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76: Your Second Brain: Understanding the Gut-Brain Connection (Part 1) · The Everyday Awesome Project

• 0:26
  Polly Mertens: hey, superstars, welcome back polly here and sam pruitt and we could barely get going today.
• 0:32
  Polly Mertens: Why is that, polly?
• 0:33
  Polly Mertens: we're so excited.
• 0:35
  Samantha Pruitt: It's one of our favorite topics.
• 0:36
  Samantha Pruitt: It's almost.
• 0:37
  Samantha Pruitt: We're not quite talking about poop, we're talking about the gut, but it is one of our favorite things to talk about.
• 0:43
  Polly Mertens: Totally Listening to your gut, listening to your gut, tuning in, tuning into your gut right, and, as we were preparing for this episode, it turns out it's going to be two, because we have a few too many things to say on this topic.
• 0:56
  Samantha Pruitt: So we do we do now?
• 0:58
  Polly Mertens: because a lot of we have a lot of personal experience with the gut and also just we are so passionate about how important this is fascinated literally yeah exactly it's critical, critical totally, and it just, you know, once you go down this little rabbit hole, it it's such a key, key area that, I think, is I think people are becoming more aware of it, right?
• 1:24
  Polly Mertens: So, you know, we love bringing topics that like, hey, if you're not aware of this, you know, here let's shine some light on something.
• 1:29
  Polly Mertens: Let's shine a light on this huge, important area of your body, right, and starting this off in terms of listening to your gut.
• 1:37
  Polly Mertens: We're starting this two part series in, like the energetic space, the emotional space, the listening to your gut, right, like, what is that?
• 1:47
  Polly Mertens: You know?
• 1:47
  Polly Mertens: And you had some phrases, some cute, cute phrases that we've heard over our lifetime, you know, like, listen to your gut, or trust your gut, or what, like what else?
• 1:54
  Polly Mertens: What have you heard?
• 1:55
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, people do use these terms and they've used them forever.
• 1:58
  Samantha Pruitt: But have people really thought about it that whole?
• 2:00
  Samantha Pruitt: Hey, you know, listen to your gut gut instincts thought about it that whole?
• 2:05
  Samantha Pruitt: Hey, you know, listen to your gut gut instincts.
• 2:06
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, getting punched in the gut, getting gutted there's all these terms that we throw around in space and we use the term gut frequently and we're talking about emotional and psychological and mental reactions or experiences and we're connecting them to the gut.
• 2:23
  Samantha Pruitt: And you know how many times have people really thought about the actual physical connection between their brain, their emotions, their thoughts and their gut?
• 2:36
  Samantha Pruitt: I do think a lot of people think they're two separate entities and they're not.
• 2:41
  Polly Mertens: Oh, and this is emerging science too.
• 2:42
  Polly Mertens: I mean, it's not like you know.
• 2:44
  Polly Mertens: People knew about this 100 years ago or even 50 years ago, or maybe they did, but I just don't think it was as mainstream, and that's why we love digging into this, to bring this more to the mainstream.
• 2:52
  Polly Mertens: More people should hear about this, know about that.
• 2:55
  Polly Mertens: I mean, you and I even read some things.
• 2:56
  Polly Mertens: We're like oh, didn't know that.
• 2:58
  Samantha Pruitt: Right on, what's that Right?
• 2:59
  Samantha Pruitt: But when we say gut instincts, we're really talking about that inner knowing, right?
• 3:05
  Samantha Pruitt: That intuitive nature that the human said human called you me, what we really know to be true because we have a reaction, response or energetic response to what might be happening around us, in our environment, et cetera.
• 3:30
  Samantha Pruitt: Intuition obviously is a big part of that, but when we're talking about it today, what we're really saying is like, are you listening to those signs and signals and the fact that those first, are you listening to them?
• 3:47
  Samantha Pruitt: But do you also understand let's back it up a minute that that's real, those signals, that messenger is you, it's a real thing.
• 3:59
  Samantha Pruitt: It's not something you're making up in your brain and that you should ignore, or it's not something that you should override.
• 4:05
  Samantha Pruitt: Or in many instances in society we say to people like, hey, just suck it up, just, you know, ignore that and keep moving forward, charge forward, push harder, blah, blah, blah.
• 4:16
  Samantha Pruitt: All the things like we're almost counter in society and culture to those inner knowings, those messages.
• 4:24
  Samantha Pruitt: We're almost countering that with our children and with ourselves and with society.
• 4:28
  Samantha Pruitt: I don't think almost.
• 4:30
  Polly Mertens: I mean, I think people are.
• 4:32
  Polly Mertens: You know, we are so in our heads, we're so guided that logic is the way to figure things out.
• 4:37
  Polly Mertens: Just think it through, or you know.
• 4:38
  Polly Mertens: Think about analysis.
• 4:39
  Polly Mertens: You know we're not taught somatic breath work in high school.
• 4:41
  Polly Mertens: What are we taught?
• 4:41
  Polly Mertens: You know like quantitative.
• 4:42
  Polly Mertens: You know we're not taught somatic breathwork in high school.
• 4:43
  Polly Mertens: What are we taught?
• 4:44
  Polly Mertens: You know like quantitative?
• 4:46
  Polly Mertens: You know methods and statistics or whatever right Like yeah, we're taught to live in our head.
• 4:51
  Polly Mertens: We're taught in our body and think that that's how we should right, yeah, yeah and well, and I want to say you said are you listening?
• 5:00
  Polly Mertens: And I think part of what we'll get to in the second part of this is like how the signals even get disrupted and dysregulated.
• 5:08
  Polly Mertens: So it might be that you're not even getting the signals you know, let alone are you tuning it, are you tuning them out?
• 5:15
  Polly Mertens: Are you trusting your brain over your body, over your gut?
• 5:17
  Polly Mertens: But also the signals might not be getting to the brain because of the dysregulation that we will talk about, about what you know creates dysbiosis, creates a breakdown, creates lack of communication between the gut and the brain, if you will.
• 5:34
  Samantha Pruitt: And on that inner knowing, listening, gut instinct side of the conversation it's been coming up a lot for me with people I'm working with and examples are I was sharing with you.
• 5:47
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean this is all you know, confidence, who it is, but like a younger person who was going through and coming out of an abusive relationship that had lasted four years, and in unpacking the emotional trauma of this experience and helping this person move forward, you know there were so many signs and signals, according to them and their honesty right, that they basically just ignored.
• 6:12
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 6:14
  Samantha Pruitt: And that happens all the time in toxic relationships, toxic work environments, toxic spaces.
• 6:19
  Samantha Pruitt: You know where people they know it's there.
• 6:22
  Samantha Pruitt: If it could be really overt.
• 6:24
  Samantha Pruitt: You know where people they know it's there.
• 6:25
  Samantha Pruitt: If it could be really overt it could be an underlying current even you know that people just ignore.
• 6:30
  Samantha Pruitt: And yet their body and their emotional body, their mind body, is saying, hey, this doesn't feel safe, this doesn't feel right, something is wrong here.
• 6:39
  Samantha Pruitt: And then another example is you know the health side of that too and those repercussions.
• 6:44
  Samantha Pruitt: But let's talk about the emotional side first.
• 6:46
  Polly Mertens: Yeah Well, I think what I also want to cue in on on what you're talking about One is I think you said it in when you just shared that is about trusting yourself, like trusting the signals, right, and, and so I think, um, as you've mentioned the word safe, right.
• 7:01
  Polly Mertens: So, depending on the upbringing of the people you know, like how you were brought up, how safe you were in that environment, what safety looked like, what measures of you know the and also trust you know the people in power, let's say your parents or your caretakers or something like that.
• 7:27
  Polly Mertens: Like you just tuned out to that.
• 7:29
  Polly Mertens: It's like, oh well, that doesn't matter, like it's what they want, right, whether we're doing it, people pleasing, because it gives us love or it keeps us from, you know being not belonging with people, right, like we start to adapt and you know contort and do all these things Maladapt.
• 7:48
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, maladapt, right, and it's because we're love-seeking beings.
• 7:52
  Polly Mertens: We need community, we need connection, we need that, you know, like not be ostracized from the tribe, if you will, or out into the desert, you know, because that's death, right.
• 8:02
  Polly Mertens: So we do a lot of contorting, right.
• 8:05
  Polly Mertens: And so, depending on the environment that we're brought up in, it can teach us new patterns and new ways of surviving that, upbringing that household, that condition, that environment, the school environment, whatever.
• 8:18
  Polly Mertens: You know, things get dysregulated in family matters or whatever, just to survive.
• 8:23
  Polly Mertens: We create these strong suits, these survival skills, and we take them into our life and it's like that environment's gone, we've left that environment, but we're operating as if, oh, I can't do this, I can't be that, because I won't get love and safe.
• 8:36
  Polly Mertens: And yet you are getting signals from someone like piece of shit, treating you poorly or not healthy relationship or something.
• 8:45
  Polly Mertens: But to you it's like, oh, I need that love and belonging Right.
• 8:48
  Samantha Pruitt: Exactly, and it's can sometimes be those really old, ingrained, like you're saying identities around self-worth.
• 8:58
  Samantha Pruitt: You know, if you grow up in a household you're born into and grow up in a household that the message is you don't have value or you perceive from the messaging and the environment I have little value, then you're going to continue to carry that forward into every aspect of your life, of course by the time you go into school, and then relationship and and career and whatever, you're going to carry that with you.
• 9:27
  Samantha Pruitt: And then, of course now we know, even in utero and ancestral, you know, traumas and messages are carried forward as well.
• 9:34
  Samantha Pruitt: Mind blowing, I'm carrying around my parents.
• 9:37
  Samantha Pruitt: Shit Damn, that backpack is heavy, girl, I gotta put that backpack is heavy, girl, I got to put that backpack down.
• 9:45
  Samantha Pruitt: It's like no layers.
• 9:46
  Samantha Pruitt: Oh God, it's bricks.
• 9:48
  Samantha Pruitt: You're literally carrying other people's bricks and your own bricks on your back Trying to go up the mountain.
• 9:54
  Polly Mertens: Totally, totally, yeah.
• 9:56
  Polly Mertens: So it's no wonder that you know this thing called our gut and listening to it's like oh, that's for other people.
• 10:00
  Polly Mertens: And then you know I've heard a lot that people or I've heard it, I'm not sure people believe it, but that women are more intuitive than men.
• 10:14
  Samantha Pruitt: And I'm like.
• 10:14
  Samantha Pruitt: But I think we all have guts, you know so that would just be programming Right Again you know, males in society, socially conditioned to again suck it up, be tough, Don't show this.
• 10:21
  Samantha Pruitt: You know, don't have that blah, blah, blah, whatever.
• 10:24
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, and just being conditioned in that way, which is also ludicrous.
• 10:28
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, they're a human being, we're all human beings are relevant of their sexual orientation.
• 10:32
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, I'll have the same basic foundational, you know, equipment, if you will, to operate Totally totally.
• 10:42
  Polly Mertens: You know something I want to insert before we go too far, because I think people talk about the gut and they don't know what we're talking about.
• 10:48
  Samantha Pruitt: Also, I was like what is the?
• 10:49
  Polly Mertens: gut.
• 10:50
  Polly Mertens: My gut was telling me to talk about what the gut is.
• 10:52
  Polly Mertens: I guess, like, hey, I don't think everybody knows what that is.
• 10:57
  Polly Mertens: So most people would say the gut is the line, the intestinal system, right, small and large intestines and some research or some things we looked into.
• 11:07
  Polly Mertens: Talk about it from the esophagus, you know, all the way to your anus, right?
• 11:11
  Polly Mertens: So you could consider all of that your digestive system, if you will 30 feet long, 30 feet 30 feet long.
• 11:22
  Samantha Pruitt: There is 30 feet of gut quote unquote inside your physical body.
• 11:28
  Samantha Pruitt: You and I are not very big people.
• 11:30
  Samantha Pruitt: Where the hell is it?
• 11:31
  Polly Mertens: I know it's all up in there and one of my most favorite little fun facts is the lining, like the thickness of it is the thickness of a piece of your hair.
• 11:43
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, and that's a whole problem.
• 11:45
  Polly Mertens: Like for me that's become a problem, yeah exactly, and, and so I forget what the percentage is.
• 11:54
  Polly Mertens: But okay, so you have, uh, immune.
• 11:56
  Polly Mertens: Your immune system largely lives full time in two places in your body the center of your nose, where you take in.
• 12:02
  Polly Mertens: You know things through your nose.
• 12:03
  Polly Mertens: And the center of your nose where you take in, you know things through your nose.
• 12:06
  Polly Mertens: And the lining of the gut, just on the outside of the lining, not on the inside, on the outside right, so on the other side of the hair, from all the food flowing through your digestive system, your, your, your, your immune system is lining that just protecting your, the rest of your body.
• 12:19
  Polly Mertens: That's like your warriors up defending against anything that should break that little tiny, tiny barrier and want to penetrate into your body.
• 12:27
  Polly Mertens: Right, they live inside of your nose, protecting anything coming in there, because that's where things can penetrate your body besides your skin, right.
• 12:33
  Polly Mertens: So you know, if you cut the lining, if you cut your skin, boom, we know that, like, all those little white cells go to it and they heal it and they repair it and stuff like that.
• 12:50
  Polly Mertens: Well, that's what's constantly on the lining of the outside if you will on protecting between your gut and your organs and your internal system, Right and so when that gets and that just, and that's like bonds, you know it's like little.
• 12:56
  Samantha Pruitt: I don't know, yeah, I don't know exactly the structure.
• 12:59
  Polly Mertens: It's not a web, but it's.
• 13:00
  Polly Mertens: You know junctions and when.
• 13:02
  Polly Mertens: We'll introduce this word now, leaky gut.
• 13:05
  Polly Mertens: If you haven't heard that before, leaky gut is when they say the bonds or those hairs that that thin lining of your gut has a hole in it.
• 13:15
  Polly Mertens: Right, there's a leak in it somewhere, however big, however long it's been going on or whatnot.
• 13:19
  Polly Mertens: And from what?
• 13:20
  Polly Mertens: Everything I've studied, that is the beginning of disease.
• 13:24
  Polly Mertens: Like that is one of the biggest roots of all disease.
• 13:28
  Polly Mertens: Like I'm pretty convinced that most things, especially anything rooted in inflammation, comes from that.
• 13:35
  Polly Mertens: So autoimmune disease, neurologic disorders, parkinson's things like that, you know, parkinson's things like that it's, I think.
• 13:41
  Samantha Pruitt: Because your immune system, like you just said, on the outside, the warriors, if you will right, protecting the rest of the body from what is going on in there and listening and, you know, reacting, et cetera, the immune system as a whole is constantly at war.
• 14:00
  Samantha Pruitt: So, instead of them just doing their job in peace and homeostasis and, you know, a calm, cool, collected, functional environment, it's bloody warfare in there.
• 14:10
  Samantha Pruitt: They're defending your life.
• 14:12
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, only in instances of disease, yeah, yeah.
• 14:15
  Samantha Pruitt: So inflammation.
• 14:16
  Polly Mertens: Well, you know, and one of the things I was reading and studying for this is about how you know, people talk about like fatigue, right, like fatigue and some of the symptoms of leaky gut and they're attributed to a lot of other things or whatnot.
• 14:30
  Polly Mertens: And the fatigue, if you think about when you have a cold, right, or you get sick and the immune system goes into action because we know there's a virus or whatever, right?
• 14:41
  Polly Mertens: Well, when you have a leaky gut that you can't see it, right, if I cut my skin, I can see, okay, it's a virus or whatever, right.
• 14:44
  Polly Mertens: Well, when you have a leaky gut that you can't see it, right, if I cut my skin, I can see, okay, it's going to take a few days to heal, like, and it's not very big.
• 14:51
  Polly Mertens: If I take a big gouge, right, like, I'm in the hospital, I'm laid up, I'm treating this thing, I'm taking care of this thing, I'm not moving my arm, whatever it is, whatever part of the body got in attacked, if you will.
• 15:04
  Polly Mertens: But your gut can be, depending on how you're taking care of it, under attack, and so your immune system is in mass, you know, survival mode, so it's drawing energy away from other functions of the body to keep you alive right exactly which is exhausting.
• 15:25
  Polly Mertens: We walk around like, ah, brain fog and you know all this stuff.
• 15:28
  Polly Mertens: It's like, yeah, oh yeah, first thing I always just look at is everybody's got lots of symptoms.
• 15:33
  Polly Mertens: It's like start with the gut, start with healing the gut.
• 15:35
  Polly Mertens: So and you're doing this right now tell us about your journey.
• 15:39
  Polly Mertens: So what?
• 15:39
  Polly Mertens: What are you tell us?
• 15:40
  Polly Mertens: Like maybe, yeah.
• 15:41
  Samantha Pruitt: And we don't want to get too deep yet Yet.
• 15:45
  Polly Mertens: Oh, cause we're going to talk about healing elements.
• 15:47
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, you're right.
• 15:49
  Samantha Pruitt: Right.
• 15:49
  Samantha Pruitt: But my, my quick story is I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.
• 15:53
  Samantha Pruitt: So autoimmune is when your own body says, hey, mofo, and it starts literally attacking itself.
• 15:59
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, if you have an autoimmune disease and, by the way, there's a couple hundred of them, so it's very difficult to get diagnosed and blah, blah, blah, all that crazy stuff your body is at war with itself in some way, shape or fashion, the immune system is in complete overdrive.
• 16:16
  Samantha Pruitt: So mine was connected to my gut and to reactions to food and in particular it's celiacs.
• 16:23
  Samantha Pruitt: But once you have one autoimmune, you tend to get more because your immune system is in overdrive and it starts throwing swords and daggers and shooting at all kinds of things.
• 16:34
  Samantha Pruitt: So it just can very quickly get away from itself.
• 16:37
  Samantha Pruitt: Basically that's when it's 30.
• 16:40
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm going to be 56 this year, so that's a while ago.
• 16:43
  Samantha Pruitt: But it did literally break my body and my brain.
• 16:45
  Samantha Pruitt: So this is no joke, this kind of stuff.
• 16:47
  Samantha Pruitt: We laugh about it now, 25, 26 years later.
• 16:50
  Samantha Pruitt: But you know, I was literally barely getting out of bed and 50 pounds overweight, but completely malnourished.
• 16:56
  Samantha Pruitt: It was a disaster, but after all, this time I've managed it pretty well and been able to perform it at a high level, but I still get symptoms at times, and so in the last year or so, I've developed some additional symptoms, and so I've been on the investigative reporting.
• 17:14
  Samantha Pruitt: What the hell is going on now?
• 17:15
  Samantha Pruitt: Skin rashes, blah, blah, blah.
• 17:17
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, you're personal, so we'll talk about that in episode two, you're right.
• 17:20
  Samantha Pruitt: Exactly so recently I discovered I have SIBO, which is a bacterial gut infection, and I might have some other stuff going on.
• 17:27
  Samantha Pruitt: So we're in process of, through functional medicine, through Parsley Health and through some other resources, figuring out what is really going on and then how can I heal that naturally, which is my preferred method of taking care of this physical body.
• 17:41
  Samantha Pruitt: But all of that to be said, like it is just incredible to me how I'm just very in tune now, after all of this time, if something isn't functioning in my gut.
• 17:58
  Samantha Pruitt: And there's a lot of different ways to discover this.
• 18:00
  Samantha Pruitt: But just first of all, can we all just have some awareness?
• 18:04
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, the basics of going poop, you know, bloating gas, like just some very basic bodily functions that we all sort of take for granted.
• 18:17
  Samantha Pruitt: Pay attention to the basics, you know, and through that path you will see that other things start to be correlated.
• 18:25
  Samantha Pruitt: And then you'll if I eat this, I get a skin rash.
• 18:28
  Samantha Pruitt: If I eat this, I get gas.
• 18:30
  Samantha Pruitt: If I eat this, I get bloating.
• 18:31
  Samantha Pruitt: Hey, you know things have gone awry or whatever.
• 18:34
  Samantha Pruitt: It just fascinates me.
• 18:36
  Samantha Pruitt: Anyway, long story short for me, and we'll get into the details of all that is.
• 18:41
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm constantly thinking about my gut, maybe sometimes a little bit too much, because it's caused me so much distress in the past, and I now do have to balance that, being a little bit emotionally or mentally over fixated on what I put in my mouth and how I manage my gut.
• 19:04
  Samantha Pruitt: So there is a slippery slope there too.
• 19:08
  Samantha Pruitt: And you were an addict with food, and so you and I also understand and I want to just put this out to the audience that we get it's complicated, right, like there's a lot attached to food and there's a lot attached to eating and eating behaviors, and there's a lot attached to your physical body's weight, shape, appearance around this topic.
• 19:34
  Samantha Pruitt: Right, because it's not just so plain and simple just eat this and just do this Like I totally get it's way more complicated than that, you know, and I just want to say that out loud for our audience, that for some of these people, what we're talking about could be really triggering, because it really has to do with your gut and what you're putting in your mouth, but it's also what you're putting on your skin, what you're putting in your air and the things that you're exposing yourself to, and we'll get into that with a second but, but anyway, I just wanted to puke all that out because really I had to just get it off my chest and it's messy.
• 20:09
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, it's fucking hard.
• 20:11
  Polly Mertens: It's messy and our goal is to simplify and help, you know, people get on the starter path.
• 20:17
  Polly Mertens: You know this.
• 20:18
  Polly Mertens: You know and some of you listening maybe you're already advanced.
• 20:21
  Polly Mertens: You know you're you're taking your sauerkraut every day and you know you're into the rainbow of food, of fibers, number one, and you're like whatever you know.
• 20:30
  Polly Mertens: So we'll we'll try and address as much of that in the second episode and make it as bite-sized as possible for those that are just, you know, entering into this conversation.
• 20:39
  Polly Mertens: But, um, what I would love to get back to when we start off with, you know, listening to your gut is something I didn't know about and I'm going to read it because I was like, I'm kind of I wasn't connected to this.
• 20:49
  Polly Mertens: So why?
• 20:51
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, like polly, like what is the connection?
• 20:53
  Polly Mertens: So, if you haven't heard already, just spoiler alert you have a second brain.
• 20:58
  Polly Mertens: Actually you have three, and we're going to talk about two today.
• 21:01
  Polly Mertens: So you have a gut brain, you have a gut brain, your heart has a brain too, and you have the third brain, your brain, and actually they form.
• 21:07
  Polly Mertens: I've heard that the brain in your head forms after the one in your gut.
• 21:12
  Polly Mertens: So, your gut, there might be something there, so, so let's talk about how they're talking to each other, right?
• 21:19
  Polly Mertens: You know, like that intuitive highway, right, that that communication that's going back and forth.
• 21:25
  Samantha Pruitt: So well, now, just to be clear, though we're we're talking beyond intuition, we're talking about real science, people, okay, so how the body works.
• 21:33
  Samantha Pruitt: Oh yeah, sorry If I'm not we never learned this in school, like it's just mind blowing.
• 21:38
  Samantha Pruitt: This is cool shit, this is so cool.
• 21:39
  Polly Mertens: Well, it's not only that, it's you know this wasn't known to like the thing that people I don't, I forgive me, I don't know when people started studying and I got maybe it was known by a few many, you know when you and I were up and coming, but largely the gut, the deep dive into microbiome and stuff like that.
• 21:59
  Polly Mertens: I would say maybe 10 years, 15 years at most.
• 22:02
  Samantha Pruitt: About 10 years is where it's really.
• 22:04
  Samantha Pruitt: People have invested time and money and now we're seeing the results of these studies.
• 22:08
  Samantha Pruitt: We're seeing the science be published.
• 22:10
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, and it's only going to grow more.
• 22:11
  Polly Mertens: So, which is fantastic, right.
• 22:13
  Polly Mertens: It's like, oh, this whole world down there that we hadn't heard about, right, and I'm sure, ancient chinese medicine and ayurveda.
• 22:18
  Polly Mertens: They're like, oh, y'all are so far back, like westerners, please, right?
• 22:23
  Polly Mertens: Which is probably, I mean like ayurveda, you know?
• 22:25
  Polly Mertens: Like, oh, yeah, of course it is, but let's just say, us westerners are waking up to it.
• 22:29
  Polly Mertens: So, so I want to read you about the enteric nervous system, the ens.
• 22:35
  Polly Mertens: It communicates with the brain, and this is Dr Michael Gershon's second brain, his book on that.
• 22:43
  Polly Mertens: So when we talk about a gut feeling, it's not just poetic metaphor.
• 22:47
  Polly Mertens: There's profound science behind it.
• 22:49
  Polly Mertens: Dr Michael Gershon, offered often called the father of neurogastroenterology, actually coined the term the second brain.
• 22:56
  Polly Mertens: This isn't just about digestion.
• 22:58
  Polly Mertens: It's a complex, intricate network of neurons lining our entire digestive tract, from the esophagus to the anus.
• 23:05
  Polly Mertens: That's the ENS.
• 23:06
  Polly Mertens: The ENS operates independently of the brain in your head.
• 23:10
  Polly Mertens: It's like this own little computer, right, they're in 30 feet of computer?
• 23:16
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, well, and they're in.
• 23:18
  Polly Mertens: So this you know, these neurons are talking to your brain, right?
• 23:22
  Polly Mertens: So it's a bidirectional communication.
• 23:24
  Polly Mertens: Gut is talking to the brain, brain is talking to the gut.
• 23:27
  Samantha Pruitt: Hey, what's up?
• 23:28
  Polly Mertens: Yo, what's going on down there?
• 23:29
  Polly Mertens: Right, so it's two powerful interconnected computers and your gut is constantly sending information to your brain about nutrient availability, inflammation, specific types of bacteria living down there, and your brain sends signals down to your gut and influences digestion and motility, which is like the movement of things.
• 23:48
  Polly Mertens: So these sensations originating in your gut can profoundly influence your mood, right?
• 23:54
  Polly Mertens: I mean right, your thoughts and your intuition.
• 23:58
  Polly Mertens: That bad feeling in your stomach, or butterflies, it's literally messages being sent to your second brain, right, so there's this communication channel and I think it's tied to this Vegas nerve, right?
• 24:10
  Polly Mertens: So that's like the information super highway.
• 24:12
  Polly Mertens: And if you don't, I can't remember exactly where the Vegas nerve is, but it I remember someone telling me like it goes down the middle of your chest.
• 24:18
  Polly Mertens: I forget if it's on the left, left side of your collarbone or, sorry, your your chest bone or the right, but it like goes down and you can like touch on there and it's actually a very so I think of the vagus nerve, um, as the pivot point between parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, right?
• 24:37
  Polly Mertens: So, you're parasympathetic is the rest and digest right.
• 24:43
  Polly Mertens: It's the.
• 24:43
  Polly Mertens: We're not, you know, like we're.
• 24:45
  Polly Mertens: We're chilling out where everything's good peace, I'm fine, things are good.
• 24:50
  Polly Mertens: The sympathetic is like fight or flight freeze, like oh I gotta, I gotta get an action, something's going on Right, and we get into the parasympathetic.
• 24:57
  Polly Mertens: I'm sorry, we get into the sympathetic nervous system when our body's stimulated or responding, or we get that email or like cut off in traffic or text something.
• 25:09
  Polly Mertens: Right, you want to live most of the time in the parasympathetic nervous system, right, and that vagus nerve is access to that.
• 25:12
  Polly Mertens: So a couple of the I don't know, I feel like dropping this right now.
• 25:15
  Polly Mertens: So a couple techniques is one is touching the vagus nerve, and, forgive me, I can't remember if you're watching this on video or listening.
• 25:21
  Polly Mertens: It's to the left or the right of your chest bone, but just tuning into it can just like calm it, right.
• 25:26
  Polly Mertens: The other one, my favorite though, is a sigh.
• 25:31
  Polly Mertens: A sigh like a somatic breath meant to just release something.
• 25:36
  Polly Mertens: So just going, ah boom, you're in the parasympathetic nervous system because you can't be sighing and being chased by a lion.
• 25:45
  Polly Mertens: It's like a signal from the universe like nope, she must not be being chased by a lion because she's signaling like I don't need to be, you know, hyped up if you will.
• 26:06
  Samantha Pruitt: Why this is so important for people to know that A this exists and B they can control this is because most of us now live with an overstimulated, vagus nerve response.
• 26:13
  Samantha Pruitt: All the time we're always in that fight or flight stress, even nuanced stress, the phone, the emails, the lighting, the air quality, the, whatever environment, traffic, all the things right.
• 26:28
  Samantha Pruitt: Even when we think we're not stressed because we appear to be relaxing, there is this constant onslaught of things that do impact our nervous system, and so, when it comes to relaxing that or resetting that, generally most people don't do it unless they're freaking asleep, and some people don't even do it in their sleep.
• 26:51
  Polly Mertens: Not conscious of it.
• 26:52
  Polly Mertens: Exactly, exactly.
• 26:53
  Samantha Pruitt: So they need to have awareness and have and there's tons of information out there about this there's a lot of therapies where you can really work on that and, you know, do your own personal routine around it on a daily basis to help reset it.
• 27:08
  Polly Mertens: I just want to give you like an example.
• 27:10
  Polly Mertens: So I want to read one thing.
• 27:11
  Polly Mertens: So this notes that I have here it's like the super highway connecting the gut and the brain, right.
• 27:16
  Polly Mertens: So it's the sensations, it's the talking to your brain and gut which is like way beyond the intelligence you know is it's picking up so much more than this logical brain can, can possibly right.
• 27:30
  Polly Mertens: So one thing I have a note about is that chronic stress, just like you were talking about.
• 27:34
  Polly Mertens: Like that chronic stress, it can inhibit the vagal tone, right.
• 27:39
  Polly Mertens: So this communication highway becomes less efficient.
• 27:43
  Polly Mertens: And so what we were talking about at the beginning when you said you know, are you listening to it?
• 27:47
  Polly Mertens: Are you listening to it?
• 27:49
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, if you're- what are you listening to?
• 27:52
  Polly Mertens: Well, no, if you're in a constant state of stress, like the signal is getting broken up, it's kind of like the sound quality is not there, you can't hear it.
• 28:00
  Polly Mertens: It's not the signal, a bad phone connection.
• 28:02
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, it's either light or it's like blip, blip, blip, blip.
• 28:07
  Polly Mertens: You know it's not a constant tuning into it.
• 28:09
  Polly Mertens: So that can lead to this vicious cycle.
• 28:11
  Polly Mertens: So the more stressed you are, you're not hearing your intuition, so you get more stress, and then the signal gets what.
• 28:15
  Polly Mertens: So you get more stress and then the signal gets what, and it's just like spiraling, spiraling.
• 28:18
  Polly Mertens: So we want to pay attention.
• 28:20
  Polly Mertens: I'll give you this.
• 28:22
  Polly Mertens: This example kind of jumps out at me.
• 28:24
  Polly Mertens: I'm not sure exactly how this relates, but maybe you can pull something out of this.
• 28:30
  Polly Mertens: So I have this client that I'm working with who is under a lot of stress, you know, and stress, I would say, is stories we tell ourself, right, because and I have been coaching some people lately on pressure I wonder so much pressure?
• 28:46
  Polly Mertens: And I was just helping them like language that differently.
• 28:47
  Polly Mertens: It's like okay.
• 28:48
  Polly Mertens: So let's just be clear.
• 28:48
  Polly Mertens: Pressure is when, like, if I take a vice and I clamp something down, like that's exerting pressure, I go, do you have a clamp on your head right now.
• 28:57
  Polly Mertens: I'm like where's this pressure?
• 28:59
  Polly Mertens: Where is it?
• 29:00
  Polly Mertens: Show me, show me the pressure that you're under, right, and it's just an internal like.
• 29:05
  Polly Mertens: It's a feeling of pressure.
• 29:07
  Polly Mertens: It's a experience of of too much to do and deadlines and whatever you want to call it, but there's no pressure on you, right?
• 29:16
  Polly Mertens: So just how we language things is our experience of them too.
• 29:19
  Polly Mertens: So this client I'm working with lots of things going on in her life constructing a second location in her business, changing, creating a whole new website and CRM system, so migrating from an old website, working with an entirely new partner on this second location the dynamics of that not all the details are worked out.
• 29:39
  Polly Mertens: Money's been a little lean because they're coming out of their slow season, about to get into their busy season.
• 29:43
  Polly Mertens: There was also a program, an event she was supposed to be at internationally and supposed to go overseas, and just too many things on the plate, whatever.
• 29:55
  Polly Mertens: And so, as I'm talking with her and just you know, we're going through action items and strategies and you know all that stuff.
• 30:04
  Polly Mertens: I was just present to this underlying vibration of kinetic energy that you know, that that people can get to when there's irregularity or imbalance.
• 30:16
  Polly Mertens: And I just had to presence her to and I was like I just want to make sure you're aware of how you know, like, are you aware of it?
• 30:23
  Polly Mertens: You know, do you feel it?
• 30:25
  Polly Mertens: You know whatever.
• 30:25
  Polly Mertens: And I always said you know, do you, do you have techniques to regulate that?
• 30:32
  Polly Mertens: You know, like in the moment, and then do you have techniques on the whole, like on the day, to regulate that?
• 30:37
  Polly Mertens: Because that level of you know, the, if you look at I forget if it's an EKG or EEG, like when the heart rate, you know, like in the nervous system, heart rate have some things to do with each other, not always, but you know, if you look at an EKG, it's like boom, boom, boom, boom.
• 30:54
  Polly Mertens: You know your heart rate's just kind of cruising along and then if you're in stress or pressure, whatever that chamber is that you call it, like that thing gets all spiky right.
• 31:05
  Polly Mertens: It's not just this nice fluid heartbeat or in flow.
• 31:08
  Polly Mertens: And so I was just reminding her of like techniques.
• 31:11
  Polly Mertens: She said, oh, yeah, I used to meditate.
• 31:13
  Polly Mertens: I haven't been meditating, you know just too much to do.
• 31:15
  Polly Mertens: And I was like Well, how long did you used to meditate?
• 31:17
  Polly Mertens: For 10 minutes, I'm like you know just too much to do, and I was like well, how long did you used to meditate?
• 31:22
  Samantha Pruitt: for 10 minutes.
• 31:23
  Polly Mertens: I'm like, can you reintroduce that?
• 31:24
  Polly Mertens: I was like you don't have 10 minutes, how about you reintroduce that in the morning, okay, and then you know, one of my, one of the things I thought would help her was EFT tapping, which is a technique that it's actually surprising, you know anyway.
• 31:34
  Polly Mertens: So it's about just like tapping on the body and certain points and actually saying nice stories to yourself, like, even though I'm in a stressful situation, everything is safe and I'm going to be OK, right.
• 31:44
  Polly Mertens: And then you just I think mostly it's the talking to yourself that helps, right, you know, we talk ourself down off that ledge, right, exactly.
• 31:52
  Polly Mertens: So, yeah, so I just wanted to share that as, like that, that nervous system, just regulation, like how she could have any sense of her intuition in that body that was just under so much vibration that wasn't like the water, Because she claimed or called it, identified and storied it as pressure Right.
• 32:20
  Samantha Pruitt: So that terminology and I've worked with a lot of business owners too and in particular you'll see, sometimes a common theme is they'll say I'm having heart palpitations or I have pressure in my chest and they'll immediately think I'm having a heart attack or I have some kind of cardiovascular.
• 32:40
  Samantha Pruitt: And that could be true, and I'm not saying we shouldn't rule that out, of course.
• 32:42
  Samantha Pruitt: Obviously we get everybody gets health checks and medical checks.
• 32:45
  Samantha Pruitt: We need to look at all that stuff.
• 32:46
  Samantha Pruitt: But a lot of times that's the physical body and I would say, the vagus nerve communicating to them because the amount of stress that they're under to start ramping up in this fight or flight nervous system response, their heart rate, things of that nature.
• 33:04
  Samantha Pruitt: Maybe there's a hormonal imbalance, all these other cascade of things that would be happening in the physical body Right.
• 33:09
  Samantha Pruitt: So to the audience it's like first have awareness how does your physical body feel?
• 33:15
  Samantha Pruitt: Is there a tightness in your chest?
• 33:17
  Samantha Pruitt: Is there a restriction in your throat?
• 33:20
  Samantha Pruitt: Are you getting migraine headaches?
• 33:23
  Samantha Pruitt: Does your back hurt?
• 33:26
  Samantha Pruitt: So a lot of it will show up, I believe, show up physically in the body somewhere, that some piece of your life is currently not working out of balance, out of imbalance, yeah exactly so.
• 33:42
  Samantha Pruitt: Your body is so freaking brilliant, it really is miraculous.
• 33:47
  Samantha Pruitt: It just blows my mind and we still know very little, right, but what we do know is it's freaking miraculous and it's basically saying hey fool, what are you doing?
• 33:58
  Samantha Pruitt: What is this ridiculous behavior?
• 34:00
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, I just met with another business, a small business owner, the other day, and I've been working with him off and on for months.
• 34:06
  Samantha Pruitt: He's like my blood pressure is so high.
• 34:09
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm like, yeah, no shit, what do you think that is is?
• 34:15
  Samantha Pruitt: And you know the mind was trying to connect it to um, you know I'm drinking too much coffee or I'm, uh, doing this like some.
• 34:25
  Samantha Pruitt: I don't want to call them superficial but logical, rational things, and I was like, oh my God, we got a much bigger thing than that going on Right.
• 34:32
  Samantha Pruitt: Like let's have a real conversation.
• 34:33
  Samantha Pruitt: How many cups of coffee did you have today?
• 34:35
  Samantha Pruitt: And also, this is so great, you are getting a warning sign from your physical body, lucky you.
• 34:44
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, we also have experienced people.
• 34:48
  Samantha Pruitt: We both have people in our lives.
• 35:01
  Polly Mertens: Who are?
• 35:01
  Samantha Pruitt: having health breakdowns of different sorts and whatever.
• 35:02
  Samantha Pruitt: And there was a physical manifestation that happened maybe a year or two years earlier.
• 35:04
  Samantha Pruitt: That was ignored and ignored and ignored and of course, disease will set in, because if you do not listen to this brilliant gut and look for warning signs and pay attention, disease is the path.
• 35:20
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 35:21
  Samantha Pruitt: And you know, hopefully not a disease that's not curable.
• 35:25
  Samantha Pruitt: But the whole point is like can we just address these things earlier, have awareness?
• 35:30
  Polly Mertens: I think what sometimes happens not necessarily is if you ever heard the story about the boiling frog, you know, and so you know.
• 35:38
  Polly Mertens: For those of you that haven't, I'll try to be brief.
• 35:42
  Polly Mertens: It's graphic, yeah well, no frogs were heard in this.
• 35:45
  Polly Mertens: I promise you Good.
• 35:47
  Polly Mertens: So if you take a pot of boiling water and you throw a frog into it, he immediately jumps out.
• 35:52
  Polly Mertens: Instead, if you throw a pot of cool water and put a frog in, he's like oh, this is great, and you turn the water up slowly to boiling, he doesn't jump out and he doesn't make it right.
• 36:02
  Polly Mertens: So I think the because the heat sneaks up on him.
• 36:06
  Polly Mertens: It's neat, you know, because these little symptoms we take them for granted, like oh, you know.
• 36:09
  Polly Mertens: I mean like okay, so here.
• 36:11
  Polly Mertens: So I'm having a little moment myself, right, so not in my body, but how this shows up for me is, um, let's say, ignoring signs, but ignoring things, so like I've got a lot on my plate right now, that just some things going on, and so there's little parts of my house that I'm seeing.
• 36:31
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm like I got to put that stuff away.
• 36:33
  Polly Mertens: Oh, I got to throw that.
• 36:33
  Polly Mertens: Oh, I got to return that to Amazon, or whatever it is you know.
• 36:36
  Polly Mertens: And so there's these little things.
• 36:37
  Polly Mertens: I'm like oh man, you know, and if you don't pay attention to those or if you don't address them, like that will cave in on you, grow and stuff.
• 36:46
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, so I, the visual representation of my, my inner life, my what's, what I'm managing, if you will, um, is showing up right and but you and I, I would say a, because we value health and vitality so fun, so foundationally, it would never get past our gatekeeper, like we would never be like, nope, just going to let that you know thing go up.
• 37:11
  Polly Mertens: There's another one Nope, just going to let that symptom go and just ignore the signs.
• 37:15
  Samantha Pruitt: We would never know it's like, like, like and truthfully, that's because we did and we had negative outcomes to I mean, you know, extreme ones, and so we learned the hard way.
• 37:30
  Samantha Pruitt: We're not just preaching from the mountaintop and we've always had everything just perfect and lovely and we and the perfect body and just.
• 37:37
  Samantha Pruitt: Can you believe all these things have always gone right?
• 37:39
  Samantha Pruitt: No, they were disasters.
• 37:40
  Samantha Pruitt: Yes, so we're speaking from a place of listen.
• 37:44
  Samantha Pruitt: It freaking hurts to suffer physically and emotionally.
• 37:49
  Samantha Pruitt: We don't really want to see other people suffering.
• 37:52
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, anything we can do to be of service.
• 37:56
  Polly Mertens: And everything.
• 37:57
  Polly Mertens: I just believe in the pyramid and the bottom of my pyramid, the foundation is my health and vitality.
• 38:03
  Polly Mertens: Right, if I'm going to have any sense of, you know Maslow's hierarchy of needs and achieve, you know, ultimate enlightenment or something, if I'm not taking care of myself, I'm sorry, that is never going to happen.
• 38:14
  Polly Mertens: I'm never going to get to that mountaintop, right, let alone the virtual mountaintop or the physical mountaintop.
• 38:18
  Polly Mertens: So, yeah, yeah, yeah, super important, super important, right on.
• 38:22
  Polly Mertens: So back to what you're reading yeah, yeah, and so some of the things I just want to tune into, just some notes I had here, is like so your gut is constantly trying to communicate and your brain is that, whatever.
• 38:34
  Polly Mertens: But just know, if we're doing things, if we're not taking 10 minutes to meditate or whatever our chosen, you know I'm going to go through some ways to get back in touch with the, the intuition, and get this all turned on.
• 38:49
  Polly Mertens: But if we're not taking those steps, taking that time, that little frog is just going to get boiled from the inside out, right, like we're just going to like.
• 38:57
  Polly Mertens: No, what intuition?
• 38:59
  Polly Mertens: Who has intuition?
• 39:00
  Polly Mertens: I've had my intuition.
• 39:02
  Samantha Pruitt: I just got the weirdest visual about the 30 feet of our gut, okay, so, so there's 30 feet there, okay, and we just discussed how it was layered, well, what the function was of the gut and then how it was layered, how it functions, how it was layered, well, what the function was of the gut and then how it was layered, how it functions, how it communicates the brain gut and, ultimately, how it's protected by the immune system.
• 39:25
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, well, we can all relate to these damn devices.
• 39:29
  Samantha Pruitt: If you were getting a text message from your gut your 30 feet long gut every few minutes, would you respond or would you just ignore it?
• 39:47
  Samantha Pruitt: Because, basically, we're not talking about you getting a text message every few minutes, we're talking about continuously, every second, if not many per second.
• 39:58
  Samantha Pruitt: Are you getting messages sent from your best friend called your gut, because they're trying really ferociously to take care of you?
• 40:06
  Samantha Pruitt: Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, do you see me?
• 40:11
  Samantha Pruitt: Do you hear me?
• 40:12
  Samantha Pruitt: Do you see me?
• 40:12
  Samantha Pruitt: Do you hear me?
• 40:13
  Samantha Pruitt: All we have to do is say, okay, well, I have awareness that that's a thing and there is a communication channel there, and that communication channel has my best interests at heart.
• 40:25
  Samantha Pruitt: My mental and physical well-being is their primary function.
• 40:30
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm going to pay attention.
• 40:33
  Samantha Pruitt: I'm going to give a shit and I'm going to start listening.
• 40:36
  Samantha Pruitt: Right, give a shit and I'm going to start listening.
• 40:41
  Samantha Pruitt: Right, you wouldn't ignore your best friend, who's texting you every minute like help help help.
• 40:44
  Polly Mertens: You know you wouldn't, and I think too, you know we.
• 40:47
  Polly Mertens: We talked earlier about how much our society, Western society, relies on the brain and the logic and thinking things through and all of that, right.
• 40:56
  Polly Mertens: So we live up in our head and we go to the answers for everything in our head and yet it's so dysfunctional up there sometimes, right, it's such a dysfunctional place.
• 41:05
  Polly Mertens: I don't know who lives up there.
• 41:07
  Polly Mertens: I know who lives in my gut.
• 41:08
  Polly Mertens: That's what I was going to say.
• 41:09
  Polly Mertens: I was like your gut is kind of unless you're treating it like a trash can, it's, it's pure, it's, it's not, um, polluted if you, unless you're, you know, in a, in a healthy gut, it's not polluted with all the dysfunction of your childhood.
• 41:26
  Polly Mertens: It's not polluted with all the patterns and habits and all that.
• 41:29
  Polly Mertens: It's like it's a pure message.
• 41:32
  Polly Mertens: Oh yeah, it's your most pure signal, like, and so some of the things that when we were talking before we started, this is like you know, it's in moments when you, let's say, need your gut, right, not only are we talking about like are you healthy and is it good down there, you know, like your celiacs, like, oh, that wasn't a good thing to eat, right, but, like, your gut comes involved when you interact with other beings too, right.
• 41:54
  Polly Mertens: So, like, is this person trustworthy, right?
• 41:57
  Polly Mertens: Or is this a good situation for me to be in?
• 42:00
  Polly Mertens: Am I in a safe place?
• 42:01
  Polly Mertens: Am I, am I following my passion, right?
• 42:04
  Polly Mertens: Or am I?
• 42:05
  Polly Mertens: Am I meant for this?
• 42:07
  Polly Mertens: Is this something that is a yes for me?
• 42:09
  Polly Mertens: Right, and so I think those messages that come from down there are a lot more pure.
• 42:15
  Samantha Pruitt: They're not so polluted, right, yeah, right, yeah yeah, they're coming from the core of your being right.
• 42:21
  Samantha Pruitt: So really you can call that whatever you want to call that your soul, your spirit, the core of who you are, the essence of who you are and really your highest potential.
• 42:31
  Samantha Pruitt: It's a little bit mind-boggling, right yeah, yeah.
• 42:37
  Polly Mertens: So just yeah, you know a couple other things I want to say.
• 42:39
  Polly Mertens: So, intuition, that that's the signals.
• 42:43
  Polly Mertens: They're subtle.
• 42:44
  Polly Mertens: They're subtle.
• 42:46
  Polly Mertens: You talk about the texting.
• 42:47
  Polly Mertens: Texting is not so subtle, which is okay, right, it's like a, it's like a whisper, it's like it's more, like you know, and and so, as you were talking about, you know, I think those signals they're they're faster and a deeper form of intelligence, they're like a pure form of intelligence, but we have to learn to listen and tune into them, right, and kind of block out all this noise.
• 43:10
  Polly Mertens: And it's like having an awareness of your body's own wisdom, like I do not know, like you know, know, I've talked about like the microbiome.
• 43:19
  Polly Mertens: So the microbiome is like what's in your gut, not the lining of your gut, but all the viruses and my millions and yeah, bacteria and all, yeah, I mean, and it's the it's like the amount of stars in the solar system is how many of those that are in your belly right, each one of us is carrying around billions of stars right um, so it's, it's wisdom like you and I didn't put them in there.
• 43:42
  Polly Mertens: We don't know what they're doing down there, we're not telling them.
• 43:45
  Polly Mertens: I mean, maybe we're telling them a little bit like, but you know, but that's all body wisdom Like it's.
• 43:49
  Polly Mertens: It's so been so designed by our evolution that it just knows what to do, it knows what, it knows how to keep us alive, knows how to keep us well, and it's like it's a subtle body wisdom, form of intelligence that we just do now, like this whole other brain we can use, and it's like no X-ray that that whole mountains of wisdom that's been accumulated by millions of years of evolution won't be trusting that.
• 44:16
  Samantha Pruitt: Well, somewhere along the line this, the story changed from.
• 44:20
  Samantha Pruitt: Um, it's there to protect us, to help us grow, to help us thrive into.
• 44:27
  Samantha Pruitt: It's not a value, it's an inconvenience.
• 44:31
  Samantha Pruitt: Um, it's, you know, actually maybe sometimes out to get us.
• 44:35
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, when I was first diagnosed and I was so sick and actually I wasn't diagnosed, I was being misdiagnosed, right, I just felt like my body was at war with me, right, so, emotionally, what it felt like was my own body was turning against me.
• 44:49
  Samantha Pruitt: So, right, people can have this bad relationship with their gut and also with their intuition, which we're saying is one in the same.
• 44:59
  Samantha Pruitt: Hey, you know, I trusted that person before.
• 45:02
  Samantha Pruitt: I have believed that the best outcome would happen.
• 45:07
  Samantha Pruitt: Or, you know, the good things come to those who wait, or blah, blah, blah or whatever all the things are.
• 45:12
  Samantha Pruitt: But that didn't work out for me.
• 45:13
  Samantha Pruitt: So I can't trust that anymore.
• 45:15
  Samantha Pruitt: I can't trust my own self, my own knowing Wow, that sucks, yeah, yeah.
• 45:25
  Polly Mertens: And I think we need to check back in with that, right, you know, because that was bullshit.
• 45:31
  Polly Mertens: Well, yeah, what was probably going on is we were checking in, you know, checking in with our brain, and then, and we probably went, we logicked it up, up, you know, we logicked it up and we'll go into too, but anyway, there's a well, no, we can add to that real quick, because I can't not add to this, please, please, I can't.
• 45:47
  Samantha Pruitt: I've lost count.
• 45:48
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, not hundreds.
• 45:51
  Samantha Pruitt: I guarantee you thousands of times things have happened that were not what I would like to have happened over this life's journey.
• 46:01
  Samantha Pruitt: Right, I had different ideas for these outcomes and experiences.
• 46:05
  Samantha Pruitt: However, shit happens and it is what it is right.
• 46:09
  Samantha Pruitt: But after so many hard falls or hard pivots and hard transformations and things of that nature, I've come to embrace, and so have you, the reality of everything happens for a reason and there are greater things around the corner and more positive things to come, and there is reasons for those things not being great.
• 46:31
  Samantha Pruitt: I would have stayed in bad jobs, bad marriage, bad health, endless.
• 46:37
  Samantha Pruitt: I don't even know, honestly, that I'd still be alive if many of these things didn't happen over the course of my lifetime.
• 46:43
  Samantha Pruitt: So you know, I guess it just takes some maturity, but also a place of just knowing.
• 46:53
  Samantha Pruitt: You know that again, that inner knowing and respect of like hey, there's a greater thing going on here than what it might first appear.
• 47:02
  Polly Mertens: Totally.
• 47:03
  Samantha Pruitt: Always trust yourself people.
• 47:04
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean it's like the number one foundational thing, the trust of self, and you feel you can speak to this yourself, but how your word and your connection to your own value and trust in your word is everything.
• 47:22
  Polly Mertens: that's how you rebuild that yeah, and I think, um, there's something in there that I well, I think I'm gonna like, all of a sudden I'm to take us off in this whole direction of like then the self-confidence and then relate you know.
• 47:34
  Samantha Pruitt: But if you're not listening to your gut, if you're not listening to your intuition, what is that?
• 47:38
  Samantha Pruitt: That's a lack of self-trust.
• 47:40
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, cause I think I would say, why do it?
• 47:43
  Polly Mertens: Because it's satisfying, right.
• 47:49
  Polly Mertens: And so, where my body goes to, and you and I I've told you about, you know, my study of the gene keys and human design and stuff like that and so, as a sacral being, right, so I'm guided by my sacral, which is my gut, right, and so I get these impulses yes or no, what's right for me?
• 48:05
  Polly Mertens: Right, and I don't want to go too much into that, but I think it's valid.
• 48:09
  Polly Mertens: It's like my intuitive yes or my intuitive no.
• 48:13
  Polly Mertens: So what happens if I, as a sacral being, if I go into the sacral no, like if I don't trust my no and I do it anyway, if I trust it and I follow through, I get satisfaction, right.
• 48:26
  Polly Mertens: I'm like, oh, this is the thing I should do, Okay, great, and I go do it and it's like I enjoy it.
• 48:28
  Polly Mertens: Like, oh, this is the thing I should do, okay, great.
• 48:29
  Polly Mertens: And I go do it and it's like I enjoy it.
• 48:30
  Polly Mertens: And then like, yeah, you're satisfied, right, and if I don't, and I go against it, I go to a no and I do it anyway.
• 48:41
  Polly Mertens: Resentment, suffering, pain, emotional distress, like I've split from myself.
• 48:46
  Polly Mertens: I'm like it's a violation to the self, exactly, exactly.
• 48:50
  Polly Mertens: So I have gone down those roads like you've talked about, recognize like, oh, I'm not sure I should be doing this, I don't know about that, you know.
• 48:57
  Polly Mertens: And then so, and then the alternative of that, or the other side of that, is I'll get these.
• 49:03
  Polly Mertens: Fuck, yeah, I should be doing that.
• 49:04
  Polly Mertens: That sounds crazy, but yeah, I should do that, like when I, you know, left my husband and my job and my nice comfortable job and my nice comfortable house and I bought a 32 motor home and I was like this is what I'm supposed to do.
• 49:21
  Polly Mertens: This is crazy, you know, and off I went, but so satisfying, so satisfying, you know, and if I had stayed, and whatnot, oh, the resentment towards the person, the job, the, you know it just would have withered.
• 49:38
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, because you're not honoring yourself.
• 49:41
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, you're disrespecting yourself and that's unacceptable.
• 49:46
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean it's the biggest crime.
• 49:49
  Polly Mertens: I mean, it's the biggest crime.
• 49:51
  Polly Mertens: So I think our, you know, suggestion here, our invitation to you, is try it Like.
• 49:56
  Polly Mertens: You've got to experiment with this.
• 49:58
  Polly Mertens: Right, we're going to give them some things to reconnect with your intuition, but regardless, as you, you know, have some ideas on how to do it and what to do and where you might go with this, with the vagus, nerve and stuff.
• 50:08
  Polly Mertens: You got to experiment, you got to find it out for yourself.
• 50:13
  Polly Mertens: You know and I'm not saying go do some, you know life threatening things or whatever, but you know, practice on smaller, smaller things, right, like, oh, what if I did this for a little while?
• 50:22
  Polly Mertens: Ok, you know, and trusted that gut.
• 50:33
  Polly Mertens: So let's talk about some ways that people can reconnect with their intuition, reconnect that gut, and some action steps and some, you know, easy wins, right, so okay, mindful body scans, right, like you talked about, like you, as a celiac, like that's like easy for you.
• 50:43
  Polly Mertens: You're like everything you put into your body and I know from traveling with you how quickly you can have a misalignment, you know.
• 50:51
  Polly Mertens: You're like shouldn't have eaten that.
• 50:53
  Polly Mertens: You're like, you know it, right, some people like just throw garbage into their mouth like it's a trash can.
• 51:00
  Polly Mertens: It's like whoops, whoops, bloating.
• 51:02
  Polly Mertens: You know constipation, just regular.
• 51:05
  Polly Mertens: You know anxiety as well Anxiety, adhd.
• 51:08
  Polly Mertens: You know lots of neurodegenerative diseases, parkinson's, alzheimer.
• 51:13
  Polly Mertens: You know there's so much that's related to that gut beginning to leak right, and so you know a stop treating your body like a trash can.
• 51:20
  Polly Mertens: What you put in your mouth should be like putting it into a temple, like you're putting into a baby's mouth, like you know, like you put it in into something that you really really care about, like would you feed this to your best, best, best friend, right?
• 51:31
  Polly Mertens: So so mindful body scans, so it can be a daily practice.
• 51:38
  Polly Mertens: You know some people have never done this.
• 51:39
  Polly Mertens: They've never even talked to their body, never listened to, never checked in, and so you know, do you do this, do you have I mean you especially with your gut, like you are in tune with checking in with your gut.
• 51:48
  Polly Mertens: But you know you don't have to be a yogi or be in Savasana to do a bodily check in.
• 51:54
  Samantha Pruitt: I mostly do it related to my fitness.
• 51:57
  Samantha Pruitt: So, depending on what my workout is going to be for the day, like I'll be like hey, what's going on with my arms, or whatever It'll be part of like my warm up is like gaining awareness around you know what might be happening with this shoulder or this knee or whatever.
• 52:11
  Samantha Pruitt: So, like mine is I'm going to do physical things, which is every day Right, and I want to know check in should I be doing this really extreme thing or should I chill the hell out and do this other thing Right?
• 52:25
  Samantha Pruitt: So I have to pay attention, yeah.
• 52:27
  Polly Mertens: You know, and so I'll just go back to that story about that business owner that I was working with.
• 52:31
  Polly Mertens: So she was not checking in with her body on that nervous system agitation that I was picking up on and we're doing this over the phone.
• 52:40
  Polly Mertens: I'm not saying I was standing near her, it was like I could just hear from the pace of her voice the pressure she was putting through her intention on the phone of like speaking things to her team, was putting through her intention on the phone of like speaking things to her team.
• 52:55
  Polly Mertens: I was just like, oh, you know, that's just like you feel her pressure coming through the phone to the team and stuff Right, and it's like everybody can identify with this, because they've all worked with a person like that.
• 53:03
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 53:04
  Samantha Pruitt: I guarantee some.
• 53:04
  Samantha Pruitt: We've all worked in environments whether that was a manager or a boss or a coworker or whatever where you're like whoa.
• 53:10
  Samantha Pruitt: I wasn't stressed today when I came into work, but now I am Thanks a lot.
• 53:16
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, Right.
• 53:18
  Polly Mertens: And your, your energy impacts your team, impacts your coworkers, your clients, your, you know yourself right Like, let alone your own.
• 53:31
  Polly Mertens: So, like a body scan would just be I mean, it could be in the moment where you're like people, so people are saying these things to me.
• 53:36
  Polly Mertens: I feel a lot of this pressure.
• 53:37
  Polly Mertens: Okay, well, you're noticing it.
• 53:38
  Polly Mertens: Where?
• 53:40
  Samantha Pruitt: is it?
• 53:40
  Polly Mertens: Like, is it in your head, is it in your chest, is it in your gut?
• 53:44
  Polly Mertens: You know, like, are you tap?
• 53:45
  Polly Mertens: You know like people tap their foot on the floor and like you get that nervous foot tapping, whatever this client was doing this.
• 53:53
  Polly Mertens: So what I'm doing is like she's moving her shoulder.
• 53:55
  Polly Mertens: It's like her body couldn't even like sit inside of its own body.
• 53:57
  Polly Mertens: You know doing her hair and you know I'm I'm over-exaggerating it for the video, but, um, just this body that was fidgeting.
• 54:06
  Polly Mertens: I'm like you need to go for a run.
• 54:08
  Polly Mertens: That's what I would be like girl.
• 54:11
  Polly Mertens: you put those shoes on now Go get some extra like run all that inner you know but can't get the body you know all, all fidgety anyway.
• 54:23
  Polly Mertens: So mindful body scans.
• 54:24
  Polly Mertens: And then when you do the mindful body scan, like do something about it.
• 54:28
  Polly Mertens: Like, if it's like, you probably have enough wisdom inside of you to know what you need to do, like you know what, I just need to go for a walk around the block for a minute, or I need to rest, lay down, lie down, exactly or as long pauses, those are my favorite.
• 54:43
  Polly Mertens: Like I'll just like stop and like go.
• 54:45
  Polly Mertens: Just that's an easy reset, right, right, one of my favorites, especially with people with addiction and you know that hyper, you know niss of compulsion, if you will.
• 54:56
  Polly Mertens: 10 slow, deep breaths.
• 54:58
  Polly Mertens: I don't think anything dysregulating the nervous system, possibly grief, but most things that we're dealing with in a daily basis can survive 10 slow, deep breaths.
• 55:09
  Polly Mertens: It's just impossible.
• 55:10
  Polly Mertens: Like you're stepping into your somatic, your nervous system, your emotional body, all these things, so mindful body scans.
• 55:17
  Polly Mertens: Next, one pause and ask so like, before you make a decision, take a deep breath and check in with your body, like okay, well, you know, I remember this with that um that Glennon Doyle, you know she had that book.
• 55:31
  Polly Mertens: Anyway, she talked about how she developed this muscle of checking in with herself and she practiced it by going into a closet.
• 55:39
  Polly Mertens: You know she's got kids and a house, that's going on and stuff like that, and so she'd go into her closet and she'd like tune into her body and like start to understand what it needed and ask it questions in the quiet of a closet, you know, to like get away from the noise and the whatever.
• 55:53
  Polly Mertens: So she practiced that.
• 55:54
  Polly Mertens: I forget weeks, months, whatever.
• 55:56
  Polly Mertens: And then she's like at a business meeting and she's got team on whatever.
• 56:01
  Polly Mertens: So what do you think, glennon, should we do this?
• 56:02
  Polly Mertens: And she was like, damn, I wish I had that closet.
• 56:04
  Polly Mertens: And she was like you know what, let me just practice it right now.
• 56:06
  Polly Mertens: And she was able to just like go in and go yeah, let's do this.
• 56:11
  Polly Mertens: And like came up with it right, so take a freaking pause, right, all right.
• 56:17
  Polly Mertens: Journaling journaling is great, you guys for free flow consciousness.
• 56:22
  Polly Mertens: Sometimes I find this for a couple of things right.
• 56:25
  Polly Mertens: People who carry their to-do list in their head oh my, like that is like a sure nervous system dysregulation you got.
• 56:32
  Polly Mertens: Like that will make you crazy because your brain is constantly reminding you.
• 56:36
  Samantha Pruitt: The worst and forgetting because it's it just doesn't want to remember Totally, Totally.
• 56:43
  Polly Mertens: Do not care.
• 56:44
  Polly Mertens: So you know whether it's a to-do list, like get it out.
• 56:47
  Polly Mertens: You know, like I have paper and pen by my bed and it's like before I go to bed if I've got that energy of thoughts like, oh, don't forget, don't forget, but write that shit down, yeah here.
• 56:58
  Samantha Pruitt: It'll be here in the morning.
• 56:59
  Polly Mertens: I'll pick it up in the morning.
• 57:00
  Polly Mertens: Great right and journaling is great to, to, whether you do like artist way, morning pages for creativity or just streams of consciousness, like it's the ability to get the chatter that's going on in the back of your mind, the subconsciously, out in front of you so you can be aware of a nervous Nelly that's trapped in your head and is like running the show or whatever.
• 57:22
  Polly Mertens: So you're my favorite nature.
• 57:30
  Samantha Pruitt: It's the greatest drug there is.
• 57:31
  Samantha Pruitt: Come on people, get with the program.
• 57:34
  Samantha Pruitt: You don't need plant medicine, it's everywhere right.
• 57:36
  Samantha Pruitt: Get with the program.
• 57:38
  Polly Mertens: It's free, spend some time outdoors, quiet your mind and then do something.
• 57:43
  Polly Mertens: You know, go for a walk in the morning or in the evening, or garden, or just look outside, you know, just look outside your damn window, right?
• 57:50
  Polly Mertens: So get away from your desk and then listen to your cravings, mindfully, right, you know, especially for those people that cope with things by reaching for something, something to put in your mouth, whether it's a food or a smoke or, you know, something chewing, whatever, like.
• 58:06
  Polly Mertens: If you're reaching for something, most likely it's because you're dysregulated on the inside, and so that's an opportunity to practice something, some somatic breath work, and we're not going to go into all the ways to calm the nervous system, to regulate that, but just start to tune into it, you know.
• 58:24
  Samantha Pruitt: These are all free basic things.
• 58:27
  Samantha Pruitt: At your fingertips Hello, exactly, exactly.
• 58:31
  Samantha Pruitt: Pick one At your fingertips Hello, exactly, exactly, pick one.
• 58:33
  Samantha Pruitt: Pick them all.
• 58:33
  Samantha Pruitt: Practice one day for a week and then decide, like what's my thing, what's my thing going to be, or do them all?
• 58:40
  Samantha Pruitt: I don't care, do them all.
• 58:41
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, and I'm a big fan.
• 58:43
  Samantha Pruitt: We didn't talk about meditation and I talked about EFT for calming the nervous system or whatever, but I think the most important thing that you said earlier is, like just being aware, oh, like notice, you might be the frog and it's getting a little hot in here.
• 59:00
  Polly Mertens: It's getting hot in here don't let yourself get boiled and like blow your top right.
• 59:05
  Polly Mertens: That's where you get those hot moments right.
• 59:07
  Polly Mertens: Steam's got to come out somewhere and it's coming towards you.
• 59:10
  Samantha Pruitt: Sorry, You're no you're not a caged animal.
• 59:14
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, well, you can feel like it.
• 59:16
  Samantha Pruitt: You can feel like I know they've convinced themselves they're in a cage and that the cage is locked.
• 59:21
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, and I'm not saying that some people actually aren't in cages, right, but most of us, by choice, are in the cage.
• 59:28
  Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, the door is open, but we're like I'm gonna just stay in here.
• 59:34
  Samantha Pruitt: What if I should get?
• 59:35
  Samantha Pruitt: What do I that door?
• 59:36
  Polly Mertens: is open.
• 59:36
  Polly Mertens: Well, they got too much to do.
• 59:38
  Polly Mertens: Busyness noise you know they've not taking.
• 59:40
  Polly Mertens: They think their life is in the cage.
• 59:41
  Polly Mertens: They forgot slow down yeah, slow, get off the crazy train.
• 59:45
  Polly Mertens: I tell you, get off the crazy.
• 59:47
  Polly Mertens: Whether it's not having a moment, from when you wake up to when you go to bed, that you're not talking, reading, looking, listening, speaking, interacting, whatever like right, just like I'm just laughing, cause I want to say can you just call us, cause we're going to take an inventory of all this.
• 1:00:05
  Samantha Pruitt: I just can't, I just need to, I just need to take an inventory of what these people are doing.
• 1:00:11
  Samantha Pruitt: Again, it comes back to we're not here to say we're doing it perfectly.
• 1:00:18
  Samantha Pruitt: The point is, we have suffered profusely and we are damn well dedicated to trying to help others, not Right?
• 1:00:28
  Samantha Pruitt: And so you're giving a lot of great free examples.
• 1:00:31
  Samantha Pruitt: But I also can hear many people that I already know never mind strangers in the audience going making up all these stories about how they don't have time or whatever.
• 1:00:39
  Samantha Pruitt: Okay, you better call us, because we're going to sort that out totally well and you're worth it right.
• 1:00:49
  Polly Mertens: Oh, oh well, true.
• 1:00:51
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, and people have to understand you know okay.
• 1:00:53
  Polly Mertens: So listen, tuning in, listening to your gut is so important we are, so I'm so glad we we took an episode to share this with you guys and we'd love your feedback.
• 1:01:03
  Polly Mertens: You know.
• 1:01:03
  Polly Mertens: So, what did?
• 1:01:03
  Polly Mertens: What did you get out of this Right?
• 1:01:05
  Polly Mertens: Like what?
• 1:01:05
  Polly Mertens: What could you do today, tomorrow, to start helping yourself?
• 1:01:10
  Polly Mertens: Right?
• 1:01:11
  Polly Mertens: Is it becoming aware of something?
• 1:01:12
  Polly Mertens: Is it practicing one of these you know simple steps to retune into it?
• 1:01:16
  Polly Mertens: Is it starting to look at like maybe I have leaky gut, I've got some of these symptoms, I've got the brain fog, I've got the autoimmune thing?
• 1:01:23
  Polly Mertens: It's like maybe I should check into that more.
• 1:01:25
  Polly Mertens: And we're going to go into another episode on the let's call it the physical well-being, the, the taking care of it, the healing it right I want to hear the thing that their gut's been telling them for weeks and months, and maybe years that they were poo-pooing yeah and the minute they heard this they're like, oh, and so they're gonna look at that, they're gonna stare it in the face with full awareness and go.
• 1:01:50
  Polly Mertens: I hear you and I respect we're doing this yeah, and it's remember, it's subtle, but it's so wise, and why wouldn't we tune into subtle and why wouldn't we tune into that wisdom?
• 1:02:03
  Polly Mertens: Even if it's subtle, right, it doesn't need to bang us over the head, so, all right.
• 1:02:07
  Polly Mertens: What's our one thing?
• 1:02:08
  Polly Mertens: What do we want to like?
• 1:02:10
  Polly Mertens: Leave them with as our one thing, my.
• 1:02:11
  Polly Mertens: What do we want to like?
• 1:02:11
  Polly Mertens: Leave them with as our one thing, my dear.
• 1:02:13
  Polly Mertens: What do you think?
• 1:02:14
  Samantha Pruitt: I mean, for me, it's about really ensuring that they heard loud and clear that the gut is actually trying to run the show and it's your best friend.
• 1:02:22
  Samantha Pruitt: So show it respect, honor it, listen to it, have awareness about how it functions and the impact it's having not just on your physical health but your emotional and mental wellbeing, and it makes space to allow it to heal If that is where we're at with this, and most of us are there and then allow it to work for you to build the body, the brain, the life that you want.
• 1:02:52
  Samantha Pruitt: It's just hanging out trying to do its job here.
• 1:02:57
  Polly Mertens: Whether you're physically or emotionally irregulated.
• 1:03:00
  Polly Mertens: You have symptoms in your physical body of autoimmune disease or pain, or can't sleep or whatever eczema like you're talking about, about you know, rashes and stuff like that.
• 1:03:10
  Polly Mertens: Or you've got emotional symptoms like adhd, or brain fog or irritability or what any of these things like tune into the gut.
• 1:03:20
  Polly Mertens: I bet you there's an answer to any of those and more from your gut.
• 1:03:26
  Polly Mertens: So, listening to it and going, oh, I hear you, let's, let's have a little conversation, let's, let's work on this, let's.
• 1:03:33
  Polly Mertens: And so stay tuned.
• 1:03:34
  Polly Mertens: Next episode we'll go into, you know the symptoms that are are being created, manifesting, so you can be more in tune to oh, that could be my gut.
• 1:03:42
  Polly Mertens: Oh, all right, and then what you can do ways to heal it.
• 1:03:45
  Polly Mertens: Yeah yeah, and we want to do that.
• 1:03:47
  Polly Mertens: All right, my dear, all right lady.
• 1:03:49
  Polly Mertens: I want to remind our beautiful humans today no more.
• 1:03:53
  Samantha Pruitt: No matter how farty you are and how bloated you are and what's going on with your pooper, how your life looks is not as important as how it feels.
• 1:04:05
  Polly Mertens: Yes, and every day is your opportunity to find your awesome.