The Resilient Mind - Respond with Resilience: Building a Stronger Mindset - Dr. Joe Dispenza

Episode Date: July 11, 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, respond with resilience, with Dr. Joe Dispenza. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Epigenetics says it's the environment that signals the gene.

Genes don't create disease. Our response to the environment actually creates disease. Well, the end product of an experience in the environment is called an emotion. So the person who lives by the same emotion every single day, the body's so objective it's believing it's living in the same environment, doesn't know the difference. And they keep the same genes signaled in the same way.

Genes make proteins. Proteins are responsible for the structure and function of your body. The expression of proteins is the expression of life. And the person now is in the same emotional state. They're expressing the same genes and nothing changes in our life until we change. Okay, so now the person who trades resentment and frustration and anger, and everything else for an elevated emotion and they can sustain that state.

The body's so objective that it's believing it's living in a different environment. So they're knocking on the genetic door. So the elevated emotion, the person memorizes, the body is so objective, it doesn't know the difference between the real-life experience that's creating that emotion and the emotion that that person is regulating by thought alone.

Keep knocking on the genetic door. You downregulate the gene for disease and you upregulate the gene for. health because their bodies in a different emotional state and the body's believing is living in a different environment. And we've done studies with novice meditators. And we were curious to see what kind of biological changes would take place in one week if you went all in.

Like all in. Like immersed yourself in the entire week-long event. We draw blood and we look at about 2,882 metabolites. All exosomes, gene expression. And at the end of seven days, the novice meditators, almost 100% of them, show substantial biological changes in their blood that suggests that they're living in a different environment. Now, here's the weird part about it. They're in a ballroom.

There's nothing going on in a ballroom. I've been to thousands of ballrooms. There's nothing very exciting going on in a ballroom. They're actually making those changes inwardly. And I say to our research team, where are those chemicals coming from? Where are they coming from? The person's not taking any substance. It's coming from within us.

And so the nervous system starts manufacturing a whole pharmacy of chemicals equal to the person's intention and emotional state. And it's how we think and how we feel that begins to alter things in our lives. Now you can understand that whether it's joyful or stressful, with every thought you think, every emotion you feel, and every event you experience, you're acting as an epigenetic engineer of your own cells. You control your destiny. So this raises another question. If your environment changes and you then program new genes in new ways, is it possible based on your perceptions and beliefs to program the gene ahead of the actual environment. Feelings and emotions are normally the end products of experiences, but can you combine a clear

intention with an emotion that begins to give the body a sampling of the future experience before it's been made manifest? When you're truly focused on an intention for some future outcome, if you can make inner thought more real than the outer environment during the process, The brain won't know the difference between the two. Then your body, as the unconscious mind, will begin to experience the new future event in the present moment. You'll signal new genes in new ways to prepare for this imagined future event. If you continue to mentally practice enough times this new series of choices, behaviors, and experiences that you desire,

reproducing the same new level of mind over and over again, then your brain will begin to physically change, installing new neurological circuitry to begin to think from that new level of mind. To look as if the experience has already happened, you'll be producing epigenetic variations that lead to real structural and functional changes in the body by thought alone. Just as do those who respond to a placebo, then your brain and body will no longer be living in the same past.

They'll be living in the new future that you created in your mind. This is possible through mental rehearsal. This technique is basically closing your eyes and repeatedly imagining performing an action and mentally reviewing the future you want all the while reminding yourself of who you no longer want to be, the old self and who you do want to be. this process involves thinking about your future actions, mentally planning your choices, and focusing your mind on a new experience. Let's go over this sequence in greater detail so we can more thoroughly understand exactly what's happening in mental rehearsal and how it works. As you mentally rehearse a destiny or dream about a new outcome, you imagine it over and over again until it becomes familiar to you.

the more knowledge and experience you have wired in your brain about the new reality you desire, the more resources you have to create a better model of it in your mental picturing. And so the greater your intention and expectation are, you are reminding yourself of what your life will look like and feel like once you get what you want. Now you are putting an intention behind your attention. then you consciously marry your thoughts and intentions with a heightened state of emotion such as joy or gratitude. Once you can embrace that new emotion and you get more excited, you're bathing your body in the neurochemistry that would be present if that future event were actually happening. It could be suggested that you're

giving your body a taste of the future experience. Your brain and body don't know the difference between having an actual experience in your life and just thinking about the experience, neurochemically, it's the same. So your brain and body begin to believe they're actually living in the new experience in the present moment. By keeping your focus on this future event and not letting any other thoughts distract you. In a matter of moments, you turn down the volume on the neural circuits connected to the old self, which begins to turn off the old genes,

and you fire and wire new neural circuits, which initiates the right signals to activate new genes in new ways. Thanks to the neuroplasticity discussed previously, the circuits in your brain begin to reorganize themselves to reflect what you're mentally rehearsing. And as you keep coupling your new thoughts and mental images with that strong positive emotion,

then your mind and body are, working together and you're now in a new state of being. At this point, your brain and body are no longer a record of the past. They are a map to the future, a future that you've created in your mind. Your thoughts have become your experience and you just became the placebo. I think there's two times the door to the subconscious mind opens up. When we wake up in the morning and we go to bed at night and it's simple brain chemistry and simple physiology. We have a circadian rhythm. As soon as there's light, our body has been pretty much programmed that we begin to release serotonin, different chemicals that kind of wake us up. So our brain waves go from delta to theta

to alpha to beta. And you kind of slide up this way and then you're back to conscious awareness and local and space and time. When you go to bed at night, you go from beta to alpha to theta to Delta and you slide down. Now, if you're stressed, you can't stop thinking. You stay in beta and you're thinking actually arousing the body because you're thinking about your problems. You can't slide down, right? So those two points in the day, when we wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, when alpha, our analytical facilities are suppressed, we're in theta, we're in a hypnotic state. And the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind is wide open. What separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind is the analytical mind.

So as you suppress analytical facilities, you can program anybody to do anything. So then what really happens for most people before they even reach for their cell phone. And by the way, the statistics are 86% of the people in the Western world. First thing they do is they reach for the cell phone and they connect to everything that's known. I would never tell people how to think. but I would give them information to cause them to think. So the device is reminding them of things that are known. And every person, every object, everything, every place is mapped neurologically in our brain

because we've experienced it. And then we have an emotion associated with our coworker, with our boss, with our ex, with our whoever. And so the moment we start responding, now we start feeling the same way. so now the environment is actually controlling the person's feelings and thoughts and anything that controls the way we feel and the way we think we're victims to so something's programming us to think and feel a certain way

there's nothing wrong with that you should check your text and do whatever you need to do but the first thing in the morning if the door between the conscious mind the subconscious mind is open why don't we program a new behavior Why don't we rehearse a different way of being with our children, with our spouse, in our Zoom meetings, when we're alone, when we're in traffic? Is there a better way to evolve our experience? So if you're truly in the game of evolution, you're truly in the game, like one lifetime one day, what am I working on today? Can I respond a different way to this person?

Can I think this way instead of that way? Let me be conscious of my unconscious thoughts. Let me not be in a habit. Let me stay away from certain emotions. Let me practice feeling these emotions and see if I can maintain it. Now you're in the game. You're out of the bleachers

and you're on the playing field. So it actually happens even before the cell phone. Because what most people do is they wake up and the first thing they do is the brain is a record of the past. They think of their problems. And those problems are just memories that are etched in the brain that are connected to certain people and objects

at certain times and places. The moment they think of their problems are thinking in the past. Then when they think about their problems and they feel unhappy, now their bodies in the past. And if you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny,

wow. And then the emotion that's associated to it is now the body's in the past because thoughts of the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body and how we think and how we feel creates our state of being. Now here's the problem.

If you can't think greater than how you feel and you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny and you understand that feelings and emotions are wrecked or the past, then you're thinking in the past and your life

will stay the same. If we have a heightened emotional response to the new thoughts we're concentrating on in mental rehearsal, it's like turbocharging our efforts because the emotions help us make epigenetic changes much faster. We don't need the emotional component.

After all, the subjects who strengthened their muscles by imagining they were lifting weights didn't need to get blist out to change their genes. However, they inspired themselves by using their imaginations with each mental lift saying, harder, harder, harder. The consistent emotion was the energetic catalyst that truly enhance the process.

Maintaining such an elevated emotion allows us to get far more dramatic results much more quickly. The same kind of amazing results as we see in the placebo response. Japanese researchers found that watching an hour-long comedy show upregulated 39 genes, 14 of which were related to natural killer cell activity in the immune system. Several other studies have shown increases in various antibodies after subjects watched a humorous videotape. Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill further showed that increased positive emotions

produced increases in vagal tone, a measure of the health of the vagus nerve which plays a major part in regulating the autonomic nervous system, and homeostasis. In a Japanese study, when baby rats were tickled for five minutes a day, for five days in a row, to stimulate positive emotion, the rat's brains generated new neurons. In each of these cases, strong positive emotions help the subjects trigger real physical changes that improve their health. Positive emotions cause the body and brain to flourish. Studies, the moment someone starts getting a clear intention of a new future,

wanting to live without pain or disease, and then combines it with a heightened emotion, excitement, hope, and anticipation of actually living without pain or disease is the moment the body is no longer in the past. The body is living in that new future, because as we've seen, the body doesn't know the difference between an emotion created by an actual experience and one created by thought alone.

So that heightened state of emotion in response to the new thought is a vital component of that process because it's new information coming from outside the cell and to the body. The experience from the outer environment or inner environment is the same.

So it makes sense that we should concentrate not merely on avoiding negative emotions like fear and anger, but also on consciously cultivating heartfelt positive emotions such as gratitude, joy, excitement, enthusiasm, fascination, awe, inspiration, wonder, trust, appreciation, kindness, compassion, and empowerment to give us every advantage in maximizing our health. Studies show that getting in touch with positive, expansive emotions like kindness and compassion, emotions that are our birthright, by the way, tends to

release a different neuropeptide called oxytocin, which naturally shuts off the receptors in the amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear and anxiety. With fear out of the way, we can feel infinitely more trust, forgiveness, and love. We move from being selfish to selfless. And as we embody this new state of being, our neuropsychotry opens the door to endless possibilities that we never could have even imagined before, because now we're not expending all our energy trying to figure out how to survive. Scientists are finding areas in the body like the intestines, the immune system, the liver and the heart, as well as many other organs that contain receptor sites for oxytocin. These organs are highly responsive to oxytocin's major healing effect, which has been linked to growing more blood

vessels in the heart, stimulating immune function, increasing gastric motility, and normalizing blood sugar levels. Let's return to mental rehearsal for a moment. Remember how the frontal lobe is our ally in mental rehearsal? That's true because, as we established earlier, the frontal lobe helps us unplug from the body, the environment, and time. The three main focuses of someone who's living in survival mode. It helps us get past ourselves to a state of pure consciousness, where we have no ego. In this new state, as we envision what we desire, our hearts are more open and positive emotion can flood through us so that now the loop of feeling what we're thinking and thinking what we're feeling is finally working in our favor. The selfish mindset we were in when we were in survival mode

no longer exists because the energy we channeled towards survival needs has now been freed up for us to create. It's as though someone paid our rent or mortgage payment for the month so that we have extra cash to play with. Now we can understand exactly why it is that if we hold a clear intention of a new future, marry it to a state of expansive, elevated emotion, and repeat that over and over until we've created a new state of mind and a new state of being, these thoughts will seem more real to us than our previous limited view of reality. We're finally free, and once we truly embrace that emotion, we can more easily fall in love with the possibility that we've been envisioning.

The symphony conductor, frontal lobe, feels like a kid in a candy store, excitedly and joyfully seeing all sorts of creative possibilities for new neural connections that can combine to form new neural nets. And as the conductor unplugs us from the old state of being and switches on the circuits in this new state of being, our neurochemicals begin delivering new messages to our cells, which are now prepared to make epigenetic changes that signal new genes in new empowering ways.

And because we've used heightened emotions to make it seem as though it's already happened, we're signaling the gene of, ahead of the environment. Now we're no longer waiting for the change and hoping for the change. We are the change. Thank you for tuning in.

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