Q & A with Dr. B. – Can self-care confer meaning and purpose to my life?

Dr. Larry Berkelhammer

The purpose of this website, my book, and the Community Education course I teach at the College of Marin, is to teach people how to live a vibrant, meaningful life through the cultivation of self-empowerment and self-efficacy. In this weekly Q&A column, I post questions from students and from people who attend my presentations along with my answers.

Here is this week’s question:

QUESTION: What do you mean by intelligence of the cells?

ANSWER: The most memorable experience I had in physiology lab long ago was the day we each dissected a frog heart. Seeing the heart still beating after removing it from the frog, and then having the mind-blowing experience of seeing individual cardiac cells, no longer part of the heart, beating under the microscope on their own, provided me with a sense of deep appreciation and wonder for the innate intelligence that allows heart cells to beat after being removed from the body and from the heart. That experience allowed me to see that there is a very sophisticated intelligence in every cell in the body.