Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

by Joe Dispenza

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself is a product of one of my passions—a sincere effort to demystify the mystical so that every person understands that we have, within our reach, all we need to make significant changes in our lives.

This is a time in history when not only do we want to “know,” but we want to “know how.” How do we apply and personalize both emerging scientific concepts and age-old wisdom to succeed at living a more enriched life?

So I invite you to experiment with everything that you learn in this book, and to objectively observe the results. What I mean is that if you make the effort to change your inner world of thoughts and feelings, your external environment should begin to give you feedback to show you that your mind has had an effect on your “outer” world. Why else would you do it?

We should never wait for science to give us permission to do the uncommon; if we do, then we are turning science into another religion. We should be brave enough to contemplate our lives, do what we thought was “outside the box,” and do it repeatedly. When we do that, we are on our way to a greater level of personal power.

When you are under the gun of the fight-or-flight nervous system, being run by its cocktail of intoxicating chemicals, you are programmed to be concerned only about your body, the things or people in your environment, and your obsession with time. Your brain and body are out of balance. You are living a predictable life. However, when you are truly in the elegant state of creation, you are no body, no thing, no time—you forget about yourself. You become pure consciousness, free from the chains of the identity that needs the outer reality to remember who it thinks it is.

Thus, if you can mentally rehearse a desired experience via thought alone, you will experience the emotions of that event before it has physically manifested.

If you can predict the feeling of every experience in your life, there is no room for anything new to occur, because you are viewing your life from the past instead of the future.

You will learn to liberate your energy in the form of emotions, and thus narrow the gap between how you appear and who you are. Ultimately, you will create transparency. When how you appear is who you are, you are truly free.

You will learn that the true purpose of meditation is to get beyond the analytical mind and enter into the subconscious mind so you can make real and permanent changes. If you get up from meditation as the same person who sat down, nothing has happened to you on any level. When you meditate and connect to something greater, you can create and then memorize such coherence between your thoughts and feelings that nothing in your outer reality—no thing, no person, no condition at any place or time—could move you from that level of energy. Now you are mastering your environment, your body, and time.

When you comprehend the what and the why, the more you will know and thus the more you will know how when the time comes.

When people gain the right knowledge, in such a way that they understand it completely, and then have the opportunity for effective instruction to apply what they comprehend . . . then like magic, they can see the fruits of their efforts in the form of changes that serve as feedback in their lives.

Once you can notice what you did inside of you that produced an outcome outside of you, you’ll do it again.

The most likely reason why you were drawn to this book is that your past efforts to make any lasting change in your life—physical, emotional, or spiritual—have fallen short of the ideal of yourself that you imagined. And why those efforts failed has more to do with your beliefs about why your life is the way it is than with anything else, including a perceived lack of will, time, courage, or imagination.

Your past shortfalls can be traced, at their root, to one major oversight: you haven’t committed yourself to living by the truth that your thoughts have consequences so great that they create your reality.

In other words, if you can imagine a future event in your life based on any one of your personal desires, that reality already exists as a possibility in the quantum

This means that the quantum field contains a reality in which you are healthy, wealthy, and happy, and possess all of the qualities and capabilities of the idealized self that you hold in your thoughts. Stay with me and you will see that with willful attention, sincere application of new knowledge, and repeated daily efforts, you can use your mind, as the observer, to collapse quantum particles and organize a vast number of subatomic waves of probability into a desired physical event called an experience in your life.

Your consciousness (mind) has effects on energy (matter) because your consciousness is energy and energy has consciousness.

Now, this leads to the question: if you were to pray (or focus on an intention) for a better life for yourself, could it affect your past, present, and future?

An intentional thought needs an energizer, a catalyst—and that energy is an elevated emotion. Heart and mind working together. Feelings and thoughts unified into a state of being.

What the HeartMath experiment demonstrates is that the quantum field doesn’t respond simply to our wishes—our emotional requests. It doesn’t just respond to our aims—our thoughts. It only responds when those two are aligned or coherent—that is, when they are broadcasting the same signal. When we combine an elevated emotion with an open heart and a conscious intention with clear thought, we signal the field to respond in amazing ways. The quantum field responds not to what we want; it responds to who we are being.

Together, how we think and how we feel produces a state of being, which generates an electromagnetic signature that influences every atom in our world. This should prompt us to ask, What am I broadcasting (consciously or unconsciously) on a daily basis?

Quite simply, our routine, known thoughts and feelings perpetuate the same state of being, which creates the same behaviors, and creates the same reality. So if we want to change some aspect of our reality, we have to think, feel, and act in new ways; we have to “be” different in terms of our responses to experiences. We have to “become” someone else. We have to create a new state of mind . . . we need to observe a new outcome with that new mind.

When you hold clear, focused thoughts about your purpose, accompanied by your passionate emotional engagement, you broadcast a stronger electromagnetic signal that pulls you toward a potential reality that matches what you want.

If your intentions and desires haven’t produced consistent results, you’ve probably been sending an incoherent, mixed message into the field. You may want wealth, you may think “wealthy” thoughts, but if you feel poor, you aren’t going to attract financial abundance to yourself. Why not? Because thoughts are the language of the brain, and feelings are the language of the body.

We should never be able to predict how our new creations will manifest; they must catch us off guard.

What does “going Newtonian” mean when applied to your ability to create? It’s when the external environment is controlling your internal environment (thinking/feeling). That’s cause and effect.

Example bc its raining today i am sad

Instead, change your internal environment—the way you think and feel—and then see how the external environment is altered by your efforts. Strive to create an unknown, new future experience. Then when an unforeseen event occurs in your favor, you will be pleasantly surprised. You just became a quantum creator. You just went from “cause and effect” to “causing an effect.”

Hold a clear intention of what you want, but leave the “how” details to the unpredictable quantum field.

be clear about what u want and let god do the rest

In terms of quantum creating, can you give thanks for something that exists as a potential in the quantum field but has not yet happened in your reality? If so, you are moving from cause and effect (waiting for something outside of you to make a change inside of you) to causing an effect (changing something inside of you to produce an effect outside of you).

The question at the heart of this book is this: Why don’t we send out a signal that will produce a positive outcome for us? How can we change so that the signal we send out matches what we intend to produce in our lives? We will change when we fully commit to the belief that by choosing the thought/signal we send out, we will produce an effect that is observable and unexpected.

How can I think, feel, and behave differently to produce the effect/result that I want?

What has profoundly and positively changed my life, and the lives of so many others, is the understanding that changing one’s mind—and thereby having new experiences and gaining new insights—is simply a matter of breaking the habit of being oneself.

I asked her to create the vision in her mind until it was so clear and real that the thought she was thinking became the experience, and her brain’s synapses began to wire that information as if it was a reality.

Think about that for a moment. What opportunities are out there waiting to find you? Who are you being in this moment . . . and every other moment? Is your being that way going to attract to you all that you desire? Can you change your state of being? And once you inhabit a new mind, can you observe a new destiny? The answers are what the rest of this book is all about.

As you continually think about your problems (consciously or unconsciously), you will only create more of the same type of difficulties for yourself. And maybe you think about your problems so much because it was your thinking that created them in the first place. Perhaps your troubles feel so real because you constantly revisit those familiar feelings that initially created the problem. If you insist on thinking and feeling equal to the circumstances in your life, you will reaffirm that particular reality.

Your identity becomes defined by everything outside of you, because you identify with all of the elements that make up your external world.

You may not think that your environment and your thoughts are that rigidly similar and your reality so easily reproduced. But when you consider that your brain is a complete record of your past, and your mind is the product of your consciousness, in one sense you might always be thinking in the past.

You’re using past events to help you make sense of the present. Instead of trying to predict it, just be present and observe.

Why are you secretly expecting something different to show up in your life, when you think the same thoughts, perform the same actions, and experience the same emotions every single day? Isn’t that the definition of insanity?

When our behaviors match our intentions, when our actions are equal to our thoughts, when our minds and our bodies are working together, when our words and our deeds are aligned . . . there is an immense power behind any individual.

The greatest individuals in history were unwaveringly committed to a future destiny without any need for immediate feedback from the environment.

Another fundamental element shared by each of these celebrated beings was that they were clear in their minds about exactly what they wanted to happen. (Remember, we leave the how to a greater mind, and they must have known this.)

Know what you want but leave the HOW to God.

Not only can we change our brains just by thinking differently, but when we are truly focused and single-minded, the brain does not know the difference between the internal world of the mind and what we experience in the external environment. Our thoughts can become our experience.

Whether we physically or mentally acquire a skill, there are four elements that we all use to change our brains: learning knowledge, receiving hands-on instruction, paying attention, and repetition.

Learning is making synaptic connections; instruction gets the body involved in order to have a new experience, which further enriches the brain. When we also pay attention and repeat our new skill over and over again, our brains will change.

So can you believe in a future you cannot yet see or experience with your senses but have thought about enough times in your mind that your brain is actually changed to look like the experience has already happened ahead of the physical event in your external environment? If so, then your brain is no longer a record of the past, but has become a map to the future.

Then the body immediately sends a confirming message back up to the brain that it’s now feeling exactly the way the brain is thinking.

For our purposes, think of neurotransmitters as chemical messengers primarily from the brain and mind, neuropeptides as chemical signalers that serve as a bridge between the brain and the body to make us feel the way we think, and hormones as the chemicals related to feelings primarily in the body.

Therefore, when you have great thoughts or loving thoughts or joyous thoughts, you produce chemicals that make you feel great or loving or joyful. The same holds true if you have negative, fearful, or impatient thoughts. In a matter of seconds, you begin to feel negative or anxious or impatient.

Figure 3C. The neurochemical relationship between the brain and the body. As you think certain thoughts, the brain produces chemicals that cause you to feel exactly the way you were thinking. Once you feel the way you think, you begin to think the way you feel. This continuous cycle creates a feedback loop called a “state of being.”

A state of being means we have become familiar with a mental-emotional state, a way of thinking and a way of feeling, which has become an integral part of our self-identity. And so we describe who we are by how we are thinking (and thus feeling) or being in the present moment. I am angry; I am suffering; I am inspired; I am insecure; I am negative. . .