Even the Ancients Knew the Gut Could “Think”
Over the course of time, the human body has been divided into separate parts by different systems of medicine. Conventional medicine is particularly famous for its tendency to divide in order to conquer the body. Of all of the parts that have been subdivided further into other, smaller parts, the tube that connects the mouth to the anus and all of the offshoots and organs that are directly connected to this tube have suffered most.
Emotion-Based Decision Making
The digestive system as a whole unit has been known and studied since medieval times. Doctors in the Middle Ages studied the physical structure of the stomach, small intestines and colon and they understood that these organs played a role in the digestion of food. Though these doctors had little information from earlier eras about the digestive system as a whole, in many ways, these doctors were less impaired in terms of their view of digestion because their natural reflex was to view the various organs of digestion as a whole unit, rather than as separate parts. Doctors at that time recognized that if digestion in the stomach was somehow impaired, that all other functions in the digestive system might also be impaired.
In the Middle Ages, doctors believed that the stomach was an active organ that could “think” which demonstrates that the intuition of these medical professionals surpassed that of modern day doctors. It’s a proven fact, after all, that the vagus nerve, which innervates the entire digestive system and all of the other visceral organs of the body, organizes a certain type of thought that people use to make decisions, namely the “emotional intelligence” of the body. Some trauma-informed therapists like Dr. Peter Levine, have labeled this emotion-based-thinking-and-decision-making the “felt sense”. While you might have been taught to believe that decisions should be made on the basis of logic or that people should try not to make emotion-based decisions, in fact, if the emotion centers of your brain are destroyed in a stroke, for example,, you’ll never make another decision about anything that you do for the rest of your life. Destroy your emotion-based brain centers and you won’t even be able to decide to get out of bed, let alone which pair of pants to wear for the day. Someone will have to help you “decide” to brush your teeth and comb your hair. As it turns out, every decision that we make in our lives is emotion-based and not logical. If you’ve never noticed yourself making illogical, emotion-based decisions, you might begin to notice this aspect of your human self now.
In the modern era, Dr. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal theory acknowledges the vagus nerve as the primary player in the recognition of emotions by humans. The two parts of the vagus nerve, the dorsal and ventral branches work together to help humans navigate complex social situations and activate survival related sequences intended to keep the body itself safe from imminent dangers in the environment. The vagus nerve innervates the organs of digestion as well as the lungs, heart, bladder, and kidneys. If we consider emotion and emotional intelligence as something that comes from the organs and data that the vagus nerve delivers to the brain some of the theories of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) make more sense. TCM says that the various organs are the seat of different emotions. The liver, for example, is where anger is stored and processes. The gallbladder is the site of curiosity and interest. The pancreas deals with trust and mistrust. In the TCM system, which is thousands of years old, organs like the lungs would store grief and sadness. This makes sense logically in that we feel grief and sadness as something very heavy in the chest. The heart, in contrast, is the organ of joy and this is, in fact, the area of the body where people feel happiness and joyful feelings when they occur.
A TCM practitioner might ask a patient if he or she has experienced anything that has been emotionally significant to relate to a particular set of physical symptoms in the body. Someone schooled in TCM might then be able to use logic to be able to understand connection between emotional experiences and physical manifestations of disease.
In the west, we’ve been taught that no such connection between mind and body exists. A doctor of conventional medicine does not acknowledge that we feel emotions in our physical body and that these emotions can actually change our biological trajectory. In fact, westerners typically discuss their emotions with their doctor if they wish to have emotions go away. There is no acknowledgement either in medicine or in psychology that an emotion might carry with it information that might be valuable to the person experiencing it.
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Feeling and Thinking Organs
In future discussions, we’re going to elaborate more on the vagus nerve and its function in helping us make appropriate facial expressions and to recognize facial expressions in others. Studies have shown that the vagus nerve works to help us recognize emotions through facial movements, including eye region movements, and whole images of facial movements (but not static images). In other words, the vagus nerve can provide us with a sense of what another person is trying to say, not saying and trying to hide, or saying with honesty and transparency, when we see that person in action. The vagus nerve makes inferences and humans are more likely to make social decisions on the basis of these vagal-nerve inferences than on the basis of linguistic material that’s exchanged between two people in a social situation. However, when we see just a photo of a person, the vagus nerve doesn’t play a role in emotion recognition. This suggests that we use logic, or the “left brain” to analyze photos of people. We use both the logical left brain and the intuitive right brain or “felt sense” to make decisions about social in-person or video interactions. The intuitive right brain intuits data from facial expressions and gesturing (body language) to provide us with data that’s weighted significantly more heavily than the words.
The doctors of the Middle Ages sensed intuitively (with their guts) that the stomach, small intestine, and large intestine were all important “thinking” organs even though they were hundreds of years away from establishing this idea through the discovery of “logical” scientific evidence. Without this kind of intuition about human existence, our bodies, the earth, our lives, our relationships, and more, logic really doesn’t even give us a place to start in terms of asking questions. Early medieval doctors believed the visceral, digestive organs were able to “think”. Five hundred years later, we’ve proven that this is, in fact, the case.
One could argue that the suppression of this idea, that the guts “think” and that these thoughts that are derived from the gut are equal if not more heavily weighted by us than the logical thoughts of our frontal-lobe-oriented mind is one of the major issues that contributes to gut-related diseases.
Let me explain…
When Logic and Emotion Disagree: Flat Affect and Digestive System Disease
Most people with Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, colorectal cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, and other serious digestive issues impacting the stomach, small intestine, or large intestine in particular, have issues making proper facial expressions in social situations. Many patients who suffer with severe gut-issues like those listed above make almost no facial expressions in social interactions and as a result, they have difficulty reading the facial expressions of others. Indeed, we are naturally wired to mirror other people’s facial expressions and gesturing to some extent not just to create rapport, but also to absorb the other person’s emotions into our own bodies. When a person mirrors another person’s facial expressions by smiling in response to another person’s smile, they absorb that person’s emotional content, in part through this natural mirroring reflex.
From our earliest moments on earth as humans, our bodies are wired to mirror facial expressions, language, and other aspects of our human experience as part of our social nature. This is why infants that are only a few weeks old can sometimes mirror words that are being spoken to them for a brief window of time before they’re old enough to actually understand words. A baby’s mirror-neurons make it possible for a newborn to say things like “I love you” (albeit in a very muddled way) if parents are saying these words to the baby over and over again. These words do not represent the development of actual language at this age. It is simply evidence of the backend code of our human existence that helps us survive. Mirror neurons help us understand and be understood even without a full understanding of the words that are being spoken to us.
When the organs of digestion have been hijacked in some dramatic, long-term way, we begin to lose our social faculties. In Polyvagal theory, the loss of facial expressions demonstrates that we are using only 2 of 3 of the branches of the autonomic nervous system. The three branches of this system include the following:
- The Sympathetic Nervous System which governs aspects of alert wakefulness and also fight-or-flight responses.
- The Parasympathetic Dorsal branch governs “freeze” or “play dead” responses that occur when the body feels overwhelmed by danger.
- The Parasympathetic Ventral branch governs rest-and digest states of healing. These states are triggered by pleasant social situations in particular.
If the digestive system is ailing and the person who is sick has a so-called “flat affect”, also known as a “poker face” or a lack of facial expressions in social situations, then this is a definite sign that the rest-and-digest function of the autonomic nervous system is imbalanced. A person who is no longer making facial expressions is also not able to derive other people’s feelings from social situations. As such, they lack a most basic type of empathy that functions to promote their survival. A person who is no longer making facial expressions cannot make subtle adjustments to their social navigation in relationships to ensure that they’re not “saying the wrong thing” or “doing the wrong thing”. Inability to make facial expressions, which manifests as a sign of digestive system disease, is often also evidence of either some form of chronic stress or some type of major trauma (biological, toxicological, or emotional).
In fact, when a person loses the basic faculty of being able to mirror another person’s facial expressions and gestures because there’s something going wrong at the level of the ventral vagal nerve system that innervates the gut, strange things begin to happen. The body’s normal hormonal response is hijacked and adrenaline release can become prolonged in response to minor stressors. Histamine, which is normally under the dominion of adrenaline and noradrenaline takes on a life of its own and it begins to function according to its own whims. When histamine levels are triggered and then remain high as a result of this type of hijacked emotional response, adrenaline levels also remain high and fight-or-flight states can be prolonged unnecessarily. Rest-and-digest states become more and more scarce which means that the body has trouble restoring balance to the autonomic nervous system through healing states wherein the ventral vagal nerve tends to organs in the digestive system.
There’s a recursive effect that happens when a person stops being able to make facial expressions because their gut is so disordered. The lack of facial expressions contributes to ongoing relationship issues and a deepening sense of isolation from other people. As isolation becomes more and more intense, digestive system health becomes even more imperilled by the lack of rest-and-digest states that are triggered most powerfully by pleasant and enjoyable social interactions.
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Bridging the Dual Nature of a Human with Alpha Brainwave States
Another way to look at this problem is to think of a human being as an entity that is, by nature, built out of two separate selves – the right brain “self” that’s intuitive and the left brain “self” that’s logical. These two “selves” are in constant conflict with each other. They regularly disagree, but can come to a consensus when the body goes into an alpha-brainwave state that allows the right brain and left brain to communicate across this brainwave “bridge”. The alpha-brainwave state is active, but also restful. This is the brainwave state wherein we have so-called “peak experiences” of total engagement in an enjoyable, yet challenging activity. It is the brainwave state through which we must pass in order to experience a healthy sleep structure throughout the night. Without alpha brainwave states to punctuate a normal day, the logical left brain begins to look with disdain and disgust at the right brain’s intuition. The monkey-brain of chatter and judgemental, toxic thoughts takes shape within this type of milieu. For example, a person with a digestive system disorder might feel intuitively that something in their life needs to change – a lifestyle change– but the doctor says that there’s a drug that can help get rid of the symptoms of disease. The doctor doesn’t care about the patient’s feelings and doesn’t have time to discuss the patient’s lifestyle issues. A part of this patient might feel happy that the doctor offered him or her a drug while another part, the gut, might feel neglected and upset. This patient is likely to think that he or she needs to “get over it” (the digestive system issues) as quickly as possible. Digestive symptoms might even make the patient do a lot of negative self-talk. This can lead to depression, anxiety, and hopelessness in an addition to physical digestive system symptoms. People in this situation begin to lose hope in their own ability to heal themselves or to be able to use their intuition and “felt sense” to seek out legitimate healing from others. If every healer / doctor / health practitioner out there is only interested in administering factory-production-mold treatments that don’t interface with the data in the digestive system itself, the patient may never find the treatment they need. If that patient has no idea that their gut issues have to do with emotions and data that they carry in the body itself – in the organs and tissues – about the root cause of their disease, they’re at a huge disadvantage in finding a cure.
Alpha brainwave states exist between theta brainwave states (very restful and sleep states) and beta brainwave states (wakeful and alert states). Alpha states can become scary if a person is not able to regularly go into this “bridge” state of awareness in order to retrieve what’s been collected in the theta brainwave state cache of intuition. When alpha brainwave states begin to feel scary, sleep is disrupted. When sleep and dreaming is disrupted, health problems begin to appear. If you’re reading this book because you or a loved one has a digestive system disease, then you need to know that alpha states can literally help you figure out how to cure your own disease. A loved one can use alpha state to gain access to information about your digestive system disease.
Not only can alpha states help a person heal simply by discharging negative energy in the gut, but they can also help you gain access to information about how to heal. When you body passes through an alpha brainwave state, even very briefly, there’s an opportunity for the organs of the body to communicate with the logical, left-brain. This is a very basic description of “intuition” as the sense of knowing something that isn’t formally known or empirically verifiable yet.
How the Brain Structure is Changed by Digestive System Disease
In people with Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis that’s been present for many years, the structure of the brain is altered such that the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure in the limbic system, stops processing emotions properly as well as pain and sensory information. Alterations in the functional connection between the amygdala and other brain structures involved in processing organ pain, sensory data, and emotions might be used as a metaphor that we’ve finally arrived at to describe the historical path from medicine in the Middle Ages to medicine in the modern era. Back in the Middle Ages, doctors readily discussed and recognized that the gut played a role in thinking. They didn’t formally know that this was true – they could say, at that time, that organs “think” and carry data as a verified fact. But their own experience with their own bodies as humans gave them an intuition about the organs and this process of “thinking” that’s different from the thinking done in the brain. Today, we’ve proven that yes, the organs think. Organs feel and they carry a certain type of information that piggybacks (so to speak) on the back of emotions. A gut that’s sick changes the entire wiring of the brain such that our senses and emotions and even our experience of pain becomes perturbed. A patient with a perturbance in the body and a perturbance in the brain would also have a perturbance in their experience of reality. So then the question is, Can you change reality, the body, and the brain back into something less painful and less perturbed?
The logical left brain will argue that it is impossible to change these things, based on the pop-culture belief that that the brain is not changeable or plastic and that reality is a non-negotiable experience that we all share. The logical left brain is not superstitious and doesn’t believe in magic or miracles. So if you rely on this part of yourself to go about your life with a digestive system disease, it will be hard for you to overcome it. On the other hand though, every human, including each of our readers, has a part of themselves that believes in something that’s improbable but not necessarily impossible. Every person reading this book believes in something that has not yet been proven to be an absolute fact. This is the part of yourself that you have to use in order to overcome a serious digestive system issue. It’s the part of you that believed in magical things when you were just a little kid.
A human who develops a serious digestive issue cannot speak of emotions within the context of medicine because medicine and psychology are, in the modern era, entirely separate domains. To speak of emotions, we have to go to a psychologist. Psychiatrists don’t really care about emotions except in terms of drugs that can be used to modify them and cover them up. And today’s psychologists are mostly in the dark about how the mind connects to the body. Psychologists are chided not to consider such frivolities. They’re scientists, after all, and they need to work with only the parts of humans that you can see and observe with the five senses. This is a real issue in psychology, but humans mask themselves, divide themselves into pieces, and sometimes “zone out” and go to far away places in their minds. A psychology that can’t intuit what’s happening to a person who has “tuned out” isn’t very interesting and isn’t very powerful or useful. Only the trauma-informed therapies, biofeedback or neurofeedback, and somatic therapies have dared to push into this No Man’s Land of mind-body connections. These therapies remain mostly hidden to most patients who arrive at a doctor’s office or at a psychology clinic simply because doctors and psychologists are educated to stay away from the mind-body connection because, they’re taught that such a thing doesn’t exist. Rewind thousands of years back to your first civilized ancestors as they began to notice for the first time that seeds from plants could be planted in fields and you’ll find that shamanism was the only system of medicine and shamanism was entirely focused on this No Man’s Land of the mind-body connection.
The whole goal of a shaman is to download the data that’s being stored in the body and navigate realms of consciousness to find cures using plants or venoms, or other tools that may not have even had names at that time. Without this system of medicine, shamanism, none of us would exist today.
The more that the belief that the connection between mind and body doesn’t exist or that it’s too ephemeral for us to study or experience quantitatively, the more twisted our gut, our intuition becomes. Intuitively, we know with the gut-brain, that there’s a connection between our logical, mental faculties, and the intuitive faculties, but we’ve been taught from infancy to ignore the connections and give no credence to intuition. In other words, we literally ignore our gut in many matters. In response, the gut gets twisted, inflamed, and irritated. This is not to say that Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis is caused entirely by emotional content, but that, when things start to go wrong with the gut, we listen to words spoken by doctors even if they don’t resonate with the gut itself. The doctor says, “take a pill” or “there’s nothing wrong with you”, and though the gut tells us otherwise, we’ve been socialized to listen to the doctor rather than listening to this “other brain” and other source of thought that we carry inside of us from the moment of conception.
The left brain is logical and it values rules. The left brain wants to follow authority figures at the clinic, at the hospital, at work, at home, in the community, and in all of the settings where fitting in is desirable. But the organs and the gut sometimes require something more inspired than antiquated rules that may simply need to be updated. The right-brain is the part of us that creatively finds loopholes while the left-brain tries hard to be an upstanding citizen. If you have a digestive system issues, you have to work with both sides (the left brain and the right brain) to resolve the inner conflict and better understand what your body is trying to tell your logical mind.
Before we can speak or understand words, our bodies can know the tone of a voice and recognize it as either safe or unsafe. But we teach babies from a young age to listen to a person’s words instead of listening to this inborn mechanism that works constantly to help us survive.
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The Ancient Physicians’ View of the Digestive System
Galen was a Roman and Greek physician and philosopher who lived between 129 and 216 C. E. He was the most accomplished doctor of antiquity and he was one of the first doctors to write about the stomach, intestines, and colon. He viewed the stomach as an animate entity, a being with its own life that could feel itself. In other words, Galen regarded the stomach as intelligent. It could generate the sensation of hunger, break down food and separate the final product into useful and non-useful parts.
Galen viewed the intestines as more passive that used length and thickness to absorb nutrients and keep waste properly contained. He noted that the convolutions of the human intestine allow us to “hold our poop” (so to speak) so that we can engage in other pursuits like music and philosophy. A cow or a horse poops almost continuously. Thus, even in ancient times, doctors noted this conflict between the body (what we often refer to as the right brain or “felt sense”) and mental pursuits (what we refer to as the left-brain or the logical-narrative mind). A human body can retain waste products in order to pursue music, writing, art, and other “intellectual” activities. But what happens when the digestive system no longer agrees to retain the poop in pursuit of intellect?
Another famous Persian physician known in the west as Avicenna, is often described as the father of modern medicine. He lived much later than Galen between 980 and 1037 C.E. He was a jack-of-all trades who wrote about everything from astronomy and alchemy to psychology and poetry. His writings were included in the early curricula for many medical schools. Avicenna was, for the most part, less concerned about the anatomy of the digestive system and more concerned about nutrition as a way to establish and maintain health in the gut. In contrast, today’s modern doctor often never takes even one single class on nutrition before becoming a doctor. But even Avicenna, a doctor who lived over 1000 years ago noted accurately that, "A small amount of movement or activity after a meal allows the food to descend to the fundus of the stomach, especially if after this there is a desire to sleep. Mental excitement or emotion; vigorous exercise; these hinder digestion".
Avicenna noted that mild activity (like a relaxing walk, for example) followed by a “desire to sleep” after eating was indicative of food descending in a healthy way to the small intestine. Indeed, this “desire to sleep” noted by this doctor from the pre-early 1000s is the rest-and-digest vagus nerve mode that our bodies require in order to properly digest our food. The mental excitement and emotion and vigorous exercise that Avicenna talks about as hindering digestion is exactly what we’ve discussed above – fight-or-flight states in particular – that can hijack digestion and, with long-term activation without regular rest-and-digest states, can lead to bursts of histamine that are released without permission from the autonomic control station that normally maintains the human body as a balanced organism that cycles through states of alertness and states of rest throughout a normal day.
At this time in history, between the early 1000s and 1500s when Christianity became a state-sponsored and enforced religion, the stomach began to be viewed by many doctors as a cold and dry organ that played a central role in human health. It was during this era that doctors stopped viewing the stomach as an active, living being with its own “mind” and instead, they began to believe that the stomach was passive and “unspiritual”. This historical trajectory may have taken shape as a result of the unappealing products produced by the stomach, but one could also argue that, as Christianity became enforced as a state religion, ideas about the body changed to accommodate for beliefs about the inherent “sinfulness” of certain organs.
During this period of history, around the year 1000, the “unspiritual” stomach was still recognized as important (the gallbladder, for example, has gone out of vogue over the past 100 years with doctors viewing it as an unnecessary organ that’s removed from the bodies of about 750,000 people annually in the U.S.) but the stomach’s lack of spirituality is worth noting here with emphasis. This was the era, over 1000 years ago, when humans began to vilify the body and view its organs as “parts”. Some of these parts began to be viewed in common, elite culture, as good and essential (the brain for example), while others were viewed as expendable and even evil. Science and the scientific method grew out of these ideals to try to tame the terrifying era of witch-burnings and the Inquisition. Science itself is neither good nor bad, but the idea of science has been used to create a reality that doesn’t see the body as a whole unit.
One could argue that logic is something that has been highly valued for the past 2000 years since the birth of Christ and the rise of Christianity. Science is a testament to this love of logic. The right brain and our natural “felt sense” has been viewed more and more as an evil, immature part of us that must be brought under totalitarian control. Spare the rod and spoil the child. If the digestive system were a child, we would be a society that puts that child into a permanent time-out using dug-restraints to hush the cries and screams.
It wasn’t until Leonardo da Vinci began writing about the human body that the digestive system’s impact on the respiratory system and vice versa was finally noted perhaps because he lived during the Reformation, just after the discovery of the New World. The Reformation was a time when church authority abated somewhat and science became an escape-hatch for logical thinkers who wished to build on the written knowledge passed down since antiquity. Nonetheless, by the 1500s, something called the Chain of Being was well-known and propagated through diagrams as a popular map of the Universe that depicted God at the top and humans above animals. Da Vinci took this concept and developed an idea about a cascade of events that led to the breath of life and active breathing in humans. Da Vinci, after all, was famous for his ability to translate the macrocosm of the Universe into the microcosm of the human form. He noted that when the abdominal muscles contract, the intestines rise up which leads to an upward thrust of the diaphragm, the muscle that causes the movement in the body that leads to breath. He believed that condensed air from the intestines played a role in diaphragm movement and that this air in the intestines was what drove air out of the lungs so that a person could breathe. In reality, we know now that the lungs, when they expand as a result of relaxation of the abdominal muscles, the bowels move downward and are massaged mildly. We also know that the respiratory system and the digestive system are not distinct. In fact, as an example, asthma, a respiratory disease characterized by episodes of bronchial constriction and difficulty breathing, which has been blamed on allergens, is actually more heavily correlated in the scientific literature with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), a digestive system issue that involves a backflow of acid and undigested food particle from the stomach into the esophagus. The acids and food particulates that reflux in GERD patients are what are actually causing bronchial irritation when they’re inhaled into the lungs inadvertently. Treating digestive system issues can significantly reduce the frequency of asthma attacks, but for most patients, Lugol’s iodine is essential to overcome asthma permanently because of the role that iodine plays in regulating reproductive hormones.
In any case, back when Leonardo da Vinci was alive, there was comparatively very little written about medicine and the human body. He used his creative mind, his “felt sense” to navigate what the popular culture at that time believed to be true and expand on it. But before da Vinci, were thousands of years of shaman who had had nothing but oral tradition and felt sense, to find cures for serious diseases within their tribe. The shaman of one tribe didn’t have the wisdom of the shaman from other tribes. Yet, these medicine men and women kept humanity alive during the earliest, most challenging times in the history of our planet. They had no logical information, no science, no books to reference in order to solve problems. All they had was the “felt sense” and intuition to make life-or-death decisions.
Traditional Chinese Medicine Influences in the History of Western Conventional Medicine
Between 1150 and 1200 C.E., Master Nicolaus, the author of a pre-Renaissance era anatomy text, noted that the liver acts like a fire underneath the cauldron of the stomach. The cold, dryness of the stomach, according to this assessment, could be transformed by the fiery heat of the liver. Master Nicolaus went on to say that the gallbladder might be likened to the cook that unites, through its action in the body, the cauldron of the stomach and the fire of the liver. This metaphor about fires, cauldrons, and cooks is similar to the views of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and it’s classification system using heat and cold, dampness and dryness along with the idea that hollow organs and solid organs pair up to function a bit like a copper coil and magnet. Hollow organs and solid organs, in TCM, might be likened to a self-energizing battery system when both organs in a pair are functioning well.
There are, in fact, parallels between the Greek and Roman systems of medicine that developed in antiquity and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The Hippocratic Corpus (writings of Hippocrates, one of the most important physicians from antiquity) and a Chinese medical textbook known as the Huáng Dì Nèi Jīng, a famous Chinese text both discuss hollow tubes or ducts that connect organs in the body. While Chinese scholars have long acknowledged the relationship between the Hippocratic channels and the similarities it has with the Chinese meridian system, modern conventional medicine pretends that the meridian system that’s used by TCM practitioners is completely foreign and possibly useless.
Hippocrates is often regarded as the father of modern medicine. All doctors are familiar with the Hippocratic oath that declares that a physician should “do no harm” though, in today’s world, most doctors have no idea what constitutes harm and what does not as they are educated under a curriculum developed by pharmaceutical companies that have denounced cures for disease as being “bad for business”. But Hippocrates is an important figure in modern conventional medicine and most people have a passing familiarity with his work.
In the metaphor of the stomach as cauldron, the liver as the fire, and the gallbladder as a cook, the small intestine, and the colon act as “colanders” (in fact, the word “colon” comes from the same Latin root word “colatorium” which means “strainer” – an interesting play on this word exists in regard to intestines and constipation). In TCM, the liver is where anger is stored when it can’t be released or properly integrated by the logical, left-brain. The feeling of anger, ideally, goes across an alpha-brainwave state as a bridge leading to the left-brain where (hopefully) logical thoughts will be able to calm the emotion of anger, not with force, but with balance. While the heart deals with joy, the lungs with sadness and grief, the spleen and stomach are a unit in the body that carries the weight of worry, overthinking, and anxiety.
The gallbladder, in TCM, deals with curiosity and interest. When the gallbladder is sick, we lose interest and feel apathy about things that would normally attract our attention. We can notice this feeling of apathy with the left, logical brain and if we’re aware of the fact that gallbladder issues cause this kind of apathy, we might treat ourselves using therapies designed to alleviate gallbladder woes.
When daily stressors are transformed into powerful fears, the kidneys are the organs that step forward to take the hit. Master Nicolaus’ metaphor in his anatomy textbook about the fire in the liver and the cauldron (of worry?) in the stomach is just one of several pieces of evidence that, in ancient times, theories about medicine and the digestive system had been informed by alternative systems of medicine like TCM. As such, the history of TCM is also the history of conventional medicine, albeit a part of history that has been rejected by modern doctors.
Christian Views of the Stomach
When I was in my early 20s, I used to write people’s biographies and I often spent time researching the history of the cities where my subjects grew up. This yielded some interesting insights that I still carry with me today. I found then, as I still do today, that it’s hard to separate a person’s personality from where they spent their childhood and where their families-of-origin grew up. And if I look back hundreds of years into the past, I can still see evidence of major historical events in a specific geographical region 10 generations later.For the most part, the people who read our books are Christian or they live in countries of the world that are predominantly Christian. As such, whether the reader himself or herself is Christian or not they’ve been heavily influenced by the values of Christianity as these rules have been imposed on different aspects of life. This includes medicine, which has been profoundly impacted by Christianity as an institution.
While the Chinese culture followed a very different path through history to arrive at the current milieu that makes up a Chinese person’s daily life, Westerners have been influenced by a very different set of values in terms of medicine. TCM has existed in its current form for thousands of years and originated from herbalism and also shamanic practices before it was recognized that the animating principle known as “chi” was vital in promoting health and balance in the body.
If you are a Westerner who is reading this book in order to try to understand how to heal a digestive system issue and you’re ready to expand your horizons and think outside of the box, then we need to look at some of the latent beliefs about the stomach and digestion that come from antiquity. Some of the beliefs about the body that have been packaged into modern medicine are still evident in the way that we work with the body in hospitals and clinics. In order to make peace with the digestive system, it’s important to cast light on the wars that were declared hundreds of years ago against the body.
Just before the Reformation and then the Renaissance, when Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth were alive and doing work on the planet, the stomach was regarded as the lowest organ in the body due to its “uncleanliness”. Alessandro Benedetti, the surgeon general for the Venetian army, wrote in 1497 that the stomach and bowels were farther away from the brain and the “site of reason” and “fenced off by the diaphragm” in order to “not disturb the rational part of the mind with its importunity”. Benedetti believed that the organs of digestion existed solely to serve the “rational”, logical mind.
But what if your stomach and your digestive organs revolt against this type of tyranny by the left-brain? What if you are among the modern humans living with a gut that is no longer willing or able to live in service to the rules and ideals imposed by the logical mind?
Alessandro Benedetti also believed that the stomach was conscious of itself and perhaps greedy in its requirements of blood and moisture. Andreas de Laguna, a doctor just 40 years Benedetti’s contemporary, acknowledged that, alas, if the stomach’s function was impaired, the rest of the body was in great peril. No matter who is discussing the matter of the digestive organs, there is a tendency to anthropomorphize them, likely because unconsciously (without knowing that an “unconscious mind” existed at that time), these ancient masters were still aware that the vagus nerve collected the meandering data from the organs and that each organ therefore possessed a mind that can, at times, cast an independent vote and revolt against the left, logical brain.
So many of us in today’s world are encouraged to go to war against our bodies and the “unspiritual” organs. We sign up for surgeries to remove whole organs and replace them with plastic substitutes. It seems nearly impossible to negotiate treaties with these organs that refuse to bow to the One True God of Christianity or Islam (as they are, technically, the same God). In order to heal the digestive system, it isn’t necessary to take up a new religion or deny the existence of God. What is necessary, though, is a willingness to admit that there are at least two parts of our human being – our human existence. There is a rational, logical, linguistic part that can follow rules and that can appreciate the importance of having limits and boundaries to keep ourselves safe. But there is also a part of us that does not possess words, but that rather works primarily in symbols, gestures, movements, and non-linguistic sound. This part of us is the “felt sense” that we’re born with, before we develop words and we need this part in order to survive. It is this part of us that will stop following the rules when the rules are harming us. This is the part of us that will act to save our own or a loved one’s life without any rational, conscious thought. Should a loved one step in front of a moving bus, this part of us will (likely) act (although the “freeze response” is also an common reaction in a situation like this) without forming a plan, and without regard for rules that are being imposed on us. If your digestive system is revolting against what the left brain wants for you to do in your daily life, what is it trying to tell you? What is your digestive system dis-ease trying to save you from?
Using Gut to Heal the Gut
In the modern world, science and logic is everything. Illogical things are stupid. Intuition has no place in most social situations. In public places, logic is all that matters. If you happen to be one of those people who can see apparitions or have visions of the future, you’re out of luck and probably crazy. These things can’t be observed using the existing tools of science, so they aren’t relevant.Maybe you’re a person who has a good job that pays well. A part of you hates what you do, but logic says that you should be happy because you make plenty of money. No one wants to hear you complain about how you feel about your well-paying job. So you keep your mouth shut about what you feel and instead stick only to dialogue about how great your job is.
My personal experience with my own gut took me pretty far afield years ago when I developed fibromyalgia after a brief stomach upset, a couple of pukes, and a fever one night after quitting my job as a social worker in Colorado. My husband John and I had recently had a stillborn baby and we’d moved twice in one year. We had a healthy girl who was 2 years old, Lydian, and though John had stayed home with her for nearly a year, it was now my turn to go back to being the homemaker. John would be working 60 to 80 hour weeks, so I was alone at home with little Lydian.
I could barely walk at this time. I couldn’t pull up the blankets on the bed at night sometimes. But I had to figure out how to get through a day with my 2 year old because I had no choice. There was no one to help and no one who cared about my pain. So I paid close attention to myself as there was no Internet that I could query to try to find “rational” answers to my questions.
I took note of absolutely anything that seemed to help relieve my pain and anything that seemed to make it worse. This was how I healed myself.
It took a long time, in retrospect. I never took drugs and I never uttered the word fibromyalgia except once to my husband after I left the clinic on the day of my so-called “diagnosis”. The doctor didn’t even look at me when he sentenced me to this lifetime of agony with fibromyalgia and seemed irritated by my mere presence in his office as he explained that “there is no cure and no treatment”. But I was lucky. I’d studied to become a doctor and I’d dropped out because I could see that the system had major problems and I didn’t want to be involved in it anymore. I had already lost faith in conventional medicine and that was a lucky strike for me.
I didn’t know, at that time, that there was a relationship between fibromyalgia and gut issues, but food and drink - my diet - became the object of my attention that yielded the most positive results in the years that followed. I used intuition and my own felt sense – literally the feelings in my body – to follow myself out of the jungle of this dis-ease.
Today, almost 25 years later, I’ve been free of fibromyalgia for 20 years. I know so much more now than I did back then. I have a lot more book knowledge, but I also have some body wisdom from having worked with the sacred medicines. This wisdom is non-transferable though. I can speak about it, but people who haven’t worked with the sacred medicines or other trauma-informed therapies are unlikely to be able to hear me. Also, I tend to believe that my wisdom is only mine and can only really be helpful to my family members and friends who are willing to step into a familial role temporarily, mostly just to find their own unique body-wisdom for their own lineages through work with the sacred medicines. When I write about the sacred medicines and the things that I’ve learned from the medicines themselves, I always try to find science to back it up because I know that we live in a world of left-brain thinkers who have little or no access to their intuition and body-wisdom anymore. Science can cut both ways and often, when a major discovery is made that could cure a lot of people, Big Pharma hires scientist-underlings who go to work to produce research that runs contrary to the big discovery of a curative treatment. Anyone who spends enough time in the scientific research library will find that in order to find the information that can be helpful and useful in a particular health-related situation, you still have to use your intuition. Anyone, in fact, can access body-wisdom and the intuition derived from it to heal themselves, but there’s work involved and a lot of self-confrontation to get past the skeletons in the closet – all of the trauma that we carry with us…trauma that needs to be released and integrated. No one works with the sacred medicines alone and no one works only on behalf of themselves. Whatever work we do on ourselves is work that we do on our whole tribe to change the growth trajectory of the entire family tree. An Ayahuasca purge is always done into the great abyss on behalf of the ancestry and for the future generations.
But needless to say, on my way from my 20s to now, I passed through a period of egotism where I collected and memorized data. But even as I was building resumes and a curriculum vitae to impress the Big Powerful Ones and the masses, I traveled to experience what seemed, for many years, to be “primitive” systems of medicine. These systems of medicine seemed primitive to me only because this was a word I’d been taught to use to describe systems of medicine that are based, at their core, on Nature and metaphors of nature. Many, but not all, of these systems of medicine were shamanic or related closely to shamanism. I didn’t know this at the time.
Travel to “undeveloped” and poor nations that still host ethnic groups that haven’t been entirely convinced of the absolute legitimacy of conventional medicine created many opportunities for me (and for Lydian, who was always at my side), to become ill ourselves and have no other choice, but accept treatment from a system of medicine that seemed “dirty” or “superstitious”. Part of what healed me of my illness were illnesses that forced me to accept treatments that made no sense to my logical mind. When I traveled, especially to far off places where no discernible paths existed at times through the landscape, I put my body into a position where its importance as the source of intuition was essential. And slowly, over the course of more than a decade, I began to listen to what my body had to say.
If one of us (me, my husband, or my daughter) got sick in a place where there was no doctor, we were forced to trust either ourselves or the medicine men and women who presented themselves to us. I would argue that we were sick because our bodies were trying with desperation to lead us to the people who still knew The Old Ways of medicine that still to this day, involves intuition as The Guide. We worked with a lot of practitioners who didn’t speak our language. One of the healers in Cambodia was both blind and deaf. I learned that communication was less about words and linguistics than I’d always thought. I could communicate with someone who didn’t share a single word in common with me if that person was motivated to understand me. I also had to motivated to communicate with that person. This was the single most important ingredient that I needed in order to be able to say something to another person and be understood and also to understand even when language was not a tool that we could use.
As someone who lives in a foreign country (Mexico) full-time, I’ve learned through the sacred medicines that language is not what I think it is. The words in a foreign language that enter my mind bubble up when the other person is tuned in on some level and listening to me. When I have no words or when the words make me nervous or if I feel forced to speak, I pay close attention to the person I’m speaking to. Whenever possible, I pay attention to what I sense in my body first before I speak.
Medicine is something that’s been developed over the centuries along two veins:
- Along a course that involves observation of parts and pieces and a mathematical type of logic in terms of how these parts and pieces are or might be related.
- Along a course that involves the use of intuition and reference to the “gut” to feel what’s right or what’s wrong in terms of a given medicine.
When I was younger, I studied medicine according to parts and pieces and logic, but it wasn’t until Lydian became an adult that she and I were forced to abandon these methods and learn a new way to use them. Living in a foreign country whose population doesn’t speak English as its primary language made me more aware of myself in terms of my tongue and my words. What I can express to another person in Spanish using words has, of course, become more precise, but my awareness of the “felt sense” to understand what another person says to me or intends to say is on full blast because it has to be. People regularly use idioms and phrases from deep cultural underpinnings that I can’t understand readily. Many people who use idioms and phrases like this aren’t aware of what the real meaning of these phrases are themselves so I can’t ask a person for their meaning because they don’t really know it. These are just some of the strange limitations of the logical left-brain. To be fair, the right-brain / felt sense also has limitations, but the trick is to try to get these two parts of ourselves to work together as fluently as possible, especially if you have digestive system issues.
How to Find Healers Who Can Heal the Gut When Your Gut Is Sick
If your gut is sick, then your felt sense is not working properly and you might struggle in tuning into your own intuition. You might not be at the top of your game in judging another person’s character if your gut isn’t healthy because you aren’t recognizing facial expressions and you probably aren’t making a lot of authentic facial expressions yourself. Your body language may not be saying what you want for it to say. Your vocal tones and inflections may also be a bit “off”. So what can you do about this? How can you find someone to help you, health-wise, with your digestive system issues if your gut isn’t able to lead you in the right direction?In reality, you gut is probably still going to talk to you and tell you what it needs even when you’re sick. The problem is that your left-brain won’t believe what your gut has to say. Most of our digestive system clients are very hard on themselves emotionally. They have a tendency toward extreme self-judgment and self-frustration. So while your gut might be telling you exactly what works for it and what doesn’t, your left brain is likely to make fun of this “felt sense”.
When you’re trying to find a healer to help you with your digestive system issues, find people with whom you can communicate easily and fluently. Try new healers often and ask yourself if you felt relaxed physically while working with them. Be aware that your left-brain will likely have a lot to say and many concerns in anticipation of meeting with healers whether the healers are good for you or not. But if you feel repulsed prior to a meeting with a health practitioner and your gut says, “No!” in no-uncertain-terms, then you should listen to that. Perhaps the timing for the meeting is wrong or perhaps the healer himself or herself is the wrong person for you at this time. Today is today. If your meeting with a healer feels utterly wrong, follow that guidance for the day. You ask yourself / your body again tomorrow about working with that person and see if you get a different answer.
Summary
In this series, we’re going to provide an overview of the digestive system along with cures for digestive system diseases. Our view of the digestive system takes into account the emotional aspects of the body’s felt sense as well as physical aspects of disease. Our model takes into consideration a number of other medical models that we’ll discuss as we go along.It doesn’t matter if you’re just beginning to attempt to heal the digestive system or if you’ve been working on your digestion for 2 decades without success. Our goal here is to give you new leads that will lead you toward the right treatments and empower our readers to work with medicines that have been used for centuries to literally teach shaman what treatments are needed to cure a disease (even if the shaman has never seen or heard of that treatment prior to the plant showing it to them). Most of our readers want to avoid the sacred medicines, but the sacred medicines offer a detour out of the mess of conventional medicine to reconnect people with their own bodies.
Resources:
• No Author (n.d.). A History of the Stomach and Intestines. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://web.stanford.edu/class/history13/earlysciencelab/body1/stomachpages/stomachcolonintestines.html#:~:text=During%20medieval%20times%2C%20anatomists%20had,less%20concerned%20about%20descriptive%20anatomy.
• Steenbergen, L. et al. (2021). Recognizing emotions in bodies: Vagus nerve stimulation enhances recognition of anger while impairing sadness. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8563521/
• Hickok, G. (2011). The Role of Mirror Neurons in Speech and Language Processing. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2813993/
• Fan, Y. et al. (2020). Altered functional connectivity of the amygdala in Crohn’s disease. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31628591/
• Grandes, X. A. et al. (2022). Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease and Asthma: A Narrative Review. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9187188/
• Corner, G. W. (1927). The Anatomy of Master Nicolaus, ca. 1150-1200. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://web.stanford.edu/class/history13/Readings/corner2.htm
• Paulo, R. F. and Zhang, Q. C. (2022). Liver and gall bladder channel parallels in the Hippocratic Corpus and Huang Di Nei Jing with theoretical considerations. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2225411021001401
• Craik, E. M. (2009). Hippocratic Bodily “Channels” and Oriental Parallels. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2629169/#:~:text=In%20the%20Hippocratic%20Corpus%2C%20the,a%20healthy%20and%20unhealthy%20state.
Over the course of time, the human body has been divided into separate parts by different systems of medicine. Conventional medicine is particularly famous for its tendency to divide in order to conquer the body. Of all of the parts that have been subdivided further into other, smaller parts, the tube that connects the mouth to the anus and all of the offshoots and organs that are directly connected to this tube have suffered most.
The digestive system as a whole unit has been known and studied since medieval times. Doctors in the Middle Ages studied the physical structure of the stomach, small intestines and colon and they understood that these organs played a role in the digestion of food. Though these doctors had little information from earlier eras about the digestive system as a whole, in many ways, these doctors were less impaired in terms of their view of digestion because their natural reflex was to view the various organs of digestion as a whole unit, rather than as separate parts. Doctors at that time recognized that if digestion in the stomach was somehow impaired, that all other functions in the digestive system might also be impaired.
In the Middle Ages, doctors believed that the stomach was an active organ that could “think” which demonstrates that the intuition of these medical professionals surpassed that of modern day doctors. It’s a proven fact, after all, that the vagus nerve, which innervates the entire digestive system and all of the other visceral organs of the body, organizes a certain type of thought that people use to make decisions, namely the “emotional intelligence” of the body. Some trauma-informed therapists like Dr. Peter Levine, have labeled this emotion-based-thinking-and-decision-making the “felt sense”. While you might have been taught to believe that decisions should be made on the basis of logic or that people should try not to make emotion-based decisions, in fact, if the emotion centers of your brain are destroyed in a stroke, for example,, you’ll never make another decision about anything that you do for the rest of your life. Destroy your emotion-based brain centers and you won’t even be able to decide to get out of bed, let alone which pair of pants to wear for the day. Someone will have to help you “decide” to brush your teeth and comb your hair. As it turns out, every decision that we make in our lives is emotion-based and not logical. If you’ve never noticed yourself making illogical, emotion-based decisions, you might begin to notice this aspect of your human self now.
In the modern era, Dr. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal theory acknowledges the vagus nerve as the primary player in the recognition of emotions by humans. The two parts of the vagus nerve, the dorsal and ventral branches work together to help humans navigate complex social situations and activate survival related sequences intended to keep the body itself safe from imminent dangers in the environment. The vagus nerve innervates the organs of digestion as well as the lungs, heart, bladder, and kidneys. If we consider emotion and emotional intelligence as something that comes from the organs and data that the vagus nerve delivers to the brain some of the theories of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) make more sense. TCM says that the various organs are the seat of different emotions. The liver, for example, is where anger is stored and processes. The gallbladder is the site of curiosity and interest. The pancreas deals with trust and mistrust. In the TCM system, which is thousands of years old, organs like the lungs would store grief and sadness. This makes sense logically in that we feel grief and sadness as something very heavy in the chest. The heart, in contrast, is the organ of joy and this is, in fact, the area of the body where people feel happiness and joyful feelings when they occur.
A TCM practitioner might ask a patient if he or she has experienced anything that has been emotionally significant to relate to a particular set of physical symptoms in the body. Someone schooled in TCM might then be able to use logic to be able to understand connection between emotional experiences and physical manifestations of disease.
In the west, we’ve been taught that no such connection between mind and body exists. A doctor of conventional medicine does not acknowledge that we feel emotions in our physical body and that these emotions can actually change our biological trajectory. In fact, westerners typically discuss their emotions with their doctor if they wish to have emotions go away. There is no acknowledgement either in medicine or in psychology that an emotion might carry with it information that might be valuable to the person experiencing it.
In future discussions, we’re going to elaborate more on the vagus nerve and its function in helping us make appropriate facial expressions and to recognize facial expressions in others. Studies have shown that the vagus nerve works to help us recognize emotions through facial movements, including eye region movements, and whole images of facial movements (but not static images). In other words, the vagus nerve can provide us with a sense of what another person is trying to say, not saying and trying to hide, or saying with honesty and transparency, when we see that person in action. The vagus nerve makes inferences and humans are more likely to make social decisions on the basis of these vagal-nerve inferences than on the basis of linguistic material that’s exchanged between two people in a social situation. However, when we see just a photo of a person, the vagus nerve doesn’t play a role in emotion recognition. This suggests that we use logic, or the “left brain” to analyze photos of people. We use both the logical left brain and the intuitive right brain or “felt sense” to make decisions about social in-person or video interactions. The intuitive right brain intuits data from facial expressions and gesturing (body language) to provide us with data that’s weighted significantly more heavily than the words.
The doctors of the Middle Ages sensed intuitively (with their guts) that the stomach, small intestine, and large intestine were all important “thinking” organs even though they were hundreds of years away from establishing this idea through the discovery of “logical” scientific evidence. Without this kind of intuition about human existence, our bodies, the earth, our lives, our relationships, and more, logic really doesn’t even give us a place to start in terms of asking questions. Early medieval doctors believed the visceral, digestive organs were able to “think”. Five hundred years later, we’ve proven that this is, in fact, the case.
One could argue that the suppression of this idea, that the guts “think” and that these thoughts that are derived from the gut are equal if not more heavily weighted by us than the logical thoughts of our frontal-lobe-oriented mind is one of the major issues that contributes to gut-related diseases.
Let me explain…
Most people with Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, colorectal cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, and other serious digestive issues impacting the stomach, small intestine, or large intestine in particular, have issues making proper facial expressions in social situations. Many patients who suffer with severe gut-issues like those listed above make almost no facial expressions in social interactions and as a result, they have difficulty reading the facial expressions of others. Indeed, we are naturally wired to mirror other people’s facial expressions and gesturing to some extent not just to create rapport, but also to absorb the other person’s emotions into our own bodies. When a person mirrors another person’s facial expressions by smiling in response to another person’s smile, they absorb that person’s emotional content, in part through this natural mirroring reflex.
From our earliest moments on earth as humans, our bodies are wired to mirror facial expressions, language, and other aspects of our human experience as part of our social nature. This is why infants that are only a few weeks old can sometimes mirror words that are being spoken to them for a brief window of time before they’re old enough to actually understand words. A baby’s mirror-neurons make it possible for a newborn to say things like “I love you” (albeit in a very muddled way) if parents are saying these words to the baby over and over again. These words do not represent the development of actual language at this age. It is simply evidence of the backend code of our human existence that helps us survive. Mirror neurons help us understand and be understood even without a full understanding of the words that are being spoken to us.
When the organs of digestion have been hijacked in some dramatic, long-term way, we begin to lose our social faculties. In Polyvagal theory, the loss of facial expressions demonstrates that we are using only 2 of 3 of the branches of the autonomic nervous system. The three branches of this system include the following:
If the digestive system is ailing and the person who is sick has a so-called “flat affect”, also known as a “poker face” or a lack of facial expressions in social situations, then this is a definite sign that the rest-and-digest function of the autonomic nervous system is imbalanced. A person who is no longer making facial expressions is also not able to derive other people’s feelings from social situations. As such, they lack a most basic type of empathy that functions to promote their survival. A person who is no longer making facial expressions cannot make subtle adjustments to their social navigation in relationships to ensure that they’re not “saying the wrong thing” or “doing the wrong thing”. Inability to make facial expressions, which manifests as a sign of digestive system disease, is often also evidence of either some form of chronic stress or some type of major trauma (biological, toxicological, or emotional).
In fact, when a person loses the basic faculty of being able to mirror another person’s facial expressions and gestures because there’s something going wrong at the level of the ventral vagal nerve system that innervates the gut, strange things begin to happen. The body’s normal hormonal response is hijacked and adrenaline release can become prolonged in response to minor stressors. Histamine, which is normally under the dominion of adrenaline and noradrenaline takes on a life of its own and it begins to function according to its own whims. When histamine levels are triggered and then remain high as a result of this type of hijacked emotional response, adrenaline levels also remain high and fight-or-flight states can be prolonged unnecessarily. Rest-and-digest states become more and more scarce which means that the body has trouble restoring balance to the autonomic nervous system through healing states wherein the ventral vagal nerve tends to organs in the digestive system.
There’s a recursive effect that happens when a person stops being able to make facial expressions because their gut is so disordered. The lack of facial expressions contributes to ongoing relationship issues and a deepening sense of isolation from other people. As isolation becomes more and more intense, digestive system health becomes even more imperilled by the lack of rest-and-digest states that are triggered most powerfully by pleasant and enjoyable social interactions.
Another way to look at this problem is to think of a human being as an entity that is, by nature, built out of two separate selves – the right brain “self” that’s intuitive and the left brain “self” that’s logical. These two “selves” are in constant conflict with each other. They regularly disagree, but can come to a consensus when the body goes into an alpha-brainwave state that allows the right brain and left brain to communicate across this brainwave “bridge”. The alpha-brainwave state is active, but also restful. This is the brainwave state wherein we have so-called “peak experiences” of total engagement in an enjoyable, yet challenging activity. It is the brainwave state through which we must pass in order to experience a healthy sleep structure throughout the night. Without alpha brainwave states to punctuate a normal day, the logical left brain begins to look with disdain and disgust at the right brain’s intuition. The monkey-brain of chatter and judgemental, toxic thoughts takes shape within this type of milieu. For example, a person with a digestive system disorder might feel intuitively that something in their life needs to change – a lifestyle change– but the doctor says that there’s a drug that can help get rid of the symptoms of disease. The doctor doesn’t care about the patient’s feelings and doesn’t have time to discuss the patient’s lifestyle issues. A part of this patient might feel happy that the doctor offered him or her a drug while another part, the gut, might feel neglected and upset. This patient is likely to think that he or she needs to “get over it” (the digestive system issues) as quickly as possible. Digestive symptoms might even make the patient do a lot of negative self-talk. This can lead to depression, anxiety, and hopelessness in an addition to physical digestive system symptoms. People in this situation begin to lose hope in their own ability to heal themselves or to be able to use their intuition and “felt sense” to seek out legitimate healing from others. If every healer / doctor / health practitioner out there is only interested in administering factory-production-mold treatments that don’t interface with the data in the digestive system itself, the patient may never find the treatment they need. If that patient has no idea that their gut issues have to do with emotions and data that they carry in the body itself – in the organs and tissues – about the root cause of their disease, they’re at a huge disadvantage in finding a cure.
Alpha brainwave states exist between theta brainwave states (very restful and sleep states) and beta brainwave states (wakeful and alert states). Alpha states can become scary if a person is not able to regularly go into this “bridge” state of awareness in order to retrieve what’s been collected in the theta brainwave state cache of intuition. When alpha brainwave states begin to feel scary, sleep is disrupted. When sleep and dreaming is disrupted, health problems begin to appear. If you’re reading this book because you or a loved one has a digestive system disease, then you need to know that alpha states can literally help you figure out how to cure your own disease. A loved one can use alpha state to gain access to information about your digestive system disease.
Not only can alpha states help a person heal simply by discharging negative energy in the gut, but they can also help you gain access to information about how to heal. When you body passes through an alpha brainwave state, even very briefly, there’s an opportunity for the organs of the body to communicate with the logical, left-brain. This is a very basic description of “intuition” as the sense of knowing something that isn’t formally known or empirically verifiable yet.
In people with Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis that’s been present for many years, the structure of the brain is altered such that the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure in the limbic system, stops processing emotions properly as well as pain and sensory information. Alterations in the functional connection between the amygdala and other brain structures involved in processing organ pain, sensory data, and emotions might be used as a metaphor that we’ve finally arrived at to describe the historical path from medicine in the Middle Ages to medicine in the modern era. Back in the Middle Ages, doctors readily discussed and recognized that the gut played a role in thinking. They didn’t formally know that this was true – they could say, at that time, that organs “think” and carry data as a verified fact. But their own experience with their own bodies as humans gave them an intuition about the organs and this process of “thinking” that’s different from the thinking done in the brain. Today, we’ve proven that yes, the organs think. Organs feel and they carry a certain type of information that piggybacks (so to speak) on the back of emotions. A gut that’s sick changes the entire wiring of the brain such that our senses and emotions and even our experience of pain becomes perturbed. A patient with a perturbance in the body and a perturbance in the brain would also have a perturbance in their experience of reality. So then the question is, Can you change reality, the body, and the brain back into something less painful and less perturbed?
The logical left brain will argue that it is impossible to change these things, based on the pop-culture belief that that the brain is not changeable or plastic and that reality is a non-negotiable experience that we all share. The logical left brain is not superstitious and doesn’t believe in magic or miracles. So if you rely on this part of yourself to go about your life with a digestive system disease, it will be hard for you to overcome it. On the other hand though, every human, including each of our readers, has a part of themselves that believes in something that’s improbable but not necessarily impossible. Every person reading this book believes in something that has not yet been proven to be an absolute fact. This is the part of yourself that you have to use in order to overcome a serious digestive system issue. It’s the part of you that believed in magical things when you were just a little kid.
A human who develops a serious digestive issue cannot speak of emotions within the context of medicine because medicine and psychology are, in the modern era, entirely separate domains. To speak of emotions, we have to go to a psychologist. Psychiatrists don’t really care about emotions except in terms of drugs that can be used to modify them and cover them up. And today’s psychologists are mostly in the dark about how the mind connects to the body. Psychologists are chided not to consider such frivolities. They’re scientists, after all, and they need to work with only the parts of humans that you can see and observe with the five senses. This is a real issue in psychology, but humans mask themselves, divide themselves into pieces, and sometimes “zone out” and go to far away places in their minds. A psychology that can’t intuit what’s happening to a person who has “tuned out” isn’t very interesting and isn’t very powerful or useful. Only the trauma-informed therapies, biofeedback or neurofeedback, and somatic therapies have dared to push into this No Man’s Land of mind-body connections. These therapies remain mostly hidden to most patients who arrive at a doctor’s office or at a psychology clinic simply because doctors and psychologists are educated to stay away from the mind-body connection because, they’re taught that such a thing doesn’t exist. Rewind thousands of years back to your first civilized ancestors as they began to notice for the first time that seeds from plants could be planted in fields and you’ll find that shamanism was the only system of medicine and shamanism was entirely focused on this No Man’s Land of the mind-body connection.
The whole goal of a shaman is to download the data that’s being stored in the body and navigate realms of consciousness to find cures using plants or venoms, or other tools that may not have even had names at that time. Without this system of medicine, shamanism, none of us would exist today.
The more that the belief that the connection between mind and body doesn’t exist or that it’s too ephemeral for us to study or experience quantitatively, the more twisted our gut, our intuition becomes. Intuitively, we know with the gut-brain, that there’s a connection between our logical, mental faculties, and the intuitive faculties, but we’ve been taught from infancy to ignore the connections and give no credence to intuition. In other words, we literally ignore our gut in many matters. In response, the gut gets twisted, inflamed, and irritated. This is not to say that Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis is caused entirely by emotional content, but that, when things start to go wrong with the gut, we listen to words spoken by doctors even if they don’t resonate with the gut itself. The doctor says, “take a pill” or “there’s nothing wrong with you”, and though the gut tells us otherwise, we’ve been socialized to listen to the doctor rather than listening to this “other brain” and other source of thought that we carry inside of us from the moment of conception.
The left brain is logical and it values rules. The left brain wants to follow authority figures at the clinic, at the hospital, at work, at home, in the community, and in all of the settings where fitting in is desirable. But the organs and the gut sometimes require something more inspired than antiquated rules that may simply need to be updated. The right-brain is the part of us that creatively finds loopholes while the left-brain tries hard to be an upstanding citizen. If you have a digestive system issues, you have to work with both sides (the left brain and the right brain) to resolve the inner conflict and better understand what your body is trying to tell your logical mind.
Before we can speak or understand words, our bodies can know the tone of a voice and recognize it as either safe or unsafe. But we teach babies from a young age to listen to a person’s words instead of listening to this inborn mechanism that works constantly to help us survive.
Galen was a Roman and Greek physician and philosopher who lived between 129 and 216 C. E. He was the most accomplished doctor of antiquity and he was one of the first doctors to write about the stomach, intestines, and colon. He viewed the stomach as an animate entity, a being with its own life that could feel itself. In other words, Galen regarded the stomach as intelligent. It could generate the sensation of hunger, break down food and separate the final product into useful and non-useful parts.
Galen viewed the intestines as more passive that used length and thickness to absorb nutrients and keep waste properly contained. He noted that the convolutions of the human intestine allow us to “hold our poop” (so to speak) so that we can engage in other pursuits like music and philosophy. A cow or a horse poops almost continuously. Thus, even in ancient times, doctors noted this conflict between the body (what we often refer to as the right brain or “felt sense”) and mental pursuits (what we refer to as the left-brain or the logical-narrative mind). A human body can retain waste products in order to pursue music, writing, art, and other “intellectual” activities. But what happens when the digestive system no longer agrees to retain the poop in pursuit of intellect?
Another famous Persian physician known in the west as Avicenna, is often described as the father of modern medicine. He lived much later than Galen between 980 and 1037 C.E. He was a jack-of-all trades who wrote about everything from astronomy and alchemy to psychology and poetry. His writings were included in the early curricula for many medical schools. Avicenna was, for the most part, less concerned about the anatomy of the digestive system and more concerned about nutrition as a way to establish and maintain health in the gut. In contrast, today’s modern doctor often never takes even one single class on nutrition before becoming a doctor. But even Avicenna, a doctor who lived over 1000 years ago noted accurately that, "A small amount of movement or activity after a meal allows the food to descend to the fundus of the stomach, especially if after this there is a desire to sleep. Mental excitement or emotion; vigorous exercise; these hinder digestion".
Avicenna noted that mild activity (like a relaxing walk, for example) followed by a “desire to sleep” after eating was indicative of food descending in a healthy way to the small intestine. Indeed, this “desire to sleep” noted by this doctor from the pre-early 1000s is the rest-and-digest vagus nerve mode that our bodies require in order to properly digest our food. The mental excitement and emotion and vigorous exercise that Avicenna talks about as hindering digestion is exactly what we’ve discussed above – fight-or-flight states in particular – that can hijack digestion and, with long-term activation without regular rest-and-digest states, can lead to bursts of histamine that are released without permission from the autonomic control station that normally maintains the human body as a balanced organism that cycles through states of alertness and states of rest throughout a normal day.
At this time in history, between the early 1000s and 1500s when Christianity became a state-sponsored and enforced religion, the stomach began to be viewed by many doctors as a cold and dry organ that played a central role in human health. It was during this era that doctors stopped viewing the stomach as an active, living being with its own “mind” and instead, they began to believe that the stomach was passive and “unspiritual”. This historical trajectory may have taken shape as a result of the unappealing products produced by the stomach, but one could also argue that, as Christianity became enforced as a state religion, ideas about the body changed to accommodate for beliefs about the inherent “sinfulness” of certain organs.
During this period of history, around the year 1000, the “unspiritual” stomach was still recognized as important (the gallbladder, for example, has gone out of vogue over the past 100 years with doctors viewing it as an unnecessary organ that’s removed from the bodies of about 750,000 people annually in the U.S.) but the stomach’s lack of spirituality is worth noting here with emphasis. This was the era, over 1000 years ago, when humans began to vilify the body and view its organs as “parts”. Some of these parts began to be viewed in common, elite culture, as good and essential (the brain for example), while others were viewed as expendable and even evil. Science and the scientific method grew out of these ideals to try to tame the terrifying era of witch-burnings and the Inquisition. Science itself is neither good nor bad, but the idea of science has been used to create a reality that doesn’t see the body as a whole unit.
One could argue that logic is something that has been highly valued for the past 2000 years since the birth of Christ and the rise of Christianity. Science is a testament to this love of logic. The right brain and our natural “felt sense” has been viewed more and more as an evil, immature part of us that must be brought under totalitarian control. Spare the rod and spoil the child. If the digestive system were a child, we would be a society that puts that child into a permanent time-out using dug-restraints to hush the cries and screams.
It wasn’t until Leonardo da Vinci began writing about the human body that the digestive system’s impact on the respiratory system and vice versa was finally noted perhaps because he lived during the Reformation, just after the discovery of the New World. The Reformation was a time when church authority abated somewhat and science became an escape-hatch for logical thinkers who wished to build on the written knowledge passed down since antiquity. Nonetheless, by the 1500s, something called the Chain of Being was well-known and propagated through diagrams as a popular map of the Universe that depicted God at the top and humans above animals. Da Vinci took this concept and developed an idea about a cascade of events that led to the breath of life and active breathing in humans. Da Vinci, after all, was famous for his ability to translate the macrocosm of the Universe into the microcosm of the human form. He noted that when the abdominal muscles contract, the intestines rise up which leads to an upward thrust of the diaphragm, the muscle that causes the movement in the body that leads to breath. He believed that condensed air from the intestines played a role in diaphragm movement and that this air in the intestines was what drove air out of the lungs so that a person could breathe. In reality, we know now that the lungs, when they expand as a result of relaxation of the abdominal muscles, the bowels move downward and are massaged mildly. We also know that the respiratory system and the digestive system are not distinct. In fact, as an example, asthma, a respiratory disease characterized by episodes of bronchial constriction and difficulty breathing, which has been blamed on allergens, is actually more heavily correlated in the scientific literature with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), a digestive system issue that involves a backflow of acid and undigested food particle from the stomach into the esophagus. The acids and food particulates that reflux in GERD patients are what are actually causing bronchial irritation when they’re inhaled into the lungs inadvertently. Treating digestive system issues can significantly reduce the frequency of asthma attacks, but for most patients, Lugol’s iodine is essential to overcome asthma permanently because of the role that iodine plays in regulating reproductive hormones.
In any case, back when Leonardo da Vinci was alive, there was comparatively very little written about medicine and the human body. He used his creative mind, his “felt sense” to navigate what the popular culture at that time believed to be true and expand on it. But before da Vinci, were thousands of years of shaman who had had nothing but oral tradition and felt sense, to find cures for serious diseases within their tribe. The shaman of one tribe didn’t have the wisdom of the shaman from other tribes. Yet, these medicine men and women kept humanity alive during the earliest, most challenging times in the history of our planet. They had no logical information, no science, no books to reference in order to solve problems. All they had was the “felt sense” and intuition to make life-or-death decisions.
Between 1150 and 1200 C.E., Master Nicolaus, the author of a pre-Renaissance era anatomy text, noted that the liver acts like a fire underneath the cauldron of the stomach. The cold, dryness of the stomach, according to this assessment, could be transformed by the fiery heat of the liver. Master Nicolaus went on to say that the gallbladder might be likened to the cook that unites, through its action in the body, the cauldron of the stomach and the fire of the liver. This metaphor about fires, cauldrons, and cooks is similar to the views of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and it’s classification system using heat and cold, dampness and dryness along with the idea that hollow organs and solid organs pair up to function a bit like a copper coil and magnet. Hollow organs and solid organs, in TCM, might be likened to a self-energizing battery system when both organs in a pair are functioning well.
There are, in fact, parallels between the Greek and Roman systems of medicine that developed in antiquity and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The Hippocratic Corpus (writings of Hippocrates, one of the most important physicians from antiquity) and a Chinese medical textbook known as the Huáng Dì Nèi Jīng, a famous Chinese text both discuss hollow tubes or ducts that connect organs in the body. While Chinese scholars have long acknowledged the relationship between the Hippocratic channels and the similarities it has with the Chinese meridian system, modern conventional medicine pretends that the meridian system that’s used by TCM practitioners is completely foreign and possibly useless.
Hippocrates is often regarded as the father of modern medicine. All doctors are familiar with the Hippocratic oath that declares that a physician should “do no harm” though, in today’s world, most doctors have no idea what constitutes harm and what does not as they are educated under a curriculum developed by pharmaceutical companies that have denounced cures for disease as being “bad for business”. But Hippocrates is an important figure in modern conventional medicine and most people have a passing familiarity with his work.
In the metaphor of the stomach as cauldron, the liver as the fire, and the gallbladder as a cook, the small intestine, and the colon act as “colanders” (in fact, the word “colon” comes from the same Latin root word “colatorium” which means “strainer” – an interesting play on this word exists in regard to intestines and constipation). In TCM, the liver is where anger is stored when it can’t be released or properly integrated by the logical, left-brain. The feeling of anger, ideally, goes across an alpha-brainwave state as a bridge leading to the left-brain where (hopefully) logical thoughts will be able to calm the emotion of anger, not with force, but with balance. While the heart deals with joy, the lungs with sadness and grief, the spleen and stomach are a unit in the body that carries the weight of worry, overthinking, and anxiety.
The gallbladder, in TCM, deals with curiosity and interest. When the gallbladder is sick, we lose interest and feel apathy about things that would normally attract our attention. We can notice this feeling of apathy with the left, logical brain and if we’re aware of the fact that gallbladder issues cause this kind of apathy, we might treat ourselves using therapies designed to alleviate gallbladder woes.
When daily stressors are transformed into powerful fears, the kidneys are the organs that step forward to take the hit. Master Nicolaus’ metaphor in his anatomy textbook about the fire in the liver and the cauldron (of worry?) in the stomach is just one of several pieces of evidence that, in ancient times, theories about medicine and the digestive system had been informed by alternative systems of medicine like TCM. As such, the history of TCM is also the history of conventional medicine, albeit a part of history that has been rejected by modern doctors.
For the most part, the people who read our books are Christian or they live in countries of the world that are predominantly Christian. As such, whether the reader himself or herself is Christian or not they’ve been heavily influenced by the values of Christianity as these rules have been imposed on different aspects of life. This includes medicine, which has been profoundly impacted by Christianity as an institution.
While the Chinese culture followed a very different path through history to arrive at the current milieu that makes up a Chinese person’s daily life, Westerners have been influenced by a very different set of values in terms of medicine. TCM has existed in its current form for thousands of years and originated from herbalism and also shamanic practices before it was recognized that the animating principle known as “chi” was vital in promoting health and balance in the body.
If you are a Westerner who is reading this book in order to try to understand how to heal a digestive system issue and you’re ready to expand your horizons and think outside of the box, then we need to look at some of the latent beliefs about the stomach and digestion that come from antiquity. Some of the beliefs about the body that have been packaged into modern medicine are still evident in the way that we work with the body in hospitals and clinics. In order to make peace with the digestive system, it’s important to cast light on the wars that were declared hundreds of years ago against the body.
Just before the Reformation and then the Renaissance, when Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth were alive and doing work on the planet, the stomach was regarded as the lowest organ in the body due to its “uncleanliness”. Alessandro Benedetti, the surgeon general for the Venetian army, wrote in 1497 that the stomach and bowels were farther away from the brain and the “site of reason” and “fenced off by the diaphragm” in order to “not disturb the rational part of the mind with its importunity”. Benedetti believed that the organs of digestion existed solely to serve the “rational”, logical mind.
But what if your stomach and your digestive organs revolt against this type of tyranny by the left-brain? What if you are among the modern humans living with a gut that is no longer willing or able to live in service to the rules and ideals imposed by the logical mind?
Alessandro Benedetti also believed that the stomach was conscious of itself and perhaps greedy in its requirements of blood and moisture. Andreas de Laguna, a doctor just 40 years Benedetti’s contemporary, acknowledged that, alas, if the stomach’s function was impaired, the rest of the body was in great peril. No matter who is discussing the matter of the digestive organs, there is a tendency to anthropomorphize them, likely because unconsciously (without knowing that an “unconscious mind” existed at that time), these ancient masters were still aware that the vagus nerve collected the meandering data from the organs and that each organ therefore possessed a mind that can, at times, cast an independent vote and revolt against the left, logical brain.
So many of us in today’s world are encouraged to go to war against our bodies and the “unspiritual” organs. We sign up for surgeries to remove whole organs and replace them with plastic substitutes. It seems nearly impossible to negotiate treaties with these organs that refuse to bow to the One True God of Christianity or Islam (as they are, technically, the same God). In order to heal the digestive system, it isn’t necessary to take up a new religion or deny the existence of God. What is necessary, though, is a willingness to admit that there are at least two parts of our human being – our human existence. There is a rational, logical, linguistic part that can follow rules and that can appreciate the importance of having limits and boundaries to keep ourselves safe. But there is also a part of us that does not possess words, but that rather works primarily in symbols, gestures, movements, and non-linguistic sound. This part of us is the “felt sense” that we’re born with, before we develop words and we need this part in order to survive. It is this part of us that will stop following the rules when the rules are harming us. This is the part of us that will act to save our own or a loved one’s life without any rational, conscious thought. Should a loved one step in front of a moving bus, this part of us will (likely) act (although the “freeze response” is also an common reaction in a situation like this) without forming a plan, and without regard for rules that are being imposed on us. If your digestive system is revolting against what the left brain wants for you to do in your daily life, what is it trying to tell you? What is your digestive system dis-ease trying to save you from?
Maybe you’re a person who has a good job that pays well. A part of you hates what you do, but logic says that you should be happy because you make plenty of money. No one wants to hear you complain about how you feel about your well-paying job. So you keep your mouth shut about what you feel and instead stick only to dialogue about how great your job is.
My personal experience with my own gut took me pretty far afield years ago when I developed fibromyalgia after a brief stomach upset, a couple of pukes, and a fever one night after quitting my job as a social worker in Colorado. My husband John and I had recently had a stillborn baby and we’d moved twice in one year. We had a healthy girl who was 2 years old, Lydian, and though John had stayed home with her for nearly a year, it was now my turn to go back to being the homemaker. John would be working 60 to 80 hour weeks, so I was alone at home with little Lydian.
I could barely walk at this time. I couldn’t pull up the blankets on the bed at night sometimes. But I had to figure out how to get through a day with my 2 year old because I had no choice. There was no one to help and no one who cared about my pain. So I paid close attention to myself as there was no Internet that I could query to try to find “rational” answers to my questions.
I took note of absolutely anything that seemed to help relieve my pain and anything that seemed to make it worse. This was how I healed myself.
It took a long time, in retrospect. I never took drugs and I never uttered the word fibromyalgia except once to my husband after I left the clinic on the day of my so-called “diagnosis”. The doctor didn’t even look at me when he sentenced me to this lifetime of agony with fibromyalgia and seemed irritated by my mere presence in his office as he explained that “there is no cure and no treatment”. But I was lucky. I’d studied to become a doctor and I’d dropped out because I could see that the system had major problems and I didn’t want to be involved in it anymore. I had already lost faith in conventional medicine and that was a lucky strike for me.
I didn’t know, at that time, that there was a relationship between fibromyalgia and gut issues, but food and drink - my diet - became the object of my attention that yielded the most positive results in the years that followed. I used intuition and my own felt sense – literally the feelings in my body – to follow myself out of the jungle of this dis-ease.
Today, almost 25 years later, I’ve been free of fibromyalgia for 20 years. I know so much more now than I did back then. I have a lot more book knowledge, but I also have some body wisdom from having worked with the sacred medicines. This wisdom is non-transferable though. I can speak about it, but people who haven’t worked with the sacred medicines or other trauma-informed therapies are unlikely to be able to hear me. Also, I tend to believe that my wisdom is only mine and can only really be helpful to my family members and friends who are willing to step into a familial role temporarily, mostly just to find their own unique body-wisdom for their own lineages through work with the sacred medicines. When I write about the sacred medicines and the things that I’ve learned from the medicines themselves, I always try to find science to back it up because I know that we live in a world of left-brain thinkers who have little or no access to their intuition and body-wisdom anymore. Science can cut both ways and often, when a major discovery is made that could cure a lot of people, Big Pharma hires scientist-underlings who go to work to produce research that runs contrary to the big discovery of a curative treatment. Anyone who spends enough time in the scientific research library will find that in order to find the information that can be helpful and useful in a particular health-related situation, you still have to use your intuition. Anyone, in fact, can access body-wisdom and the intuition derived from it to heal themselves, but there’s work involved and a lot of self-confrontation to get past the skeletons in the closet – all of the trauma that we carry with us…trauma that needs to be released and integrated. No one works with the sacred medicines alone and no one works only on behalf of themselves. Whatever work we do on ourselves is work that we do on our whole tribe to change the growth trajectory of the entire family tree. An Ayahuasca purge is always done into the great abyss on behalf of the ancestry and for the future generations.
But needless to say, on my way from my 20s to now, I passed through a period of egotism where I collected and memorized data. But even as I was building resumes and a curriculum vitae to impress the Big Powerful Ones and the masses, I traveled to experience what seemed, for many years, to be “primitive” systems of medicine. These systems of medicine seemed primitive to me only because this was a word I’d been taught to use to describe systems of medicine that are based, at their core, on Nature and metaphors of nature. Many, but not all, of these systems of medicine were shamanic or related closely to shamanism. I didn’t know this at the time.
Travel to “undeveloped” and poor nations that still host ethnic groups that haven’t been entirely convinced of the absolute legitimacy of conventional medicine created many opportunities for me (and for Lydian, who was always at my side), to become ill ourselves and have no other choice, but accept treatment from a system of medicine that seemed “dirty” or “superstitious”. Part of what healed me of my illness were illnesses that forced me to accept treatments that made no sense to my logical mind. When I traveled, especially to far off places where no discernible paths existed at times through the landscape, I put my body into a position where its importance as the source of intuition was essential. And slowly, over the course of more than a decade, I began to listen to what my body had to say.
If one of us (me, my husband, or my daughter) got sick in a place where there was no doctor, we were forced to trust either ourselves or the medicine men and women who presented themselves to us. I would argue that we were sick because our bodies were trying with desperation to lead us to the people who still knew The Old Ways of medicine that still to this day, involves intuition as The Guide. We worked with a lot of practitioners who didn’t speak our language. One of the healers in Cambodia was both blind and deaf. I learned that communication was less about words and linguistics than I’d always thought. I could communicate with someone who didn’t share a single word in common with me if that person was motivated to understand me. I also had to motivated to communicate with that person. This was the single most important ingredient that I needed in order to be able to say something to another person and be understood and also to understand even when language was not a tool that we could use.
As someone who lives in a foreign country (Mexico) full-time, I’ve learned through the sacred medicines that language is not what I think it is. The words in a foreign language that enter my mind bubble up when the other person is tuned in on some level and listening to me. When I have no words or when the words make me nervous or if I feel forced to speak, I pay close attention to the person I’m speaking to. Whenever possible, I pay attention to what I sense in my body first before I speak.
Medicine is something that’s been developed over the centuries along two veins:
When I was younger, I studied medicine according to parts and pieces and logic, but it wasn’t until Lydian became an adult that she and I were forced to abandon these methods and learn a new way to use them. Living in a foreign country whose population doesn’t speak English as its primary language made me more aware of myself in terms of my tongue and my words. What I can express to another person in Spanish using words has, of course, become more precise, but my awareness of the “felt sense” to understand what another person says to me or intends to say is on full blast because it has to be. People regularly use idioms and phrases from deep cultural underpinnings that I can’t understand readily. Many people who use idioms and phrases like this aren’t aware of what the real meaning of these phrases are themselves so I can’t ask a person for their meaning because they don’t really know it. These are just some of the strange limitations of the logical left-brain. To be fair, the right-brain / felt sense also has limitations, but the trick is to try to get these two parts of ourselves to work together as fluently as possible, especially if you have digestive system issues.
In reality, you gut is probably still going to talk to you and tell you what it needs even when you’re sick. The problem is that your left-brain won’t believe what your gut has to say. Most of our digestive system clients are very hard on themselves emotionally. They have a tendency toward extreme self-judgment and self-frustration. So while your gut might be telling you exactly what works for it and what doesn’t, your left brain is likely to make fun of this “felt sense”.
When you’re trying to find a healer to help you with your digestive system issues, find people with whom you can communicate easily and fluently. Try new healers often and ask yourself if you felt relaxed physically while working with them. Be aware that your left-brain will likely have a lot to say and many concerns in anticipation of meeting with healers whether the healers are good for you or not. But if you feel repulsed prior to a meeting with a health practitioner and your gut says, “No!” in no-uncertain-terms, then you should listen to that. Perhaps the timing for the meeting is wrong or perhaps the healer himself or herself is the wrong person for you at this time. Today is today. If your meeting with a healer feels utterly wrong, follow that guidance for the day. You ask yourself / your body again tomorrow about working with that person and see if you get a different answer.
It doesn’t matter if you’re just beginning to attempt to heal the digestive system or if you’ve been working on your digestion for 2 decades without success. Our goal here is to give you new leads that will lead you toward the right treatments and empower our readers to work with medicines that have been used for centuries to literally teach shaman what treatments are needed to cure a disease (even if the shaman has never seen or heard of that treatment prior to the plant showing it to them). Most of our readers want to avoid the sacred medicines, but the sacred medicines offer a detour out of the mess of conventional medicine to reconnect people with their own bodies.
Resources:
• Hedayat, K. M. and Lapraz, J. C. (2019). The Theory of Endobiogeny: Foundational Concepts for the Treatment of Common Clinical Conditions. Volume 2. Elsevier: San Diego.
• Hedayat, K. M. and Lapraz, J. C. (2019). The Theory of Endobiogeny: Global Systems Thinking and Biological Modeling for Clinical Medicine. Volume 1. Elsevier: San Diego.
• Hedayat, K. M. and Lapraz, J. C. (2019). The Theory of Endobiogeny: Advanced Concepts for the Treatment of Complex Clinical Conditions. Volume 3. Elsevier: San Diego.
BEFORE YOU READ THIS ARTICLE...
Be sure to take a look at a few of our e-Books titles below that might pertain to your health search:
Be sure to take a look at a few of our e-Books titles below that might pertain to your health search:
Even the Ancients Knew the Gut Could “Think”
Over the course of time, the human body has been divided into separate parts by different systems of medicine. Conventional medicine is particularly famous for its tendency to divide in order to conquer the body. Of all of the parts that have been subdivided further into other, smaller parts, the tube that connects the mouth to the anus and all of the offshoots and organs that are directly connected to this tube have suffered most.
Emotion-Based Decision Making
The digestive system as a whole unit has been known and studied since medieval times. Doctors in the Middle Ages studied the physical structure of the stomach, small intestines and colon and they understood that these organs played a role in the digestion of food. Though these doctors had little information from earlier eras about the digestive system as a whole, in many ways, these doctors were less impaired in terms of their view of digestion because their natural reflex was to view the various organs of digestion as a whole unit, rather than as separate parts. Doctors at that time recognized that if digestion in the stomach was somehow impaired, that all other functions in the digestive system might also be impaired.
In the Middle Ages, doctors believed that the stomach was an active organ that could “think” which demonstrates that the intuition of these medical professionals surpassed that of modern day doctors. It’s a proven fact, after all, that the vagus nerve, which innervates the entire digestive system and all of the other visceral organs of the body, organizes a certain type of thought that people use to make decisions, namely the “emotional intelligence” of the body. Some trauma-informed therapists like Dr. Peter Levine, have labeled this emotion-based-thinking-and-decision-making the “felt sense”. While you might have been taught to believe that decisions should be made on the basis of logic or that people should try not to make emotion-based decisions, in fact, if the emotion centers of your brain are destroyed in a stroke, for example,, you’ll never make another decision about anything that you do for the rest of your life. Destroy your emotion-based brain centers and you won’t even be able to decide to get out of bed, let alone which pair of pants to wear for the day. Someone will have to help you “decide” to brush your teeth and comb your hair. As it turns out, every decision that we make in our lives is emotion-based and not logical. If you’ve never noticed yourself making illogical, emotion-based decisions, you might begin to notice this aspect of your human self now.
In the modern era, Dr. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal theory acknowledges the vagus nerve as the primary player in the recognition of emotions by humans. The two parts of the vagus nerve, the dorsal and ventral branches work together to help humans navigate complex social situations and activate survival related sequences intended to keep the body itself safe from imminent dangers in the environment. The vagus nerve innervates the organs of digestion as well as the lungs, heart, bladder, and kidneys. If we consider emotion and emotional intelligence as something that comes from the organs and data that the vagus nerve delivers to the brain some of the theories of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) make more sense. TCM says that the various organs are the seat of different emotions. The liver, for example, is where anger is stored and processes. The gallbladder is the site of curiosity and interest. The pancreas deals with trust and mistrust. In the TCM system, which is thousands of years old, organs like the lungs would store grief and sadness. This makes sense logically in that we feel grief and sadness as something very heavy in the chest. The heart, in contrast, is the organ of joy and this is, in fact, the area of the body where people feel happiness and joyful feelings when they occur.
A TCM practitioner might ask a patient if he or she has experienced anything that has been emotionally significant to relate to a particular set of physical symptoms in the body. Someone schooled in TCM might then be able to use logic to be able to understand connection between emotional experiences and physical manifestations of disease.
In the west, we’ve been taught that no such connection between mind and body exists. A doctor of conventional medicine does not acknowledge that we feel emotions in our physical body and that these emotions can actually change our biological trajectory. In fact, westerners typically discuss their emotions with their doctor if they wish to have emotions go away. There is no acknowledgement either in medicine or in psychology that an emotion might carry with it information that might be valuable to the person experiencing it.
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Feeling and Thinking Organs
In future discussions, we’re going to elaborate more on the vagus nerve and its function in helping us make appropriate facial expressions and to recognize facial expressions in others. Studies have shown that the vagus nerve works to help us recognize emotions through facial movements, including eye region movements, and whole images of facial movements (but not static images). In other words, the vagus nerve can provide us with a sense of what another person is trying to say, not saying and trying to hide, or saying with honesty and transparency, when we see that person in action. The vagus nerve makes inferences and humans are more likely to make social decisions on the basis of these vagal-nerve inferences than on the basis of linguistic material that’s exchanged between two people in a social situation. However, when we see just a photo of a person, the vagus nerve doesn’t play a role in emotion recognition. This suggests that we use logic, or the “left brain” to analyze photos of people. We use both the logical left brain and the intuitive right brain or “felt sense” to make decisions about social in-person or video interactions. The intuitive right brain intuits data from facial expressions and gesturing (body language) to provide us with data that’s weighted significantly more heavily than the words.
The doctors of the Middle Ages sensed intuitively (with their guts) that the stomach, small intestine, and large intestine were all important “thinking” organs even though they were hundreds of years away from establishing this idea through the discovery of “logical” scientific evidence. Without this kind of intuition about human existence, our bodies, the earth, our lives, our relationships, and more, logic really doesn’t even give us a place to start in terms of asking questions. Early medieval doctors believed the visceral, digestive organs were able to “think”. Five hundred years later, we’ve proven that this is, in fact, the case.
One could argue that the suppression of this idea, that the guts “think” and that these thoughts that are derived from the gut are equal if not more heavily weighted by us than the logical thoughts of our frontal-lobe-oriented mind is one of the major issues that contributes to gut-related diseases.
Let me explain…
When Logic and Emotion Disagree: Flat Affect and Digestive System Disease
Most people with Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, colorectal cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, and other serious digestive issues impacting the stomach, small intestine, or large intestine in particular, have issues making proper facial expressions in social situations. Many patients who suffer with severe gut-issues like those listed above make almost no facial expressions in social interactions and as a result, they have difficulty reading the facial expressions of others. Indeed, we are naturally wired to mirror other people’s facial expressions and gesturing to some extent not just to create rapport, but also to absorb the other person’s emotions into our own bodies. When a person mirrors another person’s facial expressions by smiling in response to another person’s smile, they absorb that person’s emotional content, in part through this natural mirroring reflex.
From our earliest moments on earth as humans, our bodies are wired to mirror facial expressions, language, and other aspects of our human experience as part of our social nature. This is why infants that are only a few weeks old can sometimes mirror words that are being spoken to them for a brief window of time before they’re old enough to actually understand words. A baby’s mirror-neurons make it possible for a newborn to say things like “I love you” (albeit in a very muddled way) if parents are saying these words to the baby over and over again. These words do not represent the development of actual language at this age. It is simply evidence of the backend code of our human existence that helps us survive. Mirror neurons help us understand and be understood even without a full understanding of the words that are being spoken to us.
When the organs of digestion have been hijacked in some dramatic, long-term way, we begin to lose our social faculties. In Polyvagal theory, the loss of facial expressions demonstrates that we are using only 2 of 3 of the branches of the autonomic nervous system. The three branches of this system include the following:
- The Sympathetic Nervous System which governs aspects of alert wakefulness and also fight-or-flight responses.
- The Parasympathetic Dorsal branch governs “freeze” or “play dead” responses that occur when the body feels overwhelmed by danger.
- The Parasympathetic Ventral branch governs rest-and digest states of healing. These states are triggered by pleasant social situations in particular.
If the digestive system is ailing and the person who is sick has a so-called “flat affect”, also known as a “poker face” or a lack of facial expressions in social situations, then this is a definite sign that the rest-and-digest function of the autonomic nervous system is imbalanced. A person who is no longer making facial expressions is also not able to derive other people’s feelings from social situations. As such, they lack a most basic type of empathy that functions to promote their survival. A person who is no longer making facial expressions cannot make subtle adjustments to their social navigation in relationships to ensure that they’re not “saying the wrong thing” or “doing the wrong thing”. Inability to make facial expressions, which manifests as a sign of digestive system disease, is often also evidence of either some form of chronic stress or some type of major trauma (biological, toxicological, or emotional).
In fact, when a person loses the basic faculty of being able to mirror another person’s facial expressions and gestures because there’s something going wrong at the level of the ventral vagal nerve system that innervates the gut, strange things begin to happen. The body’s normal hormonal response is hijacked and adrenaline release can become prolonged in response to minor stressors. Histamine, which is normally under the dominion of adrenaline and noradrenaline takes on a life of its own and it begins to function according to its own whims. When histamine levels are triggered and then remain high as a result of this type of hijacked emotional response, adrenaline levels also remain high and fight-or-flight states can be prolonged unnecessarily. Rest-and-digest states become more and more scarce which means that the body has trouble restoring balance to the autonomic nervous system through healing states wherein the ventral vagal nerve tends to organs in the digestive system.
There’s a recursive effect that happens when a person stops being able to make facial expressions because their gut is so disordered. The lack of facial expressions contributes to ongoing relationship issues and a deepening sense of isolation from other people. As isolation becomes more and more intense, digestive system health becomes even more imperilled by the lack of rest-and-digest states that are triggered most powerfully by pleasant and enjoyable social interactions.
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Bridging the Dual Nature of a Human with Alpha Brainwave States
Another way to look at this problem is to think of a human being as an entity that is, by nature, built out of two separate selves – the right brain “self” that’s intuitive and the left brain “self” that’s logical. These two “selves” are in constant conflict with each other. They regularly disagree, but can come to a consensus when the body goes into an alpha-brainwave state that allows the right brain and left brain to communicate across this brainwave “bridge”. The alpha-brainwave state is active, but also restful. This is the brainwave state wherein we have so-called “peak experiences” of total engagement in an enjoyable, yet challenging activity. It is the brainwave state through which we must pass in order to experience a healthy sleep structure throughout the night. Without alpha brainwave states to punctuate a normal day, the logical left brain begins to look with disdain and disgust at the right brain’s intuition. The monkey-brain of chatter and judgemental, toxic thoughts takes shape within this type of milieu. For example, a person with a digestive system disorder might feel intuitively that something in their life needs to change – a lifestyle change– but the doctor says that there’s a drug that can help get rid of the symptoms of disease. The doctor doesn’t care about the patient’s feelings and doesn’t have time to discuss the patient’s lifestyle issues. A part of this patient might feel happy that the doctor offered him or her a drug while another part, the gut, might feel neglected and upset. This patient is likely to think that he or she needs to “get over it” (the digestive system issues) as quickly as possible. Digestive symptoms might even make the patient do a lot of negative self-talk. This can lead to depression, anxiety, and hopelessness in an addition to physical digestive system symptoms. People in this situation begin to lose hope in their own ability to heal themselves or to be able to use their intuition and “felt sense” to seek out legitimate healing from others. If every healer / doctor / health practitioner out there is only interested in administering factory-production-mold treatments that don’t interface with the data in the digestive system itself, the patient may never find the treatment they need. If that patient has no idea that their gut issues have to do with emotions and data that they carry in the body itself – in the organs and tissues – about the root cause of their disease, they’re at a huge disadvantage in finding a cure.
Alpha brainwave states exist between theta brainwave states (very restful and sleep states) and beta brainwave states (wakeful and alert states). Alpha states can become scary if a person is not able to regularly go into this “bridge” state of awareness in order to retrieve what’s been collected in the theta brainwave state cache of intuition. When alpha brainwave states begin to feel scary, sleep is disrupted. When sleep and dreaming is disrupted, health problems begin to appear. If you’re reading this book because you or a loved one has a digestive system disease, then you need to know that alpha states can literally help you figure out how to cure your own disease. A loved one can use alpha state to gain access to information about your digestive system disease.
Not only can alpha states help a person heal simply by discharging negative energy in the gut, but they can also help you gain access to information about how to heal. When you body passes through an alpha brainwave state, even very briefly, there’s an opportunity for the organs of the body to communicate with the logical, left-brain. This is a very basic description of “intuition” as the sense of knowing something that isn’t formally known or empirically verifiable yet.
How the Brain Structure is Changed by Digestive System Disease
In people with Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis that’s been present for many years, the structure of the brain is altered such that the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure in the limbic system, stops processing emotions properly as well as pain and sensory information. Alterations in the functional connection between the amygdala and other brain structures involved in processing organ pain, sensory data, and emotions might be used as a metaphor that we’ve finally arrived at to describe the historical path from medicine in the Middle Ages to medicine in the modern era. Back in the Middle Ages, doctors readily discussed and recognized that the gut played a role in thinking. They didn’t formally know that this was true – they could say, at that time, that organs “think” and carry data as a verified fact. But their own experience with their own bodies as humans gave them an intuition about the organs and this process of “thinking” that’s different from the thinking done in the brain. Today, we’ve proven that yes, the organs think. Organs feel and they carry a certain type of information that piggybacks (so to speak) on the back of emotions. A gut that’s sick changes the entire wiring of the brain such that our senses and emotions and even our experience of pain becomes perturbed. A patient with a perturbance in the body and a perturbance in the brain would also have a perturbance in their experience of reality. So then the question is, Can you change reality, the body, and the brain back into something less painful and less perturbed?
The logical left brain will argue that it is impossible to change these things, based on the pop-culture belief that that the brain is not changeable or plastic and that reality is a non-negotiable experience that we all share. The logical left brain is not superstitious and doesn’t believe in magic or miracles. So if you rely on this part of yourself to go about your life with a digestive system disease, it will be hard for you to overcome it. On the other hand though, every human, including each of our readers, has a part of themselves that believes in something that’s improbable but not necessarily impossible. Every person reading this book believes in something that has not yet been proven to be an absolute fact. This is the part of yourself that you have to use in order to overcome a serious digestive system issue. It’s the part of you that believed in magical things when you were just a little kid.
A human who develops a serious digestive issue cannot speak of emotions within the context of medicine because medicine and psychology are, in the modern era, entirely separate domains. To speak of emotions, we have to go to a psychologist. Psychiatrists don’t really care about emotions except in terms of drugs that can be used to modify them and cover them up. And today’s psychologists are mostly in the dark about how the mind connects to the body. Psychologists are chided not to consider such frivolities. They’re scientists, after all, and they need to work with only the parts of humans that you can see and observe with the five senses. This is a real issue in psychology, but humans mask themselves, divide themselves into pieces, and sometimes “zone out” and go to far away places in their minds. A psychology that can’t intuit what’s happening to a person who has “tuned out” isn’t very interesting and isn’t very powerful or useful. Only the trauma-informed therapies, biofeedback or neurofeedback, and somatic therapies have dared to push into this No Man’s Land of mind-body connections. These therapies remain mostly hidden to most patients who arrive at a doctor’s office or at a psychology clinic simply because doctors and psychologists are educated to stay away from the mind-body connection because, they’re taught that such a thing doesn’t exist. Rewind thousands of years back to your first civilized ancestors as they began to notice for the first time that seeds from plants could be planted in fields and you’ll find that shamanism was the only system of medicine and shamanism was entirely focused on this No Man’s Land of the mind-body connection.
The whole goal of a shaman is to download the data that’s being stored in the body and navigate realms of consciousness to find cures using plants or venoms, or other tools that may not have even had names at that time. Without this system of medicine, shamanism, none of us would exist today.
The more that the belief that the connection between mind and body doesn’t exist or that it’s too ephemeral for us to study or experience quantitatively, the more twisted our gut, our intuition becomes. Intuitively, we know with the gut-brain, that there’s a connection between our logical, mental faculties, and the intuitive faculties, but we’ve been taught from infancy to ignore the connections and give no credence to intuition. In other words, we literally ignore our gut in many matters. In response, the gut gets twisted, inflamed, and irritated. This is not to say that Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis is caused entirely by emotional content, but that, when things start to go wrong with the gut, we listen to words spoken by doctors even if they don’t resonate with the gut itself. The doctor says, “take a pill” or “there’s nothing wrong with you”, and though the gut tells us otherwise, we’ve been socialized to listen to the doctor rather than listening to this “other brain” and other source of thought that we carry inside of us from the moment of conception.
The left brain is logical and it values rules. The left brain wants to follow authority figures at the clinic, at the hospital, at work, at home, in the community, and in all of the settings where fitting in is desirable. But the organs and the gut sometimes require something more inspired than antiquated rules that may simply need to be updated. The right-brain is the part of us that creatively finds loopholes while the left-brain tries hard to be an upstanding citizen. If you have a digestive system issues, you have to work with both sides (the left brain and the right brain) to resolve the inner conflict and better understand what your body is trying to tell your logical mind.
Before we can speak or understand words, our bodies can know the tone of a voice and recognize it as either safe or unsafe. But we teach babies from a young age to listen to a person’s words instead of listening to this inborn mechanism that works constantly to help us survive.
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The Ancient Physicians’ View of the Digestive System
Galen was a Roman and Greek physician and philosopher who lived between 129 and 216 C. E. He was the most accomplished doctor of antiquity and he was one of the first doctors to write about the stomach, intestines, and colon. He viewed the stomach as an animate entity, a being with its own life that could feel itself. In other words, Galen regarded the stomach as intelligent. It could generate the sensation of hunger, break down food and separate the final product into useful and non-useful parts.
Galen viewed the intestines as more passive that used length and thickness to absorb nutrients and keep waste properly contained. He noted that the convolutions of the human intestine allow us to “hold our poop” (so to speak) so that we can engage in other pursuits like music and philosophy. A cow or a horse poops almost continuously. Thus, even in ancient times, doctors noted this conflict between the body (what we often refer to as the right brain or “felt sense”) and mental pursuits (what we refer to as the left-brain or the logical-narrative mind). A human body can retain waste products in order to pursue music, writing, art, and other “intellectual” activities. But what happens when the digestive system no longer agrees to retain the poop in pursuit of intellect?
Another famous Persian physician known in the west as Avicenna, is often described as the father of modern medicine. He lived much later than Galen between 980 and 1037 C.E. He was a jack-of-all trades who wrote about everything from astronomy and alchemy to psychology and poetry. His writings were included in the early curricula for many medical schools. Avicenna was, for the most part, less concerned about the anatomy of the digestive system and more concerned about nutrition as a way to establish and maintain health in the gut. In contrast, today’s modern doctor often never takes even one single class on nutrition before becoming a doctor. But even Avicenna, a doctor who lived over 1000 years ago noted accurately that, "A small amount of movement or activity after a meal allows the food to descend to the fundus of the stomach, especially if after this there is a desire to sleep. Mental excitement or emotion; vigorous exercise; these hinder digestion".
Avicenna noted that mild activity (like a relaxing walk, for example) followed by a “desire to sleep” after eating was indicative of food descending in a healthy way to the small intestine. Indeed, this “desire to sleep” noted by this doctor from the pre-early 1000s is the rest-and-digest vagus nerve mode that our bodies require in order to properly digest our food. The mental excitement and emotion and vigorous exercise that Avicenna talks about as hindering digestion is exactly what we’ve discussed above – fight-or-flight states in particular – that can hijack digestion and, with long-term activation without regular rest-and-digest states, can lead to bursts of histamine that are released without permission from the autonomic control station that normally maintains the human body as a balanced organism that cycles through states of alertness and states of rest throughout a normal day.
At this time in history, between the early 1000s and 1500s when Christianity became a state-sponsored and enforced religion, the stomach began to be viewed by many doctors as a cold and dry organ that played a central role in human health. It was during this era that doctors stopped viewing the stomach as an active, living being with its own “mind” and instead, they began to believe that the stomach was passive and “unspiritual”. This historical trajectory may have taken shape as a result of the unappealing products produced by the stomach, but one could also argue that, as Christianity became enforced as a state religion, ideas about the body changed to accommodate for beliefs about the inherent “sinfulness” of certain organs.
During this period of history, around the year 1000, the “unspiritual” stomach was still recognized as important (the gallbladder, for example, has gone out of vogue over the past 100 years with doctors viewing it as an unnecessary organ that’s removed from the bodies of about 750,000 people annually in the U.S.) but the stomach’s lack of spirituality is worth noting here with emphasis. This was the era, over 1000 years ago, when humans began to vilify the body and view its organs as “parts”. Some of these parts began to be viewed in common, elite culture, as good and essential (the brain for example), while others were viewed as expendable and even evil. Science and the scientific method grew out of these ideals to try to tame the terrifying era of witch-burnings and the Inquisition. Science itself is neither good nor bad, but the idea of science has been used to create a reality that doesn’t see the body as a whole unit.
One could argue that logic is something that has been highly valued for the past 2000 years since the birth of Christ and the rise of Christianity. Science is a testament to this love of logic. The right brain and our natural “felt sense” has been viewed more and more as an evil, immature part of us that must be brought under totalitarian control. Spare the rod and spoil the child. If the digestive system were a child, we would be a society that puts that child into a permanent time-out using dug-restraints to hush the cries and screams.
It wasn’t until Leonardo da Vinci began writing about the human body that the digestive system’s impact on the respiratory system and vice versa was finally noted perhaps because he lived during the Reformation, just after the discovery of the New World. The Reformation was a time when church authority abated somewhat and science became an escape-hatch for logical thinkers who wished to build on the written knowledge passed down since antiquity. Nonetheless, by the 1500s, something called the Chain of Being was well-known and propagated through diagrams as a popular map of the Universe that depicted God at the top and humans above animals. Da Vinci took this concept and developed an idea about a cascade of events that led to the breath of life and active breathing in humans. Da Vinci, after all, was famous for his ability to translate the macrocosm of the Universe into the microcosm of the human form. He noted that when the abdominal muscles contract, the intestines rise up which leads to an upward thrust of the diaphragm, the muscle that causes the movement in the body that leads to breath. He believed that condensed air from the intestines played a role in diaphragm movement and that this air in the intestines was what drove air out of the lungs so that a person could breathe. In reality, we know now that the lungs, when they expand as a result of relaxation of the abdominal muscles, the bowels move downward and are massaged mildly. We also know that the respiratory system and the digestive system are not distinct. In fact, as an example, asthma, a respiratory disease characterized by episodes of bronchial constriction and difficulty breathing, which has been blamed on allergens, is actually more heavily correlated in the scientific literature with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), a digestive system issue that involves a backflow of acid and undigested food particle from the stomach into the esophagus. The acids and food particulates that reflux in GERD patients are what are actually causing bronchial irritation when they’re inhaled into the lungs inadvertently. Treating digestive system issues can significantly reduce the frequency of asthma attacks, but for most patients, Lugol’s iodine is essential to overcome asthma permanently because of the role that iodine plays in regulating reproductive hormones.
In any case, back when Leonardo da Vinci was alive, there was comparatively very little written about medicine and the human body. He used his creative mind, his “felt sense” to navigate what the popular culture at that time believed to be true and expand on it. But before da Vinci, were thousands of years of shaman who had had nothing but oral tradition and felt sense, to find cures for serious diseases within their tribe. The shaman of one tribe didn’t have the wisdom of the shaman from other tribes. Yet, these medicine men and women kept humanity alive during the earliest, most challenging times in the history of our planet. They had no logical information, no science, no books to reference in order to solve problems. All they had was the “felt sense” and intuition to make life-or-death decisions.
Traditional Chinese Medicine Influences in the History of Western Conventional Medicine
Between 1150 and 1200 C.E., Master Nicolaus, the author of a pre-Renaissance era anatomy text, noted that the liver acts like a fire underneath the cauldron of the stomach. The cold, dryness of the stomach, according to this assessment, could be transformed by the fiery heat of the liver. Master Nicolaus went on to say that the gallbladder might be likened to the cook that unites, through its action in the body, the cauldron of the stomach and the fire of the liver. This metaphor about fires, cauldrons, and cooks is similar to the views of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and it’s classification system using heat and cold, dampness and dryness along with the idea that hollow organs and solid organs pair up to function a bit like a copper coil and magnet. Hollow organs and solid organs, in TCM, might be likened to a self-energizing battery system when both organs in a pair are functioning well.
There are, in fact, parallels between the Greek and Roman systems of medicine that developed in antiquity and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The Hippocratic Corpus (writings of Hippocrates, one of the most important physicians from antiquity) and a Chinese medical textbook known as the Huáng Dì Nèi Jīng, a famous Chinese text both discuss hollow tubes or ducts that connect organs in the body. While Chinese scholars have long acknowledged the relationship between the Hippocratic channels and the similarities it has with the Chinese meridian system, modern conventional medicine pretends that the meridian system that’s used by TCM practitioners is completely foreign and possibly useless.
Hippocrates is often regarded as the father of modern medicine. All doctors are familiar with the Hippocratic oath that declares that a physician should “do no harm” though, in today’s world, most doctors have no idea what constitutes harm and what does not as they are educated under a curriculum developed by pharmaceutical companies that have denounced cures for disease as being “bad for business”. But Hippocrates is an important figure in modern conventional medicine and most people have a passing familiarity with his work.
In the metaphor of the stomach as cauldron, the liver as the fire, and the gallbladder as a cook, the small intestine, and the colon act as “colanders” (in fact, the word “colon” comes from the same Latin root word “colatorium” which means “strainer” – an interesting play on this word exists in regard to intestines and constipation). In TCM, the liver is where anger is stored when it can’t be released or properly integrated by the logical, left-brain. The feeling of anger, ideally, goes across an alpha-brainwave state as a bridge leading to the left-brain where (hopefully) logical thoughts will be able to calm the emotion of anger, not with force, but with balance. While the heart deals with joy, the lungs with sadness and grief, the spleen and stomach are a unit in the body that carries the weight of worry, overthinking, and anxiety.
The gallbladder, in TCM, deals with curiosity and interest. When the gallbladder is sick, we lose interest and feel apathy about things that would normally attract our attention. We can notice this feeling of apathy with the left, logical brain and if we’re aware of the fact that gallbladder issues cause this kind of apathy, we might treat ourselves using therapies designed to alleviate gallbladder woes.
When daily stressors are transformed into powerful fears, the kidneys are the organs that step forward to take the hit. Master Nicolaus’ metaphor in his anatomy textbook about the fire in the liver and the cauldron (of worry?) in the stomach is just one of several pieces of evidence that, in ancient times, theories about medicine and the digestive system had been informed by alternative systems of medicine like TCM. As such, the history of TCM is also the history of conventional medicine, albeit a part of history that has been rejected by modern doctors.
Christian Views of the Stomach
When I was in my early 20s, I used to write people’s biographies and I often spent time researching the history of the cities where my subjects grew up. This yielded some interesting insights that I still carry with me today. I found then, as I still do today, that it’s hard to separate a person’s personality from where they spent their childhood and where their families-of-origin grew up. And if I look back hundreds of years into the past, I can still see evidence of major historical events in a specific geographical region 10 generations later.For the most part, the people who read our books are Christian or they live in countries of the world that are predominantly Christian. As such, whether the reader himself or herself is Christian or not they’ve been heavily influenced by the values of Christianity as these rules have been imposed on different aspects of life. This includes medicine, which has been profoundly impacted by Christianity as an institution.
While the Chinese culture followed a very different path through history to arrive at the current milieu that makes up a Chinese person’s daily life, Westerners have been influenced by a very different set of values in terms of medicine. TCM has existed in its current form for thousands of years and originated from herbalism and also shamanic practices before it was recognized that the animating principle known as “chi” was vital in promoting health and balance in the body.
If you are a Westerner who is reading this book in order to try to understand how to heal a digestive system issue and you’re ready to expand your horizons and think outside of the box, then we need to look at some of the latent beliefs about the stomach and digestion that come from antiquity. Some of the beliefs about the body that have been packaged into modern medicine are still evident in the way that we work with the body in hospitals and clinics. In order to make peace with the digestive system, it’s important to cast light on the wars that were declared hundreds of years ago against the body.
Just before the Reformation and then the Renaissance, when Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth were alive and doing work on the planet, the stomach was regarded as the lowest organ in the body due to its “uncleanliness”. Alessandro Benedetti, the surgeon general for the Venetian army, wrote in 1497 that the stomach and bowels were farther away from the brain and the “site of reason” and “fenced off by the diaphragm” in order to “not disturb the rational part of the mind with its importunity”. Benedetti believed that the organs of digestion existed solely to serve the “rational”, logical mind.
But what if your stomach and your digestive organs revolt against this type of tyranny by the left-brain? What if you are among the modern humans living with a gut that is no longer willing or able to live in service to the rules and ideals imposed by the logical mind?
Alessandro Benedetti also believed that the stomach was conscious of itself and perhaps greedy in its requirements of blood and moisture. Andreas de Laguna, a doctor just 40 years Benedetti’s contemporary, acknowledged that, alas, if the stomach’s function was impaired, the rest of the body was in great peril. No matter who is discussing the matter of the digestive organs, there is a tendency to anthropomorphize them, likely because unconsciously (without knowing that an “unconscious mind” existed at that time), these ancient masters were still aware that the vagus nerve collected the meandering data from the organs and that each organ therefore possessed a mind that can, at times, cast an independent vote and revolt against the left, logical brain.
So many of us in today’s world are encouraged to go to war against our bodies and the “unspiritual” organs. We sign up for surgeries to remove whole organs and replace them with plastic substitutes. It seems nearly impossible to negotiate treaties with these organs that refuse to bow to the One True God of Christianity or Islam (as they are, technically, the same God). In order to heal the digestive system, it isn’t necessary to take up a new religion or deny the existence of God. What is necessary, though, is a willingness to admit that there are at least two parts of our human being – our human existence. There is a rational, logical, linguistic part that can follow rules and that can appreciate the importance of having limits and boundaries to keep ourselves safe. But there is also a part of us that does not possess words, but that rather works primarily in symbols, gestures, movements, and non-linguistic sound. This part of us is the “felt sense” that we’re born with, before we develop words and we need this part in order to survive. It is this part of us that will stop following the rules when the rules are harming us. This is the part of us that will act to save our own or a loved one’s life without any rational, conscious thought. Should a loved one step in front of a moving bus, this part of us will (likely) act (although the “freeze response” is also an common reaction in a situation like this) without forming a plan, and without regard for rules that are being imposed on us. If your digestive system is revolting against what the left brain wants for you to do in your daily life, what is it trying to tell you? What is your digestive system dis-ease trying to save you from?
Using Gut to Heal the Gut
In the modern world, science and logic is everything. Illogical things are stupid. Intuition has no place in most social situations. In public places, logic is all that matters. If you happen to be one of those people who can see apparitions or have visions of the future, you’re out of luck and probably crazy. These things can’t be observed using the existing tools of science, so they aren’t relevant.Maybe you’re a person who has a good job that pays well. A part of you hates what you do, but logic says that you should be happy because you make plenty of money. No one wants to hear you complain about how you feel about your well-paying job. So you keep your mouth shut about what you feel and instead stick only to dialogue about how great your job is.
My personal experience with my own gut took me pretty far afield years ago when I developed fibromyalgia after a brief stomach upset, a couple of pukes, and a fever one night after quitting my job as a social worker in Colorado. My husband John and I had recently had a stillborn baby and we’d moved twice in one year. We had a healthy girl who was 2 years old, Lydian, and though John had stayed home with her for nearly a year, it was now my turn to go back to being the homemaker. John would be working 60 to 80 hour weeks, so I was alone at home with little Lydian.
I could barely walk at this time. I couldn’t pull up the blankets on the bed at night sometimes. But I had to figure out how to get through a day with my 2 year old because I had no choice. There was no one to help and no one who cared about my pain. So I paid close attention to myself as there was no Internet that I could query to try to find “rational” answers to my questions.
I took note of absolutely anything that seemed to help relieve my pain and anything that seemed to make it worse. This was how I healed myself.
It took a long time, in retrospect. I never took drugs and I never uttered the word fibromyalgia except once to my husband after I left the clinic on the day of my so-called “diagnosis”. The doctor didn’t even look at me when he sentenced me to this lifetime of agony with fibromyalgia and seemed irritated by my mere presence in his office as he explained that “there is no cure and no treatment”. But I was lucky. I’d studied to become a doctor and I’d dropped out because I could see that the system had major problems and I didn’t want to be involved in it anymore. I had already lost faith in conventional medicine and that was a lucky strike for me.
I didn’t know, at that time, that there was a relationship between fibromyalgia and gut issues, but food and drink - my diet - became the object of my attention that yielded the most positive results in the years that followed. I used intuition and my own felt sense – literally the feelings in my body – to follow myself out of the jungle of this dis-ease.
Today, almost 25 years later, I’ve been free of fibromyalgia for 20 years. I know so much more now than I did back then. I have a lot more book knowledge, but I also have some body wisdom from having worked with the sacred medicines. This wisdom is non-transferable though. I can speak about it, but people who haven’t worked with the sacred medicines or other trauma-informed therapies are unlikely to be able to hear me. Also, I tend to believe that my wisdom is only mine and can only really be helpful to my family members and friends who are willing to step into a familial role temporarily, mostly just to find their own unique body-wisdom for their own lineages through work with the sacred medicines. When I write about the sacred medicines and the things that I’ve learned from the medicines themselves, I always try to find science to back it up because I know that we live in a world of left-brain thinkers who have little or no access to their intuition and body-wisdom anymore. Science can cut both ways and often, when a major discovery is made that could cure a lot of people, Big Pharma hires scientist-underlings who go to work to produce research that runs contrary to the big discovery of a curative treatment. Anyone who spends enough time in the scientific research library will find that in order to find the information that can be helpful and useful in a particular health-related situation, you still have to use your intuition. Anyone, in fact, can access body-wisdom and the intuition derived from it to heal themselves, but there’s work involved and a lot of self-confrontation to get past the skeletons in the closet – all of the trauma that we carry with us…trauma that needs to be released and integrated. No one works with the sacred medicines alone and no one works only on behalf of themselves. Whatever work we do on ourselves is work that we do on our whole tribe to change the growth trajectory of the entire family tree. An Ayahuasca purge is always done into the great abyss on behalf of the ancestry and for the future generations.
But needless to say, on my way from my 20s to now, I passed through a period of egotism where I collected and memorized data. But even as I was building resumes and a curriculum vitae to impress the Big Powerful Ones and the masses, I traveled to experience what seemed, for many years, to be “primitive” systems of medicine. These systems of medicine seemed primitive to me only because this was a word I’d been taught to use to describe systems of medicine that are based, at their core, on Nature and metaphors of nature. Many, but not all, of these systems of medicine were shamanic or related closely to shamanism. I didn’t know this at the time.
Travel to “undeveloped” and poor nations that still host ethnic groups that haven’t been entirely convinced of the absolute legitimacy of conventional medicine created many opportunities for me (and for Lydian, who was always at my side), to become ill ourselves and have no other choice, but accept treatment from a system of medicine that seemed “dirty” or “superstitious”. Part of what healed me of my illness were illnesses that forced me to accept treatments that made no sense to my logical mind. When I traveled, especially to far off places where no discernible paths existed at times through the landscape, I put my body into a position where its importance as the source of intuition was essential. And slowly, over the course of more than a decade, I began to listen to what my body had to say.
If one of us (me, my husband, or my daughter) got sick in a place where there was no doctor, we were forced to trust either ourselves or the medicine men and women who presented themselves to us. I would argue that we were sick because our bodies were trying with desperation to lead us to the people who still knew The Old Ways of medicine that still to this day, involves intuition as The Guide. We worked with a lot of practitioners who didn’t speak our language. One of the healers in Cambodia was both blind and deaf. I learned that communication was less about words and linguistics than I’d always thought. I could communicate with someone who didn’t share a single word in common with me if that person was motivated to understand me. I also had to motivated to communicate with that person. This was the single most important ingredient that I needed in order to be able to say something to another person and be understood and also to understand even when language was not a tool that we could use.
As someone who lives in a foreign country (Mexico) full-time, I’ve learned through the sacred medicines that language is not what I think it is. The words in a foreign language that enter my mind bubble up when the other person is tuned in on some level and listening to me. When I have no words or when the words make me nervous or if I feel forced to speak, I pay close attention to the person I’m speaking to. Whenever possible, I pay attention to what I sense in my body first before I speak.
Medicine is something that’s been developed over the centuries along two veins:
- Along a course that involves observation of parts and pieces and a mathematical type of logic in terms of how these parts and pieces are or might be related.
- Along a course that involves the use of intuition and reference to the “gut” to feel what’s right or what’s wrong in terms of a given medicine.
When I was younger, I studied medicine according to parts and pieces and logic, but it wasn’t until Lydian became an adult that she and I were forced to abandon these methods and learn a new way to use them. Living in a foreign country whose population doesn’t speak English as its primary language made me more aware of myself in terms of my tongue and my words. What I can express to another person in Spanish using words has, of course, become more precise, but my awareness of the “felt sense” to understand what another person says to me or intends to say is on full blast because it has to be. People regularly use idioms and phrases from deep cultural underpinnings that I can’t understand readily. Many people who use idioms and phrases like this aren’t aware of what the real meaning of these phrases are themselves so I can’t ask a person for their meaning because they don’t really know it. These are just some of the strange limitations of the logical left-brain. To be fair, the right-brain / felt sense also has limitations, but the trick is to try to get these two parts of ourselves to work together as fluently as possible, especially if you have digestive system issues.
How to Find Healers Who Can Heal the Gut When Your Gut Is Sick
If your gut is sick, then your felt sense is not working properly and you might struggle in tuning into your own intuition. You might not be at the top of your game in judging another person’s character if your gut isn’t healthy because you aren’t recognizing facial expressions and you probably aren’t making a lot of authentic facial expressions yourself. Your body language may not be saying what you want for it to say. Your vocal tones and inflections may also be a bit “off”. So what can you do about this? How can you find someone to help you, health-wise, with your digestive system issues if your gut isn’t able to lead you in the right direction?In reality, you gut is probably still going to talk to you and tell you what it needs even when you’re sick. The problem is that your left-brain won’t believe what your gut has to say. Most of our digestive system clients are very hard on themselves emotionally. They have a tendency toward extreme self-judgment and self-frustration. So while your gut might be telling you exactly what works for it and what doesn’t, your left brain is likely to make fun of this “felt sense”.
When you’re trying to find a healer to help you with your digestive system issues, find people with whom you can communicate easily and fluently. Try new healers often and ask yourself if you felt relaxed physically while working with them. Be aware that your left-brain will likely have a lot to say and many concerns in anticipation of meeting with healers whether the healers are good for you or not. But if you feel repulsed prior to a meeting with a health practitioner and your gut says, “No!” in no-uncertain-terms, then you should listen to that. Perhaps the timing for the meeting is wrong or perhaps the healer himself or herself is the wrong person for you at this time. Today is today. If your meeting with a healer feels utterly wrong, follow that guidance for the day. You ask yourself / your body again tomorrow about working with that person and see if you get a different answer.
Summary
In this series, we’re going to provide an overview of the digestive system along with cures for digestive system diseases. Our view of the digestive system takes into account the emotional aspects of the body’s felt sense as well as physical aspects of disease. Our model takes into consideration a number of other medical models that we’ll discuss as we go along.It doesn’t matter if you’re just beginning to attempt to heal the digestive system or if you’ve been working on your digestion for 2 decades without success. Our goal here is to give you new leads that will lead you toward the right treatments and empower our readers to work with medicines that have been used for centuries to literally teach shaman what treatments are needed to cure a disease (even if the shaman has never seen or heard of that treatment prior to the plant showing it to them). Most of our readers want to avoid the sacred medicines, but the sacred medicines offer a detour out of the mess of conventional medicine to reconnect people with their own bodies.
Resources:
• No Author (n.d.). A History of the Stomach and Intestines. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://web.stanford.edu/class/history13/earlysciencelab/body1/stomachpages/stomachcolonintestines.html#:~:text=During%20medieval%20times%2C%20anatomists%20had,less%20concerned%20about%20descriptive%20anatomy.
• Steenbergen, L. et al. (2021). Recognizing emotions in bodies: Vagus nerve stimulation enhances recognition of anger while impairing sadness. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8563521/
• Hickok, G. (2011). The Role of Mirror Neurons in Speech and Language Processing. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2813993/
• Fan, Y. et al. (2020). Altered functional connectivity of the amygdala in Crohn’s disease. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31628591/
• Grandes, X. A. et al. (2022). Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease and Asthma: A Narrative Review. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9187188/
• Corner, G. W. (1927). The Anatomy of Master Nicolaus, ca. 1150-1200. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://web.stanford.edu/class/history13/Readings/corner2.htm
• Paulo, R. F. and Zhang, Q. C. (2022). Liver and gall bladder channel parallels in the Hippocratic Corpus and Huang Di Nei Jing with theoretical considerations. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2225411021001401
• Craik, E. M. (2009). Hippocratic Bodily “Channels” and Oriental Parallels. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2629169/#:~:text=In%20the%20Hippocratic%20Corpus%2C%20the,a%20healthy%20and%20unhealthy%20state.
• Hedayat, K. M. and Lapraz, J. C. (2019). The Theory of Endobiogeny: Foundational Concepts for the Treatment of Common Clinical Conditions. Volume 2. Elsevier: San Diego.
• Hedayat, K. M. and Lapraz, J. C. (2019). The Theory of Endobiogeny: Global Systems Thinking and Biological Modeling for Clinical Medicine. Volume 1. Elsevier: San Diego.
• Hedayat, K. M. and Lapraz, J. C. (2019). The Theory of Endobiogeny: Advanced Concepts for the Treatment of Complex Clinical Conditions. Volume 3. Elsevier: San Diego.
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