I just completely finished reading a fascinating new book titled “mBraining” about the head, heart, and gut brain intelligence and exercises to align the three. I highly recommend it. Actually I was truly excited as I began reading it because I do not find many other people writing about the intelligence of the “gut brain” and certainly not the psychological aspects of what Dr Michael Gershon calls the “second brain”. And as I read, I became more and more excited because our findings in our studies that we describe in our book “What’s Behind Your Belly Button?” and that of “mBraining” authors seem to overlap and validate each other in some very crucial ways. There are some differences in our theories as one might expect, but these are for the most part a matter of language and emphasis, as we both have our own created language for describing the gut brain and its relationship to the head and heart. Interestingly though, even some of our created language is the same and this points to the fact that when you are aware of your gut feelings, the descriptions are going to be similar. As it is said, “a rose is a rose is a rose”.
So let's talk a minute about one of the more important
overlaps in our research and theory that are discussed in both of these two books and that
is: Why is being in touch with our gut feelings so important to our health and well
being. We talk in “What’s Behind Your Belly Button?” about how the gut response
of emptiness and fullness gives us the ability to distinguish the “You” and “Not
Truly You” and thus gives the gut response the ability to regulate the immune
system with its production of endorphins and to bring us closer to our awareness of our authentic self, who we truly are and what we truly need as human beings from moment-to-moment in order to flourish. Furthermore, we find
this ability of the gut response to distinguish the “You “ and “Not Truly You”
to potentially play an important role in finding the cure of disease. Interestingly,
“mBraining” authors while speaking of the gut governing the sense of one’s core
identity, also speak of it as the distinction of what is the “You” and “Not
you”. We find it exciting that we selected the same language here to describe this important psychological function of the gut intelligence. We certainly find this over-lap in our findings, both based on clinical
studies, a validation that is important to explore further in medical science and among practitioners.
To help begin this exploration and conversation of the gut function in regulating the immune system with the ability to distinguish what is "you" and "not truly you", we have decided to publish here an excerpt from Chapter 11,
page 282-288 of “What’s Behind Your Belly Button?”on the relationship of the
self-awareness and healing of the emotional body and the physical body:
Distinguishing the “You Cells” and “Not You Cells” , page 282-288, Chapter 11 from “What’s Behind Your Belly Button”
“Immunologists are beginning to
understand something about the existence and need for the immune system to have
its own reflection process to identify unhealthy cells that need to be
eliminated. The process and intelligence of reflection of the immune system is
similar to the process of inner somatic awareness that leads to the restoration
of emotional health. If we look first at the reflection and identification
process of the immune system itself in fighting disease and bringing wellness
to the physical body, it is easy to then demonstrate how the process of the
immune system has similar elements to Depth Psychology processes, including the
Somatic Reflection Process, that lead us to healthfulness of the emotional
body.
“Dr. Toru Abo, who saved countless
lives by discovering extra thymic T cells and later in 2000 that the gastric
ulcer is triggered by the dominance of granulocytes in white blood cells rather
than by gastric or hyper secretions (as we had thought for 100 years), also
discovered in 1996 that the immune system is compromised by stress. His
findings suggest that leukocytes have an increase of granulocytes when the
sympathetic nervous system is dominant and an increase of lymphocytes when the
parasympathetic is activated. This means that if the autonomic nervous system
is stuck in sympathetic mode caused by chronic exposure to stress, the
parasympathetic nervous system is not activated and lymphocytes decrease and
the number of granulocytes and inflammation increases. Without the proper amount
of lymphocytes that are the immune system’s ability to mark foreign cells in
our body, the immune system does not have a method of identifying which cells
are healthy and unhealthy, which cells are and are not cancer cells to be
eliminated. We could say that as long as we have chronic stress in our lives,
we are at risk of being haunted with cancer cells and becoming sick because
they will continue to be produced and be of sufficient strength to go
unidentified and hidden in our bodies without being eliminated by our immune
system.
“Dr Abo found with the
identification of T cells that the immune system has the ability to mark a
foreign cell (cancer cell) from a cell that is normal and then eradicate the
foreign cell. This has been described as finding the “you cells” and “not you
cells” and getting rid of the “not you cells”. T cells continually scan the
surfaces of all of our cells in our body and kill those that exhibit foreign
markings.
“We can compare this T cell
function in the physical body to the necessary process of reflection in
eliminating old, outdated mental tapes and complex constellation affects that
occur in the emotional body. When we explore our true feelings with the Somatic
Reflection Process, and we trace our feelings and gut responses back to their
origin, we find that our guilt, for instance, began with an experience when we
were empty and without our human instinctual needs being met. It was in that
state that we may often find that we accepted the negative thinking judgment of
another person about ourselves and who we are as a human being. This external
judgment is foreign to the assessment of our own internal assessment of needs
and may become such an automatic tape in our thinking that we do not remember
where the idea came from in the first place. We may carry this external
assessment of ourselves in our consciousness for a long time and not even be
aware that the thinking of these thoughts about ourselves were told to us by an
authority or other important person in our lives. In that case, we may feel
guilty that we did something or did not do something that someone else
disapproved of and now we have laid the judgment on ourselves without question.
We decide to accept that we are stupid or ugly or selfish or lazy and we feel guilty
and thus depressed. And all of this is not something that we originally
invented, but accepted in our emptiness, as human beings are prone to do when
true acceptance for who we are is not available.
“These are assessments of whom we
are, with an origin from an external judgment of our organism, foreign to our
own thinking in origin, that we may live with for a long time without
understanding that we carry something foreign in our emotional body. We can go
all our entire lives without questioning our emotional complexes or what we
like to call emotional hauntings. So
our understanding of the “you” or what we truly feel about ourselves from an
inner needs perspective and the “not truly you” or what we were told we are,
never gets distinguished and thus the “not truly you” becomes so integrated in
our thinking that we have no way to identify what is “you” and “not truly you”,
except in the awareness of some distant feeling in our guts where the voice is
still screaming very softly of feeling emptiness and aloneness—although it is
generally true if the emotions of guilt, fear, and anger exist that we are
certainly not listening to our gut instincts of emptiness and fullness. In this
condition, our energy is drained, our thinking becomes distorted, and our premises
often consist of lies we tell ourselves that only feed into these emotional
hauntings and seem to validate our low self-opinion and esteem. Without
reflection on our inner gut feelings to dislodge the external, foreign thinking
from our consciousness, we cling to our misconceptions of ourselves and we
cannot function at an optimal healthy capacity for neither ourselves nor those
we care deeply about and our stress level is high, yet often the awareness of
all of this is suppressed and unconscious until a time of crisis.
“Without the caring of another
human being to first reflect to us acceptance and understanding, it is doubtful
that anyone ever reexamines their feelings thoroughly enough to find their way
home to who they are or as Dr. Carl Jung suggests, sets their foot on the individuation
process. Once initiated with this identification of who we are on a deep
feeling and somatic level, the process may begin toward true emotional healing.
This is something that we as psychological somatic practitioners have seen in
process for decades, going back to early analysis with Depth Psychology leading
us toward the process of individuation or wholeness for health and healing. But
recently, in the last decade, immunologists have begun to look at this same process
of identification in the physical immune system in answer to how does the white
blood cell know what cell to attack and what healthy cell to leave in tact? How
does the white blood cell make the distinction between the “you cell” and “not
you cell”?
“What excites us about Dr Abo’s
research is that he is finding that disease of the physical body is naturally
healed by the physical immune system using a process with a notable similarity
to the somatic psychological practices that are used to treat complexes of the
emotional body. Somatic practitioners have long found that clearing the
emotional body by using modalities like the Somatic Reflection Process, yoga,
breathing meditation, and other somatic psychology processes that bring us
closer to the awareness of who we truly are and release our thoughts and
emotions of who we are not from our consciousness, returns the emotional body
to its natural state of wellness. Dr. Abo, with his latest book now translated
in English in 2007, has found that the immune system works to heal the physical
body in a similar fashion, using a similar process of identifying or “tagging”
what is a “not you cell” from what is a “you cell” and being given support to
naturally eliminate what is “not you”.
“Moreover, the health of the
emotional body is affected by the health of the physical body and vice-versa.
There are similarities in how they both function and how they directly affect
each other. This effect leads one to inquire if there is something in certain
somatic and psychological interventions that not only supports the immune
system but also activates its healthy processes? Based on experience with
hundreds of clients, as well as our own inner experiences of using the Somatic
Reflection Process (SRP) for over 40 years on a daily basis, we have found that
there is experienced with this process a relief of tension/stress symptoms and
a body-feeling/mind connection that feels united and connected with a result of
much more energy accessible to the individual.
“We could hypothesis that the
greater ability you have to distinguish between “you” and “not you” affecting
your emotional body and to thus return to a normal state of body-mind unity,
the better the chances for longevity and a strong physical immune system that
can also tag the “not you cells” from the “you cells” to fight off physical
disease. A case for the vice-versa affects of the healthy physical immune
system upon the emotional immune system may also be made.
“There is an ancient Daoist saying
in the I-Ching or the Book of Changes that reads “As above, so below” and
applies here to this relationship between the emotional body-immune system and
physical body-immune system, if we might for a moment separate the two. At the
heart of the body-mind connection, we understand that we are but one entity,
united in body, emotion, spirit, and mind. But for the sake of scientific
study, it is useful to break down and identify component parts and examine them
from as many angles as possible. So we might ask, if the emotional body-immune
system works in a similar fashion to the physical body-immune system, what else
is similar about the two systems besides the identification of and elimination
of the “you” and “not you”?
“Could immunologists and somatic
practitioners learn something valuable from each other by engaging together in
discussion and inquiry about how these two systems work and how they might be
compared or if they just may be the same in source and both a function of
evolved human intelligence? It is possible that the immune system (IS) may be
just the RNA intelligence converted to a repair function after birth. Since the
RNA is the builder of the fetus, by differentiating the cells of the body,
designating and sending cells to their proper locations of the body, at the
proper time. Nature would not add-on another system if it already had a
successful functional system that worked—like the RNA. It would be contrary to
the add-on principle of life, to abandon the RNA and start over with a new
immune system.
“We suggest that the immune system
is a continuation of its work—original work—patching up the wear and tear of
the organism it originally built. Who or what would be more likely to recognize
my cells or not-my-cells after birth and throughout life of the organism than
the RNA intelligence? The implication here is that our immune system is
evolving through trials of use in fighting illnesses and the bombardment of our
modern world toxins and that this evolution not only engages the strengthening
of the body and it’s T-Cell use but also our emotional intelligence and a
higher awareness of our human nature and its original DNA coding as a highly
self-reflective and intelligence evolving entity. In this way, we could say
that all people who are fighting to strengthen the emotional immune system
along with the physical immune system, for whatever reason whether it is to
overcome disease or emotional pain, are doing the work to overcome the
body-mind split for not just themselves but also for the healthy evolution of
our entire human species.”
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