Listening to Your Body: Discerning Messages of the Mind, Heart & Gut

The other day I was driving in my car and a dashboard light came on that I had never seen before. I thought to myself, “I’m WAY too busy to deal with a car issue – I don’t even have time to stop and check it out.”

Fortunately, I had the owner’s manual right in the glove box. I looked up the symbol – it just needed air in the tires. I could easily manage that when I stop for gas.

How simple was that? What a well-designed machine! The tire experienced a drop in air pressure, a sensor sent a message to the computer, the computer turned on the dashboard message light – the message was clear, easy to diagnose and simple to fix! All because I had the manual.

Every day we – the spiritual beings that we are – travel around in our vehicles – the physical bodies we inhabit. Just like the cars we drive, when the physical body senses a problem with its apparatus, a sensor/nerve sends a message to the computer/brain which gives us a signal that something needs attention.

Unfortunately, we’re so conditioned to ignore the subtle signals that we often do not hear them until they become severe – like a serious illness, or some discomfort or distress.

What kinds of messages does the body send us?

The Body holds incredible wisdom and intelligence. It knows how to manage and heal itself when given the proper conditions. However, the Conditions must be met on the Physical, Energetic, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual levels – and this is up to us, its inhabitors.

The Body holds innate wisdom on all of these levels – Physical, Energetic, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual – and it speaks to us from each of these levels. It sends us messages through the Mind, Heart, Gut and the entire being. Each of these channels of communication has different subtleties.

Let’s Look at the Roles of Mind, Heart & Gut:

First, the Gut –

The Gut holds innate wisdom. It only knows one way to perform its functions. It does the best it can under the circumstances we give it. Food is inert – food does not perform functions. It holds properties that we may or may not benefit from, but the body itself determines what it does with the food.

Your choices determine what you give your body to work with. Then the body through its innate wisdom determines whether the food you give it is something it can use or a foreign substance that it must get rid of.

Another major influence on what your body does with what you give it is the state of your nervous system. Your digestive system is largely under the control of your Parasympathetic Nervous System. This is the part of the Autonomic Nervous System called the “Rest and Digest” system.

When you’re stressed out, the Sympathetic Nervous System, called the “Fight or Flight” system is under control. In the stressed state, your Parasympathetic System can’t stimulate your digestive system to digest. Even good foods can’t be well-received when you’re stressed out! (for more information about this, download my free eBook: Unlocking Hidden Messages Behind Stress & Digestion – on my website, https://communityforconsciousliving.com.)

It makes sense that the immune system would be contained in the gut, right? When things go awry in the gut and the innately wise physiology of the gut, including the immune system and the nervous system, can’t keep things on track, it starts to send messages.

You might recognize these messages as bloating and gas, nausea, indigestion, diarrhea, constipation, inflammation… or the louder more evident messages such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), leaky gut syndrome or inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) such as colitis or Crohn’s disease.

The Gut is also a seat of instinct – this is another kind of message your gut holds. That feeling you get – you know in your gut when something is right/good or when it is not. How many times have you heard yourself say, “I knew in my gut…” or “I should have trusted my gut!”

Gut instinct usually gives you messages pertaining to safety and survival. The gut has knowing.
The gut has a nervous system which contains more nerves than your spinal column (which is the part of your central nervous system connects body to your brain). The gut nervous system is called the Enteric Nervous System (ENS).

Ninety-five percent (95%) of the communications between your Enteric Nervous System and your brain are sent from your Enteric Nervous System – from your gut – to your brain. Not the other way around. Science has even shown that the digestive system can continue to function under control of the ENS when the communication with the brain has been severed.

When you think about it, it makes sense that the messages from the gut would inform your brain. This is where your innate wisdom and gut instinct come from, those messages of basic survival and safety.

Next, the Heart –

The Heart knows the emotional states – human experiences of sadness, grief, rejection, betrayal, emotional hurts – and also the human emotional experiences of love, compassion, joy, forgiveness. Emotions help you to understand your relationship to the Divine knowings.

The heart is also a portal for your connection to and wisdom from the Divine. It knows the Divine experience of Divine Love, Compassion, Peace, Forgiveness, Light, Wisdom, Joy, Beauty. It is the portal to know your true divine self – the truth of who you are, your oneness with all that is, your connection to Source and your purpose here on earth in physical form.

The Divine expression of these Qualities is what we true up to. As a spiritual being, you came into this physical world knowing these Truths of the Divine. These Truths remain unchanged within you. When you inhabit the physical form, you forget the truths from your consciousness and begin to witness the experience of the physical dense humanity.

On a mostly subconscious level, you try to make sense of your human experiences as they measure up to the Truths you know inside. This occurs mostly on the subconscious level. When the experiences of the physical dense humanity don’t align with the inner truths, you experience emotional pains.

The human emotions that you feel in your heart are another type of message your body gives you. They signal when you are experiencing something in the physical realm that is different from what you know to be true in the spiritual realm – from what you know inside your deep heart. They signal for you a yearning in your deep heart for the Qualities of the Divine – and when you know, you can access these at any time from within your physical body. (This is the healing.)

Now, the Mind –

The mind, contrary to popular belief, does not hold the wisdom. It is not the knower. The mind’s job is to witness the knowing of the Divine Heart and the Instinctual Gut, and to carry out the instructions needed for the body to function as needed, based on the messages from the heart and the gut.

When you are aware of the human emotional heart without the awareness and understanding of the Divine heart, and when you are aware of the discomforts of the physical gut without understanding the innate physiological needs and the instinctual nature of the gut, you lose alignment with your Truth. This is when the mind takes over and runs the show.

The mind will do what it thinks it needs to do to protect your emotional heart and physical body. It can do a good job of getting you through. It uses logic and reason to figure out what you need to do. It constructs stories that try to make sense of things – in fact, it constructs whole villages!

But if the mind takes off on its own without being aligned with the Divine Truths of the Heart and the Innate Wisdom and Instincts of the Gut, it can and likely will create a world of illusion – a world you can survive in quite nicely at times – until some glimmer of Truth shines through and your world begins to unravel.

A glitch in the Matrix? The recognition of the unraveling is another form of messaging. It might sound scary, but unraveling illusion to reveal Truths is a blessing worth the ups and downs of the journey.

The bottom line is this:

Your body is amazing! Its wisdom is important to listen to. Three sources of wisdom are:

• The Gut – innate physiology and gut instinct.
• The Heart – emotional states and connection to Divine Truths.
• The Mind – protector of the emotional heart and physical body, and soldier to carry out instructions from the Gut and Divine Heart.

Misunderstanding of the messages can result in many discomforts and even dis-ease. One of the most common ways that we see these messages manifest is through our patterns with food and digestion. Our patterns with food exhibit a basic interaction with the physical material world integral to our survival and safety.

Exploring your relationship to food and your body can bring you into deeper understanding and alignment with your Divine Inner Truths and bring healing to your physical body, emotional body, energetic body and your spiritual being.

If you’d like to know more, I’ll be holding a teleclass on Monday, November 18th, to discuss how your relationship with food brings you messages about your relationship to your inner truths and connection to the Divine.

I’ll be outlining 3 Steps to Release Patterns of Over-Eating, especially in the stressful times of the Holiday Season.

There is no charge for this call. Just go to this link to register for your unique call-in number and pin code.

Hope to see you there!
Blessings,
Live and Love Joyfully!
Debra Graugnard