Alex Videos

M1 : Lesson-6 : Cell Danger Response – Mitochondria and Cellular Threat

It serves as a foundational understanding of WHY nervous system tools are crucial for ongoing chronic symptoms at the cellular level.

Our cellular health is key to healing. And if we are literally “scared” into freeze at a cellular level, our energy is impacted, detox is slowed and many treatments will have ADVERSE effects. Therefore, to tolerate treatments and have optimal body function, restoring our cellular safety is paramount. A careful mixture of nervous system work and functional medicine can be a helpful approach in extreme cases. Finding a practitioner with a keen understanding of cell danger response is highly recommended if you struggle with chronic symptoms.

Transcript 

Cell dangerous response, Your body’s energy production is either used to thrive or to protect. This particular lesson is a key understanding to help you unlock the mystery of how to get better. What is a cell danger response? What do you think happens when we get stuck in a threat mode all the way down to our cellular level? Meaning, it’s not just our mind and our thoughts that are not okay.
It’s literally in ourselves A cell danger response is like a fire alarm in your cells that won’t turn off. Simply put, cell danger response is a chronic stress response on a cellular level, specifically with the mitochondria involved. Robert Navio, who coined the term, describes how cells initially go into a protection mode, as a normal part of responding to injury and infection. I repeat, it’s a normal part of responding to injury and infection to initially go into a protection mode, but the cells can get stuck in this protection mode, and the body cannot complete the healing process. This is similar to the diagram we just went through in the last lesson of how we can get stuck in an I am not okay feeling and our body cannot get the message that it is safe to discharge the inflammation and move back into the capacity to thrive.
This is why he terms this as an ongoing cell danger response. The cells literally harden their walls. They decrease communication with the other cells to protect themselves during the acute injury or illness. And this cellular preservation technique is not meant to go on long term. But with chronic illnesses, cells behave as if they’re still injured or they’re still in danger.
Even though the original cause of the threat has passed, It’s almost like the cells become addicted to their state of stress. What triggers a cell danger response? Well, we have infections, toxic exposures, chemicals, psychological trauma, physical trauma, physical injury? Those are a few things that are the most common triggers of a cell danger response. When the cells are stuck in this protection response, Energy production to live and thrive is diverted to be used to protect your cells and extreme fatigue results and inflammation occurs.
Cell stuck in a danger and protection response can result in an overreactive immune response ongoing far after the acute infection. We see this with long haul COVID, for example, or chronic mono. Excessive inflammatory reactions. Meaning, if we get exposed to things, even little substances of things, like whether it’s supplements we’re trying to take or pounds in the air, we can have a huge reaction that doesn’t make sense. We have impaired function like your liver, skin, gut, and brain.
You can have skin rashes. You can develop sebum and things like that. There’s an inability to fully absorb nutrients and helpful chemicals intracellular coupled with an inability to remove toxins appropriately. Remember, the cell wall gets hardened and protective. It doesn’t let the good things in.
But it also traps the toxins inside of the cell and it’s difficult to detox when we are in this response pattern. There’s a poor energy production due to a protect and freeze response on a cellular level. This causes the buildup of toxins, nutrient deficiencies, and tremendous fatigue, all because the danger response is stuck in the on position at the cellular level. This is that feeling of I am not okay all the way down to the cellular level. Things like long haul COVID, chronic Epstein Barr, chronic fatigue, mold toxicity, those are all common examples of this.
This theory also suggests there’s many other diagnosis linked to cell danger response, including fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, pots, diabetes, cancer, skin issues, and much more. With self injury response, it’s all about our mighty mitochondria. You see, our mitochondria are the powerhouse factories of the body when we are in safe and healing mode, but when we’re stuck in stress, their primary function turns to use energy for cellular protection. People feel out of energy because the mitochondria is using all of its resources to survive and shut down rather than thrive. So you can see here the mitochondria, it’s producing energy both ways It’s just being used differently, and this is such a key understanding.
A lot of people who have fatigue or chronic fatigue fatigue will say, I don’t have any energy. Well, actually, that’s not always true. The energy you have is being diverted to use to keep your cells in protection and shut down and freeze. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to do that actually. The truth is your cells are producing energy.
It’s just being used differently. When we’re in a protection response that cells also produce ATP to send messages extracellularly to tell other cells, hey, there’s a threat. You need to shut down so that ATP becomes a form of communication of threat rather than being used to run your vital force and your detoxification and your organs. So this is what I’m trying to say here is that with cell danger response, your energy is either being used to thrive or to shut down. But either way, there is energy being used.
This all comes down to a voltage change in your mitochondria. This particular voltage change will signal to the mitochondria. We’re either safe or we’re in stress, and that that voltage change is the instruction of which way to use the energy. So think for a moment what might cause a voltage change in the mitochondria. This is a slightly more advanced topic, but we know that our voltage changes when our heart is open and feeling safe and feeling loved.
And I think that that voltage change in our electromagnetic field goes all the way down to the mitochondria level to say, hey, we’re safe right now. But when we go into fear and stress, There’s a voltage change in our electromagnetic field that goes all the way down to the mitochondria that says, hey, we need to protect. We need to shut down. The mitochondria might be the most important component to the healthy functioning of our body. They’re numerously present in almost every type of cell in our body.
And interestingly, they’re most concentrated in our eyes, our brain, and our heart. Because these are the organs that need energy the most. So this is one reason I focus most of my practices and tools on how to affect our eyes, our brain, and our heart. And these little factories are full of energy to be used either to help us go and do the things we love or to clamp down our body and fight and hide. In fact, regularly stimulating your vagus nerve, which we’re gonna learn about in module 3, can increase mitochondrial activity dramatically, and therefore it’s one of the best mitochondrial therapies available.
Because of the feedback loop we have between our nervous system all the way down to the mitochondria level, it seems to me that if we can truly get our mindset and our nervous system to find a deep sense of safety and purpose and the why to have our energy back Our mitochondria of our body can respond and can return back to the factory energy production mode rather than survival mode. For this reason, I often visualize my mitochondria functioning well in my brain rewiring visualizations. So remember that when we get to the brain rewiring module. The question remains, why would the cells get stuck in a protection mode for some people, but not others? Well, again, I see a trend in personality types that end up in this situation.
Like I mentioned in the previous lesson, Some people have a higher incidence of chronic stress and protection responses in their body. It’s a habit for them to go into protection, especially if they grew up in a rough environment. So think about how this cell danger response might mimic our emotional response to injury and trauma. If we harden and protect and decrease our interaction with others that we’ve been hurt by, that can cause us all the way down on a cellular level to protect and to restrict energy. This behavior can go on for years towards those who are hurt by or also protection towards our body parts that we see we’re seriously injured.
We can also get stuck in a type of pseudo cell danger response with our emotions, our beliefs, in our behavior where we permanently changed and how we respond to the world, we can behave like the injury that trauma of the event is still happening. Well, that’s what our cells do too, and maybe it’s our behavior, our thoughts, and our opening up to the world and to siding that we’re no longer in danger that will affect our hearts, our minds, and ourselves. So if this describes you, if you feel like you’re kind of in a protective, I’m not okay, response, what do you have to lose in helping your cells, find safety again, and openness to come out of danger mode by using the tools you’ll learn in this program. Next, we’ll go over the 3 stages of cell danger response. CDR 1, cell danger response 1 is where there’s a massive threat and shutdown.
You’re often highly sensitive to everything, and even limbic system retraining or brain retraining can be very difficult, so you must go slow. This threat mode is a really sensitive stage. And I find that a lot of people have to be very gentle with this kind of nervous system retraining if this is you. This is also somebody who doesn’t handle detoxification or killing agents for infections very well because on a cellular level, they need to have a perception of safety restored. And Once the safety gets restored, then it’s safe to change, it’s safe to detox, it’s safe to kill pathogens, it’s safe to retrain your nervous system.
So just know that if this is you to go slowly, In primal trust, we have a level 1 focus that really addresses cell danger response level 1 by gently targeting the limbic system and the vagus nerve. And again, I recommend you work through this program at your own pace avoid getting overwhelmed, and really master one module at a time to help your body adjust to the changes in your nervous system. With CDR 2, you might feel I’m safer. I can now begin to build and repair. But there’s still a lot of dysregulation.
I’m able to take more supplements to exercise and detox. And with Primal Trust, we are focusing on rebuilding the self in our level 2 program, which is the mentorship We work on inner attachment repair and getting our purpose reestablished. And I wanna pause here because this is so important to me in that I want you to understand that on a cellular level, if you don’t have a sense of purpose, You’re not sending a message to your mitochondria, why you need your energy. In level 2, we really focus on purpose for this reason. But first, we do need to calm things down with the level 1 focus.
And this is why I recommend to move through the program in an orderly way. With CDR 3, this is all about the cells emerging back into communication with the body. Kind of like a community where older cells teach the newer cells how to come back to normal. What I mean by that is Some of the cells of your body have only known stress, especially if they were produced after you’ve gotten sick. And so there’s a type of mentoring that happens with the older cells in your body to the newer cells to remind them this is how you return back to normal function.
There’s also releasing of deep intracellular toxins in this stage, which is similar to releasing old internal conflicts. And that’s why we have a level 3 focused and primal trust as well, which is all about community assisting others who are on the path behind you. And a deep feeling of family and generational wounding and learning how to be well again in releasing the illness identity. This is a summary of CDR treatment approaches. The goal is to help the cells feel like the war is over.
We’re back to growth and repair. The theory suggests to remove the stressors on the cells like pathogens and toxins, and to treat the mitochondria with various supplements and protocols. The first step is all about removing stressors to the cells. A functional medicine approach might be to kill pathogens, remove toxins, but the primal trust approach about nervous system regulation to send calm biochemistry to your body and to create general nervous system relaxation signals. Once the threat level is decreased in the cells and in the nervous system, we move to stage 2, which is all about supporting the mitochondria more.
Functional medicine approach might be more exercise sweating, breath work, and hot and cold exposure. Regular sunlight exposure, a nutritious clean diet, and low EMF exposure. In primal trust, we target the eyes, the brain, the heart, with advanced neural regulation, and we focus on clear intention during our rewind practice on our soul’s purpose. Again, what we need energy for This is a stage where we focus a lot on true self alignment and integrity to bring that life force back into our cells and energy field. Again, I think if you’re going to do the functional medicine approach, please work with a provider who understands cell danger response so that you can move through the sequencing in a way that is not stressful to your body.
And again, this program is not gonna go into how to fix your chemistry of cell danger response physiologically with supplements and protocols because that’s not my expertise or even the main approach I take. I recommend implementing the tools to calm your nervous system and give your cells a different biochemical signal of safety. This is much more empowering to me to help your body heal instead of trying to figure out every little issue on a cellular level. Your body does have innate healing mechanisms. And when you give your body this spaciousness of a sense of safety, I believe it can remember just how to do the job that nature intended it to do.
And I believe that when we calm our nervous system down and feel safer, It is like our cells almost literally begin to breathe again. They start to drain toxins, absorb nutrients, and communication of the cells improves. Our energy production is to get out and start living again. In my experience, it’s priority to get this nervous system calm for the other processes of detoxification or antimicrobial treatments to even work more effectively. I know for me, I did so many treatments for years.
I spent 1000 and 1000 of dollars, and I was in so much stress, it didn’t work. In fact, it usually made me sicker. When we are stuck in survival, it is so difficult to make those cells relax and let go of toxins. I am a big fan of things like binders and other sorts of cellular communication aids when they’re tolerated. But without implementing nervous system regulation for those stuck in cell danger response, I believe that these other treatments are limited or even ineffective.
17:39So in summary, when we feel safe, our cells are safe to function again, that’s the mind body connection. In the next set of videos, I’m gonna go through specific conditions as it relates to chronic stress and chronic illness.