Transcription
On a surface level, we all know that thoughts have power, but very few of us actually know how to use that power. That is why today, I'm going to summarize another book from Joe Dispenza called "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself."
The author says that we usually consider changing our lives when things get really bad. We usually wait until the moment that we can no longer take it. We wait for crisis, trauma, loss, disease, and tragedy to happen in order to turn back and look at our lives and decide that it is time for change. The question is, why wait? You can start changing even today, and in this video, I will explain how.
But first, let me talk to you about a very important topic: you and your mind. Everything you see around you is made of atoms. The car you drive, your phone, the chair you sit in, your body, your mind are all made of atoms. And here is the interesting part: the atom is 99.99999% energy and 0.00001% matter. Think about this: everything physical in your life is not solid matter; it is energy.
If everything is energy, then you have to accept that your mind and your body are inseparable. They are basically the same thing. Mind is matter, and matter is mind. This means that when you change your mind, you change your life. Usually, when we try to change something in our lives, we are mostly focused on physical things and ignore the rest. But the physical part is only 0.00001%. The remaining 99.99999% is energy. Don't you think that by ignoring the energy, we are missing out on huge potential here?
The good news is that accessing that potential is not far away from us. We can reach it by simply using our mind. I know, right now, I probably sound like some annoying hippie who constantly talks about meditation, spirituality, and how everything around us is energy. I hate to accept it, but that annoying hippie has a point about energy. In the following minutes, I will explain how to tap into that energy in order to make positive changes in your life.
But first, we have to talk about three big problems that are going to stop you from making a positive change.
Problem number one: Your body. Does your mind control your body, or does your body control your mind? Many of us believe that our mind is in control of our lives, but the opposite is true. When we learn something new, our mind is in control, but as soon as it becomes a habit, our body takes over the control. At the beginning, the mind is the master and the body is the slave, but by the time we are in our midlife, roles change. The mind becomes the slave, and the body becomes the master.
About 95% of who we are by midlife is a series of subconscious programs that have become automatic: driving a car, brushing our teeth, overeating when we're stressed, worrying about our future, judging our friends, complaining about our lives, blaming our parents, etc. Think about that: 5% of the mind is conscious, struggling against the 95%. And if 95% of who we are is involuntary programs, memorized behaviors, and habitual emotional reactions, it means that 95% of our day, we are unconscious. We only appear to be awake. This is why making a change is difficult. You are using 5% against 95%. It's like a three-year-old kid fighting against a grown-up man.
Here are some practical illustrations of the body being in a habitual state. Have you ever tried to remember a phone number or the PIN code of your phone but couldn't do it despite many attempts? However, as soon as you picked up the phone, your fingers dialed the number. Or have you ever forgotten the PIN code of your ATM card but as soon as you put the card into the ATM, your fingers dialed the numbers?
Take for example, a mother driving a minivan to drop her kids off at school. How is she able to navigate traffic, break up arguments, drink her coffee, shift gears, and help her son blow his nose all at once? Much like a computer program, these actions have become automatic functions that can run very fluidly and easily. So, a person may consciously want to be happy, healthy, or free, but the experience of posting 20 years of suffering have subconsciously conditioned the body to be in a habitual state. We live by habit. When we're no longer aware of what we're thinking, doing, or feeling, we become unconscious.
The greatest habit we must break is the habit of being ourselves. When the body becomes the mind, our mind goes to sleep, and the body takes over. The mind might think it's still in charge, but the body is influencing decisions now. Let's say the mind wants to get back in control. What do you think the body is going to say? "Where have you been for the last 10 years? Go back to sleep, I've got it under control here." Then we're back to the same old, same old: thinking the same thoughts, performing the same actions, but expecting something different to happen in our lives.
The body is very powerful and has a lot of tools in its toolbox in order to stop you from making a positive change. It sounds strange and does not make sense, but your body actually wants to keep you unhappy. The body hates change. That is why as soon as you make a decision to go to the gym or make some other positive changes in your life, the body starts sending alarm signals, and the next thing you know, you start to hear the chatter of thoughts like these in your head: "You're too tired today. You can start tomorrow. Tomorrow's a better day. Really, you can do it later."
If this doesn't work, a second sneak attack occurs. So, it starts picking on you a bit. "It's okay for you to feel a little bad right now. It's your father's fault. Don't you feel bad about what you did in your past? In fact, let's take a look at your past so we can remember why you are this way. Look at you, you're a mess, a loser, you're pathetic and weak. Your life is a failure. You'll never change. You're too much like your mother. Why don't you just quit?" As you continue this awfulizing, the body is tempting the mind to return to the state it has unconsciously memorized again. On a rational level, that is absurd, but obviously, on some level, it feels good to feel bad.
Most of us can relate to this little scenario. It's no different from any other habit we've tried to break, whether we're addicted to cigarettes, chocolate, alcohol, shopping, gambling, or biting our nails. The moment we cease the habitual action, chaos rages between the body and the mind. Some people believe that positive thinking is the answer to make a change. I'm sorry to tell you this, but positive thinking never works. Many so-called positive thinkers have felt negative most of their lives. They were in a polarized state most of their lives. They consciously think one way, but they are being the opposite.
When the mind and body are in opposition, change will never happen. Body and mind have to be aligned. For example, how many times have you tried to create something, thinking in your mind that the end result was possible, but feeling in your heart that it wasn't? What was the result of that incoherent thinking and feeling? Why is it that nothing happened? True change happens when your thoughts and feelings are aligned. And to do that, you have to unlearn old thinking and feeling patterns and then relearn new patterns of thinking and feeling based on who you want to be.
Problem number two: Your environment. Have you seen the movie "Groundhog Day"? It's a comedy movie about a guy who is stuck reliving the same day over and over. Despite all his efforts, he always wakes up on the same day and relives the same events and sees the same people over and over again. Now, why am I telling you about this movie? Well, most of us live our lives just like the guy in that movie. At least in the movie, the guy constantly tries to live in a new day, but you're not even fighting against the monotony of your life.
For example, you probably wake up on the same side of the bed, slip into your robe the same way as always, look into the mirror to remember who you are, then shower following an automatic routine, then you groom yourself to look like everyone expects you to look, and brush your teeth in the usual memorized fashion. You drink coffee out of your favorite mug and eat your customary breakfast cereal. You put on the jacket you always wear and unconsciously zip it up. Next, you automatically drive to work along your accustomed, convenient route. At work, you do the familiar things that you have memorized how to do so well. You see the same people who push your same emotional buttons, which causes you to think the same thoughts about those people, and your work, and your life. Later, you hurry up and go home so you can hurry up and eat so you can hurry up and watch your favorite TV show so you can hurry up and go to bed so you can hurry up and do it all over again.
Now, has your brain changed at all that day? The answer is no. So then, why are you secretly expecting something different to show up in your life when you think the same thoughts, perform the same actions, and experience the same emotions every single day? Isn't that the definition of insanity? If your environment remains the same, and you react by thinking in the same way, then according to the quantum model of reality, shouldn't you create more of the same? Think of it this way: the input remains the same, so the output has to remain the same. How then can you ever create anything new?
Familiar memories remind us to reproduce the same experiences every day. As you see the same people, do the same things, and look at the same objects, your familiar memories related to your world remind you to reproduce the same experiences. We could say that the environment is actually controlling your mind. If you keep revisiting familiar thoughts and feelings, then you will keep creating the same reality. To create something different from what you've grown accustomed to in your personal world, you have to change the way you routinely think and feel each day. Otherwise, you will look like a hamster on a wheel.
Problem number three: Time. Many of us either live with past negative memories or with the fear of things that will happen in the future. Unfortunately, your body can't differentiate between the negative event itself and the memory of that event. For example, when you remember something very negative, such as a heated argument with a colleague or with your parents, your body automatically starts showing symptoms as if the same event is happening again right now. As past events trigger the same chemical response as the original incident, your body thinks it is re-experiencing the same event.
Every time we knock the body out of chemical balance, that's called stress. The stress response is how the body responds when it's knocked out of balance, whether we see a lion in the Serengeti, bump into our not-so-friendly exit at the grocery store, or freak out in freeway traffic because we're late for a meeting. We turn on the stress response. Unlike animals, we have the ability to turn on that response by thought alone, and that thought doesn't have to be about anything in our present circumstances. On the other hand, animals don't have the ability to turn on the stress response so frequently. That deer back to happily grazing isn't consumed with thoughts about what just happened a few minutes ago, let alone the time a coyote chased it 2 months ago.
This kind of repetitive stress is harmful to us because no organism was designed to be in constant stress. When we turn on the stress response and can't turn it off, we're headed for some type of breakdown in the body. For instance, when a lion was chasing your ancestors, the stress response was doing what it was designed to do: protect them from their outer environment. But if for days on end, you stress about your promotion, over-focus on your presentation to upper management, or worry about your mother being in the hospital, these situations create the same chemicals as though you were being chased by a lion. Constantly, you're staying too long in emergency mode. And emergency mode needs a lot of energy because it feels like it is a life-or-death situation, so it uses all the energy it can so that you can survive.
Your body is stealing this vital energy from your immune, digestive, and from among other systems and directing it to the muscles that you'd use to fight a predator or run from danger. But in your situation, that's only working against you. If you're putting the bulk of your energy towards some issue in your external environment, there will be little left for your body's internal environment. Your immune system, which monitors your inner world, can't keep up with the lack of energy for growth and repair. Therefore, you get sick, whether it be from a cold or cancer. Besides that, energy that is generated by stress hormones can't be used, which creates a huge pressure for your heart and other organs because you can't implement the fight-or-flight mode as nature designed it. After all, you are not going to attack your colleague, nor fly to the Bahamas for a vacation after a stressful event.
These three problems we just discussed always keep you living in survival mode. For a positive change to happen, you need to live in a creative mode. And what is the creative mode? Well, have you ever noticed that when you're truly in the midst of creating something new, or when you are doing something you love, you forget about yourself? You disassociate from your known world. You forget about time and everything else in your environment. This is one example of being in creative mode.
Luckily, you can access the same creative mode through meditation. According to the author, being in the meditative state is the best place to start constructing your new self, your new reality. We always believed that in order to make something happen, you need first to think about it, second, do it, and then be it. For example, if you know how to drive a car, then you've already experienced the most elementary example of thinking, doing, and being. At first, you had to think about every action you took and about all those rules of the road. Later, you became fairly proficient at driving. Eventually, you became a driver.
But did you know that you can also go directly from thinking to being through meditation? You can go from thinking about the ideal self you want to become, straight to being that new self. The simple way to do it is to analyze your life and write down what things you want in your new life. For example, maybe you want to be more confident, lose weight, earn a certain amount of money, stop being shy, etc. So, write them down. But just writing them is not enough. You also need to feel the emotions for each of them. For example, how would you really feel if you are a confident person? How would you dress as a confident person? How would you walk and stand? How would the tone of your voice be when talking to someone, etc.? You really need to get good at feeling the emotions as if you already have those things in your life.
You probably wonder why it is important to feel those emotions and not just imagine them. Well, it's because the language of your body is emotion, and the language of your mind is thought. Your body and mind always communicate using thoughts and emotions. You think about something, then you start to feel something, then based on what you feel, your brain produces more similar thoughts. It's kind of a circle that keeps repeating.
Now that you have written down what you want and how you would feel, what you need to do is to go through each one of them again while you are in a deep meditative state. Again, you are not just imagining it; you are also feeling the emotion so real that you can feel it in your bones. When the power of your thought and emotion is combined, you are sending out a very strong signal to the universe.
Two things I would like to mention: First, according to the author, people who usually get results are the ones who truly believe the power of this tactic. Second, you should never worry about how you will get what you want. You just need to know what you want and how you would feel to have it. Leave the rest to your subconscious mind. The "how" will come in the least expected moment and from the least expected place. In fact, when the solution appears, it should shock you. You should be in awe, thinking, "How did it all happen?"
Thanks for watching, and I hope it was useful.