Your Genes Don't Run You. Your Energy Does.

Your DNA is the parts store, not the boss. Here is what actually runs the cell, why energy is the real lever... and how far that reach might go.

**Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade.

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“It runs in my family.”

We say it like a sentence read out by a judge. Heart disease runs in my family. Depression runs in my family. Addiction, obesity, cancer, the whole grim inheritance. And we say it as if the genes we were handed at conception already wrote the ending, and the rest of our life is just waiting to find out how bad the news is.

I have spent twenty-five years in functional medicine. My training started with a biochemistry degree and ran through a doctorate in natural medicine, with a license to practice in Washington and California, and these days I am back in school again, working on a degree in transpersonal psychology. I tell you that not to wave credentials around, but because the arc of it is the whole point. I started deep in the molecules, and I have spent a quarter century walking toward the mind. This piece is that walk, compressed.

Early in my career, I believed the genes were most of the story. By around 2010, I was convinced I had it backwards. Not a little backwards. All the way backwards. And what turned me around is the thing I want to hand you now.

Some of what follows is settled science. Some of it is a guess, and a wild one. I will tell you which is which as we go, because the honest version of this is far more interesting than the tidy one.

Your genes are an auto parts store

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Start with the story you were taught, probably in the same textbook I was. DNA is the master molecule. The blueprint of life. The command center that sits in the nucleus and runs the cell, and by extension runs you. Get the code, crack the code, and you have cracked the person.

It is a clean story. It is also wrong, and you can see it is wrong with a single fact.

Your red blood cells have no nucleus. None. They carry no DNA at all. They were built, they threw out their genetic library on the way to maturity, and then they go on doing their job for about four months, carrying oxygen to every corner of you, right now, as you read this. The master molecule is not even in the building, and the work still gets done.

So if the DNA is not the boss, what is it?

It is an auto parts store. (Shout out to Bruce Lipton for the auto-parts-store analogy. It is one of my favorites, and it is not mine.) Think about that literally for a second. When your body needs a specific protein, some worker in the cell walks back to the genes, finds the right aisle, and pulls the instructions to make that part. That is what a gene is. A part number and a spec sheet. Closer still, it is the instruction booklet that falls out of a flat-pack box of Ikea furniture. It tells you what a shelf bracket is supposed to look like. It does not lift a single finger to build the cabinet. And it absolutely does not decide whether the cabinet gets built at all, or when, or why.

A manual and a pile of parts do not assemble themselves. Somebody has to want the cabinet. Somebody has to read the room, place the order, and drive the job. That somebody is not the genes. The genes just wait in the back, patient and dumb, for an order to come in.

So where does the order come from? Where is the actual control center of the cell?

Not the nucleus. The nucleus is the warehouse. The decisions get made out at the very edge, at the cell membrane, the thin skin where the cell meets the world. This is the part that reorganized how I think about health.

That membrane is not a passive bag. It is covered in tens of thousands of tiny protein antennas. Each one is tuned to something out in the environment... a hormone drifting by, a nutrient, a mineral, a signal from the cell next door, a mechanical push or pull, the energy state of the fluid around it. When one of those antennas catches its signal, it changes shape, and that shape-change sets off a relay inside the cell, a chain of messengers passing the news inward, hand to hand, until it reaches the nucleus with an instruction. Make this. Stop making that. Grow. Rest. Divide. Repair.

Notice what that means. The cell is not being run from its library. It is being run from its skin, from the surface where it touches the world. Strip the nucleus out of a cell and, like the red blood cell, it can often keep working for a while. Cripple the membrane and its signaling, and the cell dies almost at once, because it has gone deaf and blind to the world. If anything inside a cell has earned the word “brain,” in my opinion it is the membrane, not the DNA. (Again, shout out to Bruce Lipton, who showed me this way back in 2004.) The genes are the parts store. The membrane is the manager who decides what gets ordered, based on everything it is reading from outside.

Which raises the only question that matters for you and me. What is that manager listening to most?

The loophole that keeps you from becoming a pile of sand

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This is where energy comes in. To feel why it matters, you have to sit with the strangest fact about being alive.

There is a law of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, that says everything falls apart. Left alone, every ordered thing drifts toward disorder. Heat spreads out, structure slumps, the neat becomes the random. Build a magnificent sandcastle, put a glass dome over it so nothing can get in or out, and come back in ten thousand years. Flat pile of sand. Every time. The universe is running downhill toward mush, and the law says it cannot run the other way.

Now look at yourself. You are not a pile of sand. You are one of the most exquisitely ordered structures in the known universe, billions of cells cooperating, and you did not slump into a puddle. You grew. You got more complex, more organized, more intricate, from a single cell into this. A redwood does it. A whale does it. Life looks, at first glance, like it is breaking the deepest law in physics.

It is not breaking the law. It found the loophole.

The law only says order must decay in a closed system. A system sealed off, nothing flowing through it. The sandcastle under the dome. But you are not sealed off. You are wide open, and there is a river running through you. It starts at the sun, pours down as light, gets caught by plants and packed into food, and you eat that food and pull the energy out of it. A continuous flow of energy is moving through you every second of your life. And it turns out that when you push a steady flow of energy through a system, that flow can do something miraculous. It can build order and hold it up against the tide of decay. The flow itself creates structure. It creates information.

So life is not really a thing. It is a process. You are less like a statue and more like the standing wave that forms over a rock in a fast river, a shape that looks solid and stays put, but is actually made of water that is never the same twice, held in form only by the flow. Cut off the flow and the wave does not sit there. It vanishes. It becomes the flat pile of sand. That is what death is, at the level of physics. The flow stopped, and the order it was holding up let go.

Now bring that back to the cell and its parts store, because this is where it gets practical.

The engine that runs the river inside you is the mitochondria, the little power plants in your cells that take the food you eat and the oxygen you breathe and turn them into usable energy. But here is the beautiful part, worked out in detail by the geneticist Douglas Wallace and others. Those mitochondria do not just make power. The very molecules they produce while making power (ATP and acetyl-CoA, if you want the names) are the same molecules the cell uses as chemical tags on the DNA.

Remember, your two meters of DNA are wound up tight around little protein spools to fit inside the nucleus. Wound tight, a gene is buried, unreadable, silent. To read it, the cell has to loosen that particular spool and expose the code. And what loosens or tightens the spools? Those energy molecules, straight off the mitochondria. When energy is pouring through you and abundant, the tags flood in, spools loosen, and the growth-and-store genes open up all across the cell... build, divide, lay down fat, we are in a season of plenty. When energy runs low, when you fast or go hungry or move hard, the tags fall away, the spools wind shut on those genes, and a different set opens instead... conserve, repair, clean house, survive.

The genes did not decide any of that. They obeyed it. The energy flowing through you sent the order, the membrane and the metabolism carried it, and the parts store filled it. This is not fringe. It is about as established as anything in modern biology.

So here is the whole picture. The food you eat, the light you take in, the sleep you get or miss, the way you move, the stress you carry, the air you breathe... those are not just how you feel. They are the signal. They are the state of the river, and your cells are reading that river at the membrane every single hour and building a different version of you depending on what they find. Your DNA is not your destiny. It is your inventory. Your energy is the thing placing the orders. That is not a mystical claim.

Then it gets stranger: a field placed an order from outside the cell

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If a signal inside the body can walk up to a cell and change what it builds, a fair and slightly unnerving question follows. Could a signal from outside the body do the same thing? Could an invisible field reach through the wall of a cell and place an order?

The answer, at least in a laboratory dish, is yes. And the experiment that showed it is worth walking through slowly, because it is genuinely strange.

A team led by Jeffrey Friedman at Rockefeller University built it, and named the approach radiogenetics. Here is what they did, step by step. First, they put a special gate into the membrane of their cells, a channel called TRPV1 that only opens when it gets warm. A heat-triggered door in the cell’s skin. Then they took microscopic particles of iron and attached them right next to that door. Then they did the crucial part. They aimed a low-frequency radio field at the cells from outside the dish, and switched it on.

Watch the dominoes fall. The radio field made the little iron particles heat up. The heat opened the TRPV1 door. Through the open door poured calcium, which inside a cell is one of the loudest messengers there is. That surge of calcium traveled inward and switched on a gene. And they had chosen, in advance, which gene to wire it to. They wired it to insulin. So by doing nothing more than turning on an invisible radio field in the air outside the dish, they made the cells inside start pumping out insulin. In living diabetic mice, this dropped blood sugar. No drug. No needle. No touch. A field in the air, and the cell answered.

That is real. It ran in the journal Science in 2012, and again in Nature Medicine in 2014. Look it up if it sounds invented. It sounded invented to me the first time I read it.

But do not miss where they had to act to make it work. Not on the gene. On the membrane. They hung their iron on a channel sitting in the cell’s outer skin, and the field did its work right there, at the surface. The gene only answered after the membrane had opened and let the message in. Even here, even in a lab with engineered parts and an artificial field, the door to the genome ran straight through the membrane. Which is the same story I have been telling you the whole time, now told with radio waves.

And that cracks a door open. If an invisible field, from outside, can reach a cell and change what it makes... then what about all the old stories?

You have felt this one already

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Now tell me how far-fetched this really is. You and I go spend an evening with people we love, people we feel safe with, people who look at us and tell us we matter. What happens inside us? Our stress hormones drop. The feel-good chemistry rises, the oxytocin and dopamine and the whole warm cascade. And those molecules do exactly what we just watched happen in that lab dish. They land on receptors on the surface of our cells, the membrane fires its relay inward, and certain genes switch on while others go quiet.

That is not a metaphor, and it is not a maybe. Researchers like Steve Cole at UCLA have measured it directly. Put a lonely, isolated person next to a deeply connected one and you find whole panels of genes running differently between them. Inflammation turned up in the lonely. Calmed in the connected. The immune system set to a different station in each. A life with meaning and belonging in it literally reads out in which of your genes are switched on. Connection is not only a feeling. It is an input your cells are reading and building you out of.

So the people around you, and the love or the fear moving between you, are already changing your biology down at the level of the gene. That part is settled.

Whether some of that connection also travels as an actual field is where it gets speculative, and more fun. The heart is the strongest electrical rhythm in the body, and its magnetic field genuinely can be picked up a few feet off the chest by a sensitive enough instrument. The HeartMath Institute has pushed further and argued that one person’s heart field can overlap and register inside another person’s body. That further claim leans on small studies in soft journals, mainstream science does not accept it, and I would not hang anything on it just yet. Hold it loosely. But the measurable part underneath it is real, and it does get you wondering.

Now the part where I have to be honest with you

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The temptation here is enormous, and I feel it too. If a field from outside can change what a cell builds, then maybe every old tradition that talked about invisible healing energy, about laying on hands, about a force passing between people, was clumsily pointing at something real.

You can even dig up a perfect historical ghost for the idea. In 1779, in Paris, a physician named Franz Mesmer (this is where the word “mesmerize” comes from) sat his patients around a large tub of iron filings, and moved his hands slowly over their bodies without ever touching them. People wept. They convulsed. Many swore their ailments had lifted. He called the force he was channeling “animal magnetism,” and he became the most talked-about healer in Europe. The king appointed a scientific commission to investigate him, with Benjamin Franklin himself sitting on it, and the commission ran clever blindfolded tests and concluded the magnetic fluid did not exist. The cures were real, they said, but the cause was the patient’s own imagination. For almost 250 years the verdict has stood. Mesmer, the fraud who accidentally discovered the placebo effect. So the tempting move sits right there, waiting. What if he was not a fraud, but early? Feeling a real mechanism with the wrong words for it?

Here is the guess. And here, in the same breath, is where it falls apart.

A physicist named Markus Meister ran the actual numbers on this in 2016, and they are brutal. The natural iron our cells carry (a protein called ferritin, the same family of iron used in that Rockefeller experiment) is only very weakly magnetic. Meister showed that the force you could pull out of it in an ordinary magnetic field is roughly a billion times too small to open one of those cellular gates on its own. Not a little short. A billion times short. The lab result worked only because they engineered the particles, engineered the cells, and aimed a strong field from an inch away. Your friend’s brainwaves, warm and faint and a few feet across the dinner table, are not doing this to your cells. The physics simply is not there.

And yet the experiment did prove the principle. A field from outside a cell can reach in and flip a genetic switch. That much is real. It just did not do it through our own faint iron at a distance. So maybe there is another route we have not found yet... another mineral, another compound, some structure in us that answers to a field, or a thought, or a feeling, the way that engineered channel did. I do not know of one. But the principle holds, and that is what keeps the question open.

So the clean bumper-sticker version, the one that says “science now proves energy healing,” is not clean. If we are going to be honest, we have to say it is unknown, at least for now. Worth saying plainly before we get to the fun part.

And yet the picture that is left is hard to put down

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Strip away the overreach, and look honestly at what is still standing. All of it real, all of it established.

The cell is run from its membrane, by signals from the world, not by the genes. Energy is one of the loudest of those signals. Connection changes which of your genes are switched on, and we can measure it. A field from outside can reach a cell and change what it builds, under the right conditions. And your body, right now, is generating its own electromagnetic fields... your heart and your brain both throw off signals that a sensitive enough machine can measure from outside your skin. That is not in dispute. You are, in a real and measurable sense, a source of fields and a reader of them.

The question that will not die, the one humans have asked in every century and every culture, is whether any of that adds up to the connection we keep insisting we feel. To each other. To something larger. And the people who chased that question hardest were not all mystics. Some were exactly the kind of rigorous minds you would trust.

Start with the wall they hit. In the 1930s, a researcher named J.B. Rhine ran huge, careful card-guessing experiments at Duke University, testing whether people could sense information they had no ordinary way to know. Set the results aside for a second, because the important thing was not the scores. It was what happened when he changed the distance. If this were some physical signal broadcasting from one brain to another, it would have to obey the same law every physical signal obeys. It would fade with distance. A radio gets fainter as you drive away from the tower. But Rhine’s results did not fade. A person tested from hundreds of miles away scored about the same as one across the table. And the effect did not seem to respect time in the normal way either. Whatever he was measuring, if he was measuring anything, did not behave like a field or a wave at all. It behaved like something that does not live inside space and distance the way objects do.

That finding pushed a handful of serious thinkers toward a genuinely radical idea. From here on we are off solid ground. This next part is not proven. It is a beautiful hypothesis held by some smart people, and that is all I am claiming for it.

The physicist David Bohm, a protege of Einstein, proposed that the reality we see, all the separate objects laid out in space, is not the deepest layer of things. He called what we see the explicate order, the unfolded world. Beneath it he placed what he called the implicate order, an enfolded layer where space and time as we know them do not divide things up. His image for it was a hologram. Take a holographic plate and shatter it, and you do not get a piece of the picture in each shard. Every shard still contains the whole image. In the implicate order, Bohm suggested, every part of the universe enfolds the whole, and separation is a surface illusion of the unfolded world. If that were true, then two minds, or a mind and a distant object, would not actually be separated by space at all down at that level. They would already be touching. And connection across distance would not require any signal to travel, because nothing would have to cross the gap. There is no gap. Mainstream physics does not accept this as an explanation for anything paranormal. But it is real theoretical physics from a real and serious physicist, and it is one of the few frameworks in which the connection people report would not be impossible on its face.

And then there is the story I find most moving of all, precisely because it comes from two people who should never have agreed on anything. The psychologist Carl Jung spent his life mapping the deep structures of the human mind, the inherited patterns he called archetypes, the raw and almost frightening charge they carry that he called the numinous. And for decades he worked, of all people, alongside Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics and a Nobel laureate. A physicist of the subatomic world and a mapmaker of the unconscious, in long correspondence, and they kept noticing the same strange structures showing up on both of their maps, the physics of matter and the architecture of mind rhyming with each other in ways neither could shake. They came to suspect, from opposite ends of reality, that mind and matter were not two different substances at all, but two faces of a single underlying thing. Jung gave that one thing a name. The unus mundus. One world.

Is any of that proven? No. It is a hunch, held by brilliant people, and I hold it the way they seem to have held it. Loosely. With real interest. And with a healthy grain of salt. But take the whole stack in at once and tell me you do not feel the pull. The cell listens at its edges. Energy drives it. Connection rewrites it. A field can reach it. Your own body makes fields. Something in us seems to reach across distances that a signal could not cross. And every people who ever lived has insisted, in one language or another, that we are woven into each other and into the whole.

Maybe they were only superstitious. Or maybe they were early. The way Mesmer was early, hands moving over a real thing he did not yet have the words for.

What I actually take from all of it

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Here is what I keep. And the best part is that the part I keep does not depend on the speculative half being true at all.

You are not a fixed thing running out a script you were handed at birth. You are a living process, a standing wave in a river of energy, reading your world at the membrane and answering it, cell by cell, hour by hour. The genes are just the parts store out back, waiting for orders. Which means the state you keep yourself in is not vanity and it is not cosmetic. It is the single most powerful lever you have. The food, the light, the sleep, the movement, the people you choose to stand next to, the story you run on a loop inside your own head... that is the river. The story you run on a loop inside your own head… I am repeating that in bold because it is my work and I believe (perhaps wrongly) it is the secret to personal transformation and the physical healing we seek. That is the world your cells are reading right now, and building you out of. You do not edit your genes directly. You set the conditions your membranes answer to. And that lever is real, and it is in your hand today.

That part is settled science, and honestly it is already enough to change how a person lives.

The rest of it... the fields, the connection, the one world, my deep convinction we are run my our internal stories more than our physical chemistry... I cannot prove for you, and I will not pretend I can. But I would rather stand inside a real question with you than hand you a tidy answer that is not true.

You were told the genes were in charge. They never were. Something else has been driving the whole time. And a surprising amount of it is yours to set.

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PS: Learning to set those conditions on purpose... your energy, your health, your patterns, the version of you that actually gets built... is most of what I do with people. If you want help with your own river, this is where I do that work: www.nextlevelhuman.com/human-coaching or simply message me 520-504-0001.

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References:

Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the implicate order. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Cole, S. W., Hawkley, L. C., Arevalo, J. M., Sung, C. Y., Rose, R. M., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2007). Social regulation of gene expression in human leukocytes. Genome Biology, 8(9), R189.

Fredrickson, B. L., Grewen, K. M., Coffey, K. A., Algoe, S. B., Firestine, A. M., Arevalo, J. M. G., Ma, J., & Cole, S. W. (2013). A functional genomic perspective on human well-being. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(33), 13684–13689.

Jung, C. G. (1976). The symbolic life: Miscellaneous writings (Collected Works Vol. 18; R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G., & Pauli, W. (1955). The interpretation of nature and the psyche (R. F. C. Hull & P. Silz, Trans.). Pantheon Books.

Lipton, B. H. (2008). The biology of belief: Unleashing the power of consciousness, matter, & miracles. Hay House. (Original work published 2005)

McCraty, R. (2004). The energetic heart: Bioelectromagnetic interactions within and between people. In P. J. Rosch & M. S. Markov (Eds.), Clinical applications of bioelectromagnetic medicine (pp. 541–562). Marcel Dekker.

Meier, C. A. (Ed.). (2001). Atom and archetype: The Pauli/Jung letters, 1932–1958 (D. Roscoe, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Meister, M. (2016). Physical limits to magnetogenetics. eLife, 5, e17210.

Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature. Bantam Books.

Rhine, J. B. (1934). Extra-sensory perception. Boston Society for Psychic Research.

Schrödinger, E. (1944). What is life? The physical aspect of the living cell. Cambridge University Press.

Stanley, S. A., Gagner, J. E., Damanpour, S., Yoshida, M., Dordick, J. S., & Friedman, J. M. (2012). Radio-wave heating of iron oxide nanoparticles can regulate plasma glucose in mice. Science, 336(6081), 604–608.

Stanley, S. A., Sauer, J., Kane, R. S., Dordick, J. S., & Friedman, J. M. (2015). Remote regulation of glucose homeostasis in mice using genetically encoded nanoparticles. Nature Medicine, 21(1), 92–98.

Wallace, D. C. (2010). Bioenergetics, the origins of complexity, and the ascent of man. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(Suppl. 2), 8947–8953.

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