

The authors present this new image of human nature and the meaning of its understanding in making positive changes in our lives.

Over a period of 45 years, there has been a utilization of further graduate studies in Depth Psychology and Religious Education on the part of the authors, and giant steps forward in the fields of Neurology and Human Psychology, which help form a new more accurate image of human nature. They share a complete protocol and results of clinical research findings for the Somatic Reflection Process that they have created and used successfully, with themselves and hundreds of people, to assist the process of getting in touch with the voice of the gut and learning to follow its wisdom toward a healthy life-unifying the body-mind split in the individuation process. Lise Eliot who charts the development of children from conception through the first five years of life, recent research of their own in the Psychology Department at Sonoma State University, and their vast clinical experience, the authors have presented an interpretation of recent medical research into a Gut Psychology and a more accurate behavioral understanding of the Self and human nature than has previously been available. The authors carefully examined this material and accepted the research findings as pointing to the same universal feeling intelligence they experienced in counseling with hundreds of people.

Michael Gershon that identified the enteric nervous system as a center of feeling-intelligence in the gut, which he called the "Second Brain". In 1998, neurological research at Columbia University published the work of Dr. They explore how these two instinctive needs motivate nearly all our behaviors all through our lives and that the feeling memory of how well these needs are met from moment-to-moment may be accessed through somatic awareness of our gut feelings of empty and full by using the Somatic Reflection Process the authors have developed. The authors explore how gut feelings are like a gas gauge in our guts indicating through an emotional feeling of emptiness or fullness how well the two instinctive human needs for acceptance (attention from others) and of control of one's own responses (freedom) in our lives are being met and how our behavior attempts to keep these two instinctive needs in balance at all times. "Although numerous books and articles have recently talked about the gut instincts as valuable in giving us useful hunches in the decision-making process, "What's Behind Your Belly Button?" goes much further and explains how gut feelings not only have a psychological intelligence of their own, but are also understandably rational in their functioning.
