down its message about your gut symptoms.3 What is the commercial telling you about your life?
4 Does it stir up any emotions in you?
Are You Listening?
The first step in healing your gut distress and the depression and debilitation that go along with it is to rethink symptoms as messages. There is a physiological basis to understanding symptoms and sensations as messages, facilitated in part by something called the gut-brain axis. The gut-brain axis refers to the ways that the brain and central nervous system interact with the entire digestive system. It also has to do with the ways those thoughts, behaviors, and moods affect your gut—and vice versa. You'll learn more about that in Chapter 9.
What does your gut's language sound like? What does it feel like? What are its cadences, rhythms, intensity, and volume?
Awareness requires slowing down, seeking silence, and then listening—really listening. You may find that your mind is restless, that you are too busy for even fifteen seconds of slow breathing each day. Perhaps silence and awareness are a bit too uncomfortable; keeping your brain too busy and distracted is how you've learned to cope—to be completely oblivious to any inner message. This is something you will overcome.
The CORE program helps you reinterpret your gut's language through the powerful practice of Neurohormonal Retraining. This process will teach you to respond differently to your sensations, and you'll begin to develop a different relationship to your body.
You will learn to sit with the here-and-now sensory experience of a symptom, without trying to fight it, change it, or make it relax.
You will learn to sit with the here-and-now sensory experience of a symptom, without trying to fight it, change it, or make it relax. You will learn to experience the sensation exactly as it is, even as it goes through various changes in intensity, location, and duration. This may sound deceptively simple, but it is actually quite a challenge because you have been programmed to instinctively fight or avoid uncomfortable sensations. But you can change your experience of it! Focusing your attention on these sensations without fighting literally retrains the parts of your brain that learned long ago to treat the sensations as threats, setting off a cascade of stress hormones, leading to even more distress.
The good news is that learning how to pay a different kind of attention to troubling abdominal sensations can lead to effective, long lasting healing as it retrains your brain-gut axis.
3
Observe Your Stresses
Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.
—Lily Tomlin, comedian
Stress. Everyone has it, everyone jokes about it, and everyone complains about it. But no one wants to be vulnerable to it, much less overwhelmed by it.
In real life, this means that no one wants to be told that their (physical) symptoms are likely worsened by their (emotional) stress. People may too easily misinterpret such a message as, “They think I'm crazy!” or “They think it's all in my head!” Especially for people with gut distress, like Marnie, stress itself is a very stressful subject.
Marnie Denounces Stress
Marnie was a thirty-year-old buyer at an upscale department store, and she suffered from chronic constipation, throbbing pain in her entire lower abdomen, gas, and indigestion. When she came to our clinic, we gave her an initial assessment for IBS problems. When we asked her what made her symptoms worse, she replied, “I'm not really sure. I guess maybe when I eat rich food or don't drink enough water.”
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