Listening to Your Gut and Heart

Hay House Radio Episode Recap

  • Episode Name: “Listening to Your Gut and Heart”
  • Live Broadcast: April 23rd, 2019 at 12:00 pm Pacific Time
Episode Replays: Tuesdays at 9:00 pm Pacific Time / 12:00 am Eastern Time | Saturdays at 4:00 pm Pacific Time / 7:00 pm Eastern Time | Sundays at 2:00 pm Pacific Time / 5:00 pm Eastern Time

Episode Summary Re-cap

Follow your body’s subtle energy flows to discover the answer to Who am I
In the third show of our “follow the energy” series, Chinese medicine expert, Lorie Dechar joins Heather to reveal how to listen to the subtle messages of your body, including your heart and gut. Find out why your heart has 3 internal guides to support it, how critical your small intestine is when it comes to “listening” and how to engage in full body listening. You will learn important techniques in Chinese medicine to follow your body’s subtle energy flows to discover the answer to Who am I Lorie will also teach how to separate pure from impure and stay true to your values. Today, you’ll learn to open the “ears of your heart.”

Special Guest: Lorie Dechar

Lorie Eve Dechar is the author of Five Spirits: Alchemical Acupuncture for Psychological and Spiritual Healing. She has practiced acupuncture since 1985. For the past fifteen years, her focus has been on psycho-spiritual healing and personal transformation. Her medicine begins with the Taoist understanding that true health depends on our knowing our authentic life purpose and living in harmony with the wisdom of Nature. Lorie was a senior faculty member at the Tri-State College of Acupuncture in New York City for over a decade, is a co-founder of the Alchemical Healing Mentorship program and presents her work internationally at schools, conferences and retreat centers.

Lorie has two new books coming out in 2020. Alchemical Healing: A Medicine for the Soul of Our Time (Red Wheel Weiser), which she’s writing with her husband, Benjamin Fox, is on alchemy as a path to personal and planetary healing. And, Kigo: Exploring the Spiritual Essence of Acupuncture Points Through the Changing Seasons (Singing Dragon).

Her current neidan is learning to stay grounded while in flight, making technology her teacher and listening on a daily basis to the song of her own heart.

Website | Facebook | A New Possibility Facebook | Instagram

The Organs from an Eastern and Western Medicine Perspective

From a Western perspective, the organs (e.g., your heart, liver, lungs, etc.) are seen as physical structures responsible for certain functions in your body. In Chinese medicine, however, organs are not just physical, they are where the soul and spirit reside within us.

“When we talk of organs,” Lorie Dechar says, “we’re talking about a place or residence of intelligence, wisdom, and spirit with specific jobs and personalities.

The Chinese understood that the physical body was a spiritual vessel.

The Heart is the Monarch in the Kingdom of Your Body

In Chinese medicine, a thousands-of-years-old wellness system, all organs are called ministers. Officially, there are 12 ministers, including your heart. Lorie asks us to picture the 12 ministers sitting around a conference table like board members of an important organization. In order for the organization to be a success, each of the ministers needs to listen to each other, care about each other, and work together.

“That’s health,” Lorie revealed.

All organs have 2 ministers, except for your heart, which has 3 ministers. Your heart is the monarch of the kingdom of the body, soul, emotions, mental state, and spirit. Your heart regulates your body’s rhythms and blood flow. It never rests, from the time it begins at conception until to your last breath. And it takes charge effortlessly, personifying the principle of wu wei – doing without doing.

“Imagine an open bowl with a speck in the middle, sort of like a hollow nest in the center of your being. This is how the Chinese see your heart: a hollow nest that is open at the top, so that a speck of starlight can drop into each of us and guide our lives,” Lorie said.

Your Heart Guides you to Follow the Energy of Inspiration

Following your heart is like following that spark – that feeling deep within to move toward your desires. Flowing through your heart is not just your blood, it’s also your spirit, so it’s where you feel your connection to destiny.

We all have sparks of inspiration. In Chinese medicine, shen is said to reside within that empty nest of your heart. Lorie describes shen as “the seed mantra ‘I am,’ which is the initiatory spark of human self-awareness. It is pure potentiality.”

When you follow your heart, moving toward joy, awareness, inspiration, and light, you are following shen. Shen gives us our heavenly mandate, the guiding light to our individual destiny, Lorie explains.

As I announced my plans to end my Hay House Radio show to pursue a dream of moving to Thailand and studying ancient Thai medicine practices, Lorie described this as following the light of shen. When you do this, you often have to close some doors (even the ones you perceive as good!) in order to open new ones.

If we have that spark – that light of shen – and tell ourselves no, it’s the basis of psychoemotional issues or chronic health issues.

Not listening to your heart’s voice can present you with emotional challenges, like anxiety, depression, and overwhelm. At the same time, Lorie says, this can be a doorway to your healing.

Symptoms are opportunities to ask yourself: “Why does my life feel meaningless? Why am I feeling confused?”

In fact, symptoms are your mind, body, and spirit calling you to find and tend to that light within your heart, to find the people to support you on the path to your destiny.

How the Three Ministers Support Your Hearth

In order for your heart to do its job effortlessly, it is supported by three ministers:

#1 – Triple Heater

The triple heater manages the drawbridge to the kingdom of your heart. It scans the outside, notices what’s coming in and asks, “What do we need? How do I bring my light into the world and how should it be managed?”

#2 – Pericardium

This minister decides who gets to be intimate with you, who you bring into your inner circle. Think about information, nutrients, and energy coming over the drawbridge (triple heater). The pericardium is a permeable membrane which decides who goes out and who comes in.

#3 – Small Intestine

Your small intestine is the sorting minister. Imagine you are walking into the kingdom and moving toward the center of the monarch’s throne. Everyone wants access to the monarch, sending letters, e-mails, newsreels, communications…everything from the outside wants the heart’s attention. So that it’s not bombarded with too much stimulus, your detail-oriented small intestine sorts through every single thing, determining which is essential for the monarch’s attention, discarding the rest.

The small intestine’s job is to sort the pure from the impure. Problems arise when we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed with too much stimulus – food and other input – and don’t make space to learn to listen to the small intestine. Since this is not uncommon in today’s modern life, it’s no surprise so many people have health issues like leaky gut (permeable small intestine).

Listening to Your Small Intestine Has Big Benefits

The job of your small intestine is to sort through all the requests to talk to the monarch, your heart. It is the sorter of the pure from the impure, so it must have great discernment.

From the Western medicine perspective, we see much agreement in this description. The small intestine is between 9 to 30 feet long and a complex filtration system with tiny fingers called villi, which are constantly checking and discerning whether or not the matter that enters is something your body needs to assimilate or eliminate through the large intestine as unusable or toxic.

The villi in your small intestine are protrusions that together make up 90,000 square feet of information processing. This is a brain that is always active inside of us. It also supports your immunity, whose job is to discern self from other – so it’s also got the job of identifying “this is me, this is not me.” Or, this is good for me and this is what I need to get rid of.

Chinese medicine adds, from the Taoist perspective, that the small intestine is not simply digesting and assimilating food, it’s valuing, discerning, digesting and assimilating everything we take in. As Louise Hay always asked: “How are you digesting life?”

All potential nutrition for the body, mind, spirit, and heart is going through the small intestine. This minister is so committed to its job that it will do everything it can to give you the information you need to have clarity about who you are and what you came here to do.

Lorie’s Tips for Listening to Your Body

Tip #1 – Restore the Flow of Life

Qi or chi has often been described as energy in Chinese medicine. Lorie likes to describe it as the breath of life. The Chinese character for chi is a grain of rice (a sacred food in China) with vapors coming off of it.

“Think of chi as the force of life released and passing through us,” Lorie says. “It arises from the harmonizing of the yin and yang forces of the cosmos – what gives us life.”

Chinese medicine is about harmonizing the free flow of chi. It is said that where there is free flow, there is no pain and where there is pain, there is no free flow.

A way to restore the flow is to access the places where life force gathers in your body. The Chinese identified lines of flow – meridians that can be envisioned as rivers or streams of chi or energy flowing within your body. Each meridian runs through some of the organs. This is also related to the chakra system.

We have a tendency for chi to accumulate in those points.

Let’s try one!

Go to the V between your pointer finger and thumb. As you run your finger in the V, you’ll find the dip where your finger snuggles right in. This is an acupuncture point for your large intestine meridian. By touching the point lightly, you can move chi.

You can work with an acupuncturist to help identify areas of stuck chi so that you can restore the flow of energy in your body, mind, and spirit.

Tip #2 – Practice the Powerful Inner Smile

Place your hands on your heart and smile gently. Feel the joy, happiness, and peace of that smile feeling. Bring it into your body and let it radiate into your heart. Gather the loving energy from your heart and send it to an area of your body where you have symptoms or where you want to soothe emotions. Move the smiling energy throughout your body. Feel it wash over you. You can find many guided inner smile meditations online as well.

Tip #3  – Learn to Chat with Your Body

Take time to ask your body what it needs. “What do you want me to know?” If you have symptoms, your body is trying to communicate with you. Often, you can receive intuition, signs, or signals about the messages your body wants you to know about who you are and what you came here to do. This is where you can learn so much about the energy that wants to flow through you…your destiny.

Tip #4 – Take time for Soothing Silence

Asking your body questions is important and listening for the answers is just as critical. Remember the small intestine is working hard to sort through “this is me vs. this is not me.” Spending time in silence removes the stimulus, so you can actually deeply listen to what your body and heart want you to know.

Tip #5 – Once You Hear the Messages of Your Body and Heart, Take Actions for Your Self Care

If you continue to bombard your body with inputs that are not supportive of your wellbeing (e.g., processed foods, toxic relationships, overworking, saying yes when you want to say no, etc.), you continue to block the flow of chi. Sometimes, the messages you hear from your body and heart are scary. Learning to trust the path to your destiny – what you came here to do – is part of the journey of healing. Taking small self-care actions is a gentle way to develop trust in yourself for the next step in your journey.

Tip #6 – The Healing Journey is Not a Straight Line, Honor the Journey

Healing doesn’t mean you’re done and nothing else happens. Throughout life, you may find you heal and then another symptom comes up. Remember what this means! Symptoms are an invitation to walk through a new doorway that’s important in your destiny. Your body is always guiding you toward what you came here to do. First, remind yourself that symptoms are not scary, they are invitations. Then go through each of these tips as a way to discern what wants to be processed and what wants to be released so your chi can flow.

Learn to open yourself to the flow of energy in your life with these two Energy Medicine events!

Free Online Event
The Energy Medicine & Healing Summit
April 22-26, 2019

I’m honored to be among more than 35 of today’s highly sought-after teachers, doctors and healers — including Dr. Judith Orloff, Gregg Braden, Donna Eden, Bruce Lipton, Peng, Wendy De Rosa, Lee Harris, Dr. Sue Morter, Anodea Judith, Daisy Lee, Dawson Church, and others — bringing to light the curative and evolutionary powers of a wide range of proven energy practices!

During this groundbreaking 5-day event, you’ll discover:

  • Ways that spiritual practice can create a haven amidst chaos and adversity — an internal place to find stillness before responding to challenging situations
  • The role energy plays in the connection between mind and body… and why it’s the essential key to healing and living in balance
  • How to improve your vision with Chinese Reflexology
  • Qigong — an ancient healing tool for modern times
  • Leading-edge research about how your mind can shape your destiny
  • Meaningful grounding practices to address your physical, mental, and emotional needs
  • An understanding about how your thoughts hold the power to immediately impact your physical body
  • That coherence between the heart and brain can move you out of trauma
  • Methods for diagnosing excessive or deficient energy in the chakras
  • Scientific research showing how you can create a long-lasting state of bliss, passion, energy, and health
  • Profound practices based on Native American medicine and chakra clearing to remove ego, blockages, traumas, and burdens
  • And many other modalities, all for your own healing

Live Retreat in Rhinebeck, NY
October 4 – 6, 2019

Energy Medicine Weekend with Heather Dane, Donna Eden, David Feinstein, Dondi Dahlin, Sue Morter and Michael Hetherington

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This Was The Final Episode

I want to take a moment to thank all of you for being a part of my radio family for the over 3 years I’ve been on the air at Hay House Radio. You may know by now that I’m moving to Thailand next week and the time zone would make this show in the middle of the night. And you know what it’s like when you’re following a dream – sometimes, you have to close some really amazing doors to open the new ones up.

I am grateful also for my Hay House family and most especially, my Hay House Radio team. They have been my rocks from the day I came on the air until today. They have huge hearts and care about quality content and a quality listening experience for all of you.

Thanks for listening!

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As a coach, writer and recovered former executive, I understand the challenges of creating a balanced, healthy lifestyle when over-scheduled. In my journey to radiant health, I created a whole health system of eating, exercise, renewal and recharging -- a roadmap toward health & vitality. I empower clients to create their own whole health systems, in their own unique ways. I have seen amazing results in working with my clients!