Gary Craig

Gary Craig (1940–2026) was the founder of Emotional Freedom Techniques — EFT, the "tapping" method now practised by millions — and one of the most quietly generous figures in the history of modern healing. Born on April 13, 1940, his path began at thirteen with a realisation he would spend a lifetime unpacking: that the quality of his thoughts was mirrored in the quality of his life. A Stanford engineering graduate and an ordained minister with the non-denominational Universal Church of God, and a devoted lifelong student of A Course in Miracles, Craig was refreshingly candid about who he was and wasn't — "neither a psychologist nor a licensed therapist," as he put it — just a relentlessly practical engineer, self-taught in personal improvement, seeking only what produced results. He found it in the 1990s, studying Thought Field Therapy under psychologist Dr. Roger Callahan. Where TFT prescribed complex, condition-specific tapping sequences, Craig — the engineer — distilled it into one simple, universal protocol anyone could learn: tapping on a short sequence of acupressure points while voicing the problem at hand. He called it EFT, launched emofree.com in 1995, and then made the decision that defined his legacy: he gave it away. His free EFT manual, downloaded by millions and translated worldwide, seeded a global movement — EFT became the most widely applied of all the energy therapies, carried forward by the practitioners and teachers he inspired, and taken into clinical research and mainstream reach by figures like Dawson Church, Nick Ortner, and Brad Yates. Skeptics debated its mechanism; Craig, characteristically, invited people to simply "try it on everything" and judge by results. His later years brought a deepening of the spiritual current that had always run beneath the technique. Returning from an initial retirement, he developed Optimal EFT — centred on what he called The Unseen Therapist, a non-denominational name for the higher healing presence — and taught it through webinars into his final years. Retiring in 2025, he appointed Gabriëlle Rutten as his successor for Official EFT, and passed away peacefully in his sleep in January 2026, at eighty-five. His complete life's work, 1995 to 2025, is preserved at The Palace of Possibilities — a name he chose to reflect his abiding belief that within every person exists a vast inner space filled with potential. Few teachers have handed so many people so simple a key to their own freedom, and asked so little in return.