005 | A Return to the Gut
The Indigenous & Microbial Intelligence Guiding Your Mood, Energy, and Decisions
About This Collaboration
Seth Kaufman: This piece was co-written with Dr. Samefko Ludidi, a nutrition scientist, bestselling author, and someone I deeply respect for his rare ability to bridge science, ancestral wisdom, and real-life practice.
We’ve been in conversation around the gut not just as a site of digestion, but as a living, sensing interface between body, brain, and world. This essay reflects that ongoing dialogue. Two perspectives, one shared curiosity. Here, we look at the gut as a peculiar source of intrinsic wisdom, viewed through different lenses, yet pointing toward the same deep intelligence.
Let’s begin where instinct, intelligence, and intuition converge.
Dr Ludidi
The gut is the gateway to good health.
Like in life, dialogue matters. It offers us, humans, the opportunity to connect. With our partners, friends and beloved ones and most importantly with the ones we often tend to forget the most - ourselves - too.
Your gut-feeling is about learning to listen to what you - deep inside - already know. Sensing, digesting and anticipating.
For modern humans, it requires lots of practice though, but once ‘unlocked’ it takes us to new dimensions, beyond mere physical health..
Building solid relationships that we can truly rely on requires practice, time and courage to dare to trust on what we feel. It’s an inside-out process.
In the end, your body is like your lifelong partner. It wants you to communicate, to practice together with you. It wants to be heard as well, to be understood, so it can receive what it needs. What it deserves. And it does so with a reason. Because if you take good care of your body, one day your body will be able to take care of you. Altruism in its purest form. I speak from experience.
But we have to remember too that, relationships are not given. They are built step by step. To reap benefits from, not only in the moment, but in the long run. Therefore they are worth investing in, long term.
Seth
We say, “I have a gut feeling.”
It’s not just a figure of speech.
This is your body processing, predicting, and protecting you in real time, a full-body signal shaped by memory, emotion, and the billions of organisms living inside you.
Your inner world, reading the room before your brain can.
Your gut isn’t just a digestive tube, it digests experience.
It’s the body’s metabolic interface with the world. Food, emotions, stress, sensation, it all passes through here.
When something overwhelms your system, psychologically or physiologically, it lingers. Tissues tighten. Your microbiome shifts. Vagal tone is disrupted. Over time, those “undigested” experiences don’t just live in your mind, they live in your gut. Stress.
Stress doesn’t just affect your gut.
It lives there…
All these experiences shape how you feel, how you move, and how safe you are in your own body.
Zoom out.
Your Second Brain: Where Gut Feeling Comes From
Although often still regarded as merely having a mechanistic food-processing function, there is so much more to the story of the gut…
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DO YOU WANNA READ THE FULL STORY AND LEARN HOW YOUR GUT IN ALL ITS FACETS AFFECTS YOUR HEALTH & WELLBEING? CLICK THE LINK BELOW!
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