Discovering the ‘abdominal brain’: on the early path to overcoming my colitis
The softest things in the world overcome
the hardest things in the world.
Lao Tzu, Tao-te Ching, 43
While in McMaster in late winter 2003, trying to recover or rather to regain physical equilibrium in my body despite the intervention of several specialists, I had hours and days to spare. Having Ulcerative Colitis was a distraction, albeit an occupation in some sense but I was still able to have some pleasant and humorous chats with my roommate, the giant Arthur with the Johnny Cash voice and shock of white hair.
I also had with me my small collection of books I had brought along to the hospital.
In tow was The Bible, the New International Version, along with a translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and a university library copy of a book entitled The Future of Healing.
While The Bible proved heavy and foreboding with its sections on judgement (and sometimes attracting a vehement nurse who would preach to me during visits) and with Solzhenitsyn’s work too close to home in its depiction of the suffering of cancer patients — it held it up as an uncanny mirror of pain and misery I could no longer look into — I explored the last tome.
Written by Micheal P. Milburn, Ph.D., a Canadian biophysicist with special interests in acupressure, Chinese nutrition and qi gong, I had found the academic material the week previous to my admittance to the hospital. In the time of my devastating intestinal blockage (the reason I eventually sought out McMaster) I suffered through my days while attempting to maintain the norm, a status quo of fulfilling my school work and doing part-time shifts at a bookstore. One afternoon, while in the library of my local university, doing research on a future paper for my Chinese Philosophy class, I stumbled across Milburn’s book. I checked it out on a whim, thinking of discussing and comparing the idea of Chinese medicine with that of Taoism, an ancient Chinese philosophy or rather, approach to life.
This book would turn out to be more than just an intended research accessory in a term paper I would never write.
The book began with a touching story about a couple seeking to have a baby. After struggling to conceive, struggling to find a solution through western medical intervention, Karl and Diane eventually turned to a Chinese medicine specialist and within the year they became pregnant and later had a child.
In the first chapter following, I then read Milburn describing the ancient and alternative approach to healing: the system of Chinese medicine emerges from a self-consistent and holistic conceptual framework in which the human mind-body system is viewed in relation to the cosmological whole. We are part of a great Unity, a Universal Pattern, the Tao. Our health is depending on maintaining harmony and balance in the midst of inexorable change. By understanding the Way, the true nature of this change, the Tao manifests in each moment, our path to health becomes spontaneous and natural (p.58).
I had previously read Dr. Andrew Weil’s book, Spontaneous Healing and believed in the concept of healing through an unplanned, impromptu paradigm shift in the mind or body. Whatever came first, I hoped.
Yet reading Milburn, I started to once again think in terms of the mind-as-body, the body-as-mind. Long before McMaster, I had seen a naturopath who once asked me why I felt I could control everything with my mind alone. He told me my body, especially my gut, was giving a message. ‘What’s my fire?’
He suggested to me that emotional imbalance played a key factor in much of my suffering and that fire could be associated with ‘anger’ and ‘rage’. What disturbed me emotionally? I didn’t know, I told him. There was something deep in my lower intestine that irked, that suffered. What was it?
He also explained that the ‘itis’ in colitis stemmed from the Greek and Latin suffix meaning ‘inflammation’. When we are angry, he summarized, we become inflamed.
With Milburn, I was discovering an approach to compliment that of my sessions with naturopath. While resting in my hospital bed I found myself devouring chapters on the mind and body, the art of preventive medicine, acupuncture and the concept of creating balance in the mind-body.
Soon enough I stumbled across something mind-changing in chapter 7 of Milburn’s book, entitled ‘The Mysterious Link Between Mind and Body: Holistic Health East and West’. Here the author provided a diagram of the human digestive system showing ‘anxiety’ over the top of the bowel, ‘anger’ and ‘worry’ on the upper right and left side, ‘sadness’ on the lower left and right and fear towards the bottom.
In my journal at the time I sketched it out and studied it. Milburn quoting Taoist master Mantak Chia provided a further explanation: “The small intestine is in charge of digesting emotions and food. Different contractions of this intestine correspond to undigested emotions. In Chinese medicine it is called the ‘abdominal brain.’ All the negative emotions are expressed in the small intestine by contraction and circumvolutions. Anger contracts the right side of the intestine near the liver. Worry affects the upper left side near the spleen. Impatience and anxiety affect the top. Sadness affects both lower lateral sides. Fear affects the deeper and lower abdominal areas.” (p. 259)
From my session with the naturopath to Milburn’s book, I felt there was something here and it only became more apparent when I spoke to a visiting friend.
Daniel and his wife arrived at my hospital bed on my second Saturday of my stay in McMaster. Daniel had been up to see me the week before but this time with his wife, they started to talk about Daniel’s sister, Jess. I knew Jess was in remission from Crohn’s Disease. I had seen her at Daniel’s church two Sundays previous where she looked quite healthy, the brunette beaming with a stable, slender and graceful beauty.
What I learned is this stability came at a cost. The year before, she went through a near-unrelenting hell within her own body. She too had been at McMaster and after the medicine failed to bring her into a drug-induced remission, she went under the knife. Eriksson, her specialist (and later mine) surgically removed a patch of her small intestine. Following the procedure, Jess spent her time at home, being fed through a tube until her intestine slowly recovered.
What I asked Daniel and his wife is how exactly did Jess’ Crohn’s start? Did her irritable bowel disease manifest itself as a bacterial infection as it did for me?
Moreover: were there any supposed warning signs? Did she lose weight gradually? Was there blood early on in her stools? Something wrong with her diet?
Daniel shook his head. Barb said none of the above. Nothing like that, Daniel continued. In fact the only thing of significance that happened before his sister became ill was a hit and run accident that nearly killed their grandmother. Jess, perhaps the most attached and closest of grandchildren had been deeply affected but didn’t cry. Two weeks following the incident, Jess started to bleed internally. Within a month, she had lost thirty pounds and her parents, out of desperation took her to McMaster.
This fascinated me and after my visit I consulted Milburn’s book and my journal, my sketch of the ‘abdominal brain’. I shook my head. I tapped my pen against the page. There it was. There… in the small intestine, sadness. In her gut, in this low part of herself was a manifestation of repressed grief. This was inexorable evidence of the ‘abdominal brain’s’ at a time of imbalance.
Jess for some reason in her mind and heart had foregone this emotional release. The Crohn’s Disease interpreted through the lens of the naturopath, through Eastern Philosophy and Medicine and in Milburn’s book meant dis-ease in the spiritual and holistic approach to interpreting the etymology of illness.
Millburn’s book, as it turned out was a beginning, a helpful and healthy encounter that greatly influenced my decision not to get surgery but to discharge myself and discover a way of understanding my emotions and relieving/overcoming the symptoms of Ulcerative Colitis. I had to regard what was deepest inside, this lower part of my body as a powerful expression of something that had yet to be expressed. It was the stepping stone that led me into a new, unexplored and eventually healing direction.
