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?

What I learned in my 20s Lesson 3: Sensitivity Is A Super Power

I grew up hearing often, "Stephanie don't be soooooo sensitiveeee!" In hearing these external messages my young brain was shaped and made to believe that sensitivity was a weakness, it was something I needed to hide, and that I had to show up strong no matter what. It took me until I was around 25 years old to have those beliefs challenged and that actually my sensitivity to just about everything is my super power and where my strength and gifts reside.

While in internship for my Masters Degree in Body Psychotherapy I had my supervisor once ask me, "What if all the emotions you are feeling in your session is something your client might also be feeling too?" Considering this was like a light bulb went off in my head. I could actually use my emotions and sensations in my body as information for what those around me might also be feeling and processing themselves to connect with them on a deeper level and I don't have to view my sensitivity to my surroundings as "bad" or something I need to push away.

I have always had a sensitive digestive tract and I have always felt my emotions quite intensely. These two things are related and inter-connected. When we feel things deeply but do not allow ourselves the space and time to allow our emotions to be felt all those emotions can get trapped in our digestive tract waiting to be processed and assimilated. Body Psychotherapist, Gerda Boyesen, came up with the term psycho-peristalsis which basically describes the digestion of life experiences. Wounds, trauma, past struggles can all get trapped in our digestive tract waiting to be processed and assimilated into our being. A lot of the work I needed to do in the healing of my gut was giving myself that space and time to process and release old wounds and old beliefs from my body that was no longer serving me in my life.

Now whenever I find myself with an upset stomach I can slow down, rub my belly, and explore what emotions are trying to bubble up from inside that just need to be felt and heard and appreciated for their presence. Our sensitivity in this way can be viewed as the greatest gift to show us how we are processing our external environment and guide us in how we can show up more honestly within ourselves and with others. Have you ever felt anxious while around a dear friend? Have you ever had a feeling someone was going to call and then they did? Have you ever cried and had no idea why you were crying but you just knew you needed to cry?

This is all sensitivity to your surroundings running through you.

If you have ever considered your sensitivity a "negative" thing I invite you to adopt a new view. Put on your sensitivity super hero cape and explore what perhaps your sensitivity is trying to teach you and how it is even guiding you in deeply connecting with yourself and others. We can use our sensitivity as the greatest gift to support ourselves and others in truly being seen and that we empathize and relate on a very deep level of how painful and intensely joyful this human experience can be.

The beginning of March marks the month that I will turn 30. In an attempt to honor this decade (and to commit myself to writing regularly again) I am planning to write a series of posts of the lessons I learned in my 20's to close out this decade and celebrate a new journey into the next decade of my life.

Lesson #1: Your Parents Did The Best They Could

My parents separated when I was 13 years old and eventually divorced. It first took me years to acknowledge and cultivate awareness of how that circumstance affected me and shaped how I related to myself and others. Once I finally faced the immense sadness I felt inside it took me half of my 20s to process how what I needed as child from a parent was perhaps not what I received.

Our parents are always doing the best they could with what was set as an example to them from their parents in how to be a parent and the wounds and struggles they are sometimes processing throughout their entire life. When we fight internally who our parents are this ultimately causes strife and struggle within us. It took a lot of grieving on my own to grieve for what my parents were not, for the family dynamic I would never have, and to appreciate who my parents just naturally are and acknowledge all the ways that they did show up for me in their own unique way.  As adults at some point, when we are ready, we have to take responsibility to heal our internal wounds. Finger pointing ultimately does not solve anything but pushes us further away from ourselves and owning our perspective in how we processed our past.

The wonderful thing about being an adult is that we get to meet our inner child the ways we always wished we were met when we were younger. We all have an inner child inside of us. I have a picture of me roller skating when I was about 5 years old on my fridge to stay connected to her. Sometimes she is still sad and sometimes she needs my attention. In this journey in fostering a deeper connection with ourselves, we get to tell our inner child all the things they needed to hear when you were younger. So you can tell them how wonderful and amazing they are just as they are and imagine giving them a big hug and taking time to hear what they have to say so that they can feel heard, and seen, and acknowledged.

Our first form of love often came from nourishment from a parent so for the rest of life food can be connected to am I loved, am I seen, am I supported, am I heard? When our relationship perhaps does not feel nourishing with our parents or when we are not feeling those emotions and sensations in our life it is completely natural for food to then come into that space. It is when we cultivate awareness of our emotions around how we were seen and held as a child and just allow our emotions to be there without trying to change them or make them go away that our relationship with food can find a very different place in our life as we nourish and satiate ourselves emotionally.

If you have wounds around your parents, I offer this suggestion to allow yourself to feel your wounds, feel the pain, feel the sadness, feel the anger. It was in feeling these emotions and no longer pushing them down that I felt more and more connected to myself again. When we push down our emotions we disconnect ourselves from our aliveness and from accepting and embracing our human experience as is. I know it can feel intense but just like a wave does not keep getting bigger and bigger the more we feel our emotions the waves eventually crest and calm down into gentle waters once again. I want you to know I have been through that process and am completely here for you.

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.

I will start by saying that I am jumping out of my skin in excitement.  I just posted this article on my facebook page. "Enter psychobiotics: a live organism that, when ingested in adequate amounts, produces a health benefit in patients suffering from psychiatric illness."

I am trying to calm my enthusiasm for a minute to truly connect with why these findings and the continued findings of how important our gut microbiome is for me.  I spent years in digestive pain.  I ate poorly because I didn't know that eating something else would help me.  I became complacent with the pain and the bloating.  I thought this was what life was like for me and that I would never know anything different.

When the pain got worse in undergrad so did my anxiety and I began experiencing panic attacks.  I had no clue at the time that all these symptoms were connected.  There have been a lot of things that have helped healed my gut over time (and trust me when I got motivated and aware that I could heal, I tried everything).  But, one of the factors that I believe helped me the most was working on changing the microflora in my gut.

I grew up eating my emotions.  I loved sugar, I loved fatty meals, I loved gluten.  When my parents divorced, food came in to numb that pain.  I had no idea that how I was treating my body as a kid over time would destroy my gut, destroy the healthy balance of good to bad bacteria, and leave me in pain and confusion as to how I got there. 

Gut bacteria can:

Help with digestion
Protect the intestinal barrier
Direct microbial-produced neurochemical production (like GABA a neurotransmitter for relaxation)
Help to prevent stress induced alterations
Direct activation of neural pathways between gut and brain
Improve absorption of nutrients from food
Limit small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (which many individuals with digestive pain have and have yet to be diagnosed)
Reduce anxiety
Decrease cortisol production
Influences neural development, brain chemistry, emotional behavior, pain perception, and how the stress system responds in adulthood
Play a role in manufacturing the body’s supply of serotonin, which influences mood and GI activity

I could go on and on.  There is even research being done right now on what would happen to our body and our self expression if we entirely changed the bacteria in our gut.  Basically, what if we are just large bacterias walking around.  Is bacteria running the show?  Is bacteria really the "soul" we talk about on the inside?

I wrote my thesis on how to cultivate a relationship to the gut brain to teach to therapists about how their clients are eating and treating their body will help facilitate progress across time and in sessions.  The fact that more research continues to come out about the connection between the health of our gut and our mental health fascinates and excites me.  What if someone dealing with severe depression could one day take a prescribed dose of specific strains of probiotics instead of prozac to help them heal their gut and their mind. 

If there is anything that you take away from this today it is start feeding your gut some healthy bacteria every day!  Eat some fermented vegetables, kimchee, sauerkraut, take a refrigerated probiotic.  And then notice how you feel, notice how it affects your mood, your digestion, your ability to focus.  And if you are experiencing digestive pain, give your body time to heal.  When you set up the best internal environment it will heal.

I know I haven't written in a few weeks.  I will admit and share that falling in love kind of took me away from my commitment to writing.  Yet with Grad School starting up again next week, I need this outlet more than ever.

Have you ever been so confused by your own mind that you didn't know which is up and which is down?  Reflecting on this past summer, my existence has literally been blown out of the water.  Every single external stipulation I had set up for myself as a kid to find happiness has now been met.  It is utterly freaking me out haha.  One would think that if you finally got everything you have ever been asking for that you would jump for joy and settle into bliss and that whole movie style happily ever after stuff.  But o wait....I don't live in a movie....and there is no such thing as happily ever after.  Life keeps going (the parts we never see in a movie).

My mind gets in the way of experiencing this happiness.  I upper limit myself to my own experience of joy in my life.  It has been fascinating watching my mind reach as far out as it possibly can to create some drama or story to find something "wrong."  We as human beings can completely classically condition ourselves just like a dog and I have conditioned myself to continuously be searching for more.  While this has been beneficial, constantly pushing me to move forward and pursue more than I can sometimes physically and mentally handle, this tendency has now become somewhat of a detriment.  Now when I have the opportunity to accept myself and my body just the way it is, I find myself still searching.

My mind is running frantic, not understanding the shift that is happening.  It is holding on to its conditioned neural pathways as hard as it possibly can; just like an addiction.  We think of drugs, alcohol, food as addictions, yet we rarely talk about how our own patterns, routines, habits, and as I have coined, mental masturbations as addictions as well.  And the interesting thing is, we find support and guidance to change our external addictions to drugs, alcohol, and food, yet I see so many settle on, "this is just the way I am and the way I have always done things and that will never change" when it comes to our own mental blocks.

As yoga and meditation have taught me, thoughts are just thoughts, they are not facts.  While my thoughts can cause an emotional reaction, as they sometimes disturb me, again they are not reality.  Reality truly is within our own perception, but the one thing we can always come back to when our mind is running is what is fact.  For example right now, at 2:34 in the morning with a running mind like a hamster on a wheel that hasn't quite figured out how to get off yet, the facts are I am sitting on a medicine ball, my feet aren't totally touching the carpet entirely as I am up on my toes, my throat is really dry, and my jaw is tight.  That is truth, fact, what is happening in the present moment.  There is no interpretation, no reading into, or analysis of why.  It isn't necessary.  This is just what is happening right here and right now.  And even verbalizing the facts, coming back to my body toward what is real, brings me out of my head and back into my body.

I invite you to try this little exercise the next time you find yourself going through your own mental masturbation.  Lie on your floor, sit on your couch, and just begin to breath and notice.  Describe what is currently happening in your body and what you feel and every time your mind tries to speak up you gently soothe your monkey mind and then begin again to notice what is real.  There can be a powerful transformation and change that occurs when we begin to allow ourselves to slow down and just for a moment experience our life exactly the way it is.  Life can be rather simple after all.

I am currently realizing how many expectations I set up at a very young age for how I thought life should go.  Thoughts about how my life would be, my career, my love life...and I am continuously surprised these days how nothing is what I thought it would be.  So often I have looked for explanations, guidance, a reference point externally instead of searching for answers internally.  I find this is also a product of society and how often we compare ourselves to one another and obsess over what we don't have instead of what we do.  Movies are created with dreamy love dramas and happy endings and thus sets us up to believe that this is how life truly is.  Yet when we grow up and realize that it is not the case we continue to strive for this "ultimate" picture of life...the perfect love, career, body, family, etc.  Why do we keep striving for something that is not attainable?

I don't know if there truly is an answer, but I like to ask the questions anyway.  The more I have tried to strive for some form of perfection, the more I have squeezed myself into a black and white box.  Let me tell you, it is really uncomfortable in there and very constricting.  Now as I come into deeper relationship with myself as an individual and what I desire and want in my life, I now am slowly breaking out of this box.  I thought that tearing my way out of this box would happen a lot faster than it has but I am seeing now that this is years of construction.  I slowly built up one wall, then the other, I put decorations up, and made my black and white box very comfortable to live in.  It has taken time to take down the art and see this box for what it truly was.  It was a protective mechanism to keep me safe from hurt, from pain yet as time has moved forward the box and all my expectations have caused me more pain than happiness.

I have seen how this has affected me most profoundly through my food.  As I truly believe our relationship with food is connected with everything else and as digestion has been a focus in my life, I have been able to explore my relationship with food and then extend that to the rest of my life.  I have seen how many times I pop into my head thinking about what I "should" eat based off of my physical appearance, my activity level that day, my emotions and yet when I choose to eat a food from a head space it is never quite as satisfying when I eat from body awareness.  When I let go of all the knowledge I have in my head around nutrition and listen very closely to what my body needs in that moment I find more inner peace and happiness because I am respecting myself as an individual with unique needs that change from day to day, moment to moment.

It is difficult to slow down and listen when everything and everyone around us is constantly telling us to speed up.  Especially living in CO where people can't sit still, I find myself needing to spend time by myself a lot to remember that we tap into our strength when we allow ourselves to be soft.  To slow down, get out of our expectations, and live life truly in the present moment is an aid to accept any emotions arising and act and react from a more authentic place within ourselves.  How will you slow down today?