The Gut’s Instinct

I have been wondering about my actions in the world.

Not simply what I do, but what is behind the doing.

What sparks an act?
What is it in me that moves before my hands reach or my feet step?

The more I sat with the question, the more I noticed the strange ways we already talk about it.

My mind tells me one thing.
My heart tells me another.
My gut tells me something else.

We speak as though different parts of us are having a conversation,
each making its own case for what we should do.

And perhaps there is another part we are less comfortable naming.

The crotch.

The mind thinks. The heart feels. The crotch desires.

Thought. Feeling. Desire.

Three voices we experience as our own.

We spend much of our lives negotiating among them.

What do I think?
How do I feel?
What do I want?

And somehow, eventually, thought or feeling or desire becomes movement.

Hands do. Feet go.

But before the doing, before the going, there is that peculiar other thing we name.

The gut.

We usually treat it as a fourth voice.

Instinct.

Something beneath thought. Something deeper than feeling. Something more trustworthy, perhaps, because it seems to arrive before we have had time to reason ourselves into or out of anything.

Trust your gut.
Go with your gut.
I have a gut feeling.

But perhaps the gut is not a fourth voice at all.

Perhaps it is what happens when the other three have become difficult to distinguish.

Thought. Feeling. Desire.
Memory. Experience. Formation.

All arriving as one embodied signal.

Something in me simply says:

yes.

Or:

no.

We call it instinct.
We call it a gut feeling.

But I have started wondering whether we have the phrase backward.

Perhaps it isn’t gut instinct.

Perhaps it is the gut’s instinct.

Hunger

Before the gut tells us anything, it hungers.
Perhaps that is its oldest language.

Hunger is such an ordinary sensation that it is easy to overlook what it reveals.

The gut cannot sustain itself from itself.
It needs something from beyond the boundary of the body.

Food. Water.

Something that is not me must enter me for me to continue being me.

And then something remarkable happens.

What was not me becomes me.

A plant. An animal.
A grain. A fruit.
Water.

Minerals drawn from soil. Energy once carried as sunlight.

Lives and processes that existed entirely beyond the boundary I call myself enter my body,
are broken apart, transformed, absorbed, and become part of the person saying:

I.

Perhaps hunger is one of the body’s simplest confessions.

I need what is not me.

We tend to think of dependence as something that happens when independence fails.
But the gut suggests otherwise.

Dependence may be there from the beginning.

A Cosmos Inside Us

And even the gut itself is not simply ours.

It contains an entire microbial ecosystem: bacteria, fungi, viruses, archaea, and other forms of life existing in relationship with the human organism.

It communicates continuously with the nervous system, immune system, endocrine system, and brain.

Signals move back and forth.

Things are absorbed. Things are transformed.
Things are rejected. Things are shared.

We casually draw a boundary around the body and call everything inside it me.

But look closely enough at the gut and that boundary becomes wonderfully difficult to maintain.

There is a cosmos inside us.

Not cosmos simply in the modern sense of stars and galaxies,
but kosmos in its older sense: an ordered arrangement, many things somehow belonging to a whole.

The gut is not singular. It is a community.

And somehow, from that community, I emerge.

Which makes the language we use even stranger.

My gut.

The possessive makes it sound simple.
The gut belongs to me.

But the thing I am claiming as mine is itself populated by lives that are not me and sustained through relationships I do not control.

Perhaps even the possessive has it backward.

The Three Voices

That makes me return to the question that started this.

What is behind my actions?

Thought, feeling, and desire can all be narrated through the individual.

They belong easily to the grammar of I.

But what kind of I is doing the thinking, feeling, and wanting?

An I whose continued existence depends upon what is not itself.
An I inhabited by other life.
An I constantly receiving the world and turning some portion of it into itself.

And perhaps something similar happens with those three voices.

Thought, feeling, and desire begin as things we can sometimes distinguish.

But by the time they reach us as instinct, their boundaries may already have disappeared.

Many signals become one. Just as many lives somehow become one body.

And yet when I say,

My gut tells me…

I locate one of my most intimate forms of knowing in one of the least singular places in my body.

What I call my gut is already an ecology.

Already relationship.
Already exchange.
Already dependent upon what is not-me in order for me to remain me.

So perhaps the gut is not simply another voice alongside mind, heart, and desire.

Perhaps it is where the illusion that these voices belong to an entirely independent self begins to break down.

Gut Instinct

We tend to imagine instinct as something ancient and individual.

A primitive intelligence buried beneath civilization.
The animal inside us that somehow knows.

And sometimes perhaps what we call gut instinct really is our nervous system recognizing something before conscious thought catches up.

But our instincts are not untouched things.

They have histories.

What frightens us has a history. What attracts us has a history.
What feels familiar has a history. What feels foreign has a history.

Our thoughts have been formed.
Our feelings have been formed.
Our desires have been formed.

Even the things that seem to arise spontaneously from somewhere deep inside us have been shaped through countless encounters with what lies outside us.

Family. Culture. Memory. Food. Language.
Love. Fear. Loss. Touch. Place. People.

The world enters us.

Perhaps not so differently from food. Something that began outside crosses a boundary.

It is received. Broken apart. Absorbed.
Sometimes rejected. Sometimes transformed.

Until eventually we can no longer distinguish what came from somewhere else from what we experience as ourselves.

We simply call the result:

me.

Perhaps this is where formation becomes hardest to see.

Not while it still feels like something being taught to us.

But when it has traveled so deeply into us that it no longer presents itself as formation at all.

It presents itself as instinct.
As preference.
As intuition.
As me.

And perhaps that complicates the question of what sparks an act.

If what moves through me has been formed through everything that has entered me, encountered me, fed me, frightened me, loved me, and accompanied me, then even the act that feels most instinctively mine carries traces of relationship.

Perhaps that is why the gut is such an interesting place for instinct to live.
Because the gut quietly refuses the fantasy that life happens alone.

The Cosmic Gut

Maybe that is what makes the gut cosmic.

Not simply because there is a tiny cosmos inside us.
But because the pattern seems to continue as we move outward.

Nothing exists without relationship.

A meal contains relationships among soil, sunlight, water, plants, animals, microbes, weather, hands, histories, and places.

A body contains relationships among cells, organs, organisms, memory, environment, and everything it has received.

Earth itself exists within relationships that make its life possible.

Gravity gathers.
Stars forge the elements from which other things become possible.
Stars die.

Their remnants become worlds.

Worlds become conditions for life.
Life consumes other life and becomes other life.

At every scale, what appears to be one thing turns out, upon closer examination, to be relationship.

Many things somehow becoming one.

And somewhere inside all of this, a creature emerges capable of saying:

I.

Then spends a lifetime discovering how much of that I was always we.

The Gut’s Instinct

So I return again to the question.

What is behind my actions in the world?
What sparks the act before hands do and feet go?

I began with thought.
Feeling.
Desire.
And then instinct.

But the closer I looked at instinct, the harder it became to find something that belonged only to me.

Thought, feeling, and desire become difficult to distinguish.
Formation becomes difficult to distinguish from self.
What is outside becomes difficult to distinguish from body.

The many somehow presents as one.
And we call that one: I.

So I find myself wondering whether the instinct of the gut is something other than self-preservation.

Perhaps the gut’s instinct is communion.

Not because microbes possess some secret theology.
And not because every relationship within the gut is peaceful.

Ecosystems contain competition, consumption, exclusion, invasion, and death.
The gut itself survives by breaking other things apart.

Communion cannot simply mean harmony.
Perhaps communion is something more elemental.

Nothing there exists entirely by itself.

Life receives life.
Life feeds life. Life restrains life. Life transforms life.
Life makes room for life.

And through all of it, something larger than any single participant continues.

Not agreement.
Not sameness.
Not the absence of tension.

Participation in a life that none of us can sustain alone.

Perhaps the gut does not seek communion at all.
Perhaps it reveals that there was never another option.

We thought the gut was where the deepest I lived.
Perhaps it is where the body has been quietly practicing we all along.

Mind thinks. Heart feels. Crotch desires.
Hands do. Feet go.

And somewhere before the doing and the going, the gut keeps doing something older.

Hungering. Receiving. Relating. Transforming. Living with.

I began by wondering what sparks my actions in the world.

Perhaps the more interesting question is whether any act is ever entirely mine.

Perhaps we have spent a long time asking what our gut is trying to tell us.

I wonder what changes if we ask instead:

What is the gut itself trying to do?

Perhaps it has been practicing communion all along.