Breath, Healing, and the Mystery

Breath, Healing, and the Mystery

by Patricia Kay, MA, coauthor of Cell Level Meditation

Cell Level Meditation is a vehicle for finding our way “home.” We take the breath to our cells, offering them our deepest desire to be happy and healthy and strong. In some way, they hear us and respond. (Or maybe we hear them asking for the breath!) This meditative form is a gift that helps the mind and the body come into healing, which in turn, helps us be ourselves in fullness.

In the Odyssey, the great mythological journey told by Homer, the hero, Odysseus, spends years trying to get home. To get there, he goes through all kinds of trials and tribulations. He must use every kind of skill and every clever device you can imagine. He always has to have his wits about him because something new and different is always coming up, and he has to have the courage of his creative response for each ordeal.

Of course, this is the archetypal human journey we all are on in one form or another. We are trying to find out who we are and how to be full in that. I would describe this as health: being fully who we are and having the body, mind, and spirit in full congruence as an expression of that. As you begin taking this journey for yourself, you’ll discover that the journey into the body, into the cells is quite an adventure! You can take it for your own creative reasons. My little book, Cell Level Meditation, is a road map for the journey inside.

Many years ago, during a particularly difficult period in my life, I went to the beach in Mexico with some friends for renewal, healing, and inspiration. One day, I was out swimming in the ocean, and as I was coming in, I got taken by a wave and was slammed against lava rocks at the shore’s edge. I wasn’t injured seriously, but my foot was scraped and bleeding. I was jarred by the experience of being taken by the powerful force of the ocean.

I stumbled out of the ocean with my scraped and bleeding foot. I was a little dazed, but I managed to walk down the beach where I sat under a huge rock. In the shade provided there, I intuitively went into deep meditation, experiencing fully the sensation in my foot without “doing” anything but noticing it and being present with the sensations.

Within seconds, an image came to me. In my mind’s eye, I was seeing a moving kaleidoscope of orange shapes, like petals on a flower; the color was very brilliant. I was entranced by this spontaneous vision that came to me. I felt calmed by it. After a while in this meditative experience I began to “see” long, slender “fingers,” purplish in color, coming together. I felt some excitement, and wondered if I were seeing Arnica flowers, since I’d never seen them. I am a homeopath, and certainly this is the remedy I would have taken if I’d had it with me, since Arnica is a plant used by herbalists and homeopaths to heal the trauma of bruised and injured tissue. I wondered if I were connecting with it, receiving its healing properties. By now, my foot no longer hurt, and I realized I had been healed. I opened my eyes and looked at my foot. The skin, which had been broken, was totally healed. There was only some minor redness left.

As you can imagine, I was amazed by this very dramatic healing. I felt touched by something very holy. I closed my eyes and went into this sense of amazement I was feeling. A question came to me: Did I want the power to heal people? I pondered this question and followed it down a path of self-inquiry. I discovered through this that I didn’t want this power. From that clarification I also knew that what did (and does) interest me was accompanying people in their own discoveries of healing and unfolding and giving them any tools that might help them.

I came out of my reverie and walked back down the beach to where my friends were. Now, one of the people I was with was my dear friend and mentor in homeopathy, Rosa. I asked Rosa what color Arnica flowers were, and she said, “They’re orange.” Then I wondered if I had connected with their essence in the first image given to me: the kaleidoscope of orange shapes. Because of the way my mind works, I believe I somehow captured what I call the “geometry” or the essence behind the form. And, I understood that the purplish “fingers” I’d seen were cells reuniting.

This was one of my more dramatic moments with Cell Level Meditation. It was about seven or eight months later that a friend told my husband and me to contact Barry Grundland, the creator of Cell Level Meditation, and we both began to work with him. Over the years of working with him, listening to him, and accompanying other people in their healing journeys, I have been blessed and delighted to travel into myself and others, to the cellular level and beyond. I have witnessed the ordinary power of the extraordinary bodies we live in as they (and we) come into healing, and I just love that!

Each cell is kind of a mini-world that contains the whole in a peculiar way. At the most basic of levels, each cell does all the things a whole body does: it breathes, it has intelligence, it takes in food and converts it to energy for creating new things, it cleanses itself, it renews itself and communicates with other cells. I also discovered that cells seem to have memories of events, beliefs, opinions, preferences, and habits. And there are color and movement, activity and rest, sounds and rhythm. They seem to be aspects of the template of life.

Sometimes as we are going into concentration to meditate with our bodies, we are given images, metaphors, or clues to follow. These images are made for us, according to our own nature. Consciousness seems to get our attention in ways that are best meant for us. Some people don’t get images at all, but rather they sense a rhythm or a tension or a stuckness that calls to them. We are working with the notion of the analogue, in which a basic pattern reveals itself in different ways throughout different planes and states of awareness and manifestation.

I have also discovered that the inner journey inspires a similar kind of wonder and reverence as the outer journey. The journey in, or the journey out—they are surprisingly similar, and they seem to mirror each other. Looking out at the night sky inspires awe and reverence. We look up into the inky dark sky that holds glittery, sparkling lights and feel a deep sense of wonder. Going into the body—the tissues, the organs, the cells, the molecules and beyond—is similarly, breathtaking. The words spoken by the ancient master, Hermes Trismegistus ring true: “As above, so below. As within, so without.” Yes! Wonder and reverence above and reverence and wonder below.

Each time you breathe, you are participating in the Mystery. When you do this with some awareness, you may have an experience of awe and wonder. The Vastness of the Infinite comes into the finite body. The Spirit connects the Heaven with the Earth – it is the link between them! With awareness, you can take in the breath and follow it into your earth-place, your very body. This Great Space, which is around the whole earth, is so big, and it comes into your nose, down your throat, into your trachea, into your lungs, down, down, down into increasingly smaller and smaller passages, all the way into these delicate sacks, like tiny balloons, called alveoli in the lungs. The surface of the alveoli is only one cell thick. The Mighty Breath has now come down to this delicate membrane and crosses over into the one cell-thickness of a capillary (smallest blood vessel) to be received by the blood cells, which in turn will travel all through your body to deliver the Mighty Breath to every single cell. The Great Space makes itself very small, very refined, very calibrated to your exact needs. I find this mind-boggling!

And for our purposes, and this is very important, the Breath opens the channels of healing. The Breath takes us beyond the thinking of the disconnected-thought-thinking, problem-solving small mind (that thinks it is in charge of healing). The Breath opens the body and the mind to infinite possibilities.

When you begin to meditate, you don’t know what will come toward you. You don’t have to know. In fact, it’s probably what you don’t know that has the greatest power and holds the greatest potential for your true healing.

Being able to stay open to “not having to know everything” is such a liberating gift. Don’t worry, though, your mind will probably pop up over and over, trying to take charge, asking things like, “Why?” Many people I’ve worked with have done a lot of therapy and have all kinds of insights into their past. This is good. One thing that can get in the way, however, is jumping too quickly to a decision, “Oh, I’ve already seen this, and this is why this is happening to me.”

One woman who worked with me came up with a great line to help herself when she noticed this happening: “Uh, oh! The ‘whys’ got me again.” And then she’d go back to the silence, the experience of the body and the breath. And remember, you can help your mind stay curious by helping it ask better questions, like, “Where is that going on in the body?”

Sometimes you think you’re going to heal something. You begin to breathe, and the breath takes you down a totally unexpected trail, opening doors, liberating cramped and musty ideas for a deeper healing in body and mind than you ever thought possible. Or, sometimes, monsters, vampires, and three-year-olds with sad faces step into the spotlight. You just never know what’s going to show up. This can be a little scary.

Whatever comes toward you as you take this journey inside your body, you can dive in. Once I talked to a guy who liked to climb rocks. He told me something very amazing. He said that one time when he was climbing, he fell. For a brief moment he experienced fear, and then he moved beyond the fear and decided to go into the fall as if he were diving. And, he managed to land on the ground in a way that he didn’t even get hurt.

Cell Level Meditation can be like this. Instead of recoiling in fear or helplessness, you may choose to jump into whatever comes toward you. Ride the breath into it. Notice the sensation/color/sound/smell; experience it; take the breath into it; become one with it and breathe some more. Keep going!

So, breathe into your body with curiosity. Ride on the breath toward the cells. Dive into whatever comes toward you. Trying to fix it and don’t know what to do? Notice where that thought lives in your body (maybe tightness in your shoulders or clenching in your jaw), then breathe into the “trying to fix it”! Fully experience the sensation and breathe! If a sad cell comes toward you… hmm… what is your response? Can you allow your body the experience of sorrow or do you need to tell it to “get a grip and keep going?” All the way inside, you find out who you are. And there’s only one you in all the world. Use your own creative response to whatever is your true experience. And breathe to it!

If an evil cell comes toward you… hmm… what will you do? Now you may have to engage in such philosophical questions. And the cells and the breath may reveal some surprises that inform your life in interesting ways. I can tell you that wherever I have encountered evil, there has been a profound disconnect… like a disembodied mind that was not aware of its interconnectedness and interdependence with others.

So, if you deal with cells that have no interest in being in relationship with other cells, you may need to restrain them and help the body activate ways to keep them from hurting the others, including moving them right on out of the body, or retraining them to be helpful (like the bacteria in the gut that helps digest your food, but is not allowed to get in the blood and wreak havoc). How you deal with such a deep question reveals the depths and proclivities of your own nature, your own special genius, as well as a way you are learning from, adapting to, and adjusting through your own experience.

Again and again, I am brought to a very humbling reality: healing is a mysterious journey. I don’t control it. I don’t get to decide who heals and who doesn’t. I have a tendency to want to know the answers, to know how to do things, but again and again, this journey is about letting go into the moment with all my best instincts and letting the Mystery direct the unfolding. It is much more beautiful and thorough than I am, and in fact, it’s within the Mystery that healing happens.