Which came first, the egg or the chicken? Or does it really matter…?

I know some people who, through their trials, errors and successes, have a lot to teach us but don’t, for all kinds of reasons: fear of criticism, lack of time, indifference, God only knows... and, sometimes, He is not even sure Himself. What a waste of a good experience and a loss for the rest of us! I know other people who have nothing to say worth hearing but won’t shut up. Finally, the last category, by far the smallest one, is comprised of those who have something worthwhile to say, who take the trouble to say it and end up making a positive difference in someone else’s life. I blew all chances of ever belonging to the first category the day I took my first breath. Since we never know how well what we want to do will work until we try it and I am, by nature, a risk-taking optimist, I decided to do just that by sharing on this site the few tidbits of understanding I gleaned over the years and let the chips fall where they may: although I already have a slight idea, I will rely on the feedbacks I receive, if any, to tell me to which of the two groups I belong.

About 25 years ago, I decided on a whim to leave France , a crowded country with 55 million inhabitants roughly the size of California , and to move to the US . I was young, dumb, French to the core, arrogant (redundant, isn’t it) and invincible. I had no idea what I was going to find, whether I’d like it, how well I would adjust or anything else. I just knew that France had become too small for me to comfortably spread my wings. (I did burn a few bridges there during my first 25 years of life but, in retrospect, most of them would have led me nowhere anyway and quite a few among them have long been dead and buried. Forgive me Lord, for I knew not what I was doing). I arbitrarily set my mind on San Francisco , about which I knew absolutely nothing. I didn’t speak one word of English, which I had been forced to learn but hated with such a passion that I never bothered to study it.

In addition to being young and dumb, I was also a chronically malcontent dreamer, and an opportunist: if I wanted something badly enough, I knew how to steal, cheat and lie to get it. (Don’t look at me like that; you’re no Mother Teresa either and you know what you’ve done.) It took a while, quite a few slaps in the face and a radical shift in moral values but I’ve grown a lot since then: I’ve learned better and more honorable ways to obtain what I want and to simply forgo anything that would require me to willfully commit any hurtful or dishonest action.

To be able to come to this country legally, I needed a sponsor already living here. What better way to find one than by putting an ad in a paper I knew to be published in the US ? It just happens that the Herald Tribune had an office in Paris . So, completely oblivious to the risks I would be taking, I placed my ad, offering my services as an “au-pair”. Never mind that I didn’t like kids as a species and that I was completely unfit and unprepared for the job: expediency was the name of the game.

Providence (or God, if it is what you call it) decided to spare some poor, innocent kid and saw to it that the only ad my limited resources had allowed me to place should be read by Paul, an older, single, sweet and harmless man who owned a travel agency and a bar in the San Francisco area. Some time later, I received a letter from him in which he explained that he traveled frequently and needed a live-in housekeeper to take care of his cats and help with the businesses while he was away. Would I be interested and would I be available to talk to him on the phone? He would call me on such and such day, at such and such time. Interested? Me? You bet! My best friend at the time, who was fairly fluent in English, translated for me both his letter and my answer to him. On the appointed day, at the appointed time, Paul called my number (hers) and talked to me (her). By the time the conversation was over, he hung up satisfied that I spoke fluently English (I didn’t), I had a driver’s license (I didn’t) and I could handle the tasks he expected me to fulfill (we both found out that, indeed, I could. One truth out of three wasn’t so bad.)

Paul was a well-to-do gentleman: he sent me an airline ticket while I busied myself with obtaining a tourist visa. On August 8, 1982, with only a trunk full of clothes and a few nickels to rub together, my head full of dreams and without any worry about the future, I landed at San Francisco International Airport.

It soon became obvious to Paul that I was a fraud and that he had been conned. Being himself somewhat of a con artist, he respected my guts (there is a point to this story so hang on) and determination. I won’t lie and say, however, that he ever trusted me, which was largely reciprocal, but he needed me to speak English and to drive. He shelled out the amounts needed to make it happen fast and soon enrolled me in an English class at Foothill College and in a driving school. In no time, what had started out as flat-out lies became reality and I quickly was able to recklessly navigate and talk my way throughout the San Francisco area, at the wheel of a car I didn’t own and, therefore, wasn’t concerned about wrecking.

Give it enough time and recklessness will catch up with you. Within three months, on a January morning and in the midst of a heavy downpour, inexperienced, as I was speeding back from Scotts Valley on Highway 17 rendered oily and slippery by the adobe running from the shoulders, I suddenly applied the breaks (dumb) and lost control of the car as it immediately went into back-and-forth skids between the guardrails and across the two northbound lanes of travel and rolled over several times, before landing upside down against a redwood on the other side of the rail, half-way hanging in the air, some four hundred feet above the valley. In the few excruciatingly long seconds it took for the car to stop to a halt, I distinctly remember the feeling of sheer terror in the pit of my guts. My brain was registering images in a slow motion. I thought about nothing, I felt absolutely nothing except a huge knot in my guts. My entire being was engulfed into my guts. I don’t even think that I took one single breath.

I didn’t die (obviously), and managed to crawl out of the car and pull myself to safety. Only then did I go through every symptom and emotion anyone confronted with terror has ever experienced: the breathlessness, the heart pounding so hard that it feels like exploding, the cotton legs, the hysteria and, gradually, the focused fears and the bursting into tears. Oh my God! I almost died! The car! What about the car! And Paul! What is Paul going to say? And cramps in my belly. Horrible cramps the likes of which I had never felt. Eventually, a trooper stopped by, asked me a couple of questions and radioed for help. The EMTs came and checked me out. No broken bone, no blood anywhere, no evidence of internal injury. Before declaring me good to go, they asked me a weird question: did I want to go to the bathroom? Nope, I didn’t. Good. Well, I was going to be pretty sore for several days. If I felt or saw anything strange happening, I should go to the ER. And by the way, it is not unusual to come down with diarrhea after a major trauma. So, don’t worry if that happens.

Sure enough, for several days afterwards, I was sore. I also experienced the worst diarrhea of my entire life. Over time, given my reckless lifestyle in those “good old days”, I had a few other close calls and opportunities to experience again sheer terror with resulting diarrhea. Every time, I distinctly felt it in the pit of my guts. As I was getting well acquainted with fear, something started to recur frequently: suddenly and out of nowhere, I would feel surges of fear accompanied with knots in the guts. And I started worrying. My mind would think about scary eventualities such as being assaulted while out in the middle of the night and, immediately, I would feel the knots. Sometimes, I felt the knots firsts and scary thoughts would then enter my mind. Both were completely intertwined and one never happened without the other. The point of this lengthy story is that, in my experience, fear and guts are intimately connected.

I learned to live with those sinister and paralyzing “What ifs…” that linger and poison the mind and with the knots. I have the feeling that, even though I never had digestive problems, the constant stress in my abdomen wrecked havoc in my body. The numerous parasites I harbored probably finished the job. None of it though was enough of a deterrent for me to reconsider the value (or lack thereof) of my reckless ways until they finally got the best of me and progressively reduced me to the shadow of a human being I had become until I discovered DrNatura.

Since I had never had any problem with the functioning of my guts, I never really gave them much thought either until then. And to be frank, I had almost forgotten the car accident, the memory of it tucked away in the very back of my mind. I started the Colonix program for reasons completely unrelated to the colon. (I wrote about the experience in My story and About me). Again, I didn’t make any connection between the guts and fear until several months after I finished the program, when I realized that I was no longer afraid of certain situations previously frightening and paralyzing for me. In fact, I also realized that I felt no fear in situations where one is expected to feel some, like being over $250,000 in debt with no regular income and only a few bucks ahead of me, for example… or breaking a fight between large dogs (mine can be aggressive at times and he and I are still figuring out the Alpha thing). Colonix and Toxinout helped me recover my fearlessness!

I love doing research. One of these days, sooner than later, Providence will have to send me a paying job that allows me to do a lot of research. I won’t worry about it, though: I no longer know how. Anyway, inquisitive mind went to work to find whether some correlation existed between fear and the guts.

Here is what I discovered: many cultures much more ancient than ours, like the Orientals or the Greeks, placed the center of the emotions in the gut rather than in the heart, as we, Occidentals, do. The heart pounds hard as a result but the emotion itself originates in the belly. In turn, the mind tries to make sense of the emotions by superimposing specific thoughts to the sensation. Pleasant thoughts when we are in love. Scary thoughts when we are fearful. Thoughts of revenge when we are angry, etc.

In fact, even among scientists, there seem to be two schools of thoughts about the origin of our emotions. And in our language, we talk about “gut feelings” and “gut reaction”. Someone courageous is said to be “gutsy” or to have “guts” and, when we are absolutely convinced of the validity of our beliefs, we commonly declare to know them to be true “in the pit of our guts”.

I found several honorable sites mentioning the guts at the center of the emotions or, at the very least, playing an intrinsic part in their manifestation. I also read several articles on the research done by Drs. William James and Carl Lange, PhD., who theorized that [the conscious experience emotion was dependent on the perception of body reactions and that sensory feedback from the viscera (organs) –that is, feedback regarding the visceral changes themselves- accounts for the quality of emotional experiences… our feeling of fear owes much to our pounding heart and the “butterflies” in our stomach and we grieve because we cry and not the other way around.]

In other words, our body governs our mind and emotions. This theory is echoed by Dr. Jesse Prinz, PhD in his book: Gut Reactions

It is unclear to me to which extent emotions govern the body reaction and vice versa and I don’t purport to clarify it, which would be preposterous on my part. The mere fact that scientists are recognizing the existence of a correlation, however, should be enough for anyone emotionally wounded to want to pursue the idea of a cleanse as the starting point of his/her quest toward wellness. It probably doesn’t really matter if the chicken or the egg came first, i.e., mind over body or body over mind. What matters is that they are intertwined and interdependent.

So, the way I look at it is, if our emotional health can be greatly improved by a $325.00, 90-day risk-free body cleanse and detoxification instead of a $10,000.00, five-year, drawn out psychotherapy, that should be a no-brainer…

By the way, I have a theory to explain why westerners have decided to make the heart the center of the emotions. Can you, for one second, imagine the Valentines?

Christine
CBrightlife@aol.com