The Resilient Mind - Don't Believe Everything You Think - Dr. Joe Dispenza

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

Dr. Joe Dispenza is a renowned author, speaker, and educator in the fields of neuroscience, epigenetics, and quantum physics. He has spent over three decades studying the mind-body connection and the ways in which we can harness our thoughts and emotions to create positive change in our lives.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_Journal Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Don't Believe Everything You Think with Dr. Joe Dispenza. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Well, we think primarily 90% of the time we think the same thoughts as we thought the day before. The challenge with that is the thought that you keep thinking over and over again becomes a belief. And nerve cells that fire together, wire together. So, the more nerve cells fire, the more they develop long-term relationships, and the more hardwired they become, the more hardwired they become, the more automatic they are, the more automatic they are, the more unconscious they become. So the process of change really requires becoming conscious of your unconscious thoughts, which means just because you have that thought doesn't necessarily mean it's the truth. If you have that thought and you accept it, you believe it, you surrender to it without analyzing it, that thought will lead to the same choice. which will lead to the same behavior, which will create the same experience, which then will produce the same emotion. The same emotions then drive our very same thoughts. In time, our biology, our neurosurcurecure, our chemistry, our hormones, and even our gene expression stays the same because we're the same.

So in the process of change, when you come up against that unconscious belief and you make it conscious, most people get uncomfortable when they confront that thought. And they're stopping an automatic process. and the body, which has been conditioned to be the mind because it's doing something over and over again, that's a habit, is craving the experience because it wants the emotion associated with it, right? So the thought of being unworthy produces the feeling of being unworthy. That feeling then when the person feels unworthy tends to cause the person to think more unworthy thoughts. It only takes a thought and a feeling, an image of yourself and an emotion, a stimulus, and response, and you can condition the body to memorize that behavior in that emotional state

better than the conscious mind. So the moment we inhibit that thought or the moment we become conscious of and we no longer accept it, there's a biological craving that takes place in the body because the body has been conditioned to be the mind. So the body starts influencing the mind to think more corresponding thoughts, people, to that feeling. So here comes the assault. and you're not only unworthy, you're everything else that goes along with that feeling.

And this is where people have to make up their mind if they truly want to change. Because if you decide to confront that thought and make a different choice, get ready because you're going to feel uncomfortable. It's going to feel unfamiliar. And there's going to be some uncertainty because you're stepping out of familiar territory. You're stepping out of the known and you're stepping into the unknown. Now, this is really when you leave the bleachers and you get on the playing field because the brain immediately looks around in its environment to see if anything's changing because you're changing. And you see that nothing in your world is changing because you actually haven't fully changed yet.

So the moment we look for evidence in our life and we don't see it, sooner or later, most people accept that thought, which leads to the same choice, which creates the same behavior, which creates the same experience that produces the same feeling. they say, oh, this feels right to me. You know, that feels familiar because you've just returned back to the known self. I think that when people truly want to make up their mind to change, and they become so conscious of those unconscious thoughts, they would never go unconscious to them again. That's the moment the body is being reconditioned to a new mind. If you inhibit that choice, that leads to that habit or that behavior,

The habit is when you've done something so many times, the body knows how to do it better than the brain. Now, you're stopping the body from being on its automation, on autopilot. And if the body's craving the feeling of unworthiness, and you're stopping the body from feeling that way, and you're aware in your life how you speak, you're aware in your life how you're feeling, and you're checking in, you're saying, do I really want to feel this way? this is that river of change where you're going from the old self to the new self so it makes sense then if those principles and biology work in that way they could actually work in our favor so if you said okay i'm going to sit down for a few minutes i'm going to become so conscious of my

unconscious self my unconscious personality that victory today would not be going unconscious to those thoughts behaviors and emotions okay let me get so familiar with them that i don't go unconscious okay i got that down. I love that. What thoughts do I want to fire and wire in my brain? And if a belief is a thought that you keep thinking over and over again, with intention and with attention, you'll switch on that prefrontal cortex and assign meaning to the act and start installing new circuits in your brain. If you keep doing it over and over again, it becomes more hardwired. It becomes more automatic. And now you're installing a new belief that you are worthy of love, you are worthy of abundance, you are worthy to heal, whatever that is.

That's the thought you do want to believe in. And when it matters the most is when it's the hardest. Because if you don't have the circuitry in place, you'll default back to the old programs, right? So then if you said, how am I going to be in my Zoom calls today? How am I going to be in traffic today? How am I going to be with my ex, my coworkers? And you started thinking about and rehearsing how you're going to be. you are going to act in certain situations. The brain actually doesn't know the difference between

the real life experience and what you're imagining. The research on mental rehearsal shows that the brain will look like in time that it's already had the experience and it's vacant of the experience. Now, keep firing and wiring those circuits and you're going to begin to behave that way. So now you're installing circuitry now to use in your life to get your behaviors to match your intentions. If you said, how would it feel to feel worthy of love? How would you? How would would it feel to be grateful for life? How would it feel to be worthy of abundance? And you said, I'm going to teach my body emotionally what this feels like before the manifestation of the event. You're not waiting for your life to change, to feel worthy. You're actually changing your life

by becoming worthy. You're generating abundance. You're generating love. You're creating an elevated emotion. Now, our data is so compelling because when you truly begin, you're generating abundance, you're generating love, you're creating an elevated emotion. Now, our data is so compelling because when you truly begin to elevate your emotional state and you could really lock in, you know, to those elevated emotions, your body is so objective that it actually believes that it's living in a whole new environment before the environment changes. In other words, the body's believing it's in that new future. And if the environment signals the gene, and it does, and the end product of an experience in the environment is an emotion. You're actually signaling genes ahead of the environment, and your body will begin to become conditioned

to a new mind. Now, think about this. If you did that every day, the word meditation literally means become familiar with your old self. You become familiar with your new self, and you say, I'm not getting up until I feel this feeling. And then you'd say, I want to be able to bring this feeling up whenever I want. I'm going to keep remembering this feeling over and over again. It only takes a thought and a feeling, an image of the future and emotion, is thinly in response that you can condition your body to believe it's living in a whole new life. And when you feel the emotions of your future, something amazing happens. You're no longer in lack or separation, so you're no longer looking for the event to take away that feeling of lack or separation.

Your body's actually believing it's in the event. And so then you're not looking for it. You feel like it's already happened, get ready because that's when your life begins to change. And so we've discovered that if you're actually practicing this and you immersed yourself in that experience fully for seven days, the amount of metabolic and biological changes that will take place in your body will be so significant that your body will actually believe it's living in that future. And yet, most of the people that come to our workshops are literally in a ballroom. There's nothing really exciting happening in the environment, but their bodies believing they're living in a whole new life. And so one thought leads to a choice, which leads to behavior, which creates an experience that produces an emotion.

So then new information, new knowledge, begins to cause you to think differently. If you can remember that knowledge and begin to make a different choice because you want to experience the truth of that information, you'll have to behave differently. and when the experience occurs and you feel the feeling of your abundance or wealth, I guarantee you you're going to continue wanting to make the process of change something consistent in your life. It's an experiment, right? It's an experiment. Life is an experiment. So if your personality creates your personal reality and your personality is made up of how you think, how you act, and how you feel, if you keep thinking the same way, you keep acting the same way, you keep feeling the same way, your life is going to stay the same because you're the same.

So the experiment is, okay, let me begin to think differently. So I got to remind myself how I do want to think and I have to remind myself of how I no longer want to think so I don't default and go unconscious. Let me remind myself how I'm going to behave so that I could actually get my behaviors to match my intentions and let me remind myself of how I'm going to feel. If I'm able to succeed in that day, then there should be some change in my life. It's the experiment. And if it doesn't change, that doesn't mean the law,

doesn't work for you. It's just, you're not that good yet. It's just, you just got to keep practicing, right? So the act of disconnecting from your life long enough to remind yourself of who you do want to be and who you no longer want to be, that experiment then is the experiment called life. Now, it's not that you react. The question is, how long are you going to react? That's the real question. Because, I mean, I react all the time. Everybody does. But if you're going to stay there and you're to live in that emotional state, you will see life through that lens of that emotion, right? So now, it gets complicated because the stronger the emotion you feel towards certain people or problems in your life, the more you pay attention to that. And where you place your attention

is where you place your energy. So from a purely biological as well as quantum state, we could say then you're using that person or that circumstance to reaffirm your dependence on feeling that emotion. So you have to hate your enemy. And if your enemy dies, you'll find another person to hate because that is the response, right? So the body is the animal. It's been conditioned a certain way. And if it's been doing something and feeling something for an extended period of time, there's a modification of its receptor sites. It's needing those emotional states. So in the process of change, just be ready because you're going to feel uncomfortable. a lot of the time. Now, the question is, do you want to stay there? So then most people think

they don't have any control over their emotional state. They think, I'm just this way and I feel this way. Well, we actually can show people that that's not the truth, that when it's the hardest, it matters the most. And if you're able to really work and train your body like you're training an animal to stop feeling one way and start feeling another way, if you believe that, you're believe that you're an eternal being. Let's just say that, I mean, just most religions talk about we're eternal, most sects of thought, only a few that don't, whether you're going to heaven or hell or nirvana or on the wheel, you're pretty much going to be around for a long time. That moment matters so much in the light of eternity because that's the moment you make up

your mind to no longer be defined by your past. Why are you being defined by your past? because emotions are a record of the past. And so then if you're feeling that emotion, your body is believing it's back in that same experience of the past. So the more knowledge that we have and understanding that justified, valid or not, those emotions are hurting no other person but you because the long-term effects of living by those emotional states,

those survival states, are actually down-regulating genes and creating diseases. Sooner or later, you're going to have to ask yourself, is this loving to myself? And forgiveness is just when you overcome the emotion, you take your attention off that person or that problem. And you're freeing yourself and you're freeing them. So people do the best with what they think is available.

That's my belief. And if you're unaware that you can control your emotional states, you'll rely on something outside of you to do that, whether it's a computer game, whether it's a Netflix show, whether it's a drug, whatever, whatever it is. that you need to make that feeling go away. You're dependent on your outer world. And I think that's a hypnosis. That's a conditioning.

Teach people that you can actually regulate and change your emotional states. You give them the tools to literally step into a new future. So that process, of course, is extremely uncomfortable. And the question is, how long are you going to stay in that emotional state? And 50% of the story that most people tell

about that past experience isn't even the truth. Because they're making things up, and they're doing that so that they can justify why they haven't changed since some past event. Most people reach a point in their life where they reach crisis or disease or diagnosis or loss or betrayal, where they finally go, gosh, it's time to change. I think change is an ongoing process, and the more we change, the more we should see evidence in our life. That makes it exciting.

Feelings and emotions are the end product of past experiences, and we can remember experiences is better because we can remember how they feel. The stronger the emotion we have to some experience in our life, the more altered we are inside of us, the more the brain freezes a frame and takes a snapshot. And that's called a long-term memory. That image is being bossed neurologically in the brain. So then what most people don't know is that every time they remember that event, that trauma, that betrayal, that loss, whatever it is, they're producing the same chemistry in their brain

in body as if the event is occurring. So what happens over time is that conditioning process conditions the body to literally live in the past. So if a person is living by the same familiar feeling every single day, whether it's guilt or unworthiness or pain or suffering or victimization or depression or whatever it is, it's so important for them to come right up against that emotional state because they're coming up against the known. The question fundamentally becomes for that person, is it possible then to feel a different feeling? Now, if you cannot feel a different feeling, other than the feeling that you're used to feeling, it should tell you volumes about that feeling because it's going to influence your very same thoughts. So the research

that we've done over and over again is that the only way you're actually going to reprogram your brain to work in your favor is you've got to learn how to regulate your brainwave. And you know this, of course. Beta brainwave patterns are thinking brainwave patterns. It's the analytical mind. It's our critical facilities. We're in beta right now. We're aware of our bodies.

We're aware of the environment. We're aware of time. The neocortex is switched on. It's what plugs us into three-dimensional reality. It's the seat of the autobiographical self. There's a lot of circuits in there from things you've learned intellectually and things you've experienced in your life. So for the most part, it's a repository of the past, right?

And so 90% of those thoughts that we think, being the same thoughts as the day before, tend to become like automatic programs. And they become more subconscious or more unconscious. So in order for us to begin to change those programs, we've got to get into the operating system. And the only way we do that is we've got to slow our brain waves down in that thinking neocortex. The challenge for most people is they have so many demands in their life. they have so many emotional responses to circumstances in their life that they're living in a state of stress and living in a state of survival and a state of stress and survival you don't close your eyes

you got to keep your eye on the ball you got to keep your attention on the outer environment so their brains tend to work in a higher brainwave pattern a mid-range or high-level beta brainwave pattern and that's like driving your sports car on first gear it's a lot of energy for the brain so so learning how to regulate and slow your brain waves down is something that we've been very, very interested in. When you teach people how to do that, it could become a skill. And when the brain starts to relax and it moves into less of that chatter that takes place in your brain and more of kind of an imaginary state, the brain sees in pictures and images, it's more creative. We're moving into that alpha state. So now the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind opens up as we get

beyond our analytical mind. And our analytical mind is actually what separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind. So as you slow your brain waves down and you get into alpha, you're entering the operating system. And that's where you can,

we write a new program, that's where you can rehearse a new script, that's where you can begin to plan your behaviors in an intentional way. If you can't change your brain waves, then it's like your computer running amok with all of those programs

and you yelling at it, telling it to stop. You're not in the operating system. Some people can get to the point where they're so relaxed that the body's in a light sleep and yet they're conscious and awake and now they're in this theta brainwave pattern. And in theta, that's a hypnotic state. We're very suggestible to our thoughts. We're very suggestible to information in that state. And that state then is where we see the most change take place. And so the person can literally change from the inside out. when they learn how to get into the operating system. So let's get real clear because I think it's important for people to understand

when we're talking about stress and we're talking about living and survival. It's so important to name those emotions because anger and frustration and control and hatred and envy and jealousy and insecurity and unworthiness and guilt and shame and suffering and depression. Those are all derived. those are emotions that are derived from the hormones of stress. And psychology calls those normal states of consciousness. Those are altered states of consciousness.

Because in stress, the physiology is that we're knocked out of homeostasis. We're not out of balance because we're perceiving some threat, some danger, some emergency. And so the stronger the emotion you feel to whatever stressor there is in your life, the more you pay attention to it. And so in time then, you have to keep your attention on all the important elements. elements in your life. So you sit down to do a meditation. And when you're living in stress and you're living in survival, there's only three things that are important in that moment. Your attention is on your body because you've got to preserve it. Your attention is on something in your environment.

And what's in your environment? People, objects, things, places, and you're very preoccupied with time. And when you're in stress and you're in survival, the brain goes onto a default mode and it's naturally trying to predict the next moment based on what it's learned in the past. And so as you'd always try to forecast the future based on your memory of the past, you can't be in the present moment, right? And yet our model of change,

what we discovered is that the only way a person can change is when they get beyond their body, they get beyond all the elements of their environment, and they get beyond that predictable fusion of familiar past, and they sink into the present moment, which is the unknown. So if you can't do that because of the hormones of stress, most people will sit down and they'll say, okay, I'm going to close my eyes, I'm going to start this process where I'm going to rehearse how I'm going to be today,

and they start thinking about their cell phone, they start thinking about all their emails, and they start thinking, I can't meditate, there's something wrong with me. It's my mother's fault. And they actually believe that thought to be the truth, and then they get up and they actually reaffirm it and they say, I can't meditate. Now, I can tell you that if you are willing to see that thought as just the thought in your brain and you're curious what's on the other side of that thought, yeah, you're going to feel uncomfortable. But if you had some tools and skills to apply and you were able to take your attention off your cell phone

and settle your body back down into the present moment, that would be a victory. And then your body would say, come on, you've got to feel a little frustration now. You've got to be impatient. You got to be judgmental. Come on, that's what you always think. That's how you always feel. And you like an animal. You settle the body back down into the present moment

and you tell it it's no longer the mind that you're the mind. That's a victory. Then the body says, hey dude, you're super busy. You've got a lot of things to do. You got a lot of people to see. You got a lot of places to go. You got a lot of things to do. And you've been doing the same thing every day.

Your body's gonna wanna get up and do something. you're going to want to quit because your brain's telling you that you can't do this. If you had the awareness to settle the body back down into the present moment, you would be executing a will that's greater than the program because most people lose their free will to those programs. And it's that tedium in the beginning that is an uncompromising will where you keep training the animal to stay, to take all of its attention off the environment, to get beyond all the cravings, the feelings,

the habits of the body, the drives of the body, and catch yourself defaulting to that predictable future, bringing your body back into the present moment, siphoning energy back your attention into the past based on those familiar emotions of the past. We've discovered that if you're willing to do that for just a few days, you could actually liberate an enormous amount of energy from your body. You go from particle to wave, from matter to energy, and you're literally transmuting those limited emotions into elevated emotions, and something really beautiful happens. If you're willing to fire the crucible and sit through that long enough, all of these emotions move, that energy moves right up into the heart, and the person starts falling in love with life. They start feeling this

state of gratitude, this gratefulness to be alive, this ineffable word of relaxed and awake. And something really magical happens when we've discovered this little simple thing. When that energy makes it to the heart, there's only one place it wants to go. And it goes straight to the brain. So the person starts relaxing into their heart when they feel this feeling. and the more they relax into the heart, the more their brain all of a sudden starts becoming aroused. And they start going into these elevated gamma brainwave patterns.

Now, gamma is not unconscious. Gamma is actually super conscious. It's actually super aware. You're outside the program now. So when that occurs and the brain goes into gamma brainwave patterns, what we discovered is not a little gamma. It's not a lot of gamma. It's not a whole lot of gamma.

It's a supernatural amount of gamma. And we start seeing these brain waves where we see theta start carrying alpha. And alpha starts resonating with beta. And beta starts creating high beta and high beta starts creating gamma. And you see these standing waves of brain coherence happening. And the person feels so amazing that they don't want the moment to end. And so we see when they put their attention on their heart, like filling a gas tank, we see on the gauge of the scan this very low frequency start rising in the heart.

The energy that the heart uses to function actually goes up because they're placing their attention there. And where they place their attention is where they place their energy. And then you see the parasympathetic nervous system come up with it. That's the nervous system of relaxation. and then we see it kind of drop and we see the sympathetic nervous system starting to go up.

And now sympathetic regulation is an arousal, right? But the arousal is in fear. The arousal isn't hatred or aggression. The arousal is in pain. That's the arousal created from survival. There's only one other arousal, and that's ecstasy. That's bliss.

And the person all of a sudden feels connected to something greater. Here's the beauty. We can see people do this in 15 minutes. The most important takeaway around all of this is that feeling that they're feeling is not coming from anywhere outside of them. No person's doing that. No wardrobe change is doing that. No sports car, don't football game. Nothing is doing it to them. It's actually coming from within. That is the moment they stop looking for it outside of them, and the love affair begins. And so when we start feeling these elevated emotions, these more selfless emotions, it's not like you have to try to forgive. It actually

is the side effect of you changing your emotional state. You no longer want because you feel so whole, how could you want anything? So we started interviewing people when they had these moments. And and they had such an incredible amount of love that they felt. We measure their oxytocin levels. They're love chemicals. Very elevated. The amount of gamma in terms of coherence was 200, 300, 400, 400 standard deviations outside of normal in coherent gamma.

Now, three standard deviations outside of normal in gamma is about 2% of the population, 200, 300, 400, a lot of energy in the brain. So the brain all of a sudden is receiving an enormous amount of energy. So we've discovered relaxed in the heart and awaken the brain. And that process of transformation is your willingness to sit, pass that thought, pass that emotion, and keep training the animal, and sooner or later you can recondition it to a new mind. Thank you for tuning in.

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