Do you daydream about what your capabilities genuinely are? Have you ever wondered what would happen if you could master your mind with no restrictions?
Today’s guest knows a thing or two about testing his capabilities. After being hit by a truck, he broke six vertebrae in his spine, and his doctors told him he would never walk again.
Refusing surgery, he began to imagine himself totally healed. In just ten and a half weeks, he was back on his feet, and in twelve weeks, he was training again. He fully healed himself with just his mind.
Dr. Joe Dispenza is an internationally-renowned science researcher and New York Times best-selling author. He’s made it his life’s work to understand the brain-body connection and learn to heal yourself with your mind.
In this episode, we discuss a simple guide to expanding your consciousness, how to escape the shackles of stress, what you can do to create coherence between your heart and mind, the real relationship between thoughts and emotions, and so much more.
Let’s jump straight in!
Dr. Joe Dispenza is an international speaker, researcher, author, and educator who is passionate about the findings from the fields of neuroscience, epigenetics, and quantum physics to explore the science behind spontaneous remissions. He uses that knowledge to help people heal themselves of illness, chronic conditions, and even terminal diseases to enjoy a more fulfilled and happy life and evolve their consciousnesses.
Dr. Joe is the New York Times bestselling author of You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter, which explores our ability to heal without drugs or surgery but rather by thought alone. His most recent book, Becoming Supernatural, talks about how we can intentionally change our brain chemistry to initiate profoundly mystical, transcendental experiences and develop a more healthy body, mind, and spiritual life.
Dr. Joe didn’t always work in the field of neuroscience. He started as a chiropractor, earning his doctor of chiropractic degree from Life University in Atlanta, GA. He had a successful chiropractic practice, but one day he had a dangerous accident. In 1986, while cycling in a triathlon, Dr. Joe was hit by a truck. He broke six vertebrae in his spine, and his doctors told him he would never walk again.
Dr. Joe asked four different surgeons what he should do, and all four of them prescribed a complicated surgery. The surgery would relieve some of his pain but nearly guarantee he would never walk again. But that wasn’t good enough. He refused to have the surgery and instead began to imagine himself totally healed. He visualized each vertebrae’s healing and reconstructed his spine in his mind. In just ten and a half weeks, Dr. Joe was back on his feet, and in twelve weeks, he was training again and back at work at his chiropractic clinic. He fully healed himself with just his mind.
I know this might sound beyond the realm of possibility, but Dr. Joe is living proof, so let’s jump in and hear his wisdom!
Dr. Joe Dispenza assembled a team of scientists and completed 8,500 brain scans. After such extensive research, they are confident in their abilities to predict three things:
“Our research shows that the moment you take your attention off your body, you take your attention off the people in your life and go from who you identify with — from someone — to no one. Take your attention off your cell phone, computer, and car, and go from something to nothing. Take your attention off where you’re sitting [or] where you need to be, and go from somewhere to nowhere and take your attention off time. [Think] about the predictable future or the familiar past and fall into the generous present moment and go from some time to no time. Then, all you’re left with is consciousness.” – Dr. Joe Dispenza
By becoming hyper-focused on the present, you’re no longer playing by the same rules of matter. Matter is defined as any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume — it’s everything in the physical world around us. Dr. Dispenza is even demonstrating his research to a group of researchers in Santa Cruz. He appreciated that the person getting a scan was about to have a transformational moment.
“They said, ‘How do you know?’ I’ve seen enough of these, and the next moment, the whole brain just lights up. That person is switched on. They’ll never be the same person again [because] they have a transcendental moment we could predict and teach. It’s a formula, and you change the formula, and you add to it. When you no longer are identifying with your body, your environment, and time, that’s the moment you are pure consciousness. Now you’re an awareness that has nothing to do with local space and time.” – Dr. Joe Dispenza
If you can go beyond, you shorten the time for a change. When the brain tries to change the brain, it takes a long time. The same thing with the personality trying to change the personality or for the ego to change the ego. Consciousness is beginning to activate or manipulate circuits in the brain. People think the brain creates consciousness, but that’s not accurate.
“Consciousness is [running] the brain, the brain-mind is the brain in action. [When the brain changes] it’s consciousness that changes it. When people begin to disengage and get beyond themselves, [that’s when] you are at your absolute best.” – Dr. Joe Dispenza
Using the formula helps you reach that generous present moment where you feel connected. Imagine living your life from a place filled with less judgment, less frustration, and less impatience?
Sounds terrific, right? Let’s hear what the formula entails.
The formula requires a clear intention and a coherent brain. If you’re living stressed out and something goes wrong, typically, you feel threatened because you can’t predict an outcome. Your perception is that something’s getting worse or you can’t control it, which switches on that fight-or-flight system.
“You start shifting your attention from one person to one problem because your brain is trying to predict the next moment. As you shift your attention from one to the next, it’s like a lightning storm and a cloud — your brain starts firing very incoherently. When your brain is incoherent, you are incoherent. Living by the hormones of stress is not a time to create, open your heart, learn, [or] to trust. It’s a time to run, fight, or hide. People spend 70% of their life living in this state.” – Dr. Joe Dispenza
Under stress, you don’t typically sit down and meditate because you can’t sit still. The survival gene is switched on, and nobody can believe in possibility while in survival mode. Survival mode narrows our focus on the body and environment, which means trying to predict the future based on the past.
“When you go from a narrow focus on something and you begin to open your focus, you create awareness, and opening your focus causes you to stop thinking. If you stop thinking, you no longer activate those circuits, and you start to slow your brainwaves down. As you slow your brainwaves down, you start connecting to that autonomic nervous system — the thing that’s giving you life. [By moving] beyond yourself, [the autonomic nervous system] says, ‘He’s gone. Let’s step in and clean up this mess before he gets back.’ Its job is to create order and balance.” – Dr. Joe Dispenza
Becoming still allows us to connect with our innate intelligence, which steps right in to help us during stressful moments. If you can’t change your brain waves, you stay in that active state and make decisions from within that disturbing emotion.
“If you’re analyzing your life within some disturbing emotion, you’re making your brain worse. We teach people the formula: how to open their focus, change their brainwaves, [and] connect to that invisible field, and suddenly different compartments of the brain start synchronizing. The front of the brain starts talking [with] the back of the brain. The right side starts talking to the left side, and suddenly what sinks in the brain links in the brain.” – Dr. Joe Dispenza
People linking those two hemispheres of the brain start lighting up — they feel whole and in love with life. The formula helps move away from resentment and judgment that cause your heart to beat out of rhythm. It’s like stepping on the gas and the brake simultaneously.
By returning to our innate intelligence, we prevent ourselves from squandering our body’s life force and start using it to its full potential.
Dr. Dispenza gives us an understanding of the difference between the two concepts.
“Consciousness is awareness. Awareness is paying attention and noticing. 95% of who we are by the time we’re 35 years old is a set of unconscious automatic programs that we’ve practiced so many times that we’re not consciously thinking. The first step is: You [must] become conscious of your unconscious thoughts.” – Dr. Joe Dispenza
It’s a great idea to write a list at the end of the day about our most common thoughts to become aware of them. All you need is to sit down quietly, close your eyes, don’t move, and start observing your thoughts.
“When you begin to observe that thought, you’re no longer the program. You’re the consciousness observing the program and starting to pull out of the program. Become aware of how you speak [and] how you act. Become so conscious that you won’t go unconscious and let that thought or behavior run you. As you start becoming conscious of it, you’re beginning to objectify your subjective self and pull out of those programs. Nobody likes to do that because it’s uncomfortable. [Most] turn on their cell phones, get on the internet, [or] watch TV to distract them from that moment. That is what they have to move through to get to their own personal freedom.” – Dr. Joe Dispenza
Meditation means to become familiar with or to become conscious. Becoming conscious and meditating allows you to practice making unconscious thoughts conscious so that unconscious thoughts can’t control you anymore. It isn’t easy; it takes a tremendous amount of energy to do that and awareness to stay conscious.
It’s not about being perfect, and even Dr. Dispenza says he constantly has to realign himself. But he has an interesting perspective on the difficult days to meditate.
“You don’t remember the good meditations — you remember the ones where you came up against yourself, and said, ‘I’m going to go a little further’ and [you] go a little further. There’s no linear correlation — it’s just whether you’re willing to live in creation instead of living in survival.” – Dr. Joe Dispenza
We can always aspire to be better at it, and our awareness to stay conscious means staying present — and that’s an art.
One of the big reasons all these techniques are essential is that they help us overcome self-doubt.
We often hear a big question: “How do you believe in yourself when you’ve never believed in yourself?” Even if you currently feel doubt inside all day long, there are still options.
“Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge. Keep learning, keep studying, keep listening to it — sooner or later, that’ll become a louder voice in your head than, ‘I can’t. It’s too hard. I’ll never change.’ We have over 450 testimonies — start looking to see what [other people] do. When they tell their story, and it’s worse than yours, you’re going to start going, ‘Wow. That person had a tough one, and if they overcame it, I could forgive my father. I could forgive my ex.’ I don’t want to give them my attention or energy. I want to put my attention on my future.” – Dr. Joe Dispenza
Without knowledge, you will believe in yourself less, which is why learning is so important. Don’t be impatient and expect instantaneous change. Allow yourself to embrace practices like meditation to help you get to a point where you make up your mind to change.
“When the chemotherapy hasn’t worked, the surgery didn’t work, and the diet didn’t work, yoga didn’t work — this is their end, [and] they have nothing else to believe in but themselves. They go all in, not 50%, not 60% — ALL in.” – Dr. Joe Dispenza
You reach that next limit by pushing yourself a little past where you’d typically go into the unknown. What’s important is that you start believing in yourself a little more.
“It’s not the work. It’s your belief in yourself. When you believe in yourself, you believe in possibilities. When you believe in possibilities, you believe in yourself. Who else are you going to believe in? People make great strides in their personal growth [by] starting to believe [in themselves]. [Suddenly you realize] maybe we’re not as limited as we’ve been programmed to believe. Maybe we are more unlimited, and I’d rather throw in with that.” – Dr. Joe Dispenza
Guys, this episode was so jam-packed with wisdom that I just couldn’t share it all in this post. To get all the tools, you need to listen to the entire podcast Episode 997.
If you’d like to learn more from Dr. Dispenza, visit his website, which is rich with content to explore and books to buy like Becoming Supernatural. He also has meditations and courses to discover the unlimited potential within.
If you liked this episode, we would love it if you could tag Dr. Dispenza, @drjoedispenza, and me, @lewishowes, on Instagram with what stood out most to you. Also, please consider giving us a 5-star rating on Apple Podcasts because they help spread these messages even further!
If you’re ready to start unlocking the power of your mind, this episode is for you! So join me for Episode 997 of The School of Greatness, and start your journey toward discovering what you’re capable of!
To Greatness,
Music Credit:
Kaibu by Killercats
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