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

by Joe Dispenza

One of the most exciting lessons I have learned is that people can literally change their brains and change their lives by engaging in regular brain-healthy habits, such as correcting negative beliefs and using meditative processes such as those discussed by Dr. Dispenza.

Change as a Choice, Instead of a Reaction

Most of us are already familiar with the temporary discomfort of not knowing.

Absorbing knowledge (knowing) and then gaining practical experience by applying what you learned until a particular skill became ingrained in you (knowing how) is probably how you acquired most of the abilities that now feel like a part of your being (knowingness). In much the same way, learning how to change your life involves knowledge and the application of that knowledge. That is why this book is divided into three overarching sections.

The observer effect in quantum physics states that where you direct your attention is where you place your energy. As a consequence, you affect the material world (which, by the way, is made mostly of energy). If you entertain that idea even for a moment, you might start focusing on what you want instead of what you don’t want. And you might even find yourself thinking: If an atom is 99.99999 percent energy and .00001 percent physical substance,1 then I’m actually more nothing than something! So why do I keep my attention on that small percentage of the physical world when I am so much more? Is defining my present reality by what I perceive with my senses the biggest limitation I have?

we unconsciously live by a set of memorized behaviors, thoughts, and emotional reactions, all running like computer programs behind the scenes of our conscious awareness. That’s why it is not enough to “think positive,” because most of who we are might reside subconsciously as negativity in the body. By the end of this book, you will know how to enter

When you learn how to use your attention and access the present, you will enter through the door to the quantum field, where all potentials exist.

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.

Even better, when you focus your attention to the exclusion of your environment, your body, and time, you can easily move from thinking to being without having to do anything. In that state of mind, your brain does not distinguish between what is happening in the outer world of reality and what is happening in the inner world of your mind. 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. Now you are moving into a new state of being, because your mind and body are working as one.

The Gap explores how to break free from the emotions that you’ve memorized—which have become your personality—

When a new experience manifests in your life, you’ll embrace the energy you feel in the form of an elevated emotion such as empowerment, awe, or immense gratitude; and that energy will drive you to do it again and again. Now you are on the path to true evolution.

"winning is addicting"

This is the point of personal ownership. At times, the effort this takes can be tedious. But if you persist with a certain amount of will and energy, in time you’ll enjoy the results.

we want to live life as an idealized version of who we think and believe we can be. When we stand in front of the mirror and look at our love handles, we don’t just see that slightly too-pudgy vision reflected in the glass. We also see, depending on our mood that day, a slimmer, fitter version of ourselves or a heavier, chunkier version. Which of our images is real?

The fact is that we are all blessed; we all can reap the benefits of our constructive efforts. We don’t have to settle for our present reality; we can create a new one, whenever we choose to. We all have that ability, because for better or worse, our thoughts do influence our lives.

Think about it: if you really knew that this principle were true, would you ever miss a day in intentionally creating your desired destiny?

Obviously, I’m about to challenge you, but I want you to know that I’m entirely empathetic, because I too have had to let go of what I thought was true and leap into the unknown. To ease into this new way of thinking about the nature of our world, let’s see how our worldview was shaped by the early belief that mind and matter were separate things.

The Creation of Reality: Energy Responds to Mindful Attention

What quantum physicists discovered was that the person observing (or measuring) the tiny particles that make up atoms affects the behavior of energy and matter. Quantum experiments demonstrated that electrons exist simultaneously in an infinite array of possibilities or probabilities in an invisible field of energy. But only when an observer focuses attention on any location of any one electron does that electron appear. In other words, a particle cannot manifest in reality—that is, ordinary space-time as we know it—until we observe it.1

“collapse of the wave function” or the “observer effect.”

At the subatomic level, energy responds to your mindful attention and becomes matter. How would your life change if you learned to direct the observer effect and to collapse infinite waves of probability into the reality that you choose? Could you get better at observing the life you want?

So ponder this: Everything in the physical universe is made up of subatomic particles such as electrons. By their very nature, these particles, when they exist as pure potential, are in their wave state while they are not being observed. They are potentially “every thing” and “no thing” until they are observed. They exist everywhere and nowhere until they are observed. Thus, everything in our physical reality exists as pure potential.

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 field, waiting to be observed by you. If your mind can influence the appearance of an electron, then theoretically it can influence the appearance of any possibility.

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.

This demonstrates that our intentions, our thoughts and feelings, and our prayers not only affect our present or future, but they can actually affect our past as well.

we could say that how you think and how you feel create a state of being. I want you to understand that when I use the terms state of being and state of mind, your physical body is a part of that state. In fact, as you will see later on, many people exist in a state in which the body

We communicate with the quantum field primarily through our thoughts and feelings.

Essentially, they and others have documented a specific link between our emotional states and our heart rhythms. When we have negative emotions (such as anger and fear), our heart rhythms become erratic and disorganized. In contrast, positive emotions (love and joy, for instance) produce highly ordered, coherent patterns that HeartMath researchers refer to as heart coherence.

A second group of trained participants did the same thing, but instead of just creating positive emotions (a feeling) of love and appreciation, they simultaneously held an intention (a thought) to either wind or unwind the strands of DNA. This group produced statistically significant changes in the conformation (shape) of the DNA samples. In some cases the DNA was wound or unwound as much as 25 percent! A third group of trained subjects held a clear intent to change the DNA, but they were instructed not to enter into a positive emotional state. In other words, they were only using thought (intention) to affect matter. The result? No changes to the DNA samples. The positive emotional state that the first group entered did nothing by itself to the DNA. Another group’s clearly held intentional thought, unaccompanied by emotion, also had no impact. Only when subjects held both heightened emotions and clear objectives in alignment were they able to produce the intended effect.

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. If a state of being can wind and unwind strands of DNA in two minutes, what does this say about our ability to create reality?

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.

I find it a useful model to think of thoughts as the electrical charge in the quantum field and feelings as the magnetic charge in the field.4 The thoughts we think send an electrical signal out into the field. The feelings we generate magnetically draw events back to us. 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?

If you could create a new electromagnetic field by changing your state of being, which matches that potential in the quantum field of information, is it possible that your body would be drawn to that event or that event would find you?

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.

If you want a new outcome, you will have to break the habit of being yourself, and reinvent a new self.

Change Requires Coherence: Align Your Thoughts and Feelings

Just as the waves in a signal are much more powerful when they are coherent, the same is true of you when your thoughts and your feelings are aligned. 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. You’re thinking one way and feeling another way. And when the mind is in opposition to the body (or vice versa), the field won’t respond in any consistent way.

To change our reality, those outcomes that we attract to ourselves have to surprise, even astonish, us in the way in which they come about. We should never be able to predict how our new creations will manifest; they must catch us off guard. They have to wake us up from the dream of the routine reality that we’ve grown accustomed to. These manifestations should leave us with no doubt that our consciousness

Why should you want a quantum surprise? If you can predict an event, it is nothing new—it’s routine, automatic; and you have experienced it many times before. If you can predict it, the same you produced the same familiar outcome. In fact, if you’re trying to control how an outcome will occur, you just went “Newtonian.” Newtonian (classical) physics was about trying to anticipate and predict events; it was all about cause and effect.

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.

Hold a clear intention of what you want, but leave the “how” details to the unpredictable quantum field. Let it orchestrate an event in your life in a way that is just right for you. If you’re going to expect anything, expect the unexpected. Surrender, trust, and let go of how a desired event will unfold. This is the biggest hurdle for most to overcome, because we human beings always want to control a future reality by trying to re-create how it occurred in a past reality.

Can you give thanks and feel the elevated emotions associated with a desired event before it occurs? Can you imagine that reality so completely that you begin to be in that future life now?

When you are in a state of gratitude, you transmit a signal into the field that an event has already occurred. Gratitude is more than an intellectual thought process. You have to feel as though whatever you want is in your reality at this very moment. Thus, your body (which only understands feelings) must be convinced that it has the emotional quotient of the future experience, happening to you now.

Our thoughts send the signal out (I am suffering), and our emotions (I am suffering) draw into our lives an event to match that emotional frequency—that is, a good reason to suffer. In a very real sense, we are asking for proof of the existence of universal intelligence at all times, and it sends us feedback in our external environment at all times. That is how powerful we are.

Do you see that instead of responding in the manner above, you could be asking yourself: How can I think, feel, and behave differently to produce the effect/result that I want?

This principle asks us to lay down what we think we know, surrender to the unknown, then observe the effects in the form of feedback in our lives. And that is the best way we learn. When we get positive indications (when we see our external circumstances shift in a favorable direction), we know that whatever we did inside of us was right. Naturally, we’ll remember what we did so we can do it again.

If we measure and reaffirm reality with our senses, we are stuck in the Newtonian paradigm.

The very last thing we experience is sensory feedback.

You’ll also have to temporarily shift your awareness away from your external environment—all those things that you identify with in your life. Your spouse, your kids, your possessions, and your problems are all part of your identity; through them, you identify with the outer world. And finally, you will have to lose track of linear time. That is, in the moment when you are intentionally observing a potential future experience, you will have to be so present that your mind no longer vacillates between memories of the past and expectations of a “same as usual” future.

want. In short, when you change your mind, you change your life.