Dr Libby Weaver

When was the last time you stopped to take stock of your life – to consider whether the direction your life is going is the direction you would like it to go? The speed of everyday living can sometimes pick us up and carry us down the river. We get so absorbed in the day-to-day that we don’t realise the current has taken us in a different direction than perhaps we intended.

As children and young adults, we tend to dream big for ourselves. Then, perhaps due to adult life having more responsibilities than we anticipate in our youth, we don’t end up pursuing the things we wanted for ourselves back then. Or maybe we grow out of wanting to drive trains or be a ballerina. Or perhaps as we flow along with the current we discover an interest in numbers that we didn’t have in school or we fall in love and start a family and this changes our perspective on what we want for ourselves.

All of this is to say that, so long as you are happy it doesn’t matter what kind of life you lead or how different it is from the one you intended for yourself. Yet, if you feel in your heart that where you find yourself now is not where you want to be, then see this as a sign that you would benefit immensely from some change.

In the words of Mary Oliver: what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

While most of us can’t drop everything and travel the world to satisfy our burning wanderlust, move our family to another city on a whim or quit working completely—we tend to forget that we don’t have to make drastic changes to be rewarded with more excitement, contentedness or fulfillment in our lives. 

If you are feeling in your heart that you need a slight change in direction, here are three things that may help you to achieve the kind of life you want for yourself. 

1. Get clear on what you want

To be able to make effective change you must first understand what is driving your disharmony. Whatever it is that is a source of discontent for you, take pen and paper, sit down and really get clear on what is at the heart of it for you. For example, if your job doesn’t light you up and the working week is uninspiring, try to dig deep as to why. For example, is it the workplace culture or the work itself?

If the life that you want for yourself feels so far from where you are now, it can seem completely unachievable. This may lead you to feel stuck and you may even find yourself resentful because you feel powerless to change anything. So once you’re clear on what it is exactly that you want to change, work out how you can take small incremental steps to get where you want to be. Small change is much more sustainable than major change and since it’s unlikely you’re going to be able to drop everything and start again from scratch, little steps will feel much more manageable.

2. Quieten comparison

As the saying goes, comparison is the thief of joy. If you are caught up in comparing your life to those around you, you will only lose touch with whatever it is you truly want for yourself. And likely make yourself miserable in the process. Remember that you are probably comparing your entire life—the good, bad and ugly—with someone else’s highlights reel.

Try also to quell any worries about what others might think of you. There’s nothing to say that you can’t take a complete change in direction at any stage in your life. Age is only a barrier if you allow it to be. Rather than think about how old you are, consider how many years you have left to live and what you want them to be filled with. One, two, or three short years of hardship may be a small price to pay for another ten to twenty of comparative bliss.

3. Consider your perception

It is also important to consider whether your perception may be interfering with your happiness. When you want a certain coloured car of a specific make and model, you suddenly see those cars everywhere, don’t you? It’s not that all of a sudden there are more of them though. They have always been there. It is simply that now a part of your brain, called the reticular activating system, is primed to notice them.

If you were given a piece of white paper with a small black dot in the centre of the page and asked to write about what you saw, most people focus on the black dot. And that’s what we do with our lives—focus on the challenges and the disappointments—when these things are very small when compared to everything else that we have. Start to focus instead on the white space on the page—the joys, the possibilities, the opportunities—and notice how your perception of everything changes with it.

When we feel stuck or out of our depth, it’s a natural instinct to seek the wisdom of others who may have experience that we don’t have. And in some instances, this can be incredibly helpful.

Yet, for many, the tendency is to only seek external advice because they don’t trust or believe they have their own wisdom to guide them. This couldn’t be further from the truth. All of us may need a helping hand from time to time, yet there is no one who knows the inner workings of your mind and body better than you.

Here are four tips that will help you foster a deeper connection with your own inner wisdom.

1. Seek quiet solitude

The voice inside you that guides you is not always loud, in fact it’s often very quiet. So you will usually need to get quiet yourself to hear it. This means learning to turn the volume down on the other voices that vie for attention in your head as well as finding some quiet solitude where you are not meeting the demands of others. One of the best ways to get quiet is through meditation. This can be a more traditional practice or anything that helps to bring focus and stillness into your mind such as a peaceful walk in nature, knitting, drawing, journaling or gardening. Find a sliver of quiet solitude in your schedule as often as you can and notice how you begin to attune to your inner wisdom more regularly.

2. Journal

Too often we go around in circles because our head is so overcrowded with thoughts and worries and other people’s opinions. Journaling is a wonderful tool for helping you to get the stuff that crowds your head onto paper. It can be a fantastic act of self-reflection to bring to light patterns that you may otherwise not notice and it will help you to better connect with your own truth as you begin to lighten your load.

3. Pause and reflect

Often we feel the pressure to make a decision as quickly as possible. Maybe because there are other people who we feel are relying on us or maybe because the indecision makes us feel uncomfortable and no one likes sitting in discomfort. Sometimes your inner wisdom will push through forcefully and you’ll know in your heart which way to go instantly. Other times you will benefit from pausing and leaving some time for reflection before deciding. This will give you the opportunity to discern your inner wisdom from any other voices that cloud it.

4. Consider your nourishment

It’s very hard to know what works and doesn’t work for your body when you are eating predominantly processed foods. Low on nourishment and high on potentially problematic substances, over time a reliance on these foods will begin to take a toll on the body. Yet you may not realise what the problem is because symptoms creep up over time and it may be difficult to put your finger on the source. There is nothing on this planet that can replace a nourishing way of eating. Troubling or niggling symptoms of any kind are your body’s wisdom telling you that something needs to change. While sometimes you may need to go hunting to find the source, one of the best changes you can make to support yourself is to increase your intake of whole real foods and decrease your intake of processed foods. When you do this, you will clear the way for your body to communicate more effectively with you and guide you towards what works and what doesn’t work for you.  

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Learning to trust your inner wisdom is something that takes time—and to a certain degree some trial and error. As you begin to lean into it, be patient and gentle with yourself and recognise that just like training the body for improved fitness and strength takes time and practice, tuning in to your inner wisdom can too.

Many of us are taught that any ‘negative’ feeling is wrong. We aren’t taught this with actual words, but through observing how other people deal with these emotions when they come up, or how we ourselves are handled when these emotions come up for us. It happens when we’re feeling sad and a parent, with the best of intentions, offers us ice cream to make us feel better. Or when we get angry and our emotional outburst results in us getting disciplined. Or in later years when we break up with someone we love, and our friends tell us there’s plenty more fish in the sea.

Yet, emotions are a part of human existence. Sure, we may all feel things in different ways and to varying capacities, but we do all experience a full spectrum of emotions. When you don’t know how to sit with uncomfortable emotions, you are more likely to avoid them by numbing out with food, alcohol or other drugs, medications, brief sexual encounters or perhaps creating drama or stresses to focus on, to divert your attention and focus away from what you are feeling.

It may seem like letting yourself experience the full force of strong emotions will make you feel worse or perhaps add to your stress but in fact the opposite is true. Often we create more pain and heartache for ourselves when we engage in avoiding behaviours since we usually know in our heart that these things aren’t good for us and pile guilt and shame onto our emotional load. There is an immense freedom that comes with being brutally honest with ourselves about how we are feeling and acknowledging when there is sadness, grief, heartbreak, anger or rage. It’s also incredibly beneficial for deepening your self-awareness as recognising when things evoke your emotions enables you to reflect on who you are in your heart.

Here are a few tips to help you along the way.

“Name it to tame it”

In his book Mindsight, the wonderful Dr Daniel Siegel uses the phrase “name it to tame it”. In other words, by identifying our feelings—and separating ourselves from them (i.e. ‘I feel angry’ versus ‘I am angry’)—we reduce the power they have over us. The vast majority of people would describe themselves as stressed. I would argue that stress has become an acceptable umbrella term for all kinds of uncomfortable emotions. Yet, until you know what it is, you are powerless to change it.

Remind yourself that emotions come and go

Emotions are like the waves of the ocean—they ebb and flow. You are like the seabed that the waves wash over—ever present and enduring. Whatever the strong emotion is, it is transient. You will not feel it forever. Reminding yourself of this can make facing it that little less frightening.

Leave judgement at the door

When it comes to what you feel, there is no right or wrong so please try to keep your inner judge quiet when you reflect on your emotions. Instead, invite curiosity and ask yourself: I wonder what might be driving that feeling?

Recognise that the ‘why’ might come later

While in some circumstances, it might be blatantly obvious what has triggered your strong emotional response, in others, the reason may be more elusive. Just because you can’t put your finger on the reason doesn’t mean your feelings are any less valid. It may take days, months or even years for you to fully comprehend the ‘why’.

From pain we grow

Pain can offer us insight into what our Soul needs us to learn and can help form a solid foundation for a meaningful life. It can be worth doing our best to consider if we are living with the belief that what occurs TO us, or rather it happens FOR us—in order for us to be the most evolved expression of ourselves as possible.

It’s incredibly frustrating to feel as though you’re working against yourself. That no matter how hard you try, no matter what you learn, you somehow seem to end up sabotaging your own best efforts.

So why do we do what we do, when we know what we know? And why do we, at times, seemingly work against our own best interests?

There are many reasons but most often it comes down to what’s happening inside our mind.  

Here’s a useful way to think about our modern brain. We have two thought systems. You might like to think of them as old and new, or reptilian and adapted—for now, I will refer to them as Old Brain and New Brain. The former is rapid, emotional and intuitive (with ‘intuitive’ in this instance meaning a reactive, instantaneous processing that occurs based on prior experience – patterns and associations – about what kept us safe), while the latter is much slower, and able to apply logic, calculate and rationalise. The New Brain doesn’t automatically examine the Old Brain and understand why it does what it does. New Brain doesn’t usually even know that Old Brain has made a decision!

The Old Brain has a style of wiring that was laid down across the millions of years of our history to help us survive. That still runs much of the show today, whether we choose for this to be the case or not. This part of our brain and the thought system it generates is constantly alert to danger and is always scouting out for potential situations that may threaten our lives. Our New Brain can see and learn and understand how things have changed so rapidly. Yet, our Old Brain is busy creating meanings from the situations we are involved with in an attempt to keep us safe. The problem is, the meanings are made up. They’re not fact.

The lack of understanding between these two thought systems is a major driving force behind us being our own worst enemy. When so much of our behaviour and so many of our choices are made instantaneously by our Old Brain we need to actively employ New Brain to examine what Old Brain is doing. We have not yet evolved for them to find common ground or to start to rewire ourselves away from some of the outdated survival patterns.

Here are three ways to use your New Brain to stop being your own worst enemy.

1. Look to your past as an opportunity for growth

Too often we look upon what we perceive are our mistakes or difficulties we’ve faced and use them to judge and criticise ourselves or to cement a sense that life is unfair. This only perpetuates more judgement and more criticism and leads to us feeling even lousier about ourselves. Here’s the thing. All of us experience hardship in our lives, differing degrees, but hardship nonetheless. Most of it is out of our control. One thing that is in our control is how we respond to what has happened.

If there are things in your past that you feel ashamed of, or things in your past that have been difficult, instead of judging or blaming yourself or others, ask yourself these two questions:

1. If there were a gift in this situation, I wonder what that might be?
2. If there were an opportunity for me to grow from this situation, I wonder what that might be?

Leave judgement at the door and simply be curious about what you can glean from your past that may help your future to be more aligned with what you want. And remember: from pain we grow. Pain offers us insight into what our Soul needs us to learn and forms a solid foundation for a meaningful life.

2. Get familiar with your self-limiting beliefs

Your behaviour is the outer-most expression of your beliefs. The challenge is, most people aren’t taught to examine what they believe about themselves, what occurs in their lives, or their choices, and instead they just don’t really understand why they do what they do, even though they know what they know. Understanding that your mind creates meanings from what occurs every moment of every day, helps you to begin to unravel and gain deeper insights into your life and choices.

To become aware of your beliefs about yourself and the world—especially those that aren’t serving you—start paying attention to your thoughts. Your thoughts will be a reflection of what you believe, some more direct than others. I recently presented a TEDx talk on how our thoughts drive stress if you’d like to learn more about this.

3. Work on increasing your emotional intelligence (EQ)

Part of EQ is having an ability to recognise, observe and modulate your emotional response to what happens in your life and in your relationships. It’s not much fun walking around being triggered by every comment, action or situation; feeling sad, mad and hurt by more things than not. Contrary to what you may think, most of what we feel is driven by our beliefs and the meanings our Old Brain makes to keep us safe. It’s not the behaviour or actions of others or the curve balls life throws our way. It’s our response to those things. Creating some space between what we feel and how we react can help us to better understand what might be driving our emotions. That’s easier said than done sometimes, yet, with practise you will find it becomes much easier.

The next time you feel triggered, try to pause for a moment and reflect on what might be at the heart of it. If someone else is involved perhaps ask them what motivated them to behave or act in the way that they did. It might be for an entirely different reason than you perceived. Also ask yourself what meaning you made from what happened. Is that story true or based on past associations that may not be true in this instance? With a deeper understanding you will find you are better able to respond with consideration rather than reacting based on the meaning you created.

Some people love a good goal to strive towards and the promise of the achievement itself is enough motivation to keep them going. Yet, not everyone finds it easy to stick to their goals. Others don’t like goals and prefer to simply have a sense of the direction they’re headed. This might be based on their values, for example.

Over the years I’ve had many clients tell me that they lack ‘discipline’ because they set themselves goals or intentions that they don’t keep. Most of the time I’ve found it’s not about discipline at all. More often than not, it’s that the person (unconsciously) links more benefits than drawbacks to continuing the way they have been (perhaps after a brief time of making alternative choices in the direction of the goal). Or it’s that the goals that people set for themselves stem from a place of judgement and criticism, or there is a sense of deprivation or punishment around the goal. None of these situations is likely to lead to the result we seek.

If setting goals doesn’t light you up, it’s not the only way to achieve change so don’t feel like you need to do it. Yet if it is something that works for you and you just need a little guidance around how to be effective, here are four key ways to support you in sticking to the goals you set.

1. Start with small achievable steps

If you want to climb Mount Everest, you don’t just fly to the Himalayas and give it a crack. You train for months—years even—starting with small achievable mountains that incrementally get more challenging as your ability and confidence grows. Too often we set ourselves up to fail by not planning out how we are going to achieve our goal. We just expect ourselves to make radical changes that are often unrealistic to achieve in our lives.

Planning is an important part of goal setting, as is breaking the goal down into achievable chunks. Let’s say, for example, that you currently eat out for most of your meals and you want to set a goal of eating mostly homecooked meals to amp up your nourishment. If you draw a line in the sand from one week to the next and trying to cook all your meals straight up, it’s possibly going to feel like a huge amount of work and you’re probably going to feel like it’s unsustainable. Whereas, if you slowly and incrementally reduce your takeaway meals one at a time and increase homecooked meals one by one, it will feel more manageable and you’re more likely to sustain the changes you make. So map out how you’re going to get to your end goal and break it up into smaller more manageable chunks that will feel like mini wins along the way and motivate you to keep going.

2. Be realistic about what you can manage

Is your goal manageable within your lifestyle or achievable within your schedule? If you take small steps and plan it out as per the above recommendation, you may find that it is. Yet, don’t fall into the trap of setting yourself unrealistic goals that don’t match your lifestyle or fit within your schedule.

For example, let’s say you set yourself a goal of improving your fitness. If you tell yourself that in order to do that you need to go to the gym five days a week and yet you can’t find five spots in your weekly schedule, you’re not going to achieve this goal. Along the same lines, if you don’t enjoy going to the gym, you’re hardly going to be inspired to go five days a week—or even at all. It’s better to be ruthlessly honest with yourself about what’s manageable and what is going to feel good for you.

Be realistic about timelines too. Both how long you will give yourself to achieve your goal as well as how long you might maintain some. This is particularly important for goals where you give up or abstain from something. For example, it’s all well and good to commit to not consuming alcohol indefinitely—but will you sustain this? Or is it more realistic to set yourself a goal of not consuming it for one month? You can always extend it once you reach that end date if it felt easy for you. I know many people who have made significant changes to their patterns of alcohol consumption (or stopped entirely) by simply taking a break for a month.

3. Understand what is motivating you 

When you set yourself goals from your wounds—when you feel guilty or lousy about your behaviour or choices—you’re probably setting yourself up to fail. And that’s because you are already judging yourself poorly and will only look for more evidence to confirm what you already think of yourself. It will be more helpful in the long run to enquire within yourself as to why you might have behaved in a particular way or keep making choices that don’t align with what you want for yourself, than to set goals from that place of judgement. When you do, you may even find that your goals change entirely.  

4. Assess the benefits and drawbacks of leaving things as they are, as well as achieving the goal

When we set a goal, we are obviously wanting to make changes. It can help to take pen and paper and write down all the benefits of your choices continuing as they have been as well as the drawbacks of this. Really examine the points you note and focus your attention of the drawbacks of continuing the way you have been up until now. Then start a new list and identify the benefits and drawbacks to you of achieving the goal. Once you’ve finished, focus your thoughts on the benefits of this. Living each day in touch with benefits of our new choices can make the world of difference to us continuing on our new path.

Many people feel concerned or embarrassed about any sounds coming from their gut, however some sounds—such as a little bit of gurgling—can be completely normal and nothing to be concerned about. Gurgling can occur as the muscles of the gut contract to move food, liquids and gasses through the small intestine. This movement is a normal part of the digestive process, however the noise that can arise from it may be louder if more gas is present or if the bowel is overstimulated (which can also lead to diarrhoea).

A growling noise may also be heard when significant time has passed between meals and so people often notice this when they are feeling hungry. This noise can happen because of something called the migrating motor complex (MMC). You can think of this as your gut doing some housekeeping—once the party is over (the food you ate previously has been digested), the MMC springs into action to ‘sweep’ the gut. This process helps to maintain healthy gut function and plays a role in preventing an overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine.

So, as you now understand, some sounds are a normal part of healthy digestion. However, if you are experiencing very loud or excessive gurgling and/or if there are other gut symptoms occurring alongside this, it could be an indication of an underlying issue and may warrant further exploration.

Here are some things to consider if this is something you are concerned about.

Tune in to your body’s messages

Your body will let you know if it is happy or not, so consider if you are experiencing any other symptoms alongside the gurgling, such as tummy pain, loose stools or diarrhoea, constipation, reflux, excess flatulence or flatulence that is newly highly odourous, and/or bloating. I also encourage you to reflect on when this started happening for you. For example, was it after a tummy bug or during a time where you were experiencing a lot of stress? Or has it only started occurring since you made some dietary changes? This may provide some clues about what might be contributing to this for you.

Consider potential triggers

In some cases, excessive gurgling can occur when an individual is having challenges digesting certain foods or drinks. For example, you may like to consider your tolerance of caffeine, especially coffee, as this leads some people to experience some gurgling and/or diarrhoea. You may also like to consider whether lactose could be an issue for you, as lactose intolerance is quite common and leads some people to experience loud gurgling. If you suspect this, you can test it out by omitting lactose-containing foods and drinks and/or switching to lactose-free options for a period of time to see if the symptoms resolve or not. Other people benefit from omitting all foods that contain casein (a protein in dairy foods). Some also find it helpful to keep a food and symptom diary for a week or so to see if they notice any patterns.

Focus on the foundations for healthy digestion

To support your digestive system, avoid drinking water 30 minutes either side of eating. Instead drink water between meals, rather than with meals. Slow down to ensure you chew each mouthful very well and do your best to eat in a calm, relaxed state. This sounds simple but it truly can make a big difference to our overall digestion. Sometimes it is more about how we are eating, rather than what we are eating.

Seek support from your healthcare practitioner

If you are experiencing ongoing digestive symptoms or new symptoms you are concerned about, please consult with your GP. Gut symptoms can occur for a variety of reasons and it’s important to rule out any underlying conditions that may require treatment.