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In
1998, neurological research at Columbia University published the
work of Dr. Michael Gershon that identified the enteric nervous
system as a center of feeling-intelligence in the gut, which he
called the The
Second Brain. We carefully examined this material and
accepted the research findings as pointing to the same universal
feeling intelligence we experienced in counseling with hundreds
of people. Utilizing the research of Dr. Gershon, the work of
Dr. Lise Eliot who charts the development of children from conception
through the first five years of life, recent research of our own
in the Psychology Department at Sonoma State University, and our
vast clinical experience, we have presented an interpretation
of recent medical research into a new Gut Psychology and a more
accurate behavioral understanding of the Self and human nature
than has previously been available.
We
share a complete protocol and results of clinical research findings
for the Somatic Reflection Process that we have created and used
successfully, with ourselves and hundreds of people, to assist
the process of getting in touch with the voice of the gut and
learning to follow its wisdom toward a healthy life—unifying
the body-mind split in the individuation process.
Over
a period of 45 years, there has been a utilization of further
graduate studies in Depth Psychology and Religious Education on
our part, and giant steps forward in the fields of neurology and
human psychology, which help form a new more accurate image of
human nature. We present this new image of human nature and the
meaning of its understanding in making positive changes in our
lives, both individually and collectively as a species. We suggest
that we are at the beginning of a Renaissance in human consciousness
and that understanding our true human nature is the way to thrive
in this present era.
This book also discusses the implications of this new image of
human nature in education and for rehabilitation of those incarcerated.
We suggest that early in the child learning process, care be taken
to offer the experience of freedom and acceptance to the preschool
child to form a positive self-concept and to self-regulate his
and her behavior as part of the learning process in becoming a
loving, caring person.
After careful examination of life’s processes, we conclude
that of all the mammals in the animal kingdom, humans seem to
be the only species that has been denied the open use of their
natural instincts. Out of ignorance, fear or wanton control by
others—“we are denied the use of the brains we were
born with”. This awareness is of growing concern since the
absence of the use of the feeling intelligence of the body interferes
with a major stabilizing force—built into the human system—that
can affect human behavior, provide a sense of well-being, and
the ability of the body to combat stress and dis-ease.
Take
a peek inside this book and see the Preface to What's Behind
Your Belly Button:
PREFACE
In the ‘70s, we worked as both counselors and instructors
in a large community college, Santa Fe Community College (SFCC),
in Gainesville Florida. It was a very different time in the field
of education than it is today. Experimentation of learning processes
in the classroom was not only possible, but also encouraged—at
least in many schools around the country. It was an era prior
to the deluge of lawsuits that closed the doors to experiencing
the spontaneity in the classroom necessary for the exploration
into the inner worlds of human feelings. Some very forward thinking
educators, including Dr. Joe Fordyce, Dr. Terry O’Banion,
and Dr. Bob Shepack, to whom we will be forever grateful for the
educational environment they cultivated, set up SFCC as an experimental
humanistic oriented school. Their effort was to affect change
in the process of learning in the Jr. College, in the 1960s, which
created an environment of intuitive, in-depth, problem solving.
We took them seriously at the time, and, with the help of modern
medical research, today we have further validation of its pervasive
value to our modern culture.
We were fortunate enough to be there at the right time in human
history to engage in an experience that brought on our discovery
of the true inner nature of human beings and ground breaking clinical
experience in the field of psychology involving the gut response
center. Since we were instrumental in establishing and operating
a career guidance center for the college, much of the early material
in this book is our day-to-day experience in both the career guidance
center and Behavioral Science classes, in which we were teaching,
and in which learning about the inner nature of the person was
being discovered and shared. We found, that in order to deal with
the problems of career choice, people needed to first deal with
the understanding of the authentic Self and it’s concepts.
From this approach, we developed a methodology for access to the
inner instinctive processes, where the impact of life’s experience
resides, and where the energy towards individual goals is found—not
in the goals obtained from external authorities. Such an impact
of experience provides the energy, the life drive for the adult,
which is closely related to the excitement experienced early as
a child.
The process by which inner awareness of the Self is experienced
is the theme of this book. This process is learned through the
person’s own experience of himself, not by way of formal
education. It is available to all persons who seek to become aware
of the Self that lies fallow in the instincts of all human beings.
It is, therefore, a process of becoming more aware of what we
already, subconsciously or consciously, know about ourselves.
We have developed a functional model for Self-awareness by the
individual rather than an observational model for a helping profession.
In holding and supporting this functional point of view, we are
concerned only with the inner experiential Self-awareness point
of view of the person. This task is the essence of the problem
for each individual life in experience. Each person is faced with
keeping track of his own inner feelings about himself while dealing
with the outer judgments of others about his observable behavior.
There seems to be many counter productive folkways and morays
that conflict with instinctive human needs. These habits of ‘thoughtless
logic’, conceived long before our time, have produced images
of human nature destructive to the health and welfare of all ages.
We cautiously discuss some of these issues relative to common
knowledge now available.
In this book, we have tried to include both material that is experiential
and feeling, as well as material that explains our research from
a more logical, even at times an academic point of, view. The
following is a summary of material presented chapter by chapter:
Chapter One. We introduce the reader to the discovery of the gut
intelligence responses in our early clinical studies, as well
as to the history and development of the Somatic Reflection Process
(SRP). Much of this is a revision from our earlier writings, Borne
of the Human Family, 1976, which we had published at Santa
Fe Community College, Gainesville, FL, and used as a text for
the Behavioral Sciences classes we were teaching. Our first book,
Borne of the Human Family, is an explicit model and a methodology,
introducing the Somatic Reflection Process, which makes a clear
statement of the human ability in socialization: “how to
get close and not get lost”.
At the time of our counseling assignment, there probably had never
been as pervasive and as deep a display of public feeling over
a previous war. The Viet Nam war made no sense to anyone, particularly
to the youth of this country who were conscripted to fight it—there
was no creditable logic to support it.
We offer this reflection of the time to suggest to many of you
who were not present at that time, that the ‘70s was a time
when there had been no affective emotional recovery from the war,
and drug relief had set in, as an attempt to numb the upper brain
and quell the emotions. This was a time of confusion for everyone,
which, in one sense, made most of the counseling ‘tools’
with which we had to work, obsolete—making the task more
difficult. But, in another sense, this unique situation made the
students more eager to discuss their feelings, which encouraged
us to dig deeper into our own feelings; all of which made the
task more rewarding and more productive.
Chapter Two. We introduce two major bodies of neurological research,
which have emerged in the last two decades and is significant
to our work and validates our findings concerning the gut response
as a center of intelligence. The physiology of the source of somatic-feelings
remained a mystery to us in our early study of human nature and
gut instinctive feelings in the 1970s. We knew that the feelings,
with which we were working, were stored in the gut as pure feelings
without logical thinking attached, but we had no image of the
specific source of the feelings in the human anatomy. It was not
until recent years when we first read of some important neurological
research, that a clear physiological connection was made and we
understood it to be a validation of our early work.
Chapter Three. This chapter introduces the concepts and principles
transposed from the medical view to a basic psychological—behavioral
significance.
We demonstrate, as a result of our clinical experience and the
results of the cited neurological research, that we are dealing
with a quality of intelligence common and available to all human
beings. We have found that when these two centers of guidance,
head and gut, are in balance, they can offer greater satisfaction
and stability to emotional experiences to both individuals and
groups in all enterprises of life. We explore how somatic modalities
like the Somatic Reflection Process are successful in reducing
stress and may be employed as a healing process to reduce dis-ease.
It is the purpose of our presentation to identify images of the
head and gut that will help individuals discover awareness and
balance between these two centers of intelligence, and, thereby,
achieve a higher standard of health and satisfaction in their
lives, and bring on a Renaissance to the human family awareness.
When the individual achieves a unity of mind and body and the
individual’s instinctive inner needs are met, the person
and culture benefit from a higher standard of ethics, morality,
health and quality of life.
Chapter Four. It is from the awareness of two centers of intelligence
in the human being and in Gershon’s medical research and
discovery of our two brains, that we view a new image of human
nature necessary to take us into the 21st century and beyond.
We describe the experience that understanding this new image of
human nature gives to us and the self-awareness this knowledge
brings in ourselves and in others to give us the perspective necessary
to thrive as individuals during this difficult era of change we
are presently living in, and thus assisting the growth of our
humanity in making effective changes in our societies. The referenced
changes include an essential greater awareness of the inner human
nature, basic instinctive human needs, (Self-control and Self-acceptance),
and the understanding of the need for balance between our thinking
and feeling intelligence centers.
We present a view of the development of a fetus and its development
of the two intelligence centers—the thinking and gut brains,
as well as the schedule of construction of the fetus and these
centers, and its completion at birth. We also deal with the affect
of the fact that only after birth, the construction of the head
brain fully develops its tools (sight, sound, taste, touch, and
smell), and discuss how these tools are of adequate quality depending
on the stimulation of the environments to which the new born is
exposed.
We show that there is the built-in system in the human being capable
of self-control and care for others without the influence of any
outside control. We see these characteristics as the result of
stability furnished by the presence of the two centers of intelligence
working together providing self regulating feed-back with the
upper brain, focused on the outside world, and the gut brain focused
on the inner body functions—digestion, and energy generation.
We leave no question about, which is the most dependable center
of intelligence. It is with Chapter Four that we prepare the reader
for the understanding that the knowledge of the intelligence of
the enteric nervous system is the bases for the development of
a new Gut Psychology.
Chapter Five. As you will see, the Somatic Reflection Process
(SRP) is designed to purge the disturbance aspect of misunderstood
experiences of the past, from continuing to distort experiences
of the present, in order to increase confidence of movement into
the future, by reflecting back to the source with feelings. This
result requires the new image of human nature with its pure feeling,
the elimination of pure logic of the upper brain, and the relationship
between the two centers of intelligence—feeling and thinking—working
in concert. In this chapter we define the new image of humanity
with intelligence in the head and a second center of intelligence
in the gut.
Chapter Six. This chapter is used to demonstrate and explain the
intricacies of the methodology and protocol of the Somatic Reflection
Process (SRP). One of the authors facilitated the SRP in an achedemic
setting, in a research study with individual colleagues in her
Masters Program in Depth Psychology in 2005 at Sonoma State University—the
reflection is verbatim.
Chapter Seven. This chapter is devoted to the evaluation of the
results of Chapter Six. These results demonstrate the responses
of the research participants in the SRP study and their gains
of increased somatic awareness—including feeling better with
more adequate sleep and relief of tension in the body; increased
insights of problems and inner issues with a new perspective and
awareness of inner needs, and increased feelings of self-acceptance—a
clearer understanding of them selves.
Chapter Eight. This chapter, Natures Way, will probably be the
most difficult for the reader, the strangest aspect of all to
understand and accept. We have taken the results of experience
and research—psychological and medical—and formed that
material into a new image of human nature—an image of dual
intelligences. In this new perspective, we have discovered the
patterns of Nature—an inclusive paradigm of Nature’s
way that includes other sciences; then we intuit a coherent set
of behaviors to be expected from humans with two brains instead
of just one (from the boundary conditions permitted by the new
paradigm). This was written in the years after our work together
at SFCC and is taken from our two minds reflecting independently
over a period of thirty-seven years on the same subject—human
nature, then comparing notes and arriving at the same conclusions
after the years of separation.
Chapter Nine. Underlying the material in this chapter is the awareness
of a change in psychology, a change from the disruptive psychology
of external guessing of the meaning of human behavior, to an inner
psychology of a dependable center of essential intelligence, which
when consciously used is a stabilizing influence to human behavior.
This center, located in the gut, contains the architecture for
the Human design, the DNA, and the Human building plan, the RNA
for the Human organism. It is in this same area that the animal
instincts are found. However, the characteristics of the instincts
have been miss used and miss understood, in the past, named as
an evil aspect of the Human personality. The results of neurological
and psychological research over the past fifty years now indicate
that the consciously learned use of the gut intelligence provides
behavior patterns that will lead to Self-Control and Self-Acceptance—with
no need for external control or behavioral instructions. The combination
of the Main brain with its central nervous system, and the ancient
Animal Brain with its somatic, enteric nervous system in the inner
body—in the gut—and the constant dialog between them
provides a self-correcting feedback system, which regulates the
behavioral qualities of the organism when consciously cultivated—preferably
in early youth.
We examine the benefits of discovery of the second-brain voice
of feeling in the gut, as opposed to the exclusive use of the
upper brain in the head with its powerful thinking sensory skills.
This combination of inside—outside intelligence balance provides
for intellectual growth: problem solving, mobility, adaptability,
intuition, and reflective clearing of past disruptive miss understandings—that
interfere in the present—with emotional guilt, bursts of
hostility in the present, and fear of the future.
We discuss some of the institutional positions with its barriers
to the dramatic changes that the educated use of the second brain
imposes on the society. It appears that a conscious, balanced
use of the two centers of intelligence has never been allowed
to emerge in human history—for reasons not absolutely clear
we haven’t used the brains we were born with.
Chapter Ten. This chapter discusses the new Image of human nature
and its applications to education—K-12, as well as Rehabilitative
Incarceration.
We acknowledge the similarity of both public, private, and rehabilitative
education about the Self as a learning process, which should be
available to all humans in all cultures, for the simple reason
that if all human cultures use the same accurate image of the
species we would likely begin to better understand each other
for starters. We have done this in the past unsuccessfully for
the reason that we have, almost universally, accepted an ancient
image of human nature, based on observational external behavior,
based on an impossible set of standards, which was designed to
suppress instincts for the control of human behavior. The need
of rules for behavioral control existed because it was impossible—and
still is impossible—for humans to live up to those standards
without open and free use of the natural instincts. This is the
center of recent medical and psychological discoveries, and this
is the center of the need for a fundamental change in the understanding
of learning. We postulate that, if you accept and try to understand
the discoveries of psychological and neurological science research
of the late 20th century, by the end of the 21st Century your
children and grand-children and great grand children will have:
“…peace on earth good will toward Men and Women”,
throughout the world. To reach this realistic goal we will have
to place the environments of learning at the top of the agenda
of things we must do immediately, and keep it there.
Chapter Eleven. With the age of human nature now validated by
the medical research of Dr. Michael Gershon, we are better prepared
to fight dis-ease than ever before. It is important that we pay
attention to this new consciousness of our two centers of intelligence—two
brains—so we can finally make decisions in our lives that
care about the whole person, truly reduces stress in our lives,
and provides the necessary levels of somatic and psychological
nutrients to feed all our needs as human beings. We now can see
that we have ignored our humanness, our human nature, and this
has led us to great amounts of dis-ease and discomfort. But we
live on the cusp of a Renaissance in consciousness of who we truly
are and,thus, we can now begin to thrive in this exciting age
of our humanity’s journey toward a greater life and a more
fundamentally intelligent evolution of our species.
Chapter Twelve. In this final chapter, a summary is offered of
the cultural and individual importance of following the gut instinctive
feelings as a systematic experiential practice that will engender
positive states of mind, as well as recapture and utilize the
gut response as a dependable center of reference for life decision-making,
health and well-being.
CONTENT
OUTLINE of What's Behind Your Belly Button
Chapter One: Development of the Concept of Reflection
on Gut Instincts
Reassessing the Meaning Of Experience
Spontaneous Sharing of Instinctive Feelings:
The Meaningful Use of Time
Chapter Two: Medical Breakthrough Supports the Gut as a Center
of Intelligence
The World of the Enteric Nervous System
Conclusions on Gershon’s Research
The World of the Fetus Found to Begin in the Gut
Fetal Construction Schedule: Fertilization to Birth—9 Months
Conclusions on Fetal Development
Chapter Three: The Impact of Experience: The Universal Principles
of Feelings
A Process of Self-Awareness
Caring for Instinctual Feelings
The Meaningful Use of Time
Anatomy of Feelings
Levels of Feeling
Becoming Aware of Instinctive Feelings
Structured Awareness of Feelings:
Hostility
Guilt
Fear
Joy
When Caring Exists
Chapter Four: A New Image of Human Nature
On the Threshold of a Renaissance
Basic Human Needs
Needed: A New Myth for Humanity that Reduces Stress
The New Functional Image of Humanity
Questioning Human Nature and the Gut Decision
Chapter Five: The Development of the Somatic Reflection Process
and a New School of Gut Psychology
Finding the Source of Inner Conflict and Stress
The MBTI and the Development of the
Somatic Reflection Process
Reading Life Backwards
The Feeling of Emptiness and Fullness in the Gut
Our Instinctual Needs
Principles Underlying the Technique of the Somatic Reflection
Process
Centering on the Feelings of Unresolved Issues
Becoming Conscious of Inner Needs through the Somatic Reflection
Process
Chapter Six: Facilitating the Somatic Reflection Process
Three Types of Facilitation:
The Somatic Reflection Process with a Facilitator
The Somatic Reflection Process with an Imaginary Facilitator
The Somatic Reflection Process with an Inner Facilitator
Being Attuned as a Facilitator: Empty Mind—Full Belly
A Protocol for The Somatic Reflection Process
Identifying the Unresolved Issue and Feeling
Reflecting Backwards in Time with Feelings
Finding the Awareness of the
Rejection of Inner Feelings and Needs
Connecting the Feelings of the Past to the Present Life Issue
Chapter Seven: A Research Exploration on the Personal Value
of the Somatic Reflection Process
Increased Somatic Awareness:
Feeling Better
Increase of Awareness of Feelings in the Body
Increased insights:
New Perspective
Increased Awareness of Inner Needs
Increased Self-Acceptance
Somatic Reflection Process of Researcher Subject: Cindy
Somatic Reflection Process of Researcher Subject: Sara
Concluding Remarks
Chapter Eight: Nature’s Way
Neuroscience Changes our Way of Viewing Ourselves and Our Relationship
to Others
Intimacy and Instinctual Gut Responses
The Language of the Gut: ME, MYSELF, AND I
Mobility and the Gut
Adaptability and the Gut
Evolution and the Gut
Intuition and the Gut
The Maturing of Science Ushers in a New Image of Human Nature
Chapter Nine: A New Psychology of Gut Instinct
The Voice of the Gut
Gut Experience
Problem Solving and Gut Instincts
Renaissance: Freedom and Recognition of Instinctual Feeling Responses
Chapter Ten: The New Image of Human Nature In Education
The Learning Process
It Takes a Licken and Keeps On Ticken
Applications of New Image to Education
Ideals for Education
Letter on Education to President Obama
Farm to Factory
The Analog of Discovery
Puberty and Instinctual Needs
Affecting the Learning Process
Incarceration: A New Reclamation Project of Human Life
Conclusions on Education
Chapter Eleven: The New Image of Human Nature and Dis-ease
The Voice of the Gut and The Cure of Dis-ease
Distinguishing the “You Cells”and “Not You Cells”
The Somatic Reflection Process as a Medical Intervention
Identifying Elements of the Somatic Depth Process For Medical
Study
The Six Phases of Somatic Depth Process
Conclusions
Chapter Twelve: The New Image: Our Gut as a Dependable Center
of Reference
Authors' Notes and References
Notes
Further Definition of Some Terms Used
References
About the Authors
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