By Dawson Church, PhD

You are not the same person you were a second ago, let alone yesterday. Your body is replacing cells and rejuvenating its systems at a frantic pace. 

Your body contains some 37 trillion cells.  That’s a much bigger number than the count of galaxies in the known universe. Old cells are dying and new ones replacing them all the time. Each second, over 810,000 cells are being replaced.¹

Your body produces one trillion new red blood cells per day. That’s a big number; with all its zeros it can be expressed as 1,000,000,000,000.²

As they circulate through your veins and arteries, red blood cells carry oxygen and nutrients to every other cell in your body. Each blood cell has a lifetime of about four months, after which the liver extracts its vital ingredients and sends the rest to the spleen for recycling. You don’t have a single red blood cell in your body that you had six months ago. Every single one has been replaced.

Your Body Is Constantly Regenerating Energy

The lining of your digestive tract also undergoes rapid turnover. It’s replaced every four days. What about your lung tissue? Every eight days. Even the densest of tissues, your bones, are constantly regenerating, with 10 percent of your skeleton being replaced each year. 

There are about 84 billion neurons in the brain, along with a similar number of non-neural cells.³ Our brains are growing new neural cells continuously, and each cell can connect with thousands of others, weaving an interconnected web of an estimated 150 trillion synapses.⁴ Our brains are replacing at least one neuron per second.⁵

The hippocampus is the part of the brain responsible for memory and learning. It’s constantly adding new neurons and synapses while pruning others. Some neural pathways are shrinking, and the volume of those parts of the hippocampus diminishes. Other neural pathways are growing, with their volume expanding.

When a patient has a liver transplant, half the liver of the donor is typically removed and transplanted into the body of the new host. Yet so fast do liver cells regenerate that within eight weeks the donor’s liver has grown back to its original size. The oldest cell now in your liver is about five months old.⁶

Even the heart regenerates.  Until very recently, scientists believed that the heart does not regenerate and that once heart cells have died, they are not replaced. But recent research shows that heart tissue contains regions of stem cells that are available to replace damaged or dead cells and that the entire heart regenerates at least three times in the course of a person’s life.⁷

The corneal cells on the surface of your eye can regenerate within 24 hours. Your skin is being entirely replaced every month. The lining of your stomach is renewing itself every week and your colon even faster. The self you were yesterday is not the self you are today.

Welcome to the New You!

This continual turnover of the fundamental building blocks of our bodies has profound implications for how quickly and completely we can heal. Our bodies are programmed to heal. Healing is not something we get from a prescription, a doctor, an herb, or an alternative therapist. Healing is what our bodies do naturally and normally every second of every day. The deeper our understanding of the healing process, the better equipped we are to turn mind to matter.

Your Body Uses the Material You Make Available to It

When you look in the mirror each morning, you might believe you’re seeing yesterday’s face staring back at you. But during the previous day, your body replaced some 60 billion cells. You’re a different physical being than you were the day before.

This extensive daily remodeling of the body isn’t happening in a vacuum. You are shaping the quality of cells your body produces with material inputs such as the food you eat and the water you drink. When you eat high-quality food, your body has the raw materials with which to create high-quality proteins, the molecular building blocks of cells.

When you eat low-quality food, the body only has substandard materials out of which to fashion new proteins. When your food lacks vital nutrients, your body is forced to make compromises, and those tradeoffs can eventually damage your health.

Think of your body as a factory and the cells it produces as cars. If the finest steel is being delivered to its loading docks by freight companies, and it has excellent glass, flexible rubber, and advanced composites at its disposal, the factory can build high-quality cars. 

But if the rubber is brittle or the glass opaque or the steel is weak, the final product is compromised. The factory can’t build excellent cars out of shoddy ingredients. If the matter going in is inadequate, the matter emerging from your body’s manufacturing cycle will be of poor quality. Garbage in, garbage out.

For that reason, people who care about their health optimize their diet. They choose clean, fresh, high-quality foods. Whatever type of diet they espouse, they make sure their bodies get the best raw materials.

They also focus on exercise. They know that regular exercise, both aerobic, as in cycling or walking and anaerobic as in weightlifting or body building is essential to a functional body. Yet all these healthy practices are focused on matter. What about energy?

Cells Regenerate in a Field

Cells also replicate in an energy environment. Just as poor-quality matter is going to produce poor-quality cells, inferior energy is going to result in inferior molecules. Energy fields bathe our bodies, and the type of energy in which cell regeneration takes place determines the biological outcome.

Right now, I’m enjoying a delicious cup of Earl Grey tea. I went to the kitchen, popped a tea bag into a cup, filled the cup with the tangy water from my well, and put the cup inside the microwave. I set the timer for two minutes, sufficient to bring the water to a boil.

Though they’re invisible, the waves inside the microwave oven caused the water in my teacup to change state. In two minutes, the water went from a room temperature of 70°F to boiling, 212°F.  Matter was changed by energy.

In the same way, our cells are bathed in the surrounding energy fields. These fields change the matter of our cells, even though they’re invisible. Strong radiation, such as that released in nuclear reactor disasters, can cause cells to mutate. 

What happens when your cells are bathed in the energy of love, appreciation, and kindness created by a vibrant and coherent brain? Just the opposite. They’re nurtured in the radiant fields of positive emotion.

When Serious Diseases Simply Disappear

I believe that many cases of remission from serious diseases are influenced by mental fields. The bodies of these people are being bathed in positivity while the cells are replicating and growing. When every one of those 810,000 new cells that your body creates each second is born in an energetic environment of kindness and love, it shapes their development.

The spontaneous remission of cancer without treatment has historically been viewed by the medical profession as a rare phenomenon. One of the first authors to make an estimate stated that it probably happened in 1 out of every 80,000 cases.⁸ A contemporary estimate was 1 in 100,000 cases.⁹ 

Modern studies, however, are discovering that remission is common. One found that about a fifth of breast cancers are healed by mind and body without the need for medical intervention.¹⁰ Others report a similar percentage of patients healing spontaneously from a type of cancer that affects white blood cells.¹¹ A bibliography of medical reports of spontaneous remission found over 3,000 cases reported in the medical literature.¹²

The spread of cancer requires signaling and cooperation between groups of cancer cells. This signaling is triggered by stress.¹³ Adrenaline, also called epinephrine, is one of our two main stress hormones, the other being cortisol. High levels of adrenaline trigger the spread of ovarian cancer cells far away from the primary tumor. They also activate an enzyme called FAK that inhibits the destruction of cancer cells and hastens death.¹⁴ A different enzyme, one that destroys prostate and breast cancer cells, is immobilized by adrenaline.¹⁵

When we lower our stress levels, we reverse these effects, sometimes quickly. Researchers report tumors shrinking to less than half their original size within a few hours of an emotional healing session.¹⁶ Among those who experience spontaneous remission or survive much longer than usual after a diagnosis, a change in worldview is common. They become more altruistic in their relationships with others and actively involve themselves in their treatment.¹⁷ Anandamide, the “bliss molecule” generated by meditation, also inhibits the formation of cancer cells. As mind changes, so does matter.

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“How Energy Regulates DNA and the Cells of our Bodies” is an excerpt adapted for Well Being Journal from Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality, ©2018 by Dawson Church, PhD, by permission of Hay House, Inc publishers; see more at www.hayhouse.com

Dawson Church, PhD, Baylor University and Holos University, where he earned his doctorate under the guidance of Harvard-trained neurosurgeon Norm Shealy, MD, PhD, with whom he co-authored Soul Medicine: Awakening Your Inner Blueprint for Abundant Health and Energy. He founded the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare (2007, NIIH.org). Its primary program, the Veterans Stress Project, has treated over 20,000 veterans free of charge (StressProject.org).

His best-selling book The Genie in Your Genes (www.YourGeniusGene.com) has been hailed by reviewers as a breakthrough in linking emotions and genetics, and his follow-up, Mind to Matter (www.MindToMatter.com), reviews the science of peak mental states. He has conducted dozens of clinical trials, and he founded the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare (www.NIIH.org) to promote groundbreaking new treatments. He teaches the breakthroughs of energy psychology applied to health and personal performance through EFT Universe (www.EFTUniverse.com), one of the largest alternative medicine sites on the web, and trains thousands of practitioners each year, including through live virtual sessions at TappingPlace.com. See more at www.dawsonchurch.com.

References

1. Bianconi, E, Piovesan, A, Facchin, F, Beraudi, A, Casadei, R, Frabetti, F,…Perez-Amodio, S. (2013) An estimation of the number of cells in the human body. Annals of Human Biology, 40(6), 463-471.
2. Wahlestedt, M, Erlandsson, E, Kristiansen, T, Lu, R, Brakebusch, C, Weissman IL,…Bryder, D. (2017). Cloanal reversal of ageing-associated stem cell lineage bias via a pluripotent intermediate. Nature Communications, 8, 14533.
3. Azevedo et al, 2009 (see Mind to Matter for full references from hereon).
4. Sukel, 2011
5. Walløe, Pakkenberg, & Fabricius, 2014
6. Nadalin et al, 2004
7. Laflamme & Murry, 2 011
8. Boyd, 1966
9. Boyers, 1953
10. Zahl, Mæhlen, & Welch, 2008
11. Krikorian, Port-lock, Cooney, & Rosenberg, 1980
12. O’Regan & Hirshberg, 1993
13. Wu, Pas-tor-Pareja, & Xu, 2010
14. Sood et al, 2010
15. Sastry et al, 2007
16. Ventegodt, Morad, Hyam, & Merrick, 2004
17. Frenkel et al, 2011