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

by Joe Dispenza

Your brain is involved in everything you do, including how you think, how you feel, how you act, and how well you get along with other people. It’s the organ of personality, character, intelligence, and every decision you make.

With a healthier brain, you are happier, physically healthier, wealthier, wiser, and just make better decisions, which helps you be more successful and live longer. When the brain is not healthy for whatever reason—such as a head injury or past emotional trauma—people are sadder, sicker, poorer, less wise, and less successful.

Our SPECT work, now over 70,000 scans, has taught us so many important life lessons about the brain, such as: Brain injuries can ruin people’s lives; Alcohol is not a health food and often shows significant damage on SPECT scans; A number of the medications people routinely take, such as some common anti-anxiety medications, are not good for the brain; and Diseases like Alzheimer’s actually start in the brain decades before people have any symptoms.

Over the last several years, I have had the opportunity to interview a host of people who overcame significant health conditions that were considered either terminal or permanent. Per the contemporary model of medicine, these recoveries were labeled “spontaneous remissions.” However, upon my extensive examination of their inner journeys, it became apparent to me that there was a strong element of mind involved … and their physical changes weren’t so spontaneous after all. This discovery furthered my postgraduate studies in brain imaging, neuroplasticity, epigenetics, and psychoneuroimmunology. I simply figured that something had to be happening in the brain and body that could be zeroed in on and then replicated. In this book, I want to share some of what I learned along the way and show you, by exploring how mind and matter are interrelated, how you can apply these principles not only to your body, but to any aspect of your life.

If you take intellectual information that you learn as a philosophy, and then initiate that knowledge into your life by applying it enough times until you master it, you will ultimately move from being a philosopher to an initiate to a master.

Times are changing. As individuals awaken to a greater reality, we are part of a much larger sea change. Our current systems and models of reality are breaking down, and it is time for something new to emerge. Across the board, our models for politics, economics, religion, science, education, medicine, and our relationship with the environment are all showing a different landscape than just ten years ago.

We also know that to leave the familiar life that we have grown accustomed to and waltz into something new is like a salmon swimming upstream: it takes effort—and, frankly, it’s uncomfortable. And to top it off, ridicule, marginalization, opposition, and denigration from those who cling to what they think they know greet us along the way.

Who, with such an unconventional bent, is willing to meet such adversity in the name of some concept they cannot embrace with their senses, yet which is alive in their minds? How many times in history have individuals who were considered heretics and fools, and thus took the abuse of the unexceptional, emerged as geniuses, saints, or masters? Will you dare to be an original?

We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, or we can evolve in a state of joy and inspiration.

To go with the latter, we just have to make up our minds that change will probably entail a bit of discomfort, some inconvenience, a break from a predictable routine, and a period 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.

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.

Chapter 5: Survival vs. Creation illustrates the distinction between living in survival and living in creation. Living in survival entails living in stress and functioning as a materialist, believing that the outer world is more real than the inner world. 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.

When how you appear is who you are, you are truly free.

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.

meditative skills to change something within your mind and body and to produce an effect outside of you. Once you can notice what you did inside of you that produced an outcome outside of you, you’ll do it again. 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.

Once you “get it,” all the individual steps you kept reviewing merge into one smooth process. The methodical, linear approach seamlessly flows into a holistic, effortless, unified demonstration. 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.

When you know that you know “how” to do something, you’re on your way to mastering it.

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. I’m sure you’ve heard that before, but I wonder whether most people really believe this statement on a gut level. If we truly embraced the notion that our thoughts produce tangible effects in our lives, wouldn’t we strive to never let one thought slip by us that we didn’t want to experience? And wouldn’t we focus our attention on what we want, instead of continually obsessing about our problems?

you are more powerful than you knew, and inspire you to demonstrate the understanding that what you think and believe has a profound effect on your world.

Energy is the very fabric of all things material, and is responsive to mind.

If your mind can influence the appearance of an electron, then theoretically it can influence the appearance of any possibility. 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.

Mind and matter are completely entangled. Your consciousness (mind) has effects on energy (matter) because your consciousness is energy and energy has consciousness. You are powerful enough to influence matter because at the most elementary level, you are energy with a consciousness. You are mindful matter.

What we do unto others, we do unto ourselves.

We communicate with the quantum field primarily through our thoughts and feelings. Since our thoughts are themselves energy—as you know, the electrical impulses the brain generates can easily be measured by devices such as an EEG—they are one of the primary means by which we send out signals into the field.

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.

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!

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?

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.

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?

All potential experiences exist as electromagnetic signatures in the quantum field. There are an infinite number of potential electromagnetic signatures—for genius, for wealth, for freedom, for health—that already exist as a frequency pattern of energy.

When you change your electromagnetic signature to match one that already exists in the field, your body will be drawn to that event, you will move into a new line of time, or the event will find you in your new reality.

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.

Once that match exists between who we are being/what we are broadcasting and the electromagnetic potential in the field, we will be pulled toward that potential reality, or it will find us.

To change your life is to change your energy—to make an elemental change in your mind and emotions. If you want a new outcome, you will have to break the habit of being yourself, and reinvent a new self.

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.

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. Instead, when mind and body are working together, when our thoughts and feelings are aligned, when we are in a new state of being, then we are sending a coherent signal on the airwaves of the invisible.

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 made contact with the quantum field of intelligence, so we are inspired to do this again. That is the joy of the creative process.

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.

The new model of reality challenges us, as quantum creators, to change something within us—in mind and body, in our thoughts and feelings—before we can experience the physical evidence with our senses. 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.

When we arrive at the conclusion that our physiological vehicle is made up of the same stuff as the rest of the universe, and these folks bump up against the notion that what animates the body is a form of energy—the same 99.99999 percent “nothing” that constitutes the physical universe—they either shrug and walk away or come to realize that there is something to this notion that a unifying principle pervades all of physical reality. Isn’t it ironic, then, that we keep all of our attention on the 0.00001 percent of reality that is physical? Are we missing something?

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.

In the quantum field, the infinite probabilities for materializing reality are beyond time and space, because a potential doesn’t yet exist. If it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t have a location or occupy a position temporally. Anything that doesn’t have material existence—that hasn’t had its waves of probability collapsed into particle reality—exists beyond space and time.

Since the quantum field is nothing but immaterial probability, it is outside of space and time. As soon as we observe one of those infinite probabilities and give it material reality, it acquires those two characteristics.

Do you ever have any experiences when time and space seem to disappear? Think of those moments when you’re driving and your thoughts are focused on some concern you have. When that happens, you forget about your body (you are no longer aware of how you feel in space), you forget about the environment (the external world disappears), and you forget about time (you have no idea how long you are “tranced out”). At moments like these, you’ve been at the threshold of the door that allows you to enter the quantum field and gain access to working with universal intelligence. In essence, you’ve already made thought more real than anything else.

Mind is matter, and matter is mind.

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. When you overcome your senses, when you understand that you are not bound by the chains of your past—when you live a life that is greater than your body, your environment, and time—all things are possible. The universal intelligence that animates the existence of all things will both surprise and delight you. It wants nothing more than to provide you with access to all you want. In short, when you change your mind, you change your life.

I commended my daughter for her clear vision of what she wanted, and reminded her that universal intelligence would orchestrate the way her dream summer would manifest. She would take care of the “what”; a greater consciousness would handle the “how.” Since my daughter is practiced in the art of thinking and feeling ahead of the actual experience, I merely reminded her to not only set an intention every day with regard to what that summer would look like—what people she would see, what events would transpire, what places she would visit—but also to feel what it would be like to experience these things. 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.

So while it was still March, she had to begin “being” that young woman who’d been in Italy for half the summer.