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

by Joe Dispenza

Why is it so hard to live in these creative moments? 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.

Every time we knock the body out of chemical balance, that’s called “stress.” The stress response is how the body innately responds when it’s knocked out of balance, and what it does to return back to equilibrium.

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. In other words, no creature can avoid the consequences of living in long-term emergency situations. When we turn on the stress response and can’t turn it off, we’re headed for some type of breakdown in the body. Let’s say you keep turning on the fight-or-flight system due to some threatening circumstance in your life (real or imagined). As your racing heart pumps enormous amounts of blood to your extremities and your body is knocked out of homeostasis, you’re becoming prepared by the nervous system to run or fight. But let’s face it: you can’t flee to the Bahamas, nor can you throttle your fellow employee—that would be primitive. So as a consequence, you condition your heart to race all the time, and you may be headed for high blood pressure, arrhythmias, and so on.

If you’re putting the bulk of your energy toward some issue in your external environment, there will be little left for your body’s internal environment. Your immune system, which monitors your inner world, can’t keep up with the lack of energy for growth and repair. Therefore, you get sick, whether it be from a cold, cancer, or rheumatoid arthritis. (All are immune-mediated conditions.)

What is so harmful about having our stress response triggered by pressures from the past, present, and future? When we get knocked out of chemical balance so often, eventually that out-of-balance state becomes the norm. As a result, we are destined to live out our genetic destiny, and in most cases that means suffering from some illness. The reason is clear: The domino effect from the cascade of hormones and other chemicals we release in response to stress can dysregulate some of our genes, and that may create disease. In other words, repeated stress pushes the genetic buttons that cause us to begin to head toward our genetic destiny. So what was once very adaptive behavior and a beneficial biochemical response (fight or flight) has become a highly maladaptive and harmful set of circumstances.

For instance, when a lion was chasing your ancestors, the stress response was doing what it was designed to do—protect them from their outer environment. That’s adaptive. But if, for days on end, you fret about your promotion, overfocus on your presentation to upper management, or worry about your mother being in the hospital, these situations create the same chemicals as though you were being chased by a lion.

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 creation is living as a nobody. Ever notice that when you’re truly in the midst of creating anything, you forget about yourself? You dissociate from your known world. You are no longer a somebody who associates your identity with certain things you own, particular people you know, certain tasks you do, and different places you lived at specific times. You could say that when you are in a creative state, you forget about the habit of being you. You lay down your selfish ego and become self-less. You have moved beyond time and space and become pure, immaterial awareness. Once you’re no longer connected to a body; no longer focused on people, places, or things in your external environment; and beyond linear time, you’re entering the door of the quantum field. You cannot enter as a somebody, you must do so as a nobody. You have to leave the self-centered ego at the door and enter the realm of consciousness as pure consciousness.

Thus, here is the grand hint: to change any aspect of your life (body, environment, or time), you must transcend it. You must leave behind the Big Three in order to control the Big Three.

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?

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.

You may not know all the specifics of your desired outcome—when it will take place, where, and under what circumstances—but you trust in a future that you can’t see or otherwise perceive with your senses. To you it has already occurred in no space, no time, no place, from which all things material spring forth. You are in a state of knowingness; you can relax into the present and no longer live in survival. To anticipate or analyze when, where, or how the event will occur would only cause you to return to your old identity. You are in such joy that it’s impossible to try to figure it out; that’s only what human beings do when they are living in limited states of survival.

I’ve talked about Hebbian learning, which states: “Nerve cells that fire together, wire together.”

But the opposite is also true: “Nerve cells that no longer fire together, no longer wire together.” If you don’t use it, you lose it. You can even focus conscious thought to disconnect or unwire unwanted connections.

The gift of neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to rewire and create new circuits at any age as a result of input from the environment and our conscious intentions) is that we can create a new level of mind. There’s a sort of neurological “out with the old, in with the new,” a process that neuroscientists call pruning and sprouting. It’s what I call unlearning and learning, and it creates the opportunity for us to rise above our current limitations and to be greater than our conditioning or circumstances.

In creating a new habit of being ourselves, we are essentially taking conscious control over what had become an unconscious process of being. Instead of the mind working toward one goal (I’m not going to be an angry person) and the body working toward another (Let’s stay angry and keep bathing in those familiar chemicals), we want to unify the mind’s intent with the body’s responses. To do this, we must create a new way of thinking, doing, and being.

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), at least we’ve got a few things going for us. Along with the brain being neuropl...

If the limbic brain had a motto, it might be: 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.

when the body knows equal to or better than the conscious mind, when you can repeat an experience at will without much conscious effort, then you have memorized the action, behavior, attitude, or emotional reaction until it has become a skill or a habit. When you reach this level of ability, you have moved into a state of being. In the process, you’ve activated the third brain area that plays a major role in changing your life—the cerebellum, seat of the subconscious.

You ask yourself, How can I modify my behavior—my actions—and my reactions so my new experience leads to a new feeling? So you picture yourself greeting and hugging her, asking her questions about things you know she is interested in, and complimenting her on her new hairdo or glasses.

As you began to psychologically project yourself into a potential situation ahead of the actual experience (the impending dinner), you began to rewire your neural circuitry to look as though the event (being compassionate toward your MIL) had already taken place. Once those new neural networks began to fire in unison, your brain created a picture, vision, model, or what I will call a hologram (a multidimensional image) representing the ideal self that you were focused on being. The instant this happened, you made what you were thinking about more real than anything else. Your brain captured the thought as the experience, and “upscaled” its gray matter to look as though the experience had already occurred.

Soon it’s game time, and you find yourself sitting at dinner, face-to-face with “good ol’ Mom.” Instead of knee-jerking when her typical behaviors manifest, you stay conscious, remember what you learned, and decide to try it out. Rather than judging, attacking, or feeling animosity toward her, you do something completely different for you. Like the books encouraged, you stay in the present moment, open your heart, and really listen to what she’s saying. You no longer hold her to her past. Lo and behold, you modify your behavior and restrain your impulsive emotional reactions, thereby creating a new experience with your MIL. That activates the limbic brain to cook up a new blend of chemicals, which generates a new emotion, and all of a sudden, you truly start to feel compassion for her. You see her for who she is; you even see aspects of yourself in her. Your muscles relax, you feel your heart opening, and you breathe deeply and freely.

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.

can you reproduce that feeling of compassion at will? Can you repeatedly embody compassion independent of conditions in your environment, so that no person or situation could ever create that old state of being in you again? If not, you haven’t yet mastered compassion. My definition of mastery is that our internal chemical state is greater than anything in our external world. You are a master when you’ve conditioned yourself with chosen thoughts and feelings, you’ve memorized desired emotional/chemical states, and nothing in your external life deters you from your aims. No person, no thing, and no experience at any time or place should disrupt your internal chemical coherence. You can think, act, and feel differently whenever you choose.

If You Can Master Suffering, You Can Just as Easily Master Joy

if you practiced your thoughts, behaviors, and feelings enough times, “being” compassionate would become rather natural. You would evolve from just thinking about it, to doing something about it, to being it. “Being” means that it’s easy, natural, second nature, routine, and unconscious. Compassion and love would be as automatic and familiar to you as those self-limiting emotions you just changed.

Ultimately, if you repeatedly re-create the experience of compassion at will, practicing it independent of any circumstance in your life, your body would become the mind of compassion. You would memorize compassion so well that nothing from your outside world could move you from this state of being. Now all three brains are working together; and you are biologically, neurochemically, and genetically in a state of compassion. When compassion becomes unconditionally ordinary and familiar for you, you have progressed from knowledge to experience to wisdom.

Wisdom is accumulated knowledge that has been gained through repeated experience. And when “being” compassionate is as natural as suffering; judging; blaming; or being frustrated, negative, or insecure, now we are wise. We are liberated to seize new opportunities, because somehow life seems to organize itself equal to how or who we are being.

As a reminder, when you are in a new state of being—a new personality—you also create a new personal reality. Let me repeat that. A new state of being creates a new personality … a new personality produces a new personal reality.

the quantum model tells us that if you have created a new mind and a new state of being, you have an altered electromagnetic signature. Because you are thinking and feeling differently, you are changing reality. Together, thoughts and feelings can do this; separately they cannot. Let me remind you again: You can’t think one way and feel another and expect anything in your life to change. The combination of your thoughts and feelings is your state of being. Change your state of being … and change your reality.

If you can send into the quantum field a signal coherent in thought and feeling (state of being), independent of the external world, then something different will show up in your life. When it does, you’ll no doubt experience a powerful emotional response, which will inspire you to create a new reality once again—and you can use that emotion to generate an even more wonderful experience.

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.

Choose a potential reality that you want, live it in your thoughts and feelings, and give thanks ahead of the actual event. 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?

Keep in mind that this cannot be just an intellectual process. Thoughts and feelings must be coherent. In other words, 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.

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.

She gets in touch with her feelings and then turns to people in her life and says: You know what? It doesn’t matter if I don’t make you happy any longer. I’m through obsessing about how I look or what other people think about me. I am finished living for everyone else. I want to be free from these chains.

This is a profound moment in a person’s life. The soul is waking up and nudging her to tell the truth about who...

when our friend in the example in the last section begins to tell the truth about how she really feels, things begin to get very uncomfortable. If her friendships have been based upon complaining about life, then she is bonded energetically in her relationships by the emotions of victimization. If, in a moment of enlightenment, she now decides to break from that habit of being herself, she is no longer showing up as that familiar person to whom everyone could relate. People in her life are using her to remind themselves of who they are emotionally as well. Friends and family respond: “What is wrong with you today? You’ve hurt my feelings!” Which translates to: I thought we had a good thing going here! I used you to reaffirm my emotional addiction in order to remember who I think I am as a “somebody.” I liked you better the other way.

That new self emerged as unpredictable, even radical. Who wants to be around that person? Who wants to be around the truth?

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.

We have to become happy before our abundance shows up.

The point is, true happiness has nothing to do with pleasure, because the reliance on feeling good from such intensely stimulating things only moves us further from real joy.

Closing and even eliminating the gap between who we are and who we present to the world is likely the greatest challenge we all face in life. Whether we term this living authentically, conquering ourselves, or having people “get” us or accept us for who we are, this is something that most of us desire. Changing—-closing the gap—must begin from within.

At those critical moments when we’ve really, really 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. We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, or we can do so in a state of joy and inspiration. We don’t have to wait until we are so uncomfortable that we feel forced to move out of our resting state.

This is no longer serving my best interests. This is no longer serving me. This has never been loving to myself.

As you remove the veils that block the flow of this intelligence within you, you become more like it. You become more loving, more giving, more conscious, more willful—because that is its mind. The gap closes. At that stage, you feel happy and whole. 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. You no longer live in a state of lack or want. And do you know the funny thing about not wanting or lacking for anything? That’s when you can really begin to manifest things naturally. Most people try to create in a state of lack, unworthiness, separation, or some other limited emotion rather than from a state of gratitude, enthusiasm, or wholeness. That’s when the field responds most favorably to you.

heart. I realized in one instant that I had distanced myself from this innate intelligence. I closed my eyes and put all of my attention on it. I started to admit who I’d been, what I’d been hiding, and how unhappy I was. I began to surrender some aspects of myself to a greater mind. I then reminded myself of who I no longer wanted to be. I decided how I no longer wanted to live based on that same personality. Next, I observed my unconscious behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that reinforced my old self and reviewed them until they became familiar to me.

Then I thought about who I did want to be as a new personality … until I became it. Suddenly I began to feel different—joyful.

Another way to think of this transition is when you go from being a doer to a doer/watcher. An easy analogy I can use is that when athletes or performers—golfers, skiers, swimmers, dancers, singers, or actors—want to change something about their technique, most coaches have them watch videotape of themselves. How can you change from an old mode of operation to a new one unless you can see what old and new look like?

It’s the same with your old and your new self. How can you stop doing things one way without knowing what that way looks like? I frequently use the term unlearning to describe this phase of changing. This process of becoming