Retreat Life & Reflection
It is National Wellness Month, and I decided to join the “happy cell song” challenge, with a little cultural and spiritual twist of my own.
I heard the song online a few months ago. The first time I tried it, I cried deeply, and I really didn’t understand why. I sat in my living room, eyes closed, completely undone by this simple melody and the feeling of my own fingers tapping gently against my skin.
The practice is easy to describe. You sing a short affirmation about every cell in your body being happy and well while tapping or patting your head, chest, shoulders, belly, arms, and legs. I think part of its beauty is that there’s nothing complicated about it. Only a song, a body, and two hands.
My mind was skeptical. My body was not.
As the words repeated, I felt my breathing slow down. The tension I’d been holding slowly melted away. Something inside me seemed to recognize the combination of rhythm, sound, touch, and loving attention.
The experience left me curious about what was happening in my body.
What Singing May Be Doing in the Body
You have probably seen the vagus nerve described on social media as a kind of switch you can flip to make your body feel safe. The vagus is the tenth cranial nerve. It is one of the main lines of communication between your brain and your heart, lungs, gut, and other organs. It helps to regulate your heart rate, your digestion, and part of your stress response.
Singing works on several of those things at once.
When you sing a phrase, you take a breath in and let it out slowly. This is much slower than the short, shallow breaths that you take when you’re anxious. Humming and chanting stretch your exhale out even longer. That slow release helps to calm you down. Your heart rate naturally rises and falls a little as you breathe, so the gentle variation when you sing signals calm. The sound moving through your throat is part of the process, along with the breath, the rhythm, the repeating words, and whatever those words mean to you. Singing sets up the conditions your body reads as calm.
What happened to me was profound. My breath was changing. My attention was narrowing to one simple, soothing thing. My body was getting the same gentle signal again and again. And I was speaking to myself with kindness.
Sometimes safety starts as a handful of small signals.
What Touch and Tapping May Add
Touch itself can settle us. Researchers looking at self-soothing touch, something as simple as resting a hand over your heart or another tender place on your body, have found it can quiet part of the body’s stress response. A steady pat also gives your mind somewhere to land. Rather than disappearing into a painful thought, you feel where your hands are, the rhythm of them meeting your skin, the outline of your own body.
The practice was helping me locate myself.
My hands were saying, “You are here.”
My voice was saying, “You are worthy of care.”
My breath was making enough room for my body to consider believing both.
Science Is Naming Only Part of the Story
None of this feels entirely new to me, though.
Modern wellness culture loves to package these things into challenges, protocols, and newly branded methods. Long before any of that, throughout the diaspora, people were already using voice, rhythm, movement, touch, prayer, and gatherings to restore the spirit, the emotions, and the body.
Drumming, singing, dancing, clapping, swaying, prayers spoken aloud, and laying hands are woven into our rituals, our social identity, our spiritual encounters, and our healing. These practices connect us to each other and connect us back to ourselves. They have survived as a part of our ancestral memory.
These practices represent a deep cultural knowing: that sound enters the body, that rhythm gathers our attention, that movement moves our feelings, that touch says what words cannot, that repetition makes meaning concrete, and that healing tends to happen in relationship.
Our ancestors did not need heart-rate monitors to notice that a room breathed differently after everyone began singing together.
They did not need the language of co-regulation to understand what happened when a grieving person was surrounded by loving voices, hands, and comfort foods.
They did not need to measure the vagus nerve to know that rhythm could help return a person to herself.
Science can help explain part of the process. But it cannot erase the people who preserved the practice.
The Medicine I Was Already Giving My Children
I had been practicing a version of this medicine with my children for years. My children each have a song that belongs only to them. I chose each one when they were small. I sang at bedtime, or when they were overwhelmed and their frustration grew too big for the few words they had.
I would sing while rubbing their backs or their arms. Gradually their breathing would slow. Sometimes it began to match mine. The storm would pass, and I could feel them returning to themselves.
Psychology has a name for part of this: co-regulation. It is when a calm, steady adult loans a child a steadier rhythm until that child can find their own balance again. I didn’t need a title or framework. I was simply doing what I know mothers, grandmothers, aunties, and elders have always done.
I was using my voice to build a space of safety. I was connecting a specific sound to comfort in their minds, giving them something to return to when they need it most.
Yet, it had never occurred to me that I deserved that same care from myself.
When the Body Carries More Than One Lifetime
As someone walking a spiritual path rooted in Yoruba tradition, I experience the body as more than a private possession. It carries relationship, memory, responsibility, and lineage.
I cannot scientifically prove that the tears I shed belonged to anyone but me. Yet, I also cannot deny how often grief feels older than the moment that releases it.
Some suffering is personal. Some is familial. Some is produced by present-day systems. Some has been shaped by histories that taught Black people to brace, endure, perform, protect, and keep moving.
The body does not need to hold a literal recording of ancestral events for history to live through us. History shapes a family’s habits and expectations and silences, its survival strategies, the neighborhoods we land in, the institutions we move through, and the meanings we quietly attach to rest and vulnerability.
Along with the pain, we inherit the medicine.
We inherit songs and rhythm.
We inherit hands that know how to hold, pat, rub, clap, cook, braid, bless, drum, and pray.
We inherit the gift of making sanctuary out of whatever is at hand.
Wellness Cannot End with Self-Regulation
For most of my career, I have worked beside people who pour themselves out for everyone else. Caregivers, organizers, nonprofit leaders, teachers, advocates, community healers. So many of them live under an unspoken expectation that their devotion should somehow make them inexhaustible.
It does not.
A breathing practice will not undo racism. A song will not fix an exploitative institution. Tapping cannot make up for an unsafe workplace, thin resources, or years of being asked to carry far more than any one person should.
Regulation is not liberation.
Still, a moment of regulation can show us something. It can reveal our depletion. It can open give permission to name the exhaustion and grief. It helps us to set a boundary, or to ask for help. It is the beginning of choosing rest before collapse chooses it for us.
That is where this small practice fits inside my larger belief in renewal rooted in joy.
Joy is not a way of pretending. It is a life force. It reminds us that we are more than what has happened to us, more than whatever we have been asked to produce. Joy is part of how we take back the humanity that chronic stress, overwork, and being treated as less than human keep trying to chip away.
People who pour themselves out for the good of others deserve to be restored rather than consumed. Sometimes restoration begins with something so small: a familiar tune, a slower breath, and your own hands reminding your body that it has not been abandoned.
I have sung this song many mornings since that first day. I do not cry every time anymore. But I feel more settled every single time. For a few minutes, my mind and breath and voice and spirit and body are all listening to one another.
Maybe every single cell of me is not literally happy and well. But in that moment, every single cell of me is being spoken to with tenderness. That is its own kind of medicine. And that is enough of a beginning.
If you try the practice, do not rush past whatever rises. Let your body speak. It may have been waiting a long time to find out that you are finally listening.
