You Are the Placebo

by Joe Dispenza, Dr.

  So after I had all the blood tests, x-rays, CAT scans, and MRIs at the hospital, the orthopedic surgeon showed me the results and somberly delivered the news: In order to contain the bone fragments that were now on my spinal cord, I needed surgery to implant a Harrington rod. That would mean cutting out the back parts of the vertebrae from two to three segments above and below the fractures and then screwing and clamping two 12-inch stainless-steel rods along both sides of my spinal column. Then they’d scrape some fragments off my hip bone and paste them over the rods. It would be major surgery, but it would mean I’d at least have a chance to walk again. Even so, I knew I’d probably still be somewhat disabled, and I’d have to live with chronic pain for the rest of my life. Needless to say, I didn’t like that option.

  But if I chose not to have the surgery, paralysis seemed certain. The best neurologist in the Palm Springs area, who concurred with the first surgeon’s opinion, told me that he knew of no other patient in the United States in my condition who had refused it. The impact of the accident had compressed my T-8 vertebra into a wedge shape that would prevent my spine from being able to bear the weight of my body if I were to stand up: My backbone would collapse, pushing those shattered bits of the vertebra deep into my spinal cord, causing instant paralysis from my chest down. That was hardly an attractive option either.

  I was transferred to a hospital in La Jolla, closer to my home, where I received two additional opinions, including one from the leading orthopedic surgeon in Southern California. Not surprisingly, both doctors agreed that I should have the Harrington rod surgery. It was a pretty consistent prognosis: have the surgery or be paralyzed, never to walk again. If I had been the medical professional making the recommendation, I’d have said the same thing: It was the safest option. But it wasn’t the option I chose for myself.

  Maybe I was just young and bold at that time in my life, but I decided against the medical model and the expert recommendations. I believe that there’s an intelligence, an invisible consciousness, within each of us that’s the giver of life. It supports, maintains, protects, and heals us every moment. It creates almost 100 trillion specialized cells (starting from only 2), it keeps our hearts beating hundreds of thousands of times per day, and it can organize hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions in a single cell in every second—among many other amazing functions. I reasoned at the time that if this intelligence was real and if it willfully, mindfully, and lovingly demonstrated such amazing abilities, maybe I could take my attention off my external world and begin to go within and connect with it—developing a relationship with it.

  But while I intellectually understood that the body often has the capacity to heal itself, now I had to apply every bit of philosophy that I knew in order to take that knowledge to the next level and beyond, to create a true experience with healing. And since I wasn’t going anywhere and I wasn’t doing anything except lying facedown, I decided on two things. First, every day I would put all of my conscious attention on this intelligence within me and give it a plan, a template, a vision, with very specific orders, and then I would surrender my healing to this greater mind that has unlimited power, allowing it to do the healing for me. And second, I wouldn’t let any thought slip by my awareness that I didn’t want to experience. Sounds easy, right?

  A Radical Decision

  Against the advice of my medical team, I left the hospital in an ambulance that brought me to the home of two close friends, where I stayed for the next three months to focus on my healing. I was on a mission. I decided that I would begin every day reconstructing my spine, vertebra by vertebra, and I would show this consciousness, if it was paying attention to my efforts, what I wanted. I knew that it would demand my absolute presence . . . that is, for me to be present in the moment—not thinking about or regretting my past, worrying about the future, obsessing about the conditions in my external life, or focusing on my pain or symptoms. Just as in any relationship we have with anybody, we all know when someone is present or not with us, right? Because consciousness is awareness, awareness is paying attention, and paying attention is being present and noticing, this consciousness would be aware of when I was present and when I wasn’t. I would have to be totally present when I interacted with this mind; my presence would have to match its presence, my will would have to match its will, and my mind would have to match its mind.

  So for two hours twice a day, I went within and began creating a picture of my intended result: a totally healed spine. Of course, I became aware of how unconscious and unfocused I was. It’s ironic. I realized back then that when crisis or trauma occurs, we spend too much of our attention and energy thinking about what we don’t want instead of what we do want. During those first several weeks, I was guilty of this tendency on what seemed like a moment-to-moment basis.

  In the middle of my meditations on creating the life I wanted with a fully healed spine, I would all of a sudden become aware that I’d been unconsciously thinking about what the surgeons had told me a few weeks prior: that I would probably never walk again. I would be in the midst of inwardly reconstructing my spine, and the next thing I knew I was stressing over whether I should sell my chiropractic practice. While I was step-by-step mentally rehearsing walking again, I would catch myself imagining what it would be like to live the rest of my life sitting in a wheelchair—you get the idea.

  So every time I lost my attention and my mind wandered to any extraneous thoughts, I would start from the beginning and do the whole scheme of imagery over again. It was tedious, frustrating, and, quite frankly, one of the most difficult things I’d ever done. But I reasoned that the final picture that I wanted the observer in me to notice had to be clear, unpolluted, and uninterrupted. In order for this intelligence to accomplish what I hoped—what I knew—it was capable of doing, from start to finish I had to stay conscious and not go unconscious.

  Finally, after six weeks of battling with myself and making the effort to be present with this consciousness, I was able to make it through my inward reconstruction process without having to stop and start over from the beginning. I remember the day I did it for the first time: It was like hitting a tennis ball on the sweet spot. There was something right about it. It clicked. I clicked. And I felt complete, satisfied, and whole. For the first time, I was truly relaxed and present—in mind and body. There was no mental chatter, no analyzing, no thinking, no obsessing, no trying; something lifted, and a kind of peace and silence prevailed. It was as if I no longer cared about all of the things I should have been worried about in my past and future.

  And that realization solidified the journey for me, because right around that time, as I was creating this vision of what I wanted, reconstructing my vertebrae, it started to get easier every day. Most important, I started to notice some pretty significant physiological changes. It was in that moment that I began to correlate what I was doing inside of me to create this change with what was taking place outside of me—in my body. The instant I made that correlation, I paid greater attention to what I was doing and did it with more conviction; and I did it again and again. As a result, I kept doing it with a level of joy and inspiration instead of such a dreadful, compromised effort. And all of a sudden, what had originally taken me two or three hours to accomplish in one session, I was able to do in a shorter period.

  Now, I had quite a bit of time on my hands. So I started to think about what it would be like to see a sunset again from the water’s edge or eat lunch with my friends at a table in a restaurant, and I thought about how I would never take any of that for granted. In detail, I imagined taking a shower and feeling the water on my face and body, or simply sitting up while using the toilet or taking a walk on the beach in San Diego, the wind blowing on my face. These were some things that I had never fully appreciated before the accident, but now they had meaning—and I took my time to emotionally embrace them until I felt as if I were already there.

  I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, but now I do: I was actua
lly starting to think about all these future potentials that existed in the quantum field, and then I was emotionally embracing each of them. And as I selected that intentional future and married it with the elevated emotion of what it would be like to be there in that future, in the present moment my body began to believe it was actually in that future experience. As my ability to observe my desired destiny got sharper and sharper, my cells began to reorganize themselves. I began to signal new genes in new ways, and then my body really started getting better faster.

  What I was learning is one of the main principles of quantum physics: that mind and matter are not separate elements, that our conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings are the very blueprints that control our destiny. The persistence, conviction, and focus to manifest any potential future lies within the human mind and within the mind of the infinite potentials in the quantum field. Both of these minds must work together in order to bring about any future reality that potentially already exists. I realized that in that way, we are all divine creators, independent of race, gender, culture, social status, education, religious beliefs, or even past mistakes. I felt really blessed for the first time in my life.

  I made other key decisions about my healing as well. I set up a whole regimen (described in detail in Evolve Your Brain) that included diet, visits from friends who practiced energy healing, and an elaborate rehabilitation program. But nothing was more important to me during that time than getting in touch with that intelligence within me and, through it, using my mind to heal my body.

  At nine and a half weeks after the accident, I got up and walked back into my life—without having any body cast or any surgeries. I had reached full recovery. I started seeing patients again at 10 weeks and was back to training and lifting weights again, while continuing my rehabilitation, at 12 weeks. And now, almost 30 years after the accident, I can honestly say that I’ve hardly ever had back pain since.

  Research Begins in Earnest

  But that wasn’t the end of this adventure. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t go back into my life as my same self. I was changed in many ways. I’d been initiated into a reality that no one I knew could really understand. I couldn’t relate with a lot of my friends, and I certainly couldn’t return to the same life. The things that were once so important to me really no longer mattered. And I started asking big questions like “Who am I?”; “What is the meaning of this life?”; “What am I doing here?”; “What’s my purpose?”; and “What or who is God?” I left San Diego within a short time and moved to the Pacific Northwest, eventually opening a chiropractic clinic near Olympia, Washington. But at first, I pretty much retreated from the world and studied spirituality.

  In time, I also became very interested in spontaneous remissions: when people healed from a serious disease or condition deemed terminal or permanent, without traditional medical interventions like surgery or drugs. On those long, lonely nights during my recovery when I couldn’t sleep, I had made a deal with that consciousness that if I were ever able to walk again, I’d spend the rest of my life investigating and researching the mind-body connection and the concept of mind over matter. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing in the nearly three decades since then.

  I traveled to several different countries, seeking out many people who had been diagnosed with illnesses and treated conventionally or nonconventionally, either staying the same or getting worse until, all of a sudden, they got better. I started interviewing these people to discover what their experiences had in common so I could understand and document what had made them improve, because I had a passion to marry science with spirituality. What I found was that each of these miraculous cases relied on a strong element of mind.

  The scientist in me started getting very itchy, becoming even more inquisitive. I became re-involved in attending university classes and studying the latest research in neuroscience, and I advanced my postgraduate training in brain imaging, neuroplasticity, epigenetics, and psychoneuroimmunology. And I figured, now that I knew what these people had done to get better and now that I knew all about the science of changing your mind (or at least I thought I did), I should be able to reproduce it—in both sick people and people who are well who want to make changes to support not only their health, but also their relationships, careers, families, and lives in general.

  I was then invited to be one of the 14 scientists and researchers featured in the 2004 documentary film What the Bleep Do We Know!? and that movie became an overnight sensation. What the Bleep Do We Know!? invited people to question the nature of reality and then try it out in their lives to see if their observation mattered or, perhaps more accurately put, if their observation became matter. People around the world were talking about the film and the concepts it espoused. In the wake of that, my first book, Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind, was published in 2007. After Evolve Your Brain had been out for a while, people started to ask me, “How do you do it? How do you change, and how do you create the life you want?” It soon became the most common question people asked me.

  So I assembled a team and started teaching workshops across the United States and internationally on how the brain is wired and how you can reprogram your thinking using neurophysiological principles. At first, these workshops were mostly just a sharing of information. But people wanted more, so I added meditations to synergize and complement the information, giving participants practical steps to making changes in their minds and bodies, and, as a result, changes in their lives as well. After I taught my introductory workshops in different parts of the world, people would then ask me, “What’s next?” So I began teaching another level to the introductory workshop. After that was completed, more folks asked if I could teach another level, a more advanced workshop. This continued in most of the places where I presented.

  I kept thinking that I was done, that I’d taught all I could teach, but people kept asking for more, so I’d learn more myself and then refine the presentations and meditations. A momentum developed, and I was getting good feedback; people were able to eliminate some of their self-destructive habits and lead happier lives. Even though up to this point, my associates and I had seen only small changes—nothing really significant—people loved the information and wanted to continue the practice. So I kept going where I was invited. I figured that when the time came that they stopped inviting me, I’d know I was done with this work.

  About a year and a half after our first workshop, my team and I started receiving several e-mails from our participants commenting on positive changes they were experiencing from doing the meditations on a consistent basis. A flood of change began to manifest in people’s lives, and they were overjoyed. The feedback we received over the next year caught my attention and that of my staff as well. Our participants began reporting not only subjective changes in their physical health, but also improvements in objective measurements from their medical tests. Sometimes the tests would even come back totally normal! These people were able to reproduce the exact physical, mental, and emotional changes that I studied, observed, and ultimately wrote about in Evolve Your Brain.

  This was incredibly exciting for me to witness, because I knew that anything that is repeatable verges on becoming a scientific law. It seemed as though many folks were sending us e-mails starting with the same verbiage: “You’re not going to believe this . . .” And those changes were now more than coincidence.

  Then a little later that year, during each of two events in Seattle, some amazing things began to happen. At the first event, a woman with multiple sclerosis (MS), who was using a walker when she arrived, was walking unassisted by the time the workshop was over. At the second Seattle event that year, another woman, who had suffered with MS for ten years, started dancing around, declaring that the paralysis and numbness she’d experienced in her left foot were completely gone. (You’ll read more about one of these women, and others like them, in the chapters to come.) By demand, in 2010 I taught a more progressive workshop in C
olorado, where people started noticing that they were shifting their well-being right there, during the event. People stood up, took the microphone, and reported some pretty inspiring stories.

  Around this time, I was also invited to speak to a lot of business leaders about the biology of change, the neuroscience of leadership, and the concept of how to transform individuals in order to transform a culture. After a keynote address to one group, several executives approached me about adapting the ideas for a corporate model of transformation. So I created an eight-hour course that could be tailored for companies and organizations, and the course was so successful that it spawned our “30 Days to Genius” corporate program. I found myself working with business clients such as Sony Entertainment Network, Gallo Family Vineyards, the telecommunications company WOW! (originally called Wide Open West), and many others. This led to offering private coaching for upper management.

  The demand for our corporate programs became so great that I began training a coaching staff; I now have more than 30 active trainers, including ex-CEOs, corporate consultants, psychotherapists, attorneys, physicians, engineers, and Ph.D. professionals who travel all around, teaching this model of transformation to different companies. (We now have plans to begin certifying independent coaches in using the model of change with their own clients.) Never in my wildest dreams had I ever imagined this type of future for myself.

  I wrote my second book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One, published in 2012, to serve as a practical how-to companion to Evolve Your Brain. I not only explained more about the neuroscience of change and epigenetics, but also included a four-week program with step-by-step directions for implementing these changes, based on the workshops I was teaching at the time.

  Then I did another, more advanced event in Colorado, where we had seven spontaneous remissions of various conditions. One woman who was living on lettuce because of severe food allergies was healed that weekend. Other people were healed of gluten intolerance, celiac disease, a thyroid condition, severe chronic pain, and other conditions. All of a sudden, I started seeing some really significant changes in people’s health and in their lives, while they retreated from their then-current reality in order to create a new one. It was happening right before my eyes.