Areas › Your body › Touch and bodywork
Hands on your belly, breathe so that it moves, and listen. A gurgle down there is a real sign that you have stopped bracing.
Digestion is one of the first things to shut down when you feel under threat and one of the first to come back when you do not. That is why the noise is worth waiting for. You cannot fake it or make it happen on command, which is exactly its value. If you are the sort of person who suspects they are only going along with a practice, your stomach settles the argument for you.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'From their bellies comes a drink of different colours in which there is healing for people' (Quran 16:69). Healing carried through the ordinary workings of a body is a Qur'anic idea long before it is a clinical one.
ثُمَّ كُلِي مِن كُلِّ ٱلثَّمَرَٰتِ فَٱسۡلُكِي سُبُلَ رَبِّكِ ذُلُلࣰ اۚ يَخۡرُجُ مِنۢ بُطُونِهَا شَرَابࣱ مُّخۡتَلِفٌ أَلۡوَٰنُهُۥ فِيهِ شِفَآءࣱ لِّلنَّاسِۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَأٓيَةࣰ لِّقَوۡمࣲ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ
Then feed on all kinds of fruit and follow the ways made easy for you by your Lord.’ From their bellies comes a drink of different colours in which there is healing for people. There truly is a sign in this for those who think
Qur’an 16:69read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review of C fibre touch describes how slow gentle stroking of hairy skin activates a separate class of nerve fibres that feed into the brain's picture of the body's internal condition, rather than into fine touch discrimination. So there is a real channel by which gentle contact updates your sense of your own insides. That work is about skin rather than gut, and it does not test stomach noises as a marker of anything.
Björnsdotter M, Morrison I, Olausson H. (2010). Feeling good: on the role of C fiber mediated touch in interoception.. Experimental brain research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Your gut only gets moving again once the rest of you has decided there is no emergency.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
You are not trying to get calm here. You are trying to find out what is actually going on in you, and whatever turns up is the useful part.
Tapping pairs light contact on acupressure points with saying the trouble out loud. The claims made for it run ahead of the evidence, and it is cheap, quick and safe enough to try.
Before sending anyone for hands on work, ask what touch has meant in their life. A massage table is a poor place to discover that touch brings something back.