Forum; Dr. Graham Farrant on Cellular Consciousness

¶ From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is Forum. It would seem that the nuances of the egg and the sperm of the mound of conception can have an influence on the way to be human being develops. Dr. Graham Farad, Australian psychiatrist and pioneer in the areas of prenatal and perinatal consciousness.

I believe we human beings are motivated to health and we unconsciously set up situations in our daily lives repeatedly that force us to look at issues that are beyond our conscious memory recall that were uncomfortable to develop resilience, to get on top of it, to be healthy around it, not to masticously suffer again and again the repeated experience of our early life event, but to deal with it, to own it, to express it, to incorporate it, and to get on with life. This is Olive Graham. Today's guest on forum has explored the beginnings of consciousness and has arrived to conclusions that may strain the credulity of a lay audience unprepared for the concept of preconception memory. Dr. Graham Farad's three-page vita indicates international experience and credentials in the fields of medicine, psychiatry, and psychology.

He has carved out an area of clinical research that he calls cellular consciousness. For Dr. Farad, it has opened up new areas of therapy. I have discovered six or seven syndromes that haven't been described in psychiatric textbooks that emanate from disturbances or disequilibrium in the first ten days of life, from even preconception to the implantation of the developing sigote in the womb, all of the mother. If for example a person conceived in rape or incest or drugs or alcohol or even being unplanned and unwanted does reverberate as the human being child evolves in the womb and is born and becomes an adult, there is an imprint that alters its destiny forever because of the way the egg and the sperm were at the moment they came together. These six or seven syndromes that you refer to, how does it happen that they had fallen

out of the mix from traditional teleplacia? One example that's very practically pertinent in society comes from the recent use of ultrasound in pregnancy. Before the use of ultrasound we didn't realize that so many of us as human beings started life as a twin. Some studies have it as high as 80%. I'm more inclined to think it's somewhere between 20 and 30. For eternal or identical twins? For eternal. There's an ongoing study done at the Pennsylvania Medical School where ultrasounds are done the very first time a woman comes to the clinic to see if she's pregnant or not. So they know exactly how many twins there are and then they're done routinely through the pregnancy. When they've discovered that in fact at least 20% lose a twin in the first month. Just a natural abortion?

It's absorbed. It dies and is reabsorbed into the mother's body. There's no hemorrhage, there's no pain. Mother doesn't even know that she was having twins, but the surviving twin knows. Just how does this to believe this person develops in the womb, is born and grows up and presents with problems, problems to her or him in adult life, that can be traced back to the loss of that twin. Does this, you say when they become adults, does this ever manifest itself in any kind of childhood disturbance? Yes, one of the fascinating ways that that appears is the child talks about a family and a friend, someone that they can see and no one else in the family can see. They even set a place for them at the table, they buy presents for them at Christmas and birthdays, they play with them down the back of the yard, they draw them, they name them and they're very, very special and important or it can be put onto an article, usually a rug

or a blanket or a doll, but they go to bed with it and they hold it very close and they cuddle it. They talk about being incomplete and lost, there's a part of the missing, they're not whole in total and it's their twin. Let me find out what a therapy is expected to do because we're saying that the cellular consciousness is a therapy that's applicable to some syndromes that haven't been treated by traditional means and I'm saying what is expected of a therapy and how is it that cellular consciousness fits into this pattern and what would make it even become accepted and standard? My appreciation of a therapy is that it has to do two things, it has to provide insight and understanding a new profound awareness to explain the symptoms or uncomfortable sensations or physical feelings that a person is having, mental aberration, sleep disturbance, nightmares,

whatever the problems are that a person is having, people need and want to know why they're not feeling well, where's it come from, what's the explanation of their problem? But secondly and perhaps more important, people want relief from their discomfort. So for me a therapy needs to provide both these two things, understanding, explanation and relief and the relief needs to be permanent, not temporary. It's not enough to take some Tylenol to give a headache relief, a person needs to be able to grow complete and to wholeness and a therapy ought to provide a way of doing that in a simple practical common sense way and one of the advantages for me of this therapy is that it doesn't involve drugs, any induction, for me it doesn't even involve hypnosis.

I'm not saying anything negative about hypnosis but it's something that a person can do fairly easily given that it's appropriate and there are three or four problems, medical problems that exclude people from doing this therapy and I can refer to that in a moment. But given that it's appropriate for them to do this, they can by using their body to move and make sounds retrieve the memory of anything that ever happened to them. Random movement or sound? To begin with, yes but the movements will become very specific for the linear stage of their development where they ran into a problem. Let me put it to you this way that if from preconception to the acquisition of language or even later an evolving human being runs into a physical problem that's sufficient to threaten life, they contract, they shut down, they alter a part of their consciousness

to survive the ordeal. An obvious example is an attempted abortion or threatened miscarriage or a serious virus illness in the mother or a shock grief situation in the mother like the death of her mother or tragic car accident or some physical or mental problem that besets the mother that obviously is transferred to the child. The earlier the discomfort like a threatened abortion, the more profound the consequences for the surviving fetus to be adult. I'm not sure how the cells or cell perceives some of this natural phenomena that's happening so far from it. Well, I mentioned to you before this book called Quantum Healing by Deepak Chopra which has only been published some six or seven months is a summation of the very latest scientific research from medicine, molecular biology and quantum physics about how things function

in the body at a chemical cellular level and I'll quote you one very, very brief piece here. He talks about the DNA and memory. This fact makes us realize that memory must be more permanent than matter. What is a cell then? It's a memory that has built some matter around itself forming a specific pattern. Your body is just the place your memory calls home. But my entire collection of cells is not necessarily what it was five years ago, ten years ago, absolutely. And he explains this in the book too that all our cells are exchange and die and regenerate it as we live life. And the unbelievable truth is that the memory of the cells that they were when we first were created for example is somehow transferred to the surviving new cells that take their

place. This is that memory outlives matter. Candace Purt is the woman in your country who is in charge of the chemical laboratory, the National Institute of Mental Health. She's the leader in your country of all the work on neuropeptides which form the basis of the whole brain biochemistry. And it appears now that every cell in the body is in fact a mind or a part of mind. Our mind is not in our brain as we thought for centuries. It's in every cell in the body. White blood cells, liver cells, heart cells, skin cells are all brain in fact in the sense of mind. They all carry information to and from. They can send information and receive it. And the memory outlasts the matter.

Is the form of therapy that you've based on this applicable to children as well as adults? Excitingly, yes. The pioneer of this work in your country is a man by the name of William Emerson, a PhD psychologist who lives in Petaluma in California. In my country it's John Spensley, a pediatrician who's on my staff in Melbourne. They've both been using this approach to newborn babies as well as infants, children and young adults. A baby will, at the same time it's born for the first seven days of its life, reposition itself in the way it was born. It will go into its physical birth position. It will fetalize, bring its hands crossed at the wrist, thumbs in their fingers, turn the head towards the direction that the head turned in birth. Or if it's cesarean, it will take the position that it was in the mother's womb at the time

it was born. It's particularly easy at that moment of the day by putting your hand gently on its head and its feet and bringing the slightest pressure towards the centre of the body, recreate the womb experience for the baby and it will make a sound that expresses the remnant birth pain or discomfort that may have been in its body at the time of its birth, whether it's in the neck, lower back, feet, headache, frontal pain if there were forcibs or whatever. And a very astute mother or therapist can hear the different sounds that says it's not wet, it's not tired, it's not hungry. It doesn't need to be picked up, it's exercising, it's birth pain. Very very useful in births that we now are going to be a little bit more painful on others, such as breach or tart cord or twins or forcibs or cesarean. What about situations of fetal alcohol syndrome?

Well that's going to be an increasingly realistic problem in my country and probably as well as yours. Bertel Jacobson is a professor at the Carolin Institute in Stockholm and he presented a paper at the recent Perinatal Psychology Congress in Amherst in which he reported a four-year follow-up study of the connection between the use of drugs in labour and the incidence of drug addiction in later life of the evolving baby. And there is a definite very clear connection, unfortunately it's much more likely that a child born under the influence of drugs, pain killers or anesthetics will have a propensity to become a drug addict 20 years later. And fetal alcohol syndrome is an example of that type of problem. The more therapy such a baby can get earlier, the less likely it's going to be that will

have these problems. But let me mention the other common sense practical way that such babies can be helped without therapy and that's unconditional love. If her mother was unfortunate to have a pregnancy situation that was stressful or it was a part of her life where it was difficult for her to be pregnant and have this baby, if she can get help for herself and she can transfer that help to her baby, or if the birth was unfortunately complicated for some obstetrical reason that was necessary to save the life of the child, later the mother with support from her husband and her mother and family can give her baby unconditional love by which I mean feeding on demand, rooming in, being available for 24 hours a day for the first few months, tiring and exhausting I know but necessary for some babies who are hurting and in extra need, the child can overcome any

birth trauma that it may have been subjected to necessarily. Do you cite the advantages of this particular kind of therapy? What are some of its limitations? What do you feel it can't do yet or you haven't completely? Well I mentioned before that it's counter-indicated in certain types of psychiatric problem. For example it must never be used in people suffering from schizophrenia, from manic depressive psychosis, from what we call severe obsessive-compulsive neurosis and it's difficult to do with people who have had shock treatment, who are presently actively involved in drugs who are taking a lot of heroin for example and I guess in your country crack and in my clinical experience it's actually quite difficult doing people who smoke heavily, nicotine suppresses the

transmission of information flow throughout the whole body so such smokers find it very difficult to let go and trust their body to fully express through movements how they feel and in those folks that are able to do that they don't make sense of what their body movements were historically let alone make a sensible connection between what happened in birth for example of life at the Wemble Conception and the way they're living their life today. How short a trip is it from this combination of birth and movement you're talking about to that more primal use in that term primal state? Interesting.

For those of us like myself who pioneered all these years ago it took a long time. I took four months of three sessions of at least two hours duration a week to unravel the mystery of my social paranoia that turned out to be my mother's attempted abortion of me with drugs and getting into a hot bath. People now come to therapy maybe because I recognise the symptoms or the signs out of my own personal experience all that acquired from being with lots of other people. I know my body has a knowing and I guess I unwittingly move or sound or speak in such a way that promotes and allows that person to go into that space, place quicker and sooner. So these days I'm seeing people get to their truth much more quickly than I ever did. Admittedly I'm a bit jealous about that but when I deal with that envy and can allow that person to have that more easily they take it.

So I'm a firm believer and the therapist is unable to take a client or a student anywhere that they haven't had the courage to go themselves. So the answer to put a figure on it would be about three to four months from start to finish. Finish I will never finish because it's an occupational hazard for me to be doing this job. I believe I need to be very open to be intuitive and the price I pay for that is some vulnerability and sensitivity but I prefer to be like that than cold and dead and hard. But folk who are in ordinary life jobs that just need some understanding of a problem that seem to be recurring in repeated marriages or social situations or sexual difficulties or financial inadequacy, they can deal with these things, get inside, get resolution, have more option and choice to change and effectively alter within months.

Without relapse. Not always, people can relapse but if they come back and have several more sessions they can get it more clearly and completely and resolve it. Neurosis is tenacious, it doesn't give up easily, all patterns aren't all that readily necessarily changeable but profound insight, deep release does give much more option for change than just an intellectual appreciation and pursuit. In the videotape that you showed the workshop, the young woman had a paralysis as well as the psychological difficulties. Is it often the case that psychological problems will have these attendant psychosomatic difficulties as well?

In principle, if an adult as a fetus in the womb had a trauma in the first three months of development, their adult expression of the difficulty will be a psychosomatic problem. If the problem happened at birth or around birth, it will be a musculoskeletal problem. There will be difficulty with bones and joints and backache, headache, migraines, perhaps, tension headaches. If the problems happened after birth in the first weeks or so in bonding and relationships, then they're more likely to be purely psychological or mental. But in the last two or three months in the womb, if mother runs into emotional difficulties or is anxious about money, that can get transferred to the child as a permanent feeling of not-enoughness, emptiness and so on. So in principle, the majority of people that come to me eventually express psychological

problems through their body physically. Elizabeth Kuberos, famous for her work with death and dying, said to me in a workshop of hers that I did years ago, if you don't express your feeling within fifteen seconds of feeling it, your body has to do it for you. You don't have long to tell the truth to yourself as well as to whoever you're with. So the feeling is valid, regardless? No, the body will have to somehow absorb the intent or the emotion and express it on your behalf through asthma, ulcers, arthritis, eczema, skin races, headaches and so on. Are there any other tools that you use? Does music play a role, does a person's religion have anything to do with the speed of their recovery?

Any of these additional things involved? Well, as you saw last night of in the workshop, I use a lot of audio, visual aids to facilitate the descent into the physical experience of the process. It's very difficult to describe cellular consciousness with language because it's so reverberable. It predates language by twenty months. So I use sight and sound to help people understand and comprehend the magnitude of experience that one can have in the womb and in the first ten, twenty months of life, where you don't have language, but you have a plethora of sound and a variety of movements that can very adequately express how you feel. I mean, babies can communicate with their mothers their needs very clearly with sound and movement. So I use that quite a lot to help people regress. Most of us, you know, resort to anger as a blanket way of avoiding deeper, more painful

feelings, so that it's the commonest, earliest and most natural way that most people start expressing themselves in a workshop. Underneath anger is usually fear. Under fear is sadness. Under sadness is emptiness or loss. And under that is nothingness and the fear of death. So there are five layers that people may need to go through to get to the original absolute truth. An unusual suggestion I'm making and I'm finishing a book about all this recently, as soon I hope it's going to be called for the soul to sell. If intercourse takes place 36 hours after ovulation, the egg is actually beginning to fade, liquify and die.

It's only really vibrant for the first 24 hours after it pops out of the ovary and comes into the tube. That fertilization can take place around 36 hours, but it's not as vital and exciting and egg as it was much, many hours earlier. And some people, believe it or not, are regressing in their life experience to that point in time and it explains for them some of the difficulties that they have in low energy level, depressive apathy in difference, difficulty in getting up in the morning and getting going with life and so on. Excitingly, when they feel it at that early level, they change. That's the thing that you notice about that woman on the film last night that had the paralyzed arm and leg for 11 months, nothing in her arm and leg had moved. When she regressed and relived, that she survived her mother's abortion with a knitting needle that killed her twin brother and she confronted her mother about this in an assertive, if

not angry way, the paralysis disappeared. But she also regressed further back and found that she was conceived in marital rape, father was drunk and insisted on his marital rights and forced himself sexually on his wife. And that's the way she was conceived and she thought that that was a part of her nature too built in. She was terrified of men. She experienced being molested and raped by her stepfather and uncles and friends of her mother right through until she got pregnant from one of them at 14. So sadly, I think laying the famous British psychiatrist who died a month ago said in his book The Facts of Life, we're born the way we're conceived and we die the way we're born. Unless we have unconditional love or therapy in between. And what happens is we recreate the earlier situation. It's just a sophisticated reverberation of the earlier event.

Every cellar that divides leaves the imprint of its previous experience. So we get to adult life and we just do it again. What was done to us way back. Now that sounds a bit like blaming the past. Unfortunately, it's our responsibility to do something about it in the present. We can't forever go on blaming God or the past or appearance or fate or whatever. We have to get up and do something about it. And this is one very natural, practical common sense way of doing it. Our guest on form has been Australian psychiatrist Dr. Graham Farant. The topic has been cellular consciousness, a form of therapy pioneered and developed

by Dr. Farant. Aquarian lifestyle research sponsored his workshops in Austin, Texas. The views expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Texas at Austin or this station. Technical producer for forum, David Alvarez, production assistants, Christine Drawer, Byron E. Belt, and Elliot George Garcia, I'm your producer and host, Olive Graham. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing, forum cassettes, longhorn radio network, communication building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas 78712. From the center for telecommunication services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is the longhorn radio network.

Thank you. It would seem that the nuances of the egg and the sperm at the moment of conception can have an influence on the way the to be human being develops. This week on forum, the topic is cellular consciousness.