One of the fundamental facts of life is connection.  Connections in our brains of one idea to another so that we can learn something. Connections to other humans so that we feel safe and nurtured, and experience compassion as we come to comprehend what their lives are like and unlike ours.    Connections with the world around us so that we notice the impact that plants, animals, trees, weather have with us and on us.  It’s all about connection. 

Lately I am been present to the connections of my cells to each other and of my Spirit to my body.  You may think that this is esoteric and for me it is a sentient experience.  You see, I am a physical and emotional empath which translates to I can feel another’s pain/constriction/flow in my body and/or be directed to patterns of these fields in another’s system.  It was very helpful when I had a healing practice.  Now that I do all my healing thru phone and Zoom sessions, I find my body is still in connection with my client’s body whether they are in the U.S.A, in Europe, in India or China.  It’s like there is this field of connection that all of us can access and, for the most part, people ignore.

Why do we ignore our fundamental capability to connect to nature, to other humans, to our own bodies? First of all, we were told not to listen to our bodies.  Our parents said things like, ‘no you don’t feel that’ or ‘this is what you must do, ignore that feeling, it isn’t real’.  They said those things because they were trying to guide us and help us live healthy good lives.  They didn’t mean for us to divorce ourselves from our bodies but that was the result.  I assume that this happened for them as young children too, so they didn’t even consider that there was another way.  Those of us who are empaths get such strong messaging from our bodies, that we eventually learn to listen to those messages, and until we begin to trust those messages, we don’t give them priority in how we live our lives.  

Connecting to our body’s wisdom is an art, it’s a relationship developed over time.  When I first was made aware of my body’s messaging in a conscious way was while giving a massage.  I would be working on a client and get this unexplainable pain in a part of my body.  I would think, ‘Oh no, where did that come from?  How can I continue to massage my client when I have this pain?’.  Eventually the light of awareness dawned and I realized that these ‘pain episodes’ only occurred during sessions and the pain wasn’t there after a session.  So, then I started experimenting to find out if that ‘pain’ was something more than ‘my pain’.  I would pay attention to where the pain was in me and go to that area of the client’s body and focus my work there.  Lo and behold, my pain immediately released.  Eventually I could just get a sense of where to go when working on a client and I no longer had to experience their pain. I realized that the client’s body was telling me how to work with it to bring it back to a sense of wholeness.  Halleujah!

If my body can work with me like that, then everyone’s body can message them.  I have worked with students learning to write the Creation Exercises (‘Language of Creation’ by Tantra Maat) and helped them identify their own sentient intelligence markers, that is those sensations, energies, emotions, sensitivities, thoughts that arose when they wrote resonant phrases.  Everyone experienced some combination of sensations, emotion, energy or thought.  Each student’s experience had both similar and unique sentient markers.  We used to call them resonant markers because we were tracking their body’s responses to writing resonant phrases.  Our sentient intelligence arises not just in life-enhancing life-generating experiences but also in life-defeating or dangerous experiences.  The important thing to note is that everyone’s body had responses to resonant phrases.  Everyone therefore had an active sentient intelligence whether or not they had ever listened to it before.  Every human does and we are often not listening to it. Have you ever thought “I should have listened to my gut”, ‘everything in my body just says go for it’, ‘my gut say that’s not a good idea’?

How does the gut know?  Well, that is the most interesting area of research.  Turns out that the medical world now recognizes our gut brain as our second brain.  Our gut which is defined as including our stomach and our intestines has almost as much grey matter as the brain in our heads and almost as many of the transmitters that assist neurons in connecting to their axons.  If you ever studied yoga, or Taoism you will know this area as the second and third chakras, the solar plexus, the first and second Tan Tien’s.  Everything that the ancients figured out for these areas is now being discovered by medical science.  The latest ‘discovery’ is that that grey matter is actually something called glia or astrocycte cells.  For the last 100 years, no one paid attention to these cells, in fact the Neuronal Doctrine’s dogma was that they were just support cells for the neurons.  With the advent of better microscopes and of scientists who thought ‘maybe those grey cells are more” we have seen an increase in the studies of glia and astrocytes cells over that last 30 years.  What they have discovered so far is amazing.  The astrocytes cells receive stimulation from the neurons and then communicate with each other via calcium waves and, for long distances, they use neurons and axons.  It turns out that those astrocytes cells hold our memories, and thoughts, and they connect to each other in networks thru all three brains, so that we can be creative, imaginative and problem solve differently. They are who we are in the world.

Our sentient intelligence comes out of our gut traveling thru the vague nerve up to the heart and head brain and informs the astrocytes about what is occurring in the body and our surroundings, a real 360 degree view that is ‘in the moment’.  That is why we should give our sentient intelligence priority in our listening as we seek to respond to life.  That is why we should give ourselves quiet time so that our astrocytes in our gut, our heart and our head can connect different memories, and thoughts and come up with solutions that are unique to us,or create brand new perspectives of the world.  That is why we should be writing creation exercises regularly because each recursion creates a new astrocytic network in our brains that supports the perceptions of a world that we crave.  We were never meant to be robots repeating what we had been told.  We were meant to be unique and essential Beings in connection with each other, with nature and with our Source.

I now see that my renewed connection to my sentient intelligence is opening me up to connecting to cells and organs in my body.  Sounds kind of odd, but there it is.  If it is true that everything is connection, then it makes sense that we should be in connection, in relationship with our own bodies and organs.  That means that it is a conversation with and a respect for our bodies and their needs.  Just as with our human friends and our animal friends, the more that we get to know them, and show them that we respect and listen to them, the deeper the relationship becomes and a greater the ease of give and take that occurs.  So I am practicing listening to various parts of my system both physical and etheric.  What I find most interesting for me is that there are areas of my body that I have chosen to be angry at instead of being inquisitive.  What difference would that make if I asked ‘What do you need?’  ‘What does this sensation mean?’ instead of complaining that my hip, my hand still hurt me?  If I pose a question to the cells/organ and tell them that I want to work with them on an issue that is bothering me or a state of health that I want to attain, I am actually asking my astrocytes to go on a search for me. When I used to do energetic healing, I was present to conversations with organs and cells.  They would tell me what they needed and I would offer that to them.  How did such a conversation occur except that I was willing to be in connection with them?  I was always clear that every cell and organ in our bodies was aligned with our vital health and wanted us to survive.  It was clear that they were in for the long haul.

This brings me back to our disconnection to our bodies.  We have been enculturated to look to historic information in our brains for the answers or to look outside of ourselves for others’ solutions.  We don’t give our minds the quiet time they need to connect old experiences with new ones and give us a unique solution to our problem.  If we don’t listen to our sentient intelligence and don’t give our minds a chance to create new solutions that support us, no wonder we get stressed and get sick.  What is also clear is that most humans don’t recognize or honor the commitment that their bodies have for their vital living. It is also clear that most humans don’t even listen to the beginning of the conversation with their bodies which is their sentient intelligence.  They ignore it all and look outside of themselves for the fix, the pill, the latest diet or medical answer.

It’s all about connection.  We need to start with getting connected to our own bodies and give our minds the time they need to create new ways to be with our bodies, with others and with nature.  We have no other home.  Our bodies, our communities, the earth.  Let’s take a moment to learn, to listen, to open to comprehension and compassion and to respond differently so that each of us can indeed live the life that we came here to live.  That each of us gets to be the unique and essential Being that we came here to be.