Would you like to understand your inner gut instincts so you can begin a stress-management program in your life, but don't know where to begin? You do not need to feel alone in your confusion because the psychology of gut intelligence is a new field of study and research and many people are still baffled as to how to even begin to understand our second brain in our bellies. Recently, a research study in depth psychology reports that listening to the voice of your gut can lead you to have a more beneficial life experience with stress reduction and more decisive choices that benefit both the culture and you as an individual person. Understanding the twelve keys presented in this article will help you successfully navigate through your awareness of your own gut intelligence and begin to use it as an inner guide to accompany your thinking brain decisions and help you in stress-management. These keys reflect the responses of hundreds of people in clinical settings.
First: The gut is the instinctual feeling response center and we each feel either empty or full or somewhere in the middle from a moment-to-moment bases. You can understand this if you just imagine a gas gauge in your gut at all times and it is registering your needs met or not met.
Second: We feel full in our guts when our instinctual needs are met and empty when they are not. We are talking about psychological instinctual needs, psychological not in the use of logic but in our needs as human beings. We are talking not just about food intake, although the feeling of emptiness and fullness in relation to food intake and psychological instinctual needs are interestingly similar and we all do get them confused and thus may over eat to try to fill the emptiness we feel psychologically.
Third: We have two instinctual needs that the gut gauges, which are the need to feel accepted and the need to be in control of our own responses to life. These two needs must be constantly in balance to feel full of life energy.
Fourth: When we have both of these instinctive needs met, we feel full and thus energized; and when we have neither met or one is out of balance with the other, we feel empty and often experience some symptoms of stress in the body like feeling lethargic, anxious, overwhelmed, disconnected and alone.
Fifth: The gut response does not depend on the thinking brain as the gut is an independent brain of its own, as recent medical breakthroughs have demonstrated. But of course the gut brain can be greatly affected by the thinking brain, and vice-versa.
Sixth: We all naturally work both consciously and unconsciously to keep these two instinctual needs in balance at all times.
Seventh: Becoming more conscious of these two instinctual feelings and our needs as human beings will increase our ability to feel empowered and self-aware, as well as help us to experience stress reduction in our lives. We need to have a balanced and conscious dialog between our gut responses and head response so we can use our thinking brain to make the appropriate responses in the external world and try to fill these two important instinctual needs in appropriate, healthy and successful ways.
Eighth: When we are unconscious of our gut responses, our thinking brain will often use a system of thought it has picked up, perhaps from an authority like a parent, teacher or even a religious interpretation, and our thinking brain applies it as a judgment about the feeling in our gut. This is what happens when we have an emotion like guilt or depression. We feel empty because our needs are not met and our thinking brain attaches a thought to the emptiness, a thought that we may have borrowed from an outside source years ago. We then experience a lack of fulfillment as we apply this thinking like "It is all my fault for being too stupid or too small or too incompetent, etc." or "I am not capable of doing anything to make this work or be better" or "I am not worthy or deserving", thus we have guilt and or depression feelings and we experience a great amount of stress in our bodies.
Ninth: Once our thinking brain attaches a judgment to our gut feeling, we experience a combination of feeling and thinking as an emotional response. The emotional feelings are not pure feelings of emptiness or fullness anymore, as they now have the thinking component mixed in them. And these thinking-feelings or emotions are mostly felt in other parts of our bodies above our bellies, between our head brain and gut brain. If you look into your emotional feelings, you can always find a thinking element to them. And if you trace the feeling aspect only, it goes directly and purely to the gut. The gut is the source of all feeling and on a purely gut feeling level there is no thinking but just the feeling of emptiness and fullness, although you may certainly use different words to describe this binary feeling response.
Tenth: People have found in clinical settings that the only way we can unravel this tightly woven thread of inaccurate thinking judgment about ourselves and the resulting emotional stress, is to reflect back to the source of when the thinking head first applied this very same judgment causing a negative feeling emotion. Through gut feeling reflection we can find the actual source experience or as close to it as possible. And the key to finding this first experience is through reflection on both the negative feeling emotion and the gut feeling of emptiness and fullness, not through thinking back on the details of our lives.
Eleventh: Once we find this original experience, generally in childhood, in which we started the "tape" that plays over and over in our heads saying we are at fault, powerless, too needy, unloveable, etc., then we can see ourselves more realistically in the light of our adult minds and lift the sentence we have placed on ourselves and our feelings. We may then begin to see ourselves clearer and make healthy decision, and begin to use our thinking head to follow our instinctual needs and fulfill our true human nature. This gut feeling reflection is for most people an experience that they report to greatly help in stress-management and have both positive effects upon their health and energy level.
Twelfth: Reflection on the gut feelings or what we might call our gut voice helps us to be more mindful of our caring nature and thus be more caring for others. And with the new awareness of our gut responses and needs that we acquire through reflection on our instinctual gut responses, we are able to live a more caring and healthy life with the thinking head finally conscious and listening more clearly to the responses of our most reliable and authentic self, our gut instinctual feelings in our body.
Early in her career as a counselor in the 70s, Martha Love, along with her colleague Robert Sterling, became aware of the need to help people with stress reduction management and decision-making based on inner needs. After years of clinical study of gut intelligence and new medical breakthroughs supporting the intelligence of the gut brain, they have collaborated on a groundbreaking book, called "What's Behind Your belly Button?", which introduces a new Gut Psychology and explores the awareness of gut instincts to make healthy life-decisions, improve individual stress reduction management, and enhance overall well-being.
For more information on the book "What's Behind Your Belly Button" go to http://careerstorefront.angelfire.com/.
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