Secrets of Your Cells: Discovering Your Body's Inner Intelligence (28 page)

To begin, bring your awareness to a point on your forehead and imagine, sense, or feel as though that spot is breathing.

Next, bring your attention to a place between your nose and lips and imagine or sense it breathing. Now a spot on your chin is breathing. Now a place on your neck or throat area. Next, bring your attention to each of the following parts of your body in turn, staying at each place until you sense that spot breathing:

A spot on each of your shoulders

The inside of your elbows

The palms of your hands

The outside of your ankles

The soles of your feet

Your inner ankles

Your calves

Behind your knees

Your inner thighs

Your belly—feel your belly breathe

Next feel your rib cage move as you breathe. Feel it cradling your heart.

Bring your awareness to your heart and sense or feel your heart breathing. Feel your heart
beating.
You may even be able to hear it. Once you have a tangible sense of your heart, remember
with your heart
a person, time, or place for which you felt grateful, or a time when you were appreciated by someone else. Receive whatever image or experience comes first, without judgment. Allow this image of gratitude or appreciation to become as real as possible. Notice where you are and who is with you. Notice any smells, sounds, and feelings; make this a full sensory experience so that it feels real.

Your heart is remembering gratitude.

When you are ready, imagine with each beat of your heart that your
heart cells are sending this memory of gratitude to all your cells.
With each beat of your heart, that message is broadcast up into your shoulders, along your neck, and into your brain. With each beat of your heart, the experience of gratitude is sent down your arms and legs, into your back and belly, and down to your feet. Allow this experience to
resonate throughout your body, mind, and cells.
Stay with it as long as you like.

You may also imagine sending out gratitude and appreciation to someone else if that feels right to you. You could even send the experience of gratitude to all who occupy the earth with you.

When you are ready to leave this place,
anchor the experience
by gently touching your thumb and index finger together on each hand, making circles. You may add another sensory anchor such as a specific scent or sound. Any of the five physical senses will help weave the memory into your cells.

Now bring your attention back to your breath and the room. Become aware of the chair and the floor; notice how you feel. Let your fingers relax and open again, releasing any other sensory trigger you’ve used as a memory anchor. Open your eyes. Notice how alert and refreshed you feel, and know that you can recreate this experience anytime you need to.

Take a few minutes to write, draw, or physically move to express and reinforce this experience. This will further anchor it into your cellular memory.

This practice is a wonderful way to shift both attitudes and physiology. Each time you repeat this experience with your sensory anchors, your cells are learning. Soon it will become easier to reverse your frown or down mood. After a few practice sessions, your sensory anchors alone may be able to bring you to this safe and tranquil place.

Your Body, Breathing

Now let’s explore the steps and the science underlying the practice. The first part, breathing your body, is adapted from yoga, hypnosis, and progressive relaxation. One goal of this part of the exploration is to move you into a relaxed state so your imagination can become more active. The instruction—to imagine, sense, feel, or pretend that a spot on your body is breathing—allows your judging mind to get out of the way. You may find that you’re saying to yourself, “But these places don’t breathe,” and that’s OK; you can pretend. You can imagine it happening in your mind’s eye. The intent is to provide a route to deep relaxation and a tangible, embodied experience. You may discover that doing only this portion relaxes you. I have seen this happen for many people, including myself.

The Heart of the Matter

By the time you get to your heart, this should be a felt-body (kinesthetic) experience. You really can feel your heart. Again, one of the goals is to help you relax and be in your body. Now, the instruction
remember, with your heart, gratitude or feeling appreciated
is emotionally loaded. You may never have felt appreciated by anyone. But you have surely appreciated others, or a beautiful sunset, a wonderful meal. You may remember and feel gratitude for a loved one who has died. And you may experience absolute joy remembering a treasured moment. Whatever image comes to you is what you are feeling the most grateful for in the now, and it may surprise you. Notice that the instructions are to remember
with your heart
rather than to simply remember. You will learn more about the heart’s mind further on.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

— ALBERT EINSTEIN

Imagined Realities

It may seem that imagination is not real—it means making things up, right? But let’s look at some evidence to the contrary. Positron-emission tomography (PET) scans have been used to examine which part of the brain is active when someone is engaged in a particular activity.
²
Before the scan, individuals are given a radioactive form of glucose, the brain’s fuel. When an area of the brain is being used, and thus firing, it consumes this radio-labeled glucose, and the brain scan lights up that region. In one study, people were told to look at a picture, and specific visual areas of the brain lit up. Then they were told to close their eyes and
imagine or remember
the picture—and the same parts of the brain were illuminated. The brain responds in a similar fashion whether you are imagining or actually engaged in the activity. Numerous studies have repeated these results.

Now for a bit of brain geography. The areas above and beside your ears, the temporal lobes, process sound and memory. The brain span that crosses over your head from ear to ear holds movement memories and sensory impressions. At the back of your brain, the occipital region processes visual inputs. Each sensory strand of information is
woven together so that the many sensory threads of the entire experience create a memory or imprint, perhaps holographically. The more times we visit this constellation of sensory memories, the stronger a tool it becomes for healing. And this is true whether our experience is real or imagined.

If you’ve ever done guided imagery, you may recall that you were encouraged to engage as many of your senses as possible, and the practice you have just explored includes an instruction to remember your gratitude experience with as many of your senses as you can. This is to take advantage of the collection of sensory memories just described. The more times we travel a road, the easier it is to find our way.

Our Senses as Doorways to Memory and the Sacred

Our most primitive sense, smell, also is the primary initiator of memory. Be it the smell of a roasting chicken, pizza, perfume, or incense, by taking in the scent, we remember the past or a sacred moment. Remember that newborn babies can recognize their moms’ smell within their first twenty-four hours of life. Sound, too, can set our cells vibrating with a remembered experience or a sacred hum or hymn. And we can rely on our physical senses to teach the body-mind new behaviors. The senses connect inside and out, allowing us to take in the world and open to its blessings.

Anchoring and the Senses

To complete the imagery, the instruction is to touch your fingers together and/or use a sound or scent to anchor the memory, another invitation to engage multiple senses in training the cells to remember. Conditioning—or as I call it,
reconditioning
—our cells is a powerful healing strategy that is always available to us.

Writing, drawing, or moving after the experience helps even more cells connect and remember. With any relaxation or healing practice,
adding a sensory anchor encourages the cells to collaborate and build connecting points with each other.

In one of the early Western medical studies teaching meditation, people were given a scent to anchor the relaxed state when they reached it (in this study, lavender). Over time, the scent of lavender alone could initiate a relaxed state. When I did a lot of teaching around the country, driving to a new city after a full day of teaching was often stressful. I’d always have lavender with me. Sniffing it would help me relax and remember to breathe and help release the tension from my shoulders.

One of the instructions for remembering the experience of gratitude was to imagine with each beat of your heart that cells throughout your body are resonating in that state. Remember how the strings of your cells vibrate with sound, energy, or thought? One cell may set the neighboring cells into humming at the same resonant state.

DEFINITION

Resonance
has many definitions. Resonance is the quality of a sound that stays loud, clear, and deep: an intense prolonged sound produced by sympathetic vibration.

Another definition is a sound or vibration produced in one object caused by the sound or vibration produced in another. Resonance as sound includes frequency and tone. Frequency refers to a rate of vibration, a pulsation of waves; a sustained frequency is a tone. Each sensory experience has its own tones; touch, aromas, and sounds communicate information at different rates of vibration.

José Argüelles, author of
The Mayan Factor,
describes resonance as the quality of sounding again. To resonate is to reverberate, which implies communication, an exchange of information. Resonance is information.

Resonance is also a quality that makes something personally meaningful or important.

Cellular Resonance: Entraining Knowledge

According to Argüelles, only when we engage all the sensory information from the past can we actually resonate with the experience in this present moment. All our cellular strings hold our memories within us.

In
The Silent Pulse
Aikido master/educator George Leonard recounts the tale of a sixteenth-century clockmaker who built beautiful wooden grandfather clocks. One day when hanging a new clock in his shop, the clockmaker noticed that each pendulum of every clock swung with its own independent rhythm. Then, suddenly, everything changed—all the pendulums began swinging together.

Almost magically, on their own, the clocks will begin to beat in synchrony, resonating with each other. When I tended heart cells in a petri dish, each cell beat a separate rhythm until they grew close to each other. Then, like grandfather clocks in a shop, all the cells beat as one. This phenomenon is also known as
entrainment.
Now consider that our grateful, beating heart cells can coax the other cells into line, all in the same rhythm. We’ve ignited our core resonance, and may even be aligning with the universal core of energy.