Have you ignored your gut and regretted it? I don’t like to hold on to regrets, but as I look back over my life I can safely say that my biggest regrets always involve ignoring my gut.
Whether it be in business, romance, or friendship, my regrets always involve my rational brain ignoring, persuading, or bullying my intuition and body’s wisdom into doing something that just doesn’t feel right.
In the book ‘Blink’, Malcolm Gladwell writes about how our subconscious mind. He tells us how it is constantly and almost instantaneously analyzing the information around us (and inside us). And with that information it helps us make decisions that will serve us. This is an essential feature of our Mind-Body Operating System whose task is to keep us alive. Malcolm mentions that velocity (acting or knowing before thinking) is essential to keep us away from anything that could harm us.
We often feel this subconscious processing in our body (gut, chest, hair standing on end, etc.). This is because for the majority of our evolutionary history our consciousness, or self awareness, was non-verbal. Look at the image below. Animals are conscious and sentient, they just don’t have a verbal narrative. They have a narrative based on sensations, emotions, feelings, images and sounds, etc.
Our modern human chassis is built on millions of years of pre-verbal evolution. Because of this, the majority of our subconscious process really isn’t subconscious. It’s just experienced through the body and most of us are very poorly connected to our body. As a result, we are not aware of that processing (and its wisdom) most of the time. We tend to be aware only in very critical junctures where the sensations in the body are very strong.
But Karden, how do I connect to my gut? Click here to find out!
Train in Total Awareness
In Stress School, we train our students in what we call Total Awareness ™. This expands consciousness beyond the narrative mind and into the sensational body. It not only improves overall self awareness and decision making, but also enriches their lives by adding more depth and texture to their experience of consciousness.
I’ve learned to deeply respect my gut response to things as well as hone and refine my understanding of the messages that my body’s consciousness is trying to share with me. Now my goal is to make sure that my verbal-narrative rational mind and my sensational-body centric gut wisdom are on the same page when making a big decision.
I want the decision to not only make sense but feel right too.
In that way, I am making a lot of progress not adding to my list of regrets.
Learn more about somatic intelligence and ignoring your gut by visiting my Youtube channel.
