Cell Level Meditation: The Healing Power in the Smallest Unit of Life

by Barry Grundland, Patricia Kay

Overview

A practical tool to engage the healing capacity of the body

• Explains how to connect with your cells through breath and awareness to enact profound healing and inner communication on the deepest level

• Enables you to experience cell consciousness directly as you not only visualize and connect with the cell but actually become it

• Shares profound healing experiences from those who have practiced cell level meditation, both those who are experienced meditators and those who had never done it before

By simply looking at something, by becoming aware of it, you can change it. Cell Level Meditation focuses awareness on the smallest unit of life for the purpose of healing. Using the timeless technique of combining awareness with the breath, you move into the cells and become them. By meditating with your cells, you can awaken to the vast potential within yourself, move to greater levels of self-awareness, and enact healing all the way down to the cellular level.

In this simple guide, Patricia Kay, MA, and Barry Grundland, MD, give you the tools to connect with the wisdom and intelligence of your cells and work with them to heal. They offer sample meditations to help you connect with specific cells, such as your liver or lung cells, yet emphasize that you should use the Cell Level Meditation technique to follow your intuition and discover the cells that are inviting you in. Sharing their own and others’ experiences, from both experienced meditators and those who had never meditated before, they validate experiences you are likely to have and inspire you with stories of profound healings from serious illness such as cancer as well as other ailments and everyday stresses.

The authors explain how during Cell Level Meditation, you may have a vision or an insight, or some inner experience of shape, color, movement, sounds, or smells. You may also feel a shift in your physical body. By bringing breath into these experiences and staying present with them, you open up to a new level of communication within yourself and discover your unique way of bringing harmony and healing to your life.

Guided to be an active participant in your healing, engaging many levels of your inner experience, you are led to a new level of mind-body coherence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644112243
Publisher:	Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Publication date:	03/30/2021
Edition description:	2nd Edition, New Edition
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

BARRY GRUNDLAND, M.D. (1933-2016), was a psychiatrist who specialized in psychoneuroimmunology (mind-body healing). For more than 40 years, he worked with people as a true healer with incredible insight and compassion. Cell Level Meditation was his life’s work.

PATRICIA KAY, M.A., CCH, CSD, is a homeopath, teacher, writer, and retired midwife. She studied Cell Level Meditation with Barry for 15 years and currently works as a spiritual director, guiding people to bring mind, body, and spirit into alignment using his teaching. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 16.

Experiencing the Cells

And you may be wondering, but what about the cells? This is Cell Level Meditation! Yes, we can get all the way down to the cells. In fact, anything that you are doing or thinking is also, in some way, going on in the cells, no? It’s already happening, and you are learning to shift into states of awareness in which you can be co-creative and engaged with what’s already going on! A woman I know got to the bone cells, and what most surprised her is that they were doing their “bone cell thing” independently of what she thought or said or did. We might say that the bone cells already know what to do! Thankfully so!

Everything ultimately is a pattern of energy in expression. The manifest form, if you travel into it, is made of smaller parts, the smaller parts are made of even smaller parts, and so on, until you get down to a level where there is only the sensation of something like vibrancy itself arising from the emptiness. The expression of the energy of a substance running at a certain rate is solid, at another rate it’s liquid, and at another it’s a gas. Every known substance has its parameters, temperature, rate and rhythm, and how it behaves under different circumstances. Similarly, different types of cells in the body have their own “signature” pattern of color, movement, speed, sound, or energetic frequency. Muscle cells have a different kind of pattern than bone cells. And they “feel” different than bone cells in some kind of subjective way. The cells are working along with their own programming, and if you are suffering from an illness, you might find a sense of unease or disturbance when you get there. How do we work with that? Breathe to it! Experience it as it comes to you! Become it! Be responsive. Just keep breathing. Stay curious and simply wonder how to engage the experience fully, looking for clues. It seems counter-intuitive to “become the disease,” but you may have a sense that you will find the road to healing mysteriously revealed to you by doing just that.

Now because I have worked in health care, I have studied such things as biology and anatomy and physiology. So, I have seen the pictures of cells in textbooks and under the microscope. However, the first time I “saw” the cell membrane in Cell Meditation, I was quite moved. It was much more dynamic than I had imagined, and beautiful! A few years later, I was delighted to see a photo of a cell membrane taken with the use of an electron microscope, and I was pretty excited to have my vision corroborated. A couple of times I have had something like this happen.

One time during Cell Meditation I got to a structure in my body that, somehow, I identified as a virus. It was very resistant to being in relationship with the other cells. In fact, it felt very “other” or foreign to me. And it was quite a rascal! A few weeks later, I went to pick up a friend at a doctor’s appointment. While I was in the waiting room, waiting for her, I picked up a magazine, and there on the cover was a picture of the virus I’d seen, taken under an electron microscope!

Sometimes (actually, most of the time), I’ve noticed that the “cellular picture” comes as a metaphor. For example, one patient I work with has some problems with her cholesterol levels, and when she went inside during Cell Meditation, she described to me some pipes. As her description became more vivid and dynamic, I realized she was in the cardiovascular system, working on the plaque on the wall of blood vessels that needed some attention.

Other times, people I’ve worked with have gone into the structure of the cell. There is a kind of geometry with shapes, color, movement, and vibrancy. Participating in the harmony and beauty of this underlying pattern is an experience of great delight.

And! The potential that lies within you may astound you! The cells of the body are quite versatile, noble, and capable of transformation (just like you are)! We have already mentioned stem cells. These are cells that haven’t been programmed yet for a specific job.

We become aware that the cells turn over and that some cells can become any other cell. A cell can go into neutral entropy. It can transform. It becomes the new cell. Breathe with it and allow it to have the experience of itself as a new cell with itself. Then let it have the experience of the Whole.
~Barry

Cells might be considered as an archetypal template for life. They are the smallest unit of life. Life, by its very nature is . . . alive! Because it is alive, it is not just responding in a set, mechanical way, but rather it is responsive to what is needed and helpful and useful. Once they are given a job, a function, they take on an identity and leap into the cell community as participants in life.

Whatever you can imagine opens possibilities that can birth into physical reality. The noble cells of your body can rest, take stock of the situation, and create solutions to problems. They can transform. They use creative solutions. In addition to their versatility, what makes the cells of the body so successful is their ability to cooperate! Sounds like we should be taking classes from them.

Become aware of the liver cell.
Breathe to it.
Become aware of the experience of your liver cell.
Breathe.
Let the liver cell experience that you are there.
Let the liver cell experience itself as itself.
Open the panorama.
Breathe.
Let the liver cell experience itself as part of the community of liver cells.
Breathe.
Now let the community experience itself as a community.
Breathe.
And now let the community of liver cells experience their part of the larger community of the Whole Body.
Breathe.
Breathe.
~Barry

Table of Contents

Foreword Lynne D. Feldman 9

Preface 13

Introduction 21

1 The Power of Meditation 27

2 Cell Level Meditation in a Nutshell 31

3 The Mind 41

4 The Body 52

5 The Breath 56

6 Not Knowing & Knowing Too Much 61

7 Falling? Dive! 68

8 Emotions 73

9 Being IN the Body - The Five Senses & Beyond 79

10 Standing Back Far Enough or High Enough to See 89

11 Meditating with Nature 95

12 Resistance 99

13 Breathing to Beliefs 103

14 Treatments and Medications, Herbs and Vitamins 108

15 Only One You-Creativity and Originality 115

16 Experiencing the Cells 121

17 Cell Level Theater 126

18 Prayer 142

19 Conditioned Habits 148

20 Meditating with Others: The Cell Community 152

Afterword 159

Acknowledgements 160

A Few Resources 162

Poetry and Quotes 165

Index 168

About the Authors 171

Editorial Reviews

Cell Level Meditation is a lively narrative that moves between macro and micro, from personal to global—a written expression of the expanding and compressing practice of returning to breath. A deep exploration into our bodies’ most basic cellular structures, as well as how we might fit in as cells of a larger cosmos, is pragmatically demonstrated throughout the text in the consistent practice of return to the vital function of breath. In fact, the book breathes!

homeopathic master clinician (HMC) Dianne Miller

It’s amazing that you’ve been able to express the ineffable in ways that speak to beginners as well as seasoned meditators. This book and the method are very simple without being simplistic. It’s so profound!

DENNIS deLEON

This book speaks in an easy way about something incredibly complex. In this beautiful simplicity, it can be read on several levels. By reading it again and again, the process can take you to deeper experiences of awareness for a more profound embodiment. It’s a book to hold and return to throughout your journey.

Joleen Kelleher

Written with both poetry and precision, Cell Level Meditation synthesizes many ways of knowing and makes very complex material both accessible and fascinating. And it contains the wisdom garnered through years of authentic experience.

Julia Brayshaw

"One of the things I appreciated about Cell Level Meditation is the way in which the reader is enveloped in the intention, whether overtly or subtly in the writings, with a gift of opening to the experience of meditation. Cell Level Mediation takes the reader into a journey of the microcosmic nature of our self and the profound power of healing and wholeness contained in the singular component of our physical make-up—the cell. And, from that place of the cell the potential for what can be brought back into the macrocosm is limitless."

Musing Mystical Robin Fennelly

Within the pages of this book, I was delighted to find an elegantly simple offering that guides the reader to a threshold of inner truth through meditation. If you are on a road to discovering true self, Cell Level Meditation is a wonderful point of interest to explore. I am sure you will find the inner view of you to be astounding.

certified vibrational medicine practitioner Peggy Smith

Cell Level Meditation evokes in one a desire to reach in and explore sound, breath, visual scapes and fields, and encounters with new horizons that make up its power into levels of potential healing; it beckons and engages. Throughout, it dances into the joy and power of letting the reader in on the healing course that cells are being redirected by Cell Level Meditation and breath. In the closing chapters the reader is gently prodded to ‘Go sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.’ And it further states ‘whatever you can imagine, opens possibilities that can burst into physical reality. The noble cells of your body can rest, take stock of the situation, and create solutions to problems. What makes the cells of the body so successful is their ability to cooperate! Sounds like we should be taking classes from them.’ One can conclude Cell Level Meditation is therefore a companion textbook, a new friend in introducing cell level listening. You’ll find the harmonics insightful.

Jose Saïd Osio

"This book tackles a very complex subject and somehow brings it down to very simple terms regardless of your level of meditation practice. For a psychoneuroimmunologist and a homeopath to come together is sign of our times and the need for a more inclusive way to see the world and our relationship to it. Chapter 13, Breathing to Beliefs, takes the reader deep into the unconscious beliefs/tapes that dictate so much of our lives, much of which is to our detriment."

From the Publisher

Cell Level Meditation evokes in one a desire to reach in and explore sound, breath, visual scapes and fields, and encounters with new horizons that make up its power into levels of potential healing; it beckons and engages. Throughout, it dances into the joy and power of letting the reader in on the healing course that cells are being redirected by Cell Level Meditation and breath. In the closing chapters the reader is gently prodded to ‘Go sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.’ And it further states ‘whatever you can imagine, opens possibilities that can burst into physical reality. The noble cells of your body can rest, take stock of the situation, and create solutions to problems. What makes the cells of the body so successful is their ability to cooperate! Sounds like we should be taking classes from them.’ One can conclude Cell Level Meditation is therefore a companion textbook, a new friend in introducing cell level listening. You’ll find the harmonics insightful.

Jose Saïd Osio

Cell Level Meditation evokes in one a desire to reach in and explore sound, breath, visual scapes and fields, and encounters with new horizons that make up its power into levels of potential healing; it beckons and engages. Throughout, it dances into the joy and power of letting the reader in on the healing course that cells are being redirected by Cell Level Meditation and breath. In the closing chapters the reader is gently prodded to ‘Go sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.’ And it further states ‘whatever you can imagine, opens possibilities that can burst into physical reality. The noble cells of your body can rest, take stock of the situation, and create solutions to problems. What makes the cells of the body so successful is their ability to cooperate! Sounds like we should be taking classes from them.’ One can conclude Cell Level Meditation is therefore a companion textbook, a new friend in introducing cell level listening. You’ll find the harmonics insightful.

Jose Saïd Osio