Our Gut Feelings Are Not Luxuries | Gabor Maté, MD

From Sustainable Human: Our gut feelings tell is what is right and what is wrong, what is safe and what is dangerous, and what is true and what is false.

From Sustainable Human: “Alienation is a separation. Being a stranger to something. You’re an alien to something. There are four alienations in this culture.

One is we are alienated from Nature . . .

The second alienation is from other people . . .

We are alienated from our work . . .

And finally and most importantly, we become alienated from ourselves. Let me ask you a question. How many of you have had the following experience? You had a powerful gut feeling about something, you didn’t pay attention to it, and you were sorry afterwards?

Well you know what you are telling me? You are telling me that at some point in your childhood, you got separated from yourself. Because no infant is born without gut feelings. Infants are totally connected to their gut feelings. Have you ever met a 2-day old that didn’t know how to express their gut feelings?

And that means in this culture, something very powerful happens to alienate you from your true self . . . your parents were too stressed themselves to honor and recognize who you really were. And then we become alienated from ourselves. We shut down our gut feelings.

And our gut feelings are not luxuries, you know. They tell is what is right and what is wrong. They tell us what is safe and what is dangerous. And they tell us what is true and what is false. So when we are alienated from our gut feelings, we no longer have a sense of reality, nor a sense of truth.”

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