April 3 - How old are you?

According to my birth certificate I'm 54 years, 2 months and 7 days old (but who's counting?) But from a different perspective I'm a lot younger than that.

No part of my physical body is more than 10 years old.

My body is made up of cells that renew themselves on a regular basis. The type of cell it is and where it's located determines the rate of renewal. Cells in the stomach lining, for example, are replaced every 5 days and the entire skeleton is renewed about every 10 years.

Even though my birth certificate says I'm 54 years old the only part of the physical me that is actually that age is my mind. This leads to the question "Where in my no-more-than-10-year-old body does my mind reside?

The only logical answer to this is that my mind resides in every cell of my body, moving into the new cells as they grow and creating the body-mind being that is me. This makes sense as every cell of my body contains a complete DNA map of my whole body.

Another question you might ask is "Given that my cells renew themselves, why don't scars and injuries disappear over time?" I imagine that this is where cellular memory comes into play and the memory of an injury gets passed down through the generations of cells. I expect they mirror the condition of the cell they replace, but can this be changed?

I assume also that the mind controls the aging of the body and the rate at which this happens as there can't be some sort of Universal Aging Rate for everyone. As evidence of this assumption I present the following story -

When I was in Year 12 at High School there was a teacher that most of the girls lusted over. He was tall, dark, gorgeous, a great teacher and about 35 years old. Less than 5 years after we'd left school a friend and I ran into him and were totally stunned because he was grey-haired, wrinkled and looked more than 20 years older.

The reason for his transformation was that his wife had become gravely ill and he'd nursed her for 3 years until she died. She was the love of his life and her illness and death had devastated him. With such powerful negative emotions consuming him his mind accelerated the aging process in his body and turned him into an old man overnight.

If thoughts and feelings are the language of the mind and this dialogue translates into the form of the body then it must be possible to influence the wellness of the body by ensuring that the majority of our thoughts are positive and happy ones.

I'm so convinced about the truth of this assumption that from this moment on I'm going to direct my thoughts away from negativity and sadness towards a happy feeling place.

What do you think and how will you respond to this idea?