You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

by Joe Dispenza

theta, which is a kind of twilight state where we’re half-awake and half-asleep (often described as “mind awake, body asleep

This is the state we’re shooting for in meditation, because it’s the brain-wave pattern where...

In theta, we can access the subconscious, because the analytical mind isn’t operating—we’re...

Think of theta as the key to your own subcon...

the person then embraces the emotions of fear, worry, and anxiety, along with sadness, then the only possible

thoughts (or autosuggestions) are those that are equal to how he or she feels.

signaling of the same genes, and the inability to see or perceive any new possibilities.

First, they didn’t accept the finality of their diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment.

Nor did they believe in the most probable outcome or future destiny that their doctors had authoritatively outlined.

Finally, they didn’t surrender to the diagnosis, prognosis, or ...

Because they had a different attitude from those who did accept, believe, and surrender, they were i...

They weren’t suggestible to the doctors’ advice and opinions, because they didn’t feel fe...

Instead they were optimistic and enthusiastic, and those emotions drove a new...

enabled them to see new pos...

Because they had different ideas and beliefs about what was possible, they didn’t condition their bodies to the worst-case scenario, they didn’t expect the same predictable outcome as others who’d received the same diagnosis, and they didn’t assign the sam...

They assigned a different meaning to their future, so they had a ...

Changing a belief requires changing a subconscious program—since a belief, as you’ll soon learn, is a subconscious state of being.

Folks who use only their conscious minds to change never come out of the resting state to reprogram their genes,

Is it possible that, whenever people don’t respond to treatment or when their health stays the same, they’re living by the same emotional state every day, accepting, believing, and surrendering to the medical model without too much analysis, based on the social consciousness of millions of other people who’ve done exactly the same thing? Does a doctor’s diagnosis become the modern-day equivalent of a voodoo curse?

let’s dissect belief

When you string a succession of thoughts and feelings together so that they ultimately become habituated or a...

And since how you think and feel creates a state of being, attitudes are really just ...

They can fluctuate from moment to moment as you alter how ...

If you repeat or maintain certain attitudes long enough and you string those attitudes together, that’s how you create a belief

(attitudes) that you keep thinking and feeling over and over again until you hardwire them in your brain and emotionally condition them into your body.

You could say that you become addicted to them,

Because experiences are neurologically etched into your brain (causing you to think) and chemically embodied as emotions (causing you to feel), most of your beliefs are based on past memories.

So when you revisit the same thoughts over and over by thinking about and analyzing what you remember from your past, these thoughts will fire and wire into an automatic unconscious program. And if you cultivate the same feelings based on past experiences and you feel the same as you did when the event originally occurred, you’ll condition your body to subconsciously be the mind of that emotion—and your body will unconsciously be living in the past.

And if the redundancy of how you think and feel over time conditions your body to become the mind, and it becomes programmed subconsciously, then beliefs are subconscious and also unconscious states of being derived from the past. Beliefs are also more permanent than attitudes; they can last for months or ...

If you string a group of related beliefs together, they form your perception.

So your perception of reality is a sustained state of being that’s based on your long-standing beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, and feelings. And since your beliefs become subconscious and also unconscious states of being (that is, you don’t even know why you believe certain things, or you aren’t really conscious of your beliefs until they’re tested), your perceptions—how you subjectively see things—for the most part, become your subconscious and unconscious view of your reality from the past.

When perceptions become implicit or nondeclarative (as was discussed in the last chapter), they become automatic or subconscious so that you automatically edit reality subjectively.

You expect it to run as it did the day before; you naturally expect your future experience of driving your car to be like your past experience, yesterday and the day before—that’s your perception.

Once your perception of your car is altered because something has changed about the way it drives, you’ll now perceive your car differently.

Now, if you want to change an implicit or subconscious perception, you must become more conscious and less unconscious.

In truth, you’d have to increase your level of attention to all of the aspects of yourself and your life that you’ve previously stopped paying much attention to. Better yet, you’d have to wake up, change your level of awareness, and become conscious of what you were once unconscious about.

When your perception becomes so second nature and so automatic that you really don’t pay attention to the way reality truly is (because you automatically expect everything to be the same), you’re now unconsciously accepting and agreeing to that

So the only way to change your beliefs and perceptions in order to create a placebo response is to change your state of being. You have to finally see your old, limited beliefs for what they are—records of the past—and be willing to let go of them so that you can embrace new beliefs about yourself that will help you create a new future.

beliefs and perceptions are based on past experiences,

We don’t look at it that way, of course, because we’re addicted to our beliefs; we’re addicted to the emotions of our past. We see our beliefs as truths, not ideas that we can change. If we have very strong beliefs about something, evidence to the contrary could be sitting right in front of us, but we may not see it because what we perceive is entirely different. We’ve in fact conditioned ourselves to believe all sorts of things that aren’t necessarily true—and many of these things are having a negative impact on our health and happiness.

once any of us accepts, believes, and surrenders to an outcome without consciously thinking about it or analyzing it, then we’ll become suggestible to that particular reality.

In most people, such a belief is planted well beyond the conscious

mind into the subconscious system, which is what cre...

Instead of thinking and feeling, I never have enough time to get everything done, what if you instead thought and felt, I live in “no-time,” and I accomplish everything? What if instead of believing, The universe is conspiring against me, you believed, The universe is friendly and works in my favor?

How would you think, how would you live, and how would you walk down the street if you believed the universe works in your favor? How do you think that would change your life?

first accepting that it’s...

then change your level of energy with the hei...

finally allow your biology to reorg...

It’s not necessary to think about how that biological reorganization will happen or when it’s going to happen; that’s the analytical mind at work, which pulls you back into a beta...