Monthly Archives: August 2012

Cellular Awakening by Barbara Wren

Are you keen to learn more about natural health but feel a little confused or overwhelmed when trying to decide what to read or even just what superfoods and supplements to get?  Maybe you wish you had a knowledgeable and experienced friend who could pick out a handful of the best books and say to you, ‘Start with these.’  Raw Living have done this for you; they have made a selection of some of the best books out there which makes choosing a lot easier.  They have some real stand-out classics.  Some are helpful in a practical way if you want to eat more raw but aren’t sure where to start - any of Kate’s recipe books are good on that.  Others are great if you want to develop a deeper understanding of the theory and research behind the natural health movement, such as Conscious Eating and The China Study.  There are others that look at key issues, like enzymes and specific nutrients.  You could just browse through the list and see what jumps out at you as most appealing, safe in the knowledge that you’re not going to be disappointed, because there are no duds on this list.

There are some books that come at you from a completely unexpected direction and give you a new and hugely enlightening perspective.  Cellular Awakening by Barbara Wren is one of the these.  It has given me a framework to help me understand all sorts of puzzles, problems and symptoms that I thought were unconnected but that turn out to be parts of a coherent bigger picture.  It’s a hugely relevant book for those healing from disease and for healthy people who want to get to the next level.

Barbara Wren writes in a way that makes a new (to me) idea easy to grasp without ever being patronising.  She explains how the body holds and creates light, and how disease and low energy relate to stagnation and a lack of light at a cellular level.  It makes sense of how illness progresses in an individual and how to tell symptoms that show an illness is getting worse from symptoms arising naturally from the healing process.  I found the section on how the seasons and the phases of the moon affect us interesting, as I find the full moon does affect me adversely.  There’s also a fascinating bit on how different organs are active at different times of the day and night, which helps us pinpoint what bits most need our attention.

She does give practical steps for reversing stagnation in the body and getting the healing processes moving gently, along with some case studies to illustrate how poor health is created over a lifetime.  Some of the techniques she describes were already well known to me, such as colonics, enemas and flax tea.  But I still learned something new even about those, because she describes what they do on an energetic level.  But the main strength of this book is less in the practical suggestions than in the big picture it offers of how the body works in terms of energy.

I think this book gives two gifts of huge importance.  One is that it teaches you how wise your body is and how it always works for you, never against you.  It gives you the gift of trusting your body and its innate wisdom, releasing you from the fear of future illness.  The other gift of this book is that it shows how our spiritual well-being can develop naturally from gaining good physical health and energy.  I have known for some time that this happens and have read and heard a lot of testimony to that effect.  But it was always hard to understand how better physical health creates a greater sense of spiritual connectedness.  This book clearly shows how a body that is clean at a cellular level, that has healthy energy flow and is full of light, connects us back to ourselves and to the universe.  The best word to describe this book – pun most certainly intended – is enlightening.

Former Radio One DJ (now on BBC 6 Music), label boss Gilles Peterson went on my friend Marsha's show this week on NTS radio. Gilles started talking about health and Marsha asked him if he was into raw foods. This is what he had to say (click the link below)!

Gilles Peterson on NTS Radio