Tapas Fleming

Tapas Fleming is a California-licensed acupuncturist who developed the Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT) in 1993. She began practicing acupuncture in 1987, specializing in allergy treatment using acupressure-and-acupuncture methods derived from the work of Devi Nambudripad.

By her own account, the core of TAT came to her after a nap in her office, when she woke with the idea that a particular acupuncture point near the eyes could be used to heal a person’s whole system. The resulting method combines a held acupressure “pose” — fingertips lightly contacting points on the face and back of the head — with a guided sequence of statements about the problem being addressed.

Within the energy-psychology field, Fleming represents the stillness pole of the spectrum, in contrast to the rhythmic tapping of TFT and EFT. TAT asks the practitioner to simply hold the pose while moving attention through the issue, the trauma, its origin, and its release.

This makes it a distinctively gentle, attention-based trauma method, and it has been studied and applied to stress, anxiety, PTSD, and Adverse Childhood Experiences. Fleming’s contribution is the idea that sustained, posed attention on a single acupoint configuration can carry the mind through a structured release of a held charge.