CSChristoffel SneijdersThree brains: head, heart and gut for decisions you keep deferring

Understanding The 3 Brains Theory: How Your Head, Heart, & Gut Work Together | Gut-Brain Connection

7 Oct 2016 · 4 min

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4:03

In this spoken presentation, the speaker outlines a model of three distinct yet interconnected 'brains' within the human body: the heart, the head, and the gut. The heart is portrayed as an emotional center that generates feelings of love, connection, and protective signals based on its interaction with every cell in the body. The head (brain) is described as the cognitive archive that stores past knowledge, experiences, and internalized critical voices from family and society, influencing decision‑making through verbalized and visualized thought. The gut is presented as an instinctual brain, rich in nerve connections, that provides intuitive signals about safety, happiness, and survival, despite its physical vulnerability. The speaker emphasizes that misalignment among these three centers—such as critical inner voices from the head or ignored gut instincts—can lead to stuckness and poor choices. By cultivating mindfulness and becoming aware of past limiting beliefs, individuals can integrate the signals from heart, head, and gut, thereby improving decision‑making and personal growth. The talk concludes with an invitation to a February workshop focused on working with these three centers to “remaster” oneself and overcome past obstacles.

Chapters

Hey, good to see you. It's a beautiful day today. Why we're going to talk more about our head, our heart, and our gut. Who doesn't like to talk about our heart and the center of love? And let's start in the middle with the center of love. Why does our heart sometimes talk to us or make us— gives us feelings? We can all have the feeling of love. We know that feeling. And sometimes we always have to feel from rejection, Pain, and it gives us signals: do it or don't do it. Step into that, don't step into that. And that's really connected with the passion we have in our heart of love— love for yourself, love for other people, being connected, not connected. And the brain has 40,000 brain cells, and our heart is connected with every body cell everywhere, because based on those interactions with every body cell, our heart knows if it should increase Slow down, more blood, less blood, and those kind of things. Our heart is extremely wise, but it's also based on a feeling part, on the energy fields we have inside us and outside us. So making really great decisions for the future needs another brain, the head brain, where the knowledge and the connections are made from all the past knowledge, experience we have. It's almost Verbalized, visualized, and it makes sense if we say those words. But having said that, the brain sometimes is also connected with the past, with the critical voices we had from parents, siblings, brothers who said to us, you cannot, you're too stupid, you're too ugly, you're too whatever you are, too fat, too slow, you're picked out last in school. So that head then somewhere says as a critical voice, oh, don't do that. Heart, be protected. We don't do those kind of things. Let's do differently. Don't do it at all. Stay stuck. That's safer. That interconnection doesn't work. And then to make it totally messy, I'll stand up. This part, our gut, has also a brain. More connections than even our heart. Because our gut, to make digestion work, to make our liver work, our kidneys work, everything works, it has a lot of nerve systems connected with it. It only likes to protect and save us. As you know, the gut is a part that's not protected in our body. Here we have bones that protect our heart. There it's totally vulnerable and open. So there's a lot of connections also with the outside energy to feel how it feels. So the instinct is somewhere in our gut. It likes to pursue happiness. Hey, we've got a beautiful opportunity there. Intuition. Or it says, oh, that could be painful, could be hurt, could be fear, don't do it. That's the third signal we could have. To make it all connected with each other, our brain, our heart, and our gut, means we really get in line with the inner voices we have, the inner brains we have, so we connect much more. And we can also be observant of our intuition and become aware what we can and cannot do. And the only way to really get there is connect those 3 and get all those past obstacles out somewhere, or dismiss them, or be aware of them but push them out. They say in mindfulness, be in the now, because if you're in the now, you cannot see the past, you cannot connect with the past. That's easier said than done, but we can. In my workshop that will run in February, we work on those 3 centers or brains. To also remaster yourself again and become aware what we had in the past and how it's blocking us for getting in the future where we like to be. So far so much. Have a beautiful weekend. We speak to each other after weekend again. Enjoy. Ciao.