By Serenity | RELEASE Embodied Wellness
You’ve said it your whole life.
I have a gut feeling about this. My gut tells me…..My stomach dropped when I heard the news. I just knew it in my gut. I’ve been carrying this in my belly for years.
Of course, we say these things casually, as if they’re poetic metaphors. As if the gut is a passive bystander to our emotional lives, you know, just along for the ride.
But what if I told you that your gut isn’t a bystander at all — an active participant? That your abdomen is, quite literally, equipped with its own intelligence, its own nervous system, and its own capacity to hold memory, emotion, and stress in ways that shape how you feel every single day?
This isn’t woo. This is neuroscience and physiology — and it’s some of the most fascinating, empowering information I believe every woman should have access to.
Because for too many of us, the abdomen has been treated as a problem to manage, a place to hold in, a source of bloating and cramps and “hormonal issues.” We’ve learned to disconnect from this part of our bodies rather than listen to it.
What would change if you started treating your belly not as something to control, but as something to trust?
Let’s explore what’s actually living in there — and why it matters so much for your hormonal health, your emotional resilience, and your nervous system.
Your Gut Has Its Own Nervous System — And It Has a Lot to Say
Let’s start with the science, because it genuinely earns its own wonder.
Your gastrointestinal tract — from esophagus to colon — is lined with an intricate network of neurons called the enteric nervous system (ENS). This system contains somewhere between 100 and 500 million nerve cells, woven throughout the lining of your gut in a mesh-like network that spans your entire digestive tract.
To put that in perspective: your spinal cord contains roughly 100 million neurons. So basically, your gut has more.
The enteric nervous system is so complex, so capable of functioning on its own, that neuroscientist Dr. Michael Gershon coined the term “the second brain” in his 1998 book — and the name has stuck.
Here’s what makes this pretty dang remarkable: your enteric nervous system can sense, process, and respond to information without waiting for instructions from your brain.
It regulates digestion, detects chemical and mechanical changes in your gut, communicates with your immune system, and produces neurotransmitters — including approximately 90% of your body’s serotonin.
Read that again. Ninety percent of your serotonin — the neurotransmitter most associated with mood, wellbeing, and emotional stability — is produced in your gut. Not your brain. Your gut.
This is why the gut-brain connection isn’t a metaphor. It’s anatomy.
The Vagus Nerve: The Highway Between Your Gut and Your Brain
If the enteric nervous system is your second brain, the vagus nerve is the superhighway connecting it to your first one.
The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in your body. It originates in the brainstem, travels down through your neck, branches through your heart and lungs, and extends deep into your abdominal cavity — touching your stomach, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, spleen, kidneys, and intestines.
Its name comes from the Latin word for “wandering,” which is fitting — it wanders through nearly every major organ system in your body.
And here’s the whopper detail that changes everything: approximately 80-90% of the nerve fibers in the vagus nerve are afferent — meaning they travel from your body to your brain, not the other way around.
Your gut is talking to your brain far more than your brain is talking to your gut.
All those “gut feelings” — the intuitive hits, the visceral knowing, the stomach clenching when something feels wrong — that’s your enteric nervous system communicating up through the vagus nerve to your brain, where it becomes conscious awareness. Your gut was registering the information before your thinking mind caught up.
But the vagus nerve does more than carry gut intelligence. It’s the primary pathway of the parasympathetic nervous system — the “rest and digest” branch that counteracts the stress response. A well-toned, responsive vagus nerve means your body can move efficiently between states of activation and rest. It can respond to stress and then return to safety.
This is called vagal tone, and it’s one of the most important markers of nervous system health.
When vagal tone is low — as it is in chronic stress, trauma, and many autoimmune conditions — your body has difficulty returning to that parasympathetic, restorative state. Digestion suffers. Sleep suffers. Immune function suffers. Mood suffers. Hormone regulation suffers.
Shall I go on — or you get my point!? The body stays in a low-grade state of survival mode.
Supporting your vagus nerve is one of the most direct pathways to healing your nervous system — and, downstream, your hormonal health.
What Chronic Stress Does to Your Abdomen Specifically
We’ve talked in other posts about how chronic stress affects your hormones broadly — cortisol, progesterone, estrogen, thyroid. But let’s get specific about what happens in the abdomen itself, because this is where the story gets particularly relevant for women.
When your nervous system perceives a threat — whether that’s a difficult conversation, a packed schedule, an old trauma, or a blood sugar crash — it activates the sympathetic nervous system and diverts resources toward survival.
Blood flow is shunted away from your digestive organs and toward your muscles and heart. Digestion slows or halts. The muscular walls of your intestines tighten. Your pelvic floor braces.
In an acute stressor, this is temporary. Once the threat passes, the parasympathetic nervous system comes back online, blood returns to the digestive organs, and everything resumes.
But in chronic stress — which is most women’s baseline — the digestive system is perpetually under-resourced. The abdominal muscles and the fascial tissue surrounding the organs can become chronically held, creating a kind of armoring.
The connective tissue around the uterus, ovaries, bladder, and intestines can become restricted. Blood flow and lymphatic drainage to the pelvic and abdominal organs diminishes. Organs can become slightly displaced from their optimal positions over time.
The consequences of this chronic abdominal holding include:
- Digestive dysfunction — bloating, constipation, IBS-like symptoms, sluggish elimination
- Menstrual irregularities — because the uterus and ovaries receive less circulation and may be in suboptimal position
- Pelvic pain and tension — including pain with intercourse, chronic low back pain, and hip tightness
- Hormonal imbalance — because the liver (which metabolizes hormones) and the reproductive organs function better with healthy circulation
- Emotional holding — the abdomen is where many of us unconsciously store grief, fear, unexpressed anger, and unprocessed stress
- Disrupted gut-brain signaling — fascial restriction and poor circulation impair the enteric nervous system’s ability to communicate effectively
When you understand that your abdomen is holding all of this — the nervous system activation, the emotional residue, the impaired circulation, the physical tension — the idea of working directly with the belly starts to make a great deal of sense.
The Abdomen as an Emotional Archive
Here is something that tends to land quietly and deeply with the women I work with: the body keeps score of what the mind has not yet processed.
The phrase comes from Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s foundational work on trauma and the body — and nowhere is this more true than in the abdomen.
Biologically, this makes sense. The enteric nervous system is not just processing food. Its processing experience. Your gut receives input from your environment, your relationships, your internal state, and your memories — and it responds, often before your conscious mind has any idea what’s happening.
Think about the last time you were super frightened. Where did you feel it? Your stomach. Your gut clenched, your appetite disappeared, your bowels may have responded. Your body responded to an emotional event with a visceral, physical one — because for your nervous system, they’re the same thing.
Now consider what happens when stress, grief, fear, unexpressed emotion, or relational tension becomes chronic. The abdomen — already registering all of this — begins to hold it. The diaphragm tightens. The psoas muscle (which connects your spine to your femur and runs directly through your pelvic and abdominal cavity) contracts and stays contracted. The fascia around your organs thickens and restricts.
Many women carry years — sometimes decades — of emotional history in their bellies. Pregnancies. Losses. Surgeries. Grief. The years of over-giving and self-suppression. The relationships that cost them more than they should have. The times they held their breath to get through something hard.
This is anatomical. And it’s releasable.
What Is Visceral Release — And Why Does It Matter?
Visceral release (also called visceral manipulation) is a gentle form of manual therapy that works with the organs and the connective tissue surrounding them — the mesentery, the ligaments, and the fascia that holds everything in position and in relationship to each other.
Developed by French osteopath Jean-Pierre Barral, visceral manipulation is based on the understanding that your organs are not static. They move with every breath, every heartbeat, every shift of your body. When the connective tissue surrounding an organ becomes restricted — due to surgery, trauma, chronic stress, inflammation, or physical injury — that organ’s movement is impaired. And because everything in your body is connected through fascial lines, restriction in one area affects the whole.
Visceral release techniques work to:
- Restore mobility and motility to organs that have become restricted
- Improve circulation — both blood flow and lymphatic drainage — to the abdominal and pelvic organs
- Release fascial adhesions that form around organs after surgeries, infections, or chronic inflammation
- Support optimal organ positioning — particularly relevant for the uterus and bladder
- Facilitate the release of stored tension and emotion held in the abdominal tissues
- Improve gut-brain communication by releasing restriction around the vagus nerve’s abdominal branches
Women who receive regular visceral work often report improvements in digestion, menstrual comfort, pelvic pain, lower back pain, bladder function, and — perhaps most notably — a kind of emotional lightness that follows. A sense of something releasing that they didn’t even fully know they’d been holding.
Mayan Abdominal Therapy: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Understanding
One of the most beautiful traditions of abdominal healing work is the Arvigo Techniques of Maya Abdominal Therapy® — a modality rooted in the ancient healing traditions of the Maya and brought to the modern world by Dr. Rosita Arvigo, who trained under the renowned Belizean medicine man Don Elijio Panti.
The foundational principle of Mayan abdominal therapy is elegant in its simplicity: when the uterus and other pelvic and abdominal organs are in their optimal position, receiving adequate circulation, and free from fascial restriction, the body has the conditions it needs to heal.
The uterus, in particular, is understood in this tradition as the seat of a woman’s creativity, vitality, and emotional life. When it’s displaced — even slightly, which is more common than most people realize — or when the circulation to and from it becomes compromised, the downstream effects touch nearly everything: menstrual health, hormonal balance, digestion, bladder function, lower back, and emotional wellbeing.
The massage itself is a gentle, external abdominal and pelvic massage that works to:
- Guide the uterus back toward its natural position and support the ligaments that hold it there
- Improve blood flow and lymphatic drainage to the uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, and surrounding structures
- Release chronic tension in the abdomen, psoas, and pelvic floor
- Support liver and digestive function through improved circulation to the upper abdomen
- Stimulate the vagus nerve’s abdominal branches, supporting parasympathetic activation
- Create a direct experience of safety and trust in the belly — which is itself deeply healing for the nervous system
This work is appropriate for women at nearly every life stage — from menstrual irregularities and fertility challenges, to pregnancy support and postpartum recovery, to perimenopause and beyond. It’s contraindicated during active menstruation, during pregnancy (after the first trimester without specific training), and in a few specific medical conditions — all of which I discuss individually with clients.
What makes Mayan abdominal therapy particularly special is that it’s also taught as self-care. You don’t have to wait for your next appointment to receive its benefits. Part of the work I do with women is teaching them to perform a simplified version of this massage on themselves — returning agency and connection to a part of the body that so many of us have learned to ignore or dismiss.
This is one of the most potent things I know of for rebuilding trust with your own body.
Craniosacral Therapy and the Abdominal Connection
While we’re in the territory of the body’s deeper intelligence, I want to speak briefly to craniosacral therapy’s relationship with abdominal and pelvic health — because the two modalities work beautifully together.
Craniosacral therapy works with the craniosacral rhythm — the subtle, rhythmic motion produced by the production and reabsorption of cerebrospinal fluid, which pulses through your central nervous system from your skull to your sacrum. This rhythm can be felt throughout the body, including in the abdomen and pelvis. When the system is under chronic stress or holding tension patterns, this rhythm becomes restricted, irregular, or asymmetrical.
Craniosacral work uses extremely gentle touch — no more than the weight of a nickel — to facilitate the release of restrictions throughout the membranes and connective tissue surrounding the brain, spinal cord, and related structures. It’s one of the most direct and profound ways I know of working with the central nervous system.
From an abdominal perspective, craniosacral therapy can:
- Release tension in the diaphragm — the primary respiratory muscle and a major fascial crossroads in the body, deeply involved in both stress and vagal activation
- Address sacral restrictions that affect the nerve supply to the pelvic organs
- Support the vagus nerve through work at the brainstem and cervical tissues where it originates
- Create deep parasympathetic states during which the body’s own healing intelligence can reorganize and restore
Many women fall into a state between waking and sleep during craniosacral sessions — a place the nervous system rarely gets to visit in modern life. In that state, the body does remarkable things.
Together, craniosacral therapy and Mayan abdominal therapy address the abdominal-pelvic-nervous system complex from complementary angles — one working with the central nervous system from the skull and sacrum, the other working directly with the organs and their connective tissue from the outside in. For women navigating hormonal shifts, chronic stress, or a sense of deep disconnection from their bodies, this combination can be genuinely transformative.
How to Start Reconnecting With Your Belly
You don’t have to start with bodywork — though I’d deeply encourage it when you’re ready. There are things you can begin today that start to shift your relationship with your abdomen and support vagal tone.
Diaphragmatic Breathing
This is the most direct, most accessible vagus nerve tonic available to you, and it is free.
When you breathe fully into your belly — letting your abdomen expand on the inhale and fall on the exhale — you are massaging your abdominal organs with every breath. You’re activating your diaphragm, which is innervated by the vagus nerve. You’re signaling to your nervous system that it’s safe.
Practice: Lie on your back with one hand on your chest and one on your belly. Breathe so that only the hand on your belly rises. Slow the exhale — make it longer than the inhale. Do this for five minutes and notice what shifts.
Abdominal Self-Massage
Even without training in Mayan abdominal therapy, gentle self-massage of the abdomen can begin to shift chronic holding patterns, improve circulation, and build trust with your belly.
Practice: Lying down or seated comfortably, place warm hands on your lower abdomen. Begin with gentle, clockwise circles (the direction of digestive flow). Breathe into your hands. Notice sensation without judgment. Spend five to ten minutes here, moving from the lower abdomen up toward the navel and liver, and down toward the pelvic bowl. This is nourishment.
Warm Castor Oil Packs
A time-honored naturopathic tool with growing research behind it, castor oil packs applied to the lower abdomen support liver detoxification, reduce inflammation in the pelvic and abdominal tissues, and support lymphatic drainage. They also provide the kind of warmth and containment that signals safety to the nervous system.
Somatic Awareness Practices
Begin noticing your gut’s signals during your day. When a decision feels right, where do you feel that in your body? When something feels off, what does your belly do? Journaling these observations builds a relationship with your enteric intelligence over time.
Prioritize Digestive Rest
Your vagus nerve and enteric nervous system need periods of rest to repair and function optimally. This means not eating while stressed or distracted. It means giving at least twelve hours overnight between your last meal and your first. It means chewing slowly and without screens. It means eating in a parasympathetic state whenever possible — because digestion only functions well when you feel safe.
The Deeper Invitation
There’s a reason women throughout history and across cultures have understood the womb space, the belly, the gut as sacred — as a seat of intuition, creativity, and power.
Science is now confirming what the body has always known.
Your abdomen is not just a container for your organs. It’s a site of intelligence, memory, emotion, and healing. It holds the machinery of your hormonal health — your liver, your reproductive organs, your gut microbiome, your lymphatic system. It houses a nervous system of its own. It’s the origin of most of your serotonin and a vast portion of your immune function. It speaks to your brain constantly, in a language that surfaces as intuition, as “gut feelings,” as the deep knowing that precedes thought.
Learning to listen to your belly — to release what it’s been holding, to restore circulation and ease to the tissues within it, to treat it as trustworthy rather than something to tighten and manage — is one of the most profound acts of self-restoration I know.
This is the heart of what Mayan abdominal therapy and craniosacral therapy offer. Not a fix. Not a quick solution. But a coming home to the intelligent, living vastness of your body.
If you’re ready to explore what that might feel like for you, I’d love to be a part of that journey. You can learn more about bodywork sessions and 1:1 coaching at RELEASE Embodied Wellness.
Your belly has been waiting for you to come back.
Serenity is a licensed bodyworker and health and wellness coach specializing in women’s hormonal health and nervous system support. She offers Mayan abdominal therapy, craniosacral therapy, and 1:1 coaching through RELEASE Embodied Wellness. This post is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice.
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