The Resilient Mind - Rewiring Your Brain for Healing and Wellness - Dr. Joe Dispenza

Episode Date: March 5, 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 rewiring your brain for healing and wellness with Dr. Joe Dispenza. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. First of all, I never planned on doing any of this, to be really straight and really honest. I had my own personal injury, I run over by a truck and a triathlon, broke six vertebrae in my spine. typical surgery is Harrington rod surgery. I was young. I was in my 20s. I was athletic. I had a martial arts studio. A yoga studio. I was training for, you know, a lot of different races. And I went from

100 miles an hour to face down and in trouble. And I couldn't imagine living my life on addictive medications with Harrington rods from the base of my neck to the base of my spine. It was a full, you know, six compression fractures is a lot. So I had bone fragments on the cord, and I had the neural arch broken, so I was in a lot of trouble. So I figured my mind as well see if my mind can influence my body. This was at age 20-something? 24, yeah. And it worked. It really worked for me. And when you go through that kind of initiation, you can't go back to business as usual. And it was a dark night of the soul for me during that time because I couldn't get my mind to do what I wanted it to do. Because I think when you're faced with crisis like that,

we always focus on what we don't want to have happen instead of what we do want to have happen. So turning that battleship around for me as a 24-year-old kid was an enormous effort because I couldn't keep my mind on the task. So when I finally was able to get back on my feet and return back to my life, I decided from that point, I decided from that, point that it would be good to study other people that may have had a spontaneous remission from disease where we're treating conventionally or unconventionally they were staying the same getting worse and all of a sudden they were getting better so i traveled around the world i traveled to 17 different countries interviewed a lot of people at age 28 now uh before you're 20 let's see i was probably 29

yeah so i wanted to see if my mind could influence my body and i decided two things i I thought, God, there's an innate intelligence within us that's giving us life. It's keeping our heart beating, digesting our food, all the way down to the cellular level, organizing trillions of functions in a cell every second, correcting for mutations in the DNA. So I had a respect for that innate intelligence. And I thought, well, it can heal to a certain point. And it does. And it does.

It is healing. It's trying. It's very best. compression fractures, I thought, this has got to be next level now. This has got to be next level. This is this. So I had to weigh what I knew against what I didn't know. And so for me, I thought, God, if I could make contact with this intelligence and give it a plan, give it a directive, give it some orders, give it a template. And if I could do it really well, once I've had that, that vision in my mind super clear, I know that I can't heal it. I'm going to surrender that

vision to a greater mind and see if it could begin to work with me. Because what I want to do is I wanted to influence it and see if I could take it to the next level. Because I knew that, well, you know, the compression fractures could heal, but I would lose bone height. I still love ragged inside my cord. I had motor function problems. I had sensory function problems. I had an enormous amount of pain. So this was kind of next level for me. And I think anytime you go against convention, whether it's social convention, scientific convention, religious convention, anytime you go against the current belief systems, you're always considered foolhardy or insane, right? I mean, you're nuts. The four opinions I had from four surgeons, they all thought I hit my head.

They were like, what do you, what are you thinking here? So, but if you pull it off, in 1986, you didn't do that. Like I was living in San Diego, you just didn't do that. And I just figured, God, if I have the Harrington Rod surgery, I'm not going to be the same guy. I won't be able to do, I won't be able to do anything like I was doing. And so I was willing to trust in that process. I figured if it didn't work, I'm going to wind up. with surgery anyway so I might as well roll the dice and so number one was make contact with that

intelligence I'm not going anywhere I'm not doing anything I'm laying face down and the second thing was I'm not going to let any thought slip by my awareness unnoticed by me so mystic mystical means unknown that's what the word means so I was willing to trust if this could work now little background I had I had studied hypnosis a lot I saw the people power, the subconscious mind, I knew, I saw, you know, amazing things. And then I did have this kind of crazy moment where I was leaving for graduate school and my best friend's father gave me a book, autobiography of a yogi, and I was reading this book and I was, I was like, God, if that is actually the truth, and I am unaware of a lot. And I read that book in scrutiny. I, and I read that book

and scrutinized it and threw it across the room and wrestled with it. But I had kind of this kind of idea that I was willing to take that risk because I had the time. I went from 100 miles an hour in my life to laying face down. So I knew enough about the spine. I knew enough about the body. The first six and a half weeks was misery. It was really, really a dark night of the soul because I couldn't. not, I was wrestling with my own belief and my own self-doubt and my inability to be able to control

my mind when you're at a balance. So the first six and a half weeks, it took me three hours to go through that inward process and then when I was done, I wasn't satisfied. But after that six and a half weeks, what took me three hours, three and a half, sometimes four hours to do? Because the moment I started thinking, should I sell my practice? Should I sell my home? I'm going to be living in a wheelchair. You know, the moment I was, my mind left the present moment and I went off to ask. I start all over again.

I'd start home. So it was a very, very deliberate, but very, very difficult process because if you get frustrated, it's going to get worse. So I had to move through all this muck. Yeah. And six and a half weeks, all of a sudden something clicked. It was like I hit a golf ball right in the sweet spot. I had a tennis ball.

It was just right. Something clicked for me. And then all of a sudden from that point forward, it got easier. And what took me three and a half hours, three hours do I was doing in much less time. And I didn't know it at the time, but I was really mastering the ability to pay attention and to be present. Because every time you catch yourself defaulting and you're going unconscious,

the only way you become conscious is you catch yourself going unconscious and you become conscious again. That's the moment to celebrate. Right, and most people say, well, I can't do it. And I was doing that, but really, that's a victory. Yeah, yeah.

Because that's the only way that you're actually going to stop yourself from going unconscious. So I was pruning connections and I was refiring and rewiring new connections and I started developing kind of a new mind And at that moment, Michael, I noticed like the dramatic reduction in my pain. And I was getting sensory feeling back and motor, and then my toes.

And I was just like, okay, whatever you're doing is working, so keep doing it. And your belief at that point goes from here to here. Right. It just catapults because you're seeing the effect of you would cause, right? So for me, I was back in my feet in 10 and a half weeks. They wanted to put me in this huge body cast. I was better. You know, I was done.

So I couldn't go back to business as usual because I was initiated. I have a very scientific mind. So I just kind of sold everything and left and went to the Northwest and started over again. And I wanted to take some time for myself and ask the big questions. If that truly happened, how did that happen? And is there anybody else? Has that happened to anybody else? So I had to start studying epigenetics and neuroplasticity and psychoneuroimmunology

and electromagnetism, quantum physics, and just was this kind of exploration for me. And I started getting closer to the understanding. And then when I started interviewing people that had spontaneous remissions from diseases that were treating conventionally or unconventionally, staying the same and all of a sudden got better. Once I studied and found the commonalities amongst these people, and it was really about the mind. It was really about breaking the habit of being themselves,

their old self and reinventing a new self. The other thing was that they, in their inward process of really deciding who they no longer wanted to be, like if I really could live my life again and live again, how would I live differently? Do I really want to be an attorney? I hate my job. I don't want to be an attorney. I want to be an artist, right? So you see these people make the transition by choice to stop being one person and start being another person. And in their

inward process of thinking about how they do want to think, how they do want to act, how they do want to feel in their new life, they had long moments where they lost track of space and time. Their inward experience became more real than their outer experience. And it caused me to spend a lot of time studying the frontal lobe, which is kind of the workshop of the brain. That's where we focus, where we have intention, so we have attentions, where we have free will, we restrain our behaviors, you know. Judgment, reason. We vent.

We speculate. It's the creative center, right? And so, and then that fourth thing was that they believed there was an intelligence that was giving them life that they would trust and surrender to. Whatever that consciousness is, that's giving us life, that's within us, that's happening and kind of in, I'll say scientifically, the autonomic nervous system, the limbic brain, right, is the seat of all of those biological functions that keeps us in homeostasis and balance, right?

The neocortes, the thinking brain is the analytical mind, and a lot of times that's what kind of gets us in trouble, right? So they had a belief and independent of religion that there was, you know, was some intelligence that was giving them life that could help them in their healing process. Now, there was a spectrum involved in that, but the similarity was that it was within them. So there came a period of time where it was in a documentary, and the documentary became really popular, and people started asking, well, how do you do it? And I think this is a time in history where it's not enough to know.

I think it's a time in history to know how, right? So I thought, okay, I studied all these things. I went back to school and studied neuroscience and just got really into it. And then I was like, okay, if it worked on these sick people, let's see if we can reproduce an outcome. And so for the first couple of years, we didn't really see much. It was doing these one-day courses and two-day courses and people were feeling better at the end of the weekend, but no real big changes. Then all of a sudden, it just started happening. We started seeing the most amazing changes in people's health.

that really challenged my belief. And so when we started seeing people have remissions from very serious stage four cancers and Parkinson's disease and MS and ALS and ALS and spinal cord injuries and all kinds of crazy things, that's when I knew it was time to measure. And so we organized a group of scientists, and now I work with University of California, California, San Diego. And so when I started seeing the outcomes, Michael, and they were unbelievable, literally unbelievable to me.

Like I was shaking my head, like I cannot believe what I'm seeing. And I knew that when a person has an inward experience, where they're in a certain health condition, and then after they're, we use meditation as, and I know, we'll talk about that, demystifying meditation, in a way that allows a person to learn how to make an inward experience really, really real. And so I knew that when a person got up out of a wheelchair with MS, right in front of me, like something was happening in there, something was happening inside of them that was very profound

and very real, right? And it was an experience, right? So we organized, we've got over 20,000 brains, scans. We have fMRI scans. We've measured thousands and thousands of HRV measurements. We've measured gene expression. We've measured microbiome. We've measured 2,882 metabolites in blood. We've measured immune regulation. We've measured tears. We've measured breast milk. We've measured everything you can possibly imagine. And the idea is what happens when a person completely immerses themselves in a community that's interested in change and transformation. And that's what we teach. We teach the process of change. We use meditation, not to heal. Use meditation to change. When you change, you heal, right? So the science has been so compelling because you can't call

a pseudoscience anymore. The data is so profound that it shows that, as an example, the studies that we've done demonstrate that the human nervous system manufactures a pharmacy of chemicals that works sometimes better than any drug, and it's within you. And is it possible then to upregulate genes for health and downregulate the genes for disease? And if you teach people in a very simple way, the philosophy, the theory, the information, the knowledge, and they can learn that information. Learning is making new connections in the brain, as you know, but the research also shows that if you don't review it,

if you don't repeat it, if you don't think about it over and over again, those circuits prune apart within hours or days. So we set up these large events with thousands of people from all over the world, and the information is so tantamount for them because it's what they're going to do with it. They've got to do something with it. So when they learn the information, then they have to teach it back to the person next to them.

They have to be able to explain it. And if they can't explain it, it's not wired in their brains. So as they remind themselves what they learn, they're reproducing that same level of mind. And nerve cells that fire together, wire together. And the more you understand what you're doing, and the more you understand why you're doing it, the how gets easier,

because you can assign meaning to the task. And when you assign meaning to the task, you turn on that prefrontal cortex, and it wants an outcome. So they're installing the neurological hardware in their brain in preparation for the event. So if you can set up the conditions in the environment and give people the proper instructions and they can get their behaviors to match their intentions, their actions equal to their thoughts, they get their mind and body working together and initiate that knowledge.

They should have an experience, right? And the experience then enriches the circuitry in the brain. But the end product of the experience is called an emotion. And then when you feel unlimited or you feel grateful or you feel grateful or you feel empowered. Now you're teaching your body chemically to understand what your mind is intellectually understood. So the information is no longer in the brain.

Now the information's in the body, right? So the person's embodying the truth of that philosophy. So this is kind of the journey of what we do. So then we're measuring, we're measuring what's taking place inwardly. Now, if you can go for seven days and keep reproducing the experience, neurologically and chemically, neurochemically, you're conditioning the mind and body to begin to work as one. And when the body now knows how to do it better than the mind, now it's implicit, it's innate,

it's automatic, it's easy, it's familiar, we've become that knowledge, right? And so the person's in a different state of being. So we have to go from philosopher to initiate to master, you know, from knowledge to experience the wisdom, from mind, the body, the soul, from the thinking to doing to being, learning with your head, applying with your hands, knowing it by heart. And we discovered that it's the overcoming process that is the becoming process because 95% of who we are, by the time we're in the middle of our life, are a set of memorized, hardwired, attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions,

you know, automatic and unconscious habits and behaviors and reflexive emotional responses. So it's that unlearning process, that 95% of being unconscious, getting conscious, And if a person's able to do that, if they're able to reconstruct and reinvent a new way of thinking, a new way of behaving, a new way of feeling, will it be reflected in their biology? And we've discovered that the majority of people that go through a week-long event, it's not like a small percentage. There's a community effect that's taking place. I think when we're brought to our lowest denominator, whether it's crisis, disease, diagnosis, loss, betrayal. It doesn't matter. You reach this lowest denominator where nothing is making that feeling go away. No vacation, no TV show, no friend, where that feeling is, thing is making that feeling go away.

And I think this is a really important moment for people because they don't feel like themselves. Nothing in their environment and their outer world is making this feeling go away. in this is where they start for the first time observing themselves, that idea of metacognition. They feel so different than the way they normally feel that they can view themselves through the eyes of someone else. This is the moment where they can all of a sudden go, oh my God, look at the way you've been thinking.

You've been saying, I can, it's too hard, I hate this person. Those thoughts have consequences. You can say, oh my God, you've been complaining, blame you've been a victim you've been you know you've been judging uh making excuses feeling sorry for your oh my god look at you like it's the it's the lighting the match in the dark place and then you can say my god i live the majority of my life in hatred and anger and fear oh my god that's not loving to me but but no one is going to tell no one you're not going to listen to anybody when they tell you that you're going to bump them off right but this is kind of when

the soul kind of go kind of give you a little nudge like this is your moment right right And so I'm curious. We see that the brain changes the most. When you get beyond, I can't. I'm too tired. I don't feel like it. I want to quit. This is too hard.

I'll never make it. When you get beyond, like people who are curious, what's on the other side of that thought? They're stepping into the unknown. A person who says, oh my God, I want to be happy. Why am I spending the majority of my day complaining? But complaining is not going to make me happy.

It's going to make me unhappy. And then, oh my God, this emotion that I live by every day, emotions are just a chemical record of the past, right? So a person feels frustration because of an experience that happens or has a series of experiences that happen in their life. The stronger of the emotion that we have to some experience in our life, the more altered we are inside of us, the disruption in our chemical continuity causes the brain to freeze a frame and take a snapshot or a series of snapshots. And that's called the long-term memory. So the memory is embossed in the brain, right? So if it happens a few

times, and then you review the event, you keep remembering the event, you're producing the same chemistry in the brain and body as if the event was occurring. And the body's so objective. It's the unconscious mind that it does not know the difference within the real-life experience that's creating that emotion. And the emotion that person's fabricating by memory alone to the body, it's exactly the same. So the body's reliving the trauma 50 to 100 times a day. So it's a thought and a feeling. It's an image and an emotion or a memory and emotion.

It's a stimulus and response. And you're conditioning the body, become the mind of that emotion. And so now the body, the servant, is now the master. So the body has learned it and it's automatic. And so you're sweeping your environment just to look for something to actually cause you to feel fresh. So the hormones of stress become highly addictive. And it's entirely possible that people use the problems and conditions in their life to reaffirm their addiction to frustration, to reaffirm their addiction to that emotion.

So they don't know they're doing that consciously, but they're becoming addicted to the life they don't even like. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes. Download the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes.