Alyce M. Sorokie - Gut Wisdom: Understanding and Improving Your Digestive Health

This edition first published in 2004 by New Page Books, an imprint of

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

65 Parker Street, Suite 7

Newburyport, MA 01950

www.redwheelweiser.com

www.newpagebooks.com

Copyright 2004 by Alyce M. Sorokie

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN: 978-1-56414-753-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sorokie, Alyce M.

Gut wisdom : understanding and improving your digestive health / by Alyce M. Sorokie.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-56414-753-3 (pbk.)

1. Gastrointestinal systemDiseasesPopular works. 2. Gastrointestinal systemDiseasesAlternative treatment. 3. IndigestionPopular works. 4. IndigestionAlternative treatment. 5. Medicine, Psychosomatic. I. Title.

RC817.S66 2004

616.3'3--dc22

2003064395

Cover design by Cheryl Cohan Finbow

Interior by Eileen Dow Munson

Printed in the United States of America

IBI

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter

This book is based on the research, experience, and opinions of the author. If symptoms persist, always check with the Wisdom of your Gut and with your doctor.

To Laura Ruby ___________________

I have tremendous gratitude for your

help on this project.

You transformed my vision

into a reality.

A hug and a smooch to you, my friend.

Very special thanks to Laura Ruby for generously editing and organizing my work. You cemented my pile of bricks. Thanks to Niambi Jaha Echolsmy book birthing coach. You were one of the angels nudging and pushing me to spread the word and get my message out. Thanks to Joan Epstein, Kari Schieble, Pam Gearhart, Dr. Gabrielle Frances, and Bob Condor for your discriminating eagle eyes, open hearts, and encouragement. Additional thanks to Miriam Smith, Angie Becerra, Ardath Berliant, Diane Valletta, and Kristin Amondsen for offering your computer-savvy and editing skills to this project. Also, warm acknowledgment to my dearest pal, Diane Cistaro, who phoned me daily during the process of writing this book. You were my very own cheerleadereven at times when I didn't want one. Thanks to Nora Harold and Carrol Chaiken for their spiritual counseling and assistance in helping me to transform my old beliefs about the difficulty of the pursuit of being published.

My gratitude to Career Press for seeing the wisdom and potential within my book and creating a great opportunity. Thanks to Mom for believing that I could do this as well as for embodying me with alternative health before it was called alternative. Dad, though you have been watching me from the other side for the past 28 years, I have a gut feeling that you had a finger in this project. I cherish you for the challenges, the lessons, and bestowing this mission. Thanks to all of my clients who have also been my teachers. Together, we have explored gut-brain connections and have listened and answered your previously ignored gut distress. Finally, I acknowledge my inner gut wisdom, which continues to guide and direct me, even during times of resistance.

My life's mission was conceived at a very early age. I was raised by parents who were both mired in the dark ages and light years ahead of their time. In the 1950s, my father had one of the first health food stores in Chicago, well more than a decade before it was a groovy thing to do. I was raised on fruits, vegetables, and unadulterated whole grains while everyone around me dined on hamburgers, French fries, and colas. Junk foods were forbidden. Doctors, antibiotics, sick daysnone of these were a part of my family's vocabulary. On the rare occasion when we did get sick, my parents used herbs and vitamins to strengthen our immune systems and heat packs and various water therapiesincluding the dreaded enemato detox our systems and help our bodies do what they do best: heal.

Needless to say, I did not brag about my father's profession. Then, when I was 20 years old, the unthinkable happened: My 60-year-old father passed away from colon cancer, and I inherited the health food store. As customers came in and heard the news of his death, they were saddened and bewildered, and they wondered aloud how their guru could have died so young. Didn't eating yogurt and drinking distasteful green health drinks give you the license to live at least as long as the hundred-year-old Hunzas?

I was also saddened and bewildered and unable to answer their questionsor mine. How did this happen? How could my father be taken from this world so early, and by the very disease he seemed most prepared to fight? What did my father do wrong?

Michael Sorokie did not open a health food store because he was a free-spirited, tie-dye wearing, ultra-progressive hippie. Just the opposite: He was an uptight, hard-working, meat-and-potato-eating, right-winged truck mechanic. What attracted him to the business wasn't a change of heart as much as a change of health. An unconventional doctor had used herbs, supplements, and healing foods to miraculously cure my father's urethra cancer 30 years earlier. With his newfound knowledge, my father wanted to help and teach others. And he was quite a success.

Yet, although my father totally changed his attitude toward food, medicine, and healthcare, his attitude toward emotional expression was another story. Nowadays we get copious opportunities to work through anger, hurt, and grief with the support of self-help groups and therapists (even family and friends) that can help us accept, understand, and integrate the pain, disappointments, and tragedies of life. These things were not as prevalent in the 1950s and 60s. My father, as did many men of his time, kept his feelings tightly bottled up within him. The only feeling he seemed able to express was anger. And my father was angry. He was angry when he spoke, when he ate, when he worked. He was marinated in rage. My father, in his anger, would often grip his stomach area and shout, This is making my gut sick!

Despite his temper, my father's second bout with cancer, 30 years later, came on unexpectedlywho expects it? Seeing my fatherthis angry, seemingly invincible man, filled with a cantankerous spirit, yet strangely sensitive to the needs of his customersdoubled over with pain made me sick to my stomach. As the illness progressed, my father finally gave in and saw a conventional medical doctor for an official diagnosis. Initially, he needed a colostomy just to help relieve the discomfort of the growing malignancy. This was news we all wanted to deny, but my father's pain wouldn't let us.

Cancer, medical doctors, a colostomy, my dada nightmare. Within six months, he had passed on.

Soon after my father's death, I was consumed with questions: Didn't he eat well enough? Was it heredity (since then an aunt and cousin both suffered with, and beat, colon cancer)? Was it just his time to go? Or was all that pain and anger literally eating him up? Could emotional issues affect the digestive system? Could the mind actually alter the gut's basic processes? Could we learn something from our symptoms? Could changing our attitudes change our gut? Could the gut's healthor lack thereofactually affect the choices we make?