A lot of studies show that our attitude, our reaction to life events affects our health. People unconsciously conditioned their body according to the past, about the unhappy events, the frustrating things of the past. The stronger the trauma, the more the body lives in the past with resentment, frustration, anger, low self-esteem. This becomes the subconscious program. We are creating in our mind self-fulfilling prophecies without being aware of.

Most automatic behaviours are produced by unconscious or subconscious programming that is happening behind our awareness.

Humans are creatures of habit. We think between 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts in one day and 90% of those thoughts are exactly the same ones we had the day before. We live a huge part of our lives in autopilot. According to Dr Dispenza thinking the same thoughts leads us to make the same choices, and the same choices leads us to the same behaviour and the same behaviour create the same experience and thus produce the same emotions. And those same emotions then drive the same thoughts and the same thoughts create the same reality as usual. You create the same brain activity that leads to the same chemistry, biology, the same gene expression and your life and health stay the same. In truth your past becomes your future, and that familiar feeling is your identity or your personality. Your personality then creates your personal reality. Most people want a new personal reality with the same old personality and it does not work. To change your life, you have to literally become someone else.

How the brain works:

The basic principle in neuroscience is “Nerve cells that fire together wire together”. If your thoughts, choices, behaviours, experiences and emotional states remain the same for years, it reinforces the same endless cycle, then your brain becomes hardwired into a finite signature.

Neuroplasticity

Whenever you make your brain works differently, you are creating a new circuitry and you are changing your mind. Rats that are in an enriched environment had larger brains with more neurons and more connections between those neurons.

How to change

To change, you have to become conscious of your unconscious self which is just the set of hardwired programs. The hardest part about change is not making the same choice we made the day before, that is to step into the unknown. It is uncomfortable and it takes time, and those new connections must be reinforced repeatedly until they become a habit. New chemical states develop from emotions of new experiences and new genes must be signaled to make new proteins to alter our state in new ways. The expression of proteins is the expression of life and health of the body. A renewed mind and a renewed body must emerge. That is true metamorphosis.

By nature, most of us are thinking in the past and we are using the same hardware and software program from our past memories.

Association between thinking and feeling

Every time we have a thought, the brain makes another chemical, a small protein called neuropeptide to send a message to the body and the body reacts by having a feeling. The brain notices the feeling and generates another matched thought. Eventually, if this loop of thinking and feeling operates long enough, our body memorizes the emotions in a well established and ingrained familiar state. When the cell receives the chemical messengers, the cell creates a protein that in turn activate the cell’s DNA within the nucleus and the cell makes a new protein or hormone to be released in the body. Therefore, the body is trained by the mind. When the same genes are repeatedly activated again and again, and just like gears in the car, they start to wear out. The body makes proteins with weaker structures and lesser functions. We get sick and we age.

When the body isn’t getting its emotional chemical needs met, it will signal the brain to make more of those chemicals, so the body is controlling the mind and it gives rise to emotional addiction. Once the body becomes the mind, it is a habit. 95% of our behaviour, skills, emotional reactions, beliefs, perceptions and attitudes function like a subconscious automatic computer program.

For example, you are nervous with public speech because of some previous bad experiences, you were altered physically, chemically and emotionally from that event and you chose to be defined by your own limitations. In this case you are enslaved by your body because it has now become the mind and you are trapped by the conditions of your environment. A single thought could activate the body’s autonomic nervous system and produce significant physiological changes.

The Placebo effect on the body

In September 1981, a group of men in their 70’ and 80’s was taking part in a 5 day-retreat in Boston where they were asked to pretend that they were young again of at least 22 years younger than their age. The men in the control group were asked to actively reminisce about being 22 years younger but not to pretend they were younger. The researchers discovered improvements in height, weight and gait, their memory sharpened, the eyesight and hearing got better. The first group improved significantly more than the control group. Clearly the men were able to turn on the circuits in their brains of when they were 22 years ago and their body chemistry magically responded. They did not just feel younger, they physically became younger. The change was not just in their minds, it was in their bodies.

“Genes contribute to our characteristics but do not determine them” writes Dawson Church, PhD.

Epigenetic refers to the control of the genes not from within the DNA itself but from messages from the outside of cells, that is from the environment. These signals cause a methyl group to attach to a specific spot on a gene (called DNA methylation) to turn the genes on/off. We are not doomed by our genes and that a change in human consciousness can produce physical changes, both in structure and function in the human body. We can modify our genetic destiny. Twins were born with identical genes, but those who live in different lifestyles ended up expressing their genes very differently especially when time went on.

Stress Keeps us Living in Survival mode

Stress is one of the biggest causes of epigenetic change as a chemical cascade of stress hormones is triggered, your mind influences your body through the autonomic system. Acute stress is adaptive but chronic stress has been linked to anxiety, depression, digestive problems, memory loss, insomnia, hypertension, heart disease, strokes, cancer, ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, cold, flu, aging acceleration, body pain, chronic fatigue, impotence, asthma, hormonal issues, hair loss, eczema, muscle spasm, diabetes, to name just a few.

How thoughts Change the Brain and the Body

Dr Dispenza states that “when you are truly focused on an intention for some future outcome, if you can make inner thought more real than the outer environment, the brain won’t know the difference between the two. As neurochemically it is the same. Then your body, as the unconscious mind, will begin to experience the future event in the present moment. You ‘ll signal new genes, in new ways, to prepare for this imagined future event.” As you mentally rehearse a destiny or dream, you imagine it repeatedly until it becomes familiar. Your brain and body are no longer a record of the past, they are the map of the future that you ‘ve created in your mind. Your thoughts have become your experience and you just become a placebo.

There are many mental rehearsal success stories written in the book “You are the Placebo” by Dr Dispenza. Mental rehearsal is extremely effective for learning a physical skill with minimal physical practice.

Healing by thoughts alone

Studies showed that strong positive emotions helped the subjects trigger real physical changes that improved their health. When someone starts getting a clear intention of a new future (wanting to live without pain or disease) and then combines it with a heightened emotion (excitement, hope, and anticipation of actually living without pain or disease), that is the moment the body is no longer in the past. The body is living in that new future because the body doesn’t know the difference between an emotion created by an actual experience and one created by thought alone. So it makes sense that we should avoid negative emotions like anger, fear but also consciously cultivating heartfelt, positive emotions, such as gratitude, joy, excitement, enthusiasm, fascination, awe, inspiration, wonder, trust, appreciation, kindness, compassion and empowerment to give us an advantage in maximizing our health.

Studies show that positive emotions like kindness and compassion tends to release oxytocin which shuts off the receptors in the amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear and anxiety. Oxytocin has major healing effect linked to growing more blood vessels in the heart, stimulating immune function, increasing gastric motility and normalizing blood sugar levels. When our hearts are open and positive emotions can flood through, we get past ourselves to a state of pure consciousness, where we have no ego. The selfish mindset we were in when we were in the survival mode no longer exists, because the energy we channeled toward survival needs has now been freed up for us to create.

When you feel an emotion, you can bypass the neocortex- the seat of the conscious mind- and activate the autonomic nervous system, where health is regulated, maintained and executed.

Emotions like gratitude and appreciation open your heart and lift the energy in your body and you feel more selfless. Gratitude is one of the most powerful emotions for increasing your level of suggestibility. It teaches your body emotionally that the event you are grateful for has already happened, because we usually give thanks after a desirable event has occurred. If you bring the emotion of gratitude before the actual event, you body as the unconscious mind will begin to believe that the future event has already happened or is happening to you in the present moment. When you open your heart, there is heart brain coherence, and you can generate a wide magnetic field up to 3 metres wide to broadcast to the universal field.

As an extension of our egos, the analytical mind protects us so that we can cope and survive best in our external environments. It is always evaluating situations in the external environment and assessing the landscape for the most advantageous outcomes. It takes care of the self and tries to preserve the body. We can get overanalytical, and the ego becomes highly selfish by making sure that we come first. It needs to be in control to protect the identity, it clings to the familiar and won’t let go, it holds grudges, feels pain and suffers. It will always avoid the unknown condition and view it as potentially dangerous, because to the ego, the unknown is not to be trusted. The analytical mind is a separate part of the conscious mind that divides it from the subconscious mind. Since the placebo works only when the analytical mind is silenced so that your awareness can instead interact with the subconscious mind- where true change occurs. The placebo response is possible only when you can get beyond your self and so eclipse your conscious mind with your autonomic nervous system. The conscious mind (logic and reasoning and creative abilities) is only about 5 percent of the total mind. The subconscious mind is the operating system where all the autonomic skills, habits, emotional reactions, hardwired behaviour, conditioned responses, associative memories, and routine thoughts and feelings create our attitudes, beliefs and perceptions.

The conscious mind is where we store the explicit or declarative memories, memories that we can declare or knowledge we learned (semantic memories) and experiences in this lifetime (episodic memories). The subconscious is holding the implicit or nondeclarative memories or operational memories. Implicit memories are developed from the emotions of experience such as a highly charged one-time emotional event or the redundancy of emotions derived from consistent experience. Thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body. When you have a feeling, you are turning on the mind-body connection because your body has become your subconscious mind. You have just entered the operating system. Only when a person accepts, believes and surrenders to a suggestion does the door between the conscious and subconscious minds open.

Meditation

Like hypnosis, meditation is another way to bypass the critical mind and move into the subconscious system. The whole purpose of meditation is to move your awareness beyond your analytical mind- to take your attention off your outer world to pay attention to your thoughts and feelings. There are many kinds of meditation. The meditation of Dr J Dispenza is to move our consciousness beyond the analytical mind and into the deeper levels of consciousness.

In that meditation, we move not just from the conscious mind , but also from selfish to selfless, from being somebody and someone to being nobody and no one, from being a materialist to being an immaterialist, from being some place to being no place, from being in time to being in no time, from believing that the outer world is reality with our senses to believing that the inner world is reality and that once we are there , we enter “non-sense” the world of thought beyond the senses. Meditation takes us from survival to creation, from separation to connection, from imbalance to balance, from emergency mode to growth and repair mode, and from the limiting emotions of fear, anger, and sadness to the expansive emotions of joy, freedom and love. Basically, we go from clinging to the known to embracing the unknown.

Brain waves

Beta wave is our everyday waking state: low range (more relaxed) mid-range and high range beta (highly focused). When we go from high frequency beta to slower alpha where we can pay attention, concentrate and focus in a more relaxed manner, we automatically activate the frontal lobe. The frontal lobe lowers the volume on the brain circuits that process time and space. We are no longer in survival mode but in a more creative and more suggestible. Theta wave is a kind of twilight state where we are half awake and half asleep (mind awake, body asleep). This is a state we are shooting for in meditation. In theta we can access the subconscious. Delta is deep restorative sleep, totally unconscious.

Beliefs

Our beliefs aren’t always as conscious as we think they are. We may very well accept an idea on the surface but if deep down, we don’t really believe it is possible, then our acceptance is just an intellectual process. Beliefs tend to become subconscious. When you add beliefs together, you create a perception. Your perceptions have everything to do with the choices you make, the behaviours you exhibit, the relationships you chose, and the realities you create.

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, as what we perceive is completely different.

In summary, if at the present moment, you forget yourself as the same personality, you have access to other possibilities that exist in the quantum field. That is because you are no longer connected to the same body-mind, to the same identification with the environment. In that moment, the same familiar past and future no longer exist, and you become pure consciousness, a thought alone. That is the moment that you can change your body, change something in your environment, and create a new timeline.



References:

You are the Placebo by Dr Joe Dispenza

Becoming Supernatural by Dr Joe Dispenza

Breaking the Habit of Becoming Yourself by Dr Joe Dispenza

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