The Mesentery: Intelligence at the Core
Exploring the emotional, fluid, and structural depth of our gut brain
Lately, I’ve been exploring the mesentery—not just as an anatomical structure, but as a perceptive and emotional center in the body. This post dives into the mesentery’s role in our gut intelligence and inner sense of support. I’m also including a short video where I share more about how this fluid, fascial organ rests in our deep bellies and can be fed by specific breathing technique called Navel Flooding Breath.
Mesentery and Gut Intelligence
Our mesentery is the organ that roots and supports our small and large intestines into the back abdominal wall. It’s composed of highly sensitive and intelligent connective tissue—double layers of peritoneum that slip and slide in relation to each other. Woven through these delicate folds are the complex and critical structures of the autonomic nervous system. The mesentery forms a vital part of our gut brain, housing both parasympathetic and sympathetic nerves.
Our mesenteries are complex hubs of primal emotional and structural support. Alongside the nervous system, they contain fatty tissue, blood vessels, and lymphatics. This fascial web, laced with nerves, becomes a conduit for our autonomic responses to nourishment—both literal and figurative.
The mesentery, with its supple fatty weave, supports the enteric nervous system in managing the processes of digestion. The gut brain lets us know how we feel about what we’re digesting—food, information, experience.
Sensing and Feeling in the Mesentery
How do we respond to nourishment? What do we do with the food we eat—and the ideas or emotions we take in?
Do we want what we’re swallowing? Are we safe here?
In very real ways, our guts are trying to make sense of life. We digest what we can, and sometimes even assimilate it into the fabric of our being. Sometimes we can’t. Maybe we harden against it. Maybe we collapse because we feel powerless.
It’s worth wondering: are these emotional states, these survival responses, living in the supple folds of the mesentery?
This fluid hub of intelligence is always working on our behalf. When we begin to recognize and feel it, perhaps we can support it more consciously—with love and respect. Your mesentery is doing its best to help you out! As you get to know it, you may find it easy to give it a little more love.
I love tree fungus because its shape so closely resembles the mesentery. Thick, undulating folds attached to the trunk, their waving forms reaching outward into the environment. (Of course, our mesenteries are even more fluid—literally waving into the watery world within us.)
The starfish is a beautiful example—a sea creature completely organized around its navel. In this image, it’s eating.
The continuity of our embodied mesenteries offers a key structure for organizing inquiry, breath, and movement around the navel in yoga.
What is Gut Consciousness?
To me, the mesentery holds a deep knowing of who we are at the core. In embodiment, it opens a window into the weave of our fluid underpinnings, and into our most primal human experiences of gut reality: safety, comfort, nurturance. Or, often, their opposites—fear, discomfort, confusion, misperception.
In yoga, we recognize the navel center as the home of the manipura chakra and the fire element. This consciousness aligns beautifully with the felt experience of the mesentery—one of our most primary organs of the core. Exploring its form and function offers a visceral doorway into the integration of body and mind at the navel: our gut, our primal hungry and desirous self as part of who we are. Not to deny but to know and incorporate.
If we choose, we can begin to accept ourselves as we are. These deeply fluid navel folds can provide comfort when we release the fear and gripping we may hold in our guts. When acknowledged and allowed, the mesentery reveals itself—fluid, undulating, perceptive. A relational partner to our whole structure and consciousness.
We can journey inward and support this process through gentle movement, breath, and, of course, self-acceptance.
Explore Navel Flooding Breath With Me in the Video Below!
Learn to breathe with and into the glorious and sensitive tissues and folds of our mesenteries!
Thank you for reading and watching. If this sparked anything for you, I’d love to hear about it. And if you’re interested, our next video explores our mesentery supporting embodied movement.