How to get OUT of your head, into your body and truly listen to your “gut”!

Your mind isn’t who you are. Your endless stream of thoughts isn’t who you are either. Your feelings and emotions are still not who you are. Your body is who you are. It is the foundation of your experience here on earth. Your body is the vessel that carries your soul and it is the most intuitive part of you. 

Because your body is of this earth. It is carbon and nitrogen. It is calcium, iron and hydrogen. The elements that existed at the creation of the universe live inside your body. It is your access to the magic and to the divine. And this makes it the most powerful aspect in your life.

There is a reason you have a “gut feeling” or you get a “hunch” as to whether a situation is good, bad, or downright life threatening. It is because your body just knows! It is taking in every energy in your surroundings without you even having to think about it. Your body is perceptive, intuitive and most importantly it has no biases.

When you get an intuitive hit in your body, it is not laced with emotions of what has been or what may be in the future. It just is! It is a yes or no, right or wrong, do or don’t kind of system. 

And that’s why you can trust it! 

If you’re looking to live a life of more ease you MUST learn to trust your physical intuition. So first you need to know what it feels like and how your intuition speaks, otherwise you may confuse anxiety for intuition. And then you’re in all sorts of shit heaps before you know it!

There is an art to feeling into your intuition because it is different for everybody. But what it will be is consistent. A consistent way that your body tells you when something is right or it is wrong. Sometimes this is a sharp hit. Sometimes it may build over time. But it will consistently show up the same way. 

For me, it is a heaviness that bubbles up from the pit of my stomach before irretrievable words erupt from my mouth. These hits sometimes end in break-ups, quitting jobs and transatlantic moves. But most often then lead me to take the long route home, turn one street earlier on my daily dog walk, or put my phone in the glove box instead of taking it with me. Now on the otherside of these intuitive hits isn’t always some grand and exciting revelation, sometimes I just avoid a bad situation or see a cute bird. Maybe I run into a certain person or see a billboard that I needed to see. But when I do not follow these hits, something shitty happens. 

Just the other day I just had this gut feeling “you should go check the hot water bottle” said my intuition boiling up from my belly. Me being lazy “nahhhhh, it’s fine.” Low and behold as I clambered out of my bath 45 minutes later my bed, duvet, sheets, mattress, the whole shebang was soaked through because I had not done the top up completely. I should’ve known. I did know. But I ignored it. Other happenings after not following an intuitive hit range from house fires, car break downs and smashed phones.

Anyway, back to the topic. To step fully into a life of ease and learn to trust in your intuition to guide you when you need to go you are going to need a SOLID mind body connection. Because as much as your body can do all the hard work, you’re going to need to learn to listen. There are 2 basic steps to developing a mind body connection.

1: Move Your Body

2: Tire Yourself Out Enough to Listen

So one is simple enough, you have to move your body. Consistently, daily and with purpose. 

The purpose aspect is really important. If your exercise goal is “lose weight” or “be skinny”, you are not seeking a physical connection, you are just using exercise to feed ideas of the mind. And these goals are not healthy and also not fulfilling, meaning that you will probably fall of the wagon pretty soon after you clamber on. 

The most simple purposeful reason to move your body is this: because you are a human being! You were designed to move. Sitting at a desk, sitting on the couch and then sitting in bed with very little else in between is just not what human bodies were made to do. Your body is made to move. 

Exercise has a whole heap of delicious benefits of which you can find with a quick internet search. But when it comes to developing that physical intuition exercise works magic in 2 ways. 

A: It releases stuck energies and allows what was previously not flowing to flow. From a physiological perspective staying still causes bad posture, bad alignment and lazy muscles. In turn this restricts blood flow and thus oxygen around the body. Moving your body gets things flowing, blood, oxygen, creativity.

B: It creates space. Our sedentary lifestyles are causing compression within our bodies. Your spine is compressing, your pelvis, your knees. By moving your body, engaging your muscles and building strength you are creating space in your body. And it is in the space that the magic happens!

So pick an exercise of choice, be it yoga, weight lifting, running or playing rugby. Walking the dog, digging up your vegetable patch and dancing around the kitchen in your pants also count. Just get the energy moving!

On to number 2! Due to the fact that you are a human. And a human whose body has developed to hunt, gather, build and run from sabre tooth tigers. You have a shit ton of energy. Believe it or not, the human body needs 3 hours of consistent aerobic exercise each day! Even when you’re lying on the sofa exhausted from a day’s work you probably still have surplus energy left over.

This issue with all this energy is that if it is not channelled and used it will destroy you. This leftover stuck energy is what feeds your negative thought and your Ego controlled spirals of negativity. So you have to use all that energy! 

People who know me often say “oh I just don’t have the motivation to go to the gym” and quite frankly neither do I! But I know the insanity that ensues if I do not use up all that energy in my body. Again, it clears space for the magic to happen. It turns off (or at the very least tones down) that monkey mind and always some peace into your body, some emptiness into your mind.

Now, lots of this energy can be used in step 1 depending on that vigorousity of your activity of choice. But to really tire yourself out you need to invest your extra energy in a creative activity too! Humans are naturally creative. We have creatively muddled our way through the ice-age, feudalism, industrial revolutions and now we’re trying to invent our way out of a global climate crisis! This all to say that we are creative by nature. So whether you choose to sing, dance, crochet, learn calligraphy, coding or a new language. Channel this incredible energy into a creative pursuit!

Once you have completed step one and step two, you can finally begin to listen to your body. To notice hunches. Experience the gut reactions. Act on the urges.