Cellular Imprinting ~ Serenity Wellness Podcast ~ E65

Hi there,

Welcome to Serenity Wellness Podcast,

Episode 65,

Cellular Imprinting.

My name is Nicole White.

I'm an integrated mental health and energy therapist,

And I'm happy to be here to share wellness with you.

Today,

I want to talk a bit about habitual patterns and cycles that we use to move through life.

These are going to be the ones,

Though,

That are a little under the surface.

Perhaps we've never even pulled them up to look at them,

Examine them,

And decide if we really want to be moving through life with them,

Or maybe even seeing if they're really ours or ones that we have just collected and continue to repeat on that auto cycle without deciding if it's really something we want to do.

If you think of driving,

And maybe you go to a certain destination pretty frequently,

You might notice that you tap out a bit when you're driving.

You arrive safely,

Thankfully,

But we might,

If we're driving the same highway,

The same road pretty frequently,

We might kind of have a little side mind stuff going on,

And then we arrive at the destination and we're like,

Oh,

I don't really remember much of the drive,

But I'm here and I got here,

And we might have been a bit on an auto pattern or auto cycle there.

Or maybe you have a way that you move through your day that is pretty habitual.

And perhaps some of that you have kind of designed and created yourself,

But maybe some of it you've actually just kept moving with,

Even if it was not something that you truly believe or even want to have in a way to move.

I'm going to break it down a little bit,

And then I'm going to give you a tool at the end to consider.

If we think of our physical body and cellular imprinting,

I'm just going to cover a tiny bit really honestly of the vastness of what this topic covers,

But just to give you a little bit of an understanding,

And I will be putting some book links in the description box below if you want to read more about this stuff.

But when you're thinking about the physical body and cellular imprinting,

You can think about posture would be one area or example.

We might notice that we posture in a way that's very similar to a family member,

Perhaps a parent or a grandparent.

And when you're thinking of posturing in this way that I'm talking,

Think about how we posture if we're stressed,

Or we posture if we are in communication.

Are we having an open posture in communication,

Or are we pretty closed off,

Kind of putting up a wall between us and another?

How we posture when we are trying to communicate something that's important to us.

Are we feeling kind of closed in,

Not very maybe a confident body posture?

You might have heard of that Superman posture,

Or something like that,

Where you stand in front of the mirror and like,

Yay,

With yourself to get yourself into that movement of posturing.

Body posture has a lot to do with communication with ourselves in terms of our whole physical system,

And then also how we communicate with others.

Over 70% of our communication is nonverbal,

So posture has a whole lot to do with a whole lot.

But even with our internal body system,

If we're posturing in a way that we are feeling depleted,

Defeated,

It's feeding those signals to the internal self.

And we might have carried that on generation after generation of body posturing and how we move through the day.

That posturing has to do with our emotions,

It has to do with the mind flow,

It's a whole connected system.

So it has to do with how we're communicating with ourselves,

And then how are we communicating with others when you're thinking of nonverbal communication.

And for yourself,

You might just kind of catalog that a bit and think,

Do you notice anything?

Sometimes it's helpful for people to look outside of self-burst.

So you might like,

Hmm,

Do I know someone who I notice that the family seems to have like a generational or family posturing presentation?

One that pops out for people a good bit is around worry or anger,

That they might notice like a family system that people are a little bit more closed in and body posturing when worried or the family systems that might have a little bit more of a reactive cycle around emotion might posture in a domineering stance of kind of control and intimidation type of posturing.

So those are two examples.

There's lots of examples,

But posturing and how things are kind of passed on and how we mimic or we mirror a lot of different stuff on surface like that.

And we might not even be aware.

We might just,

It feels familiar,

It feels comfortable,

And it's what we do.

And there's also epigenetics.

It's a whole field of science.

I'm not a scientist,

But I'm familiar with epigenetics because it is the science that is showing us what we know and have known for eons and eons of time in energy therapy.

And that is that we can pass down trauma,

Among other things,

But in this example I'm talking about here,

We can pass down trauma generation after generation.

Even if a few generations out,

They did not experience the trauma,

They can be born physiologically in the same way as if they were.

This looks at proteins,

Amino acids,

But also the amygdala,

The area in the brain that regulates emotion.

And there's a lot of studies with this,

But there's one on Holocaust survivors and great-grandchildren being born with cycles in the body system that I mentioned there related to proteins,

Amino acids,

And the amygdala as though they were in the Holocaust.

So that research in epigenetics is showing us 14 generations that this can go back.

So when my mother was pregnant with me,

Everything she experienced,

I experienced in her womb but my daughter experienced as well,

And it can go on and on and on.

And the way that that factors out then and how we're moving through our day ties into all of these other things as well.

So that's the physical body and response system,

But you can hear in that I mentioned about even the amygdala and the amygdala being the emotion control center,

Not the soul emotion control center.

Again,

It's all connected,

Our gut health has to do with emotion,

Liver dehydration has to do with emotion.

So it's not the 100% because nothing in this body is 100%,

It's all connected.

But the amygdala does have a big factor in trauma response,

Reactivity,

And response cycles in emotion.

And we can be born in with all of these systems fired up and ready to go,

And then it can continue to play out in our life.

It doesn't have to,

Even if you hear these things and you notice them,

You're like,

Oh my gosh,

I've been doing this for 20 years,

30 years,

Et cetera.

Neuroplasticity is real,

So we can redesign all of this.

The key factor here is we have to have awareness,

We have to slow down.

As I mentioned at the very beginning,

These are things that we might not even have slowed down enough to have contemplation about or thought around.

Sometimes when I'm working one-on-one with my clients,

While I'm in session with them,

They'll draw out family lineage,

Like a family tree,

But we get really specific.

Maybe I'll do a future episode on this.

You mark off in certain ways who's alive and who's dead,

Yes.

But then you mark it off in ways of,

Was there addiction there?

Was there emotional,

Mental distress or termination there?

Did someone end up taking their own life due to emotional distress or falling into an addiction cycle that stole their life in that way?

We can be living and living in an avoided place through addiction cycles.

How did we learn,

But also how were we born into emotion?

What did we know and what do we know now about how we regulate emotion based off of cellular imprinting learned responses?

We might notice in our family that worry,

I'll use again as an example,

Which is such a common one,

That we learned to worry generation after generation after generation.

Or we might see that we have a very high work ethic and we might notice that generation after generation after generation,

We have cellular imprinting.

It's not all bad.

We think oftentimes of generational collection as all the stuff we don't want there,

But we have strengths.

We have a lot of things that we can carry forward that we might want to carry forward.

We might not want to let go of,

But we also might have things that we would like to design differently.

We are just now learning the importance of emotion and understanding of emotion and using all of our emotion,

How we can digest emotion in a different way,

That we can use support in a different way.

And even that,

We're just now expanding upon getting rid of the stigma around getting help and support.

Well,

Generations ago,

They didn't know that.

They didn't have that.

And we might still be repeating stuff from that place of the unknown,

Things that they just didn't know yet,

That now we have the ability to learn and understand about psychological flexibility.

We have the ability to understand and learn about how maybe our behaviors,

Our reaction cycles impact our life in ways that maybe they just weren't slowing down to see or just weren't aware of or didn't have the tools and resources.

So we still can play out the same emotion and the same response cycle,

Even though it might not be something that we really want to continue to carry on.

When you're thinking about this,

Some examples here that are common have to do with self-care.

A lot of times,

People will explain how the idea of slowing down and relaxing to them equals lazy,

That if they do that,

They're going to feel like they're being lazy.

And then when we slow it down a little more and we try to hear,

What was that?

Where did I hear that before?

Well,

Whose voice is that?

Is that even my belief?

Is it really something that I see to be true?

Or am I repeating something that I heard from a family member or somewhere in society?

The lazy relaxation thing,

A lot of times,

When people report in the over 20 years that I've been working with people in mental health,

It often stems back to kind of language they heard growing up.

If they're relaxing,

Get up.

You're being lazy.

Go do something.

Not all the time.

And as a reminder,

Or if you're just now tuning in for the first time,

When we unravel or uncover things that we discover that maybe like this,

Maybe we are like,

Oh,

I have lazy attached to relaxation because so-and-so in my family,

Anytime I was relaxing,

They told me I was lazy,

That I wasn't going to become anything in life.

It's not to then go back and blame that person.

It's just about awareness so that we can decide if we want to do something different.

People are where they're at.

So it's not judging or saying how dare they.

That's not the purpose of this.

The purpose of this is let me see what I can see so that I can do something different.

Another example here is around perfectionist mindset and the emotions that carries with it.

And again,

These thoughts and emotions are kind of tied in a little bit here.

The emotions carried around it.

I'll often hear how people will not want to give up perfectionist mindset because they fear that if they do,

They're going to become complacent and just fail.

Like they'll have no motivation anymore.

They're just going to kind of sink away to the depths of life and not move forward at all until they start recognizing and realizing the detriment that actually holding on and gripping to that mindset has and again,

Slowing it down a little bit.

Where did that come from?

Is that something that I truly believe or is this something that I am just kind of moving along in?

And when you're looking at emotional reaction cycles and the cellular imprinting,

Keep in mind how what are we born with?

What reaction cycles are we born with?

And then what do we learn through what we're seeing in relation to emotion?

The worrying mindset,

The anger mindset,

The numbing out.

And how then do we replay that?

Because it teaches us a bit about safety around emotion,

Reflection versus reaction around emotion.

I'll have people explain to me about anger,

For example,

Like,

I don't want to feel angry.

I might look like my parent did when they were angry and that was really abusive and I don't want to go there at all.

So I'm going to just move right into people pleasing and anything anybody needs,

You just tell me and I'm going to do it.

No problem,

No questions asked because I don't want to feel anger and I don't want to have any disappointment,

Is another one,

Disappointment or anger towards me.

And many of us might be familiar when you're thinking of that concept about the repetitive patterns of abuse in family systems or addiction in family systems,

Emotion being this umbrella over both of those and the ability and understanding,

So emotional intelligence and then the psychological flexibility within that.

And what are we repeating?

What are we continuing to carry out based off what we knew or what we saw?

And what are we maybe fearing because of that too that's leading us into moving through life with emotions in a way that is not how we want to do it?

Abuse and addiction in family lineage cycles stop somewhere.

Someone along the lineage comes along and says,

That's it.

Enough's enough.

I'm stopping the cycle here.

It's hard work.

It's an ongoing process and sometimes when you really break family cycles,

It can be really heavy because you might then feel like you're kind of then on the outskirts of your family and that can be heavy and difficult,

But we are here to design our own plan and our own path.

This cellular imprinting or way that we move through life also has to do with our thought cycles.

How are we thinking?

How are we digesting the world around us and what type of habit might we get into there?

I already mentioned some of those when I was talking about emotion because it's hard to kind of separate these things out.

Sometimes I just start talking and then it all blends together,

But when you're thinking,

How is your thinking?

Like how do you notice you think?

Are you in a way of digesting the world with your beliefs,

Your values,

Or are you moving through it in a way that is someone else's design plan for you?

Because how we think and how we perceive and what we believe is going to impact these other areas,

Our emotions,

Our physical body,

And how we're moving,

And what we see there and our motivation to move through something different.

So if we have a thought cycle that we might be in a habitual cycle of being the critic of ourselves,

Well,

That's going to help us to stay in that emotion place of being maybe feeling hopeless or helpless or resentful and reactive,

Or it might move us into a physical space of not only posturing,

But any of those emotions are also going to cause the physical reaction in the body,

The serotonin,

The dopamine,

The adrenals,

All the things.

You can check out episode two of the Anxious Body System,

And that will talk a little bit more about that too,

The way the body responds in some of this,

But it's all connected.

If we're thinking,

Thinking,

Thinking a certain way,

It's feeding the emotions.

It could be off a complete illusion,

But we're still feeding the emotion.

If we notice that we are that critic,

That's about,

Again,

Slowing down and asking,

Where did we hear that,

And whose voice is that?

Because through life,

We can take the very things,

The very words that have caused us suffering or pain inside,

And then we turn the voice into our own,

And we continue to speak that way to ourself,

Not even recognizing that we don't really believe it.

We have just turned someone else's voice that maybe we heard towards us or something we picked up in society,

And that's then how we start viewing ourselves.

That's then how we start treating ourselves.

This even has to then do with how we connect these cellular imprints and systems within that we're born with and that early design pattern,

That kind of architectural design that was put in place when we were brought into the world,

And how then we move into connection with others.

That is such a bigger topic that I'm going to just kind of pause the connection style part,

And I'll bank that in my brain to do an upcoming episode on that.

I know a lot of people have heard about attachment styles.

That's something for sure,

But this is a little bit different.

How we connect with others,

What we're drawn towards,

The magnetic pull within can have to do with all this.

So we can mind over body kind of thing.

We can,

In our mind,

Have awareness of morals,

Values,

Beliefs,

Desires around connection,

And then all of a sudden we can feel our body go a different way because of some of this imprinting in the pull there is a light way to put it right now.

Again,

I'll talk about that further in another situation.

One other area here is about spirituality,

And certainly that has to do with our beliefs and morals and values as well,

But spirituality in itself and our belief system there can really heavily be looped in here to cellular imprinting and obligation around that.

Obligation can kind of come in there with beliefs as well and traditions.

I'm going to pop over there now for just one second again now that I just said that.

The imprinting around beliefs and traditions is also something to just be aware of and notice if it's there and notice if it's really something you want to move still.

I hear so often about these family roles that people will have,

And they'll talk to me about them and they won't label them like a family role.

They'll talk to me about how just this obligation,

This is just what we do or what we don't do.

It could be the color they want to paint their walls or holiday seasons here.

They want to do a different tradition around the holidays,

Even something like using a different type of pan to cook in than maybe grandmom did or great-grandmom did.

What are you doing using something different?

That's not what we do.

So there can even be like a lot of obligation,

But just remember we're not obligated to do anything that we ourselves are not feeling is important to us and our being.

I understand that not everyone might agree with what I'm saying here.

Just take what fits for you.

We are not in a place of.

.

.

I'm about to just repeat myself.

That's not going to be helpful for you guys,

So I'll just stop.

So okay,

Think about the beliefs.

Think about the values part there,

But then when you move it over to spirituality and the deep anchoring here,

If you would,

That people sometimes feel they might even have a desire to move a different direction.

So maybe they were raised within a certain organized religion and maybe they don't feel it anymore.

It's just not resonating with what the teachings are there,

Whatever,

However you want to explain that to yourself,

But it's just not in alignment anymore,

And they might have a different belief cycle.

Maybe they are moving into a different type of organized religion or maybe they are moving out of religion completely.

Maybe they're moving into spirituality or something even outside of that,

Just something different than what they were raised within.

And when they go to try to share that with a family member,

They might get pushback.

They might even get ridiculed or put down or maybe even ostracized and not allowed to really be a part of the family anymore.

Just depends on our family system and are we in a system that has unconditional positive regard and unconditional love or are there a lot of rules around it and if we move away from the rules suddenly we're not okay.

And again,

I know it can be super,

Super hard to move away from something that is so deeply ingrained because of outcome that might happen around you.

I've had it happen many times in my life as a race Catholic,

Not Catholic anymore.

I have nothing against Catholicism.

It's just not for me personally.

So that would be one of the areas in my life that I'm just a little different than my family and then that's okay.

It's okay for me.

If it's not okay for them,

Well,

That's their stuff to work on.

So we have to just allow ourselves to be ourselves and whatever that way is for us.

And I recognize it's easier said than done sometimes.

I mean sometimes if we are completely booted from our family or from our community because we have a different belief,

We really,

Really have emotionally and I always encourage individuals going through that to remember that we can create our support system even if it's not our bloodline.

We can always create our family.

Family is heart-space connection.

It doesn't have to be blood-related.

Think about people who are married,

Right?

They're not blood-related and there's a lot of love there.

So why do we have to be limited to what family means?

So if you're one who you feel so trapped or you have moved into your own belief cycle and now you're completely ostracized,

Create your family because there's a lot of people out there who will love you for just exactly who you are.

That I would like to move into the tools now.

Well,

Kind of a tool,

But it's a couple layers.

With everything here and what we're talking about,

This cellular imprinting,

The way we move through life,

That is that under the surface stuff.

So it's not,

Well,

It is,

But I'm not talking about today so much like the example I gave at the beginning,

Driving on autopilot.

This is about that stuff that's really kind of hidden around the corners deep inside the depths of self and it's quiet and it's comfortable and it feels familiar.

And then we realize,

I don't really know that that fits me anymore.

I don't really think that it aligns with what I'm trying to do in life.

So as you're thinking in these different ways about maybe physical posturing example I gave,

Physical body also in terms of how we take care of it,

What we put into our body related to food,

Related to movement,

Related to absorption of chitter chatter,

Noisiness with social media,

News,

Bombardment into brain kind of thing.

People I've shared,

They'll go to their parents and they're blasting the news all day long and then they leave and they're like,

Oh my gosh,

My brain just can't even take it anymore.

So we might learn and get into habits to what we absorb into our physical body that way.

Absorption into physical body is not just food,

It's all the things we take in through our day.

Remembering physical body,

What we might be born with in terms of response cycles,

Activation cycles and remembering about neuroplasticity,

We can change things that might be on autopilot as well as the way our body might be in health.

We can start to move into healthiness and start to notice changes within our health system through the way we take care of ourselves that might be different than past generations.

Remembering emotion and thoughts,

What are yours or what are you carrying or saying to yourself or reacting in a way that is just something that you have picked up and learned and keep playing out.

And this picking up and learned,

We could have picked it up in early childhood.

As I'm recording this today,

I am 46.

I could be picking up and carrying response cycles that I learned from when I was three or when I was in my mom's utero or when my mom was in her mom's.

It doesn't matter where we picked it up.

It's just I see it now today and what am I doing with it?

What do I want to do with this?

Especially if we notice that we're,

You know,

Think of the language part that I said.

If we are repeating this critical mindset,

The bullying language towards ourselves that we have now turned into our own language or the family rules that we are living by that we don't even believe and you identify where did that come from,

Whoever that individual is that you notice there,

If they wrote a book on how to live life,

Is that the book that you would purchase to use as your guide?

Would that book be a bestseller?

And you might say absolutely no to both of those,

Yet still carry out life living them until we decide to do something different.

So as you're thinking about these and certainly in relation to that spirituality and the belief cycles and habits,

Traditions,

You can think of it as a foundation and then ask yourself a few questions around the foundational part.

You can even draw this out if you would like,

If that's helpful,

If you're one who,

You know,

Vision,

Seeing,

Drawing,

All that stuff is part of your learning style,

But think of it in terms of foundation and then start asking yourself just some questions out of curiosity.

You might ask yourself what the foundation is made of.

Is it made of something like brick,

Stone,

Wood,

Or is it made of something like quicksand or a black hole?

Is it something that's rooted down or does it move?

What's the foundation?

What's the structure and how sound is the structure?

Can you walk out onto this structure,

Because it's your foundation you're living on,

Without thinking it's going to crack,

Break,

And you're going to fall through into the abyss?

When you're noticing the foundation,

Notice also what makes it up,

Not only in terms of the material part,

You know,

The stone versus wood versus quicksand type deal,

But also what's it made up of?

Is it the beliefs?

Is it the values,

Emotions,

Reaction cycles,

Lack of care for self,

People-pleasing dynamics,

Forced this,

That,

Or the other,

Where,

You know,

We have this sense of obligation,

So this sense of force that really might not be an obligation.

I'll just leave that as that.

I don't want to,

You're not my clients,

So I don't have the ability to kind of really work with you more directly about this idea of obligation.

I don't have the ability to create a safety plan with you first,

If that's something needed,

So please guide yourself in that.

I will be linking a support line underneath in case anybody needs that to help in decision making in life,

But just try to let yourself think of this foundation,

Think about these areas,

And can I stand on it without a worry that it's going to crack and fall apart?

And as I'm noticing,

Where are the areas that I notice are really strong?

Where are the areas that I want to keep there,

That I see are really powerful,

Strong-based things that have been passed down generation after generation that I hold dear to my heart or that I value,

Those things I want to keep?

But what are the areas that I notice are crumbly,

Are really worn down,

Need some extra work,

And how can I start to replace them?

What can I bring in or what can I learn so that I can create this foundation in a way that I can walk on it,

I can jump on it,

I can dance around on it,

And I'm not worried that it's going to fall and break?

That's going to look different for every single person,

And there's no right or wrong or how that should be or could be or needs to be.

It's what do we desire?

What is important to you personally?

Because who you are is who you are,

And others out there will love you for just who you are.

It's no one else but you who can ultimately tell yourself what you want that to look like.

No matter where we're at or what we're doing,

We are always with ourselves.

So for us to try to live our life according to someone else's plan,

I mean,

They're not with you all the time.

And as open as we can be with another,

We know ourselves more than anyone.

So give yourself the gift of creating that foundation in a way that aligns for you.

And it's no right or wrong,

And it's not about judging those areas that need to be replaced,

That we notice are broken down.

It's just about letting ourselves move forward in a way that shows that we are dedicated to self.

I hope you find that information helpful,

And I look forward to seeing you again soon.