The Wisdom of Your Cells: How Your Beliefs Control Your Biology by Bruce H. Lipton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This audiobook is delivered as a series of lectures which covers and reinforces some of the material from Biology of Belief. We are shown the fallacy in our thinking which portrays as victims of circumstance and products of random chance. Lipton goes further in this book, discussing evolution on a species and planet wide scale, and the ability we have, right now, to pick a new trajectory and get ourselves out of this mess we are in. He offers ideas on improving health, on a physical, relational, and community level, encouraging the reader to engage the power of their own attention to envision a brighter future.

If you have always suspected that quantum physics implies much about the nature of biology, neurology, and sociology, this book will give you much to ponder. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in taking the helm of their own healing voyage and improving this world we live in together.

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On the Quantum Nature of Education

I keep bumping up against the fallacy of reductionism as I stretch to find the words that define my learning process. I am a wave AND a particle; sometimes I work with trajectories, while at other times I am fully in each particular moment of NOW. When I focus on one, the other becomes difficult to fathom. In each now, attention is what matters, being present before it all slips away into a never-ending progression of moments. But without trajectory, there is no story and no context. These are essential to meaning, learning, and connection. Focus too much on trajectory, however, and it is easy to become ungrounded and unpresent.

When I am learning best, I am fully engaged in process, not in describing that process. Something is lost in translation when I look to pin down my experience into some sort of tangible shape. Yet this is necessary in order to fully integrate that which I learn, to reflect and consider this process in context.

It seems that an important lesson is that learning is organic, and rarely conforms to modern notions of time, haste, efficiency, production, or regularity. It is more like a tide, alive with a billion unknowable presences.

I am trying to find the patterns in my experience, looking for a framework to measure my balance by. I keep trying to overlay various systems upon my experience: Five Element Theory; Bloom's Taxonomy; Glasser's Five Basic Needs; the Chakras; the Four Elements; the Four Directions; the Kabbalah; Multiple Intelligences. None of these are complete on their own, but each system brings a certain palette and texture to self-observation that can be used to propel further growth and understanding.

The Four Questions revisted

I am learning more than I can put into words, and words do my learning little justice. Yet that is the language of academia, and a right and proper way to record the experience of growth and change.

I set out this quarter to discover how to approach my life more sustainably. I read to discover a sense of context, and Zinn and Freire both inspired me to be a less complacent participant in this play of now that our world is dancing. My experience fits into a larger picture of power, class, and what it means to be human in ways that give my life texture and pattern. Yet I know the power of intention; harnessing this is harnessing the soul of our divinity. We can do this with our emotions, with our minds, and with our bodies. We can feed that which feeds us. We can stop feeding our trolls. We can become our own most beautiful creations.

This is the heart of sustenance: how do we invest our attention in ways that bring us the most bounteous harvest of existence? How do we make systems that keep energy flowing and creativity possible?

Energy moves in circles and waves. I think when we can recognize rhythm and account for it in living, we have a better chance of finding wellness. There are days and nights, winter and summer, ebb and flow. These things exist in a circular spectrum, where each part flows into the next. I feel that our culture refuses to recognize the power in these rhythms, and seeks to make rigid that which should move.

In order to be sustainable, I need to be able to flex more gracefully in the context of my life. I feel that self-employment is the only way in which I will be able to create that sort of movement.

On Fascia and Social Change

Fascia.

Fascia is the network of collagen fibers in ground substance that shapes our flesh. Is there a metaphor in this about personal change and social change? Can we think of humans as the fibers in the mesh of the universe, creating shape and meaning, and binding together in many different ways for many different aims. How then, can we affect this human fascia, finding the uncomfortable places and learning how to experience them with greater awareness and intent?

Furthering this metaphor, scar tissue is where the friction has made a mess of human relationship, and the aim of deep tissue work is to align the fibers so they have a more functional relationship with one another. Less friction creates less resistance, and this is true on a physiological level as well as on a relational level.

Choice Theory is like deep tissue for relationships. When we learn how much influence we have over our experience, we can make better choices so that relationship itself becomes something of a flow generator. We learn how not to catch on one another's rough spots and find the places where we line up and work well together.

My latest thoughts

I have been wrapped in diversity studies lately, and have been pondering the effects of culture, gender, race and class. I am learning that people are all unique in their interpretations of this; every experience paints an entirely new picture of what it means to be human. I think it is important to also remember that we are not just these bodies, and in this way are transcendent of culture. We are all beings of Spirit, fractal expressions of the Source in all of it's creative glory. This expresses the way in which we are One, and connected. People are so easily wrapped up in identity because that is what we use to experience existence. But there is a place where there is no you and no me and this is the place I want to remember, because it makes dealing gracefully with the ingrained habits and responses of ego much more possible.

I have been thinking a lot about the ideas of liberation that Paolo Freire discusses in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It seems to me that the only thing that can lead to our mutual salvation is the realization of each human potential. Only the individual really knows how to chart their own path; we can, however all be resources to each other to support, educate, and connect with others on their journeys. An important first step that I have been working on this quarter is the banishment of hierarchacal relationships in my life, where I can manage to effect this. One place where I can access this road to power is my professional life as a massage therapist. I currently work as an employee, where I rent out my labor to another for a fixed fee, while he charges whatever he can for my time. This bothers me on ethical grounds, and it interferes with my authentic relationship with my clientele. I admit that this road is easier in many ways; someone else is taking care of many details which are bothersome and boring. I don't have to worry much about advertising, and I can save thinking about work for the days I am in the office.

Yet I am constrained in what I do, and unmotivated by the lack of possible improvement of financial possibilities as an employee. I have effectively reached my earning limit, unless I choose to devote more hours of my life to a situation in which I feel constrained by my environment. If I choose, however, to devote myself to my practice as a way of serving and moving through my community, I know I will move to the next level of professionalism, process, and practice. I can negotiate each relationship using what I have learned from William Glasser's Choice Theory, and know that the arrangements I agree to are a result of my own efforts at authentic relationship and communication.

This is all as intimidating as it is exciting. Perhaps that is the same thing? I know that going into practice for myself is a new way of being present for my community, without the buffer of someone else to arrange the work. This is scary because I am a private person, and value the time when I am answerable to no one. This will change the scope of that, but I feel it is the only way to put the call out to the Universe that I am ready to dance the big dance, where we give and receive and twirl and sing and make experience for each other to savor.

The compost I am adding to the soil of my mental processes is the idea of fascia. Fascia: my favorite aspect of anatomy. There was a fascial conference in 2009 in which the very nature of anatomical perspective was shaken out of its reductionist roots. Thinking about muscles as isolated structures has no real meaning as they never act in isolation. The fascia, too, is a singular connected mesh of collagen and fluid that creates the shape of our flesh and the patterns of our movement. Thinking in this way informs my professional work in ways that create more lasting change. It is good to know that academia is supporting my approach to the work I do, which is something that I have sometimes struggled to express in more conventional assessment language.

Studying small business administration, education, diversity and somatics will make me a better asset to my community, increasing my ability to help others get from where they are to where they want to be.

The Four Questions

1: What will I learn?

I will learn how to create a more sustainable life.

2: How will I learn it?

Through reading, reflective writing, dialogue, and practice, I will explore what sustainability means to me on a personal scale. I will explore Wellness as an integral key to making positive change in the world, examining the ideas of sustainability in terms of Cognitive, Emotional, and Somatic experience.

3: How will I know that I learned it?

I will keep a journal recording my readings and explorations. I will make a bibliography listing the texts I found useful in my studies. I will keep a blog, to share what I learn and think with others.

4: What difference will it make?

As an educator and health care professional, I am poised to facilitate a healing change in consciousness in a diverse population of people. Increasing embodied awareness in myself will give me authentic knowledge and skills to share with my community. Helping create a future in which we get out of our heads and into our bodies will put us in touch with inner knowledge that can heal our bodies, our relationships, and our planet.