Secrets of Your Cells: Discovering Your Body's Inner Intelligence (30 page)

Until Ader’s work and his subsequent collaboration with immunologist Nicholas Cohen, the common consensus was that the immune system learned only through its attraction and response to foreign, or “not self,” antigens.
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They broke through that long-held scientific dogma by showing that the immune response can be influenced by conventional sensory conditioning. This also opened the door on the role of belief, expectations, and the mind on immune functions. Later, other investigators demonstrated that immune memory could be enhanced or diminished by pairing an immune stimulus with any of the five physical senses. So cells can be educated by our senses.

EXPLORATION

Sensory Conditioning

Sensory conditioning is a useful strategy to put into your “medicine bag” of health remedies.
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The next time you meditate or do the gratitude practice in this chapter, or are simply feeling relaxed, enjoy a whiff or two of one of your favorite scents, or a new one. When you feel that way again, sniff away. It might take four or five “cellular sessions” to take effect, but soon the scent alone will give you that same relaxed, peaceful feeling. This is a great backup for those times you want to change your mood and mind.

When setting up a pairing experiment such as this, make sure you pair the sensory input (the scent) and the physiologic trigger (being relaxed) within thirty seconds.

Imagery: “Re-Minding” the Body

When I worked with children I believed imagery worked, and taught it for years, but I never used it personally. (Unless we include the imagery associated with worrying, at which I was a champion.) About twenty years ago, when preparing to teach my first course in psychoneuroimmunology, a rash erupted on my left arm. It persisted for months. I changed my soap, body lotion, detergent—nothing made a difference. Cortisone cream didn’t diminish it, nor did any other remedy I tried. Then one day I thought, “Well, if you believe that imagery works, why don’t you test it out on your rash?” I closed my eyes, breathed deeply for a few minutes, got relaxed, and suddenly an odd image—one a child might imagine—leapt to mind: an elf. This little creature called himself Mortimer, and he carried a gold spike, which he used to clean the rash from below the surface of my skin. When he was through I thanked him, asked if I could call on him some other time, and opened my eyes. The rash was still there—but the next day it was gone.

A miracle? A coincidence? Was it my wish, my belief, my intention that eliminated the rash? I may never know, but my arm stayed clear for weeks. That is, until a former physician colleague offered to share the materials on imagery and body-mind health he had gathered through the years. He had labeled the file “Quackery.” The next day my rash returned!

This story serves to demonstrate that not only do our own beliefs influence our healing; we are influenced by others’ beliefs as well. My mind both believed and doubted what had happened to the rash using imagery, and when an “expert” suddenly reinforced my doubt, the magical healing process was reversed. Can reinforcement or contradiction of one’s beliefs by others explain why some people who are told they have six months to live die in six months, while others live far longer?

We often think that what we imagine is not “real.” How, then, do we explain the placebo effect? A medication that is really an innocuous
sugar pill can relieve pain, change the course of an illness, or even stimulate the nausea of a chemotherapy agent. Our minds and our cells collaborate in such responses.

This holographic matrix provides each cell with its cellular mind. The discovery that every cell contains a reflection of the whole has given us a tremendous clue to the way in which this mysterious, multi-level body is constructed.

— JOHN DAVIDSON
The Web of Life

The Mind of Our Cells

The mind is said to live in every cell, and if you change the mind of one cell, the rest may move to resonate with it. Picture the seed of an image beginning somewhere in your brain. This image sends impulses to numerous sensory neurons linked to various regions of your body landscape. Trigger one, and they may all respond, and the potential is truly astronomical. You have at least 10 billion neurons, each with the capacity to make more than five thousand connections. The more links and connections you make through imagery, thoughts, and feelings, the more doorways to change you can open. The more senses and emotions involved with the image you hold in your mind’s eye and in your cells, the more pronounced are the electrical, energetic, and chemical responses and information flow throughout the body—and the more powerful the remembering.

When you imagine engaging in an athletic activity, you are “re-minding” the body of its neuromuscular patterns.
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Olympic athletes from the former Soviet Union perfected their performances using imagery. A surprising story of an elderly yoga practitioner bears repeating here.

George, who had done yoga for nearly ten years, slipped and fell. Now with his leg in a cast, he was unable to continue his practice. Every day, however, at the same time he usually did his poses, he did them in his imagination instead. Usually when a limb is in a cast for a period of time, it loses muscle and strength, but when George’s cast was removed,
his leg was quite healthy. Was it imagining his cells that helped maintain strength and tone?

My qigong master, DaJin Sun, tells of his own remarkable recovery. When living in China as a teen, he had carried huge sacks of rice until he suffered an accident that broke his back. This is a terribly immobilizing injury. But as he lay in a hospital bed, he began recalling the qigong exercises his mother had taught him. He had never actually done them before, but now he began—in his imagination. When I met DaJin about twenty years later, he was a robust, active man with no traces of his earlier injury.

Remembering to Remember

A teenage boy lying in bed overheard the doctor whispering these words to his parents in the next room: “He won’t be alive in the morning.” He didn’t want to die and pleaded, “Please let me at least see one more sunset.” Hearing him, his mother tiptoed into his room.

“Mom, would you please move my dresser?” he asked.

It was a strange request from her very sick son, but she complied. He told her how to place his dresser so that the mirror on top of it would reflect the setting sun. For the next hour, the setting sun was all seventeen-year-old Milton saw.

The next morning Milton was unconscious. And the next. And the next. When at last he woke on the fourth day, he was almost completely paralyzed. All he could move were his eyes and his mouth to speak—barely. It was polio, and for all he knew, this was how he would spend the rest of his days.

His body was crippled, but fortunately, his mind was not.

Curious and astute, he played mental games. Whose footsteps did he hear coming from the barn? What kind of mood was the person in? He listened to all the sounds around him and invented stories about what he heard. One day his parents left him alone in the middle of his room, tied into a rocking chair so he wouldn’t fall. Milton looked longingly at
the window, wishing he were closer to it so he could gaze out at the farm and the sunshine. Then his chair began to rock slightly.
What had just happened?
Was it the wind, or had his wishing to be closer to the window stimulated body movements he had thought himself incapable of?

For most of us, this experience might have gone unnoticed, but Milton couldn’t let it go—in fact, it propelled him into a period of profound self-discovery. Could he imagine moving and make it happen? Could he wish his body into motion? Could it remember what it had once been able to do? Searching his memory for sensations and images of the movements he had most enjoyed, he imagined climbing a tree like a monkey. How did his hands and fingers grasp the tree limbs? What did his legs do to scamper up the trunk and reach a higher branch? Often when imaging these movements, he stared at his hand, and one day his fingers began to twitch. He continued his mental exercises, and he also studied his baby sister, who was just learning how to walk. He studied how she did it. He watched, and he remembered.

Every experience, real or imagined, is remembered in sensory fragments. Gradually this determined young man became stronger. Movement returned to his body. In less than a year, he was walking with crutches. Though he had been fully crippled at seventeen, the following year he made a courageous solo trip by canoe into the wilderness.

What was it that helped this inspiring young man to recover? Was it only a matter of time? Did his intense desire and his ability to thoroughly recall sensory memories actually enable him to move again more quickly?

So profoundly was he changed by his experience that Milton went on to become a physician and psychiatrist. One of the first to use imagery in medicine, Milton Erickson is now considered the father of medical hypnosis. His awareness, persistence, and imagination changed more than his own life; he has helped millions of others.
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There are numerous stories about magical healings in the health literature I could have chosen to relate in detail in this chapter. I offer this one because I find it an inspiring illustration of the profound connection between our cells and our minds—a testament to the power of
imagination and intention to change the physical form and functioning of our cells.

Numerous studies with athletes have shown that those who combine imagery with their physical practice improve more than those who avoid the imagery training sessions. One of my students, a fitness coach, tested this out with several of his clients. He had one set imagine lifting weights before actually doing the exercise; they gained strength more rapidly than the clients he trained in the usual fashion without imagery.

Imagery and Healing

The psychologist, the religious believer, the medical scientist, and the mystic or the shaman each offer a different explanation of how imagery works to benefit health. The psychologist may say we are changing our conscious thoughts to align with deeper, purpose-driven unconscious beliefs. The religious person may say God is hearing a prayer and answering it. The scientist may say that imagery is changing the neurotransmitters, molecules, and cellular networks of the body. The mystic and the shaman may say that we’re changing the energy surrounding the situation and that this allows change to take place. In spite of the variety of theoretical constructs about the mechanisms of the imagination, how and whether it will work as we wish it to are part of the great Mystery. We can say it works by giving people hope, a sense of control with their lives or their illness. It’s a coping skill that can be brought to bear on day-to-day problem solving. One thing we do know is that a state of relaxation is the first prerequisite; the stress-reducing biochemical and energetic environment induces healing through autonomic nervous system balance.
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The language of the body as well as the spirit—image and symbol—feeds our healing power. Now, through the doorways of science, we are beginning to understand how the imagination can have such a profound effect on the body.

Imagery helps create connection to the sacred, the self, and the cells.

Forgetting

So now we’ve learned a bit more about building cellular memory, but how do we diminish the power of a negative memory on our body and mind? Can we loosen its hold on us?

New Age thought has it that there are strings or cords of energy that bind us to another person in our life, both figuratively and literally, and that there are ways to cut those strings if we feel we need to. We can perform a ritual with the intent of disconnecting from a past relationship, for example. I have certainly experienced the power of this practice; the results were short-lived, but nonetheless, something in the ritual enabled me to feel free of the relationship for a while. The memories and longings that had seemed to consume me no longer occupied my every waking moment.