The Resilient Mind - Overcoming Limitations - Dr. Joe Dispenza

Episode Date: September 2, 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 Overcoming Limitations with Dr. Joe Dispenza. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. One of the things that people come up against is that why is it so hard to change? So we've kind of come down through a lot of research, a simple formula to help people to make transformations first in themselves and then their lives. And so we give people knowledge and information, and we use science as that language to meet information, and we combine quantum physics with neuroscience and neuroendocrinology and psychoneuroimmunology

and epigenetics and electromagnetism and help people understand information. That's philosophical, that's theoretical. And when you learn information, you make new connections in your brain. That's what learning is. But if you don't review it and if you don't repeat it, you don't. You don't think about it. Those circuits prune apart within hours or days. So we run these courses, these events that are typically seven days where it's fully immersing yourself in this process of transformation.

Give people the information. It's philosophical. It's theoretical. Have them understand it. They have to be present with it. Now, turn to someone and teach it back to them what you've learned. Nerve cells that fire together, wire together. So then in time, you begin to install the neurological.

hardware in your brain in preparation for the experience. And the more you understand what you're doing, and the more you understand why you're doing it, the how it gets easier because you can assign meaning to the task and get a greater outcome. If you can't explain it, it's not wired in your brain, right? So it's so much easy to forget the information and then to remember it and just takes repetition and attention to get the circuitry in place. And once you understand the what and the why, we set up the conditions in the environment to give people the proper instruction. and when you apply it, when you personalize it, when you demonstrate it, when you initiate that knowledge, and you get your behaviors to match your intentions and you get your actions equal to your thoughts,

you get your mind and body working together, you have an experience. Now experience really enriches circuitry in the brain. And when those neurons organize into networks even further, the brain makes a chemical, and that's called a feeling or an emotion. So now when you feel abundant, when you feel successful, you feel unlimited, you feel whole, the experience is teaching the body chemically to understand what the mind is intellectually understood. So now the information is not in the brain anymore.

The information is now in the body. And the person is embodying the truth of that philosophy, right? And somehow there's biological changes that take place as a result of it. The question is, okay, if you've done it once, you should be able to repeat the experience. And so if people go through a seven-day immersion and they keep repeating the experience, they begin to neurochemically condition their mind and body to begin to work together.

And when you've done something so many times that your body now knows how to do it better in your conscious mind, now it's innate in you. You've become the knowledge. It's a subconscious program. It's who you are. So we teach people to go from that kind of philosophical, theoretical, knowledge to the application, to initiate it, to ultimately get wise about why they're doing it. And so we study the neuroscience and biology and we work with University of California, San Diego, and we publish papers, and we do extensive research really to demystify the process. I think the biggest difficulty in change is making a different choice. I think about the New Year's resolutions.

Everybody's very clear about what their intention is, what they want, whatever that is. But if you keep making the same choices, you're going to keep doing the same things. you're going to keep creating the same experiences, you're going to keep feeling the same emotions, and your biology and your neurocircuitary, and your chemistry, and your hormones, and even your gene expression is going to stay the same because you're the same. But keep thinking the same way,

keep acting the same way, keep feeling the same way, and do it over and over again. Those circuits in the brain ultimately become hardwired. And the emotions that respond to someone or something, even your own thoughts, get conditioned subconsciously as a program into the body. So 95% of who we are by the middle of our life is an unconscious set of thoughts, behaviors,

and emotions that are automatically programmed into our biology. So the first step to change is not thinking positively. You have to become conscious of those unconscious thoughts when you decide to make a different choice and it doesn't feel familiar. The thought that says start tomorrow, it's too hard, just do it. anyway, you know, go ahead and make that choice through the same thing. You're not good enough. You'll never change. You're too much like your parents. You know, I failed last time. You have to be able to become so conscious of those unconscious thoughts that you would never go unconscious to that thought

ever again, and that's change. You'd have to catch yourself how you speak and how you act. If you want to be happy and you're blaming and you're complaining and you're feeling sorry for yourself and you're judging everyone, those behaviors are not going to make you happy. They're going to make you unhappy. So you've got to become so conscious of those unconscious habituations that you wouldn't go unconscious and behave that way. And then, of course, you've got to look at those emotions that are pretty much chemical residue from the past and decide, does this lack, does this suffering, does this pain belong in my future? And that process of becoming so conscious that we don't go unconscious is the process of change.

And how many times do we have to forget until we stop forgetting and start remembering? That's the moment of change. So the hard part about change is when you decide to make a different choice, get ready, it's going to feel uncomfortable. There's going to be uncertainty. You're not going to be able to predict the next moment. It's going to feel unfamiliar.

So if the body has been conditioned to be the mind, then the servant is the master. So the body starts sending information back to the brain to think a certain thought so that you make the same choice, that you do the same thing, you create, get back to the same feeling of suffering. Oh, that feels so much better than the uncertainty of the unknown. So going from the old self to the new self and crossing that river literally is a neurological, it's a biological, it's a chemical, it's a hormonal, it's a genetic death of the old self. That's the phoenix lighting itself on fire. And most people would rather

cling to that familiar place than take a chance and possibility. That void, that vacuum actually is the perfect place to create. And we discovered this, that the brain changes the most. When you get to that point where you think you can't go any further and you want to quit, if you go past that point, that is the unknown. Now, the unknown has always been wired in our biology, that the uncertainty of the unknown is always a scary place. Is that a tiger in the bushes or is that just a shadow? So the unknown becomes a very scary place when we're living in survival. So most people never take that chance and possibility. But if a person's actually taught how to execute in the unknown and there's nothing scary there, and they can apply the

same principle and say, what thoughts do I want to fire and wire in my brain? And a belief is just the thought you keep thinking over and over again. So what is the voice in my head that I want to program my brain into thinking and believing? What behaviors am I going to demonstrate in my life? If I'm going to not behave this way around this person or around this circumstance and I want to behave a different way, let me rehearse in my mind, close my eyes, and get really clear on how I'm going to respond or behave in this circumstance. And the act of mental rehearsal literally grows circuits in the brain. Now your brain's looking like you've already done it. Your brain is no longer a record of the past, it's being conditioned and mapped into the future. So now you have the circuitry

in place. So if you keep practicing that, the hardware becomes more automatic. It becomes more of a software program and you start behaving that way. And then the biggest challenge then is, okay, if I'm not going to feel suffering and I'm not going to feel pain and I'm not going to feel judgment, but I want to feel grateful for my life, can I teach my body emotionally what my future will feel like before it happens. So once you start conditioning your body to an elevated emotion, we tend to see that the heart-centered emotions tend to be the ones that produce the most dramatic changes in our biology. And the body's so objective, it really doesn't know the difference between the real-life experience that's creating that emotion and the emotion that you're creating

by thought alone. And the body starts getting lifted in a lot of ways. So keep thinking differently, keep acting differently, keep feeling differently, that's your personality, then your personal reality begins to change. And people who cross that river, there's new opportunities, there's new experiences, there's new events that take place in their life. So that's what we teach. I think that people, unfortunately, they have to get knocked to our lowest level sometimes, you know, where you're no longer inside the jar. When you're inside the jar, you can't read the label. You got to get so uncomfortable that you could actually see yourself, right? And so that tragedy, that that crisis, that disease, the diagnosis, the loss, it's got to be so severe that you finally look at yourself and say,

maybe it's me. Oh my God, could it possibly be me? But you're looking at yourself kind of through the eyes of someone else because you don't feel like you in that moment. You're so uncomfortable that you can see yourself. That concept is called metacognition, right? So a lot of times people wait for that crisis or the diagnosis or the betrayal to go, oh my God, I got to really change because I'm really unhappy or I can't blame that person or my past or my circumstance because nothing's working here. I got to really start making those changes. So when they see themselves separate from their program, they're becoming conscious of their unconscious self, that is the first. step to change. Now, I say you can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, which most

people like to do, or you can learn and change in a state of joy and inspiration, right? So could you be defined by a vision of the future? And could you get up from your morning practice, actually believing in your future more than you're believing in your past? So from that elevated state where you combine a clear intention with an elevated emotion, from an elevated state, instead of a self-limiting state, you can be conscious of that old self as well. And so I think, I think, God, what a great time in history to be alive because this is a time in history where it's not enough to know. This is really a time in history to know how. And I've been at this long enough, Chris, to know that 20 years ago, people didn't hear it like they hear it now. The information is

readily available. And people are realizing, God, if I have this dream, if I have this goal, how bad do I want it? And if they really want it, and we've all done this, you sit down and say, what would it be like to be super healthy, super wealthy, super in love, super mystical, you know, transcendental, whatever it is. Like you ask that question and your brain gets really creative. It starts combining circuits in new ways and you start getting this vision of the future, this possibility that you actually put yourself in this future reality.

it becomes so real that you start to feel the emotion as if you were actually there. And so that moment when you come out of your resting state, the stronger the emotion you feel when you hold that vision, the more you'll remember that vision. That's creating a memory. So the person comes out of the resting state and they make a decision with such firm intention that the amplitude of that decision carries a level of energy that causes their body to respond to their mind. that their choice that they're making in that moment becomes a moment in time that they would never forget. They'll say to you, I remember the moment I made up my mind the change.

I was in this place. I was with these people. I was this particular time. The event is a long-term memory. And they've come out of the resting state. And we could say then they're giving their body a taste of the future emotionally. And somehow they begin to embody whatever that future is. And now they begin to move in a different direction.

And so they start trusting in their future more because they feel like they're connected to it. So then the person who's really interested in making a change would have to come to that same state again in order to produce the same effect. If they say, I don't feel like it or I want to be nicer or whatever, and there's nothing really at stake. You know, intention is really meaning. You've got to have a meaning behind what you're doing. So people who now say I want a better life, I can't have a better life unless I change. And when I change, my life will change. Now you're not so interested in what's happening out there.

You're more interested in what's going on inside of you. The brain is a record of the past. The brain is a reflection of everything in your environment that's known to you. It's an artifact. It's a repository of everything you've learned and experienced in your life. It's a memory bank. And so people wake up in the morning, and every person, every object, everything, every place, every experience that they've had in their life is mapped neurologically in their brain. So they wake up in the morning and the first thing they do is they think about those problems.

And those problems are memories that are really tattooed in the recesses of their gray matter. And the moment they start remembering the problem and they start remembering the past, they're thinking in the past. Every one of those experiences or problems has an emotion associated to them. So the moment they think of the past and they start feeling unhappy or anxious, now they're bodies in the past. Thoughts are the language of the brain, feelings are the language of the body. Thought and feeling, an image and emotion, a stimulus and response. And you're conditioning the body emotionally into the familiar past.

And the body's so objective, as I said, doesn't know the difference between the real life experience and the one that you're imagining. The body's actually believing it's living in the environment where that problem actually existing in the present moment. So that becomes the familiar past, and we call that the known. Then people get up, and then they rush through a series of automatic routine behaviors. They're on automatic pilot because they do the same thing today as they did yesterday. And the habit is a redundant set of automatic, unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that's acquired through repetition. So now the person is in habituation of program, and their bodies dragging them,

into the same predictable future based on what they did in their past. In other words, we could take up there yesterday and set it on there tomorrow, and there's going to be a lot of predictability. So if you can predict something, then that's the known too. So the familiar past is the known, the predictable future is the known. There's only one place left where the unknown exists, and that's the sweet spot of the generous present moment. And so we teach people how to master the moment, how to master their attention, how to master their

attention. And where you place your attention is where you place your energy. And paying attention is being present. And you know when someone's paying attention to you because they're present with you. And you know when they're present with you because they're paying attention to you. Well, it's the exact same thing. So you're sitting with your eyes closed and you start thinking, how long is this going to go? I got a lot of things to do. Oh, God, I got to think about that place I got to go to and meet that person. I got another meeting over there. And now your brain is actually defaulting and going to to that predictable future. We discovered that you're not a bad meditator actually at all. This is actually how you do meditate. You become conscious that you've gone unconscious in your predictable

future and you return your attention back to the present moment. That's a victory. Okay, so then your body says, hey, it's been about an hour. You usually get pretty judgmental around this time. You get in traffic. You get really angry. And you're sitting in a meditation and all of a sudden you start feeling aroused and impatient and frustrated, and people, most people think, oh, well, that means I can't meditate. Well, actually, your body's used to being stimulated from something outside of itself. You settled the body back down into the present moment and you tell it it's no longer the mind.

You're the mind. Do this enough times and train the body to be in the present moment to be in the unknown. There'll come a moment where the body is no longer the mind. The servant's no longer the master. you're the mind. And when that occurs, there's this tremendous liberation of energy that takes place in the body. The body's going from particle to wave. It's going from matter to energy. The body's being freed from the chains of the past or the predictable future. And we discover energy actually kind of moves right into a person's heart. And they start feeling really grateful to be in the

present moment instead of being in the unknown and trying to predict the next moment. So it's a practice. and if you practice it on a regular basis, we discovered you can get really good at being in the unknown and going against thousands of years of programming that says the unknown is a dangerous and a scary place. There's better chances of survival. If you run from the unknown, then you embrace it. So you put the person that keep relaxing into the unknown,

and sooner or later they realize nothing bad is happening in the unknown, and they just start relaxing and expanding. And there's just a host of biological changes that begin to take. take place. So I think you can make that a skill or a habit. Well, an addiction is something that you think you can't stop. An addiction is when you know something is not good for you, and you tend to choose and do it anyway, right? So it turns out that living in stress is living in survival, and when you perceive a threat or a danger or you perceive something that's, you perceive something that's potentially going to get worse in your life or you can't control or predict something in your

life, you switch on that primitive nervous system called the fight or flight nervous system, and it's secreting a lot of chemicals to get you awake. It's getting you ready. It's wanting you to perform, but if it gets, there's too much, the rush of that adrenaline is like a surge of energy. It's an arousal. And people get addicted to that rush of energy. So they use, use the problems, they use the conditions, the stories of the past in their life to reaffirm their addiction to that emotion. So they need the bad job, they need the bad relationship, they need the challenging conditions in their life. It makes them feel something, right? So, okay, so when you're living in stress, stress is when your brain and body are knocked out

of homeostasis. Stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of balance. So the moment you react to someone or something in your life and you switch on that system of arousal and it's an emergency system, your body moves completely out of balance. It's mobilizing all of its energy for some threat, real or imagined. Okay. The problem with human beings is for a zebra or for a gazelle, if it outruns the lion, it goes back to grazing. The event is over and the stress is short term. But if it's a constant exposure to stressors in your life, what becomes once was maladaptive, adaptive becomes very maladaptive. Because when you turn on that stress response and you can't turn it off, now you're headed for

disease because your body's constantly out of homeostasis imbalance. So, okay, so the event is over and someone betrayed you or you lost your job or you got fired and you can't stop thinking about it. So every time you think about that problem, you're turning on the stress response just by thought alone. So if the hormones of stress are addictive, and you can turn on the stress response just by thought alone, you could become addicted to your own thoughts. And if you have to keep talking about those problems to get the rush of adrenaline, your thoughts can knock you out of balance as well. And it's a scientific fact that the long-term effects of the hormones of stress

push the genetic buttons that create disease, which means your thoughts could literally make you sick. So then if your thoughts could make you sick, the fundamental question is, can your thoughts make you well? And that's what we're, you know, interested in uncovering. Yeah, so every time you have a thought, you make a chemical. And if you have a happy thought or think of something happy, you turn on a set of neurological networks in your brain that fire in a sequence, a pattern, a combination, that signals another part of the brain. The brain makes another chemical. That's a chemical messenger that makes you feel a certain way as you secrete a certain hormone. Okay, the moments you start to feel happy, the moments you start to feel joyful, your brain is checking in with your body,

saying, Chris, you're feeling pretty joyful. And so then the chemistry influences you to think more wonderful thoughts. And so the cycle of thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking creates what we call a state of being, okay? But you could have thoughts that make you feel guilty. And you can turn on a different set of circuits in your brain that signal a different batch of neuropeptides that signal a different hormonal center to make you feel differently. The moment you feel miserable, the moment you feel victimized, the moment you feel suffering, the moment you feel pain, and you can't think greater than how you feel, the brain's checking out with the body and saying you're really miserable and it generates more corresponding thoughts equal to that feeling.

So it's thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking. This loop of thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking creates a state of being. And again, the thought and the feeling, the image and the emotion, the stimulus and response is making the body become conditioned subconsciously into the past. And so now the person has to feel that same motion to reaffirm their identity. So that becomes their state of being. and now they behave as if they're in their past, and they think as if they're in their past. Well, everybody has a story, right? And the way we make memories is from emotions. So if you have an

event in your life that's highly traumatic, just as an example, the moment you perceive that event in your life through your senses, the chemical information that's coming back as information to your body is telling you to be altered. So once you begin to change your internal state, the greater the change in your internal state from its normal continuity, the more the brain freezes a frame and takes a snapshot. And that's called the long-term memory. So then the person thinks neurologically within the circuitry of that experience and they feel within the boundaries of the emotions of that experience. Every time they, they, They review the event in their mind.

They're producing the same chemistry in their brain and body as if the event was occurring. So again, the body's reliving the trauma 50 to 100 times in the day. And now the trauma is no longer in the brain. The trauma is emotionally conditioned in the body, right? So if you say to the person, why are you so bitter? Why are you so sad? Why are you so unhappy? They'll say, I am this way because of this event that happened to me 10 years ago.

which what they're really saying is after that event, I changed and I have not been able to change since this event. Well, the research on memory says that if you ask that person, that story of the actual account, 50% of that story is no longer the truth. In other words, they're embellishing the story so they can excuse themselves. They're making it worse. They're making the conditions worse. They're telling the story.

and they're embellishing it to some degree to excuse themselves from changing, right? So if 50% of that story isn't even the truth, they're reliving a miserable life they never even had, all to reaffirm their addiction to that emotional state. So here's the crazy part because we work with veterans and Navy SEALs. And can you then forget about the memory and just overcome the emotion? because the memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom. And now you no longer belong to the past. You're ready to create a new future.

And so the stories we tell about our past are only stories we tell when we feel those emotions. We would never tell that story when we feel a different emotion. Because the person's telling the feeling that emotion and that emotion is the record of the memory chemically. So they're telling the story because they can't think greater than that feeling. Feelings have become the means of thinking. But what if you told a different story? And that's exactly what we teach people to do. Stop romancing your past.

Start romancing your future. Stop telling the story of your past. Start telling the story of your future. Stop believing in your past. Start believing in a new future. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.