Les 1
The Relationship Between Your brain, Nervous System & Gut
Your gut is biologically wired to be affected by stress via your nervous system. Knowing and understanding this connection not only takes the pressure off you, but means you are then in an empowered position to work with it. This first lesson is a comprehensive introduction to this connection which is the foundation of all the following lessons. I also share with you what gut-directed imagery is, how it works, and why it’s beneficial for you to get started today.
Les 2
Your Body Is Highly Responsive To Your Thoughts
What you think, consciously or unconsciously, activates a response in your body. In this lesson I facilitate this very concept to enable you to experience it in real time, and therefore build an awareness and capacity to observe when your thoughts are affecting your body or exacerbating your symptoms.
Les 3
The Softening Of Acknowledgment & Validation
You are struggling. This experience is really hard and we can’t deny it - we don’t want to. We want to do the exact opposite, which is to acknowledge your thoughts and feelings and experience for the struggle that it is. You absolutely deserve to be seen and heard, so in this lesson we cultivate self-compassion, kindness, and gentleness because as you’ll find out, it activates a softening in us, and whenever we soften, so does the tension and symptoms.
Les 4
Interpreting The Body Signals With Curiosity Rather Than Fear
Fear narrows our attention, inhibiting our capacity to observe objectively. When we are paying attention to our body with fear, our nervous system is on high alert. We are hypervigilant and experience visceral hypersensitivity. Because your gut is reactive to your nervous system state, the fear and hpervigilance activate and exacerbate gut symptoms, which is the exact opposite of what you’re trying so desperately to achieve.
Being able to observe the body signals with curiosity deactivates the stress response, ensuring your symptoms aren’t exacerbated. In this lesson, I show you how.
Les 5
Embody Your Whole Self - Body, Mind & Emotions
Now that we have learnt how to observe body signals with curiosity, we are going to explore the 3 main aspects of you: body, mind, and emotions. Very commonly we spend the majority of our time in our mind. We detach from our emotional selves and don’t want to be in our body when it’s uncomfortable. If you don’t do emotions, they will do you in the form of physical symptoms.
In this lesson we explore and integrate the 3 aspects of you. By integrating especially the emotional aspect, we negate the need for the body to get involved and eventually symptoms stop presenting themselves physically.
Les 6
Create Your Internal Environment
Your body, and in particular your nervous system, is highly responsive to you. The body is your vehicle, and you are in the driver's seat. Therefore, your body is dependent on you for its environment. One of the greatest resources we have to calm our internal world is our breath. We can speak directly to our nervous system through the breath. When gut symptoms are exacerbated by stress, we know the nervous system is overactivated, so we use the breath to regulate it.
Les 7
Safety Behaviours
Safety behaviours are anxiety behaviours. They are very effective in the short term which is why we use them, but they reinforce the original anxiety which is unhelpful in the long term. You might recognize safety behaviours as decisions you make around your symptoms, to prevent or manage them. In today’s lesson we learn about safety behaviours, how to recognize yours, and how to reduce the anxiety that’s causing them in the first place.
Les 8
Stop Striving & Just Be
I know you’re tired and need a rest. You’ve been working overtime to seek and gather more information and be hyper vigilant to your symptoms to find any way to minimize them. It’s exhausting. When you’re afraid and unwell and desperately seeking answers, it’s hard to slow down. There’s so much outwards grasping that not only exacerbates stress, anxiety, and physical symptoms, it also has a high risk of us abandoning ourselves in the process. In this lesson we pause to give you the time and space to just be with yourself in a safe and comfortable way.
Les 9
Don’t Blame The Food
If you notice that your gut symptoms reduce when you’re relaxed or on holidays, or they get worse with stress, then you already have evidence that stress is a contributing factor to your gut. Because our digestive tract processes food for us, it can be automatic to blame food for gut symptoms. We know that food is only one contributing factor and that stress in all forms makes the microbiome hostile, which gives rise to unhelpful changes in the healthy balance of your gut flora.
If your gut health is compromised by stress, then it makes sense that digestive processes will also be compromised. To minimize constantly eliminating foods from your diet, attending to any stress-producing causes of your gut symptoms will improve your microbiome and increase the capacity of your gut to accept and process a wider variety of food.
In this lesson we learn to decipher stress-related gut symptoms from the rest. Your capacity to determine when this is happening puts you in an empowered position to actively reduce that stress in the moment to minimize any ongoing symptoms.
Les 10
Future-Affirming Actions
When you’re not feeling well or you’re overwhelmed, the focus is often on what you don’t want to be happening, rather than what you do want. We bring awareness to this and take intentional actions to move you to where you want to be. I know you want to feel better, and I want that for you too.
