When you have an upset stomach, do you reach for a pill or do you connect to your body and start asking questions? Your body is extremely intelligent and every part has its own story to tell.

By connecting to your body, you can start to understand yourself better and potentially improve or even heal your health issues.

While it’s vital to eat healthy, detox and fast to have a healthy digestive system, how you take in and process life, and transform heavy, stagnant emotions can be just as, if not more important, to your overall gut health than eating a balanced diet.

So, let’s explore what can cause you to experience digestive challenges and how you can start to turn this around.

Here are four steps you can take to better process your life experiences and, in turn, improve your overall wellbeing:

1. Reduce stress and drama

Constant stress and non-stop drama in your life can lead to difficulty in digesting and assimilating life experiences.

To turn this around, you need to create a healing practice which allows you to relax, breathe, and find your equanimity throughout the day.

It’ll help you to recognise what you can learn from each experience that meets you.

2. Set healthy boundaries

The lack of healthy boundaries can cause you to literally absorb other people’s dense and heavy energies, which weakens your digestive system.

Thus, you need to practice saying yes and no, when you truly mean it, as well as asking yourself: “Will this work for me?”

3. Stop worrying about the future

Fear of the future and constant worry can have a profound impact on your digestion, as well as your ability to breathe.

Take these moments as an opportunity to learn to breathe deeply and to focus on what you really want instead of on what can go wrong. Thus, you can create amazing possibilities for the future.

4. Develop breathing techniques

Try this remedy regularly: take slow breaths in and out.

Gently place your hands on your stomach and become aware of how it feels. Become aware of any beliefs that you are holding in your stomach which are hurting you. Take your time to acknowledge them.

Ask yourself who had the same beliefs in your family or environment? Are you willing to let them go? Are you willing to take responsibility for changing and being different?

Slowly massage the index finger of your right hand from base to tip and visualise the release of all the negativity that is stored there and place it into an imaginary purple fire. Do this for a few minutes.

Repeat several times: “I let go of all control, worry, and guilt. I welcome joy, peace, and wellbeing”.

Visualise beautiful yellow sunlight pouring into your stomach, pacifying, clearing, and relaxing it. If you have digestive issues, I suggest you work with this process daily for the next 30 days.

Respond, don’t react

Every day we have an opportunity to learn to respond instead of reacting to life’s challenges.

Rather than pushing difficult situations and feelings away, we can look within and discover powerful lessons that we can learn.

When we can find something positive in an experience, we can assimilate it and greatly improve our digestive health.

Try the above practices to help you better process life’s experiences and improve your overall wellbeing.