Dr. Joe Dispenza

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself:How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

You may already be aware of the paradigm shift that is going on in science. In the old paradigm, your consciousness – you – is regarded as an epiphenomenon of your brain. In the new paradigm, your consciousness is the ground of being and your brain is the epiphenomenon. If consciousness is the primary ground and brain is secondary, the idea to change the patterns of the brain arises and then it is only natural to ask how can the brain be used in an optimal fashion to fulfill the purpose of consciousness and its evolution? How can I change myself? How can I improve myself?

Scientists are making astounding discoveries about the connection between the mind and the body, revolutionizing the way we think about ourselves and our capacity to create our future desired reality. Through comprehensive research over recent years we now know the brain is malleable and has a neuroplasticity that allows us to make new neural connections and pathways at any stage throughout our life.

New world biologists are discovering that our DNA is being influenced by the way we think and that our cells react to this. An emerging field of science called psychoneuroimmunology is suggesting that every thought produces a chemical reaction in the brain and the brain then releases chemical signals that are transmitted to the body.

A renowned leader in this field is Dr. Joe Dispenza, an author, speaker, researcher and chiropractor. He explains the fields of quantum physics, neuroscience, brain chemistry, biology and genetics, and gives practical tools on how we can truly change ourselves.

Over the past decade, Dr. Dispenza has lectured in 24 different countries on six continents educating people about the role and function of the human brain. He has taught thousands of people how to re-program their thinking through scientifically proven neurophysiologic principles. This approach creates a bridge between true human potential and the latest scientific theories of neuroplasticity.

Given the latest discoveries that are taking place in many traditional and emerging fields of science, how can we truly change ourselves and create the reality we want?

You are not doomed by your genes and hardwired to be a certain way for the rest of your life. You can change and improve yourself. What neuroscience has to say about this possibility of change, it delivers in form of the concept called neuroplasticity. It tells us that we’re changed by every thought we think, everything we learn, every experience we have, every dream we embrace, that the brain is formed through our entire lives and allows us to modify our behaviors to do a better job in life.

When we have a thought that thought produces a feeling. That feeling then signals the body for us to feel exactly the way we were just thinking. The moment we feel the way we think we begin to think the way we feel and this is where we get in trouble because the redundancy of that cycle of thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking, it’s the mind and body working together to create the state of being. This is the idealistic state. In practice, things are a bit different. The feeling-thinking cycle is our point of access to this process of creating the new mind. This is also where the difficulty arises when the time comes to break that connection between thinking and feeling and break from the familiar self. The body, which has become the mind because of this cycle, tends to send signals back to the brain and to cause it to turn back to the familiar self.

Every time we learn something new we’re making a new connection in brain.

If we’re talking about evolving the brain, there are two primary ways: learning and experiencing.

There are some practical steps we can follow. We can articulate our desired future reality and at the same time be aware of our current reality and our behaviors and patterns of thought and feelings that make up the person we are.

We can live in the present moment with full acceptance while having total trust in our ability to create the future state and act as though we are already in that state of being. In essence, we can change ourselves at a conscious and subconscious level with the knowledge that profound and long-lasting change is possible.

The Greatest Habit You Can Ever Break is the Habit of Being Yourself

Many of us are still looking for approaches that are grounded in sound scientific evidence—methods that truly work. But already new research into the brain and body, the mind, and consciousness—and a quantum leap in our understanding of physics—is suggesting expanded possibilities on how to move toward what we innately know is our real potential.

Every person should understand that we have all we need to make significant changes in our lives within our reach.

This is a time when not only do we want to “know”, we want to “know how”. How do we apply and personalize both emerging scientific concepts and age-old wisdom to succeed at living a more enriched life?

Times are changing.

As individuals awaken to a greater reality, we are part of a much larger sea change. Our current systems and models of reality are breaking down, and it is time for something new to emerge. Across the board, our models for politics, economics, religion, science, education, medicine, and our relationship with the environment are all showing a different landscape than just ten years ago.

Letting go of the outmoded and embracing the new sounds easy. Much of what we have learned and experienced has been incorporated into our biological self, and we wear it like a garment. But we also know that what is true today might not be true tomorrow. Just as we have come to question our perception of atoms as solid pieces of matter, reality and our interaction with it is a progression of ideas and beliefs.

We also know that to leave the familiar life that we have grown accustomed to and waltz into something new is like a salmon swimming upstream: it takes effort—and, frankly, it’s uncomfortable. And to top it off, ridicule, banishment, opposition, and denigration from those who cling to what they think they know greet us along the way.

Change as a Choice, Instead of a Reaction

It seems that human nature is such that we balk at changing until things get really bad and we’re so uncomfortable that we can no longer go on with business as usual. This is as true for an individual as it is for a society. We wait for crisis, trauma, loss, disease, and tragedy before we get down to looking at who we are, what we are doing, how we are living, what we are feeling, and what we believe or know, in order to embrace true change. Often it takes a worst-case scenario for us to begin making changes that support our health, relationships, career, family, and future.

Why wait?

We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, or we can evolve in a state of joy and inspiration. Most embrace the former. To go with the latter, we just have to make up our minds that change will probably entail a bit of discomfort, some inconvenience, a break from a predictable routine, and a period of not knowing.

Absorbing knowledge (knowing) and then gaining practical experience by applying what you learned until a particular skill became ingrained in you (knowing how) is probably how you acquired most of the abilities that now feel like a part of your being (knowingness). In much the same way, learning how to change your life involves knowledge and the application of that knowledge.

Knowing

It is important that you begin to embrace the concept that your (subjective) mind has an effect on your (objective) world. The observer effect in quantum physics states that where you direct your attention is where you place your energy. As a consequence, you affect the material world (which, by the way, is made mostly of energy). If you entertain that idea even for a moment, you might start focusing on what you want instead of what you don’t want. And you might even find yourself thinking:

If an atom is 99.99999 percent energy and .00001 percent physical substance, then I'm actually more nothing than something! So why do I keep my attention on that small percentage of the physical world when I am so much more? Is defining my present reality by what I perceive with my senses the biggest limitation I have?

Overcoming the Environment. If you allow the outer world to control how you think and feel, your external environment is patterning circuits in your brain to make you think “equal to” everything familiar to you. The result is that you create more of the same; you hardwire your brain to reflect the problems, personal conditions, and circumstances in your life. So to change, you must be greater than all things physical in your life.

Overcoming the Body. We unconsciously live by a set of memorized behaviors, thoughts, and emotional reactions, all running like computer programs behind the scenes of our conscious awareness. That’s why it is not enough to “think positive”, because most of who we are might reside subconsciously as negativity in the body.

Overcoming Time. We either live in the anticipation of future events or repeatedly revisit past memories (or both) until the body begins to believe it is living in a time other than the present moment. The latest research supports the notion that we have a natural ability to change the brain and body by thought alone, so that it looks biologically like some future event has already happened. Because you can make thought more real than anything else, you can change who you are from brain cell to gene, given the right understanding. When you learn how to use your attention and access the present, you’ll enter through the door to the quantum field, where all potentials exist.

Survival vs. Creation. We rarely make conscious distinction between living in survival and living in creation. Living in survival entails living in stress and functioning as a materialist, believing that the outer world is more real than the inner world. When you are under the gun of the fight-or-flight nervous system, being run by its cocktail of intoxicating chemicals, you are programmed to be concerned only about your body, the things or people in your environment, and your obsession with time. Your brain and body are out of balance. You are living a predictable life. However, when you are truly in the elegant state of creation, you are no body, no thing, no time—you forget about yourself. You become pure consciousness, free from the chains of the identity that needs the outer reality to remember who it thinks it is.

Knowing how

Three Brains: Thinking to Doing to Being. The concept that you have three “brains” allows you to move from thinking to doing to being. When you focus your attention to the exclusion of your environment, your body, and time, you can easily move from thinking to being without having to do anything. In that state of mind, your brain does not distinguish between what is happening in the outer world of reality and what is happening in the inner world of your mind. Thus, if you can mentally rehearse a desired experience via thought alone, you will experience the emotions of that event before it has physically manifested. Now you are moving into a new state of being, because your mind and body are working as one. When you begin to feel like some future reality is happening to you in the moment that you are focusing on it, you are rewriting your automatic habits, attitudes, and other unwanted subconscious programs.

The Gap. How to break free from the emotions that you’ve memorized—which have become your personality—and how to close the gap between who you really are in your inner, private world and how you appear in the outer, social world? We all reach a certain point when we stop learning and realize that nothing in our lives can take away those feelings from our past. If you can predict the feeling of every experience in your life, there is no room for anything new to occur, because you are viewing your life from the past instead of the future.

Knowingness

If you take intellectual information that you learn as a philosophy, and then initiate that knowledge into your life by applying it enough times until you master it, you will ultimately move from being a philosopher to an initiator to a master. We should never wait for science to give us permission to do the uncommon; if we do, then we are turning science into another religion. We should be brave enough to contemplate our lives, do what we thought was “outside the box”, and do it repeatedly. When we do that, we are on our way to a greater level of personal power.

Once you can notice what you did inside of you that produced an outcome outside of you, you’ll do it again. When a new experience manifests in your life, you’ll embrace the energy you feel in the form of an elevated emotion such as empowerment, awe, or immense gratitude; and that energy will drive you to do it again and again. Now you’re on the path to true evolution.