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

by Joe Dispenza

how we feel—without the stimulation of our outer reality: Feelings of shame and anger about a failed marriage. Fear of death and uncertainty about the afterlife, related to the loss of a loved one or even a pet. A sense of inadequacy due to a parent’s insistence on perfectionism and achievement at all costs. A sense of stifled entitlement from having grown up in circumstances barely above poverty. A preoccupation with thoughts of not having the right body type in order to look a certain way to the world. These kinds of feelings are what we want to conceal. This is who we truly are, the real self hiding behind the image we are projecting. We can’t face exposing that self to the world, so we pretend to be someone else. We create a set of memorized automatic programs that work to cover the vulnerable parts of us.

At this time of life, other people who don’t strive to keep their feelings buried ask some big questions: Who am I? What is my purpose in life? Where am I going? Who am I doing all of this for? What is God? Where do I go when I die? Is there more to life than “success”? What is happiness? What does all this mean? What is love? Do I love myself? Do I love anyone else? And the soul begins to wake up. . . .

When your life is over and you cannot rely on your external world to define you, you will be left with that feeling you never addressed. You would not have evolved as a soul in that lifetime.

If the soul’s purpose is to learn from experience and gain wisdom, but you stayed stuck in that particular emotion, you never turned your experience into a lesson; you didn’t transcend that emotion and exchange it for any understanding.

Whatever the addiction, people are still thinking that some external thing is going to take that internal feeling away. And remember: we have this natural propensity to associate an external thing that’s making that feeling go away with our internal chemical change. And we like that external thing if it makes us feel good. So we run away from what feels bad or painful, and we move toward what feels good and comfortable or brings us pleasure.

The reason why people need more drugs or more shopping or more affairs is that the chemical rush that’s created from those activities activates the receptor sites on the outside of their cells, which “turns on” the cells. But if receptor sites are continually stimulated, they get desensitized and shut off. So they need a stronger signal, a bit more stimulation, to turn them on the next time—it takes a bigger chemical high to produce the same effects.

We have to become happy before our abundance shows up.

Instead, let’s just unmemorize our self-limiting emotions. A memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom.

So if a person relinquished unhappiness and got on with his life—entered into a new relationship, got a new job, moved to a new place, and made new friends—and then he looked at that past event, he would see that it provided the adversity he needed in order to overcome who he was and become a new person. His perspective would change, just by seeing that he could actually overcome the problem.

grown tired of being beaten down by circumstances, we’ll say: This can’t go on. I don’t care what it takes or how I feel [body]. I don’t care how long it takes [time]. No matter what’s going on in my life [environment], I’m going to change. I have to.

You also have to tell the truth about yourself. You have to come clean and reveal what you’ve been hiding in that shadow part of the gap. You have to drag those things out into the bright light of day. And when you really see what you’ve been doing to yourself, you have to look at that mess and say, This is no longer serving my best interests. This is no longer serving me. This has never been loving to myself. Then you can make a decision to be free.

Pamela’s energy release signaled the field to begin organizing outcomes that were just right for the new self she was in the process of becoming.

Ask yourself: What energy from past experiences (in the form of limited emotions) am I holding on to that reinforces my past identity and emotionally attaches me to my current circumstances? Could I use this same energy and transform it into an elevated state from which to create a new and different outcome?

You no longer rely on the external world to define you. The elevated emotions you are feeling are unconditional. Nobody else and no event can make you feel that way. You are happy and feel inspired just because of who you are.

My transformation wasn’t immediate. I meditated every day, looking at my unwanted emotions, and one by one, I began to unmemorize them. I started my meditative processes of unlearning and relearning, and I worked for months to change myself. In the process, I was intentionally dismantling my old identity and breaking the habit of being myself.

When you move from unconsciously producing thoughts, beliefs, actions, and emotions and take control of them through the conscious application of your will, you can unlock the chains of being your old self to become a new self.

In the Tibetan language, to meditate means “to become familiar with.” Accordingly, I use the term meditation as a synonym for self-observation as well as self-development.

To “know thyself” is to meditate.

in Tibetan, to meditate in Sanskrit means “to cultivate self.” I especially like this definition because of the metaphorical possibilities it offers—for example, gardening or agriculture.

Instead, to cultivate requires making conscious decisions—when to till the soil, when to plant, what to plant, how each of the items planted will work in harmony with the others, how much water and fertilizer to mix in, and so forth. Planning and preparation are essential to the success of the endeavor. This requires our daily “mindful attention.”

When you cultivate anything, you are seeking to be in control. And that’s what is required when you change any part of your self. Instead of allowing things to develop “naturally,” you intervene and consciously take steps to reduce the likelihood of failure. The purpose behind all of this effort is to reap a harvest. When you cultivate a new personality in meditation, the abundant yield you seek to create is a new reality.

Creating a new mind is like cultivating a garden. The manifestations you produce from the garden of your mind will be just like crops from the earth’s soil. Tend well.

Alpha. Now, let’s say that you close your eyes (80 percent of our sensory information derives from sight) and purposefully go inward. Since you are greatly reducing sensory data from the environment, less information is entering your nervous system. Your brain waves naturally slow down into the Alpha state. You relax. You become less preoccupied with the elements in your outer world, and the internal world begins to consume your attention.

On a daily basis, your brain moves into Alpha without much effort on your part. For example, when you’re learning something new in a lecture, generally your brain is functioning in low- to mid-range Beta. You’re listening to the message and analyzing the concepts being presented. Then when you’ve heard enough or you particularly like something interesting that applies to you, you naturally pause and your brain slips into Alpha. You do this because that information is being consolidated in your gray matter. And as you stare into space, you are attending to your thoughts and making them more real than the external world. The moment that happens, your frontal lobe is now wiring that information into your cerebral architecture . . . and like magic, you can remember what you just learned.

Having high amounts of coherent Gamma activity in the brain is usually linked to elevated states of mind such as happiness, compassion, and even increased awareness, which usually entails better memory formation. This is a heightened level of consciousness that people tend to describe as “having a transcendent or peak experience.” For our purposes, think of Gamma as the side effect of a shift in consciousness.

The scales of attention become tipped toward the external environment, causing an overfocused state of mind. Anxiety, worry, anger, pain, suffering, frustration, fear, and even competitive states of mind induce high-range Beta waves to predominate during the crisis.

Our attention and conscious awareness primarily focus on everything that makes up the external environment. Thus, we identify more readily with those material elements: we criticize everyone we know, we judge the way our bodies look, we’re overfocused on our problems, we cling to things we own out of fear that we might lose them, we busy ourselves with places we have to go, and we’re preoccupied with time. That leaves us little processing power to pay attention to the changes that we truly want to make—to go inward .

awareness can exist outside of analysis. When you are aware, you may think, I’m feeling angry. When you are analyzing, you go beyond that simple observation to add: Why is this page taking so long to load? Who designed this stupid website?

Figure 8I. One of the main purposes of meditation is to go beyond the conscious mind and enter the subconscious mind, in order to change self-destructive habits, behaviors, beliefs, emotional reactions, attitudes, and unconscious states of being.

Once the body is no longer running the mind, the servant is no longer the master and you are working in a realm of true power. You are like a child again, entering the kingdom of heaven.

Others cannot shift gears to naturally progress down the ladder into sleep; they are hyperfocused on the cues in their lives that reinforce their addictive mental and emotional states. They become insomniacs, and may take drugs to chemically alter the brain and sedate the body. Either way, sleep problems may indicate that the brain and the mind are out of sync.

Figure 8J. This diagram shows how our brain-wave functions move from the highest and fastest state of activity (Beta) to the lowest and slowest (Delta). Please take note that Alpha serves as the bridge between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The lower/slower the brain waves, the more we are in the subconscious mind; the higher/faster the brain waves, the more we are in the conscious mind.

The object in meditation is to fall like a feather down from the top of a building, slowly and steadily. You first train yourself to let your body initially relax, but keep your mind focused. Once you begin to master the skill, the ultimate goal is to let your body fall asleep while your mind stays awake or active.

Figure 8K. In the first picture, the brain is balanced and highly integrated. Several different areas are synchronized, forming a more orderly, holistic community of neural networks working together. In the second picture, this brain is disorderly and imbalanced. Many diverse compartments are no longer working as a team, and thus the brain is “dis-eased” and disintegrated.

The book instructed him to simply focus on his breath and allow his mind to expand beyond the barriers of his body. One night before bed, he decided to try the process.

As he vacated his familiar personality and became something other than his typical thoughts and feelings, he went from the habitual random thought patterns driven by the familiar ego to a more expanded sense of self.

All of this happened because when he got out of the way and became no body, no thing, outside time—when he forgot about himself—his focus went from sustained disorder to sustained order . . . survival to creation . . . contraction to expansion . . . incoherence to coherence.

She recognized that she’d always made decisions or sought solutions to problems from a perspective of lack—lack of time, of money, and of energy. She had memorized that state of being; lack became her personality. The epitome of inertia, she tended to “let the chips fall where they may.”

Next, Monique created a template of who she wanted to be, how she wanted to think, and what she wanted to feel. She imagined herself as a woman who made all of her choices with an abundance of energy, time, and money. Most important, her goal to become this person was as firm as her vision was precise. She knew who she no longer wanted to be; and she had definitive plans for how her new self would think, feel, and behave.

Monique began to live her life from the perspective of someone who had plenty of money, who had abundant energy, and whose every need was met. She felt wonderful. Certainly, not all the problems from her catalog of worries went away, but she was becoming better at living from a different mind-set.

What Monique’s story illustrates is the power of creating a new state of being. She couldn’t do that just by imagining that she was a new person; she had to put that new self into action. The old Monique wouldn’t have bought a lottery ticket; her new personality aligned her behavior to match her objective, and the field responded in an entirely unexpected yet perfectly appropriate way.

In time, if you can repeatedly create internal coherence like those monks did, you too may walk into the external environment and no longer suffer the self-limiting effects of its disruptive stimuli. And because of that, you won’t experience the knee-jerk reactions that formerly forced you to return to the old, familiar self that you are so eager to change.

Your inner coherence can counteract negative reactionary emotional states and allow you to unmemorize the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that make them up.

Remember that knowledge is the forerunner to experience.