Quite Possibly the Only Knowledge You Need To Change Your Life
10 insights that can help you get everything you’ve ever wanted
As originally published in Better Humans on Medium.com.
Photo by francescoch on iStock
I’ve been on a journey of healing and self-evolution for the past four years now, after hitting rock bottom in life at the beginning of 2020. Throughout this time, I’ve learned about, tried, and studied many different healing methods and modalities, most of which have added value to my life in some way and built on my understanding of how we operate as humans. More importantly, my journey has enlightened me to the mostly untapped yet innate power we all possess within us. A recent weekend at Dr. Joe Dispenza’s Progressive Retreat in Basel, Switzerland, expanded on this knowledge and my resolve to help others become healthier and happier. Here are 10 insights from the weekend that may just help you get everything you’ve ever wanted.
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For those of you who are unfamiliar with Dr. Joe Dispenza, he is a chiropractor, international speaker, researcher, author of multiple New York Times best-selling books, 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 so they can enjoy a more fulfilled and happy life as well as evolve their consciousness.
The work he does today was borne out of an accident he suffered back in 1986 while cycling in a triathlon. Dr. Joe was hit by a truck and broke six vertebrae in his spine. His doctors told him he would never walk again. Any surgery would have all but guaranteed he never walk again, so instead, he began using his mind to reconstruct his spine and self-heal. In just ten and a half weeks, Dr. Joe was back on his feet. In twelve weeks, he was training again and back at work at his chiropractic clinic. He fully healed himself with just his mind.
1. Where you place your attention, you place your energyEverything is energy. It’s physics. Everybody knows this.
What I didn’t know is that thoughts have an electrical charge and feelings have a magnetic charge. This creates an electromagnetic charge around us — energy.
The vibration of this energy is, therefore, directly determined by our thoughts and feelings. When we become stuck in negative thought patterns and feelings, the vibration of our energy will be at a much lower frequency than if we move with positive thoughts and feelings. Whatever frequency we emit will draw an equal frequency back to it.
Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.
— Albert Einstein
In other words, change your energy, change your life.
And we can do this by changing our thoughts AND emotions.
2. Your personality becomes your personal reality95% of who we are is a set of memorised behaviours, emotional reactions, beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes. They function like a subconscious computer program below our conscious awareness.
Your brain is like a supercomputer, and your self-talk is the program it will run.
— Jim Kwik
Beliefs we hold about ourselves are created based not on the events that occur in our lives but on the meaning we give to them — on our memory of them.
Image: Revival Health GmbH — adapted from Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work
Our thoughts and beliefs lead to our feelings. Our feelings lead to our behaviour. Our behaviour leads back to our thoughts. It’s a loop, and negative thoughts and beliefs quickly become self-fulfilling prophesies.
For example, if you’re backstage before giving a presentation and think you’re going to be terrible. This is the thought and belief.
As a result, you start to sweat, your heart starts to race, and you may feel light-headed. This is the feeling.
By the time you get to the stage, you’re a hot mess and forget half of what you were going to say. At the end of the presentation, you tell everyone, “See, I knew I’d be terrible.” This is the behaviour.
This behaviour reinforces your thought and belief that you are terrible at giving presentations. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The same theory applies to positive thoughts and beliefs.
Believe. Behave. Become.
3. Your body is your subconscious mindAs a hypnotherapist, I’m well aware of the split between the conscious (which determines 5% of our behaviour) and the subconscious mind (which determines 95% of our behaviour). I’m also very familiar with the body storing memories. But Dr. Joe Dispenza gave me a new way of looking at the subconscious mind in saying that this was our body — and it made a lot of sense to me.
Once we learn how to do something and repeat it enough times, our body begins to do it automatically.
For example, we don’t think about how to walk; our body just does it. We don’t think about how to brush our teeth; we just do it. We don’t think about how to read; we just do it. But at one stage early in life, all of these tasks seemed like almost insurmountable challenges.
The same principle applies to habits, good or bad.
Image: Revival Health GmbH — adapted from Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work
But what’s more, is that our body does not know the difference between an actual experience in our life that creates an emotion and an emotion that we can fabricate by thought alone. To the body, it’s exactly the same.
So, if we can become aware of the beliefs that cause the emotions that underlie our bad habits, we can change those habits by changing our thoughts and emotions alone.
Thoughts are the language of the mind. Feelings are the language of the body.
Believe. Behave. Become.
4. Pain is emotion stored in the bodyAn ever-increasing number of people today suffer from chronic illnesses. I wrote about this recently in another article called “You Can’t Outsource Healing.” In this article, I also talk a lot about the mind-body connection.
Emotions are energy in motion.
So many of our bad habits and deep-seated beliefs we hold about ourselves originate in childhood. The reason for this is that young children do not possess logic, only emotion.
For the first 6 years of life, all of the attention is on the inner world because that’s where the brainwave patterns are (delta and theta).
For the six years after that, children move into the imaginary world (alpha). It is during this time, between the ages of 6–9, that the analytical mind develops, and a filter is created between the conscious and subconscious mind.
Image: Revival Health GmbH — adapted from Dreamstime and Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work
When some or all of our basic needs of food, shelter, safety, love, and care are not met as children, we develop beliefs about ourselves. These might include beliefs such as “it’s my fault,” “I’m unworthy of love,” “I’m not enough”, or many others. I wrote more about this in another recent article called “The Cost of Caring Too Much.”
Until the age of six, a child is completely in its subconscious mind. All information coming in is coming in unencoded because it has no analytical facilities to be able to process it. So, whatever the child hears, it takes as reality.
In turn, we develop unhealthy coping behaviours as a survival mechanism. While these behaviours may be necessary as a child, by the time we reach our teenage years and adulthood, they are part of our subconscious operating system. Our survival no longer depends on them, yet it is all we’ve ever known. And so the negative emotions that are trapped begin to fester from within.
From our teenage years onwards, most of our time is spent in beta brainwaves. Beta is our conscious awareness of our external world. We become more and more detached from our emotions.
Our analytical mind is an extension of the ego. When our ego is in check, it takes care of the body (moves us away from danger, etc). But when our ego is driven by the hormones of stress, it moves out of balance and our hormones begin to endorse the ego which leads it to become overly analytical. When this happens, it goes into high beta.
When we try to analyse in high beta, we move even further into high beta, which means the brain is in a state of incoherence, and further away from our original operating system (alpha and theta).
When in high beta, we are unable to listen to or believe anything that isn’t equal to the emotion we are feeling at the time. We’ll auto-suggest to ourselves thoughts that are equal to that emotion.
Simply put, the more negative our thoughts and beliefs, the more bad habits we create. The more bad habits we have, the more stress we create for ourselves. The more stress we have, the more pain we add to the body. Dis-ease is almost inevitable.
Believe. Behave. Become.
5. A memory without the emotional charge is called wisdomWe don’t see things how they are. We see them how we are.
There’s a story that goes along with every emotion. It’s not the events that matter; it’s the meaning we give to them.
Familiar feelings are a record of our past. We can’t create a new future when our body is living in the past.
If we can overcome our emotions, we can change our future.
Believe. Behave. Become.
6. You don’t meditate to heal. You meditate to change.Our conscious mind is where there is logic and reasoning. The purpose of meditation is to get beyond the analytical mind and tap into our subconscious, where our habits and behaviours reside.
Affirmations don’t work because we’re in beta, and the body says no. We must open the door to alpha or theta. Meditation gets us past the analytical mind so the body can absorb the information.
When we slow our breathing, we slow our brainwaves and can move from beta (our conscious analytical mind) to alpha and further to theta, a hypnotic state where we are open to suggestions. This is where we are conscious in our subconscious mind.
Meditation means “to become familiar with”.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge of the self is self-empowerment.
As we become familiar with our unconscious thoughts, our unconscious behaviours, and our unconscious emotions, and we make them familiar to us, we begin to truly know ourselves. When this happens, we are no longer the program, but instead the consciousness observing the program.
When we can objectively look at our subjective self, we can see things for how and what they truly are, as opposed to our interpretation of them. And this provides the opportunity for change.
If we can get beyond ourselves, we can choose new, upgraded beliefs about ourselves and upgrade our emotions accordingly. If we can truly live in this new state of being at a new frequency, the unexpected begins to occur.
First, WE have to change. Then, our lives begin to change.
We must become “nothing, no one, nowhere” so that creation can happen from the unknown.
Believe. Behave. Become.
7. Genes don’t change. Gene expression does.According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, 9/10 people in the Western world who walk into a healthcare facility walk in because of a stress-related disorder. Only 2-5% are born with a true genetic disorder.
In other words, it’s not that we have bad genes; it’s that our way of life is signalling our genes to express themselves in ways that are harmful to us.
The poorer our state of being, the more we downregulate our genes, and the poorer the protein that is produced.
Gene expression refers to how often or when proteins are created from the instructions within your genes. While genetic changes can alter which protein is made, epigenetic changes affect gene expression to turn genes “on” and “off.”
Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviours and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work.
— CDC (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention)
In other words, if we can switch our genes “on,” then we can switch them “off” too, and visa versa.
We can change our genetic destiny by changing our mind and body from one state to another.
And our autonomic nervous system is the most powerful pharmacy in the world.
Believe. Behave. Become.
8. The emotional signature is what signals the geneUnprocessed negative emotions linger. Time doesn’t heal. Time conceals.
Lingering emotions create our mood. If the emotions are still left unattended, this mood becomes our temperament. If left unattended even longer, this temperament becomes our personality. And our personality becomes our personal reality. And for most people, this is not the reality they actually want.
According to the World Health Organisation, 76% of all deaths are predicted to be caused by chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and this figure is expected to increase to 86% over the next 15 years.
The term NCDs refers to a group of conditions that are not mainly caused by an acute infection, result in long-term health consequences, and often create a need for long-term treatment and care. These conditions include cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and chronic lung illnesses.
— The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)
Living in constant states of Stress causes us to live in fight or flight mode. This state causes us to use all our energy to respond to the external environment (think back to when people were chased by wild animals and needed to fight or flee). When all our energy is directed to our external environment, there is none left for our internal environment — none left for growth and repair and the internal environment of the body begins to break down.
No organism in nature can tolerate the effects of living in emergency mode for extended periods of time. We cannot create anything new from this state either.
Long-term effects of the hormones of stress disregulate and downregulate genes to create disease.
Disease = Dis-ease
Our thoughts and emotions alone can make us sick. In turn, they can also make us well. It’s the ultimate mind-body connection.
Believe. Behave. Become.
9. To change, you need a clear intention with an elevated emotionIt is not possible to move towards a new future whilst holding on to emotions of the past.
This doesn’t mean forgetting. Remember #5 — a memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom.
It means that continuing to be who we are today will continue to get us more of what we already have.
I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.
— Albert Einstein
Whether it is our physical health, financial situation, relationship health, living situation, or anything else we wish to be different in our lives, it all starts with us.
If we can’t think greater than we feel, our future will look a lot like our past. And the moment we start to remember our problems, we are living in the past.
We must become the person we wish to be — as if the change we desire has already occurred.
The overcoming is the becoming.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections, especially in response to learning or experience.
— Oxford Language Dictionary
If we can bring up the emotion we want to feel before the actual event of what we wish to happen, we are signalling new genes in new ways.
If we can permanently live in this new, elevated state, we raise our frequency, and the change we desire must then happen because our mind and body are living as though it already have.
The goal is to move out of the Newtonian model of reality and into the Quantum model of reality.
The Newtonian model of reality is cause and effect — where we need a reason for joy or gratitude. When something outside of us changes how we feel on the inside, we pay attention to what caused that feeling.
The Quantum model of reality is about causing an effect. This means we have to give thanks and feel the joy and celebration ahead of the actual event.
For example, in order for us to have wealth in our lives, we have to feel abundant. In order for us to have success in life, we have to feel empowered. In order for us to have healing in life, we have to feel whole before the healing occurs.
Remember, we can create an emotion by thought alone. And to the body, it’s exactly the same. This is called emotional rehearsal.
We know that mental rehearsal changes the brain and body. However mental rehearsal works even better in changing the body when there is an emotional quotient assigned to that rehearsal.
According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, studies conducted on people who have experienced spontaneous remissions show that those people reached a level of wholeness and self-satisfaction so great that they no longer cared that they had the disease. It was at that moment they healed. They were not waiting for the healing to occur to feel whole. They reached a point where they no longer needed anything, and that was the moment the healing occurred.
Emotional quotients amplify the creations in magnificent ways.
Image: Revival Health GmbH — adapted from Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work
Believe. Behave. Become.
10. The miracle is youA video describing many ways in which the human being is a miracle.
Love now. Love life. Love yourself. Love others.
Believe. Behave. Become.
It’s About Progress, Not PerfectionMost of us have things we want to change in life. For better or worse, it often takes trauma or something dramatic to make us feel differently and then see ourselves differently. This was the case for me, and I hit rock bottom four years ago.
Since then, I have made countless positive changes to my life — and they all started with me. Tough as it was, I realised that I had to change if I wanted something different. This is what most people consciously or subconsciously fight against. But nobody can help us until we are willing to help ourselves.
But of course, my work on myself is not done. I doubt it ever will be, and there are still things in my life I wish were different. I’m a novice meditator but have committed to trying Dr. Joe’s methods over the next month. I’m working on becoming “nothing, no one, nowhere” so that creation can happen from the unknown. I’m working on feeling today the way I imagine I will feel after the changes I wish to occur.
It’s a process. It takes time. It takes commitment. It takes determination.
The most important thing is to start. The action builds confidence. And the mind learns by repetition.
Here’s hoping there will be a follow-up article sooner rather than later!
Believe. Behave. Become.
