From the Author We wrote this book as a narrative of the maturation of the sciences (Psychology and Neurology) and using our combined experiences, all of which started to take form in the 1960s with the unrest of youth over the Vietnam war--the era of "give peace and love a chance". In the 1970s, we were involved in a college occupational and academic counseling-teaching assignment, dealing with the aftermath of the previous era of changes in society and integration of the Black and White cultures. Having no effective references with which to work, we used a personality inventory (Myers Briggs Type Indicator), based on the theories of Dr. Carl Jung. Experience with groups and individuals soon allowed feelings of the students involved to surface at a variety of levels, which were centered on personal disturbances of their pasts and were not defined by the inventory. Hours of study of what we were learning from students, suggested that we were tapping into genuine universal instinctive feeling intelligence, primarily focused in the gut area of the body. It was at that time that we first developed the Somatic Reflection Process to assist people in accessing their gut feeling memory and gut intelligence. It was also then that we wrote a text for our classes about the gut instinctive responses that we were discovering with people we were working with in career exploration and much of that material has been included in this book.Since our initial years of working together at Santa Fe College, we both have continued to work and study in the field of psychology and education, as well as to keep up a correspondence comparing notes on our subsequent work in education. In 2005, Martha received her second MA in Depth Psychology and continued her study of the gut instinctive response in a research study at Sonoma State University. Bob continued to work in the educational field as a counselor and college teacher and then as an administrator in a privately funded experimental high school near Gainesville, Florida. With the new medical breakthroughs on gut intelligence, we decided to compile our lives' work in a book and share it with the medical and psychological community as well as the general public. What's Behind Your Belly Button? explains what your gut feelings are actually capable of telling you about your inner instinctive needs, how to listen to the voice of your gut, and how to use both of your brains--head and gut--to work together for your optimal health and wellness. We have included in this book a complete protocol for the Somatic Reflection Process on gut feelings that we developed to be used with both individuals and in groups. It is our hope that readers will find using this protocol useful in exploring gut intelligence and in uniting the two brains--gut and head--for developing higher intuitive intelligence. Read more
