The Resilient Mind - Transform Your Mind - Dr. Joe Dispenza

Episode Date: March 19, 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_JournalSubscribe to Steven Bartlett for more inspiring videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Transform Your Mind with Dr. Joe Dispenza. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. I was interested, really, in the transcendental experience, the transcendental moment. So when I started teaching this work, I taught the work because people were asking, how do you do it? like, how do you change your life? And what does it mean to change?

And so I want to provide people the information, where they can actually learn the information, make new connections in their brain. That's what learning is. Repeat what they've learned to the person next to them, you know, build a model of understanding so you can remember it. Remind yourself what you've learned

because it's so much easier to forget this information then to remember it. So create a new level of mind. take away all the doubt, the conjecture, the superstition, the dogma, and so that the person can actually understand what they're doing and why they're doing. So the how gets easier. And when the how gets easier, we assign meaning to the act because we understand what we're doing. And when we do that, we want a greater outcome. So I want to give people the information. And I looked at all the latest research that pointed the finger at human potential and human possibility. I had my

personal experience with a personal injury. We talked about it last time. I studied spontaneous remissions. I wanted to see what people had in common with each other. And I couldn't find the explanation pretty much in contemporary texts. I had to start looking at neuroplasticity and epigenetics. And then I wanted to see, well, now that I know what people did and I understood what they did to have their own personal healings and transformation, could I reproduce the effect? knowing what they did, finding out what the commonalities were, putting it in the language of science, and then teaching it to people, they could be sick or they could be well. It wouldn't matter. But understand what they did in order for them to change and have their life change.

And after a couple years of teaching it, we started to see kind of the same type of effects in those people that were applying and doing something with it. So this is a time in history where it's not enough to know. a time in history to know how. So when we started seeing people stepping out of wheelchairs and having dramatic changes in their health, I knew that in some moment during the retreat or during their meditation, that something happened to them. They had an experience inwardly that must have changed them biologically.

In other words, if you come into an event and you have three days to be together and at the end of three days, you're no longer in your wheelchair and you no longer have symptoms of MS. That, you know, the human being in me said, wow, that's amazing. The scientists in me said, how? Like, how did that happen? So that's when we started doing our own independent research. And that's when I started calling in neuroscientists and, you know, biologists and quantum physicists and really scientists measuring a heart rate variability to look to see. see what was going on in people that were coming to our events. So I could answer the question by saying now that the majority of the research that I look at

is our own personal research. And we have the largest database in the world now on meditation and the mind-body connection. And what we do is we really work on demystifying the process of change and transformation. And if we're able to demystify it, I think all. all the measurements of the transformation that we're seeing is more information for me to teach transformation better. And I think that's how we close the gap between knowledge and experience. So we have a huge research team.

We work with UC San Diego. We work with other universities like Harvard, Stanford. And the data is so compelling. And the data is so amazing that I think we're making scientific history right now. People come for all kinds of reasons. The baseline is that they understand on some level that meditation can change their body and change their life. Some people understand that they could have mystical experiences without using any exogenous substances. So we have people that come that want to heal their body that want to have a new job or a new career or become abundant,

people that want to have loving relationships and people want to have mystical experiences, whatever that is, right? But the person is coming with the intention of actually creating exactly what they want. So that's what they think they're there for. But in time, what they're really coming for is to change. And 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. They're doing 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 to that. The stronger the emotion we feel from some event in our life, a trauma, a betrayal, 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 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 and 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? 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 over 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, 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, is to 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. Okay, so we work with Navy SEALs, special ops, prisoners. We work with people that have had some very serious traumas, have really serious abuses, just difficult childhoods. These people are, you know, night terrors, suicidal. can't, you know, leave their homes, socially having trouble, panic attacks. It's kind of funny because the moment that person actually breaks through from the emotion. And the words they typically describe, they say, was like my heart exploded. It's like my heart blew wide open. The moment that happens, they're bringing their body right out of the past, right into the

present moment. And lo and behold, many times there goes the anxiety, there goes the depression, there goes the cyclic mood patterns. Somehow the body gets recalibrated back into order, back into homeostasis. So the point I'm making is that the memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom. And now you're you're ready for the next adventure in your life. 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.

Like, 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. Is 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? That's 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. That's 95% of a person by the middle of their life, their, you know, hardwired attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions, automatic habits and behaviors and unconscious emotional responses. 95% 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 caused you to learn that, you know, your observation caused you to get programmed to that's the way life is by mirror neurons looking at behaviors that are being programmed in you. So but that's not who you are. 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. That's 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 say, 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. That first, is the first step insight? Like, is this a sequential multi-step process to change? I think that insight is an aspect of awareness. So is awareness stage? Yeah, so consciousness is awareness, and awareness is paying attention and noticing.

So I think that I think the first step is to become conscious that we're a certain way. And sometimes it lands as an insight or a download or a life experience that just kind of goes, you go, whoa. Like, you know, so I behave this way or I did this thing. So I think when you don't have that, you don't have a conscience. and you can just keep staying in that world. But sooner or later, you have to become aware. How do I increase my awareness? By paying attention.

What we know is that the more you practice being present, the better you get at it. And so how do you do that? If you sit in a meditation, right? And so there's a mode in the brain called default mode, and it's just always busy. It's consuming enormous amounts of energy in the brain, and it's always trying to predict the future based on what it knows in the past.

It's kind of an anticipation machine. It's always trying to fill in a known in reality so we feel safe. So a default mode system in the brain when you close your eyes in a meditation is going to immediately go into overdrive. It's going to say, oh, my back hurts a little bit, I'm kind of thirsty, how long is this going to go? I really don't want to do this. I don't like the music, you know, it might be too long. Oh, I'm starting to get a little frustrated. I want to lay down, you know, all of this stuff comes up.

And then people have the belief and they say, I can't meditate. That's their conclusion from the experience. That's their, I'm not a good meditator. That's their affirmation. That's their belief, right? From that experience. But if you say to a person, listen, that's normal. But every time you catch yourself going unconscious, catch yourself going unconscious,

and become conscious, that's a victory. And as tedious as it may be in the beginning, the more you catch yourself going on conscious and becoming conscious, the more conscious you become in your life. And all of a sudden, you begin to pay attention to things that you weren't paying attention to before. So in the work that we do, we say that being in the present moment, truly in the present moment,

is being comfortable in the unknown, right? The present moment is the unknown, because there is the familiar past that we feel emotionally and we have the predictable future, which are both the unknowns. Being the present moment is being in the unknown, and that goes against thousands of years of programming because our biology is programmed that if we are truly in the unknown, we should be in survival.

because if you're in survival and you're in the fighter flight system, the unknown is a threat. It's a danger. So always try to predict the future based on the past and you'll have better chances of survival. Predict the worst case scenario and be ready for that. Anything less that happens, you have better chance of surviving. So then to rest in the unknown goes against a lot of our biology. And we discover that when a person keeps doing it over and over again, the body gets agitated, it gets frustrated, it gets impatient, instead of the person saying, I quit.

Give them something to do, and they can lower the volume to the emotion and settle the animal down, like training an animal, settling the body back down into the present moment. We teach people how to do that, and that's the victory. And if they catch their mind going from a person to another person to another object to their cell phone, to their computer, to a place they need to be at a time, and they catch themselves, with their brain firing in modulated compartments. If they keep catching themselves doing that, if they keep doing that and they catch the circuit

when it's firing and they settle it down, in time, sooner or later, they're going to stop firing those circuits in the brain. And their brainwaves begin to change from an agitated, aroused state into a more coherent and slower brainwave state. So when they do this enough times, the brain begins to synchronize. The brain begins to fire in greater levels of wholeness or greater

levels of order. So when that occurs then, the nervous system gets very regulated, gets very orderly. The autonomic nervous system moves into a state of regulation. Disregulation of the autonomic nervous system is called stress, right? So to answer your question, when people do this really well, in just a few days, they'll get really good at it. The side effect of that is they get very relaxed in their heart. It's relaxed in the heart, and it's awake in the brain. And the more relaxed you get in your heart, we've discovered, really relaxing into your heart, the more the heart informs the brain to get creative.

And so now the person has this kind of synchronization that's taking place between their heart and their brain as well. And they can rest in the present moment. So the way you do that is you define what it really means to change. And to change is to be greater than the conditions in your environment, to be able to think, act, and feel differently in your same environment. That's what changes. To change is to be greater than your body.

To be greater than its drives in a meditation, I'm speaking specifically, greater than its emotional responses, its memories, its emotional reactions, greater than its habits. The habit is when you've done something so many times the body knows how to do it better than the conscious mind there. So if you're sitting in a meditation, your body wants to get up and wants to get going and got people to see things to do, that's kind of like automatic, right? And people get up and they say, I can't meditate. But if you tell them that when you notice that, you bring your body back into the

present moment, you settle it down and tell it it's no longer the mind that you're the mind. You're training the animal sooner or later. The body literally responds to a new mind. And there's literally a liberation of energy. The body begins to liberate energy. And if the person's not thinking about time, if you're not thinking about where you need to be, where you need to go, where you were yesterday, where you're sitting, where you live, If you're not thinking about any place, you can go from somewhere to nowhere. And if you're not thinking about the predictable future of the familiar past, you can go from some time to no time.

And we discovered when a person becomes nobody, no one, no thing, nowhere, and no time. They literally become pure consciousness. And opening our awareness, I know this is kind of difficult to explain because we're materialists, opening our awareness to nothing and sensing space tends to cause us to move more into the eternal present moment and there's a change that takes place

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