What I learned in my 20s Lesson 4: Intuition Is Not Intuition Until You Check It Out

Growing up I believed intuition was this mystical thing that just hit you with insight out of no where. I have learned along the way in my 20s that intuition is really just another word for being mindful and truly present in the moment with what is. In Graduate School when my Family and Therapy Teacher spoke the above words, Intuition Is Not Intuition Until You Check It Out, my perception of intuition has changed forever.

When we feel called to respond to a situation in a certain way we can slow down and tune in to our body and explore the emotions that might be arising for us. We can often be responding in the present from how we used to respond in the past. Or we can be reacting out of fear to a situation that feels similar to a moment we have been through and scared of the same results happening.

Let's say you just entered into a new relationship and you are feeling anxiety or fear that this isn't the "right" relationship for you. In these moments, we can explore how does this situation remind us of our past and are we thinking these thoughts to avoid feeling the fear of the unknown and showing up with another human being vulnerably.

Every single reaction we have can offer us information for how we are processing our life. We are all powerful mirrors and teachers for one another. In any moment we can ask what is this moment or this person here to teach me? How is this person being a strong mirror for me right now in what I am perhaps still working on within myself? What can I learn about myself in this moment and what patterns or reactions do I want to engage in that might actually not serve me or feel respectful to another individual?

So the next time you hear someone say, "just listen to your intuition," get curious around what you want that to mean to you. How do you want to define intuition for yourself?

I'm sure you're seeing a lot of articles right now on how to eat less during the holiday season, what to fill your plate with to keep the pounds off, how to stay away from certain foods this Thanksgiving. I'm here to offer a very different piece of advice. Eat! Eat with pleasure! Eat everything and anything you want. Eat that pie. Eat the cake. Eat all the foods you have maybe been waiting to eat for an entire year.

When we restrict our food or tell ourselves that we can's have that piece of food that we want so badly we trigger a stress response in our body. Eating in a stress response shuts down our digestion and makes it more difficult for our body to assimilate and digest the food we are trying to eat. So you could be eating the healthiest foods on the planet this holiday season but if you are eating it in a stress response because what you really want is the gravy or the mashed potatoes or that piece of pumpkin pie then you actually won't be nourishing your body in the most optimal way which is probably your intention to begin with.

Now I'm sure some thoughts can perhaps arise of, "But if I eat that food I'm never ever going to stop eating!" When you hear these thoughts, I want you to slow down, close your eyes, and take three deep breaths, and invite in trust. Trust your body. Trust yourself that when you tune in to your body and what it is truly wanting to be fed that your desire for the food will diminish. A tidal wave does not keep getting bigger and bigger. Eventually all waves die down. So you can eat that piece of pie and then notice. Notice how it feels in your body. Notice the desire to eat another piece of pie and explore what would eating another piece give you? Explore the voice that wants more and more and see what it has to say, what does it have to teach you, if it had an age how old would that voice be? The more we deeply listen, the more those internal voices can soften because we are allowing them the space to be heard and acknowledged and seen and we get to embrace our human experience exactly the way that it is. You can invite all your emotions to the table. Invite in the fear, the excitement, the anxiety, and give them all a big hug for a being a grand messenger to remind you to be gentle with yourself.

Every eating experience we have is just an opportunity to learn more about ourselves. So instead of bringing in even more control over this holiday season, allow yourself to relax into the moment, and put whatever foods you want to eat on your plate. Fully enjoy them. Notice the tastes, the textures, notice what you love about that food, be fed by your surroundings and being around people you love or even just appreciate your own presence in the moment. When we eat in this way we bring our body into a relaxation response where the body can function optimally and digest any kind of food that you choose to nourish your body with.

I'm wishing you a holiday season filled with self compassion, acceptance, and kindness toward yourself no matter what you eat. I hope your plate is filled with pleasure, joy, and love!

In my studies, I heard one of my teachers say, "Intuition is not intuition until you check it out." This profoundly stuck with me. We hear a lot of sayings around trust your gut intuition but what exactly does that mean? Ultimately, we can misinterpret intuition for fear. If we enter into a situation that reminds us of a previous situation we have been in from the past and it reminds us of a negative outcome we may say we felt intuition that the situation wasn't safe to be in or that relationship wasn't the "right" relationship when really we were feeling fear for the same previous outcome to occur.

So how can we tell the difference between fear and intuition?

1. Have you experienced a situation like this before? If you are feeling intense emotions arise in a moment, you can slow down and check in and explore if the situation you are in reminds you of some occurrence from your past. You can then explore what happened in that situation and discover how your current situation is different so that you can step out of fear and simply name all the ways that you are different or the current situation has different nuances. This way you can become embodied again and self soothe to feel yourself grounded in the present.

2. Ask questions to the person/people around you. If you think you are intuiting something check it out! It never hurts to ask others questions so that you can get clear on if you are projecting your past or feelings or stories onto another person. If while you are asking questions and the person in front of you is resonating with everything you are asking then you might be on to something. If the person is confused or does not agree with the ideas you are presenting then that is just an opportunity to explore within yourself how some emotions might be triggered within you and has nothing to do with that person or the present moment.

3. Lastly, it can also be both! We are emotional human beings and we are all strong mirrors and teachers for each other. We can use our past as inspiration to connect with others on a deep level in the present. We can offer our insights to those around us in what we have learned on our journey and also honor that what has worked for us may not work for someone else. If fear is arising for us we can name that we are feeling fear and just by embracing our human experience exactly the way that it is in the moment can soften any intense emotions we might be feeling to allow space for intuition to make its way through and also hear where our fear is calling us to grow or calling us to support those around us. Fear (or any emotion) we feel in a moment can inform us on how those around us may also be feeling so we can also cultivate so much compassion that our feelings are ours and also are a part of greater collective around us.

If I could leave you with one take away from this post it would be question everything. Question your thoughts. Question your actions. Question the words that come out of your mouth or the definitions you have created or been taught. Question what intuition is and even question fear. It can be incredibly liberating that you get to create your own reality and that reality can also change depending upon what your perspective is on any day.

I know it has been awhile since I last wrote something. Let's just say I have been traveling in the depths of my own soul as I entered my last year in my 20's. It took me awhile to be able to first acknowledge that a lot of emotions and questions were coming up for me. Instead of honoring and embracing where I was at, I was pushing it all away. And of course in me pushing it all away, everything that wanted to arise to be explored pushed right back. And so this push pull went on for awhile until of course the emotions won (as they always do) and I began to explore and question how do I want to spend my precious time here on Earth and what am I looking forward to going into my 30's. My body began to relax into the uncertainty of it all.

Whenever we push away our feelings, that usually intensifies the feeling. We may think that pushing something away means it will just leave and never come back. In not honoring how we feel, in not embracing our human experience as messy as it can be, that is when food comes in, addictions come in, digestive issues worsen, and stress increases. We have to own our emotions, own our situations, own our body just as it is to be able to love where we are at now, bringing our body into a relaxation response, to set up an internal atmosphere of relaxation for deeper healing to occur.

Is there anything in your life right now that you are pushing away? Are you having a hard time slowing down and listening to the deeper message within your symptoms? As difficult as it may feel, trust that your symptoms, your emotions, your weight, your relationship with food is all there for a beautiful reason and is perfect just as it is right now. It is all there to be the greatest teacher for you to cultivate the most beautiful insights and wisdom.

So how do we do this? How do we begin to embrace what is? Here are two suggestions:

1. Whenever you hear old harsh internal voices arise or old patterns show back up, begin to breath and start to name what is unequivocally true around you. Usually our thoughts are going over things from the past or anticipating what is to come for the future. When we begin to name what is true around us, like the sky is really blue today, I am wearing jeans, the leaves on the tree outside my window or bright green, you can begin to come back to your body and the present moment and that in that very exact moment nothing bad is actually occurring and that you may even find you are having a pleasant moment.

2. Name the thought or feeling. We get to approach everything with childlike curiosity. So when a thought passes by like a cloud in the sky, you can just name the thought, "O look that old thought is popping up again. Thanks thought for showing up. I wonder where this thought is asking me to go and explore how I am feeling today." There is so much softness and loving kindness in just approaching a thought not as a fact but as a fabrication of our own mind that we can explore how it got created in the first place. The same thing can happen with feelings. When you feel anxious or stressed and want to begin to push it away, actually welcome it in. "O my dear old friend anxiety, how are you today? Thank you so much for being here." In embracing your human experience, it suddenly makes emotions not something that is dangerous but in actuality they are your friends.

These two tricks can facilitate coming into the present moment with so much love and compassion that whatever is going on or whatever you are experiencing is just a part of your beautiful journey. Embrace it. Invite it all in. Have dinner with it. Own it. And then watch it all shift and change and transform into something else that supports you in stepping into your life more honestly and authentically.

I find more and more these days my clients are finding they are sensitive to the foods they are eating every day.

Eating the foods we are sensitive to can cause low grade inflammation in the body and cause all sorts of bodily and emotional distress.

Watch this episode of Gut Guru and learn about how you can spot and identify a food sensitivity without all sorts of medical or blood testing (which can sometimes miss the foods we are sensitive to anyways).

Have you discovered any food sensitivities? How did you learn from your body around what foods did not work for you? I would love to hear about your experience discovering and learning from the foods you have found simply don't digest well in your unique system!

Ah, one of my favorite topics in the world.  Poop. I get far too excited in my initial intakes with my clients talking about how their bowel movements are doing. 

Honestly, poop is one of the best indicators for how your insides are doing and how clean your digestive tract is.  Dr. Ken Heaton created the Bristol Stool Chart as a tool to measure the transit time of the colon. Take the chart with a grain of salt but many practitioners still use it today as a way for individuals to talk about what their stool looks like.

We typically want stool that is soft, well formed, and easy to pass. This means that food is not staying in your digestive tract too long and fermenting or not transiting too fast and thus increasing the likelihood of not absorbing the nutrients in your food.

Your bowel movements can change from day to day, month to month depending upon what you're eating, your physical activity, your stress levels, even how much you're chewing your food. Use your stool as information and an opportunity to reflect on your eating habits and stress levels. Through healing my digestive tract, I have seen the health of my own bowel movements improve. So don't fear how your elimination is going now, it can and will change.

If you find you're having too many hard bowel movements or stool coming out too easily try incorporating more vegetables into your diet, sip on a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in water with meals, take some probiotics (especially those with Saccharomyces boulardii), try some digestive enzymes for a short period of time to assist with the digestion and elimination process, and add some fermented vegetables like Kimchee or sauerkraut to your meals (just make sure there is no added sugar!).

Additionally, your bowel movements are such a wonderfully unique way, that rarely gets talked about in my opinion, of how to check in with yourself and come into the present moment.  Your stool can tell you a lot about how you're doing emotionally not just physically. What might you be holding on to? Or where are you not creating appropriate boundaries for yourself? Are you holding on to past experiences or fights or grudges and having a difficult time letting go? Do you share everything that is on your mind and always say yes to everything and having a hard time nourishing your soul and identifying what it is that you need?

I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences with your own poop and what you have learned from your ability or difficulty with elimination.

I have learned over the years that it doesn't matter how healthy I am eating, that if I am eating quickly or when I am stressed, I have a difficult time digesting my meals.

Check out this video that it is not just what we are eating that contributes to healthy digestion but also how we are eating.

Please comment below: Have you noticed a difference in your ability to assimilate a meal when you are eating when you are relaxed or stressed?  I would love to hear from you!

Let's get vulnerable shall we?  My first year of Graduate School to get my Masters in Body Psychotherapy was intense.  The way I like to describe the experience to others, is that the classes are shaped in a way to rip your heart out of your chest, make you look at it, so that you can do the same for others.  Additionally, while going through the program, you also have to be in therapy so that you know what your triggers are and don't project your issues onto other people.

So my first year of Grad School I was mucking around in the deep dark depths of my soul.  I was looking at pains and wounds I hadn't explored probably ever.  There was a lot of crying and a lot of eating.  I had never binged this much on food in my entire life.  I was uncomfortable and it was unsettling.  Here I was still calling myself a nutritional counselor and spending whole days just eating dates.

While being in that period of time felt like forever, I can look back on it now and feel grateful for that experience.  I was using food as a tool to cope with emotions that just felt too big to manage.  I was talking about situations from my past and deep wounds that I wasn't entirely sure how to sort through, process, assimilate, and digest.  My binging was a way to protect myself.  It was a way to feel grounded on earth, that I was still alive, and that these situations didn't eat me and swallow me whole.  It was a way to fill myself up when I was exploring situations that left me feeling so empty.  

The one thing I want to offer you that I could have done without during that time was the judgment.  If you have ever binged or are currently struggling with binging it is not something that is bad, not something to be shamed, or ashamed about.  It is a message from yourself to yourself.  You can learn from these experiences with food and they can teach and reveal to you your own resiliency.  Whatever your binging is trying to help you get through, it is actually a sign of your strength.  You are getting through whatever difficult experiences that are happening.  The situation and the binging will eventually subside (even if it has been years), I promise you. 

Binging is a way to feel connected to yourself, to feel your aliveness.  I recently heard Marc David, founder of IPE, say that binging has a lot of power to it.  So you engaging in the act of binging can just be a misguided attempt to step into how powerful, resilient, and strong you are.

The lesson that my time with bingeing helped me to discover was to reach out and talk.  So I will leave you with this the next time you are feeling the need or desire to binge on food, pick up the phone and talk to someone.  Call your mom, your dad, a sibling, a friend, a significant other, whoever you want and talk about your emotions.  You can talk about the fact that you want to binge but that is skirting the issue that some big emotions are coming up that feel like they have the power and are going to consume you. 

Even if you have the binge, once it is over and you feel yourself coming back in to your body, still pick up the phone and call someone or take out a journal or a piece of paper and start writing.  Find some way to connect back with what is coming up for you because even after the binge is over the emotions will probably still be there.  And remember to send yourself so much loving kindness because you are just trying to do the best job you can taking care of you and, trust me, you are doing a pretty damn good job.

This was my very first episode of Gut Guru. 

In this episode I talk about cravings and how they are meant to be heard, they are meant to be listened to, and they typically have a message for you.

How do you typically approach your cravings?  What do you find yourself craving on a regular basis?

When people find out that I am a nutritional counselor, I suddenly feel like they are nervous to eat in front of me.  Like I have all the answers and what they are doing is supposedly wrong.  I want to dispel that right now, that I never judge what someone else is eating. 

I have learned through my journey and relationship with food that what works for me isn't going to work for everyone else.  I don't live in your body, I don't truly know what your body needs from moment to moment (I do however love teaching how to learn to communicate with your unique body).

At the beginning of my gut healing journey, I was told how mucus forming dairy was and that it could be causing some of my issues.  You want me to give up my yogurt!? I loved my sugary added yogurts and the first time I heard this I was not ready to take that advice.

I tell you this story because it took me another 3 years to actually experiment with completely taking dairy out of my daily eating habits to find out that indeed dairy and I are not friends.  When we are ready to deepen in our relationship with food and ourselves we will.  What I have learned through my client's and my own process with the gut is to be patient and to give yourself plenty of time.

Embrace where you are now with your relationship with food.  Sometimes it may just be too intense to look at how you are nourishing yourself because it may be a protective blanket covering up some intense emotions that you are just not ready to deal with yet.  And that is totally fine!  Love yourself up and know that you are doing the best you can in this moment to take the very best care of yourself.

I wish I had been told this more on my journey to heal my gut.  Every time I had a digestive upset I felt like a failure and that all my effort to heal was for nothing. But every decision, every effort, every choice I made in the direction of listening, of tuning in to myself, especially in the moments that I was in pain and I didn't want to listen, brought me closer to myself and to my body and what it truly wanted.

So if you find yourself eating in front of me, just know that all I wish for you is an enjoyable experience with that food. We are all at different phases and stages in our relationship with food and I find the journey beautiful and full of deep wisdom and knowledge for who we are and the stories we bring with us from childhood.  It is all right there on our plate.