Trust your gut (and your heart)


“Trust is the highest form of human motivation.” ~Steven R. Covey

The brain is the most important organ in the body. ACCORDING TO THE BRAIN.

It has evolved to seek, find and solve problems. Our proto-rodent ancestors that were relaxed and mellow became snacks. The ones that were anxious and worried tended to survive. We have inherited millennia of this programming, as well as the epigenetics of whatever traumas and disorders our grandparents had. Western culture has over-emphasized the mind as the ultimate wisdom center, but because it seeks problems to solve lots of modern humans are unhappy.

The mind is actually not very reliable for providing solutions to unhappiness, as generating problems to solve is like its main job.

Good news: the mind is not the only wisdom center.

There are cardiac neurons in the heart, the “heart brain.” There is what’s known as the enteric nervous system, the “gut brain.” The traumatized brain is especially prone to hypervigilance (proto-rodent behavior) so tapping into these other wisdom centers is especially helpful.

“I knew in my heart…”

“I had a gut feeling…”

These are trustworthy resources that are available all the time, and while they are simpler and more primitive in some ways, they are much more likely to give you clear answers and accurate information. You don’t need to “know” why you don’t really want to be friends with someone, or take the job that “should be a perfect fit,” or shoehorn yourself into a situation because the mind thinks it will solve some problem.

Trusting these other brains (often labeled “intuition”) requires that we become very clear on what we truly need. It also requires that we let go of “thinking we know” what anyone else truly needs. Because unless you are their caregiver or durable power of attorney, that is actually not your job. Ever.

Your job is to trust your own deepest knowing, without apology, in ways that we haven’t created words for yet.

painting by Flora Bowley

