Trust Your Gut. Gregory Plotnikoff
agitated that he needed to interrupt. He sensed that she needed to focus. He moved on to the physical exam and told her he wanted to check her pulse. “I took her right hand in mine and placed my left hand over her right wrist to feel her pulse. I noticed that she closed her eyes. I felt her pulse for one minute. Her hand was not cool or damp, as I had expected. Her pulse was a very reasonable seventy-four beats per minute. I switched to her left hand for another thirty seconds.”
The energy in the room changed significantly with that simple act of checking her pulse for a minute and a half. They were both able to center. He asked what she was feeling, and Carol reported a sense of calmness and hope, of actually feeling better. He then led her in some breathing exercises focused on breathing into her center. She left the clinic having discovered one approach for centering and grounding herself.
The Emerging Science of the Gut: The Intestinal Brain
Western science has increasingly come to consider the gut as much more than just a digestive tract. In the last twenty years, scientists have researched the neuralhormonal complexity of the gut, and more and more are now referring to it as the second brain. The intestinal nervous system (or enteric nervous system) is composed of a cluster of more than 100 million neurons. It has receptors for more than thirty neurotransmitters—the hormones such as epinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine that allow a neuron to send a message to another neuron. In fact, more than 90 percent of the serotonin receptors and more than 50 percent of the dopamine receptors are in the gut.
Of course, the brain in our head is vastly more complex and has a thousand times more neurons than the intestinal brain. However, like the main brain, the intestinal brain receives, organizes, and transmits information. That means that both brains allow rapid and coordinated responses to changes in the environment, and both brains can regulate our internal organs.
The intestinal brain has two main connections to the main brain: a calming route along the vagus nerve and an energizing route along the spinal cord. Both connections operate automatically as part of the autonomic nervous system. When your body/mind is balanced and centered, the calming and energizing parts of your nervous system are likewise balanced. They are complementary. But when these two systems are out of balance, the result is often major intestinal problems like pain, bloating, diarrhea, or constipation.
When your body/mind is balanced and centered, the calming and energizing parts of your nervous system are likewise balanced.
For chronic intestinal problems in which all the life-threatening diseases and maladies have been ruled out, one major cause of dysfunction is that your two brains have somehow gotten their wires crossed. They have become conditioned—just like Pavlov's dog—to react to a threat when no threat exists. That's why it can't be fixed by a pill. The problem is not a disease but rather something closer to a computer virus. It is a system gone awry. The problem is not in your head; it's in your wiring.
Imagine a feedback loop that is out of control—such as a sound system in an auditorium when someone talks into the microphone and you hear a squealing feedback sound. The problem in this loop is that the microphone is oversensitive and picks up not just the normal voice but also the amplified voice over a loudspeaker. Then the microphone sends the amplified voice back through the amplifier and out the speaker again, only louder and more shrill than ever. In a fraction of a second, the shrieking sound gets so loud, it hurts your ears. The speaker has to stop because nobody can hear her anyway, and then you have to turn down the microphone or move the loudspeaker farther away to interrupt the feedback loop.
In the case of an attack of digestive distress, instead of an oversensitive microphone you have a hypersensitized amygdala—a primitive part of the main brain that decides whether a threat exists. It can take a small, harmless sensation and encode it as threatening. This sends a danger signal to the gut, which reacts by tensing up and causing distress. The intestinal brain sends these amplified distress signals back to the amygdala, which totally freaks out and sends more emergency signals back to the gut, so then the gut goes bonkers as well. The feedback loop has gone berserk and keeps accelerating, but instead of a terrible noise in an auditorium, you get awful pain and distress in your gut.
Sally Sees a Tums
Sally was a young professional who suffered from IBS and had recently gone through a painful diarrhea and constipation cycle. She was on her way to a date and stopped in a convenience store for lip gloss. While there, she saw a shelf of Tums and other digestive remedies. Almost instantly she felt a minor rumble in her abdomen. What just happened?
The main brain and the intestinal brain just had a little scene together. The main brain took in visual input of Tums, which sparked memories of recent diarrhea and constipation, and automatically assigned an emotional evaluation of threat. The oversensitized amygdala exaggerated the severity of symptoms and sent an alarm message via the spinal cord to the intestinal brain, which activated her gut. If the threat is seen as a crisis, the system releases stress hormones such as cortisol or adrenaline—which cause a series of reactions including tightening of the gut muscles, resulting in pain, bloating, cramping, and more. Sally ended up canceling her date—not because she was sick but because she saw a Tums and that set off a feedback loop gone bad.
Neurohormonal Retraining
The good news for Sally and all gut sufferers is that there is an adjustable link in this automatic chain of events. The part of the brain that decides whether a threat exists, the amygdala, is retrainable. On the negative side, the amygdala can be falsely conditioned to arouse a fear response when there is no actual danger, thus setting off a feedback loop gone awry. But on the positive side, the amygdala is the loophole in the main-brain/intestinal-brain circuitry that provides an opening to fix the erroneous programming. The process of fixing this feedback loop is called Neurohormonal Retraining, a key skill you will learn in this book.
Ecological Rebalancing
Because everything is connected, a variety of imbalances in your body/mind system can have negative effects on the function of your gut. Your connections outside your body comprise your exterior ecology—everything from your personal relationships and home life to your workplace and environmental surroundings. Your interior ecology includes the food you eat, the levels of vitamins and minerals in your system, and the health of your microbiome—the 100 trillion microbes that live inside you. These are the bacteria that help you digest food, strengthen your immune system, and keep you in a good mood. While you may not find it amusing that several pounds of microbes are dwelling in your gut—far outnumbering your human body cells—if your microbiome is imbalanced, it could be a cause of your gut distress. Throughout this book you will discover techniques for balancing your inner and outer ecological systems.
How to Start the Process of Getting Centered: A Three-Step Exercise
Now that you know the importance of centering for your gut health, it's time to begin putting it into practice. Here are a few steps you can take right now to begin the process of centering and the journey of your CORE healing:
1 Get grounded.
2 Identify your strengths.
3 Set your intention.
Get Grounded
Grounded is a common term used to describe being calm, centered, relaxed, and focused. Yet most people don't know how to deliberately achieve this experience. Here is an exercise to help you get grounded:
1 Sit in a comfortable chair.
2 Take slow, easy breaths for 30 to 60 seconds. Breathe in through your nose, into your center, and slowly exhale through your mouth.
3 Pay close attention to your senses (visual, auditory, sensory/kinesthetic) in your body and what they take in. Spend 1 to 2 minutes on each of your senses.
For example, start