Secrets of Your Cells: Discovering Your Body's Inner Intelligence (29 page)

Cells entrain too as the field of energy changes. Biologist and futurist Rupert Sheldrake would say that our cells, when entrained, share a field of morphic resonance. The field of energy surrounding these cells tunes them to the same vibration.

You can enjoy another experience of resonance or entrainment by listening to music with a slow beat and then with a fast beat. Notice what happens to your heartbeat. Or what about listening to music that makes you happy? For me, while writing this book, Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours” embraced me with joy, always. When we resonate with a piece of music, an idea, a place, or a friend, we echo and reverberate the same “vibes.”

Why Gratitude?

When I first began doing imagery with people, I gave the instruction to remember a peaceful or joyful time. I was shocked to discover that some people had no memory of being peaceful or happy. Gratitude seems to be much more universal and achievable. We may feel gratitude for a person, a place, a movie, a pet, or something someone did for us. We may have been acknowledged and appreciated by another person. There are lots of reasons to be grateful. We may even feel gratitude for being able to pretend to be grateful! Gratitude journals have been made popular by Oprah Winfrey and Brother David Stendl-Rast. Books on gratitude and research on its benefits abound.

Gratitude is an attitude.

— CAROLYN MYSS

A growing body of literature in the relatively new field of positive psychology shows that keeping a gratitude journal or taking the time to remember three things that occurred in the day for which one feels grateful benefits physical, emotional, and social health. Heart rate and blood pressure are lowered. Immune health is enhanced. People become kinder, more generous, and more empathetic. When gratitude or appreciation is expressed in the workplace, people are more cooperative and productive. It certainly can’t hurt any of us to take a few minutes every day for gratitude. Our very cells will be grateful if we do.

I recently taught a weekend Cells and the Sacred workshop. Though I am in the habit of occasionally thanking my cells for taking care of me, on that Sunday morning in the garden I was truly grateful for everything my cells bring me, including the wisdom I share here. I felt a response inside, a giggling and a message of gratitude that said,
Finally, you got it—you really
mean
it.
Were my cells talking to me? Was I simply resonating in a state of remembered gratitude and my energy inside ignited with joy? All I know is that my relationship and communication with my cells has deepened since then. We play better together, now more than ever.

Gratitude and the Heart

According to investigators at the Institute of HeartMath, what we feel and remember influences how our heart cells beat and project electromagnetic energy.
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When we feel positive emotions, the interval between heartbeats differs from the rate when we feel fear or anger; this interval between heartbeats is called heart-rate variability (HRV).

HeartMath researchers found that increased HRV is associated with more positive emotional, mental, and social interactions. When we are in states of anxiety, anger, or fear or are holding “negative” thoughts, our heart generates decreased HRV. When we stop a “negative” thought or feeling by remembering a moment of appreciation or feeling loved, HRV increases. We radiate a field of electromagnetic waves of energy that influences those around us; the magnetic field around the heart varies with changes in HRV. When hearts and minds are peaceful, people resonate positively with one another. In fact, businesses that teach their employees how to shift mental and emotional states report improved workplace cooperation, relationships, and productivity. The work of the Institute of HeartMath illustrates that our heart cells are powerful generators of resonating energy. Some attribute this to the
brain or mind of the heart.

The Heart’s Mind

Psychologist and author of
The Heart’s Code,
Paul Pearsall was one scientist who believed that heart cells do in fact have a mind—and with good reason. While he was in the hospital after receiving a bone marrow transplant, Pearsall heard intriguing stories from other transplant patients, particularly those who’d received new hearts.

In one remarkable story, a middle-aged woman behaved very differently after receiving the heart of a twenty-year-old biker. A lover of classical music, she now listened to rock and roll and craved green peppers, junk food, and beer—all of which had been passions of the biker.

Another tale is even more compelling. While driving down a dark country road, a husband and wife were arguing. A truck swerved and hit their car, and the husband was killed instantly. Hours later, his good heart was transplanted into a young Hispanic man. Months passed. The wife, who was being counseled by Pearsall, asked to meet the recipient of her husband’s heart, and it was arranged. She asked the young man if she could place her hand on his chest. He understood her need to connect, and agreed. With her hand on his chest, she said, “Everything is copacetic.” The recipient’s mother gave her an odd look and then asked what “copacetic” meant. The woman told her it was the word she and her husband would say after an argument when everything was OK again. The mother smiled. “That’s the first thing my son said when he came out of surgery: ‘Everything’s copacetic.’”

Mysterious? The young man spoke little English—how did such an unusual word come to his mind? Can heart cells truly carry such memories?

Pearsall reminds us what other cultures say about mind: it does not reside in the brain; it dwells in the heart. The Chinese characters for heart and mind are the same. Think with your heart, our Native American relatives tell us. If your heart were given to another, what memories would it carry to them? What memories would you want it to offer?

To most scientists, the idea that the heart—or a cell—has a mind or memory seems absurd. Mind resides solely among the neurons in the brain, they believe. And indeed, for more than a hundred years scientists have sought the seat of memory within the brain. Yet according to some scientists, rather than being localized in one place as originally theorized, memory and the mind are everywhere within us.

Where Is Mind?

Does the capacity to learn reside in the mind, brain, or the whole body? Where is the mind? The physical brain of course, unlike the mind, has
a distinct location in the body. The brain is physical; it can be touched, dissected, probed, and measured. Encased within the stronghold of the bony skull, our brain, a three-pound wrinkled hunk of wet tissue, is certainly capable of learning. It can transform multiple molecular messages into electrochemical signals and meaningful patterns of information. A vast network of more than 100 billion cells helps direct the neurochemical traffic of incoming data and outgoing instructions. The network carries instinctual orders for our survival by maintaining the basic operating system of our body: breathing, heartbeat, temperature, the instinct to eat and drink, and so forth. Though it operates by instinct, the brain can also be trained and programmed with patterns that keep us alive with pleasure.

The mind, on the other hand, has no tangible dimension as we know it. We can’t touch it physically; it’s invisible. We can only measure its effects. Yet the mind and brain must interact. The brain carries out the mind’s wishes, and together they learn. A single neuron does not learn by itself. Learning takes place in communities of neurons, and memory is the network of cellular and energetic connections. Just as described earlier in this chapter, our sensory channels create a network of each specific experience. According to Stanford University neuroscientist Karl Pribram, memory is stored in wave forms throughout the brain and body. Once more we meet the idea that vibrational waves of energy carry information.

One Piece Remembers the Whole

A holographic image captured on film is unlike a regular image. Shining a laser through any piece of holographic film can project the whole image rather than just a portion. Pribram says that memory works the same way, that each memory is holographic, held in a code of waves throughout our entire body.
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Activating one piece of the holographic impression triggers the rest; one part remembers, bringing all the other connected parts into play.

When I remember my son or daughter’s face, their actual face, or even a picture of it, is not residing somewhere in my brain. Yet how can I see them so clearly when I think about them? Somewhere in my body is a code for each face. Our mind-brain holds information somewhat as a computer holds its information—in a patterned code. How else could we carry a lifetime of memories, millions of cellular skills, and a thousand ideas if these were not somehow compacted into an electrochemical coding system? Though Pribram’s notion of memory and mind is not universally accepted, he provides yet another argument that our cells know more than we think they do and that their intelligence is carried in waves of vibration.

Deeper into the Construct

Sir John Eccles wrote that the electrical exchanges between brain cells (synaptic potentials) don’t occur singly. Every nerve has branches. When an electrical message goes down the branches, a ripple or a
wave front
is formed. When other wave fronts come to the same location from different directions, they intersect and set up an interference pattern. It’s like the meeting of ripples that form around two pebbles thrown into a pond.

So according to the holographic theory, our memory is constructed from vibrational patterns and becomes activated when the right set of wave forms is transmitted. When a song or the scent of newly mowed grass floods us with memories, it’s because the wave patterns trigger a set of stored holograms. What we call
situational cues
for memory are none other than a set of wave forms that can activate the appropriate hologram.

Perhaps herein lies the answer to the mysterious effects of the transplanted heart; it carries holograms of wave forms that inform its new owner of preferred tastes and sensibilities.

Though there is no objective proof of this hologram theory, it carries a compelling idea; cellular memory and intelligence still remain enigmatic. Whatever it is and wherever it resides, mind is an enigma. Yet as
I have become aware of this hologram theory, I am discovering that as I attempt to let go of a memory, I can imagine waves leaving me.

What goes into the making of the neural holograms that the brain uses to experience reality are the images upon which we meditate, our hopes and fears, the attitudes of our doctors, our unconscious prejudices, our individual and cultural beliefs, and our faith in things both spiritual and technological. These are important clues that point towards why we must become aware of and acquire mastery to unleash these talents.

— MICHAEL TALBOT
The Holographic Universe

On One Condition: Sensory Learning

A person with cancer standing across the street from the hospital where he received chemotherapy the month before feels the same discomfort of the previous treatments by simply looking at the front door. The smells inside the hospital further remind him of his stomach’s queasy reactions. Seeing the building and smelling the odors associated with his upsetting experience, he is being unconsciously conditioned, his memories and nausea rekindled.

The cellular body-mind recalls sensory conditions when it learns. Psychologist Ernest Rossi calls this
state-dependent learning.
⁵
Pribram would name it
holographic.
From the multidimensional pictures in your mind—the smells, sounds, feelings, sensations—you create a holographic sensory state associated with a previous encounter. Any one of the sensory triggers can bring back the whole experience. We learn conditions “conditionally.”

Does the Name Pavlov Ring a Bell?

While sensory input can trigger an old memory or prejudice, it can also help us learn new behaviors, like feeling gratitude. Remember Ivan Pavlov? Experiments more than a century ago by the Nobel Prize-winning Russian scientist led to the discovery of behavioral
conditioning.
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Dogs automatically salivate when they see a piece of meat. The sound of a bell doesn’t have the same effect; it will not trigger that autonomic physiologic response. Yet Pavlov trained dogs to salivate at the ringing of a bell. How? Each time he showed meat to the dog, he also rang a bell, and over time, the sound of the bell even when meat was not present caused the dog to salivate. In this way, Pavlov discovered that the brain could be changed to acquire new knowledge and behaviors. For his dogs, a bell foretold the arrival of food. The dog’s cells learned to respond to unusual triggers, and their physiologic networks connected and learned.

What does Pavlov’s discovery have to do with us? It helps us understand how many of our unconscious behaviors and attitudes have been programmed and perhaps can be unlearned and new physiologic patterns learned. Dr. Robert Ader, world-renowned psychologist at the University of Rochester, showed that our immune system could also be conditioned through sensory stimuli.
⁷
At the time, he wasn’t interested in either the senses or immune function—he wanted to understand what it is that builds the memories that cause persistent reactivity to an unpleasant experience. Why does a person who has undergone chemotherapy one time react so drastically the next time he or she sees the doctor’s office, hears the nurse’s voice, or smells the waiting room?

Ader’s objective was to discover how an unpleasant experience programs or conditions the same experience to recur. To investigate this, he first worked with animals. He injected mice with a chemical that made them sick to their stomachs while at the same time giving them a unique taste: saccharin-sweetened water. So here we have a new taste for the animals paired with a one-time unpleasant experience—nausea. Over time, he followed whether the animals would avoid the water or keep on drinking it. Surprisingly, the animals that drank the most saccharin-sweetened water started dying of infections. Unbeknownst to Ader, the drug he used to cause nausea, the chemotherapy agent Cytoxan, also suppressed immune function. The animals had received the chemotherapy drug only once, yet each time they drank more
saccharin-sweetened water, their bodies “remembered” the immune-suppressing effects of Cytoxan. So here is an example of the sense of taste triggering a long-term effect. It turns out that taste often stimulates the most rapid conditioning, as other sensory input like touch or smell requires numerous introductions to condition the body. What Ader unwittingly discovered was that immune responses could be conditioned or “trained” through the senses!