You Are the Placebo

by Joe Dispenza, Dr.

  Although Laurie didn’t know this when her condition was diagnosed, the emotionally charged events she experienced growing up with her father had been branded into her implicit memory system beyond her conscious mind, programming her biology. Her reaction to her father’s anger—feeling weak, powerless, vulnerable, stressed, and fearful every single day—then became part of her autonomic nervous system so that her body chemically memorized these emotions and the environment signaled the genes associated with her disorder to turn on. Because that response was autonomic, she wouldn’t be able to change it as long as she stayed trapped in her emotional body. She could only analyze her state of being equal to the emotions of her past, even though the answers she needed existed beyond those emotions.

  Once Laurie received the fibrous dysplasia diagnosis, her mother immediately proclaimed to the entire family that Laurie had been officially pronounced “fragile” by modern medicine—so she was safe from her father’s physical violence. Although he continued to emotionally and verbally abuse Laurie (right up until his death 15 years later), her disease, ironically, protected her from further physical abuse.

  Cementing Her Identity in Disease

  This perverse sense of safety that Laurie created became a vehicle of survival for her. As a result, she began to benefit from special treatment (which she almost always needed). Whether getting a seat on the bus or subway when there was standing room only, getting her friends to wait in line for events while she sat on a nearby bench, or getting a seat quickly in a crowded restaurant, Laurie found that her disease began to work for her. She started relying heavily on her ailment to get what she wanted. She was now able to manage better in a world that she’d never before viewed as safe. The emotional benefit of manipulating her reality to get what she wanted in this way became very convenient, and Laurie received far more than she really needed to take stress off her body to prevent injury. Before long, her disease became her identity.

  Laurie next developed a late-adolescent rebellion against the life that she thought had been thrust upon her by her doctors, her parents, and fate. By the next semester after her diagnosis, she went into a solid state of denial about her disease. She decided to become the first “gimpy” bodybuilder, returning to the sport with complete devotion. Blindly obsessive, while white-knuckling it and forcing a positive attitude solely with her conscious mind, Laurie found creative ways to bear weight that wouldn’t twist her limbs.

  She thought that by trying to push through the pain, she’d become healthier—although in truth, her efforts backfired, because she felt awful most of the time and her pain worsened. As sometimes happens with polyostotic fibrous dysplasia patients, Laurie also developed scoliosis and suffered from severe back pain daily. By the time she was in her 20s, she began to develop arthritis in her spine and elsewhere.

  After she graduated from college, despite shuttling herself between a new house and a new job, Laurie became very sedentary and felt even more removed from life. Her fear, anxiety, and depression remained. She envied most of her peers and lost friendships and romantic interests because she lived more like her elderly parents than like a young adult.

  By her late 20s, Laurie used a cane all the time to get around, even when she wasn’t nursing one of the 12 serious fractures she’d eventually endure. As if those issues weren’t enough, she also experienced dangerous microfractures. Her bones were so weak that bigger stress fractures would appear beneath the microscopic fissures and connect to other areas of weakened bone to form even bigger fractures that could be seen on an x-ray.

  By age 30, Laurie had more back problems than her 72-year-old father, and she essentially became old before her time. She rested in bed for days and missed so many weeks of work that she was forced to quit jobs. She put graduate school on hold, because the school that accepted her didn’t have a working elevator. She had to forgo parties, museum outings, shopping, traveling, concerts, and other activities that would have involved a lot of standing or walking. She was caught in the thinking-and-feeling loop I talked about earlier: thinking that she was limited and fragile on the inside, while her body manifested limitedness and fragility on the outside. The more she felt vulnerable and weak, the more vulnerable and weak she became—while continuing to experience fractures that reinforced her belief that she was frail, and further reaffirming her identity and validating her state of being.

  She adjusted her diet and took various vitamins and supplements in addition to bone-strengthening drugs, but nothing seemed to stop the fractures. She could fracture a bone from just walking up a flight of stairs or even stepping off a curb. It was like waiting for the next nightmare in a series.

  Ironically, when Laurie wasn’t using crutches or limping, she looked perfectly healthy. Most people assumed that her cane was some sort of eccentric accessory, and many didn’t believe Laurie really had a debilitating condition, which made it difficult and frustrating at times to receive the special treatment she often needed. Trying to convince people that she really had a disease further solidified her identity as a sick person, set her intention to prove she was handicapped, and anchored her belief about her disabled status. While the rest of the world seemed to work very hard to hide their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, Laurie found that she was constantly announcing hers.

  She spent a lot of energy trying to control as much as possible in her environment. She paid careful attention to everything she ate and drank, measuring everything she consumed. Every walk around her neighborhood was calculated. She even weighed how much she could carry home from the supermarket: ten pounds, which was also the limit of the weight she could gain before her bones would worsen.

  It was exhausting, but it was all Laurie knew to do. Her range of options got narrower and narrower as she kept limiting the scope of things that she could do physically in an attempt to keep from fracturing. As her lifestyle became narrower, her mind became narrower along with it. Laurie’s fears increased, her depression worsened, and eventually, she tried to work again but couldn’t even hold down a job.

  This same woman who’d once been a runner, dancer, and competitive bodybuilder was now limited to doing only yoga for fitness, and by her late 30s, even hatha yoga had come to be too much for her. For years, her exercise was limited to sitting in a chair and doing vigorous breathing (although in her early 40s, her doctor finally allowed her to take up lap swimming).

  She did make some attempts at healing through therapists, holistic doctors, energy healers, sound healers, and homeopaths—always seeking solutions outside of herself. A few times, she’d feel better after an energy healing and go straight to the orthopedist and demand new x-rays—only to be deflated when the results came back unchanged. She thought, Maybe this is as good as it’s ever going to get. She awoke overwhelmed each morning, overcome with a feeling of dread, convinced she couldn’t handle whatever the world had in store for her.

  Laurie Learns What’s Possible

  Laurie and I met in 2009, after she had seen What the Bleep Do We Know!? and become transfixed by the concept that a person could possibly create a totally new life. I happened to meet her while eating dinner before a workshop I was teaching at a retreat center near New York. We talked about the courses I gave on personal change, and she immediately registered for my next class that August.

  When Laurie came to her first event, she heard that it was absolutely possible to change your brain, your thoughts, your body, your emotional state, and your genetic expression. During the workshop, I talked about physical change, but Laurie’s beliefs about her disease and her body were tenacious and her emotions were stuck quite firmly in her past. She had absolutely no intention of healing her body, mostly because she didn’t really believe it was even possible. She came because she just wanted to feel better on the inside.

  Laurie immediately applied the principles I taught as best she could, even though she couldn’t seem to feel different by choice. The very first thing she did, almost immediately after that first week
end course, was to stop sharing her diagnosis with others. Even though she couldn’t control her emotions, she figured that she still had control over what she said out loud. So unless she needed to ask for a chair at a party or explain to a date why she couldn’t take a walk with him, she stopped acknowledging her condition altogether. Laurie chose to focus on where she was headed in her future: toward a happy inner self, a deep connection to some unknown divine source, a wonderful job that she excelled at, a life partner, and close and healthy relationships with friends and relatives.

  Laurie next concentrated on changing a few simple behaviors. She watched her thoughts and words, and reminded herself repeatedly to stop her old, repetitive, destructive patterns. She kept doing the meditations and taking my courses. In order to assign meaning to what she was doing, she reread her class notes religiously and kept in touch with as many fellow students as she could. In time, some small but perceptible percentage of the day, Laurie felt better, taller, abler, and stronger. She’d say “Change” to herself 20 times a day, whenever she noticed her mind drifting to her past. Although negative thoughts sneaked through a hundred times a day, little by little, Laurie created a few new thoughts, wrote them down, and attempted to believe them deeply.

  Laurie worked hard at it, but it took almost two years before she could really feel those new thoughts. Instead of getting frustrated during that waiting period, Laurie reminded herself that it had taken quite a long time to create the disease from her emotional state, so it might take some time to uncreate it. She also reminded herself that she’d have to go through a biological, neurological, chemical, and genetic death of the old self before the new self emerged.

  The circumstances in her external environment got worse before they got better. A flood trashed Laurie’s home, and other situations in her apartment building created some new health problems. Laurie told me that every time she’d sit down to do her meditation and rehearse her ideal life, she felt as if she were telling herself a lie—and afterward, opening her eyes to her current circumstances felt like a slap in the face. I encouraged her to stop defining reality with her senses and to keep crossing the river of change.

  Laurie kept limping in to the workshops, grumpy at times and grateful at others, and she kept at the work. She also assembled as many local fellow students as she could to meditate together. Hardly any situations in Laurie’s life were pleasing, so she thought, What the hell, I may as well have one hour a day behind my own eyelids where reality looks different, where I have a pain-free body, a safe and quiet home, and a full and loving relationship with the outside world and with my friends and family.

  In early 2012, during one of my progressive workshops, Laurie had a significant deepening in her meditation experience. She was literally and figuratively rocked to her core. Physically, it was like a disturbance and then a release. Her body shook, her face contorted, and her arms flew up as she tried her best to stay rooted to her chair. Emotionally, it was inexplicable joy. She cried, she laughed, and sounds came out of her mouth that she couldn’t explain. All of the fear and control that she’d previously used to hold herself together was finally loosening. For the first time, she felt a divine presence and knew she was no longer alone.

  Laurie told me, “I sensed something, someone, some divine presence, and this consciousness wasn’t ignorant to my existence and unconcerned with my welfare, as I apparently previously believed. This consciousness has actually been paying attention. Realizing that was an overwhelming change for me.” All the energy she’d been putting into controlling her physical movements and her life in general finally began to relax and unwind, and the energy she’d been using to maintain that control started to free up.

  At the next event, I noticed that Laurie was walking without a cane or any limp. She was happy, smiling, and laughing to herself, instead of irritated, frowning, and wincing in pain. She was transmuting fear into courage, frustration into patience, pain into joy, and weakness into strength. She was beginning to change—on the inside and the outside. Free from the addiction of those limiting emotions, her body was now living less in the past as she moved toward a new future.

  In early spring of 2012, Laurie’s orthopedist told her during a regular checkup that about two-thirds of the length of a fracture she’d had in her femur since she was 19 (a fracture that had shown up on every one of the hundred or so x-rays she’d had so far) had vanished. He had no explanation to offer but, instead, suggested she begin riding a stationary bicycle at the gym for ten minutes, twice a week. The message was music to Laurie’s ears, and off she went.

  Success and Setbacks

  All of Laurie’s work in crossing the river of change was now starting to pay off. She was finally getting feedback that let her know she was making some type of physical progress. Each day, as Laurie got beyond her body, her environment, and time, she was also getting beyond the personality that was connected to her present and past external reality, beyond her emotionally addicted and habituated body, and beyond the predictable future that she’d always expected, based on her memory of the past. All of her effort to supersede her analytical mind, change her brain waves to those of a more suggestible state, find the present moment, and venture into the programming system where she was emotionally altered earlier in her life was finally changing her.

  Laurie started to really believe that her mind was healing her body by thought alone. And the old fracture that was connected to the old self was healing, because she was literally becoming someone else. She was no longer firing and wiring the circuits in her brain that were connected to the old personality, because she was no longer thinking and acting in the same ways. She stopped conditioning her body to the same mind by reliving her past with the same emotions. She was “unmemorizing” being her old self and remembering being a new self—that is, firing and wiring new thoughts and actions in her brain by changing her mind and emotionally teaching her body what her future self would feel like.

  Laurie was signaling new genes in new ways during her daily meditation by simply changing her state of being. Those genes were making new proteins that were healing the proteins responsible for the fractures related to her “dis-ease.” From what she learned in the workshops, she reasoned that her bone cells needed to get the right signal from her mind in order to turn off the gene of fibrous dysplasia and turn on the gene for the production of a normal bone matrix.

  Laurie explained:

  I knew that over the years, all of those fractures had manifested structurally from the unhealthy protein expression in my bone cells, because I had been living by the survival emotions of fear, victimization, and pain—and I felt weak. I was powerful enough to manifest weakness perfectly in my body. I had programmed the genes to stay on, because I’d memorized those emotions subconsciously in my body. And my body, as my mind, was always living in the past. So I figured, if bones are made of collagen—which is a protein—and I wanted my bone cells to make some healthy collagen, I’d have to enter my autonomic nervous system, get beyond my analytical mind, enter into the subconscious mind, repeatedly reprogram my body with new information, and allow it to receive new orders every day. When I received the good news, I felt like I was halfway across the river of change.

  Laurie kept her meditations going and continued to take my workshops. She continued to have times of physical pain, but the frequency, intensity, and duration decreased considerably. She changed as many things as she possibly could. She changed gyms just for a different environment. She put her deodorant on the right side first instead of the left. She folded her arms left over right instead of the more natural right over left, whenever she could remember to do so. She sat in a different chair in her apartment. She slept on the other side of the bed (even though it meant walking all the way around to the far side of the room to get in and out of bed).

  She reported, “Ridiculous as that may sound, I was just intent on giving my body as many new and different signals as possible, and since moving to a big house in
the Hamptons wasn’t realistic, these tiny things would have to do.”

  Laurie even put notes everywhere in her environment to remind herself to stay conscious and to elicit thoughts and feelings about her future. She wrote, “I am grateful,” “Elevate!” and “Love!” on painter’s tape and stuck the notes on the backs of several doors. She stuck a sticky note on her dashboard that read, “Your thoughts are incredibly powerful. Choose yours wisely.” Encouraging notes and affirmations weren’t new to her, but she’d never had the capacity to believe them before because she hadn’t known how to change her beliefs.

  In late January 2013, when she saw her orthopedist again, he told her for the first time in 28 years that she had no evidence of fractures—none. Her bones were whole and undamaged. She wrote to me, “I cannot convey in words the joy this brought me. I now felt empowered and lifted. I know I am more than halfway across the river of change.”

  Her bone cells were now programmed to make new, healthy proteins. Her autonomic nervous system was restoring balance within her body physically, chemically, and emotionally. It was doing the healing for her, through a greater intelligence, and she knew she could trust and surrender more to it now. Her body was continuing to respond to a new mind.

  The month after her appointment with the orthopedist, Laurie flew to Arizona for one of my advanced workshops. An hour after she arrived, she received a phone call from the doctor’s assistant, who told her that the results from her blood and urine tests were back and they indicated that her disease was actually still quite active. Her doctor recommended that she resume intravenous bisphosphonate therapy for the first time in many years.

  Laurie was heartbroken. The x-rays had left her with the impression that she was whole again, but the lab tests indicated otherwise. Within seconds, she had lost perspective and was certain she’d failed. When she told me the news, I reassured her that her body was still living in the past and just needed more time to catch up with her mind. I suggested she continue to do the work for a few more months and retake the urine test then.