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

by Joe Dispenza

this meditation requires that you drop down about ten inches out of your head and move into your heart. Open your heart and think about how it would feel if you embodied a combination of all the traits that you admire and that make up your ideal self.

While we are young, we keep busy doing things that, for a while, stave off those old, deep emotions, sweeping them under the rug. It is intoxicating to make new friends, travel to unknown places, work hard and achieve a promotion, learn a new skill, or take up a new sport. We seldom suspect that many of these actions are motivated by feelings left over from certain earlier events in life.

Then we really get busy. We go to school, then possibly college; we buy a car; we move to a new town, state, or country; we begin a career; we meet new people; we get married; we buy a house; we have kids; we adopt pets; we may get divorced; we work out; we start a new relationship; we practice a skill or a hobby. . . . We use everything that we know in the external world to define our identity, and to distract us from how we really feel inside.

Don’t get me wrong. We all reach greater heights from applying ourselves throughout different periods in our growing years. In order to accomplish many things in our lifetimes, we have to push ourselves outside our comfort zones and go beyond familiar feelings that once defined us. I am certainly aware of this dynamic in life. But when we never overcome our limitations and continue carrying the baggage from our past, it will always catch up with us. And this usually happens starting around our mid-30s (this can vary greatly from one person to another).

When we’re trying to escape this emptiness, or when we’re running from any emotion whatsoever that is painful, it is because to look at it is too uncomfortable. So when the feeling starts to get a bit out of control, most people turn on the TV, surf the Internet, or call or text someone. In a matter of moments we can alter our emotions so many times . . . we can view a sitcom or a YouTube video and laugh hysterically, then watch a football game and feel competitive, then watch the news and be angered or fearful. All of these outer stimuli can easily distract us from those unwanted feelings inside.

Technology is a great distraction and a powerful addiction.

Think about it: You can immediately change your internal chemistry and make a feeling go away by chan...

This becomes an all-consuming search for pleasure and ways to avoid pain at all costs—

A Different Midlife: A Time for Facing Feelings and Letting Go of Illusions

Some of us ultimately realize that nothing in our environment is going to “fix” the way we feel.

How long can we juggle, keeping so many balls in the air, just so our lives don’t come crashing down? Instead of buying a bigger TV or the latest smart phone, these people stop running from the feeling that they’ve been trying to make go away for so long, face it head-on, and intently look at it. When this happens, the individual begins to wake up. After some self-reflection, she discovers who she really is, what she has been hiding, and what no longer is working for her. So she lets go of the façade, the games, and the illusions. She is honest about who she really is, at all costs, and she is not afraid to lose it all. This person stops expending the energy she had been putting into keeping an illusory image intact.

Change and Our Relationships: Breaking the Ties That Bind Most relationships are based on what you have in common with others.

Yes, the person wasn’t being herself—not the “top-hand” self that everyone had grown accustomed to. Instead, briefly, she was the “bottom-hand” self—the one with the past and the pain.

And who can blame those loved ones who insisted on the return to her former numbed self that “went along to get along”? That new self emerged as unpredictable, even radical. Who wants to be around that person? Who wants to be around the truth?

For instance, if you had certain experiences 50 years prior that marked you as insecure or weak and you felt that way about yourself ever since, then you stopped growing emotionally 50 years ago. 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. While that feeling still anchors your mind and body to those past events, you are never free to move into the future. And if a similar experience shows up in your present life, that event will trigger the same emotion and you will act as that person you were 50 years ago. So your soul says: Pay attention! I’m letting you know that nothing is bringing you joy. I’m sending you urges. If you keep playing this game, I’m going to stop trying to get your attention, and you will go back to sleep. Then I’ll see you when your life is over. . . .

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.

is imperative to realize that behind every addiction, there is some memorized emotion that is driving the behavior.

if we are to break free, it means we have to confront that true self and bring out into the light that shadow side of our personality.

The advantage of the system I employ is that you can confront those darker aspects of yourself without bringing them into the light of your everyday reality.

in the privacy of your own home and your own mind, you can work on extinguishing negative aspects of self and replacing those characteristics (or at least, metaphorically, cutting way back on the role they play and allowing them only an occasional, brief appearance) with more positive and productive ones.

I want you to forget about past events validating the emotions you’ve memorized that have become part of your personality. Your problems will never be resolved by analyzing them while you are still caught up in the emotions of the past. Looking at the experience or reliving the event that created the problem in the first place will only bring up the old emotions and a reason to feel the same way. When you try to figure out your life within the same consciousness that created it, you will analyze your life away and excuse yourself from ever changing.

Instead, let’s just unmemorize our self-lim...

Yet far too often, most of us change only when we are faced with a crisis, trauma, or discouraging diagnosis of some sort.

That crisis commonly comes in the form of a challenge, which may be physical (an accident, say, or an illness), emotional (the loss of someone we love, for example), spiritual (for instance, an accumulation of setbacks that has us questioning our worth and how the universe operates), or financial (a job loss, perhaps). Note that all of the above are about losing something.

Picture yourself standing in a room with arms outstretched, pushing the opposite walls apart. Do you have any idea how much energy you would consume if you were trying to keep those walls from crushing you? Instead of doing that, what if you released those two walls, took a couple of steps forward (after all, that gap is kind of like a door, isn’t it?), and walked out of that room and into a completely new one. What about that other room you left behind? Well, the walls have come together in such a way that you can’t ever get back inside it. That gap has closed, and the separate parts of you have become unified. And what’s going to happen to all that energy you were expending? Physics states that energy can’t be created or destroyed; it can only be transferred or transformed. That’s exactly what’s going to happen to you when you get to the point that no thought, no emotion, no subconscious behavior goes unnoticed.

When you liberate the body from the chains of an emotional dependency, you will feel uplifted and inspired.

Meditating will help you peel away some of the layers, remove some of the masks you’ve worn. Both of those things have blocked the flow of that grand intelligence within you. As a result of shedding those layers, you will become transparent.

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.

from a state of gratitude, enthusiasm, or wholeness. That’s when the field responds most favorably to you.

All this starts with recognizing that the gap exists, and meditating on the negative emotional states that have produced that gap and dominated your personality.

one of the keys to breaking the habit of being yourself is working toward being more observant—whether that entails being more metacognitive (monitoring your thoughts), embracing stillness, or focusing more attention on your behaviors and how elements in your environment might trigger emotional responses.

Besides its meaning 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. When you cultivate the soil, you take the packed-down earth that has been lying fallow for a while and you churn it up with a spade or other implement. You expose “new” dirt and nutrients, making it easier for seeds to germinate and for tender shoots to take root. Cultivation may also require you to remove plants from the previous season, attend to weeds that went unnoticed, and remove any rocks that rose to the surface by natural sifting. Thus, last season’s plants might represent your past creations derived from the thoughts, actions, and emotions that define the old, familiar you. Weeds could signify long-standing attitudes, beliefs, or perceptions about yourself that are subconsciously undermining your efforts, which you hadn’t noticed because you were too distracted by other things. And the rocks can symbolize your many layers of personal blocks and limitations (which naturally rise to the surface over time and block your growth). All these need tending to so you can make room to plant a new garden in your mind.

My hope is that you understand by now that it is impossible to create any new future when you are rooted in your past.

Figure 8A. The biological model of change involves

transforming the familiar past to a new future.

Awareness comes first—recognizing when and how those programmed responses take over is essential. When you move from the unconscious to the conscious, you begin to close the gap between how you appear and who you are.

Research has discovered a wide scope of brain-wave frequencies in humans, ranging from the very low levels of activity found in deep sleep (Delta waves); to a twilight state between deep sleep and wakefulness (Theta); to the creative, imaginative state (Alpha); to higher frequencies seen during conscious thought (Beta waves); to the highest frequencies recorded (Gamma waves), seen in elevated states of consciousness.1

When high Beta becomes chronic and uncontrolled, the brain gets juiced up beyond the healthy range. Unfortunately, high Beta is terribly overutilized by the majority of the population. We are obsessive or compulsive, insomniac or chronically fatigued, anxious or depressed, forcibly pushing in all directions to be all-powerful or hopelessly holding on to our pain to feel utterly powerless, competing to get ahead or victimized by our circumstances.

Sustained High Beta Sends the Brain into Disorder

many people spend their waking days in a sustained high-frequency Beta state. To them, everything is an emergency.

Their continual repetition of survival-based thoughts creates feelings of anger, fear, sadness, anxiety, depression, competition, aggression, insecurity, and frustration, among others.

People become so caught up in these intoxicating emotions that they try to analyze their problems from within these familiar feelings, which only perpetuates more thoughts overfocused on survival. Also, recall that we can turn on the stress response by thought alone—the way we are thinking reinforces the very state of the brain and body, which then causes us to think the same way . . . and the loop goes on. It’s the serpent eating its tail.

Of course, when disorderly, incoherent signals from the brain relay erratic, mixed electrochemical messages through the central nervous system to the rest of the physiological systems, this puts the body out of balance, upsetting its homeostasis or equilibrium, and setting the stage for disease.

If we live in this high-stress mode of chaotic brain function for extended periods, the heart is impacted (leading to arrhythmias or high blood pressure), digestion begins to fail (causing indigestion, reflux, and related symptoms), and immune function weakens (resulting in colds, allergies, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and more).

In high Beta, the outer world appears to be more real than the inner world.

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.

When you are stuck in high Beta, it’s hard to learn: very little new information can enter into your nervous system that is not equal to the emotion you are experiencing.

When we are plugged into all three dimensions—the environment, the body, and time—the brain tries to integrate their varied frequencies and wave patterns. That takes up an enormous amount of processor time and space. If we can eliminate our focus on any one of those, the patterns that emerge will be more coherent, and we’ll be better able to process them.