Serious Diagnosis
Everything has changed
Not everything is decided
Cellular Healing is for people living with a serious, life-changing diagnosis, illness or medical event.
Cancer. A serious neurological condition. A progressive illness. A disabling injury. A medical event that divides your life into before and after.
Your medical team is focused on the disease. Cellular Healing works alongside that care, with YOU–the person who is actually living through it.
The first step is a private conversation with Nina.
When a diagnosis changes everything
Suddenly, your calendar may be full of appointments, scans, decisions and an entirely new vocabulary you never asked to learn. People begin asking about your numbers. Your medications. Your next appointment. Your prognosis.
Meanwhile, you are trying to understand what happened to your life. Where you are in this new ecology.
Maybe your body no longer feels like your own. Maybe you're bracing for the next piece of news, waking at three in the morning, or managing everyone else's fear along with your own. Perhaps you've stopped making plans because you no longer know what you're allowed to hope for.
A diagnosis can begin as information and slowly creep into an identity. It starts shifting the way people view you, the way you think about your body, and the future you can still imagine for yourself.
Medical treatment matters. Sometimes it saves your life.
But there is still a person inside the diagnosis.
That's the person I work with.
I know something about having your life interrupted
I was nineteen when I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis. Lupus and several other autoimmune diseases followed.
By twenty-six, it was 1978 and the life I had expected to be living was happening all around me. My friends were marrying, having babies and forging careers. I had recently had a play off Broadway. And now I was moving between a wheelchair and a bed.
There were good hours when my body cooperated, followed by hours when it didn't. I had double vision. Sometimes I had to hold my jaw with my hand in order to chew.
I was fortunate to live in New York, where I had access to gifted physicians. There were surgeries and medications. My doctors kept me alive, and I remain profoundly grateful for that.
But the life they saved was very far from the life I had imagined for myself.
Eventually, I began looking beyond the question of how to stay alive and became interested in another one:
How was I going to live?
Western medicine kept me alive
The rest made my life livable
I explored what was available at the time: nutrition, meditation, psychotherapy and eventually the early work of physicians Carl Simonton, Jerry Jampolsky and Bernie Siegel, who were exploring ideas we would now recognize as mind-body medicine.
At first, the changes were hardly dramatic. I simply noticed that I could function a little longer before I had to go back to bed.
So I kept going.
I attended workshops first as a patient and later as a student. I kept what worked and discarded what didn't. Over the years I refined the process, studied, went back to school and eventually spent more than twenty years practicing acupuncture while incorporating everything I had learned.
I also remarried. Had children. Traveled. Built a career.
Years later, a neurologist looked at my medical history and asked me why I wasn't in a nursing home.
I left his office.
His idea of what was possible for my body was not an idea I was interested in adopting.
I'm seventy-five now. I have outlived all of my mentors and all but one of my doctors. I still live with a complicated body.
I also lift weights, travel, write, work and remain very interested in what else might be possible.
Cellular Healing grew out of fifty-five years of asking and learning how to LIVE
What is Cellular Healing?
When something frightening happens to us, the body adapts. It braces. It protects. It learns what to watch for and what to fear. Those patterns can be extraordinarily useful when we're in danger, but the body can continue running them long after they are useful.
I work with those patterns.
During a session, I guide you into a deeply restful state where we can begin to notice what your system has learned and work with it differently. You are awake and aware throughout. This isn't something being done to you, and it doesn't require you to meditate, clear your mind or think positively.
Over time and through repetition, the body can experience other possibilities besides the ones it has practiced most.
This work doesn't treat cancer, autoimmune disease, neurological disease or any other medical diagnosis. It does not replace your physician, your medications or your treatment.
Your medical team treats the disease. I work with you and your body.
You don't have to wait until you're “better” to begin
People often assume they should wait until the crisis is over. After chemotherapy. After surgery. After the next scan. When they're less tired, less frightened, more themselves.
You can come as you are. You don’t have to wait until things are better or more certain.
We meet on Zoom, so there is nowhere to travel and no waiting room. If you're exhausted, you can lie down. If your mind is racing, that's fine. If it's been a terrible week, I don't need you to turn it into a good one before we meet.
I would rather know what is actually happening.
Sessions are scheduled around treatment and around your energy. Your body does not need to accommodate the work. The work accommodates your body.
We begin with a conversation
Before we work together, I want to meet you
We'll talk about what has happened, what your medical treatment involves, how you're doing and what you want for yourself now. You can ask me whatever you need to ask.
I also want to understand whether I believe this work is appropriate for you. If I don't, I'll tell you.
If we decide together to continue, Cellular Healing begins with a series of four private, one-hour sessions on Zoom. The initial series is $1,800.
Four sessions give us enough time to identify the patterns your system has developed, work with them more than once, and begin to see what changes.
But you don't need to decide any of that now.
The first step is simply a conversation.
A few questions worth asking
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No. Cellular Healing is complementary to appropriate medical care, never a substitute for it. I expect you to maintain your relationship with your medical team and continue the treatment and medications prescribed for you.
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I won't promise you an outcome, and I won't tell you Cellular Healing cures disease. Anyone making those promises should concern you. My work is with the person living with the diagnosis and with the patterns the body and mind develop in response to what you've been through.
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No. I have lived with serious autoimmune disease for fifty-five years and have heard variations of this idea myself. Illness is not a failure of character, attitude or positive thinking. That isn't what this work is about.
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Then we work with the body you have that day. Sessions can happen during active medical treatment and can be done lying down from your bed. We schedule around your medical care and your energy.
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I won't argue with your doctors or tell you what your outcome will be. I also won't reduce your life to a prognosis. However much time any of us has, the question remains: How do you want to live it?
There is more to you than what has happened to your body
I cannot tell you where your story goes from here.
Nobody can.
What I can tell you is that I have spent most of my life interested in the distance between a diagnosis and a life.
If something in what you've read here feels familiar, let's talk. Tell me what's happening. I'll listen. We'll ask some questions and see whether Cellular Healing is the right next step for you.
No promises. No pressure. No need to know before we begin.
Curiosity is enough
Private conversation with Nina Frankel · Sessions available on Zoom