Should you trust your gut?

Albert Einstein certainly did: “I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am” (1929).

Neuroscience supports Einstein’s conclusion. Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis suggests that emotions are crucial in decision-making. Damasio suggests that the brain learns to associate our experiences with specific emotional states, creating a “somatic marker.” These markers guide our future choices.

This demolishes two wildly held — but false — ideas. First, many people still believe that reason and emotion are incompatible. Wrong. Emotion and feeling are “indispensable” to the reasoning process (Damasio, 2003). Second, our culture is still suffering from the pernicious notion that the mind and body are separate. Descartes infamously promoted this nonsense; he may be the stupidest genius that ever lived!

Portrait of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia by Elizabeth Godfrey

When Descartes first claimed that the mind and body are distinct, the philosopher Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia challenged him. She highlighted the importance of the body in thinking. Sadly, she didn’t convince him, and we’ve been suffering from the consequences of Descartes’ influence ever since.

Somatic markers are sometimes outside our conscious awareness but can be sensed as gut feelings. When we pay more attention to our gut feelings, we can learn to listen to them and even dialogue with them. The philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin describes “a body-sense of meaning” that he calls a “felt sense” (1981). Felt senses give us access to embodied knowing that may be fresh because “your body knows much that you don’t know” (Gendlin, 1981). I use my felt sense all the time, especially in my therapy work, by applying Gendlin’s Focusing technique.

Gut feelings are most reliable when we have experience to draw on, and there’s a lot of subtle information to consider. Intuition can spot patterns, while analytical thinking tends to get confused by all the data. Lie detection is a good example. We’re pretty good at using our intuition to assess if someone is telling the truth, but if we’re asked to think it through and explain our reasoning, we tend to get it wrong.

Financial trading is a perfect example of a situation with masses of subtle information, and the experts have much experience. Unsurprisingly, traders often rely on gut feelings instead of market analysis. Research revealed that “the gut feeling of financial lore” brought market success (Kandasamy et al. 2016). One trader describes this gut feeling as “like having whiskers, like being a deer … something somewhere just gave you a slight shiver, but you’re not quite sure what, but it’s something to be careful about, something’s around” (Vohra and Fenton-O’Creevy, 2014).

Gut feelings are subtle, but as Gendlin showed, we can learn to be more attuned to our intuition. Recent research suggests that enhancing our emotional intelligence can improve our intuitive decision-making.

So, should you trust your gut? The answer is an empathetic ‘yes’ if there’s a lot of subtle information to consider and you have experience of similar situations. Improving your emotional intelligence and learning Focusing will help you listen to your gut instincts and get better at knowing when to trust them.

How does psychotherapy work?

How does psychotherapy work? There’s no simple answer because there are multiple interacting factors. However, something crops up again and again across myriad therapeutic approaches; the capacity to be with an experience rather than being engulfed in it.

I’ll use my Experiential Iceberg model to illustrate how this works. The Experiential Iceberg is a simple but powerful representation of the bodymind. It shows our everyday awareness at the tip of the iceberg, and directly below, our gut feelings. How aware of these feelings we are tends to vary for each of us and in different circumstances.

The Experiential Iceberg

Let’s zoom in on how awareness looks when you’re feeling anxious, depressed or distressed. The first thing to notice is that awareness is stuck at the tip of the iceberg, which is only a tiny part of the bodymind.

The tip of the Iceberg

Anxiety or depression can feel tight or contracted, and in the diagram, the space at the Iceberg’s tip is quite cramped. You’ll notice that gut feelings are leaking in, but the direction is only one way. All these feelings are coming into awareness, but there’s nowhere for them to go; they circle around in this contracted space.

If there’s someone you can talk to about these feelings, the space of awareness tends to expand. Instead of having these feelings – and the thoughts they inevitably prompt – circling your mind, there’s an outlet. Hearing yourself say something can be surprisingly transformative. Sometimes, you hear yourself say something you didn’t realise you knew! The space of awareness expands when you voice your unspoken thoughts and hear their truth. The expanded space provided by being able to express yourself is the start of being with your feelings and thoughts instead of being caught up in them.

This capacity to be with your experience is essential, and different approaches to therapy offer different tools to help develop that ability. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which draws on mindfulness, teaches a strategy called ‘cognitive defusion’. This technique teaches you how to get some distance from thoughts and emotions. Instead of your sense of self being fused with an unhelpful thought, cognitive defusion expands your awareness so that there’s more space. This lets you notice what you’re experiencing and changes how you relate to it.

Ann Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin, who teach Focusing, recommend a different way to open up some space. Let’s imagine someone said something that’s upset you. If I asked you how you felt about it, you might say: “I feel really frustrated by what she said”.

Let’s try an alternative:
Something in me feels really frustrated by what she said”.

Does that feel different? Instead of identifying with your emotions, which often means they overwhelm you, this helps you be with your feelings. You can learn to be present, in the moment and in relationship with your feelings. Remember; you are more than your feelings. You can be with your feelings and not get taken over by them.

To sum up, when we’re stressed or anxious, our experience is stuck at the tip of the Experiential Iceberg. Although we’re not paying attention to the ‘gut feelings’ hovering under the wavy line, they’re still having a significant impact on how we feel and act. When we’re in this state of mind, we’re likely to react rather than respond. The Iceberg tip is quite a tight space, and our awareness tends to get caught up with our experience. There isn’t room to find space between me and my experience. The iceberg tip is a place of contraction that breeds a sense of urgency, but when we open a little to what I call the ‘Deep Body’, we slow down and feel more spacious.

I’ve picked two techniques from quite different therapeutic approaches that can help you find more space in your bodymind. They are an excellent start, but your awareness can expand much more. The first step is to move a little way down the Experiential Iceberg and sense into those mysterious gut feelings. If you choose to drop your awareness further into the Deep Body, then wonders await; healing, spiritual growth and altered states.

The journey begins and ends with greater awareness: How far you decide to travel is up to you.

Interoception: The Sixth Sense

Back in the 1860s, a Russian psychologist called Ivan Sechenov noted the existence of an “obscure muscular sense” at the border of consciousness. He was probably the first to suggest that bodily sensations might be significant, but no one paid much attention. It wasn’t until 1907 that Charles Scott Sherrington named this internal sense ‘interoception’, finally giving a name to our ability to sense bodily signals like heartbeat, breath, thirst, hunger and muscle tension.

Although we’ve known about interoception for over 100 years, research into this powerful ‘sixth sense’ has taken off in the last few decades. Why the sudden interest? It’s become increasingly apparent that interoception is fundamental to emotional regulation and can play a crucial role in our wellbeing.

Interoception feeds a vast amount of information to the brain: While most of that input will remain outside conscious awareness, it all significantly impacts our emotional state and thinking. We all differ in how intensely we experience emotions, and the research suggests that this might be due to individual differences in interoception. People with greater interoceptive awareness tend to feel emotions more intensely, are more empathic and are better at emotional regulation. Conversely, research links a lack of interoceptive awareness with emotional disorders. In summary, listening through your body can enhance your emotional life and mental health.

So how can you learn to listen to your body? I asked Jennifer Tantia, a Somatic Psychotherapist and Dance Movement therapist. Many years ago, Jennifer “went on a quest” to find the answer to a vital question: “How am I going to teach people how to get into their bodies?” Jennifer explains that the body is “a gateway between consciousness and unconsciousness”, and she talks us through ways we can learn the path through that gateway. The key is to “really pay attention, start listening through [your] body”. You need to let go and be open to listening and receiving information “outside of what you think you know”. Meditation, dance, and Focusing can all help develop your interoceptive awareness; perhaps unsurprisingly, these three are embodied pathways of connection.

Mindful breathing and body scan meditation are especially valuable to developing your interoceptive awareness, and mindful movement can also help. Jennifer talks about a form of dance movement therapy called Authentic Movement: “It’s like putting your brain in the back seat and putting your body in the driver’s seat, and you really are in a different state where your body is moving”.

My conversion with Jennifer goes deep, and we identify presence as an underlying theme. You have to be fully present to listen through your body. Jennifer notes that it underpins meditation, nature connection and psychedelic experience. As our conversation ends, Jennifer emphasizes the importance of practice.

“You can’t just do it once and get it. It’s a practice; it’s tolerating your own frustration, it’s letting yourself be surprised until everything is a surprise. And that’s presence, right, and it’s worth the effort to practice”.

Learning to listen through your body takes time – and you need to keep practising – but the reward is no less than becoming fully human.

The Embodied Pathways of Connection: A Presentation

The Embodiment Conference was a huge online event that took place in late 2020. I was the Manager of the Ecology and Research Channel and I also gave a presentation about the Embodied Pathways of Connection. While there have been a few days of free access to the Conference recordings, most of the time they’re behind a paywall. Fortunately, I’m able to share my presentation here. Although you can read an introduction to the Embodied Pathways of Connection in a couple of my blog posts, this 50-minute presentation allows me time to go into more depth. I refer to some of the other presentations from The Embodiment Conference, but you don’t need to watch those to understand what I’m talking about here. However, the Conference organisers will be delighted to sell you lifetime access to all the recordings if you’re keen!

In this presentation, I’m proposing that there are numerous ways of altering consciousness that can enable us to access our embodied knowing and awaken from what Thich Nhat Hanh called “our illusion of separateness.” These are the Embodied Pathways of Connection (EPoC). I talk about several of them in this presentation: mindfulness, psychedelic experience, nature connection, dance, ritual and Focusing. These are the EPoC that I identified when I was doing my PhD research, but are others I haven’t explored yet – art and sex are probably the most obvious.

Since I gave this presentation I’ve been working on a book about the EPoC and my ideas have developed a lot and changed in some ways. I’ll say more about that in future blog posts, but for now, I hope you’ll enjoy this. There’s a short introduction to the Ecology and Research Channel and I open with a reference to a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh: “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness”.

Left brain – right brain: In therapy

In my previous post I outlined some of the key differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain and touched on what that might mean for psychotherapy. I’ll now delve a little deeper into that mystery.

While my previous post was based on well established neuroscience, some of what follows is more speculative. That said, it’s all grounded in current scientific understanding.

As I explained last time, part of the role of the right brain is to keep us alert to danger. The right hemisphere is specialized for wide-angle sensory awareness that’s good for scanning for threats: We might say that the right brain is naturally suspicious. Perhaps it’s no surprise that research has found a correlation between depression, anxiety and increased activity in the right hemisphere. A lot of that activity is in the frontal lobe, a region concerned with reward, attention, planning, and motivation. There’s also a high level of right hemisphere activation in PTSD and when childhood abused adults recall unpleasant memories. Another strand of research suggests that PTSD is linked to poor communication between the hemispheres (Cozolino, 2017).

How might therapy help balance and integrate the two hemispheres? When I work with clients, I’m constantly monitoring several channels of communication. The most obvious strand to watch for is the difference what is said and the way it’s said. The structure of language, the way sentences are strung together, is largely a left brain activity, but our tone of voice is more involved with right brain processes. Body language and facial expressions are also more under right brain control. If, or rather, when, there’s some inconsistency between the simple content of what’s said and the wider context, I’ll need to make a judgement call. Suppose a client says “I’m fine about that”, but their facial expression, body language or tone say ‘I’m really not OK”. I might decide to reflect that back to them: It’s as if I’m acting as a mediator between the right and left hemispheres.

Peter Afford suggests that Experiential Focusing – the foundation of my therapeutic approach – may work by promoting the integration of the left and right hemispheres (Afford, 2014). Focusing invites us to drop our awareness into our physical bodies and check for a ‘felt sense’, a feeling in the body that carries meaning. We then sit with any felt senses that arise and gradually begin to engage with them through language. A felt sense is often just a vague sensation at first and I’ll be curious about where it is in my body, its size and shape, and whether it has a colour or a particular emotional tone. I’m initiating a dialogue between an emotional, bodily sensation, which are right brain processes, and the more left brain activities of labelling and seeking details. The next stage is to deepen that dialogue, literally asking the felt sense what it’s about. The linguistic right hemisphere is engaging in dialogue with the more embodied left.

I’ve been watching the therapeutic process over the last few months and I think I’m seeing lots of occasions where I’m helping my client with some left/right brain integration. I’m not saying this explains how therapy works; there are many parallel processes going on all the time, many of which we may currently be oblivious to. However, I believe the work of balancing and integrating the left and right hemispheres is a key part of therapy and having a greater awareness of how that might happen can enhance therapeutic practice.

‘Sacred Ecology’ Revisited

Over a quarter of a century ago, I presented a paper called ‘Sacred Ecology’ at a Newcastle University conference (1994), and it’s still my most widely read article. Should I be dismayed that I haven’t come up with anything more popular or pleased that it’s remained relevant?

Sacred Ecology was published in 1996 (Harvey and Hardman) and has been republished several times since, both in books and on the Internet. When ‘Humanistic Paganism’ re-posted Sacred Ecology in 2015 I added a short introduction to put it into context. I commented that my emphasis on ritual missed something: “While ritual can be very powerful, there are many ways to access the wisdom of the body and some – like Focusing – are arguably more reliable”. Twenty-five years on, I’m increasingly curious about a whole range of embodied pathways to the wisdom of the body and what fundamental principles might underpin them. I’ve already discussed several of these pathways in this blog: Focusing, mindfulness and the wilderness effect, but there are many more.

St. Catherine’s Hill
St. Catherine’s Hill

Since writing Sacred Ecology I’ve gained a better understanding of ritual. Back in the ’90s, I was heavily involved with Paganism. While that gave me a profound personal experience of the power of ritual, it was in a very specific context. I’ve since explored ritual in other contexts, notably ecopsychology and dance therapy.

Ritual is fundamental to the practical ecopsychology of Bill Plotkin and Joanna Macy. While Plotkin has a more Pagan orientation, Macy’s ‘Work that Reconnects’ is grounded in Buddhism. Both are valuable and widely influential.

Psychotherapy can be a kind of ritual: I’ve argued elsewhere that ritual theory can help us understand the healing process in outdoor therapy (Harris, 2014) and that’s probably true of psychotherapy in general. Moreover, ritual is used explicitly in Family Therapy (Hecker & Schindler), dramatherapy and the dance therapy developed by Anna and Daria Halprin.

Does all this shed light on why Sacred Ecology is still relevant? I wrote Sacred Ecology to illustrate the importance of EcoPagan ritual, but if that’s all it was about I doubt that anyone would bother to read it today. Sacred Ecology hints at something more fundamental: A profound re-connection with the other-than-human revealed through the wisdom of the body.

The Intuitive Therapist

If you’ve ever watched a filmed therapy session or heard Susie Orbach’s In Therapy, it might seem like there’s not much going on. The client says something and then the therapist says something. What you can’t sense, unless you’ve been there, is the deeper process going on throughout the session. As a therapist I want to be 100% present in the moment and sensitive to every nuance of our complex interaction. I also want to be aware of everything the client has ever said to me, how they might be feeling and how I’m feeling. I need to consider if, based on half a dozen theories of therapy, there’s any pattern in all that. If there is a significant pattern, I need to decide when and how to say so.

When I was training to be a therapist I despaired of ever being able to process all that and stay present with the client. I was so busy thinking about what they’d just said that I kept missing something crucial! It seemed impossibly hard. And I was right; trying to consciously think through the complexity and depth of therapy is impossible.

Most of the vast bulk of Uluru lies below ground

I’d assumed that I had to think everything through consciously, but actually about 95% of our cognitive processing happens in the other than conscious mind (Thrift, 2000). I talk about this a lot in my PhD thesis on embodied knowing, but it took me a while to appreciate how this happens in therapy. In therapy – and in everyday life – my “body senses the whole situation” (Gendlin, 1992). The wisdom of the body draws on sensory perceptions, emotions, memories, past experience and much more to decide what to do next. It’s a massive understatement to say that “your body knows much that you don’t know” (Gendlin, 1981).

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this “power of thinking without thinking” in Blink (2005). The book is full of wonderful stories about people who know intuitively what’s going on in very complex situations. There’s the art expert who can unerringly sense a fake but can’t tell you how, and a fire chief who’s gut feeling saved his entire crew from disaster. In each case the ability to correctly intuit what to do emerges from a powerful embodied knowing that’s been developed through training and experience.

In a typical therapy session I’m not constantly pondering what the client had just said: My focus is on staying present. Meanwhile my embodied mind – which has a huge range of input and a vast capacity to process that input – does the work. Drawing on this embodied wisdom is the essence of Focusing Orientated Therapy.

The psychotherapy of place

How we are in the world emerges from the matrix of mindbody and place. Although it seems very obvious that where I live or grew up will influence how I feel or even who I am, that reality is largely neglected by psychotherapy. The traditional Freudian model focuses on individuals caught in Oedipal family relationships and place is all but ignored. Psychotherapy in general seems to have forgotten embodiment, although there are notable exceptions like Focusing, body therapy and some Existential approaches. But even in the more embodied psychotherapies, place is rarely discussed. The term embodiment implies place – we are all embodied somewhere – but it often seems that those working with embodiment treat place as a mere background, an adjunct to the important business of having a body.

Merleau-Ponty suggests that we have “a knowledge of place which is reducible to a sort of co-existence with that place” (2002 [1962]). It’s not that I am sitting in my room – I am in a co-existence with that space. Gendlin is even more radical: the body “is an ongoing interaction with its environment” (Gendlin, 1992). To be clear, there isn’t a typo there: Gendlin isn’t saying that the body is in an interaction, but that the body actually is that interaction.

Ecopsychology engages with the wider world, and ecotherapists might well ask about a client’s relationship to nature. But how often do therapists consider the places that we live in more generally? We typically ask about siblings, parents, intimate partners and the like, but when do we wonder about the everyday landscape of our client’s lives? “How do you feel about your home? What’s your local area like? Do you drive to work, walk or take the bus? Where did you play as a child?” If ecotherapy is about the environment rather than just the ‘natural’ world, (whatever that means), these questions are vital.

Clients sometimes talk about the fields they played in as children, how they feel when they wake up in the familiar space of home or what the corridor outside their flat means for them. I’m increasingly curious about these things, perhaps because I’m aware of the importance of this dimension of our existence. Where do we go with this? Ecopsychology has opened new pathways and my Focusing practice is sensing into this edge. There are also clues in the work of Gaston Bachelard, who proposes a new strand of psychoanalysis he calls topoanalysis. Topoanalysis “would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives” (Bachelard, 1969 (1958]). I haven’t had time to study Bachelard yet, but watch this space.

Focusing in Nature

Put simply, Focusing is a means of opening our awareness to the “bodily sensed knowledge” which Eugene Gendlin calls the “felt sense” (Gendlin, 1981). The term ‘felt sense’ describes those fuzzy feelings that we don’t usually pay much attention to – those vague ‘gut feelings’. As you become more aware of a felt sense it will often open like a bud, revealing an otherwise hidden embodied knowing. I discovered Focusing when I was doing my PhD research and it’s become central to my spiritual practice and personal wellbeing. It subsequently become the foundation for my psychotherapy when I trained as a Focusing Oriented Therapist.

Focusing is usually done indoors, but it occurred to me that it would be interesting to see what happened if I tried it in nature. It’s an obvious step and  it came as no surprise that other people were already doing it. What did surprise me was how powerful it could be. My first experiments were a revelation:  Focusing in nature quickly softened the perceived barrier between ‘me’ and ‘the world’, enabling a much more intimate relationship to place.

A boat sits on a still Loch at dawn

This was amazing! In minutes I could get a deep sense of connection to the natural world. Was it just me? I read about other peoples experiences and did some interviews. Although different people had different experiences, that sense of profound connection came up again and again.

As Deep Ecology has noted, that connection is fundamental to changing our environmental behavior. Herbert Schroeder, an environmental psychologist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service found that Focusing in nature “was a first step toward articulating the ineffable, experiential value that natural environments have for me” (Schroeder, 2012: 141).

There’s much more to be said and done. If you’d like to know more, see my article, Gendlin and ecopsychology: focusing in nature in the Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies journal.

The Embodied Pathways of Connection in Therapy

My previous post introduced the EPOC, embodied practices that can reveal our radical interconnectedness. I initially came across the EPOC during my PhD research into spiritual eco-activism: The EPOC both inspired and supported the campaigners I worked with (Harris, 2008). Years later I noticed something curious; the EPOC I’d identified amongst road protesters seemed to underpin much of psychotherapy!

That may initially sound implausible, but the deeper I’ve looked into this apparent link, the more sense it makes. My research with activists identified seven EPOC; nature connection, meditation, Focusing, ritual, dance, trance and psychedelics. These seven all map to psychotherapeutic practices:

  • nature connection is the foundation of ecotherapy;
  • mindfulness meditation is at the heart of third wave CBT;
  • Focusing is a therapeutic practice;
  • psychedelic psychotherapy may be the next big mental health breakthrough;
  • dance therapy has been around since the mid-60s’;
  • ritual is widespread in psychotherapy, while
  • trance is an altered state of consciousness which is common in psychotherapy.

This is a big subject, but there are two points I can make about how the EPOC function in psychotherapy. First, the EPOC facilitate access to embodied knowing and that process is fundamental to how psychotherapy heals. Second, they can dramatically widen our perspective: If you’re focusing too much on your own mental processes, mental distress is often the result.

John Kabat-Zinn launched the therapeutic mindfulness revolution that’s transformed the lives of millions. He believes that connection is fundamental: “the quality of the connections within us and between us and with the wider world determines our capacity for self-regulation and healing” (Kabat-Zinn, 2013).

Many Focusing Oriented Therapists speak of that connection too: “Focusing allows our consciousness to settle into that area in ourselves where there is physical in-binding with the rest of the cosmos” (Campbell and McMahon, 1997).

Research into how psychedelic psychotherapy works has come to the same conclusion: “a sense of connectedness is key” (Carhart-Harris, et al, 2017). The theme of connection also runs through dance therapy: Connecting the mind and body, the conscious with the unconscious, the self with the other (Halprin, 2002).

This leaves ritual and trance, which are both complex and multifaceted. I’d argue that ritual is fundamental to many psychotherapeutic approaches and my experience of psychoanalysis felt deeply ritualistic. But for the moment, I’ll be more specific and reference Family Constellation Therapy (FCT) which explicitly draws on African healing ritual. FCT is based on the notion of the ‘knowing field’ a web that “propagates information and affect through the family and ancestral network” (Adams, 2014). That sounds strange to Western ears, but accords very well with Eugene Gendlin’s claim that “Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people. In fact, the whole universe” (1981).

Trance is much more common than many of us suppose: When you’re watching a film or reading a novel, you’re most likely in trance. Hypnotherapy is of course the most obvious use of trance in psychotherapy but it’s arguably more fundamental. Furthermore, nature connection, meditation, Focusing and psychedelics can all induce an altered state of consciousness which we might call trance. On that basis, trance can certainly facilitate a sense of deep connection. There’s also a powerful association between psychotherapy and shamanism which gives trance a central role (Thalhamer, 2015). Boundaries get very blurred at this point because Shamanism is intimately engaged with nature connection and can include aspects of meditation, Focusing, dance, ritual and psychedelics.

We’re now close to the place to which these embodied pathways of connection all lead. For Glen Mazis this place is about ‘earthbodying’; Philip Shepherd names it “radical wholeness” (2017); David Abram might speak of participatory perception (2010), while Susan Greenwood writes of “a heightened awareness of an expanded connected wholeness” (Greenwood, 2005). For me this place is characterized by a particular kind of embodied knowing, the “wisdom of the body; that all things are ultimately one” (Harris, 1996).