KNOW YOUR DIGESTIVE SYSTEM
Ingestion is a metaphor for taking into ourselves, for receiving, for actively absorbing the world around us both good and bad, for feasting on perceptions. There are so many expressions about eating.
We eat our words.
We eat our hearts out,
eat humble pie,
eat crow, eat dirt.
Someone is eating out of our hand.
We eat and run,
eat to live or live to eat,
bite off more than we can chew.
Things eat away at us.
I am eaten up by the news, by guilt.
Ingesting we make decisions about what comes in
and what does not.
Does eating start with the rising of desire, with smell or sight, with the feeling of hunger or emptiness? Does it start with a feeling or is it about a time of day? What is nourishing? How do I nourish myself? What do I want to take in or keep out?
How do I swallow? Can I feel the lifting of the back of the tongue and the settling of the epiglottis, the passage in the esophagus through the mediastinum and the turn through the diaphragm and into the stomach? Can I listen to the stories in my teeth and my tongue, in my jaw as I chew?
And when I find my stomach under my left front ribs how do I break down what I swallowed.
This is an image of the relationships of the pancreas. The liver is the brownish large shape at the top coming over from under your lower right ribs. (The image is of the insides of a person standing looking at you -so the reverse of how you feel it under your hands) The little bright green shape peeking out from under the liver is the gall bladder. (Bile inside the gall bladder is a bright yellow green color.) The transparent shape in front of the yellow pancreas is the stomach. Transparent just so you can see the pancreas, it’s head snuggled into the duodenum (beginning of the small intestine) and going diagonally back so that it’s tail touches the purple spleen. In front partially covering the lower pancreas is the transverse part of the large intestine and below is more small intestine.
As I enter my small intestines how am I processing this material? How do I sort it out? When is it good enough to move on? What do I need to store for later? What and where are all these organs and can I feel the emotional tones and sounds of my stomach, my liver, my gall bladder, my pancreas? How does the middle layer support my existence, my movement, my being in the world? And the side trip into the kidneys who snuggle up from behind, but don’t belong to the tube and to the spleen so patient and settled in the back. How do they relate to the digestive system?
As we enter into the last part of the small intestine and pass through into the large intestine digestion is mostly over and the particles of nutrients can pass through the lining of the gut tube into the bloodstream and eventually to all the cells of your body. Waste is sorted out.
Water is resorbed.
How do I receive and use resources? What do I keep and what do I let go of?
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
What is my process of expressing what I have digested or that is still undigested? I experience the journey through the small and large intestines as a river becoming a stream becoming a marsh which eventually dries. What is this seeping away of the waters, the journey through the membranes, the knowing where to go? How do I experience the timing, the weight, the decisions of the intestines?