The Resilient Mind - Is Your Past Holding You Back From the Future You Really Want? - Dr. Joe Dispenza

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

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_JournalExplore tools from past guests of the podcast. Some links below are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you:💓 HeartMath: https://www.heartmath.com/resilient 🧠 Muse: https://choosemuse.com/resilientmind 🌿 Brain Ritual: https://www.brainritual.com/THERESILIENTMIND🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We have a lot of different cultures here, and we have been in the deep study of consciousness, in the deep study of how to affect the nature of reality. We have crossed a great river, and we are at the end of our event. And I want to take some time and talk to you about a teaching that many, many people in the last four months or so that I've taught have experienced really profound results with. And it's something that I personally do when I reach a situation in my life where I don't have any answers.

Everything that I'm doing isn't working. And I think to myself, surely there must be a possibility in the quantum field that already exists. That is a solution that I haven't thought of. And if I don't know the answer, then I have to move to the unknown. How many people are with me so far?

So then how many people in this room have situations in their life where they've done everything they've possibly could to change it? Matter to matter. They've hired experts. They've had counseling. They've hired hitmen. They've done everything. And nothing has changed the situation. You have a few of those, yes?

So then let's start with just understanding the nature of our biology. Your brain is a memory bank. It's a record of everything you've learned and experienced at this moment. We could say that your brain is a record or an artifact of the past. So most people, when they wake up in the morning and they start their day, new day, a brand new day where there's so many different possibilities, the first thing they do is they get their brain working and they start activating circuits in their brain that are connected to memories of the past. So they activate the memories, and a memory is a record of the past. So they think about the problems in their life,

and those problems are connected to certain people and certain things and certain times and places, and every one of those problems, then, has an emotion associated with them. So if thoughts are the language of the brain, and feelings are the language of your body, and how you think and how you feel creates a state of being, if you're living by familiar and same thoughts, and you're feeling the same emotions,

and emotions are a record of the past, we could say that most people wake up in the morning and their entire state of being is in the past, in the familiar past. So then if your biology is in the familiar past, then the next thing most people do is they start to crave the predictable future. They start to want to create the same experiences over again

because they can predict the feeling of every experience and over time they stay safe in the known. So then the memories that you can call upon or recall the easiest are called long-term memories. And the stronger the emotion you feel from some past event in your life, the more altered you feel inside of you from some external event, the moment you notice a change in your internal state, it captures all the brain's attention,

and we narrow our focus on the cause, and in that moment we freeze an image and the brain takes a snapshot, and we begin to emboss circuitry in our brain. And then people then recall the event. They talk about the event. They think about the event over and over again, and they're firing and wiring the same circuits in the same way,

and they begin to hardwire their brain into the past. And when they talk about their problems, and they think about them, and they remember them, they're combining an image with an emotion and they start the conditioning process. And conditioning is based on the past. And if you do it enough times, the body begins to believe that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,

the body as the unconscious mind doesn't know the difference between the actual experience in your life that's creating an emotion and the emotion that you're creating by thought alone. The body's believing it's in the same past experience. So then if you think you're a failure, you feel like a failure. If you wake up in the morning feeling like a failure, you're going to think thoughts equal to how you feel. And people get caught in these loops of thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking.

And the repetition of doing this over and over again, the conditioning process, conditions the body to memorize that emotion, and now the body literally is in the past. So then you can't create a new future holding on to the emotions of the past. and in fact, that person, we could say, could never see many opportunities in their future because they're viewing their future

completely in the biology of the past, and they won't see possibilities. They're only looking for knowns. Are you with me still? So then crisis, trauma, disease, diagnosis, loss, betrayal, something has to cause us then to wake up. And it's usually crisis or emergency where a person reaches their lowest,

level where they just can't keep any of their agreements any longer. They no longer want to see the same people. They don't want to go to dinner anymore. They're not answering their text. They're not even watching their favorite television show. They just stopped. And that's the moment they start paying attention to how they're thinking. They start noticing how they're acting or how they've acted. And they look, my goodness, I've been feeling suffering for the last 20 years. I didn't even know it was suffering or guilt. It's just the way I feel. And the act of becoming conscious of your unconscious states of mind and body means now you're disconnecting from the programs,

disconnecting from your biology, and now you're the observer of those programs, and now you're becoming conscious, and you're objectifying your subjective self. Yes or no? So then that is unfamiliar territory. That is the unknown for most people, and the hardest part about change in most people's lives

is not making the same choice as they did the day before. And the moment you decide to make a different choice or do something differently, that's when you're leaving the known familiar territory. And if the body has been conditioned to be the mind, now the servant is the master. And what happens is the moment you decide to step into that unknown, the body starts influencing the mind.

And here come the programs, because in that place of uncertainty, unpredictability, discomfort, The body is saying, I want to return back to the known because I can't predict the next moment, and it starts influencing the same thoughts. In fact, the thoughts in our head, the chatter in our head, gets louder. And if we respond to that same thought in the same way, 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 then will produce the same

familiar feeling, and people say this feels right. No, it feels familiar. where you're returning back to the known, and the door closes to the unknown. Are you with me still? So then, it makes sense then that in order to change then, you have to be greater than your body that has been conditioned to be the mind,

that you have to demonstrate a will that's greater than those programs, that you have to recondition your body to a new mind. But then most people get up in the morning and they're beginning to think about all the experiences they want in their life, and they can predict the feeling of every one of the one of the ones those experiences. So they start looking forward to the same familiar future based on the same

familiar past. So the thought leads to the same choice. The same choice leads to the same behavior. The same behavior produced the same experience. Same experience produces the same emotion, and it reaffirms the same identity, which influences the same thought. And if you wake up every morning and you follow the same exact routine, we could say that the moment you wake up in the morning and you start thinking about going to the kitchen and getting a cup of coffee or a cup of tea, you're placing your attention on the future, a place in consciousness outside of you. So there's one point of consciousness, you, and you have another thought in your mind

of going to the kitchen and getting a cup of coffee or tea, a second point of consciousness. And when you begin to hold your attention on that, your body begins to follow your mind to a known, yes or no. And as you move through space, you experience time. It takes you time to get over there. So then if you keep doing this every single day and then you take a shower and then you drive the work the same way and you do the exact same things, your body over time will go on autopilot and now it's dragging you into a predictable future based on what you did in the past and now you've lost your free will to that program and you're headed for a genetic destiny. How many people understand? So then if you're waking up in the morning and you're not being defined by a vision of the future, then we could say, say then, for the most part, you're left with the memories of the past. And if you believe this idea, if your brain is a record of everything that's known in your life and you're not creating

a future, the moment you wake up in the morning and you see the same people and you go to the same places and you do the exact same thing that you did yesterday, all of a sudden now, everything in your environment is influencing how you're thinking and feeling, because you have a neurological network for your boss, for your partner, for your kids, for your home, for where you work, where you sleep, all the problems in your life are mapped neurologically in the brain. So your environment is made up of bodies and people and objects and things and places. And so when you begin to interact with your environment, it is your environment then that is controlling unconsciously how you're thinking and feeling.

Here's the challenge, though. how you think and feel creates your life. That's the quantum model of reality. So if you're thinking equal to everything that's known in your life, then you're reaffirming the same reality because you're thinking in the same way and feeling in the same way. How many people understand? Now, every thought has a frequency.

Every thought produces an energy. So we could say then from a quantum perspective, you're thinking the same known thoughts. the majority of the time that are producing the same frequencies, so then the same frequency is the same energy, and your life shouldn't change. And the only way your life can change is to change your energy, and nobody changes until they change their energy.

So if your personality is made up of how you think, how you act, and how you feel, and your personality creates your personal reality, then in order for you to create a new, new personal reality and new life, you would have to change your personality, yes or no. You would have to change the way you think, change the way you act, and change the way you feel. And most people in their lives are trying to create a new personal reality as the same personality. And it doesn't work. And the repetition of doing the same exact routine every

single day, thinking the same way, acting the same way, feeling the same way over and over again, By the time we're 35 years old, we go on autopilot. And 95% of who we are at that point is just a set of programs. And so the body then is dragging somebody in the predictable future based on what they did in the past. And imagine this. This has happened to all of us. You have a thought in your routine day that you're going to go do something,

and that thought is going to lead to a choice, and the choice is going to lead to a behavior, and the behavior is going to lead to experience. The experience produces the payoff. and payoff is the feeling or the emotion and all of a sudden something happens where it doesn't work out and you're not getting the feeling that reaffirms your identity and most people replace it with a pretty uncomfortable feeling they get angry they get frustrated they get impatient they get disrespectful because now the body

is craving the feeling and they're not getting the feeling that they want and they don't believe that they have any control over how they feel are you with me still So then if your personality creates your personal reality and you're waking up every single morning and you're thinking the same way, acting the same way, and feeling the same way and it's your environment, all the people and objects and things and places in your life that are controlling your thoughts and feelings, then we could say that your personal reality is creating your personality

and you're not thinking, acting, or feeling greater than your current known reality. And so then now we can say that a person is victim to the circumstances in their life because they'll tell you it's that person or that thing that's making me think, feel, and act this way. How many people are with me? But we say then that we create the world outside of us by the way we think and feel. So then the challenges and the problems in our lives are created from a certain level of consciousness or unconsciousness, yes or no. And Einstein said, hey, you want to resolve that problem?

You've got to go to a greater level of consciousness than the consciousness that's created it. And that's evolution. Would you agree? So then the problems and conditions that we have in our life, in order for us to be greater than those problems and conditions, we would have to be greater than the body, to change, to be greater than our environment. That means don't let our environment we no longer react and think and predictable. ways. Environment no longer controls our feelings and thoughts, and that in order for us to truly

change, we couldn't live in the program of the predictable future or the familiar past. We would have to be in the present moment and stop all of those programs. If the problems in our lives are created from some level of consciousness or unconsciousness, then it would make sense then that every time you become conscious of an unconsciousness, then, that every time you become conscious of an thought, you're changing your level of awareness. Would you agree? And you can't have consciousness without energy. So then as you begin to become aware of the way you're thinking, you're moving to a greater level of consciousness than the consciousness that created the problem. Yes or no? Come on. And if you can begin to observe how you act or how you speak and you can begin to

become conscious or aware, would you agree then the more conscious or aware that you become of how you act and you want to change it, the less unconscious you'll go in your normal day. Yes or no? And if you've been living by certain emotions that bring you to a lower denominator, to a lower level of energy, to cause you to feel more like matter and less like energy,

more separate from everyone and everything, including your dreams, and all of a sudden, you're sitting and you're observing your feelings and you're watching your body go through a gamut of different sensations and feelings, and all you're doing is sitting there. Would you agree if you can begin to observe it? You're becoming less of the body as the mind

and more of the consciousness separate from the body, yes or no? And you're moving to a greater level of consciousness. So what have we been doing all week? This has been a great study in one whole week because people then come to an event and they have all these problems in their lives. And all of those problems primarily come from people because that's what makes up the majority of our living environment.

And so the stronger the emotion that people feel from the problems in their life, the more they pay attention to the person that's creating them. And we could say then they're giving their life force, they're giving their energy away to that person because where you place your attention is where you place your energy. And so now you're giving your power away to that person, and that's the energy you need to create a new reality. So you're sitting in the presence of that emotion

and your body's off schedule. It loves to judge at around 11 o'clock in the morning, but you're off schedule. There's no one to judge. You're sitting there with your blindfolds on. And your body says, well, there's got to be somebody to judge. How about the person next to me? I'm by the person in front of me.

How about Dr. Joe? I'll got to find somebody to judge. And your body is just looking for the hit of those chemicals. So then you would have to agree with me then. And when you start thinking about the problems in your life when you first get here, then your attention is moving away from you. And if that's the case then,

if you can lower the volume to that emotion, it would take some level of energy to do that, a level of energy that's greater than the energy of that emotion in order to change it. That means you've got to demonstrate a will that's greater than the body is the mind, and that takes an effort. It's so much easier to go unconscious.

Or if I keep asking to return back to the present moment and your attention is on this person all the time or this problem all the time, and you keep stopping the thought that's connected to them, then you'll stop producing the emotion. And the body is going to crave that emotion, and the brain is going to crave that connection. And there's a withering. There's a biological death that goes on.

There's a dissonance that's creating neurologically in the brain. That's disorder. That's chaos. That's information being released out of the system. and now energy is changing, circuitry is changing, neurochemistry is changing, hormones are changing,

gene expression is changing. The body's in flux, it's in change. And the chaos that's created from that, most people can't handle it because they don't know what to do with it. So the solution then is to get up and get on your computer and surf or watch TV

or do something to distract you from that feeling that makes it go away. So over time then we become, reliant on our outer world that change our inner world. So then think about this. When you lower the volume to that emotion and you take your attention off the problems in your life and you do it with a level of passion

and keep returning to the present moment, you're going to begin to weaken the energetic bonds with everyone and everything in your life. And when you have an energy that's greater than the energy that's holding you together, holding you connected to every person and everything in your life, there's going to be a break of that energy. and that energy is coming back to you, that's chaotic energy.

That's difficult energy for the body to deal with unless you know how to apply a formula, unless you know how to create order out of disorder. So then throw in the hormones of stress. Living in stress is living in survival, and when you're in stress and you're in survival, the very chemicals of stress cause you to heighten your senses

and narrow your focus on the cause. And now you're putting all of your attention on the material world. Now, where you place your attention is where you place your energy, and the rush of adrenaline that's created from the hormones of stress arouses the body to such a degree that you begin to believe that you're your body. It rouses the brain to put all of the attention on the outer world because that's where the danger is. And now, when we're under stress, we can't predict something,

we can't control something, or we have the perception that something's going to get worse. The moment we signal those chemicals, Now, all of a sudden, now, in survival, we're doing our best to control and predict everything in our life to bring it all back together. And so we begin to become over-focused, and we shift our attention from people to things, the objects,

the problems, the places. And every one of those has a neurological network in the brain, and the act of doing that causes the brain to become compartmentalized. And the brain starts firing in a very incoherent way. And when the brain is incoherent, you're incoherent. When the brain isn't working right, you're not working right. So then the very rush of those stress hormones draws from this invisible field of vital life force,

this invisible field surrounding the body of energy, and it's turning it into chemistry. And chronic stress keeps tapping the body's vital resource, and in time we start feeling more like matter and less like energy, more like particle and less like wave. And when you feel like you are matter, trying to change matter, There's only a certain number of things you can do. You can fight for it.

You can race to get it. You can compete. You can manipulate. You can control, predict. You can do the basic things because we only have a certain number of resources when we're matter trying to change matter. So then the very chemicals of stress, when we narrow our focus on an object or a thing or a person, the very nature of narrowing our focus on matter causes us to feel separate from everyone

and everything. So the very chemicals of stress heighten the senses, and now we're materialists, and we have separation from everybody and everything. We don't experience connection in any way. And in fact, when you're in the state of survival, you're not going to learn, you're not going to want to create, you're not going to want to go within, you're not going to want to open your heart, you're not going to want to be vulnerable. It's not the time to do that. In stress, it's time to run to hide or to fight. And so people spend 70% of their life, living in this state. And as they begin to get caught up in these chemicals,

what they start doing is out of the infinite possibilities in the quantum field that they can begin to create. In stress, you will select the worst-case scenario. And when you select the worst-case scenario, you're in survival, because in survival, if you prepare for the worst, there's better chances of surviving. So people are always picking the worst reality in their mind

and combining a thought with the emotion. and they're conditioning their body into a genetic destiny. So then separation means I'm here and you're there, and if you look any different than me, then I'm going to experience a little bit more separation. And if you have a different skin color, or you're a different race, or you look different than me,

then I'm going to experience more separation. And then there's me here, one point of consciousness and you there, another point of consciousness. But then there's me here, and there's my dreams. And where do we place our dreams? Way out there. because we experience time linear. So we make an estimate in our mind.

It's going to take me a lot of time to get what I want. So here's one point of consciousness, and then your dreams are another point of consciousness, way over there. And it's going to cause you to drag your body through space every single day to go to work, to pay off all the dreams that you're creating because you're matter trying to change matter.

So then in stress, your brain is firing very incoherently, and at the same time, your heart is racing because the adrenaline from stress is telling you to run, fight, and hide, but social mores say you can't do any of those things. So now you're stepping on the gas and the break at the same time, and your heart starts to race and starts to fire very incoherently.

And when your heart is incoherent, you stop trusting yourself. You stop believing in yourself. You stop believing in your future and your dreams because this center right here is the center from which we create. And when energy moves in this center, it begins to create more coherence in the heart. All these centers below, the centers of the body. Excuse my art here, but this is the body here.

It looked really good at one point. Our sexuality, our consumption of food, our ability to use our will to overcome the conditions in our environment, most people live by these centers here. These are centers of awareness, centers of energy. And each one, every thought that you have, produces a frequency. So this is what we call the zero point field.

It is the quantum field, the unified field, the energy that connects everything material. It is the consciousness of the all in all. It is oneness, wholeness, universal mind, infinite intelligence, zero point field, the unified field, source, observer, the void, the fertile void, all possibilities, the eternal now, the infinite unknown, the very life force that holds everything together. And it's a unifying field. And scientists have been trying to unify the principles

and the energy of the universe to explain how matter exists. So energy then, the zero point field, slows down in frequency, and it reaches a certain point, and at this level, there's a explosion called the Big Bang. And all of a sudden, energy can't slow anything. anymore before it divides and becomes polarized. And the patterns of everything material exist at the speed of light, and it's the patterns then that slow energy down to take form and structure that ultimately appear as matter. Now, all of us, the divine aspect of ourselves, came from this universal intelligence,

and we came all the way down into density. And this is the realm of our senses, and we can experience the three-dimensional reality with our senses, and we see. spend our whole life being a somebody or having some type of body or knowing someone or being someone, owning certain things, living somewhere and some time, and this becomes the identity. So then people then spend the majority of their life living in this way and they experience from matter the greatest separation from the unified field. Here is source and if you're living as a body local in space and time, you're experiencing a separation between you.

as a consciousness and the consciousness of the unified field. So when you're living in a body and space and time, it takes a long time for your dreams to happen. Thank you for listening. Continue strengthening your mind by subscribing and listening to our other episodes.