REKINDLING CELLULAR CONNECTIONS: Finding refuge in our cell bodies

For those who know me or have been following my writing, you would know that I have experienced breast cancer twice. The first one happened when I was 37 years old, and another in 2023. Both situations are different forms of early-stage breast cancer. The oncologist suggested breast-sparing treatments given its early stage, yet I felt I needed to let go of my breasts, to allow for more healing to come through. I have been holding on to the fear since I was a teenager. This was when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she passed away at the young age of 49 years old.

The same age that I will be in a few days from now.

This is also the reason why I have been broody the past couple of weeks. Not only was work intense, but I was also contemplating what it means to heal from breast cancer. Right now, I am in what they call “no evidence of disease” (NED). But what does it really mean to heal, not only in the medical sense but on a deeper cellular level?

I don’t know fully yet what this means, but here are some thoughts forming and percolating in me.

The Cellular Realm: Where Belonging Begins

Before culture, before story, before language, there was the first communication. Life did not begin as an individual act but as a relational one with cells sensing, signaling, discerning, and responding to one another in order to survive. The cellular realm is where we remember that belonging is not a social construct we invented later; it is a biological condition we emerged from.

At the cellular level, power is not domination. It is discernment, metabolism, and relationship. The egg does not conquer; nor does it wait passively. It chooses. Mitochondria do not rule rather, they collaborate, transforming nourishment into energy through an ancient symbiosis that still lives in us. Every cell membrane teaches us the same lesson: healthy systems are selectively permeable, open enough to receive nourishment, and bounded enough to protect thrivability.

This is why the cellular realm matters so deeply. Trauma begins as a rupture in communication. When cells are overwhelmed, they shut down signaling, isolate, or harden their boundaries. These same patterns echo later as emotional withdrawal, hyper-independence, or fear-based control. And just as importantly, repair also begins here. Cells are constantly repairing membranes, correcting errors, and restoring flow. Healing is not an exceptional event; it is life’s default orientation when safety returns.

To tend the cellular realm is to slow down enough to listen beneath thought. It is to ask where our internal communication has been disrupted by survival, and where it is ready to be restored. Within our cell bodies is the realm of the deepest refuge: a reminder that long before the first rupture of belonging, life already knew how to choose connection, how to collaborate, and how to return to wholeness.

Before the Body Breaks or Blooms: How Cells Communicate and Relate with Each Other

Before we ever open our eyes into a world of relationships, ideologies, or culture, our bodies have already been practicing relationships for billions of years. Long before the first tribal conflict, long before our ancestors were exiled from the grove, before we even formed a sense of “I,” our cells were communicating, coordinating, supporting, and responding to each other in an exquisite choreography of survival and belonging.

The body is not a machine of separate parts. It is an ecosystem of interwoven lives. A rainforest of cells. A murmuration of signals. A river delta of networks. At every scale, from the microscopic to the systemic, life depends on relationships, communication, and connection, and at every scale, rupture happens when these conversations are lost.

The first whispers happen at the cellular level. Cells release chemical messengers to say, “I am here,” “I need help,” “It’s time to rest,” or “Something is wrong.” They build tiny physical bridges, called gap junctions, to share nutrients and electrical impulses, a kind of cellular hand-holding, a cellular resourcing. They recognize each other by touch, determining who belongs and who does not, and even before the evolution of a nervous system, they learned to communicate through electric fields, forming patterns that guide growth, repair, and regeneration.

Communication is not optional for cells; it is life. Isolation is lethal. Trauma at the cellular level is what happens when communication breaks down, when cells no longer know how to trust, respond, or coordinate with their neighbors.Healing is the restoration of the cellular realm.

As cells form tissues, this relational dance becomes even more intricate. A tissue is simply a community of cells in constant dialogue. Heart muscle cells beat in sync by passing ions to one another. Skin cells collaborate to form a barrier. Immune cells coordinate to protect the whole. When tissues stop communicating, whether through inflammation, chronic stress, injury, or disease, the coherence dissolves. What once functioned as a coordinated community becomes fragmented, rigid, and oftentimes defensive.

The extracellular matrix, the “soil” that surrounds cells, holds memory of these ruptures. It stores the echoes of past injuries, the remnants of inflammation, the imprints of chronic bracing. Fascia, our connective tissue network, becomes like the mycelial web of the body. It carries tension, hydration, vibration, and subtle electrical signals. Healthy fascia is supple and communicative; trauma-held fascia becomes dense, dehydrated, and unresponsive.

When the body experiences prolonged stress or rupture, the fascia stiffens as if bracing for impact. The lymphatic system slows, unable to fully drain waste or mediate immune responses. The glymphatic system (the brain’s nocturnal cleansing network) becomes impaired, leaving toxins behind. The microbiome loses diversity, weakening digestion, mood, and immunity. The endocrine system overproduces stress hormones. The immune system becomes hypervigilant or exhausted.

In other words, trauma in the body is not abstract. It is ecosystemic.

But it is also true that the body is wired for repair. When communication is restored, when breath deepens, when safety returns, when the nervous system finds a way to settle, the networks begin to reopen. Fascia softens. Lymph moves. Glymphatic tides return. Microbiomes diversify. Energy metabolism stabilizes. Systems begin to listen to one another again.

Growth is the state that emerges when communication flows freely. When cells can signal truthfully. When tissues collaborate again. When systems do not operate from fear. When the ecosystem remembers its coherence.

What we call “healing” is simply the re-weaving of the internal forest.

And these patterns, the breakdowns and the regenerations are not limited to our body. They echo outward into society.

HEALING PRACTICES

Here are ways we can tend the body’s ecosystem so that it becomes a rehearsal for the world we want to build, a world shaped by belonging instead of rupture.

1. Reopen the Conversation: Practices for Cellular & Tissue Communication

Your cells speak constantly. Trauma interrupts the conversation; safety restores it.These practices help your internal ecosystem talk again.

Touch-Based Listening

Place your hands on an area of your body that feels tight, numb, or distant. Don’t try to fix or change anything. Simply ask: “What are you holding?”And wait for sensations like warmth, tingling, heaviness to respond.

Social healing begins with listening, not solving.

Micro-movements

Slowly rotate a joint, stretch your ribs, wiggle your toes. Invite tiny movements that soften fascia, the body’s mycelial web. Fascia doesn’t need force; it needs gentle repetition to unfreeze. When fascia softens, tissues reconnect in the same way a community softens through slow, repeated contact.

Hydration as Relational Care

Hydrated fascia communicates. Dehydrated fascia isolates.Drink water and hydrate your tissues through slow movements and breath.

Water is the original communication medium in the body and the Earth.

2. Restore Flow: Practices for System-to-System Coherence

When systems talk to each other, inner coherence returns.Here are ways to foster this dialogue.

Vagus Nerve Co-regulation

Place a hand on your chest and another on your belly. Soften your gaze. Hum gently.The vibration activates the vagus nerve, the bridge between:

• nervous system

• endocrine system

• immune system

• heart

A hummed note is like a village bell calling your systems back into harmony.

Lymph + Glymphatic Activation: The Cleansing Ritual

• Gentle bouncing

• Deep diaphragmatic breathing

• Neck stretches before bed

• Sleeping on your side

These support the lymph and glymphatic rivers in clearing toxins, the bodily version of doing truth-telling, repair, and historical witnessing in community.

You clear what stagnated. You release what accumulated. All these make space for clarity.

Gut–Brain Reconciliation

Healing the gut is healing the village within. Eat fermented food and your microbiome receives it like a peace offering. Remember, microbes respond with neurotransmitters that calm your nervous system.

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Pagmumuni-muni: Returning to the Inner Forest

Here are gentle reflections to reflect on:

• Where in my body does communication feel open?

• Where does it feel closed?

• And what does that mirror in the world around me?

• If my body were a forest, which roots need nourishment?

• If my community were a body, which systems need reconnection?

To support you further in rekindling this deeper connection with yourself and your cell bodies, here are daily prompts to explore for the month of January.

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Ready to dive deeper into these explorations?

JOIN: THE HEALING-CENTERED ECOSYSTEMS COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

A gathering for leaders who want to lead from rootedness, repair, and relational wellbeing.

This is a tending place for leaders who want to lead differently.

Because we cannot build liberatory systems with dysregulated bodies.Because relational change requires leaders who can feel, notice, repair, and restore.Because culture shifts when leaders remember their essence, not just their roles.Because healing is not individual work, it is deeply communal, interdependent, and relational.

Who This Is For

This is a home for leaders who want to:

• center healing in how they lead

• deepen their relationship with their nervous system

• practice kapwa and pakikiramdam as leadership strategies

• deepen awareness of colonial patterns and how to shift to regenerative practices

• hold grief, rage, joy, and longing with compassion

• embed repair and reconciliation as core leadership practices

• build relational, healing-centered cultures

• rehearse futures that feel safe in the body

• root into ancestral wisdom and embodied stewardship

What You’ll Experience

Each month includes:

1. A Live Practice Gathering (120 minutes)

A grounding space with:

• somatic arriving

• a short story or teaching

• a guided practice

• small-group reflection

• communal harvesting

These zoom sessions move gently but deeply.

2. Refugia Circles (Self-organized small groups)

You’ll join a small trio/quartet that meets between sessions. These circles are pockets of warmth where you practice the monthly ritual, reflect on what’s alive, and support one another in integration.

3. Monthly Practice Guide

You will receive:

• a grounding ritual

• a somatic or sensory practice

• reflection prompts

• a relational exercise

This community is a tending place, a Refugia space for your remembering. If you feel called to be in this space with me, do join me! Read more about the proposed 12 arcs for the monthly gatherings by clicking on the link .