The Resilient Mind - Mind Over Matter: The connection between thoughts and well-being - Dr. Joe Dispenza

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

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 Mind Over Matter, the connection between thoughts and well-being with Dr. Joe Dispenza. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Your body is a protein-producing machine, and proteins are responsible for the structure and the function of your body. In every single cell in your body,

except red blood cells makes proteins. Your immune system makes immune proteins called antibodies. Your stomach cells make stomach proteins called enzymes. Your skin cells make skin proteins called collagen and elastin. Your muscle cells make muscle proteins called actin and myosin. And in order for your body to make a protein, a gene has to be regulated in the cell. Are you with me?

Come on, is this too much? So they used to say, you know, you're hardwired to be a certain way and you're doomed by your genes, that's a lie. We are marvels of adaptability and change. But if you're a scientist studying rats in an unchanging environment, you're not going to see many genetic changes

or neurological changes, would you agree? So then genes are like Christmas tree lights. they're turning on and off all the time. And when they turn on, they upregulate, they make a healthy protein. And when they downregulator turn off, they make a cheaper protein. And, you know, the central dogma in science

was that genes create disease. Less than 5%, more like 1% of every person that's born with a genetic condition comes from birth, like TASX disease, sickle cell anemia, type 1 diabetes. The other 95% to 99% is from lifestyle and behaviors. And so scientists that were going to map the human genome, they said, okay, there's 100,000 proteins that make up the body. So there should be 100,000 genes.

There's 40,000 regulatory proteins that help make those proteins. so that's 40,000 more genes. So 100,000 plus 40,000 is 140,000 genes for every protein. When they map the human genome, 23,68 genes. You're 300 genes away from a chimpanzee, some more than others, but roughly that. Because in one gene, you could have over 3,000 variations on that gene. and genes don't create disease. It's the environmental signal.

It signals the gene to instruct it and select it to make new proteins. But if you're thinking the same thoughts, making the same choices, demonstrating the same behaviors, creating the same experiences, to produce the same emotions, you have the same lights on and the other lights off and you're headed for a genetic destiny. Are you with me still? take a group of stressed-out executives. You teach them how to find the present moment,

you teach them how to breathe, you teach them how to make a few different choices and to do a few different things, and you teach them how to express some suppressed emotions. At the end of eight weeks, they regulate 1,561 new genes, over 800 genes for growth and repair and just about 700 genes

that downregulate inflammation and disease, turning on new lights, turning off old lights. And so then, we did an experiment in February of this year in our advanced workshop. I randomly selected 120 people. And I wanted to measure their cortisol levels, which is the stress hormone level.

And I wanted to measure another chemical called IGA, immunoglobulin A. or salivary immunoglobulin A, the primary defense against bacteria and viruses in your body better than any flu shot. And what happens is that when your stress hormones go up, your immune system goes down. Because as you begin to mobilize all this energy for some threat in your external environment, real or imagine, you rob the energy in your internal environment for growth and repair. So if you keep turning on the fight-or-flight response,

you keep turning on the sympathetic nervous system, and you're mobilizing all this energy. You're drawing from this invisible field of vital energy around your body, and you're turning it into chemistry. And if you keep doing that, the field around your body shrinks. And now you are more matter and less energy, more particle, and less wave.

And now in your life, you are matter trying to change matter, and it's going to take time to get with you. you want. But as you keep diminishing your vitality, you keep robbing from this field, the immune system begins to shut down because all the troops are fighting some war abroad and there's no homeland security. And IGA levels go down. So we randomly selected 120 people and we measure their cortisol levels and we measure their IGA levels. Now when you're under stress, the emotions that you feel under stress is anger, hostility, frustration, impatience, fear, anxiety, worry, guilt, shame, envy, jealousy, competition.

Those are all created by the hormones of stress. And psychology says those are normal human states of consciousness. Those are alter states of consciousness because living in stress is living in survival. and stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of balance. Stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of homeostasis. Are you with me? So I reasoned, well, what if the reverse was actually true? What if people were taught how to open their heart?

And when you're frustrated and when you're impatient and you're angry, your heart beats out of rhythm. And we've measured that over and over again. the heart gets highly incoherent, and the heart has its own little brain. But when you feel gratitude and thankfulness and care and inspiration, all of a sudden, if you do it properly, your heart will start to get very orderly, very coherent, very synchronized. And so I wanted our students to sustain an elevated emotion for at least 10 minutes,

two to three times a day. That's it. But what happens when you experience an elevated emotion, and we know this because we've measured it also, if you can begin to sustain an elevated emotion, this is the creative center right here. It's like dropping a pebble in water. And if you are able to sustain that emotional state,

you were dropping pebble after pebble, after pebble, in a perfect rhythm. And what happens is the field around the body tends to grow. Now you are more energy and less matter, more wave, and less particle. And now you begin to feel connected to something greater. And if you can feel more deeply, more richly and more completely, you're dropping a big stone and it's creating a bigger wave. and that energy is a frequency.

And all frequency carries information, just like a radio wave. And your thought is the intention on that wave. And so I had them sustain these elevated states for 10 minutes a day, twice a day, or three times a day, for four days. At the end of four days, their cortisol levels dropped three stands,

standard deviations, clinically significant. But their IGA levels went from about 53-5 to 87. That is scientific history right there. They epigenetically signaled new genes and new ways, and their immune system got much, much stronger. Even the people who heal from all kinds of health conditions, what I learned in the last couple years is they're not doing their meditations to heal. their meditations to change. And when they change, they heal. And so what they begin to crave

is the next unknown experience, you know, that experience that exists really beyond three-dimensional reality. But I would say that the majority of people come for a particular reason, and after a period of time, they just want to get more whole. And I don't think there's an end of that. The stronger the emotion we feel from some event in our life, a trauma, a betrayal, a loss, a shock, a diagnosis, that the event produces an emotional response. And the high quotient of the emotional response changes our internal state.

And the moment we feel altered inside of us, the brain takes a snapshot, freezes a frame or a series of frames and takes snapshots, and that's called a long-term memory. So then from a biological problem, perspective, every time the person remembers the problem, they're producing the exact same chemistry and their brain and body, as if the event was happening. Cortisol, the adrenaline, whatever the emotion is. When they feel that emotion, we could say then that the body is reliving the event emotionally

50 to 100 times in a day. So the trauma is no longer in the brain at that point. Now the trauma is also in the body because thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body. And it's that thought and that feeling. It's that image and that emotion. It's that stimulus response that's conditioning the body subconsciously to become the mind of that emotion. And now that person emotionally is branded into the past. And you can say to them, why are you this way? Why are you so angry? Why are you so bitter? Why are you so mistrusting? Why are you so afraid? And they'll say to you, I am this way because of these events or that event that happened to me in my life 20 or 30 years ago.

Now, this is kind of an interesting thing because, in a sense, their identity is completely connected to their past. And as long as they feel that emotion, they'll always remember the past. So now, the body is so objective when it feels that emotion, it does not know the difference between the real life experience that's creating the emotion and the emotion that person is fabricating by thought alone. So now the body's believing it's living in the past event, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. But what the person is really saying is, after that event, I haven't been able to change.

That's what they're saying. And so that becomes the person's identity and there's nothing wrong with this. But you'll never hear me say in any of the work that we do, go back and process the past. We've discovered that when a person analyzes their problems within the emotions of the past, they make their brain worse. They actually drive it further out of balance. they're over arousing it. We discovered is that if the person can get beyond the emotion, truly get beyond the emotion,

they'll free themselves from the past. And what we discovered is that if you teach a person to give up the fear, the bitterness, the resentment, the frustration, the impatience, the judgment, you say, stop feeling that emotion. I know there's a reason why, I'm sure everybody's got a story, right so but there's nothing that's going to change that story until you change right and so we discover that if you trade those emotions for an elevated emotion if you start feeling gratitude and appreciation and love and kindness and care and you practice feeling that emotion we give you some tools to

to use to change your breathing to put your attention in a different place and to work with your body What we discovered is when the person can truly begin to open their heart, and we have brain scans on this, when the heart begins to open and it begins to become coherent. In other words, when you're feeling frustration or impatience or judgment, your heart is beating very incoherently. When you're feeling love and gratitude, kindness, and care, there's a rhythm, there's a cadence that the heart has that's very coherent. When the heart gets coherent, we measure this. it immediately informs the brain that the trauma is over. The heart tells the brain the past is over, the event is over, and it resets the baseline in the brain.

And so now the person, when they look back at their past, they're no longer looking at it from the same level of consciousness. In fact, many of them will say, oh, my God, I needed to go through all of that to get to this point right here. tell you, they'll say, I wouldn't want to change one thing in my past because it got me to the present moment. The soul can't go to the next adventure if it's holding on to the past. So we don't really ever address the story because the story is only firing and wiring the same circuits

in the brain, reaffirming the identity to the past just to feel the same emotion. And the research shows that 50% of the story we tell in our past isn't even the truth. That means that, people are reliving a miserable life they never even had, just to excuse themselves from changing, right? And I'm not taking shots at anybody. But what I am saying is you can't tell me that your past was so brutal that you can't change. Because we have seen people with some really, really horrible pasts that literally, literally are completely different people that have completely different lives. All I'm saying is that when does the story end? And I'm not certain that insight changes behavior.

You could have a realization, even from an exogenous drug, you can have a realization or an insight. But if you still can't function in your life and you're still, you know, you're having connected with your wife or, you know, you're still dealing with trauma, it hasn't served you at all.

So the insight that your father was overbearing or your mother was a perfectionist or you were beaten as a kid, and that's why you're this way. It doesn't change the behavior. In order for us to change, we have to become so conscious of those unconscious beliefs, and what's a belief that thought you just keep thinking over and over again, or how you've been programmed, right, as a belief.

We have to become so aware of our automatic habits and behaviors, and we have to pay attention to our emotional states if we're going to change. And staying conscious of our unconscious self is really the work that it takes to really overcome so you can become another person. person. That's 95% of a person by the middle of their life. They're, you know, hardwired attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions, automatic habits and behaviors and unconscious emotional responses. Ninety-five percent of us is programmed. So as a child, your brain waves are very slow. A door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind is wide open. Your brain

waves are in alpha and theta. And so you're very suggestible to the information. And so your exposure to that cause you to learn that that, you know, your observation caused you to get programmed to that's the way life is by by mirror neurons looking at behaviors that are being programmed in you. So, so, but that's not who you are, right? So the fact that you became conscious, like, oh my God, I do this. Oh, my God, I see where I got it from. Okay, that doesn't mean that I'm going to excuse myself and say, I can't be in relationships. You could. Some people do that. It might be a different belief, but they do that. But you said, I really want to have a meaningful relationship.

I really want to overcome this. This is part of me that I want to change, right? So you recognize that. That's called metacognition, right? The fact that you can objectify your subjective self and observe yourself, that's consciousness, right? And when you're conscious, then that's when you're not unconscious. And being unconscious is being in the program. So how many times do we have to forget until we stop forgetting and start,

remembering. That's the moment of change. So you said, okay, that's uncomfortable. That must mean something. And you actually went on a personal exploration. Do something with the insight, with the provocation, with the interest of actually wanting to change yourself in some way so that you create a greater experience of life, that there is love in life and that you can have a committed relationship. And it can be different from your parents. And now you know what you're not going to be, right? So I think all of that is valuable. I think every experience that we have in our life that programs us to be a certain way sooner or later, if we're interested in arriving at the goals and dreams that we want, we have to leave that behind. Sooner later, a part of us must die.

As soon or later, we have to leave that. So I think that's evolution. Thank you for tuning in. strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.