You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

by Joe Dispenza

Instead, you just have to make a decision tha...

And once the amplitude or energy of that decision becomes greater than the hardwired programs in your brain and the emotional addiction i...

your past, your body will respond to a new mind, and you can ...

I don’t care how I feel [body]! It doesn’t matter what’s going on in my life [environment]! And, I’m not concerned how long it will take [time]! I’m going to do this!

In reality, your body was no longer the mind; you were the mind. You were changing a belief.

Like beliefs, our perceptions of past experiences—whether positive or negative—directly affect our subconscious state of being and our health.

If you’re having vision challenges, what

things might you have chosen not to see because of painful or frightening past experiences? Similarly, if you’re having hearing challenges, what in your life might you be unwilling to hear?

The Power of the Environment

Just changing your beliefs and perceptions once isn’t enough. You have to reinforce that change over and over.

That didn’t happen because they were praying or hoping or wishing their bodies would make dopamine; it happened because they became people who made dopamine.

they go back to who they were before: their old states of being. In this case,

their same old environments reminded them of their same old personalities and their same old

states of being.

All of the conditions in their familiar lives reminded them of who they were before, so they just slipped right back into those identities, and their various motor problems recurred.8 They reidentified w...

The same thing happens with drug addicts who’ve been clean for many years. If you put them back in their same environments where they used to do drugs, even without their ingesting any drug, being there turns on the same receptor sites in their cells that the drugs did when they were using—and that in turn creates physiological changes in their bodies as if they’ve taken the ...

the conditioning process creates strong associative memories. You’ve also learned that associative memories stimulate subconscious automatic physiological functions by activating the autonomic nervous system. Think of Pavlov’s dogs again. Once Pavlov conditioned the dogs to associate the bell with getting fed, the dogs’ bodies ...

was the cue from the environment that (via associative memory) automatically, autonomically, subconsciously, and physiologically changed the dogs’ internal states. They began to salivate and their digestive ju...

It was the stimulus from the environment that created the associative memory from ...

In fact, that past state of being, which has been thinking and feeling the same way for years on end, has conditioned the body to become the mind. That is, the body is the mind that responds to the environment.

the greater the addiction to the emotion, the greater the conditioned response is to the stimulus in the environment.

For example, let’s say you were addicted to coffee and wanted to break your addiction to it. If you were visiting my house and I started making a java, and you heard the blast of the espresso machine, smelled the coffee brewing, and saw me drinking it, here’s what would happen: The moment your senses picked up those cues from the environment, your body, as the mind, would subconsciously, automatically respond without much help from your conscious mind—because you conditioned it to be that way.

Your body-mind would then be craving its physiological reward, waging a war against your conscious mind, trying to c...

But if you truly broke the addiction to coffee and then I made a cup in front of you, you could have some or not, because you wouldn’t have the physiological response you had previously. You’d no longer be conditioned (your body would no longer be the mind), and the associativ...

The same holds true for emotional addictions. For instance, if you have memorized guilt from your past experiences and unconsciously live that way every day in the present, then like most people, you’ll use someone or something at someplace in your external environment to reaffirm your addiction to guilt. Try as you might to be consciously greater than it, the moment you see your mother (whom you use to feel guilty) at the house where you grew up, your body will autonomically, chemically, and physiologically return to the same past state of guilt in the present moment, without your conscious mind being involved. Your body, which has been subconsciously programmed to be the mind of guilt, is already living in the past in that present moment. So it’s more natural to feel guilty when you’re with your mother than to feel any other way. And just as in the drug addict, a conditioned response has altered your internal state ba...

they got drunk because the environment, by associative memory, cued their brains and bodies to respond in the same old, familiar way.

They believed they were drinking alcohol, and those beliefs translated into neurochemicals, which altered their states of being.

In other words, their beliefs alone were sufficient to fire up a biochemical change in their bodies that was equal to being drunk.

That’s because the students conditioned themselves enough times to associate alcohol with a change in their internal chemical states. As the subjects expected or anticipated the future change in their inner states based on their past associative memories of drinking, they were cue...

There’s a flip side, too, of course. The environment can a...

Our states of mind, created from the environment, can most definitely contribute to healing our brains and our bodies.

So, then, do you need a sugar pill or a saline injection or a sham procedure or a picture window—something or someone or someplace in your external environment—to move into a new state of being? Or can you do it just by changing how you think and feel? Can you simply believe in a new possibility of health, without relying on any external stimulus, and make the thought in your brain a new emotional experience to the degree that it changes your body and you become greater than the conditioning in your external environment?

If so, what you’ve just read suggests that it would be a good idea to change your internal state every day—before you get up and face your same old environment so that it won’t pull you, as it did the ...

If you could access a new state of being through meditation by combining a clear intention with getting in touch with that heightened state of emotion that was mentioned earlier, and you got up jazzed and on fire about what you were creating every day, you’d finally start coming out of your resting state. You’d then be in a new state of being, with a different attitude, belief, and perception, no longer reacting to the same things in the same way, because now your environment would no longer control how you think and feel. You’d then be making new choices and demonstrating new behaviors, which would lead to new experiences and new emotions. And so you’d then turn into a new and different personality—a personality that doesn’t have the arthritic pain or the Parkinson’s motor issues or the infertility or whatever other condition you want to change.

My point is that no matter what the source of our ills, there’s a possibility that we can change our condition.

a clear and firm intention and heightening our emotional energy, we have to create a new internal experience in our minds and bodies that’s greater than the past external experience.

In other words, when we decide to create a new belief, the amplitude or energy of that choice must be high enough that it’s greater than the hardwired programs and emotional conditioning in the body.

similar process happens with the firewalkers, the glass chewers, and the snake handlers. They get clear that they’re going to move into a different state of mind and body. And when they hold that firm intention to make that shift, the energy of that decision creates internal changes in their brains and bodies that make them immune to the external conditions in the environment for an extended period of time. Their energy now is protecting them in a way that, in that moment, transcends their biology.

When you change your energy, you change your state of being. And the rewiring in the brain and the new chemical emotions in the body trigger epigenetic changes, and the result is that you become quite literally a new person. The person you were before is history; a part of that person simply vanished along with the neurocircuitry, chemical-emotional addictions, and genetic expression that supported your old state of being.

direct any outcomes according to your intentions.

exist simultaneously in an infinite array of possibilities or probabilities within the invisible and infinite quantum field of energy. It’s only when an observer focuses attention on any one location of any one electron that the electron actually appears in that place. Look away, and the subatomic matter disappears back into energy.

So according to this “observer effect,” physical matter can’t exist or manifest until we observe it—until we notice it and give it our attention. And when we’re no longer paying attention to it, it vanishes, going back from whence it came. So matter is constantly transforming, oscillating between manifesting into matter and disappearing into energy

In other words, if you can imagine a particular future event that you want to experience in your life, that reality already exists as a possibility somewhere in the quantum field—beyond this space and time—just waiting for you to observe it. If your mind (through your thoughts and feelings) can affect when and where an electron appears out of nowhere, then theoretically, you should be able to influence the appearance of any number of possibilities that you can imagine.

From a quantum perspective, if you observed yourself in a particular new future that was different from your past, expected that reality to occur, and then emotionally embraced the outcome, you’d be—for a moment—living in that future reality, and you’d be conditioning your body to believe it was in that future in the present moment.

So the quantum model, which states that all possibilities exist in this moment, gives us permission to choose a new f...

So the mental rehearsal I talked about earlier is certainly not idle daydreaming or wishful thinking. It is, in a very real sense, the way you can intentionally manifest your desired reality, including a life without pain or disease. By focusing more on what you do want and less on what you don’t want, you can call into existence whatever you desire and simultaneously “fade away” what you don’t want by no longer giving it your attention. Where you place your attention is where you place your energy. Once you fix your attention or your awareness or your mind on possibility, you place your energy there as well. As a result, you’re affecting matter with your attention or observation. The placebo effect is not fantasy, then; it’s quantum reality.

It was his level of energy that transcended the effects of matter. He made a decision with such firm intention that his choice carried an amplitude of energy that transcended the laws of the environment, the effects on the body, and linear time.

a new energy that rewrote the circuitry in his brain, the chemistry in his body, and his genetic expression. In that present moment, he wasn’t his identity that was connected to his familiar environment, nor was he his physical body, nor was he living in linear time.

When they saw their

father trapped and almost certain to die, their heightened state of energy turned off the cell receptors that normally would tell their bodies that the tractor was too heavy to lift and turned on the muscle-cell receptors to bear a greater load so that when they tried, their muscles responded and they were able to free their dad. It wasn’t matter (body) that was moving matter (tractor); it was energy that was influencing matter.