My Enteric Brain Journey, Intro

Enteric Brain

My intent is to begin a series from journal entries that I recorded when I was going through some intense healing therapy with Dr. Paul Canali.  When I first was acquainted withe work he does, it was referred to as therapy involving the Enteric Brain.

The enteric brain is the name of an energetic physical structure located within your gut or abdominal area. It is made up of a mesh of nerves, fascia, muscles, organs and various physical structures.  It is hard to identify this physical structure anatomically speaking but we all know that it exists within us.  Have you ever said, "that was my gut decision?"  If you have, than you know exactly what I'm referring to in this post.

Emotional Vomiting

It started out, as a peaceful morning. The sun was shining and while the outside air felt humid, it was not too warm. The agenda for the day was not too hectic at that moment. As my attention turned toward the computer and my online friends, I saw a posting that I quickly commented on. Thinking I was really just commenting to the friend that posted it, I had the temporary lapse of rational thought that everyone out in cyber space connected to this friend could read the comment as well. But yet, in my mind, it was a conversation between me and my friend, not between me and the rest of the world.

Quickly, a friend of hers that I do not know posted a very strong response accusing me of being short sighted and part of the problems in the world. I was quite shocked and surprised that it generated this type of response because in many ways, I did not disagree with the points this person was slapping me with. We probably shared more in common than not but I never got the chance to explain anything. It was like this person was the judge; jury and executioner of what I said and that really irked me. Since it was on a friend’s page, I did not want to cause a scene and out of respect to them, I deleted the comment. Thinking that would be the end of the story, I quickly found out that this action inflamed the person further which surprised me all the more. The other commenter suggesting that I was a coward because I deleted the comment could have not been further from the truth. I no longer feel I have to prove what is right or wrong in these things. I just let it go. And finally after I had enough of this back and forth bantering, I just said whatever and banned this person from seeing anything connected with me or I from them.

Not that anything the person said was in disagreement with how I feel but the way in which it was done left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. Sometimes people say far more in how they respond than what they actually say in words. So be it. I’m over that but it turned a good morning into the start of a bad day without me even realizing it in the moment. And it was unfortunate in many ways because this person may have been able to share some things that I am not aware of. However, now my ears are turned off to this person because my boundaries were violated and there was absolutely no respect.

This may sound like an experience that just needs to be dropped and for me to move on. At face value, I would agree but as the day grew on, I realized just how this impacted a series of events that culminated into my spending time in front of the porcelain god puking my guts out. This even though, would not seem as if it was connected to anything else until much later.

Later in the day after mowing the yard in the hot heat and struggling with allergies, I could feel the pressure of a sinus headache beginning. We also had a visitor come over to do some taping of Jeff for a movie he is creating. The guy seemed very nice with his grey hair and raspy voice but the moment he arrived through the front door, the stench of cigarette smoke almost took my breath away. The raspy and somewhat loud, nervous voice filled the room. Little did I know that these things were beginning to play ping pong with me and connecting dots I was not aware of at that moment.

As the afternoon wore on, and I heard the guy going through the interview process with Jeff, the voices seemed to carry upstairs and be amplified a hundred times. I grew exhausted as my headache began to intensify with every moment that passed. It seemed like an eternity when in reality it was only a couple of hours. I stayed upstairs away from the noise just hoping that would help alleviate some of the irritation I felt. Then as the guy left, I watched out through the window as he backed into the garbage can spilling the contents and driving off as if nothing had happened. Just another random event in the day that acted as glue for the connection of the dots, yet I was not even aware of what was going on.

I began to watch a movie that had of all things, a wife appearing to be beat and murdered in the first scene. Probably not something I should have watched this day after looking back but at the time, it didn’t seem too far out of line and it was such a quick scene that I just tried to overlook it. However, it didn’t overlook me!

Part way in to the movie, my stomach began hurting as my head began pounding from the headache. Heartburn was picking up and I felt like my stomach had a balloon in it that was being blown up as it became bloated. The temperature in the room seemed to increase by a thousand percent as my face and body felt so warm. The lights in the room and the sounds around me began to be irritating to an exponential degree. After some time of trying to bare this, I gave up and went to my bed to lie down. Only then did things really intensify.

Trying to use ice packs on my head helped momentarily but the pain was so intense that part of me just wanted to lie down and die. A jackhammer on my head could not have been any more intense. It was excruciating. I would move the ice pack to my stomach to help alleviate the discomfort and again, it would help momentarily but then just as the pounding in my head, it would come back in full strength as a wave crashing into the shore.

During this time, I could begin to feel a lot of anger come up within me but not anger that was directed at any one thing. It was the random anger I get that has no hooks necessarily to hang anything on. It is the anger that seems to bubble up as a spring of water from the ground with a never ending source. Yet, in the moment, there does not seem to be any events to go along with this anger.

I tried my hardest to breathe and scream into my pillow but it seemed as if I had no energy to do this and I felt further exhausted. As my body sank back down into the bed and I found a moment of peace and comfort, I drifted off into a relaxed state. All of the sudden from out of nowhere, my right leg jerked as if it was going to fly off of me into outer space. It woke me from the relaxed state and then I felt my body shiver and shake with trembling. As these things happened, my headache came back with a vengeance and the heartburn within me increased while my stomach grew more agitated. The ice packs that I was using were not helping alleviate the growing nightmare of pain within my body. I tried to work on my enteric brain but even that was providing little comfort for me. The pain was overwhelming. The pain was unbearable.

It was in this moment that a series of images came to my mind along with some smells. The image was of my father storming out the door after he and my mother had fought or I should more accurately say after he beat the daylights out of her. In the image, he got in the car just like I remember and took off into the night. It would be many hours before we would hear him come back through the door and even though I was supposed to be asleep, my eyes remained opened. The terror alert level was quite high. He would come back home sometime many hours later into the early morning, smelling of smoke and appearing intoxicated. I would listen to him apologize to my mom and then they would make up as if everything was fine. No one would ever talk about this the next day or dare utter a word about it. It was a secret that was not to be told. These things filled in the image my mind recalled as I laid on my bed with my head pounding and my stomach violently shaking with pain.

As I ran into the bathroom and knelt next to the porcelain god, my stomach vomited its contents with fury and frequency. My body wanted to collapse on to the floor but the events of the moment would not allow it. In a weakened slumber, I made my way back to the bed and collapsed into my pillow. My body had no strength to hurt or move any further but the headache had decreased significantly at that moment. I fell into a restful moment of sleep waking up not feeling as bad as I did only a short time before.

As I recounted all of the things that happened during the day, I could begin to see how the smell of the cigarette smoke, the grey hair of the visitor and his loud voice, the confrontation with the lady online and feeling as if I had to take cover from the loudness of the events going on in the house were all connected. Each activity in itself did not paint a picture but when you put them all together, it was easy to see the entire portrait.

Even though it is hard for me to admit, I saw so many horror filled moments in my house. My younger brother shared with me many years ago, the things he remembered, yet to me it is like he is talking about some other family. I know that loud noises especially voices get to me and I know that there are some smells and scents that just about bring me into a full rage. For the most part, I cannot explain either of these things except as being triggers to events I have witnessed.

While there are many people who go into town to the bars to drink, I did not think my father was one of those. For the church we went to completely condemned drinking any alcoholic beverage. Our church preached time and time again where I can almost quote it from memory that if you take one drink, you will become an alcoholic because one drink leads to another and another and soon you cannot stop. Even going into a restaurant or establishment that served alcohol was prohibited because someone might see you and think you were drinking which then might cause them to drink and become alcoholics. Since you were responsible for your brothers (fellow man), and if you caused them to become an alcoholic, you were responsible for their sins.

That is what was taught and of course it was backed up with scripture in the bible like the verse in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 which reads, “What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For Ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. It is a lovely verse of scripture but when used to control and manipulate others, than it becomes dangerous as so often the purpose of this verse or others like it by the strict sect of Baptist churches (GARBC – General Association Of Regular Baptist Churches) we attended.

So this secret that my Dad had which I didn’t not even fully realize until now went against every teaching of the church which he used to control and manipulate all of us with. What a conflict of monumental proportion! When you mix that in with all the other events taking place, it creates such confusion that for me has been difficult to sort out. The lines and the boundaries are all blurred and unclear. The horrors lurk in the shadows as the infliction of pain is witnessed. It is the existence of the well that bubbles up from within that has no paintable portrait but a feeling of despair, anger and exhaustion.

These events make me wonder about myself at times. I feel like the oddball in life, the oriental reject as my dad once called me and I feel as if I don’t fit in. Sometimes, I struggle to know what is real and what is not or why the anger within me builds. I could fool myself into thinking that these things don’t exist and I could try to just push forward in life acting as they don’t but I would only be fooling myself. It is in these times, that I know I’ve got to heal through them rather than continue running from them but this is nothing short of being extremely difficult. I would love things to be different. I would wish and hope that no other person would be a witness to the events I have seen. It is a daily horror that haunts me and a complete healing of wholeness that I long for.

I remind myself of just how far I have come but my eyes still cannot close to all they have seen. Once again, I am a witness to how our emotions, the events of our past and our memories impact not only our current day but the core of our body and mind.

Let The Body Feel The Pain

In a Peanuts Cartoon script, Charlie Brown is having a difficult time going to school. In it, he complains that every morning as he gets up and goes to school, his little stomach hurts so much. Then, as other kids are enjoying their lunches, his stomach is so sick that he has no desire to eat. He goes on to say that it isn’t his brain that has trouble with school, it is his stomach.

That example is a very powerful example of something I have learned a great deal about. It is referred to as the “Enteric Brain” or the second brain or even sometimes is called the gut brain. What Charlie Brown didn’t fully understand, it was the brain in his stomach where all the difficulty came from. Many of us go through life struggling in the same way as Charlie Brown but we don’t fully understand what the source of our struggles is.

There was many a day that I would get up and go to school where I would be just like Charlie Brown. By the time I got to high school, I could barely eat breakfast in the morning because it would really make me sick. My stomach would be in knots as I faced each day. It was an awful experience and for the longest time, I just thought everyone went through this to some degree or another.

As time went, I realized that when I had very stressful decisions to make or when I was encountering a strange situation or unknown place, my stomach would be in knots. I would not be able to eat, sleep or function that well. I often would say that I made decisions with my gut because in many ways that was true. My gut would react to whatever it was I was facing and if it was in turmoil or in pain and agony, I would know that the decision I was about to make was not right. On the other hand if things were calm and I was not sick, I could feel pretty certain I was making the right decision.

One of the things I struggled with was that because of difficult times I went through in family situations, my stomach was tied up in knots most of the time. There were very few times when it felt good and most of the time it hurt. Eating breakfast or most foods during the day were extremely difficult as I would not feel good from it or get sick. This seemed to be an everyday occurrence and if my stomach didn’t hurt, than I would suffer from daily headaches. Sometimes the two went hand in hand and my only savior was Tylenol.

Things got so bad in high school that I was rushed to the hospital with the doctor feeling I needed to have my appendix out. I was at the age where this was common and so I was immediately checked into the hospital with tests beginning to see what was going on. After many tests that were not conclusive, the doctors were just not sure what was going on or what the best course of action was. Shortly before I was scheduled for surgery to have my appendix removed, the doctor began to question if that was really the best route to go. Thankfully he questioned it.

Soon they determined that it was a nervous stomach (pre ulcer) condition that I had. This was just before Christmas of course when all this was taking place and the next thing I knew, the doctor told me I had to go on a special bland diet and medication. This diet was no fun and while it did help, it by no means took care of the problem. I spent considerable time watching everything I ate and watching my mom prepare meals in such a way that it would not affect me. However, no one ever addressed the real problem behind this. No one understood the connection of stress to the stomach and the enteric brain.

As I have learned now, there is a strong connection to what happens on the outside with what happens on the inside. The stomach is a very important barometer of what is going on in the body because after all, it is the gut brain. If you continue to pile stress and difficulties on the body with no way of discharging them, the body is going to react in one way or another. Often the gut is where the bulk of our stress, pain and grief go but other parts of our body will harbor these things as well.

So when Charlie Brown talked about his stomach hurting, he had a very valid reason for saying that. If someone would have taken myself at that point as well as Charlie Brown, and taught me how to let go of all these things I was locking up within myself, my life would have been very different. Our bodies try to talk to us and get our attention but often we either do not have the tools or the desire to listen to what our bodies are telling us. We try to make this in to a difficult situation of suffering when in fact; the pains, discomfort and conditions we face are there on purpose. They are trying to get our attention so that we will take necessary steps of corrective action. Too many times, we medicate ourselves with drugs, surgery and pathways into la la land, only to find that we have treated the symptoms instead of the source.

Our bodies are miraculous living organisms with the ability to heal, function and self regulate all that goes on within them. Often we search for answers that we so need only for our bodies to offer us solutions that go unheard. Have you ever heard someone say, I just don’t know where I’m going in life and yet the next thing you hear, they are in at the doctor’s office struggling with a foot condition of one type or another? Maybe you have heard of people who are struggling with so much anger at some individual and yet you see the arthritic display in their hands because of their clenched fists. How about the person who is said to have died of a broken heart after suffering the loss of a loved one not knowing how to grieve their loss and say goodbye. There are so many examples in our day and if you stop and listen for them, you’ll hear so many from people around you. You might even be surprised at how much you hear from yourself.

We’re taught in our society that pain can be frightening and scary and at the first sign of pain or discomfort, we need to take something for it. From the over the counter medications to a doctor prescribed medication, we try to get rid of the symptom, also known as the pain or discomfort, instead of looking for the reason it is there. We try to flee from it when there is a reason that our body is working hard to get our attention. If we continue to ignore what the body is trying to tell us, it will continue to get our attention and if we go down this path to far, the conditions can get serious.

Learning though to stop and listen to our body and see what is going on, is a good first step in healing our body. There are times of course that we may not like what we see when we do this and there may be considerable amounts of fear to go along with it, but ask yourself this question. Would it be better to treat the symptoms or treat the cause? I think it would be an easy answer to this question that all of us would want to treat the cause. Yet, the first thing we move towards is finding something or someone to get rid of the pain.

May we all strive to learn to listen to our bodies as well as the answers it so freely offers us. For the more we look to other things and people to heal us, the more we will become disillusioned and disappointed. Yes, we do need the help of those who can heal, but we also need to realize just how powerful we are as a human and the immense abilities we have located within us.

Less Than Human

From July 2004 Enteric Brain Workshop with Dr. Paul Canali

Trauma, repetitive stress without release, change our biology, our chemistry, our bodies, minds, brains and nervous system. We become less than human, and begin to hurt ourselves and others. We lose the ability to communicate with our internal selves through our internal somatic awareness, enteric brain and spiritual brain. We begin to live in fear. Chronic fear destroys, leads to anger, depression, sickness, loss of faith and apathy. Only through release of these things can we restore the wholeness and health of our mind, body and spirit.

My Enteric Brain Journey, Aug 25, 2004

Here is an account of a session with Dr. Canali in 2004. My reason for sharing this from my journal are to help bring about awareness to all that is possible through this simple but deep form of healing. Please keep checking back for future postings from my journal.
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There were a lot of tears last night in my session with Dr. Canali. When I was asked to describe what had gone on in the session for me, I described pain, hurt and more appropriately sadness. I felt like I was choking and I couldn’t get enough air. I recalled the time when I had inflammation in my chest as a kid and somehow that or the pattern of chest problems may tie in with this. It isn’t as important though I am learning to become aware of exactly what memory is behind everything as it is to just experience the emotion that comes up. Memories can sometimes cloud the actual experience of what is going on and distort the actual memory. I have been getting several tremors in my right thigh just above my knee and my left thigh. This is normal for the left thigh but unusual for the right. You can actually see the muscles shake in my leg like they are being stimulated. I feel like I have more armies to fight with me than fight against me right now.

My Enteric Brain Journey, July 31, 2004

Here is an account of one of my sessions with Dr. Canali in 2004. My reason for sharing this and subsequent postings from my journal are to help bring about awareness to all that is possible through this simple but deep form of healing. Please keep checking back because I intend to continue posting parts of my sessions and with time, they will share a lot of information.

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Last night I had one of the deepest nights of sleep that I have ever had in my life. I don’t think I have ever experienced that. The dreams were more vivid than I usually have and when my alarm clock went off this morning, I did not want it to end. I actually went back to sleep for a couple of hours because it was such a beautiful moment for me. Anyway, I really feel rested right now and I went outside and sat in the sun for a few minutes.

My Enteric Brain Journey, July 30, 2004

Here is an account of one of my first session with Dr. Canali in 2004. My reason for sharing this and subsequent postings from my journal are to help bring about awareness to all that is possible through this simple but deep form of healing. Please keep checking back because I intend to continue posting parts of my sessions and with time, they will share a lot of information.

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July 30, 2004

Wow, the treatment I had today seemed like it was only 5 minutes long but when I left to go home, I realized I had been there for an hour. It sure didn’t feel that long and when Dr. Canali was trying to bring me back to the room, I thought that was strange because it seemed like only moments earlier we were starting the process.

I felt a lot of trembling (just very light and rhythmic) through out my body but mostly in my legs. But other than that I really didn’t feel to much or wasn’t aware of what took place. I don’t remember much of what was going on around me and felt like I was in a void all to myself where it was quiet and peaceful.

From Paralysis and Fear Through Touch

Note: For a licensed print ready version, click here.

Imagine a 25 year old guy laying in a hospital bed and struggling to talk, move all parts of his body and remember basic things like his name. There was no car accident and no disease. The muscles had the same tone in them as they had before this time.

Just days before, this same guy had been an average hard working person just trying to make it in life. Of course he had the usual aches and pains that everyone has and he had been getting medical attention to deal with all of this. Of course most of the doctors didn’t have the slightest clue what to do in this situation. After a severe episode of seizures, he was taken by ambulance to the hospital only to be sent home because they found nothing wrong with him.

As the situation worsened, family and friends once again took him to seek additional medical help. Fortunately this time a neurologist knew to ask the right questions which began the road of healing for this young man. He had been diagnosed with a condition known as a conversion disorder.

Conversion disorders are technically known as Somatoform Disorders which involve physical bodily symptoms that suggest there is a medical problem when in fact no medical condition can be found. Symptoms may include anything from chronic pain, blindness, and deafness to paralysis of the arms and legs, and seizures. Conversion Disorders are estimated to occur in about 15 out of 100,000 people. It is a very rare condition.

If you have not figured out by now who this person is, it was me. I suffered through this condition in 1991 and have fought hard to overcome the effects of it. Although some sources indicate there is no treatment for the disorder, most people would not be able to tell I suffered through paralysis to the point that my brain was shutting down on me.

As part of my continued healing, I spent many years undergoing counseling and therapy to overcome the effects of this condition. With conversion disorders, there is usually an underlying emotional situation such as child abuse that goes to the root cause. I did suffer through intense child abuse as a kid and I have had to deal with the effects that this brought into my life.

For a long time in my life, I struggled with touch. Since my body was beaten and sexually abused as a kid, touch and closeness to other humans was not something that was a comfort to me. Yet at the same time, I longed for touch and I longed to be close to people because it was a very lonely life.

Several years ago, I started trying to receive massage from a very good licensed massage therapist in NC. This lady was very professional and tried to make sure she could do whatever it took to help me begin accepting touch as something good, healthy and beneficial. I think I made it through about 3 sessions before what she was doing just triggered me to past events. I still remember leaving her office that day, so silent and withdrawn, not able to say what was going on and afraid of her even though she was doing a fantastic job. Of course it was not her that I was afraid of, it was the touch.

More healing took place in my life which allowed me for the first time to accept touch in a healthy and wholesome way. As time went, I began to trust a very special person in my life and touch became so much easier than it had ever been in my life. However I went through some very intense periods where a hug would leave me feeling nauseated and I would feel at times like my skin was crawling with bugs. Even with all of the struggles I faced, my body longed to be touched and to actually feel the touch and feel the goodness that it held.

After a life changing event where I lost my mom to a car accident, I began to contemplate the future direction of my life and the role the universe was asking me to play in it. Amazingly with all of the touch issues I struggled with, I was drawn to massage school. Just before massage school, I once again had a massage and it was actually something that was a much more enjoyable experience for me. I knew that I was drawn to massage school for some reason but was not totally sure why at that point nor was I sure if I could handle learning how to touch others. Fortunately, I trusted my intuition enough and took a giant leap of faith into massage school.

I felt so at home at Educating Hands School of Massage and I felt like I would be able to learn how to trust others. So as time went and we began doing the touch on each other, I was so frightened. My body didn’t know how to take all of this and so most of the time, it just shut down to what I was feeling. I know several of my classmates were frustrated when we tried to give feedback about the massage and I had no words to describe it because I could not feel it. I knew that the massage was not bad, but I absolutely could not feel it.

With time and continued massage day after day, my body began to wake up. It started to see for the first time in my entire life just what touch was. It was like a miracle to me and as I began to feel the touch of my classmates in my body, I began to feel and sense through my fingers wonderful things that were going on inside of those people I got to work on. As school progressed and the experiences continued to come my way, my body became more awake and alive. Life started to change in dramatic ways for me.

Last July, I again followed intuition and attended a workshop by Dr. Paul Canali on the Enteric Brain. It was at this workshop that I heard someone speak a language about the body which my body fully understood and realized that no one else had ever spoken in this way. Through my continued work with Dr. Canali’s, “Unified Healing Therapy”, I am for the first time in my life becoming totally aware of what it means to live in my body. I’m actually experiencing what it means to reach a relaxed state far from the anxiety, depression and abuse that I suffered from all of my life. Touch is becoming so much more alive in me and life is becoming more beautiful with each new day of awareness that I am introduced to.

Working with people who struggle with touch takes a great deal of patience, understanding, compassion, sensitivity and non judgment. There are others out there like myself who may come across your massage table and I hope that you realize from my story that touch is sometimes a very scary thing but you may just be one of the healing stones for that person on their journey. From first hand experience, I know there is hope for each and everyone of these people and while the journey may get rough, it is well worth it in the end.