March/April 2011 Featured Stories
Lose Your Mind, Recreate Your Life: An Interview with Dr. Joe Dispenza
by Linda M. Potter
His role in the landmark quantum physics film, What the Bleep Do We Know!?, made Dr. Joe Dispenza a metaphysical rock star. His groundbreaking mind/body connection work in the bestselling book, Evolve Your Brain
, has earned him a reputation as one of the leading authorities on the interconnectedness of the brain, the mind, the body and consciousness.
He is also a working chiropractor, and a living testament to the transformative power of the brain. When he invites you in his new book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, to “lose your mind and create a new one,” he isn’t asking you to do anything he hasn’t done himself.
At age 23, facing the possibility of permanent paralysis after a spine-crushing bicycle accident, Dispenza was faced with a life-changing decision. His doctors believed that his only hope of walking again was a surgical procedure which, even if successful, could leave him permanently disabled and in constant pain. Dispenza refused the procedure, opting instead to recreate his own physical body by literally “changing his mind.” Ten weeks later, without surgery, he was back at work, completely healed and pain-free.
Now Dispenza is out to change the way the world thinks.
Q. Let’s start with the most basic and probably the most complex question about accessing the quantum field. What is consciousness?
A. Consciousness is a level of awareness about ourselves and the environment. When we pay attention to what we’re experiencing in the outside world and what we’re experiencing in our inside world, and then use our brain to create meaning between the two, we are conscious. Consciousness is awareness. When we are aware of ourselves, it allows us to begin to pay attention to how we think, how we act and how we feel. Because we can notice and observe those things, it means we actually have a choice in modifying our behavior.
The more consciousness you have, the more awareness you have about yourself, your environment and yourself in the environment. More consciousness also means you are better able to adapt to conditions in your life and make changes to meet those environmental conditions. If someone is unconscious, they keep repeating or reconfronting the same issues over and over again without even thinking about modifying something about themselves to produce a different outcome.
Consciousness allows us to take the shortcut to evolve our actions, our thoughts and our emotions so we can actually, in a very nonlinear way, take the shortcut to a greater level of evolution.
Q. Right now, so many people are living in survival mode. Is creating a new life even possible when we’re overwhelmed by stress?
A. We have three kinds of stresses: 1) physical stresses like trauma, accident and injury, 2) chemical stresses like toxins, pesticides, pollutants, chemicals, preservatives, food allergies, influenza and heavy metals, and 3) emotional stresses like traffic jams, internet connections, second mortgages and single parenting. Every single one of those stressors begins to knock the body out of homeostasis, out of balance.
The stress response is innately always trying to create internal order. If we keep knocking the body out of balance, and it doesn’t have a chance to return back to order, that imbalance becomes the new balance and now we’re headed for disease.
What makes us so unique as human beings is that we can turn on the stress response just by thought alone. If we know that the chemicals of stress disregulate and downregulate genes that create disease, that means that we can create our own diseases just by thought alone. So that begs the question: If our thoughts can make us sick, can our thoughts also make us well?
The chemicals of stress endorse the ego to become very selfish, very self-involved, very self-centered, very self-important, very self-aggrandizing and very self-serving.
When we’re living in stress, we obsess about our bodies, we obsess about things, we obsess about our environment, we obsess about time. And because we do, we live by the laws of the material world. We begin to feel disconnected from the quantum field — the emotions of stress create anger and aggression, fear and anxiety, shame and suffering, hopelessness and powerlessness, and judgment and hatred.
Now most people’s thoughts are pretty much 90 percent within those emotions. Those stress chemicals bring us to a lower denominator.
Q. What shifts when we move from survival mode to creative mode?
A. When we’re in creative mode (when we’re truly present and truly creating), we’re no longer trying to predict the future moment based on the past moment. We’re actually so present with what we’re doing, so focused on who we are, that we forget about ourselves. We’re so focused on what we’re attending to that there is no body, there is no thing, there is no time. We are now pure consciousness.
The moment we slip into that space, we move from being a somebody into being a nobody. We move from being selfish to self-less. The ego is now laid down and the survival centers are shut off. That energy now moves right into the heart and we begin to feel inspired and lifted. We start to feel joyful because we’re making our way out of the mess, and that’s when we feel connected, that’s when we trust in an outcome that we can’t see or experience with our senses, but we know is coming.
Q. How do we make that shift to creative empowerment?
A. The process of change requires unlearning and relearning. It requires breaking the habit of the old self and reinventing the new self. It requires pruning synaptic connections [in the brain] and then sprouting new connections. It requires literally unmemorizing an emotion and reconditioning your mind and body to a new mind or a new emotion. It means losing your mind and creating a new one or very simply said, changing your energy — using the same energy of anger, for example, and turning it into something else. And when we change our energy, of course, we change our life.
Q. How big a part do our emotions play in setting an intention for a better life?
A. In the process of creation there is a balance between intention and surrender, and if you over-intend, that’s called “trying” (trying to control the outcome) and that doesn’t work in the quantum field. Then there is surrender, which is trusting an outcome that already exists beyond your senses and letting your body emotionally move into what that would feel like. Then you give thanks before the event has taken place.
We know from the experiments that intention by itself does absolutely nothing. But when you couple it with an emotion, when you surrender to the emotion ahead of the actual event and don’t try to analyze it or figure out how it’s going to happen — and you just let go and believe — it works a whole lot better. It’s a balance. When our thoughts and feelings are aligned, or our mind and body are working together, we are in a state of being. The field responds to who we’re being, not just what we think or feel, but what we’re actually thinking and feeling.
Dr. Joe Dispenza presents events in Seattle on March 25-26 and in Portland on May 6-7. Visit www.drjoedispenza.com. Linda M. Potter is the managing editor of BellaSpark magazine and the author of the forthcoming book If Only God Would Give Me a Sign. Visit www.lindampotter.com.