April/May 2007

Why Having More No Longer Makes Us Happy
Bill McKibben

Communities Uniting for climate Action
Lesley Adams

Are Big Enviro Groups Holding Back the Anti-Warming Movement?
Megan Tady

Al Gore and the Wedges Game
Kelpie Wilson

Plastic Bottles and Can Liners Under Scrutiny Again
Jody Woodruff

Creating a New Level of Awareness. Interview with Dr. Joe Dispenza
Katie Elliott

Ashland Independent Fillm Festival

Bowing to Fate, Growing to Destiny: A look at Women's Themes through Film
Marla Estes

Awakening to Our Full Potential
Arjuna Ardagh

Life Organizing: A New Way to Flow with Time
Jennifer Louden

Homelessness in the House
Coenraad Rogmans

Dharma Publishing
Karen Egan

Mixed Media Reviews

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

BACK TO TOP

Creating a New Level of Awareness

Exchanging Self-limiting Thoughts for New Ones

Interview with Dr. Joe Dispenza

By Katie Elliott

Dr. Joe Dispenza studied biochemistry at Rutgers Uni-versity in New Brunswick, NJ. He received his Doctor of Chiropractic Degree at Life University in Atlanta, Georgia, graduating magna cum laude. His postgraduate training and continuing education has been in neurology, neurophysiology, and brain function. Dr. Joe was one of the scientists interviewed in the film What the BLEEP Do We Know!? His new book is Evolve Your Brain.

Katie Elliott: What would you say is the theme of your new book?
Dr. Joe Dispenza: The book is about what science and neuro-science offer as great promise and real hope for human change, so it is first about changing the brain, changing the mind and then ultimately what effects those intentional changes have on the physical body. What is the relationship between the mind and the body, how they can interact with each other so that when we do change our thinking process the effects produced demonstrate chemical changes and neurological changes on a cellular level? And what this can do for people’s health?

So are you talking about creating health by eliminating negative thinking patterns?
To some degree, but not entirely. Whether we are changing beliefs or perceptions, attitudes or habitual thought patterns, the brain seems to like to replace an old idea for a new idea. So there is an exchange of self-limiting thoughts and memories for new and improved thoughts. Eliminating negative thoughts is probably better said as interrupting the negative habitual thoughts by creating a new level of awareness which then allows room for more serving thoughts.

In the book I talk about the direct change of physical health conditions, physical manifestations of disease. When I studied people, those people that had spontaneous remissions from physical ailments or had changes in the level of their health from health conditions, there were some things in common among all the people that had a physical change.

First thing is, they accepted that there was a greater order, a greater intelligence running their body. Nothing mystical about the order, it’s the same intelligence that’s keeping your heart beating and digesting your food. They reasoned that they had separated themselves from this mind and in order to improve their health condition they had to make contact with this intelligence so that it could do the healing for them.

The second thing was that they all accepted that they had to become responsible for the fact that they’d created their disease by their unhealthy reactions and thought processes over the years that ultimately brought the body to a state of imbalance. That imbalance then became ultimately their normal state of balance. So they asked themselves, “If I change my thinking, will it change my physical body?” And of course we understand from neuroscience that every thought that we have produces a chemical in the body. The problem is after 10 or 15 years of making the same chemicals and thinking the same way, not only do we hardwire the brain neurologically, but we also create a very strong connection between the brain chemically and the physical body.

The third thing is they said is that they had to reinvent themselves. They had to start thinking in new ways, and become different people. They started asking themselves difficult questions, like “What would it be like to be happy? What would I have to change about myself? What people do I know from history were great that I admire, and what were their qualities and characteristics?” So they started changing their mind and changing the way their brain worked. According to neuroscience the principal is that nerve cells that “fire together, wire together.” If we can cause the brain to fire in new sequences, patterns and combinations, then the mind is changing. If we can recreate the same level of mind everyday, we will cause more permanent neurological changes in our brain. The more we use the same new neurological frame by producing the same mind, the more the same neurons gang up together to build stronger connections.

What if someone pictured themselves exercising rather than actually doing it physically?
[Some research was done] with a group of people. And the researchers said, “Ok, we want you to practice moving your ring finger against this spring-loaded device an hour a day for four weeks.” The results were that their finger got 30% stronger because they were practicing pulling against the spring. Then they took another group of people and said, “Sit down and imagine yourself pulling against the spring but never touch the spring.” And they practiced an hour a day for four weeks. At the end of the four weeks those people had a 22% increase in finger strength and never touched the spring.

What does that say about our brains? That in the process of rehearsal, if we can become so involved in what we’re doing, the brain can’t distinguish between the actual external experience and the internal experience. And what it does is, it maps and tracks the experience so that the nerve cell connections become stronger and, at the same time, the nerve cells’ connections become more enriched. And that enriched synaptic process where they become more refined and intricate is what can actually create the strength in the finger. In effect, those that mentally rehearsed the activity had stronger minds that created greater strength in their finger. The same is true when we mentally rehearse being a different person.

What if you have a relatively healthy person, but they go to the doctor and he tells them they don’t process sugar correctly. But it’s not anything they have thought themselves into with negative thinking. Can that person think themselves out of that? Can they decide that they do process sugar and can they change their brain patterns until they can eat sugar and have a normal reaction to it?
That’s a great question and the answer is yes and no. The first step is that we have to acknowledge that certain people are born genetically with certain predispositions. What we are given genetically is the starting point in our life. But that’s not the end all because there’s a dramatic exchange between genetics and environment, nature and nurture in that we’re literally changed by the thoughts we think and the experiences we have. Both of those elements are encoded neurologically in our brain. To change from being sugar intolerant to being able to process sugars properly is not a process that happens over night.

First of all, the genetics of what you’re given is something that usually is connected to an emotion or some attitude. So you may say well I don’t have any negative thinking and maybe you’re right about that. But there are also self-limited thoughts we all need to change. And so if we don’t consistently make an effort to become greater than we presently are, if we never make that effort, we never change the chemical continuity of how we live in normal states. For example, the person who can’t process sugar because of their genetic predisposition, the question should be; if they changed and became a different person—self liberated, happy, generous, lived in gratitude, and expressed joy—would it produce different effects in their physical body? The answer is yes. The same is true for a person who has created their sugar sensitivity by living in reactive stressful states of mind or reliving destructive emotions on a daily basis. Both scenarios can be shifted by a change in the way we process our thoughts and reactions.

How can you differentiate what your mind is saying you need and what your cells are saying they want?
It depends on which mind is asking the question. When you’re in the midst of change there is always a tug of war between what we consciously have declared for ourselves as a mind and what has become familiar to us because of our chemical continuity as a body. Normally most people have an intention, which is mind, but their body has been entrained to do something else physically, so the body wants something else. That’s why when people say “I want to change this about myself,” their body says, “Well, you haven’t trained me to be that way. You’ve trained me to be like this.” And so there’s this struggle. So we have to be able to train the mind and then actually demonstrate what we’re thinking and apply what we’ve learned. We have to personalize our intentions so that if we can modify our behavior we produce a new experience. Producing a new experience is the doing. Once we can accomplish what we set our mind out to do, that new experience produces a whole new set of chemicals in the body. Then the body goes “Whoa, this is a different experience!” At the end of an experience, all of our senses: seeing, smelling, feeling, tasting, hearing, are accumulating data from the environment in a different way and sending a rush of chemicals back to the brain. So now the body has a new chemical experience. Now the body is finally getting a new signal to reinforce the mind’s intent.

The key is, we can’t be satisfied with producing the experience once. We have to be able to reproduce the experience consistently. And once we’re able to reproduce the experience at will, on command and demonstrate it over and over again, now we’re starting to hardwire it in the brain; we are creating a new habit. So the process is going from thinking, to doing, to being. Thinking is learning, contemplating and deciding to do something. Doing is then applying what we learn and personalizing it, or demonstrating it so we can modify our behavior to have a new experience. After repeated doing and practicing, you just are it naturally. It is what the mystics have called “being it.” The question has to arise: What are we thinking, doing and being everyday to create new experiences with new emotional events that reinforce what we’ve intentionally thought? If we are thinking the same way, doing the same things and being the same person with the same feelings, chances are we haven’t changed our brain at all. As a matter of fact, if we process the same feelings everyday, it means that we really haven’t had any new experiences.

You have to really want to change something.
You have to do your homework. You have to ask, “What are my weaknesses? What are the things I want to change about myself? Who do I have to become? Where do I lose it and at what part of the day? What pushes my buttons?” You have to be aware of these questions and then, instead of watching the television, sit and think all those things through. That process actually causes the brain to fire in different ways and out of routine patterns so that circuits hook up in different combinations and make new levels of mind. So, the beginning stage is becoming self-aware, then it is followed with accumulation of self-knowledge. Then a plan has to be implemented. If I want to be joyful, clear, unattached, present, etc., I’m going to have to keep reminding myself that’s who I want to be. That’s my sphere of influence right there. Now I’ve got enough thinking to go on to start altering the hardware in my brain.

So it could be as simple as you just imagining yourself getting all the way to dinner time …
…without having a fit of anger, etc.

And just keep going over that in your head and that’s going to help you that much more?
The more we use the brain in the mental rehearsal process the better. Then mental rehearsal is followed by physical rehearsal. The union of mental and physical rehearsal is an alignment of thoughts and actions which then provides a new experience—a new way of being. We ultimately wind up with a state of being that becomes a new hardwired state and neuroscience shows that as we do this process and we pay attention and we use the most newly formed part of the brain called the frontal lobe, the frontal lobe can allow us to make whatever we’re thinking about more real than anything else. It allows us to select what things are important either in our mind or our environment

How can you practice using your frontal lobe more instead of just staying on a reactionary fight or flight automatic pilot?
It takes no longer allowing something external to you, in your environment, to cause you to think than it does to think for yourself. But this is where people get lost in their life. We’re so used to being in reaction. We’re so used to our environment turning on the circuits in our brain to cause us to think. When this occurs, our life can never be greater than our circumstances. The actual antithesis to this is actually asking the questions and then forcing our brain to come up with the answers without having something external from us turn it on. That is moving from effect to cause. And that’s not something in this society that’s revered too much, because entertainment, and sports, and convenience, and internet, and information is so accessible to us that to actually sit down and turn off those stimuli and ask questions and wait for answers from within ourselves is a dying art. It’s so much easier to just turn on the television and say, “Oh I feel so much better now.”

So that’s what my book is about. It’s about first learning what those people who had personal healings did. How our brain is wired. What parts are hard-wired and what parts are changeable. How we learn and what we experience and what it does for our brain. How we develop new circuits. What neuroscience says about people who repeat things with intention. What stress does to our bodies, what emotions do to our bodies. How did we turn on the genetics that create disease? How do we use the frontal lobe properly? How do we mentally rehearse? And finally, how do we go from thinking, to doing, to being?

So, what’s next for you?
To actually continue to practice and become everything that I talk about in my book. That’s what my mission is, to really demonstrate it. I think that finally in science we have an understanding of what happens when you change your mind. Applying what we have learned, which is having an experience and being able to repeat that experience at will, is to take it to the next stage That takes it from what’s called explicit memories to what’s called implicit memories. Im-plicit memories are just the hard-wired programs that we live our life by—those same hard-wired programs that we use for unhappiness or anxiety. We can rewire our brain just the same way, to be joyful and secure, genius, unlimited. It’s the same thing neurologically.

That’s exciting, just to know that. Are you good at doing that?
Here’s what I think: I think we’re all good at it. I think the most difficult part is actually sitting down and doing it. Every one of us actually mentally rehearses all of the time. The problem is that we constantly rehearse the same thoughts and therefore produce the same frame of mind everyday. To produce that same mind state everyday only reinforces the same brain circuits. For example, if you were to sit down and rehearse who you’re going to be during the day, you would have to ask yourself a question similar to this every morning: “What is the greatest ideal of myself that I can demonstrate today, that I want to actually live as today?” And if I can actually live this way, and that’s my mind, then I would have to be different that I have been yesterday. If I can therefore, think, act and be equal to who I rehearse myself as being, then there should be some reflection in my world as a result of my changing mind because quantum physics says that the observer creates reality. So if I accept that I’ve created a new mind, and I can maintain that new mind all day long, something unusual should happen in my day as a result of my new state of being.

But then, at the end of my day, if you were to ask yourself, “How’d I do today?” and then, of course with that awareness of self by reflection and self-observation, the honest answer might be: You fell from that desired state of mind right around four o’clock when that person did this and you started thinking this way and you went back to being your old self again. So then you might say to yourself, “Well, how can I do it better?” The moment you ask that question your brain will start to create a new formula or plan in order to evolve your thoughts and actions. As a result, the sincere individual will want a similar experience to return the next day so they can get better at it. That’s how we evolve our way out of our limitations.

For me, I make a deal with myself. I say, “If I’m going to rehearse and be this person, and I’m going to actually take the time and interact with the quantum field and the field is all things; then if I change my mind, the field should change and my life should change.”

That’s kind of like your feedback test.
It’s a scientific experiment and the brain and mind need feedback to know that it’s working. The feedback I get in my world from my experiment in life means the field is trickling down into my life because I’ve changed my mind in that field, and I’m going to walk into that experience out here in physical reality. So, I look for that. I live for that. And if it doesn’t happen, then the scientist in me asks, “Well, why didn’t it happen?” And the answer comes, “Because you’re still this, or you’re not really that; you’re still thinking about this, or you’re still in your past and you have to let go more.”

When the new experiences start to happen, the emotions that are created from those experiences are usually complete wonder and joy. The biggest thing I can say about it is an incredible appreciation for being alive. It’s like you’re so excited that something happened that was your secret with some invisible power and that invisible power answered you and you know that it was a result of your intentional thinking, acting and being. And it’s come in such a way that’s so unusual that you couldn’t even explain it to anybody. But you wouldn’t want to because you wouldn’t want to rob yourself of what you’re feeling at that moment. I think that feeling is the natural state of being. That’s going from survival to creation and that’s really what the book is about. It’s about creation.

Reprinted with permission from The Bleeping Herald (www.bleep ingherald.com). Katie Elliott is the content manager for the What the BLEEP website and writes occasional articles for The Bleeping Herald. For more information on Dr. Joe’s work visit www.drjoe dispenza.com. His new DVD series, Your Immortal Brain, looks at the ways in which the human brain can be used to create reality through the mastery of thought.