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

by Joe Dispenza

Warning: when feelings become the means of thinking, or if we cannot think greater than how we feel, we can never change. To change is to think greater than how we feel. To change is to act greater than the familiar feelings of the memorized self. It is to be greater than the body.

As a practical example, let’s say you’re driving to work this morning and you begin to think about the heated encounter you had a few days ago with a co-worker. As you think the thoughts associated with that person and that particular experience, your brain starts releasing chemicals that circulate through your body. Very quickly, you begin to feel exactly the way you were thinking. You probably become angry.

This describes those moments when you literally cant think about it without getting mad all over again

effect, your feelings are now controlling your thinking. Your body is now driving your mind.

Im learning to respect the fact that my mind is the greatest power that I have. Its interesting bc i feel like i dont always respect it because its not tangible and obvious on the surface

When the body remembers better than the conscious mind—that is, when the body is the mind—that’s called a habit.

Psychologists tell us that by the time we’re in our mid-30s, our identity or personality will be completely formed. This means that for those of us over 35, we have memorized a select set of behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, emotional reactions, habits, skills, associative memories, conditioned responses, and perceptions that are now subconsciously programmed within us. Those programs are running us, because the body has become the mind.

About 95 percent of who we are by midlife1 is a series of subconscious programs that have become automatic—driving a car, brushing our teeth, overeating when we’re stressed, worrying about our future, judging our friends, complaining about our lives, blaming our parents, not believing in ourselves, and insisting on being chronically unhappy, just to name a few.

Think about that: 5 percent of the mind is conscious, struggling against the 95 percent that is running subconscious automatic programs.

Thus you can remember experiences better because you recall how they felt at the time they happened—feelings and emotions are a chemical record of past experiences.

Maya Angelou

One of the most active areas of research today is epigenetics (literally, “above genetics”), the study of how the environment controls gene activity.

When you have thoughtfully rehearsed a future reality until your brain has physically changed to look like it has had the experience, and you have emotionally embraced a new intention so many times that your body is altered to reflect that it has had the experience, hang on . . . because this is the moment the event finds you!

This is one of the reasons why it is so hard to change. The conscious mind may be in the present, but the subconscious body-mind is living in the past.

We, as personalities, memorize our emotional reactions and live in the past.

If you start keeping track of your thoughts and write them down, you’ll find that most of the time, you are either thinking ahead or looking back.

What some might call miracles, I describe as cases of individuals working toward changing their state of being, so that their bodies and minds are no longer merely a record of their past but become active partners, taking steps to a new and better future.

the main obstacle to breaking the habit of being yourself is thinking and feeling equal to your environment, your body, and time. Obviously, then, learning to think and feel (be) greater than the “Big Three” is your first goal as you prepare for the meditation process you will learn in this book.

greater than your environment, your body, and time. These moments when you transcend the Big Three are what some people call being “in the flow.”

If we focus on an unwanted past or a dreaded future, that means that we live mostly in stress—in survival mode. Whether we’re obsessing over our health (the survival of the body), paying our mortgage (the survival need for shelter from our external environment), or not having enough time to do what we need to do to survive, most of us are much more familiar with the addictive state of mind we’ll call “survival” than we are with living as creators.

That deer, back to happily grazing, isn’t consumed with thoughts about what just happened a few minutes ago, let alone the time a coyote chased it two months ago. This kind of repetitive stress is harmful to us, because no organism was designed with a mechanism to deal with negative effects on the body when the stress response is turned on with great frequency and for long duration.

Fight-or-flight is using up the energy your internal environment needs. Your body is stealing this vital energy from your immune, digestive, and endocrine systems, among others, and directing it to the muscles that you’d use to fight a predator or run from danger. But in your situation, that’s only working against you.

From a psychological perspective, overproduction of stress hormones creates the human emotions of anger, fear, envy, and hatred; incites feelings of aggression, frustration, anxiety, and insecurity; and causes us to experience pain, suffering, sadness, hopelessness, and depression.

When our stress response is triggered, we focus on three things, and they are of highest importance: The body. (It must be taken care of.) The environment. (Where can I go to escape this threat?) Time. (How much of it do I have to use in order to evade this threat?) Living in survival is the reason why we humans are so dominated by the Big Three.

The stress response and the hormones that it triggers force us to focus on (and obsess about) the body, the environment, and time. As a result, we begin to define our “self” within the confines of the physical realm; we become less spiritual, less conscious, less aware, and less mindful.

When the ego is balanced, its natural instinct is self-preservation. There’s a healthy balance between its needs and those of others, its attention to itself and to others.

But when chronic, long-term stress chemicals push the body and brain out of balance, the ego becomes overfocused on survival and puts the self first, to the exclusion of anything else—we’re selfish all the time. Thus, we become self-indulgent, self-centered, and self-important, full of self-pity and self-loathing. When the ego is under constant stress, it’s got a “me first” priority.

Under those conditions, the ego is primarily concerned with predicting every outcome of every situation, because it is overfocused on the outer world and feels completely separated from the 99.99999 percent of possibility. In fact, the more we define reality through our senses, the more this reality becomes our law. And material reality as law is the very opposite of the quantum law. Whatever we place our awareness on is our reality. Consequently, if our attention is focused on the body and our physical realm, and if we become locked into a particular line of linear time, then this becomes our reality.

1. Metacognition: Becoming Self-Aware to Inhibit Unwanted States of Mind and Body

To become familiar with your unconscious states of mind and body takes an act of will, intention, and heightened awareness. If you become more aware, you will become more attentive. If you become more attentive, you will be more conscious. If you grow to be more conscious, you will notice more. If you notice more, you have a greater ability to observe self and others, both inner and outer elements of your reality. Ultimately, the more you observe, the more you awaken from the state of the unconscious mind into conscious awareness.

2. Creating a New Mind to Think about New Ways of Being

dreaming of more complex and detailed models. To initiate this step of creation, it is always good to move into a state of wonder, contemplation, possibility, reflection, or speculation by asking yourself some important questions. Open-ended inquiries are the most provocative approach to producing a fluent stream of consciousness: What would it be like to . . . ? What is a better way to be . . . ? What if I was this person, living in this reality? Who in history do I admire, and what were his/her admirable traits?

By beginning to mentally rehearse new ways of being, you start rewiring yourself neurologically to a new mind—and the more you can “re-mind” yourself, the more you’ll change your brain and your life.

When the frontal lobe is working in creative mode, it looks out over the landscape of the entire brain and gathers all of the brain’s information to create a new mind. If compassion is the new state of being that you want to create, then once you ask yourself what it would be like to be compassionate, the frontal lobe would naturally combine different neural networks together in new ways to create a new model or vision. It might take stored information from books you read, DVDs you saw, personal experiences, and so forth to make the brain work in new ways. Once the new mind is in place, you see a picture, hologram, or vision of what compassion means to you.

3. Making Thought More Real Than Anything Else

If you effectively execute the creative process, this experience produces an emotion, as you know, and you begin to feel like that event is actually happening to you in the present. You are one with the thoughts and feelings associated with your desired reality.

When you’re living in survival, you’re trying to control or force an outcome; that’s what the ego does. When you’re living in the elevated emotion of creation, you feel so lifted that you would never try to analyze how or when a chosen destiny will arrive. You trust that it will happen because you have already experienced it in mind and body—in thought and feeling. You know that it will, because you feel connected to something greater. You are in a state of gratitude because you feel like it’s already happened.

We’ve covered a lot of possibilities: the concept that your subjective mind can affect your objective world; your potential to change your brain and body by becoming greater than your environment, your body, and time; and the prospect that you can move out of the reactive, stressful mode of living in survival, as though only the outer world is real, and enter the inner world of the creator. It is my hope that you can now view these possibilities as possible realities.

Much of what you learn is via this progression from thinking to doing to being, and three areas of the brain facilitate this mode of learning.

Given that to change our lives, we first have to change our thoughts and feelings, then do something (change our actions or behaviors) to have a new experience, which in turn produces a new feeling, and then we must memorize that feeling until we move into a state of being (when mind and body are one),

Experience is for the body. If knowledge is for the mind, and experience is for the body, then when you apply knowledge and create a new experience, you teach the body what the mind has intellectually learned. Knowledge without experience is merely philosophy; experience without knowledge is ignorance. There’s a progression that has to take place. You have to take knowledge and live it—embrace it emotionally.

So by intellectually learning compassion with your brain and mind, then demonstrating this ideal in your environment through experience, you embodied this elevated feeling. You just conditioned your body to a new mind of compassion. Your mind and body were working together. You embodied compassion. In a sense, the word has become flesh.

My definition of mastery is that our internal chemical state is greater than anything in our external world.

In this book, you will learn a special meditation designed for a specific purpose—to help you overcome the habit of being yourself and become that ideal self you desire.

In meditation, you take that knowledge and then place yourself in the equation. Instead of merely asking what it would mean to be happy, you put yourself in the position of practicing, and thus living in, a state of happiness. After all, you know what happiness looks and feels like. You’ve had past experiences with it yourself; you’ve seen other people’s versions of it. Now, you get to pick and choose from that knowledge and experience to create a new ideal of yourself.

A new state of being creates a new personality . . . a new personality produces a new personal reality.

Instead, I’m asking you to take control and to invert the process. Rather than waiting for an occasion to cause you to feel a certain way, create the feeling ahead of any experience in the physical realm; convince your body emotionally that a “gratitude-generating” experience has already taken place.

I’m asking you to use thought and feeling to put yourself in the shoes of that future self, that possible you, so vividly that you begin to emotionally condition your body to believe that you are that person now. When you open your eyes after your meditative session, who do you want to be? What would it feel like to be this ideal self, or to have this desired experience?

Can you accept the notion that once you change your internal state, you don’t need the external world to provide you with a reason to feel joy, gratitude, appreciation, or any other elevated emotion?