On Sensing Your Intuition, with Debbie Rosas.

No matter how you feel about your belly, and no matter what size it is, this part of you has power, and it is smart — gutsy. Butterflies in your stomach are real. This is your gut letting you know something is going on. It might be something you either sense as right or unsettling. These butterflies live in the body’s gut-brain, where over 100 million neurons live, which is more than in your body’s spinal cord and peripheral nervous system put together. Gutsy thinking is not cognitive thinking. It is intuitive. It is something you should never ignore. 

“I should have followed my intuition!” “I should have followed my first instinct!” “I should have listened to my gut!” We have all had this experience at times such as when we have trusted our intuition, gut, wisdom, and instincts. The body knows. It is in our DNA for our body to sense everything. Our job is to listen. Sensation begins in our core. The more connected we are to our core sensation, the easier it is to receive the communication. It might be as simple as “I don’t feel good about this,” or it could be just the opposite: “This feels right.”

We must develop this key part of the body’s toolkit in order to live our lives proactively, responsibly, freely from doubt. And, we must teach our children well, to do the same.

 

Everyone is born to listen to the voices of their body. It’s the best way to navigate through life. However, messages from the body are like a cypher or a code; if you can learn to interpret these messages, you have an edge. Unfortunately nobody teaches us the code, or how to read and interpret the language of our gut.  I’ve had butterfly sensations all my life, and I’ve learned to listen and respect the messages I get from them. I’ve trained myself to  observe what I refer to as, a “call of the wild,” which is my gut-brain trying to speak to me.

Whether it’s the flow of neural traffic from my head informing my gut, or my gut informing my head, one thing is clear: my body talks and my brain follows, which is why I listen first to my gutsy thinking.  I use my gut as an emotional barometer. It’s my sensing intelligence. It’s what I use to listen to desires, levels of stress, safety, and discord. I place my hands on my belly when I want to think. In Aikido, everyone pats the belly. They call it the Hara. They pat their belly to connect to a powerful energy center. Brain thinking is too slow. Gut thinking is faster.

When in doubt there is no doubt: trust your gut. Your gut instincts are there to protect you and to give you guidance. This is something necessary in childhood and adulthood.

 

As our body begins to react to our gut instincts, we can notice ourselves either relax or tense up as we respond to positive or negative stimuli. In the most basic example, we all know what it feels like to sense danger or to sense the presence of a loved one. The key is to refine our relationship with sensation and learn to hear it more clearly. As we develop our fluency in the language of sensation, we learn to trust it more and more. We become more aligned with our path and connected to our primary tool for reaching our objective, which is our body.

I could fill volumes with grand stories of the times I did not listen to my intuition when my body was sending me gut wrenchingly loud messages, and yet I did not listen.  Your gut instincts are there to protect you from danger and to give you guidance. The outcomes when I did not listen have been a disaster and in spite of what I lost, I gained experience. It could be said that I brought the experience on myself to fulfill an aspect of my spiritual journey or that I needed to learn a hard lesson in setting boundaries. Gut instincts are there to protect you. 

We must give future generations their best chance by teaching them to listen to their bodies and to trust their instincts for more health and wellness in body and life.

I imagine that in our evolution, we developed gut instincts as feedback, whether this strange plant would nurture us or kill us. Today our experiences may be less primal, but they are just as important. Our gut has its own evolutionary trajectory as it adapts to the message it receives for assessment and response. As we evolve physically, spiritually, and culturally, the stimuli messaging is evolving. Now it is even more imperative that we have a conscious connection with our gut for the ever changing demands in our culture and society.

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