The Resilient Mind - Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life - Dr. Joe Dispenza

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

Dr. Joe Dispenza is teaching the world how to empower and heal our mind through meditation and mindfulness. His studies have proven that when well practiced these tools can put us on the path to understanding and breaking deep-rooted bad habits and even heal illnesses. The author of Becoming Supernatural explains how to stop your mind from controlling you on this episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠Source: Impact Theory Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's a scientific fact that the hormones of stress downregulate genes and create disease, long-term effects. Human beings because of the size of the neocortex, we can turn on the stress response just by thought alone. I think about our problems and turn on those chemicals. That means then our thoughts could make us sick. So if it's possible that our thoughts could make us sick, is it possible then our thoughts could make us well? The answer is absolutely yes. Hey everybody, welcome to Impact Theory.

Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right, today's guest is a New York Times best-selling author and one of the most sought-after speakers in the world. He's lectured and given advanced workshops in more than 30 countries across five continents, all with the aim of helping people better understand and unlock the power of their mind. His expertise is the intersection of the fields of neuroscience, epigenesis, and it's epigenetics and quantum physics, and he's partnered with other scientists across multiple disciplines

to perform extensive research on the effects of meditation, using advanced technologies such as epigenetic testing, brain mapping with EEGs, and gas discharge visualization technology. Through his work, he is endeavoring to help advance both the scientific community and the public at large's understanding of mind-derived health optimization, a topic he covered extensively in his groundbreaking book, You Are the Placebore. His teaching has had such a profound impact on the way that people perceive a wide range of brain-related topics around mindfulness and well-being that he's a faculty member at the Quantum University in Hawaii, the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in New York, and the Krupaulu Center for Yoga and Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He's also an invited chair of the Research Committee at Life University in Atlanta as well as a corporate consultant where he delivers his lectures and workshops for businesses.

So please help me in welcoming the man who has appeared in such films as heal, people versus the state of illusion, and unleashing creativity, the author of the recent book, Becoming Supernatural, Dr. Joe Dispenza. Thanks for having. Thanks for being here. So diving into your world and how you perceive the sense of self and the way that you marry science to the way that we form memories, the way that we live in a perpetual state of reliving our past and things like that, It's really, really incredible. And I want to dive into the whole notion of you sort of being a habitual construct.

Like what is that? What is the habit of you? Well, a habit is a redundant set of automatic, unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that's acquired through repetition. The habit is when you've done something so many times that your body now knows how to do it better than your mind. So if you think about it, people wake up in the morning. they begin to think about their problems. Those problems are circuits of memories in the brain.

Each one of those memories are connected to people and things at certain times and places. And if the brain is a record of the past, the moment they start their day, they're already thinking in the past. Each one of those memories has an emotion. Emotions are the end product of past experiences. So the moment they recall those memories of their problems,

they all of a sudden feel unhappy, they feel sad, they feel pain. Now, how you think and how you feel creates your state of being. So the person's entire state of being when they start their days in the past. So what does that mean? The familiar past will sooner or later be predictable future. So if you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny, and you can't think greater than how you feel, or feelings have become the means of thinking,

By very definition of emotions, you're thinking in the past. And for the most part, you're going to keep creating the same life. So then people grab their cell phone. They check their WhatsApp. They check their text. They check their emails. They check Facebook. They take a picture of their feet.

They post it on Facebook. They tweet something. They do Instagram. They check the news. And now they feel really connected to everything that's known in their life. And then they go through a series of routine behaviors. They get out of bed on the same side. They go to the toilet.

They get a cup of coffee. They take a shower, they get dressed, they drive the work the same way, they do the same things, they see the same people That push the same emotional buttons and that becomes the routine and it becomes like a program So now they've lost their free will to a program and there's no unseen hand doing it to them So when it comes time to change the redundancy of that cycle becomes a subconscious program So now 95% of who we are by the time we're 35 years old five years old is a memorized set of behaviors, emotional reactions, unconscious habits, hardwired attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that function like a computer program. So then person can say with

their 5% of their conscious mind, I want to be healthy, I want to be happy, I want to be free. But the body is on a whole different program. So then how do you begin to make those changes? Well, you have to get beyond the analytical mind because what separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind is the analytical mind. And that's where meditation comes in because you can teach people through practice how to change their brain waves, slow them down. And when they do that properly, they do enter the operating system where they can begin to make some really important changes. So most people then wait for crisis or trauma or disease or diagnosis. You know, they wait for loss, some tragedy to make up their mind to change. And my message is why wait.

And you can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering or you can learn in change in a state of joy and inspiration. I think right now the cool thing is that people are waking up. That's really interesting. And where I found the deepest hooks into how powerful this can be for somebody is when you talk about trauma and you've talked about how people experience a traumatic event, but they then basically rehearse it and how that then has this knock on effect. So what is that, why do people find it so hard to get past trauma? Well, the stronger, the emotional reaction you have to some experience in your life, the higher the emotional quotient,

the more you pay attention to the cause. The moment the brain puts all of its attention on the cause, it takes a snapshot, and that's called the memory. So long-term memories are created from very highly emotional experiences. So what happens then is that people think neurologically within the circuitry of that experience, and they feel chemically within the boundaries

of those emotions. And so when you have an emotional reaction to someone or something, most people think that they can't control their emotional reaction. Well, it turns out if you allow that emotional reaction, it's called a refractory period to last for hours or days, that's called a mood. Say to someone, hey, what's up? You say, I'm in a mood. Well, why are you in a mood?

Well, I had this thing happen to me five days ago, and I'm having one long emotional reaction. If you keep that same emotional reaction going on for weeks or months, that's called temperament. Why is he so bitter? I don't know. Let's ask him. Why is he so bitter? Why are you bitter? Well, I had this thing happen to me nine months ago.

And if you keep that same emotional reaction going on for years on end, that's called a personality trait. And so learning how to shorten your refractory period of emotional reactions is really where the work starts. So then people, when they have an event, what they do is they keep recalling the event because the emotions of stress hormones, the survival emotions are saying, pay attention to what happened because you want to be prepared if it happens again. Turns out most people spend 70% of their life living in survival and living in stress. So they're always anticipating the worst case scenario based on a past experience. And they're literally, out of the infinite potentials in the quantum field,

they're selecting the worst possible outcome, and they're beginning to emotionally embrace it with fear. And they're conditioning their body into a state of fear. Do that enough times? The body has a panic attack without you. You can't even predict it because it's programmed subconsciously. So then you say to the person, why are you this way? And they'll say, I am this way because of this event that happened to me 15 or 20 years ago.

And what that means from biological standpoint is that they haven't been able to change since that event. So then the emotions from the experience tend to give the body and the brain a rush of energy. So people become addicted to the rush of those emotions, and they use the problems and conditions in their life to reaffirm their limitation so at least they can feel something. So now when it comes time to change, you say the person, why are you this way? Well, every time they recall the event, they're producing the same chemistry in their brain and body as if the event is occurring. Firing and wiring the same circuits and sending the same emotional signature to the body. Well, what's the relevance behind that? Well, your body is the unconscious mind.

It doesn't know the difference between the experience that's creating the emotion and the emotion that you're creating by thought alone. So the body's believing is living in the same past experience 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365. five days a year. And so then when those emotions influence certain thoughts, and they do, and then those thoughts create the same emotions, and those same emotions influence the same thoughts, now the entire person's state of being is in the past. So then the hardest part about change is not making the same choice as you did the day before, period. And the moment you decide to make a different choice, get ready because it's going to feel uncomfortable. It's going to feel unfamiliar. It's There's going to be some uncertainty.

Why does it feel so uncomfortable? Is it because of the neurons of fire together, wire together? So there's like an easiness to that loop, just because literally, and you've talked very eloquently about this, the way that the neurons connect in the brain, how rapidly, I've seen you show footage of how rapidly those connections happen, which is pretty incredible. Is that what makes it so discomforting for people? I think that the bigger thing is that we keep firing and wiring those circuits, they become more hardwired.

So you have a thought and then the program runs. But it's the emotion that follows the thought. If you have a fearful thought, you're going to feel anxiety. The moment you feel anxiety, your brain's checking in with your body and saying, yeah, you're pretty anxious. So then you start thinking more corresponding thoughts equal to how you feel. the redundancy of that cycle conditions the body to become the mind. So now, when it comes time to change, a person steps into that river of change and they make a

different choice, and all of a sudden, they don't feel the same way. So the body says, well, you've been doing this for 35 years. You're going to just stop suffering and stop feeling guilty and stop feeling shameful, and you're not going to complain or blame or make excuses or feel sorry for yourself. Well, the body's in the unknown. So the body says, I want to return back to familiar territory. So the body starts influencing the mind, and it says, start tomorrow. You're too much like your mother.

You'll never change. This isn't going to work for you. This doesn't feel right. And so if you respond to that thought as if it's true, that same thought will lead to the same choice, which will lead to the same behavior, which will create the same experience, which will produce the same emotion. I want to talk about that notion of, give me a little more detail of what you mean by the body becomes the mind or the unconscious mind.

What do you mean by that exactly? Well, those are two different things. Your body is your unconscious mind. In a sense, if you're sitting down and you start thinking about some future, worst-case scenario that you're conjuring up in your mind and you begin to feel the emotion of that event, your body doesn't know the difference between the event that's taking place in your world, outer world, and what you're creating by emotion or thought alone. So most people then, they're constantly reaffirming their emotional states.

So when it comes time to give up that emotion, they can say, I really want to do it, but really the body is stronger than the mind because it's been conditioned that way. So the servant now has become the master, and the person all of a sudden, you know, one Once they step into that unknown, they'd rather feel guilt in suffering because at least they can predict it. Being in the unknown is a scary place for most people because the unknown is uncertain. People say to me, well, I can't predict my future. I'm in the unknown and I always say the best way to predict your future is to create it.

Not from the known, but from the unknown. What thoughts do you want to fire and wire in your brain? What behaviors do you want to demonstrate in one day? The act of rehearsing them mentally, closing your eyes and rehearsing the action. The rehearsing the reaction of what you want? Yeah, the action of what you want. By closing your eyes and mentally rehearsing some action. If you're truly present, the brain does not know the difference between what you're imaging

and what you're experiencing in 3D world. So then you begin to install the neurological hardware in your brain to look like the event has already occurred. Now your brain is no longer a record of the past. Now it's a map to the future. And if you keep doing it, priming it that way, the hardware becomes a software program. And who knows? You just may start acting like a happy person.

And then I think the hardest part is to teach our body emotionally what the future will feel like ahead of the actual experience. So what does that mean? You can't wait for your success to feel empowered. You can't wait for your wealth to feel abundant. You can't wait for your new relationship to feel love or your healing to feel whole. That's the old model of reality of cause and effect, you know, waiting for something outside of us to change how we feel inside of us. And when we feel better inside of us, we pay attention to whoever or whatever caused it. But what that means then is that from the Newtonian world is that most people spend their whole life living and lack, waiting for something to change out there.

What do you mean the Newtonian world? Newtonian world is all about the predictable. It's all about predicting a future. But the quantum model of reality is about causing an effect. The moment you start feeling abundant and worthy, you are generating wealth. The moment you're empowered and feel it, you're beginning to step towards your success. The moment you start feeling whole, your healing begins. And when you love yourself and you love all of life, you'll create an equal.

And now you're causing an effect. And I think that's the difference between living as a victim in your world saying, I am this way because of this person or that thing or this experience. They made me think and feel this way. When you switch that around, you become a creator of your world, and you start saying, my thinking and my feeling is changing an outcome in my life. And now, that's a whole different game, and we start believing more that we're creators of reality. So how do we go from, okay, I have this negative emotion.

It's controlling my life. It's got me in this cycle of, I think about this emotion, which triggers the chemical reaction, which trains my body to feel that way, which makes it easier, more likely I will do it again. And so now I'm in this vicious cycle. And unconscious, and it's unconscious. Right. And you said, does your thinking create your environment or does your environment create your thinking, which I thought was really, really interesting?

So how do we then go from that mechanistically to begin this visualization process of something that's empowering? It's me in a different state. It's my future self. Is it meditation? What does that look like? If you're not being defined by a visualized. vision of the future, then you're left with the old memories of the past and you will be predictable in your life. And if you wake up in the morning and you're not being defined by a vision in the

future, as you see the same people and you go to the same places and you do the exact same thing at the exact same time, it's no longer that your personality is creating your personal reality. Now your personal reality is affecting or creating your personality. Your environment is really controlling how you think and feel unconsciously. Because every person, everything, every place, every experience has a neurological network in your brain. Every experience that you have with every person produces an emotion. So some people will use their boss to reaffirm their addiction to judgment. They'll use their enemy to reaffirm their addiction to hatred.

They'll use their friends to reaffirm their addiction to suffering. So now they need the outer world to feel something. So to change then is to be greater than your environment, to be greater than the conditions in your world and the environment is that seductive. So then, why is meditation the tool? Well, let's sit down, let's close our eyes. Let's disconnect from your outer environment. So if you're seeing less things, it's less stimulation going to your brain.

If you're playing soft music or you have ear plugs in, less sensory information coming to your brain. So you're disconnecting from your environment. If you can sit your body down and tell it to stay like an animal, Stay right here. I'm going to feed you and we're done. You can get up and check your emails. You can do all your texts, but right now, you're going to sit there and obey me. So then when you do that properly, you're not eating anything or smelling anything or tasting anything, you're not up experiencing and feeling anything, you would have to agree with me that you're being defined by a thought, right? So when the body wants to go back to its emotional past, and you become aware that your attention is on that emotion. where you place your attention is where you place your energy.

You're siphoning your energy out of the present moment into the past, and you become aware of that. And you settle your body back down in the present moment, because it's saying, well, it's 8 o'clock. You normally get upset because you're in traffic around this time. And here you are sitting, and we're used to feeling anger, and you're off schedule. Oh, it's 11 o'clock and usually check your emails and judge everybody. Well, the body's looking for that predictable chemical state.

Every time you become aware that you're doing that and your body is craving those emotions and you settle it back down into the present moment, you're telling the body it's no longer the mind, that you're the mind. And now your will is getting greater than the program. And if you keep doing this over and over again, over and over again, over and over again, just like training a stallion or a dog, it's just going to say, I'm going to sit. And the moment that happens, when the body's no longer the mind, when it finally surrenders, there's a liberation of energy. We go from particle to wave, from matter to energy, and we free ourselves from the chains of those emotions that keep us in the familiar past. And we've seen this thousands of times. In fact, we can actually predict it now on a brain scan. I found that so interesting.

Let's go a little bit harder on metacognition, the notion that you don't have to believe, everything you think. I love the way that you talk about that. Yeah, we have a huge frontal lobe, and it's 40% of our entire brain. And most people, when they have a thought, they just think that that's the truth. And I think one of my greatest realizations in my own journey was just because you have a thought doesn't necessarily mean it's true. So if you think 60 to 70,000 thoughts in one day, and we do, and 90% of those thoughts are the same thoughts as the day before, and you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny, your life's not going to change very much because the same thought leads to the same choice, the same choice leads to the same behavior,

the same behavior creates the same experience, and the same experience produces the same emotion. And so then the act of becoming conscious of this process to begin to become more aware of how you think, how you act, and how you feel. It's called metacognition. And so then why is that important? Because the more conscious you become of those unconscious states of mind and body, the less likely you're going to go unconscious during the day. And that thought is not going to slip by your awareness unchecked because it means to know thyself.

The word meditation means to become familiar with. So as you become familiar with the thoughts, the behaviors, and the emotions of the old self, you're retiring that old self. As you fire and wire new thoughts and condition the body into a new emotional state, If you do that enough times, it'll begin to become familiar to you. So it's so important, just like a garden.

If you're planting a garden, you've got to get rid of the weeds. You've got to take the plants from the past year and you've got to pull them out. The rocks that sift to the top that are like our emotional blocks, they have to be removed. The soil has to be tenderized and broken down. We have to make room to plant a new garden. So primarily we learn the most about ourselves and others. when we're uncomfortable. Because the moment you move into that uncomfortable state,

normally a program jumps in. When that program jumps in, is because the person doesn't want to be in the present moment and engage it consciously. So when you teach people how to do that with a meditative process, it turns out that when they're in their life, they're less likely to emotionally react.

They're less likely to be so rigid and believe the thoughts that they were thinking. They're more aware of when they go unconscious back into a habit, And that is what starts the process of change. And so we have to unlearn before we relearn. We have to break the habit of the old self before we reinvent the new self. We have to prune synaptic connections and sprout new connections.

We have to unfire and unwire and re-fire and re-wire. We have to unmemorize emotions that are stored in the body, then recondition the body to a new mind into a new motion, like deprogram and reprogram. That's the act, and it's a two-step process. Yeah, I like the way that you call that out as an action. There was another thing that you said that I thought was really, really powerful about how insights themselves are essentially inert. They don't do anything.

What then do we do with an insight? How do we take a breakthrough moment and make sure that it's not just a breakthrough moment? Like, I guarantee people watching right now are having like 100 aha moments. For sure, that was definitely the case for me as I was researching you. And when you said that, I was like, and that's the danger, that you have the aha and then nothing. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a, it is a danger because then people will will shrink back into to mediocrisy and they'll use the insight to excuse them from taking a leap. They'll say, yeah, you know, I have a chemical imbalance in my brain. Yeah, my father was really overbearing.

He was a perfectionist. That's why I am the way I am. You know, people, they come up with stuff to excuse themselves. The insight is actually giving them permission to stay limited. And it's an amazing idea because they'll say to you that they really want to get over their anxiety. But let's, okay, let's take your ex-husband, let's put them in a straight jacket, let's duct tape them and shoot them to the moon. Now what? I mean, what are you going to do now? You still have to make those changes. And so when the person's enemy dies or something

shifts in their life and that person's gone, they'll find another person to hate. This is just how we function as human beings. We just slide another reason to feel those emotions. So I think I think when people start to understand this, I think knowledge is power, but knowledge about yourself is self-enpowerment. So how much of this is really learning to just bifurcate the world into, there's negative emotions that have negative neurochemistry associated with, and you said that in those states, if you're living in a perpetual state of stress hormones and things like that, illness is like a step away.

And then just the other side of that is understanding, but there's this whole other side of positive energy, which happiness, joy, empowerment, whatever that, you know, neurochemical cocktail is, but that when you're on that side, your immune system is more likely to function well. Like, is that just sort of bringing it down to like a really base level? Is that sort of one of the big things? Well, let's talk about it in terms of survival or creation. As I said, 70% of the time people live in stress. And living in stress is living in survival. Now, all organisms in nature can tolerate short-term stress. You know, a deer gets chased by a pack of coyotes.

When it outruns the coyotes, it goes back to grazing, and the event is over. And the definition of stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of balance, out of homeostasis. The stress response is what the body innately does to return itself back to order. So you're driving down the road, someone cuts you off, you jam on the brakes, you may give them the finger, and then you settle back. down and the event is over and boom. Now everything's back to normal. But what if it's not a predator that's waiting for you outside the cave, but what if it's your coworker

sitting right next to you and all day long you're turning on those chemicals because they're pushing all your emotional buttons. When you turn on the stress response and you can't turn it off, now you're headed for disease because no organism in nature can live in emergency mode for that extended period of time. It's a scientific fact that the hormones of stress downregulate genes and create disease, long-term effects.

Human beings, because of the size of the neocortex, we can turn on the stress response just by thought alone. We can think about our problems and turn on those chemicals. That means, then, our thoughts could make us sick. So if it's possible that our thoughts could make us sick,

is it possible then our thoughts could make us well? The answer is absolutely yes. So then what are the emotions that are connected to survival? Let's name them. Anger, aggression, hostility, hatred, competition, fear, anxiety, worry, pain, suffering, guilt, shame, unworthiness, envy, jealousy, those are all created by the hormones of stress. And psychology calls them normal human states of consciousness. I call those altered states of consciousness.

So then we tend to remember those traumatic events more because in survival, you better be ready if it happens again. And when survival gene is switched on, you could have 10 really great things that happened to you in your day. And you just have one bad thing that happens and you cannot take your attention off that bad, that unhappy thing because the survival gene is switched on. It's really interesting. How does epigenetics come into play in all this?

Like what's actually happening? We've talked pretty profoundly about proteins and really at a deep level how we're signaling to our genetics to create these kinds of changes. What does that actually look like? Well, epigenetics, epi means above the gene. And many years ago after the DNA Helix was discovered by Watson and Crick, they said the blue points of life, all diseases are created from genes. out less than 5%, more like 1% of people on the planet are born with a genetic condition

like type 1 diabetes or TASX disease or sickle cell anemia. The other 95% to 99% are created by lifestyle and by choices. You can take two identical twins, exact same genome. One dies at 51, the other one dies at 85. Same gene, different environment. So all of a sudden they said, we lied. That was wrong. It's not genes that create. disease. It's the environment that signals the gene that creates disease. Well, okay, but that's not the whole truth too, because you could have two people working side by side in the same factory. One gets cancer after being exposed to a carcinogenic for 25 years, both working for 25 years, the other one has no cancer at all. So there must be some internal order that would cause one person

to not get it while another one does. So is it possible then? If the environment, signals the gene, and it does, and the end product of an experience in the environment is called an emotion, can you signal the gene ahead of the environment by embracing an elevated emotion? We've done the research on this. We measured 7,500 different gene expressions in a group of people that came to an advanced event for four days. And we had them doing a seated meditation, a walking meditation, a laying down meditation, a standing

meditation and at the end of four days, just four days, the common eight genes that were upregulated, two genes to suppress cancer cells and tumor growth, two genes for neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons in response to novel experiences and learning, the gene that signals stem cells to go to damaged areas and repair them, the gene for oxidative stress was upregulated. We started seeing all these genes that are very, very healthy to cause the body to flourish. Imagine if people were doing that for three months. We also measured telomeres, the little shoe strings on the end of DNA that tell us our biological age. We asked people to do the work, meditation, five out of seven days for 60 days, measured their telomeres that determine their

biological age. 60 days later, 74% of the people lengthen their telomeres. 40% significant change. 20% of very remarkable change. that they got a little bit of their life back. If it lengthened by 10% they got 10% of their life back. That's incredible. Before I ask my last question, tell these guys where they can find you online. Sure, my website is just Dr.Jodespenza.com. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, we're all over.

And then my final question, what's the impact that you want to have on the world? I think that the end game for me is to empower people. people to such a degree that they realize that they need less things outside of them to make them happy, less things outside of them to regulate their moods and their behaviors, and that they begin to use the kind of the power that we all have access to and to really, and to change the world, to make a difference so that there's more peace, there's more wholeness, there's more connection, that we support and love each other, we serve better. And I think that we have to start for the most part. if everybody's working on themselves and trying, doing their best to present the greatest ideal of themselves to the world, I think the world will be a better place. And so that's my passion,

and I'm witnessing it happening now more than I ever thought I would. That's incredible. Joe, thank you so much for being here. It was amazing having you. Guys, go watch this man's videos. They are some of the best explanations of what's going on inside the mind that I've ever come across. There were several that I literally have people in my life

that I'm going to force to sit down and watch these things. It's just incredible explanations of how you create yourself out of the things you do habitually. The way that you think creates a feeling, the way that you feel creates thinking that matches that, and then you get in this cycle. And that coming down to that personality, ultimately being a finite set of patterns in your brain,

I think is really, really illuminating in terms of how we actually, actually experience the world. And I think when people understand that, that it's within your control, that you don't have to believe every thought that you think that you can step outside of that, that you can leverage metacognition to think about your thinking and deconstruct it and decide what you want to think about and start focusing on that and create an entirely different version of yourself that has new elevated feelings that's over on the side of the positivity, empowering yourself.

I think it's really incredible and he gets deep into the mechanistic stuff, which I love, you guys, regret diving deep into this man's world. I think you will get some incredible revelations. All right. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Thank you so much for being here. That's incredible. Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.