The Mind Body Connection

In this article I’m going to explore what I’m currently seeing about the mind body connection and the impact the powerful mind has on the body.

My understanding of the mind body connection is in its infancy. But as I pay less attention to thinking, I’m noticing that my body has been responding in surprising ways.

I’m going to take you on my journey and introduce you to some possibilities you may never have considered.

It starts in my late teens…

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)

During my late teenage years I started to have problems with my bowels. Don’t worry, I won’t go into details but it took until my early twenties to be diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. It then took a further seven or eight years before I realised that eating wheat appeared to contribute to my excessive bloating.

At that point I removed wheat from my diet and my bloating became more bareable.

Fast forward a few years and I was faced with a poorly baby who was diagnosed with various food allergies and then coeliac disease.

It was due to our combined issues with food that I started The Free From Fairy, to help others with practical elements of a restricted diet.

Food Intolerances & Candida

From my teens I’d had issues with candida but by my early thirties my problems were getting worse.

Adding to the mix, my body started to react to additional foods.

I got rashes on my body when eating certain things. My knuckles became swollen; my eczema returned on my hands and I had constant breakouts on my face.

Fed up with the constant-seeming reactions my body was having I put myself on a very restrictive diet removing all sugar along with various carbohydrates. (Please note that I would never advocate doing this without the guidance of a professional).

My body seemed to calm down, but I was miserable!

I spent my life thinking about food; what I could and couldn’t eat and something that had been one of my greatest pleasures became a chore. It was like a kind of punishment.

Probiotics & The Gut Brain Connection

During my time of struggle I did a lot of research into the gut brain connection.

To simplify it, researchers have found that we have a ‘second brain’ in our gut that communicates with our brain. There are a huge number of articles about the gut brain axis or connection so if you’re interested I suggest heading over to Google.

Alternatively start with this fairly simple article from Dr Axe.

I started eating fermented foods and testing out different probiotics. I even spent a year or so sending off stool samples to track my gut microbiota every month.

And I’ve done the Zoe personalised nutrition programme – worn a blood sugar monitor, pricked my skin to take blood and eaten horrible muffins to try and understand what foods are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad’ for me.

Over the last twenty years or so of experimenting, I’ve not found one particular diet, probiotic or regimen that has helped with my gut and skin issues.

But what I’ve seen very clearly for myself is the power of the mind…

My mind has settled and so has my body

Around eight years ago I came across the Three Principles; a description of how experience is created through the mind.

A few years ago I realised that my skin was no longer reacting to food, despite eating ‘normally’. In addition to this, the symptoms of IBS no longer bother me.

When I say IBS no longer bothers me, I mean that although I still experience bloating from time to time I no longer care. It no longer seems to be something that I need to fix.

And what I notice is that the less I care about the bloating or see it as some dreadful problem, the less I experience it.

The less I worry about the food I eat; the less problems I have with it. The less I worry in fact, the better…

Then last week I realised that another change had happened. I was staying with a friend who has two cats.

Since I was a child I have been allergic to animal hair, and cats particularly, were a major problem, seeming to instigate itchy eyes, sneezing and a tight chest.

I went to her flat prepared with anti-histamines and an inhaler, and upon my arrival, despite their insistence for my attention, I did my utmost to not touch them.

But I soon realised that I was having no reaction to them at all. No sneezes, no itchy eyes and no tight chest.

Innate intelligence

As I was explaining to a client this morning, we are no different from nature. We are made from the same intelligence that turns an acorn into an oak tree and tells the swallows when to migrate to Africa.

Our bodies know what they need. When we ‘get in the way’ (using what we think we know) and try to control our experience it leads to suffering.

Have you ever noticed that a small child will eat something one day and then refuse it the next? Is that down to fussiness? To them trying to ‘play you up’, or down to something else? Could it be that their body knows what it needs and that changes from one day to the next?

Let’s assume that our body always knows what it needs and the physical symptoms it gives us are love letters (a term used by Dr Bill Petit).

Love letters to tell us that we are trying to control; that we are caught up in our minds (thinking about the past or future) and not living in the present moment.

The gut problems, the skin issues, the candida and other symptoms, all love letters to show me that I was taking life too seriously. That I was innocently believing fear-based thought patterns.

All the symptoms showing me that I was caught up in worry; in the ‘what if’s’, ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ of life and in the perpetual need to keep myself safe by considering every potential negative outcome to every single action I took.

And it was all completely invisible to me. I had no idea that I was worried and anxious but when I look back now I can see that I was.

Sticky Plasters or Root Cause

For many, many years, because I knew no better, and it’s what society around me favours, I’d been attempting to cure the symptoms by sticking metaphorical plasters on them. The diets, kinesiology, medication, acupuncture, supplements and goodness knows what else…all treating the symptoms at the surface level.

Nothing wrong with any of them, and they can all be extremely helpful, but never addressing the root cause of the symptoms.

Please don’t get me wrong, all these things were part of my journey of discovery and therefore incredibly important. It couldn’t have been any other way, and led me to where I am now.

And I still take supplements that make sense to take. But they are no longer being taken from the idea that there is something wrong that needs to be fixed; just out of curiosity for how my body might respond to them.

If you’re fed up with trying to fix an endless array of physical ailments and you’re curious about what might be the root cause of symptoms for you, then get in touch.

I love nothing more than to explore the basis of experience and to see how that understanding impacts every area of life.