, which means today's sequence and 1995's sequence overlap heavily but bookend differently.
The 9 Gamut Procedure. The filling of the sandwich, performed between the two passes through the points: nine brief actions done while continuously tapping a single spot on the back of the hand. The whole of it takes perhaps fifteen seconds and is taught in full in this lesson's final section.
The Sequence again. A second complete pass through the points, identical to step two. The repeat is the other slice of bread, closing the sandwich: sequence, 9 Gamut, sequence, with the strange filling held between two layers of familiar tapping.
After the sandwich comes the re-rating and, if needed, further sandwiches with the adjusted "remaining" wording, exactly as the modern recipe handles its subsequent rounds. Structurally, then, the original differs from today's version in only two ways: a longer point route, and the 9 Gamut tucked into the middle of every round.
The Finger Points and the Gamut Point
The retired stops all live on the hand, which made the original recipe's back half a tour of one's own fingers.
The finger points sit at the base of each fingernail, on the side of the finger facing the thumb, at the corner where nail meets skin. The original sequence visited four of them in order: the thumb, the index finger, the middle finger, and the baby finger, each tapped with the fingertips of the other hand, five to seven taps and the Reminder Phrase, just like any body point. The observant will notice the famous omission: the ring finger is skipped. The skip was not an accident or a typo, and generations of students have asked about it. In the meridian frame the original recipe was built in, the ring finger's pathway is the one addressed by the Gamut point itself, which the recipe was about to visit at length, so the finger was passed over as already covered. Whatever one makes of the frame, as this course's foundation lesson discussed evenhandedly, the skip is a beloved fossil: a little anatomical signature of EFT's first edition.
The Gamut point is the home of the entire next section, so its location matters: it sits on the back of the hand, about an inch behind the knuckles, in the soft valley between the bones leading to the ring finger and the little finger. The finding tip: make a loose fist, spot the knuckles of the ring and little fingers, then slide a fingertip from between those two knuckles back toward the wrist by about an inch, into the groove between the hand bones. That groove is the Gamut point, and it is tapped continuously, with two fingertips of the other hand, for the entire duration of the procedure that bears its name.
The 9 Gamut Procedure
And now the centerpiece, the fifteen seconds that made the original EFT unforgettable to everyone who ever learned it. The 9 Gamut Procedure consists of nine brief actions, performed in order, while tapping the Gamut point without pause and keeping the issue tuned in. The head stays still throughout; only the eyes move. The nine actions:
Eyes closed.
Eyes open.
Eyes hard down to the right, without moving the head, as far as they comfortably go.
Eyes hard down to the left, the same.
Roll the eyes in a full circle in one direction, as if tracing the rim of a large clock.
Roll the eyes in a full circle the other direction.
Hum a few seconds of a simple tune out loud, the traditional suggestions being Happy Birthday or Row, Row, Row Your Boat.
Count rapidly from one to five out loud.
Hum the tune again.
Then the procedure ends, and the recipe moves straight into its second sequence, completing the sandwich.
The rationale, inherited from the Thought Field Therapy lineage and kept by Craig, is the procedure's real charm, and it earned the 9 Gamut its traditional nickname: the Brain Balancer. The design deliberately busies multiple channels of the brain while the issue stays tuned in. Humming is a musical, melodic act, classically associated with right-hemisphere processing; counting is a sequential, logical act, classically associated with the left; alternating hum, count, hum is meant to swing engagement back and forth between the two while the eye movements sweep through positions and the tapping keeps its rhythm underneath. The issue, in other words, gets held in mind while the brain is marched through seeing, moving, melody, and arithmetic in fifteen seconds. Modern readers often notice the family resemblance to the eye movements used in certain mainstream trauma therapies, and the tradition notices it too; the methods arose separately and claim different mechanisms, and this course makes no equivalence, but the convergence on "engage the eyes and the brain's channels while the distressing material is active" is, at minimum, an interesting rhyme. As with everything mechanical in this modality, the explanation sits inside the open scientific debate the Discovery Statement lesson described; the procedure itself sits in fifteen perfectly harmless seconds.
One genuinely delightful detail from the tradition concerns step seven: the tune imprints. Practitioners observed that whatever song a person habitually hums in the 9 Gamut becomes associated with the work, surfacing in memory alongside it, so the standing advice is to choose with a little care: something simple, brief, and either emotionally neutral or quietly positive. Happy Birthday has served millions; a tune freighted with personal history serves less well.
When might a modern tapper actually add all this back in? The tradition's answer is specific. On the stuck issue: when a well-chosen, well-worded target has held its number through several shortcut rounds, the next experiment is the full sandwich, sequence, 9 Gamut, sequence, on the same words. Gus has been parked at a 6 on the same well-aimed target for three evenings; on the fourth he runs it as a sandwich, hums his ridiculous tune at the kitchen table, and the re-rate comes back a 3, which is all the argument he needed. On the flat, gray moods, where the procedure's old reputation lives. And as a pattern interrupt, when rounds have gone stale and mechanical, because nothing re-engages a drifting session like fifteen seconds of eye-rolling and birthday songs. The original equipment asks little, costs seconds, and waits patiently on its shelf, which is the right way to keep a first edition: not under glass, but within reach.
Below this lesson, you'll find an Emotional Freedom Techniques practice built around one of the skills you just learned, along with a few ways to begin noticing and practicing it in everyday life this week.
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