Your Personality is Your Personal Reality
Dr. Joe Dispenza is an author, coach, educator, and researcher. His message is that meditation allows us to change our inner world by calling in elevated emotion and a clear intention, and thus, our external world improves. Essentially, you rehearse the future that you want to have in meditation to prime you to make that future happen in the real world. People often frown upon Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work and seemingly holistic health and spirituality. It’s cultural conditioning or personal wounding, or both.
The irony of backlash and resistance to spiritual and well-being living is that everything we use and engage with all day is manipulating us in subtle and not so subtle ways. Food and drink, health products, retail, and experiences all convey that your external world will suddenly improve if you get this one product.
The world has conditioned us through religion, education, and family structures to believe we are stuck living in a passive, rigid world saved only by faith or the new shiny product. Or we grew up in a controlling environment that hampered our power and voice.
The intent behind taking a pill for moods or buying the hottest product is often to change something internally. I’m not insulting consumerism; I partake like most others. Products can bring pleasure and experiences joy. I highlight that we’re all trying to change and control our worlds, reality, and emotional states. It’s just a matter of doing it through internal or external changes, or how much is weighted toward the outer. And if you have been working on external changes for a while, I invite you to keep reading and see how to change your internal world.
People are inherently against the notion of sitting in silence and being with their minds. Understandably silence is scary, uncomfortable, or annoying, and our world keeps us hyper-aroused and plugged in all day. There’s a time and place for pills, but there’s always time and space for getting to know ourselves more intimately and setting our course. If you are opposed to this notion and think of this as pseudoscience or pop psychology, this isn’t the article for you.
If any part of you is curious about changing your inner world instead of another attempt at changing your external world, read on. Doubt is welcome. Open minds are required.
Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon
Dr. Joe’s book, Supernatural: How Common People are Doing the Uncommon, sets out to convince you that you have a lot more control of your reality when you get out of your way. We can rewire our brains by getting quiet and rehearsing what we want to feel before the actual experience. To summarize, he explains:
Why do we get stuck in the same patterns (because our brain uses the past to create our future)
Why do we need to access the present moment in meditation (to transcend our current mental state, habits, and problems)
How to cultivate new possibilities (by tapping into elevated emotion with a clear intent)
How the Past Impacts Your Present & Future
Dr. Joe writes that it takes a clear intention from a coherent brain and an elevated emotion from a cohesive heart to change a person’s biology from living in the past to the future. Part of what blocks us from pursuing a more fulfilling life is that we get in our way. What does that mean? Instead of experiencing more joy in our relationships, we let our past neural wiring make us snap at our spouses for not doing the dishes because we’ve fought in this exact situation many times before. Or we job hop changing our title in hopes of experiencing more happiness. We have to allow something more substantial than our past patterns to take over, or we’ll keep repeating the past because it’s how the brain works.
How do our brains work?
The brain is a product of the past, with patterns and imprints creating neural networks that accomplish tasks efficiently by recalling stored instructions for an action, like driving. The neurons in the brain assemble to form thousands of synaptic connections ( neurons in the brain connect to neurons in the rest of the body and from those neurons to the muscles), and those connections then build complex neurological networks (how we gather facts and categorize what we see, hear, feel, and read). When new knowledge is received, the interaction with the environment leaves an impression in the brain. More neurons come together to make more connections, and your brain gets upgraded. Networks allow us to plan, execute, see, hear, feel, cook, drive, swing a bat, learn, and stay motivated..
Experiences enhance the brain circuitry, but they also create emotions. Emotions are chemical feedback or chemical residue from past experiences. The stronger the emotional vibration from an event, the more the experience leaves a lasting impression in your brain – aka long-term memories. Then as a thought, choice, behavior, experience, or emotion is repeated, the more the neurons fire together and are sustained.
Thoughts contribute to or create emotions, distinguished professor of psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett explains in her book. Dr. Barrett used brain scans to determine the “emotion” region of the brain is active even during perceptions and thoughts that aren’t emotional. Our thoughts really affect our well-being.
Her theory is that the brain doesn’t spontaneously create emotions per the situation. Instead, the source of emotions is already in each person’s brain from previous experiences, like books on a bookshelf holding information ready to be utilized. The brain makes predictions and anticipates sensory inputs such as vision or taste. Sensory inputs either affirm the mind’s predictions as correct, or the brain changes if it wrongly predicted the situation. Each response has its own neural pathway and bodily movements. This is why anger responses can differ based on the context. Sometimes we shout red in the face; other times, we stay quiet and boil inside. The brain uses prior experience and sensory input to predict which reaction is best for the situation in front of us. Our experience constructs our emotions, which means our feelings are not innate or fixed.
If we can embody new experiences, we can have new emotions. What’s even more interesting is that emotions are a convention of the culture we live in, Barrett writes. Once we know the concept of an emotion, we can experience it, which brings us back to Dr. Joe’s work.
Joe summarizes the impact of thoughts and emotions and says, “if you have a fearful thought, you start to feel fear. The moment you feel fear, that emotion influences you to think more fearful thoughts, and those thoughts trigger the release of even more chemicals in the body that make you continue to feel fear.” It creates a feedback loop, which hardwires our brain into the same patterns. If you spend your day doing the same thing, your brain goes on autopilot and turns past experiences into habits through repetition. You eat the same breakfast, drive the same commute, react to your coworkers as you did the day before, watch the same shows, go to sleep on the same side of the bed. You are now on autopilot.
Thoughts are the vocabulary of the brain, and feelings are vocabulary of the body, and the cycle of how you think and feel becomes your state of being.
For example, suppose an upcoming meeting with your boss stirs up a memory of feeling insecure. In that case, your brain releases chemicals and emotions associated with past feelings of insecurity - like increased heart rate and sweating. The physical sensations and emotions of insecurity are present, so now your mind looks for more reasons to feel insecure during the conversation. Your boss slightly frowns at your pitch, and your mind confirms that to mean you aren’t doing a good job. The feedback loop engages and reaffirms insecurity. You see your boss again in two weeks with the same feelings, and the same experience happens, further strengthening your insecurity.
The brain uses these past experiences because it craves efficiency. An ancient survival mechanism, the brain acts fast with past data to reduce energy intake. The brain is constantly trying to make sense of the data it receives and using the past as a guide saving time and energy. Our brain creates a reaction without having all of the information so that it’s quicker, which increases our response rates for survival. We’re quite literally jumping to conclusions for the goal of survival. So your yesterday creates your tomorrow.
ForteLabs says this leads to a profound conclusion: that the simulations we create in our heads are more real to us than the physical world. What we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are simulations of the world, not reactions to it. It takes energy to create new patterns and disrupts habits, but the reward is great if we are willing to simulate elevated experiences in our minds.
Are we doomed to feel what we’ve always felt?
So far, we’ve learned the brain is using the past to efficiently predict the future and determine the sensations, feelings, and emotions required in the present moment.
Joe writes that we have to change how we think and feel to change our state of being. Could you focus your attention and energy on the unknown so that your body would follow your mind into a new experience in your future?
According to experts, our brains don’t know the difference between imagining an event and emotion and actually experiencing that event and emotion. What you mentally rehearse repeatedly not only becomes who you are but also determines your future. Great athletes like Kayla Harrison, Missy Franklin, and Michael Phelps mentally rehearse, winning their sport over and over again in their heads. We are mentally rehearsing all of the time, even if we don’t realize it. We see heavy traffic on our commute, which brings up the past emotion of frustration, so we lean into frustration again. We come home with frustrated energy and get into a fight with our spouse for no other reason than that energy is present.
Our neurons create electrical charges from a thought, which causes a chemical charge that results in a feeling, and those feelings make magnetic charges. As we learned, emotions are energy in motion. The neurons that fire in the brain create electrical charges. Remember, we are electrical beings. That’s why if someone has a heart attack, you use a defibrillator to deliver a dose of electric current to the heart. Have you ever seen an angry guy at the airline counter? You can sense his anger; it’s palpable because emotions produce frequencies. Love, joy, and gratitude create higher frequencies than stress, fear, and anger. If we keep feeling fear and anger, and it’s a habit because we are on autopilot, then our energy is essentially equal to our past. However, we can disrupt this pattern. It’s up to us, whether you believe that or not – it’s true. We aren’t doomed to the past.
Given what you now know about the brain, does it still seem crazy that you can change your life by changing your internal world?
It’s similar to the criticism of the placebo effect. People look down on practices like acupuncture because they believe it is all placebo effect. Despite promising research on acupuncture’s impact, so what if it's a placebo effect? If we can trick our brains into turning off pain receptors in the knees after fake knee surgery, why don’t we tap into that more often and trick our brains into feeling elevated emotions as our baseline?
Society and culture say if we fix and change our external circumstances, our lives will change. But what Dr. Joe and many other wise people teach us is that if we haven’t changed our internal state, we stay in our old state of being and emotions. Even if we get the new job to replace the miserable one and don't change our inner world, the new job can be just as miserable after the newness wears off. If we focus all of our attention and energy on the external world – our house, careers, spouses, kids, news, there’s no energy left to put on our inner world of thoughts and feelings. There’s no energy left to create something new because we are busy thinking and feeling the same thoughts and feelings as before, reaffirming our same life. Our external environment has all the control over our thoughts and feelings. That’s not a great spot to be in because we (mostly) cannot control our external environment, despite how much we try, but we can change our inner thoughts and feelings.
Our personality is no longer creating our personal reality, but our personal reality is creating our personality. Dr. Joe Dispenza
If stress, frustration, anxiety is the default and the fight-or-flight nervous system turns on and stays switched on, then it’s hard to turn this feedback loop off. If the threat doesn’t seem temporary – seeing the dishes and emails pile up, the stress turns on, and it can’t turn off. The stress hormones become addictive. Do you have people in your life that seem addicted to being busy and stressed or being dramatic? Long term, this chronic state of being in distress turns into disease. Dr. Joe writes that we use our people on the other political side to reaffirm our addiction to hatred and righteousness. We use our social media feed to reaffirm our insecurity. We use our relationship with money to reaffirm our sense of lack. In reading this book and through meditation and breathwork, I’ve seen how I reinforce and reaffirm negative feelings. We’re all privy to it. You might even feel overwhelmed reading up to this point but stick with me.
How do you get back into the present moment? How do you let the past experiences dissolve?
It’s time to take your energy back and reclaim it as your own through meditation and breathwork. Meditation can be unbelievably uncomfortable. Your mind wants to do something, play with something, eat something, fix something. Give me something, it screams. Your mind wants to engage in the external world, but it’s precisely the gift of spending time with your inner world that will upgrade your mind’s software. As you practice repeatedly returning to the present moment, you will break the bonds with your known reality. You also release stored emotional energy through breathwork, freeing up the mind. Once you reach the present state, you have the power to create. You create space in your body to call in new feelings you want to feel – joy, gratitude, bliss.
Invisible field of energy & information: Your World is Alive
Why is it so important to settle in the present moment? It begins with energy. The quantum field is an invisible field of energy and information that exists beyond space and time. Some call it the field of intelligence or consciousness. This universal field of energy and information governs all the laws of nature and is a major topic for researchers like Carlo Rovelli. Quantum uncertainty means we cannot know the positions and speeds of all the particles in the Universe. Just by observing particles with awareness, they are affected. According to Nature, the malleability of space and time means that two events occurring far apart might even happen when viewed by one observer and in the opposite order when viewed by another. The particle exists when we bring awareness to it, in other words, when we pay attention to it.
What does the quantum field have to do with us accessing the present moment? Dr. Joe explains that when we access the present moment and focus our attention away from our bodies, identities, and personalities, we enter into the unified field where nothing material exists. With a focus on the unknown, we can create possibilities. Dr. Joe says this experience occurs when the brain waves have coherence, they are not mixed or erratic, but balanced and optimal. Essentially, our brain has moved into a slower frequency–from beta to alpha or theta–during meditation and breathwork. In his book, he shows brain wave scans of people using open focus (alpha) versus people meditating (theta) and the levels of coherence created through meditation. After a workshop of intense meditation, he shows evidence of people’s brains moving from a high-stressed brain, beta to theta.
Why is it important that our brains move into coherence and theta or delta waves? What is significant about accessing the present moment and leaving behind the focus on our identities, jobs, partners, challenges, and to-do lists?
Once we reach a coherent state, we call forth a clear intention and elevated emotion. We create an electrical charge behind what we desire so clearly and vividly in our brain that we actually experience it during this present state. As explained above, the brain doesn’t know if we are experiencing the thing in our mind or our world, so if we begin to undergo it in our mind, it will create momentum to feel it in the world too. Dr. Joe says that elevated emotions, like joy or awe, carry higher energy and magnetic charge than fear or stress. When you combine that elevated emotion with your attention, an electromagnetic signature equals your state of being. What does that mean? You are becoming and experiencing what you want already at this moment. We are priming our future reality by pre-feeling what we desire “out there.” Dr. Joe writes, “If you are going to perform something that's unlimited, you’d better feel unlimited. If you want to create freedom, you’d better feel free.” In this unified field, you’re bringing it to life with your attention and intention – here, you get to be a genius, abundant, healthy, wealthy, create a new job, resolve an old problem. After meditation, you get up as a new self–one who feels more like energy than matter. As you go through your day, you tune back into these feelings you experienced deeply in your meditation when old neural patterns emerge, like feeling grumpy in a long line or ticked off in traffic.
Skeptical people will say you can’t change your experience in this way, but they are already doing this whether they know it or not. They obsess about the worst thing that could happen. They are priming their body to feel stress and frustration and activating a feedback loop of distress. Why not obsess about the best thing that could happen? If you think about the future regardless, why not tap into what you desire?
Meditations and Breath: Tap into Your Body’s Energy Centers
You can practice Dr. Joe’s meditation:
Sit in a quiet space and rest your attention in different parts of your body
Bring that attention to the space around parts of your body
The space behind your eyes, the center of your head, the back of your throat
back of your head, and then beyond your head in space
Space beyond your throat and around your neck, the center of your chest
The space around your body, behind your navel, around your hips
The vastness of space of the room you’re in
Extend your awareness of the space that occupies space in space
As you feel into the awareness of the vastness of all space, tune into your future
Remember your future before it happens
Mentally rehearse what it’s like to live in that place, in that future
Call up the elevated emotions to feel what that future feels like
Finally, bless your body and mind, your challenges, your past, and your future
What does the energy and frequency of our body mean?
Through the above meditation, you quiet external stimulants and open space to call in higher frequencies of feeling. Roughly thirty-seven trillion cells exist in our bodies. These cells are constantly communicating with each other by exchanging information transmitted on different frequencies of light. We are beings of light. The field of research on how cells exchange information using light, or photons, is still developing, but it proves that bodies emit electromagnetic waves. In layman's terms, this means we emit waves of energy from our body out into the world, and our cells use light to share information, which means we can tap into specific frequencies.
When we place our energy into different energy centers in our body, aka our chakras, we stimulate the frequencies in those areas. Conscious intent brought to each chakra activates them and heals them. Information surrounding our organs, glands, and cells lies in each energy system. If worry and anger are the default states, incoherence rests in each of the body’s centers. The body moves from overstressed back to balanced when coherence, energy, and attention are placed on the body’s centers. Coupled with experiencing an elevated emotion, significant shifts of healing occur.
When we shift our attention from a narrow focus (such as reading this paragraph) to open focus (sensing the space in your room, hearing the sounds around, the sensations in your body), it changes our brain waves. We move brain waves from beta, conscious thought, to alpha, relaxed and creative. We become aware of space or nothingness by moving from a narrow to an open focus. Buddhist traditions have taught this meditation for thousands of years. When we open our focus, like an overhead light lighting up the room, instead of a narrow focus, like a flashlight shining in a closet, our brain waves slow down. We sense and feel instead of think and ruminate. We can’t think our way into fixing an energy solution, but we can slow our brain waves down and allow our autonomic nervous system to take over, which controls our breathing, heart rate, etc., to nourish and bring us back into a state of balance.
An open focus meditation from Dr. Joe:
Place your attention in your first energy center
Open your attention to the space around this first energy center
Thank that enter for the greatest good
Connect to your elevated emotion (joy, gratitude, love)
Repeat this for all seven energy centers
Finish at the eight center above your head
Keep coming back to the high emotion if it dissipates, or you get distracted
After the eight centers, rest in stillness as this energy integrates into your body
Heart Coherence: Tapping into Possibilities
Up to this point, we’ve talked a lot about the brain. Now we’ll move down into the heart, a longtime symbol of health, intelligence, and love. It’s not just a pump but a place to connect to our inner knowing by accessing our heart’s intelligence in this energy center.
What is the heart’s intelligence?
HeartMath Institute, a nonprofit research organization, defines it as “the flow of awareness and insight that we experience once the mind and emotions are brought into balance and coherence through a self-initiated process. This form of intelligence is experienced as direct, intuitive knowing that manifests in thought and emotions that are beneficial for ourselves and others.” This state lowers blood pressure balance in the nervous system and hormones, improves brain function, and promotes healthier gene expression (aka epigenetics). We can access the heart’s intelligence when we meditate and enter coherent states. Heart intelligence is so beneficial, yet we can’t access it if we are stressed and imbalanced.
How does stress affect our hearts?
It’s widely known that stress impacts our hearts and is one of the main factors for heart disease, a leading cause of death. A Mayo Clinic study showed psychological stress was the strongest predictor of future cardiac events. Stress makes our heartbeat incoherently, a fragmented rhythm. Sooner or later, the incoherent and fragmented beats take a toll and cause heart disease and heart attacks. Managing stress is about creating resiliency – the capacity to prepare for, recover from, and adapt in the face of stress, adversity, trauma, or challenge. The good news is we can manage our stress through the internal skill of heart coherence.
What is heart coherence, and why is it so important?
According to Dr. Joe, the energy of elevated feelings sets at least 1,400 biochemical changes in the body that promote growth and repair. The heart produces the strongest magnetic field in the body–5,000 times greater in strength than the field produced by the brain. Read that again; your heart produces an electromagnetic field outside your body. What is an electromagnetic field? It’s a physical field produced by moving electrically charged objects and is one of the four fundamental forces of nature. A low-frequency electromagnetic field is electrical wiring and appliances versus a high-frequency electromagnetic field like mobile phones. The energy created with an open heart that is orderly and coherent, just like the brain, produces a measurable magnetic field. We uplevel our energetic state.
The heart's magnetic field, which is the strongest rhythmic field... | Download Scientific Diagram
According to Psychology Today, the heart's energy reaches about three feet outside of the physical body. It can be detected in another person sitting nearby via an electrocardiogram (ECG). This is what it means when a person says, “I just feel good when I am around her.” The more we practice the skill of heart coherence through meditating and calling in elevated emotions, the more our health is improved and the more we enhance our emotional baseline. Our resting state becomes more joyful, thankful, and connected. We recondition our body, rewire our brain, and reconfigure our biology through this sustained practice.
How do we create heart coherence and tap into our heart’s intelligence?
We practice these meditations as much as possible, and when we come to the present moment, we rehearse feeling elevated emotions like inspiration, thankfulness, compassion, and freedom. If that feels silly, consider what emotions are present throughout your day. Is it so foolish to feel more thankful, or is it just a skill you haven’t practiced?
Practice this heart coherence meditation:
Close your eyes, allow your body to relax
Bring your attention to your heart
Start breathing in and out from the heart center, more slowly and deeply
As your mind wanders, keep bringing your attention back to your heart center
Start to send that energy out beyond your body
Call in your intention (to feel thankful, joyful, connected)
Continue to broadcast that energy and intention in the space all around your body
Continue to practice this heart coherence meditation daily or multiple times a week.
Alive and Supernatural
The post doesn’t fully capture the entirety and richness of Becoming Supernatural. Still, I hope it leaves you with a glimpse of the simple and accessible practices available no matter your circumstances. It's a straightforward and accessible skill that, with time, can improve everything from your health, biology, relationships, purpose, and work. We change our gene expression through this practice. We can cease conditioning the body to live in the self-limiting emotions of the mind that are programmed to survive and stay safe. It’s going to feel uncomfortable, perhaps corny or silly at first, or maybe always.
But this practice is about being okay with the uncomfortable because discomfort is the path to growth. You will feel more alive.
Dr. Joe states, “if your familiar environment is controlling how you think and feel, it’s time to retreat from your life and go inward so you can reverse the process of being a victim of life and instead become a creator of it. You know that it’s possible to change yourself from within and that when you do it, it will be reflected in your outer world.”
I’ll leave you with that, and off to stillness and meditation, you (and I) go.
Interested in a free breathwork session?
Some of you know I am completing a six-month program to become a breathwork facilitator. As part of the practicum, I am conducting free sessions in exchange for feedback. Breathwork is a practice of allowing our systems to see a different perspective whereby we feel deeply connected to our bodies and understand and experience the intelligence contained within our systems. Breathwork is a way to heal, release, and transform.
Book a free session here
Here are the most common benefits of breathwork:
» Immediate stress reduction & anxiety relief.
» Connect with your emotions & change your response to them.
» More energy & mental clarity.
» Deepens your relationship to your body.
