It’s always interesting when a few different classes all line up and teach and talk about the same thing from different angles. I’d say the theme of the past few weeks has been “the belly” or “Hara” in Japanese. In our culture, we have an interesting relationship with our bellies. There are plenty of media outlets showing us what a “pretty/sexy belly” looks like and if our belly doesn’t look like that we may have trouble liking our belly. So, we either try to change it, or ignore it, or oscillate between the two – either way, we don’t love our bellies as they are. We also generally spend more time trying to tell it how we think it should be rather than listening to what it needs and wants.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we store a lot of our stress and tension in our bellies. Sometimes it shows up in symptoms (acid reflux, belly aches, loose stools, indigestion, gas, bloating), but sometime it doesn’t, and most of our stress alleviating practices don’t really focus on on stressed out bellies. When was the last time you had your belly massaged? As strange as it may sound, that’s an integral part of many Chinese and Japanese health treatments, and while it’s not always entirely pleasant while it’s happening, it usually feels great afterward and makes a big difference, and it happens to be the first thing we’re learning how to do in my Shiatsu class. There are plenty of other things we can do to make our bellies (and thus our whole bodies) happier that don’t involve direct contact for those of us who aren’t comfortable with that, or who are at a loss about where they can find a belly massage.

There’s the obvious thing of choosing what how and when to eat. There’s so much out there about what and how to eat, that I hesitate to add the echoes of the often contradictory advice. A couple perhaps indisputable suggestions I can make are to try not to eat while stressed out or in a hurry, try not to eat late at night. I’d also recommend eating warm foods more often than cold foods (warm foods are easier to digest, cold foods constrict the stomach and require extra energy to bring them up to body temperature) – especially as we move into the colder months.

In my differentiation of disease class we’ve been talking about how much of our immune system is in our gut. While we tend to thing of our digestive track as inside of us, however the whole length of our alimentary canal from our mouths to our anus is technically outside of us, and we have to keep things in our guts in check. There happen to be billions of microorganisms living in our gut, and when things are in balance, we’re living symbiotically. They break down some of the fiber we eat into short chain fatty acids (SCFA), which are an essential nutrient for the cells lining our intestines. When things are out of balance, bacteria and yeasts can live like parasites inside of us, sapping some of our energy and nutrients and weakening us and our immune systems and thus making us vulnerable to other diseases. A few simple things we can do to help our guts out are eating probiotic foods (like yogurt or sauerkraut) or taking a probiotic (such as acidophilus), and making sure we get enough fiber (preferably from a natural source like fruit and vegetables).

Hopefully, we can all bring a little more attention to our bellies, and send them some love, regardless of how they look or feel, and maybe start listening a little more to what they need and want.