“Trust your gut”, “This just doesn’t feel right”, “My gut reaction” “I feel sick at the thought of it” “My heart’s not in it” these are all phrases we might use ourselves or hear bandied about fairly frequently.
Feeling “Butterflies” or “Cartwheels” in the stomach when there is a bit of anxiety or stress around a particular situation? Can’t eat properly or have an over-active digestive system in anticipation?
Noticing your heart beating faster as the stress begins to build, or palpitations at night even when something is really getting to you?
I challenge you to think of a situation where you had a gut feeling about something, but didn’t follow those feelings. You chose to follow what your head told you to do, and with the benefit of hindsight, you wish you hadn’t? Most likely you got annoyed with yourself because you knew you had a funny feeling about that, and the adverse outcome could potentially have been avoided if you had acted on that funny feeling.
Recently, Beth Nurnberger (www.bethnurnberger.com) introduced me to a concept that helped me to make more sense of all of this – “MBraining” or Multiple Braining.
At it’s simplest, is recognising that we have 3 brains- the head brain, the heart brain and the gut brain, and all 3 have a part to play in how we think and feel about things and the decisions we make. My basic interpretation is that if my gut or heart doesn’t agree with what my head thinks; it’s going to let me know about it.
And the reason this makes so much sense to me is because I have experienced all of the above physical signs, and at the time I wasn’t attuned to what those signs were trying to tell me. I just kept on allowing my head to lead me. Now I know why certain situations felt so very uncomfortable for me.
The “MBrain” theory being that if all 3 brains are aligned we can truly do some amazing things. But we need to do some serious listening to ourselves and perhaps even some work on ourselves to reap these rewards.
If you have read this far, there may be something here that resonates for you. Maybe it’s time to start paying attention to what your heart and gut, as well as your head are trying to tell you.
