The Cells Call Themselves "We": How talking to your cells in hypnosis changed about my work

Most of what happens in my office is quiet. Someone lies back, closes their eyes, and we spend an hour or two going somewhere through the subconscious mind. There's no drama to it. Dolores Cannon used to say that the overwhelming majority of past lives people recover are unremarkable — she called them "digging potatoes" lives, ordinary work in an ordinary century. Something else that came through her sessions is that the subconscious only hands a person what they can handle that day. In my two years working as a hypnotherapist certified in QHHT, all of this has proven true.

The ordinary lives are the ones that do the work

I get mixed reactions to that. Some people are relieved. Others are bothered they didn't get a dramatic life, because they thought that would be more fun, more exciting. Most people come in with expectations about what past life regression is supposed to look like, and the quiet lives are almost always the ones that move something.

What Dolores Cannon taught me about cellular consciousness

Something else I learned from Dolores Cannon sat with me a long time before I ever tried using it: cells aren't used to being addressed, and when they are, they prefer the pronoun "we."

Our cells are small intelligences working two jobs at once — keeping themselves alive, and holding up their end of the larger organism they belong to. They cull what they need from their surroundings and pass on what they don't. And this is the part that stayed with me: they know when something has gone wrong. I had never considered that. Our cells have some sense of what they're supposed to be doing, and when they stop doing it, that gap registers.

If the cells have an intelligence, then healing isn't only something done to the body. It's something you can ask the body to participate in. You address the intelligence. You ask for its help. Their name, and their preferred pronoun, is "we." And you don't need to know what's blocking the healing. You only need to make contact and ask, and then wait for the echo — whether that's in hypnosis or in your own meditation.

Talking to your cells in hypnosis

I applied this in a session this week with a woman who has spinal stenosis, lupus, fibromyalgia, and a crushed spine. She has lived with chronic pain for many years. During the session I made a new practice of speaking to her cells after every memory.

"Can WE release this memory now that we have learned from it?" "Can WE release the need to be in fight or flight?" "Can WE regenerate the colony of cells now that we are done learning from the traumas that compounded the current ones?"

Her voice changed throughout the session — when her subconscious spoke, when the child she had been in the memories spoke, and when I spoke to the entities in those memories who were most appropriate to address. But it changed again when I spoke to the cells in hypnosis. Different mannerisms, a different voice, and distinct from the subconscious. It made it easy to distinguish as the conversation carried on talking to each of the entities as we performed the healing work, each with our own jobs. I knew when I was speaking to the colony (the cells).

What happened with the pain

As the energy released from the body, the pain released with it. At the end of the session she told me she was pain free for the first time since she was a teenager.

She came to me with a long history — not only of pain, but of being inside the western medical system and coming out of it tired and discouraged. She has hope now, and she plans to return to continue the work.

Where we left off

When I asked her subconscious and her cells whether we could keep going, since it was clear we weren't finished, I was told no. We had worked for two hours and that was enough on her body. What she needed was rest and healing at the place we stopped. We'll complete it in a second session.

I'm a hypnotist, not a physician. This describes my practice and my client's own report of her experience — it isn't medical advice, and hypnotherapy is complementary care. If you're managing a diagnosed condition, keep your medical team.