Remember when you were 3 months old and your parents placed you on your tummy so you could attempt to roll over? Perhaps you don’t remember it, but you and your tummy were building a connection that would last a lifetime.

There you were lying like a beached whale on your fuzzy little blanket, checking out a shiny primary-colored plastic toy, half cognizant of the audience of adults cheering you on, “Roll over! Go for it!”

With every wriggle from side to side in an attempt to get out of that mess, your core muscles were getting stronger and your organs were getting a little massage. It probably helped relieve those gas pains that had kept you and a parent up at 4am.

Fast forward to adulthood. Hopefully, you and your tummy are on good terms. Maybe you still wriggle around on the floor sometimes? Or at least you do some self-massage after Thanksgiving dinner. But when is the last time you really checked in with it, on either a physical or emotional level? You know the old adages:

“Trust your gut”,

“I can feel it in my gut” or

“I have butterflies in my stomach”?

These all go to show we have an innate intuition deep in our core about things. I would venture to say that when we keep an open conversation going between these gut feelings and the rest of us, those “things” go a lot smoother.  Smooth moves in the gut are a bonus as well!

I love doing belly massage. Sometimes people ask me what is my favorite part of the body to massage. It changes from time to time, but the belly is always a top fave.

I’ve come to see that many people would rather ignore their own bellies; they see them as a nuisance, something to get around, push out of the way, or cinch up.  But as one of my clients has put it whenever I work on his, “It feels like you are looking under the hood of the car.”  There’s a lot of vital stuff in there!

 

You may ask, “Why are you calling it the ‘tummy’ and ‘belly’ like you’re talking to a four-year-old?” This is the way my awesome visceral manipulation teachers talk about it, and so I do too. You can call it the abdomen, the guts, the tummy, or the belly, but try not to call all this stuff your “stomach”. Your stomach is actually just a single organ nestled in with the rest.

So what else is in there? Underneath all the soft tissue of our abdominal muscles are all the vital organs of our digestive system.

Abdominal Muscles

• External and Internal Intercostals
• Diaphragm
• External and Internal Obliques
• Transversus Abdominis
• Rectus Abdominis
• Quadratus Lumborum
• Iliopsoas (Psoas Major and Iliacus)
• Psoas Minor — This is absent in about 40% of people!

Abdominal Viscera

• Lower Esophageal Sphincter
• Stomach
• Large Intestine
• Small Intestine
• Gall Bladder
• Liver
• Spleen
• Pancreas
• Kidneys
• Bladder
• Rectum

 

Why get a belly massage?

• Feel lighter and longer in the trunk.
• Move with a better sense of moving from your core.
• Feel more awareness of the entire breath cycle in the whole abdominal cavity.
• Relieve gas, bloating pains, and indigestion.
• Relieve hidden stress.
• Increase parasympathetic response (rest and digest) vs sympathetic response (fight or flight).

Our digestive health is interrelated to our nervous system in that sympathetic (fight or flight) vs parasympathetic states (rest and digest), are expressed through smooth muscle contraction at every stage of our digestive tract from the esophogus to the anus.

When we are stressed, the smooth muscle is tight and constricted; all sphincters are in lockdown mode because evolutionary speaking, we don’t need to go to the bathroom when we’re running from a tiger.

When we are relaxed, the smooth muscle tissue relaxes and contracts and relaxes, creating a natural peristalsis (like a snake eating a mouse), and moving food through the system with optimal absorption and digestion.

Smooth muscle contraction is also stimulated by direct pressure, meaning we can manipulate the tissue into peristalsis even if the rest of us is still a little stressed.  And since the abdominal viscera is most innervated tissue in the body, we can flood the brain and spinal cord with good anti-stress hormones when we relax the belly and thus relaxing the rest of us.

What a groovy relationship. Yeah, baby!