#47 - Your Belly is AWESOME: How to Stop Hating It

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Your belly can hold a lot: hunger, gut feelings, stress, tenderness, and the stories we’ve learned about our bodies. It’s also a part of how you experience stress, desire, nourishment, vulnerability, and emotion. 

Kelly and Nyssa explore the gut-brain connection, body image and cultural pressure, and how stress can affect digestion, including experiences like IBS. They also discuss traditional Chinese medicine’s view of the stomach and spleen, the body’s stress response, and the simple practice of relaxed diaphragmatic (belly) breathing. 

Along the way, they invite listeners to get curious about what they feel in their bodies, soften their breath, and treat their bellies with a little more kindness.

Main Topics

  • Why the belly can feel like a meeting place for desire, intuition, and emotion

  • Body image and the cultural pressure to keep your belly small

  • The gut-brain connection and how stress may affect digestion

  • The body’s fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses

  • Belly breathing and the parasympathetic nervous system

  • Traditional Chinese medicine’s ideas about the stomach, spleen, and nourishment

  • Supporting others without neglecting your own needs

  • Meditation, body awareness, and learning to soften the belly

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