The Elephant Memory! Increasing Your Own Memory Through Gut Feeling Awareness!

Science has shown that elephants do have excellent memories that decode and identify survival skills and imprint important data to be used later when needed. And for the elephant, this memory seems to increase with age and experience, leaving the younger of the herd at risk if the elders are captured or killed by poachers. Let's talk now about how we humans can improve our memory retrieval system through awareness of gut feelings and body-mind unity, a process that can be used at about any age and is one that may certainly increase our health, longevity, and the connection to the awareness of our inner Nature.

So much has been studied recently on memory and aging, on restoring memory and using brain scanning to determine how a variety of modalities to connect body and mind work (for instance meditation and hypnosis) and how they reduce stress. Stress has been found to be one of the main reasons for disease, including alzheimer's, confusion, and loss of memory. Over-secretion of stress hormones may impair long-term delayed recall memory.  

For decades we shared our experiences of using the Somatic Reflection Process with hundreds of people in counseling who were experiencing such high stress and confusion that they were having a difficult time making life decisions, particularly concerning career choice and relationships. By centering on the gut feelings of emptiness and fullness (and we are not talking about hunger but instead the feelings that are associated with the two human needs of acceptance and control of one's own responses and the impact of life upon us), and assisting the person to go back in time with their feeling awareness, people were able to be conscious of repressed feelings and examine the impact life had upon them with a clearer view than they did at the time of the actual experience. The gut feeling awareness seems to be the key to our stored feeling memory and most people using the Somatic Reflection Process will remember things they never thought of past the moment of the experience, particularly if it was a traumatic experience or one in which stress was experienced.

And how is this possible that the gut is the key to stored memory? Why is it that by somatically reflecting on the gut response, we can have access to our stored memories? Through electro-chemical communication, neurotransmitters send signals from one neuron to another in your nervous system. One theory is that when we allow ourselves to feel into our gut feelings, we send these signals that restore the synapses in the part of the brain that holds feeling memory. These feeling memories that we have long been suppressing are then called to connect like a magnet to these signals. So when we become aware of gut feelings, we invite hidden memory to emerge to our consciousness, transforming and uniting the body and mind, often for the first time.

And why is it so important to connect the gut and head brains, to restore memories, many of which we may be just as happy not to remember? Why? Because ultimately it is only through this connection of body-mind that we begin to make what is unconscious to become conscious,  that we become more self aware, that we find our deepest wisdom and reduce the stress of carrying the burden of misconceptions of who we are and who we are not. And only through understanding ourselves and accepting ourselves can we know and fulfill our instinctive needs that lead us on the path of happiness, fulfillment, and gives us a blueprint for making successful life-decisions.

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If you are interested in exploring the use of the Somatic Reflection Process to help you recover memory and for body-mind unity, then we suggest first reading our book What's Behind Your Belly Button? which explains the development and use of the process in detail and also includes a complete protocol for it. 

And we cover memory and gut awareness for health  throughout our latest book Increasing Intuitional Intelligence. Here below are two excerpts from Increasing Intuitional Intelligence that we think you might enjoy reading: 

 

Gut Feelings As the Key to
Further Development of
Memory Theories in Psychology

W

e are educators and school counselors, not neurologists, and although we could certainly speculate, we would not presume to say that we know why in a biological sense that reflecting on gut feelings is key to personal memory. However, from our extensive counseling experiences with the Somatic Reflection Process on gut feelings, we have observed that there is a strong psychological relationship between gut feelings and memory. It is as though reflecting on how one has felt in their gut in the past, begins to awaken feeling memory in the majority of people and this triggers even memory of external events or at least what the person assumed was true at the time of the event. We therefore, feel from this experience that memory theorists and researchers in the field are amiss if they do not explore the functional  relationship of gut feelings to memory.

Many people say that they cannot remember their childhood experiences prior to age 7 and memory studies by psychologists in the field of childhood development will tell you that this is normal. Dr. Patricia Bauer, Professor of Psychology and Senior Associate Dean of Research at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, has been researching the development of memory in children since the 80s. She has found that children begin to have a significant increase in the rate of forgetting memories of their past life events after the age of 7, or the onset of what was termed by Sigmund Freud as Childhood Amnesia.

For a long time, it was thought that the reason many adults could not remember events from their early childhood was because young children just did not have memory ability. But that has since been explored in research and Bauer concludes children do have memory ability but that memories from earlier than age 7 have an accelerated rate for being forgotten once the child is past age 7 than the memories formed after that age. Why the onset of this forgetting process is at age 7 is still in question and has lead to further important memory studies of children.

What is important here to us is that the memory research now being conducted on children concludes that recovering childhood memories is important to the development of personal identity and adult decision-making. This is a welcome validation of our work developing and using the Somatic Reflection Process on gut feelings to recover memory, with the affect of uniting body and mind in consciousness. The importance of recovering childhood memories is an understanding that we as career counselors have used in our clinical studies with people since the 70s, as we found that the seeds of who we are and who we become begin in early childhood. If we can become conscious of those beginnings, then we have valuable self-awareness information upon which to base healthy and successful life decisions as adults.

In our counseling work, we found something very shocking to many people who had no prior or very little childhood memories. When we asked people to center their awareness on their gut feelings to guide them and slowly to go back in time and remember when they felt a particular feeling in their gut before, they would be able nearly 100% of the time to access early childhood memories previously un-recalled. And those people who had previously been able to recall childhood memories were able to continue to recall additional memories using this gut feeling reflection process.

—From Increasing Intuitional Intelligence

Gut Feelings as the Key to
'Feeling String Theory'

We discovered that the key to recovering childhood memories was to have people focus on their inner gut feelings and impact of experience rather than the details of their lives. We would ask them to come in their awareness to a place in their past when they had the same feeling they were centering on in the present (usually starting with a reoccurring feeling connected to an unresolved issue in the present time of their life) and then they would allow the details of the experience in the past to come to their own minds. Each time a feeling memory would come up in their consciousness, they were asked to focus on the feeling and continue to go back further in time. It was as if their present feeling awareness was attached to a thread that went all the way back in time to the impact of early childhood. One just had to follow the feeling and see where it landed. We like to say that our feelings are like sausages in a string, and that they are similar impacts of events that are connected. We could call this a feeling memory string.

Often, the early childhood memory in this feeling memory string was completely surprising to the person as the details of the event in childhood would be completely unrelated to the details of the person’s present life issue that was the trigger of the feelings. But if they focused on the feelings, it was clear that the issue was the same in childhood as it was in the present and the person was often still trying to work out this issue in the present, an issue that began so very long ago.

Using the head brain alone (without gut feelings) to think back to earlier childhood did not access new memories. But feeling back in time, particularly centering on gut feelings of emptiness and fullness, would take people back to feelings in relation to events in their pasts that they had not previously remembered. This was usually true in each successive session using the Somatic Reflection Process. The common response after these somatic reflections was amazement at remembering things they had not previously remembered and how useful it was in giving them new insights and perspectives into the present adult issue and decision they may be facing.

How this occurs, that is, how or why neurologically the gut feeling is the key to recovering memory, we never knew when we first developed and used the process in the 70s. We just knew that it worked and that it helped people to resolve issues they had been carrying all their lives and that the acquired knowledge of self through this somatic process on gut feelings encouraged positive adult decision-making.

 —From Increasing Intuitional Intelligence

Click on a book cover below to go to Amazon to Buy:

"What's Behind Your Belly Button?" is available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon,de and Amazon.fr and Amazon.CA and other international Amazon sites

and it is on The Book Depository with free international shipping.

"Increasing Intuitional Intelligence" is also available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon.de and Amazon.fr  other international Amazon sites

 

Twelve Keys to the Importance of the Gut Response for Body-Mind Unity and Vitality

"We have two instinctual needs that the gut gauges—the need to feel accepted and the need to be in control of our own responses to life. These two needs must be constantly in balance. Too much of one without the other leaves us empty."

Our first book What’s Behind Your Belly Button? has been on the market for seven years as of this month, and yet my colleague Robert Sterling and I are sure the important discoveries that we made in our work and covered in this book concerning gut feelings and intuition are still unexplored for the most part in modern psychology. To help this exploration of our work, we have briefly outlined below what we found in counseling hundreds of people and using what we called The Somatic Reflection Process to access gut feelings, recover memory, and unite body and mind for wellness and successful life decision-making. These keys below represents the core of our findings on gut intelligence. We hope they help in the exploration and understanding of inner most gut feelings and how to listen to the voice of one’s gut to have a healthier and more beneficial life experience with a relief of stress and an increase of vitality and Intuitional Intelligence.

It is our hope that with the research being done today using brain imaging to understand how various healing modalities work to restore both memory and good health, we will see some of this research also taking into account our findings on the gut response and will study these important concepts further. (See What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct and also its companion book Increasing Intuitional Intelligence: How the Awareness of Instinctual Gut Feelings Fosters Human Learning, Intuition, and Longevity)

Twelve Keys to the Importance of the Gut Response for Body-Mind Unity and Vitality

1. The gut is the instinctual response center and we feel either empty or full or somewhere in the middle (imagine a gas gauge) in our gut at all times.

2. We feel full when our instinctual needs are met and empty when they are not. We are talking not just about food intake (although the feeling of emptiness and fullness in relation to food intake and psychological instinctual needs are interestingly similar and we do get them confused and thus may over eat to try to fill the emptiness we feel psychologically). We are talking about psychological instinctual needs—psychological not in the use of logic but in our needs as human beings.

3. We have two instinctual needs that the gut gauges—the need to feel accepted and the need to be in control of our own responses to life. These two needs must be constantly in balance. Too much of one without the other leaves us empty.

4. When we have both of these instinctive needs met, we feel full and thus energized; and when we have neither met, we feel empty and often experience some symptoms of stress in the body like feeling lethargic, anxious, overwhelmed, disconnected and alone.

5. The gut response does not depend on the thinking brain as the gut is an independent brain of its own (see Dr. Michael Gershon’s research), but of course it can be greatly affected by the thinking brain, and vice-versa.

6. We work both consciously and unconsciously to keep these two instinctual needs in balance at all times.

7. At best, we need to have a balanced and conscious dialog between our gut responses and head response so we can use our thinking brain to make the appropriate responses in the external world and try to fill these two important instinctual needs in appropriate and successful ways. 

8. When we are unconscious of our gut responses, our thinking brain will often use a system of thought it has picked up (perhaps from an authority like a parent, teacher or even a religious interpretation) and applies it as a judgment about the feeling in our gut. This is what happens when we have an emotion like guilt or depression. We feel empty because our needs are not met and our thinking brain attaches a thought to the emptiness and lack of our fulfillment like “It is all my fault for being too stupid or too small or too incompetent, etc.” or “I am not capable of doing anything to make this work or be better” or "I am not worthy or deserving", thus we have guilt and or depression feelings.

9. The emotional feelings are not pure feelings of emptiness or fullness anymore, as they now have the thinking component mixed in them. And these thinking-feelings or emotions are mostly felt in other parts of our bodies above our hara, between our head brain and gut brain. If you look into your emotional feelings, you can always find a thinking element to them. And if you trace the feeling aspect only, it goes directly and purely to the gut. For as we have said, the gut is the source of all feeling.

10. Generally, the only way we can unravel this tightly woven thread of inaccurate thinking judgment and resulting emotional stress, is to reflect back to the source of when the thinking head first applied this very same judgment and find the actual source or as close to it as possible. And the key to finding this first experience is through reflection on the gut feeling of emptiness and fullness, not through thinking back on the details of our lives.

11. Once we find this original experience in which we started the “tape” that plays over and over in our heads that we are all at fault, powerless, too needy, unlovable, etc., then we can lift the sentence we have placed on ourselves and our feelings and begin to see ourselves clearer and make healthy decisions—begin to use our thinking head to follow our instinctual needs and fulfill our true human nature.

12. Reflection on the gut voice helps us to be more mindful of our caring nature and thus be more caring for others. And with the new awareness of our gut responses and needs that we acquire through reflection on our instinctual gut responses, we are able to live a more caring and healthy life with the thinking head finally conscious and listening more clearly to the responses of our most reliable and authentic self—our gut instinctual feelings in our body.

Click on a book cover below to go to Amazon to Buy:

"What's Behind Your Belly Button?" is available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon,de and Amazon.fr and Amazon.CA and other international Amazon sites

and it is on The Book Depository with free international shipping.

"Increasing Intuitional Intelligence" is also available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon.de and Amazon.fr  other international Amazon sites

Be sure and keep scrolling to our next blog article: Our 25+ Most Viewed Blog Articles on Exploring Gut Intelligence, Gut Feelings, Memory and Instincts. Since we have been posting this blog site now since 2009, there may be some important posts that you have missed and so we have made a convenient links list, up-to-date, that would be a summary of all the important post on this blog exploring gut intelligence.

Our 25+ Most Viewed Blog Articles on Exploring Gut Intelligence, Gut Feelings, Memory and Instincts

Welcome to our blog on exploring gut intelligence, feelings and instincts. We give thanks to all our followers. Since we have been posting this blog site now since 2009, there may be some important posts that you have missed. We have had a number of people ask us if we could make a convenient links list, up-to-date, that would be a summary of all the important post on this blog. The following is a list of our blog posts to which we have had the most traffic and positive responses. You may find older such lists on this blog, but this is the most up-to-date at this time. There are many more posts on this blog, so if you are interested in reading every one of them, please feel free to use the left side bar archive or just keep clicking “older post” at the bottom of each page on the right side.

Our 25+ Most Viewed Blog Posts on Exploring Gut Feelings and Instincts:

 

1. Reflections on Meetings With Isabel Myers and The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to Develop the Somatic Reflection Process on Gut Feelings
OCTOBER 11, 2018
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2018/10/reflections-on-meetings-with-isabel.html

2. How the Somatic Reflection Process Brings You New Hopeful Information From Your Past.
JANUARY 25, 2018
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2018/01/how-somatic-reflection-process-brings.html


3.  Relationship of Instincts and Gut Microbiome in Human Development and Personality.
JUNE 11, 2017
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2017/06/relationship-of-instincts-and-gut.html


4. Morals and Gut Instincts: How Our Awareness of Gut Feelings and Intuition May Protect Us From Immoral Behaviors.

DECEMBER 14, 2015
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2015/12/how-our-awareness-of-gut-feelings-and.html

5. Increasing Intuitional Intelligence: How the Awareness of Instinctual Gut Feelings Fosters Human Learning, Intuition, and Longevity.

OCTOBER 15, 2015
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2015/10/increasing-intuitional-intelligence-how.html

6. Affects of Increased Awareness of Gut Instincts on Aging and Longevity

JULY 27, 2015

http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2015/07/new-book-on-affects-of-learning.html

7. Freeing Human Nature: An Essay on the Process of Human Learning and the Two Brain System—Head and Gut
JULY 22, 2014
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2014/07/freeing-human-nature-essay-on-process_22.html


8. Healing the Trauma of the Body-Mind Split Through Accessing Instinctual Gut Feelings
MAY 27, 2014
 http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2014/05/healing-trauma-of-body-mind-split.html


9. Reflecting on Gut feelings as the Key to Recovering Childhood Memories that Enhance Healthy Adult Decision-Making
APRIL 19, 2014
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2014/04/reflecting-on-gut-feelings-as-key-to.html


10.  Is Love, Happiness, and Compassion Truly More Related to Your Heart or to Your Gut?
FEBRUARY 13, 2014
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2014/02/is-valentines-day-love-happiness-and.html


11. How to Explore Gut Feelings to Help In Making a Marriage Decision and Develop Self-Awareness for a Successful Love Relationship
DECEMBER 3, 2013
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2013/12/how-to-explore-gut-feelings-to-help-in.html


12. Exploring Gut Instincts and the Need To Be "Social" as Applied to the Education of Our Children
OCTOBER 23, 2013
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2013/10/exploring-gut-instincts-and-need-to-be.html


13. Following Gut Instincts to the Awareness of Our True Human Nature
APRIL 16, 2013
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2013/04/following-gut-instincts-to-awareness-of.html


14. Was Religion Invented By the Thinking Mind to Try to Make Sense of Gut Feeling and Gut Instinct? An Exploration of the Theory of "God Is In the Gut"!
FEBRUARY 9, 2013
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2013/02/was-religion-invented-by-thinking-mind.html


15. What are the Instinctual Needs That are Often Confused for the Need of Food in Gut Feelings of Emptiness and Fullness?
MARCH 27, 2013
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-are-instinctual-needs-that-are.html


16. Improving Gut Health Using the Somatic Reflection Process to Influence Both Physical and Mental Health
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2013/06/improving-gut-health-using-somatic.html


17.  Reflecting on Gut Feeling to Deal with Sadness and Loss in Love Relationship
FEBRUARY 14, 2013
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2013/02/reflecting-on-gut-feeling-to-deal-with.html


18.  Exploring Gut Feeling and Unresolved Issues with People
JANUARY 14, 2013
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2013/01/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-ja-x.html


19. How Do We Know When Our Gut Feelings Are Reliable? Can you Trust a Gut Feeling?
DECEMBER 13, 2012
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2012/12/how-do-we-know-when-our-gut-feelings.html


20. Reflecting on and Sharing Gut feelings of Emptiness and Aloneness to Deal with Fear During a Hurricane (or other Life Threatening Event)
OCTOBER 29, 2012
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2012/10/reflecting-on-and-sharing-gut-feeling.html


21. Explore Why Doctors Can Save Lives by Listening to their Gut Feelings During a Diagnosis: On Gut Feelings in General Practice
OCTOBER 5, 2012
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2012/10/explore-why-doctors-can-save-lives-by.html


22.  Why Is Reflecting Upon Our Gut Feelings So Important to Our Immune System and Well Being— Distinguishing the "You" and "Not Truly You" for Excellent Mental and Physical Health!
SEPTEMBER 1, 2012
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2012/09/why-is-reflecting-upon-our-gut-feelings.html


23. Are Gut Feelings Really in the Gut? Understanding Your Gut Feelings and What They Are Telling You
AUGUST 16, 2012
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2012/08/welcome-this-morning-i-read-blog-in.html


24.  Increase your Intuition By Learning the Difference Between Emotional Feelings and Gut Feelings
JULY 16, 2012
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2012/07/increase-your-intuitition-and-learn.html


25.  What Are Gut Feelings and Instincts and How To Become Aware of Them To Overcome Stress
JUNE 27, 2012
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2012/06/what-are-gut-feelings-and-how-to-become.html


26. A Specific Guide to Use to Listen to Your Gut Instincts—The Somatic Reflection Process
FEBRUARY 15, 2012
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2012/02/specific-guide-to-use-to-listen-to-your.html


27. Acknowledging the Enteric Nervous System in the Gut To Provide a New Image and New Myth of Humanity
OCTOBER 15, 2009
http://instinctualgutfeelings.blogspot.com/2009/10/acknowledging-enteric-nervous-system-in.html.

Click on a book cover below to go to Amazon to Buy:

"What's Behind Your Belly Button?" is available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon,de and Amazon.fr and Amazon.CA and other international Amazon sites

and it is on The Book Depository with free international shipping.

"Increasing Intuitional Intelligence" is also available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon.de and Amazon.fr  other international Amazon sites

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Reflections on Meetings with Isabel Myers and The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to Develop the Somatic Reflection Process on Gut Feelings

     

     Over the past four decades, many people have asked Robert Sterling and I about our relationship and personal experiences with Isabel Myers, who created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator along with her mother Katherine Briggs. We have written in What's Behind Your Belly Button? quite a bit about our lengthy history with her as a colleague in the 70s. As we were creating a career storefront center for students and the general public alike affiliated with the local community college in Gainesville, Florida, we used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator with hundreds of people. And we met regularly with Isabel Myers and Dr. Mary McCaulley to give them, for their on-going research on the MBTI, the data from the inventories we had administered and to discuss the meaning of the findings. The MBTI was quite important in our development of the Somatic Reflection Process and really, we are not sure that without the MBTI we would have ever seen the importance of past childhood experiences in understanding our human needs nor the need to recover the unconscious information stored in our feeling memories.
      So we wanted to share with all of you a few pages from WHAT'S BEHIND YOUR BELLY BUTTON? that describes much about our first hand experiences with Isabel Myers and Dr. Mary McCaulley, director of the Typology Lab at the University of Florida, so you can get a true glimpse into the initial work of these amazing empowered women who struggled against lack of resources and how their work related to our work with gut feelings and the Somatic Reflection Process. If you enjoy this excerpt, then you will surely enjoy reading the book where it is all further discussed in depth and a complete protocol for the Somatic Reflection Process is given.

Excerpt below from page 119-124 of

What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct:

The MBTI and the Development of the Somatic Reflection Process

Early on, when we began our work at SFCC in Career Gap, we began to enjoy a special working relationship with Dr. Mary McCaulley, Director, University of Florida’s Typology Lab, and our meetings with Isabel Myers and Dr. Mary McCaulley, on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). We mention the importance of the MBTI in our work because it was through interpreting our own results before using it as part of a battery of tests in the Career Gap Center that we first had a need to reflect on our early childhood experience to assess if our type results had changed as adults, and if so, what that might have meant in serving our needs as a person. We were in search of the understanding if our type results were true for us naturally or if our type had changed due to necessity and environmental adaptation. And if our type had changed, we were interested to understand if the early type was more satisfying of our human needs. This deep unconscious information could only be accessed through a reflection on our feelings, rather than our thinking process, beginning in childhood and brushing up to the present time. And it was in our personal exploration and validation of the results of the MBTI that the Somatic Reflection Process had its beginning and served as a further guide toward understanding a new image of human nature. . . .

. . . . Many people in America during this post ‘60s period were going through profound transformations in their lives and experiencing confusion as they attempted to make drastic changes in career and life style toward the goal of higher personal fulfillment. We soon found the majority of people coming into the center not only had absolutely no idea of a suitable career direction for them but also had no idea who they were inside. We found that the usual career interest tests were meaningless for these people because they had no real idea of their own inner feelings and thus had no way to determine if the results were accurate and thus useful. Often the test-results would point the person in a direction that had more to do with their cultural and family values than their true inner feelings, instincts, and personal values.

Fortunately for us, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was at this time, in the mid ‘70s, being extensively researched at the Type Lab by Dr. Mary McCaulley at the University of Florida, so we had the opportunity to abandon our idea of using standard personality tests for career counseling and employ the MBTI. For several years we had the opportunity to administer, interpret, and gather data from the MBTI for hundreds of people using the services of Career Gap and fed this data to the University of Florida Typology Lab, headed by Dr. Mary McCaulley. Because of this association with Dr. McCaulley, we were introduced to Mrs. Isabel Myers and had a number of private meetings with both of them.

Isabel Myers would come to town several times a year to check on how the research was going at the Type Lab. The MBTI was used at that time, more locally at the University of Florida and, perhaps, a few other university communities. Dr. McCaulley and Mrs. Isabel Myers were struggling to provide additional research data on the use of the MBTI, though its validity and reliability had been proven in the early ‘60s. But the funding was so skimpy for the research project that we had to meet at Dr. McCaulley’s home, because the Type Lab at the university was just a small office where she had a computer and one part-time assistant, whose name, our memories have barely recorded was Penny. (We can now actually remember more about her personality type than her name, as she was a very friendly ENFP). Funding was a struggle and on several occasions Dr. McCaulley was not sure if they would be able to keep the Lab open due to the lack of support. But somehow they managed to continue their work, even with occasional cutbacks. Perhaps it was as they thought and on occasion told us, that their intuitive preferences, both being INFP’s, kept them persistently focused in moving forward, despite financial lack of funds, toward a vision of a future time when their research would be accepted and fully funded (Personal communication with Dr. McCaulley and Mrs. Isabel Briggs-Myers, 1975).

On one occasion during a meeting in which we were handing over data to Dr. McCaulley for their research, and Isabel Myers was also visiting, we asked Isabel if she would come talk to one of our freshman classes, an introductory course in psychology (BE100), in which we were using the MBTI. She graciously accepted and appeared the next week. It was long before the days of cell phones, and there was not an easy way to affirm the appointment, so we were a bit surprised and very much elated that she actually came. When she arrived at the class, she was wearing a simple housedress and had her hair in a bun. She was a lady in her early 70’s and made no pretense of being a professional. She sat with her legs crossed, in front of the students, her hands folded in her lap, and a relaxed sweet smile on her face. Everyone seemed to accept her as Grandmother for the evening imparting the knowledge of a wise old woman. The following is an account of what we remember of Isabel Myers’ personal communication to the class (Personal communication 1975):

"My Mother, Katherine Briggs, was a woman that noticed even small things about people. She wasn’t a psychologist and I don’t think she had read a word of Carl Jung. She just noticed the different relatives acted the opposite from each other when they all got together for Thanksgiving dinner. She would say, Uncle [Hank] always talks about only facts and Aunt [Sarah] always talks about possibilities. Sometimes they had whole conversations, my mother would say, without really listening to each other. She wouldn’t judge any one for being so different. She was just interested that it seemed to be that way. So she sat down over a period of time and wrote all the characteristics of each relative and made up a questionnaire. It was very different from the one you take now, although it asked about the same basic kinds of preferences."

Isabel Myers went on to tell the story of how the MBTI was developed, and we remember her saying she helped her mother by working with a Jungian psychologist to develop the inventory, fitting Jungian theory. What was really interesting to us was her account of how the Myers Briggs Type Indicator had its root beginnings as a homespun personal inventory. It was born out of the keen observations of the every day experiences with people of Katherine Briggs and her interest in helping people communicate with each other with greater understanding.

Most of the discussions we had in our meetings with Isabel Myers and Dr. McCaulley centered around accounts of the research in the Type Lab. They were both quite excited that the research was going so well and the findings were coming up significant for certain job categories. They found it interesting that elementary school teachers came out a majority of sensing types and college teachers were showing results of being a majority of intuitive types. We talked about the implications of how type affects learning styles and how the difference in type can explain intuitive types who may do better in higher math like algebra while having had difficulty adding and subtracting, and sensing types doing well in applied math areas of study as a career choice. They also found a difference between the type outcome of police professionals—being sensing types, and the university students—being intuitive types, and mused over ways they could bridge the communication gap between these two types during student protests that were quite prevalent on campus at this time in the ‘70s.

Over and over, Dr McCaulley and Mrs. Myers expressed that we all have the ability to understand each other and thus communicate more effectively if we can understand our different preferences in type. We do not think it was Jung’s intention that we label ourselves and obsess about our category or label or type. And we think that the MBTI was meant to be used by both Isabel Myers and Katherine Briggs as simply a way of thinking about ourselves and our gifts, not a device to trick us into a typology box in our minds, but as a tool to guide us in life decision-making and communication with others. We base our opinion on the many talks we had personally with Isabel Myers and her close colleague, Dr. Mary McCaulley, whose explanations of typology were always flexible and open to the person’s inner decision about himself or herself. We will add that both Isabel Myers, her mother Katherine Briggs, and Dr. McCaulley were all Introvert Intuitive Feeling Perceptive (INFP) types, according to what we were told in our conversations with Dr McCauley and Isabel Myers. True to their types, they meant the MBTI to be a flexible and perceptive tool that the person could use as a guide to illuminate one's inner experiences and accept their unique gifts of perception and judgment.

 End of Excerpt

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How the Somatic Reflection Process Brings You New Hopeful Information From Your Past!

When dealing with persistent emotional feelings of sadness and loss, fear, shame, and/or hostility that result in depression and anxiety, many people feel it is hopeless to explore and reflect upon their past for fear that they will just come up with the same old suffering and nothing will change. And this would be true if you simply rehashed the details of your life, just thinking back over the details of your life over and over again. Or if you simply looked at the isolated emotions without exploring the pure feeling impact of life before, during and even after the experience that these emotions are related to. And when we speak of pure feeling impact of life, we mean how it felt to be you in your body (not your thinking), how empty or full you were (with the needs of acceptance and freedom being registered in your gut feelings) and how well your needs were met or not met at that time. It is only through examining your gut feelings in your past from moment-to-moment, coming up through time from early childhood to adulthood and into the present time, that you can often see new pieces of information that change your entire perception of what you think really took place in your life and more importantly what you think about yourself, and thus emotionally feel about yourself. 

This sort of emotional “aha moment” that comes from using the Somatic Reflection Process on gut feelings is best understood with an example. The following is an excerpt from What’s Behind Your Belly Button in which a young woman named Anne who was dealing with extreme feelings of loss in her current life, used the Somatic Reflection Process to get in touch with her gut feelings to deal with her emotions. As a result, she reassessed a core belief about herself that had weighed on her much of her life. It did not take away the loss in the present that she was experiencing, but it took away much of the feeling of shame that had accumulated through her life and had made the current loss so difficult to deal with.

Excerpt from WHAT’S BEHIND YOUR BELLY BUTTON? 

Chapter 3 — The Impact of Experience: Anatomy of Feelings, page 68-70

“We had a patient, Anne, who came to us in deep distress mid school semester. She was an “a” student and was sure that her chosen field of nursing was exactly what she needed, but she was not able to function in school as she was devastated by a divorce that had just hit her like as she said, “an ocean of waves of sorrow.” We had found with our patients that divorce was a time that all of the person’s negative feelings of loss from past experiences would crash in on them and while it seemed that all the sadness was related to the loss of the present day spouse, the devastation they were feeling was much bigger and reached far back into their past experiences. While it does not take the sting of divorce away completely, it does help lessen the pain to work on the past unresolved issues and at least erases much of the pain and suffering mixed into one’s feelings in the present. Often the person is not even conscious of having the past suffering as it has all been repressed and so well hidden from the conscious ego in our unconscious, our shadow. Once the unconscious content has been brought to light, people would often find that the repression was at least part of the reason the present relationship was not fully functioning and had met with an end. It is often the part of ourselves that we are hiding from our loved one that is the most appealing part of ourselves and holds the key to our feeling pulse that gives energy and life to both ourselves and to our relationship.”

“As we began in coaching to have her focus on her feelings of sadness, Anne was able to trace it back to the death and loss of her younger brother in childhood. She had been quite young and had, in the way that children often do in absence of information, blamed herself because she had scolded him to get out of her room earlier in the day before his untimely accident attempting to cross the street alone at three years old. Upon reflection on her feelings, she realized that she was not even home at the time the accident occurred and a baby sitter had been in charge of her brother. She felt for the first time in her life a relief that her brother’s death was not her fault and was astounded that she was feeling all of that loss and guilt in the present mixed in her feelings of loss of her spouse to an impending divorce. She went home and shared this feeling experience with her spouse and while they finally did part ways, it was as friends and Anne was able to stop blaming herself and continue school successfully to become a nurse. We saw her on several occasions in the halls after the session and noticed that even though she was struggling with a divorce, she possessed a glow and less stress facial expressions about her that had not been there previously.”

“As we learn to reflect on our feelings, we can see more clearly that each crisis in our lives alerted us to an awareness that we needed to back off the direction we were headed and go back to pick up the signals from our guts and follow them to fullness. As we learn more to do this, we find our thinking less likely to borrow a role from the world for us to play and more likely to work in support of our gut feelings to bring the feeling of fullness to ourselves and live a full and healthy life.”

 End of Excerpt

Click on a book cover below to go to Amazon to Buy:

 

"What's Behind Your Belly Button?" is available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon,de and Amazon.fr and Amazon.CA and other international Amazon sites

and it is on The Book Depository with free international shipping.

 

"Increasing Intuitional Intelligence" is also available on Amazon USA and Amazon UK

as well as Amazon,de and Amazon.fr  other international Amazon sites

If you are on the homepage of this blog, click word "comment" directly below to see all comments and make one yourself! If you are on the webpage for this post, then simply post in the box provided below.