Your body has a history
And It can still learn New Ways of Being
Cellular Healing is an intensive, private mind-body practice for people living with serious illness, chronic pain, or trauma the body is still carrying.
I'm Nina Frankel. I've been doing this work for fifty-five years. The first several as a patient.
Sometimes life can Change in an instant
Sometimes the body has been asking for help for years
You may have received a diagnosis that split your life into before and after.
You may have been managing pain or illness so long that managing it has become a full-time job.
Or you may know that something you lived through is still showing up in your body, in ways you can't seem to resolve.
These are different experiences. They tend to arrive at the same question.
What do I do now?
Wherever you're starting…
we begin with you
WHEN EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED
A serious diagnosis can shift everything, including how to trust your body again.
WHEN YOUR BODY FEELS TRAPPED
Chronic illness or chronic pain. Months, years, decades. You've tried nearly everything, and your body keeps returning to what it knows.
WHEN THE BODY REMEMBERS
That chapter is over, thankfully. But your body is still responding as though it isn't.
WHEN yOU NEED SUPPORT
You love them, and you are committed to caring for them, but there comes a point where you need support for the caregiving you are providing
You did not do this to yourself
Mind-body work has a bad habit of implying otherwise. That people make themselves sick. That the right attitude would have spared them. I have lived with these diseases for fifty-five years. I have heard all of it.
It isn't true, and it isn't what this is.
Your illness is not a character flaw. Your pain is not a failure of willpower. And this work is not a replacement for your medical care — I will expect you to keep that care firmly in place.
What we work with is something else entirely: what your body learned while it was surviving, and what it might still be able to learn now.
Your medical team treats the disease
This is about how you live inside Your Body
You don't need another person telling you what's wrong with you. You're already very familiar with that. So we don't start there.
Here is what I see in almost everyone who comes to me. The body learns. Under sustained illness, pain or threat, it lays down pathways that once kept you functioning, and it keeps running them long after the circumstances have changed. Those pathways are learned survival. They're competent. They're also, by now, familiar enough to feel like simply who you are.
Cellular Healing is a guided process for repatterning them. Not overriding the body. Working with it, deliberately, until other pathways become available.
Why Cellular Healing?
What your body has learned or is going through isn’t an abstract idea that only lives in your mind.
It's held in how your system functions — in the nervous system, in tissue, in the muscles, in the blood vessels, in the organs—in the way you feel.
We work together at the cellular level—the body’s language—to open new possibilities and patterns of being, feeling, and living.
What happens During a session
We go deep together, first by resting into safety and relaxation.
I guide you into a deeply parasympathetic state , which is your body's rest and repair mode. This is the opposite of the braced, vigilant state most people living with pain or illness occupy by default.
You're not asleep. You aren't doing anything strenuous. You are, often for the first time in a long while, not defending yourself.
That state is where healing begins.
A body that is bracing doesn't have the resources available to reorganize. A body at rest can.
Once your body is in the parasympathetic state, we work directly with the patterns your system has learned.
And we introduce it to new ones.
The same capacity that allowed your body to learn a pattern is the capacity that allows it to learn a different one.
Cellular Medicine grew out of decades studying and applying mind-body medicine alongside the pioneers of the field, and more than twenty years of clinical practice as an acupuncturist.
We meet over Zoom, so you can be comfortable in your own space. We begin with a series of four sessions, usually over the course of six weeks.
Your body is already wise. We give it new information to work with.
what people are saying
"Nina is wonderful!! I can’t stress how She has changed my life for the better.
-E.L.
Here’s how we begin
1. We talk first
A conversation about what's happening and whether this work is right for you. I want to know that as much as you do.
2. We begin with four sessions
Typically over the course of six weeks, each session builds on the one before it.
3. Your body takes it from there
We listen, we recalibrate, we fine-tune. Repetition is what moves a pattern from something you practice to something your body does on its own.
Step one is a conversation where we get Curious Together
Western medicine kept me alive
Mind Body Medicine made my life livable
I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis at nineteen, then lupus, then several other autoimmune diseases. My future became a promise unfulfilled.
By twenty-six I was straddling a wheelchair and a bed. Double vision. Twisted facial expressions. Chewing accomplished with a hand positioned under my jaw. My friends were marrying, having babies, forging careers. Me, limbo.
I had my pick of gifted clinicians in New York. They kept me alive, far from the life I had imagined for myself.
So in 1978 I looked elsewhere. Macrobiotics. Orthomolecular medicine. Meditation. And over a period of months I noticed something: I could function longer into the day without needing to go back to bed.
Then psychotherapy, and the work of Carl Simonton, Jerry Jampolsky and Bernie Siegel — three physicians risking their reputations on what we now call mind-body medicine. I came to it as the patient first. Later as the student.
I began to really heal. I was no longer at the mercy of my diagnoses. I had learned to take ownership of my health.
I kept what worked and fine-tuned it as I went, for fifty-five years. That process became Cellular Healing.
I have outlived all of my mentors and all but one of my doctors.
Nobody gets to decide what your life becomes
These days, when I interview a new clinician for myself, I am usually greeted with amazement. Years ago one of them read my history and asked why I wasn't in a nursing home. I immediately left his office. He was not aligned with me or my goals.
I'm seventy-five. I lift weights. I travel, I work, I'm still learning, and I am still challenging my own assumptions about what this body can do.
I won't tell you illness isn't real, or that we control everything that happens to our bodies. I will refuse to reduce a person to a diagnosis, a symptom, an age, or somebody else's expectations of what their life can become.
This was never about spending my life healing. It was about having more life to live.
My purpose is to live the best life possible, and to help others do that for themselves
what people are saying
“Nina herself is very knowledgable, welcoming and shares the reasons behind her techniques. I have always felt comfortable with her.”
-J.P.
Let's discover what else is possible for you
Cellular Healing begins with a conversation.
We'll talk about what's happening, what you've already tried, and whether this work belongs in your life right now. Curiosity is enough to start.