By Dianne Trussell, BSc Hons, Goonellabah, NSW
As a child I suffered from hiccups. And when I say ‘suffered’, I mean SUFFERED! Once they started, they’d go on and on, every 5 to 6 seconds, 24/7, for days and days. I’d be sleepless, frustrated, irritated, driven crazy by them. I was in despair. I tried every remedy suggested: held my breath, breathed into a paper bag, put sugar under my tongue, drank water upside-down, fasted, ate…. all to no avail. By the time the hiccups would subside (by themselves) I’d be exhausted and very sore in my throat and chest. And in dread of the next bout. It’s one of the reasons I became such a slow eater – to help avoid the ‘hell’ of hiccups!
One time when I was in my early teens I had absolutely had it with the hiccups. This had to stop. I was determined to find out what would work. What did my body want to do? I sat down, relaxed, and closed my eyes. When my mind had settled, I asked my body: “What do you want me to do?” and to my unending surprise, I got a clear answer, rather unusual, but very logical. The method my body ‘told’ me is this:
Breathe in slowly, but not all the way. Stop breathing in before it feels finished or satisfying. Then breathe out slowly, but not all the way. Stop breathing out before it feels finished or satisfying. There were a couple of hiccups at the start, but I ignored them and kept steadily doing my shortened breaths. Suddenly there was a flush of heat, then a hard-to-describe feeling of ‘descending’ or relaxation in my diaphragm. At the end of this feeling – no more hiccups! The method worked every time, and my hiccups diminished until they became a rare event that didn’t take long to stop. And it worked for some other people with intractable hiccups too. On later reflection I could see that this method solved one of the failings of all the breath-holding methods for me: that I’d run out of air before the hiccups would stop!
So there you go, years before I’d ever heard of Universal Medicine, and me being a skeptical, practical young scientist-in-the-making, I had a conversation with my body that solved a long-running and very annoying health problem.
Various detractors and ‘skeptics’ have criticized Universal Medicine practitioners for claiming to ‘talk to patient’s ovaries’ etc. Well for starters, they don’t do that or claim that at all. But consider this: we can certainly talk to our own organs, as I did with my errant diaphragm in the hiccups saga. Anyone who arcs up and says this is non-scientific garbage ought to remind themselves that their bodies are made of cells, and all cells in the body (including the brain) communicate with each other in both close proximity and at a distance, using chemical, electric, quantum and magnetic signals. This is how the entire body knows what’s going on inside it from moment to moment, and what to do about it. So it’s perfectly reasonable that, if one so chooses, one can ‘tune in’ to one’s body and access the messages that are flying hither and yon like information packets on the internet. It is also possible to tune in to a particular part of the body to find out what’s going on there and what is needed.
Medicine and Serge Benhayon 
I was shopping in a local supermarket recently and had gone on auto pilot plucking things from the shelves not realising I was in my head and had left the wisdom of my body behind. My mobile phone rang and it was a good friend and in the course of our conversation I realised how I had been shopping and immediately started to feel into what I had chosen to put into my trolley. several special offers found their way back onto the shelves and when I went to the check out the contents of my trolley positively beamed at me in their freshness and clarity.
We can help ourselves and our body by simply tuning in and listening to our body, there is a huge amount of wisdom that our body holds that is conveyed to us when we listen.
This blog has changed my life. Having conversations with my body have and continue to be insightful and supportive.
There is such a power in stopping and listening to what we are feeling in our body. Could it be that we are avoiding this simplicity and power by always being on the run?
As I child I did the same thing Dianne, my hiccups weren’t as severe as yours were but they were certainly annoying. I did the same ideas of drinking water backwards, holding my breath and getting people to shock me with back slaps none of which worked. It was not until I listened to my body and explored my breath that I too was able to stop my hiccups. It’s interesting how without being consciously aware of the wisdom from our bodies (because it is not taught and celebrated) we all to a greater or lesser degree tap into those messages that are constantly on offer.
I am curious now that we have two childhood ‘hiccuppers’. If the answer to hiccups is in the breath, could this indicate that a disharmony in the breath is part of the problem? As a nurse I know that the breath is the first vital sign to change if there is any stress or imbalance in the body. I wonder what you had in common with the way you breathed when you used to have serial hiccup attacks.
To deny the wisdom of the body leads to all sorts of problems, I know I did it for many years and ended up pretty exhausted and sick, I now listen to the messages my body is sharing as it can be amazing what can be offered to us.
‘Conversations with your body’– Love it Dianne!
Try putting your hand over a flame and see what your body has to say – in my experience it will speak very loudly.
Conversations with my body.. great title, the more conversations I have with my body, and listen, the more it reveals to me in how I live and the choices I make in how I live, bringing me the truth of these and therefore the choice to make changes.
Reading this, ‘talking to our body’ starts to sound like the most basic scientific approach we can apply in solving any physical issue, and ridiculing this way of building a connection with the body feels very unscientific – after all, it is a physicality, and it sure does produce a series of evidence and we call that a life.
There is no doubt we have a very very very beautiful and intricate master piece of science and magic, order and flow, harmony and rhythm with us all the time. Imagine what this says about us, the being inside and who we truly are if our body is but a mere smidgen of the stupendousness we come from?
This is a very interesting piece Dianne and very informative. Thanks for sharing.
This is so fascinating to read, allowing for the understanding that our ability to breathe our own natural breath not too long, deep, shallow, fast or slow is innate within us all.
That is an extraordinary story of listening to your own wisdom, and through that you offer a great lesson for us all.
Listening to your body makes so much sense. If you listen to the radio without tuning in you won’t hear anything.
I love the science you bring to your example of the body’s wisdom with your hiccups, practical and undeniable in what it offers. ‘bodies are made of cells, and all cells in the body (including the brain) communicate with each other in both close proximity and at a distance, using chemical, electric, quantum and magnetic signals.’
me too Ruth, bringing it back to basic physics takes out all the so called mystical and makes it practical to the point where it is accessible to the greater many.
I’m in awe of how detailed and precise the communication from our body can be. Inspiring.
I simply love your practical science lessons. And this one is no exception. It simply goes to show that we are enhoused in one amazingly wise and intricate vessel which most of the time we ignore. Taking the time to stop and listen to our body is one of the wisest and self-loving choices we could ever make.
Conversation comes from the Latin from Latin com “with, together” (see com-) + versare, frequentative of vertere “to turn.” The image of turning together makes clear that conversing is a movement that brings the ‘other one’ with you. When we converse with the body, understood as just described, the effect is profound.
By focusing on our breath we can experience many changes in how our body reacts to situations!
Our body is amazing at how it looks after itself, the question is how do we assist it to work at its best, it’s like tuning up an engine, you have to listen to it, until you know it’s working as well as it can, it’s like learning a new language, that we already know, we just forget that we know.
I’d never heard of hiccups hanging around that long and I can relate to all the remedies that are claimed work. For some reason we avoid asking the very part of us that has a problem or isn’t at ease and I know this is the last thing on my mind to do if it’s on my mind at all. This article has broken new ground though and I can see very simply this is the way we should be going about everything and in place of asking everyone or everything around you why not ask you. When we hold onto to seeing life in a certain way or living a certain way then we close off to the ‘all’ that is available to us and like this article presents if your body has something going on or you have something going on with you, take a seat with yourself and take the time to ask, like the author you may be surprised at the answer you truly get.
Next time I get the hiccups I will definitely be applying your technique Dianne!
Yes absolutely what you say, and also it is not crazy to know how to heal ourselves because it simply is our body, a body we live in day in day out which makes us the most skilled in knowing what is going on and how to heal ourselves.
Agreed, our whole body communicates within itself at all times, we are a mass of cells, a community working in harmony, a big reflection for us as a human community as we go about our day.
I love that you are living proof of our ability to tune in and communicate with particular parts of the body and in this case determine what was needed to heal your suffering. We are remarkable creatures with remarkable capabilities not yet fathomed… science has only scratched the surface of understanding the wonders of our makeup.
Very good point and one that we are not taught enough about. We have become so disempowered by information over load that we have forgotten our secret weapon; our relationship and connection to ourselves. Unfortunately we have become so accustomed to living in our heads that we can forget that the rest of our body is very intelligent too, if we only take a moment to tune into it.
Love the science that you bring into this very handy hiccup hint. I have been waiting to try it since my first read but the hiccups have not obliged, as yet. I too love the fact that we can have conversations with our body but we need to know at what point to stop talking and to start to listen, as you did. I am endlessly amazed at what my body tells me; I mightn’t always like the answer but I can never deny that what I am hearing is the truth.
“So there you go, years before I’d ever heard of Universal Medicine, and me being a skeptical, practical young scientist-in-the-making, I had a conversation with my body that solved a long-running and very annoying health problem.” Love this – yet we so often look outside of ourselves for answers. Looking to our body rather than our mind – makes so much sense.
Our own questions answered when we accept that we do already know… to deny this as a possibility is to deny ourselves true health and wellbeing.
You make a very convincing point for tuning into one’s body and getting a sense of what is needed and might help. This evidence and those from the many other experiments you have conducted are a testimony to the fact that we are all scientists and experts on our own body and life. We do know but it suits us, more often than not, to not know.
A beautiful sharing Dianne, thank you. I love reading your blogs, there are so many lessons you share in an interesting, real and fun way.
It’s an interesting thing to observe, that there are those that claim you can’t talk to a body, when their very intelligence is very disconnected to the body! I really enjoy being an open person and exploring things for myself. Life itself is a science and we can each observe, test and evaluate outcomes and be our own natural scientists. I personally feel that true science is innate, children are a great example of this, they are such amazing little scientists and they live in the wonder of what they explore. Adults can be too quick to shut down to possibilities, which to me says life is more about safety than true exploration.
This blog and the following part 2 has changed my life, having conversations with my body has brought in so much wisdom and understanding of why things occur and how to move out of them in a way that supports the body to heal not only physical but mental states as well. Listening to what is being communicated is a huge dose of medicine we all need in our lives.
This makes complete sense Dianne but I am left wondering then why we give the mind the upper hand when there is such wisdom our bodies are willing to share?
It is such a natural way of finding answers to messages of the body but do we trust what we feel as being the answer? For me it’s work in progress to embrace the sensitivity and wisdom of the body but when I am honest and do tune in and ask my questions I receive the messages of (a part of) my body very clearly.
Incredible what lengths we go to in order to cure hiccups getting caught up in myths and beliefs, rather than quietly connecting to our body and allowing our own body to deliver its own wisdom to us, great example Dianne of how the body can guide us to exactly what is required.
Its beautiful to feel this kind of sensitivity and common sense from a scientist. In many ways and generally speaking scientists have gained a reputation for being quite the opposite.
I agree Elaine, Dianne makes science very simple and practical for everyone.
As you described your shortened breath it seemed to be a re-set movement – which reminds me of a particular Esoteric Connective Tissue Therapy movement, where we can use the introduced rhythm to also bring the body back, to then deepen its natural rhythm.
It is beautiful to consider that our cells are communicating constantly with each other – cellular harmony in action!
I absolutely love your description of the body communicating Dianne, Thank you for sharing.
I have wondered if Einstein were still alive today, and given that we now accept the ‘everything is energy’… not only relate and reserve this statement for astronomy and physics, I wonder what discoveries Einstein would have made in relating this to the human body… as it too is a bundle of energy, atoms, molecules, particles, quanta – visible and invisible to the naked eye… We do have the intelligence to tune into the communication between all the energy movement within our body, it just that we have got too used to looking ‘out there’ for the answers rather than looking in right under our own nose…
It is interesting to read stories like this, especially when all tried and tested methods do not work and the answer is within the body all along. I have an example such as this, where my throat gets sore if I have spoken up about something but not fully said my piece – once identified the sore throat clears up on it’s own.
This is an inspiring story on many levels. I love the way all the usual treatment methods failed and you had to ask your body how to do it. I love that a sceptical scientist was able to discover how amazing their body is. And I love how this scientifically makes sense.
Beautiful Dianne, I love this, so real, so practical and so doing-able. Tuning into our own body is a most sensible thing for anyone to do.
I love how you bring science to everything or more so how you show and thus allow us to see the simplicity of science in our everyday life.
I just knew I had to read your contribution again for its clarity and pioneering qualities – as you say, our body does communicate with us, continually so in many minute ways and much louder in a health crisis. As you say, “one can ‘tune in’ to one’s body and access the messages that are flying hither and yon like information packets on the internet”. I’d go as far as saying that the internet is a pale imitation of the goings on in the human body – for one, there is not a hint of abuse in its pursuit of homeostasis unless of course, we introduce it from the outside by the way we treat our body.
The breath is fundamental to life so, in a way, it is not surprising that simply changing the way we breathe could have such a marked effect on us, literally changing our life. I have noticed this too, when my body is in pain, by breathing gently and focussing on my breath, or within my heart, the pain diminishes and can completely disappear.
I love this. Thank you Miss Scientist for further confirming the truth about science. Why we waste time ignoring our bodies everyday is beyond me. I say that despite the fact that I ignore my body more than I realise…but it still baffles me that I would choose to do this, because I know it has all the answers.
That’s awesome. Of all the different ways to ‘cure’ hiccups, who would have thought the easiest way would be to listen to your body and to focus on your breath?! Simple isn’t it? Amazing how easy life is when we tune into our bodies.