You Are the Placebo

by Joe Dispenza, Dr.

  Part of her process of change included becoming conscious of the unconscious thoughts that typically slipped by her awareness during the day. In her meditations, she became determined that those thoughts would never go unnoticed again. Under no circumstances would she allow herself to return to the behaviors and habits connected to her old self. She erased the chalkboard biologically, neurologically, and genetically, making room to create a new self, and her body began to liberate energy. In other words, she was going from particle to wave by releasing the stored emotions as energy in her body. Her body was no longer living the past.

  With this newly available energy that she’d freed up, Candace began to see the landscape of a new future. She asked herself, How do I want to behave? How do I want to feel? How do I want to think? By getting up every day for months on end in a state of gratitude, she was emotionally instructing her body that her new future had already arrived, which signaled new genes in new ways, moving her body back into homeostasis. Right on the other side of Candace’s anger, she found compassion. Right on the other side of her frustration, she discovered patience and gratitude. And right on the other side of her victimization was a creator, waiting to create joy and wellness. It was the same intense energy on either side, but she was now able to liberate it as she moved from particle to wave, from survival to creation.

  Sweet, Sweet Success

  When Candace returned to her doctor seven months after her diagnosis, he was amazed by the change in his patient. Her blood tests had come back perfect. In her initial round of tests in February 2011, her thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) had been 3.61 (which is high), and her antibody count had been 638 (showing a major imbalance). But by September 2011, Candace’s TSH had dropped to a normal 1.15, and her antibody count was a healthy 450, even though she was no longer taking any medication. She’d healed herself in less than one year.

  The doctor wanted to know just what she’d been doing to get these great results. It seemed almost too good to be true. Candace explained that she knew she’d created this condition, so she’d decided to conduct an experiment on herself to uncreate it. She told the doctor that by meditating daily and maintaining an elevated state of emotion, she had been epigenetically signaling new genes instead of letting unhealthy emotions continue to signal the old genes. She explained that she’d worked regularly on who she wanted to become and that she’d stopped responding to everything in her external environment like an animal in survival mode: fighting, fleeing, kicking, or screaming. Everything around her was basically the same; she was just responding in a way that was more loving to herself.

  The doctor told her, looking absolutely amazed, “I wish all my patients were like you, Candace. It’s just incredible to hear your story.”

  Candace doesn’t really know how her healing happened. She doesn’t need to. She just knows that she has become someone else.

  I had dinner with Candace a while after all this happened, at a point when she had been off her medication for months and had no symptoms at all. Her health was fantastic, all her hair had grown back, and she felt great about herself. She mentioned over and over again that she was so in love with her present life.

  I told her, laughing, “You’re in love with life, and it’s loving you back. You should be in love with your life—you created it every day for months that way!”

  Candace explained that she just trusted in an infinite field of potentials and knew that something else was going on beyond her that had helped her heal. All she really had to do was to get beyond herself and enter into the autonomic nervous system, and then keep planting the seeds for a new life. And without knowing how it happened, it just happened—and when it did, she felt better than she’d ever felt before.

  Candace’s life is now completely different from her life when she was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. She’s a business partner in a personal development program that teaches self-development work, and she also maintains a corporate job. She has a loving relationship, new friendships, and new business opportunities. A new personality ultimately creates a new personal reality.

  A state of being is a magnetic force that draws events equal to that state of being, so when Candace fell in love with herself, she drew a loving relationship to herself. Because she felt worthy and felt respect for herself and all of life, conditions began to show up for her in which she had opportunities to contribute, to be respected, and to make a difference in the world. And of course, when she moved into a new personality, the old personality became like another lifetime. That new physiology began to drive her to greater levels of joy and inspiration—and the disease then belonged to the old personality. She was someone else.

  It’s not that she became addicted to joy; she was just no longer addicted to being unhappy. When she started experiencing greater levels of happiness, she found that there’s always more bliss, more joy, and more love to experience, because every experience creates a different blend of emotions. She started really wanting the challenges in her life so that she could find out to what extent she could take this information into transformation.

  The ultimate lesson that Candace learned was that her disease and her challenges were never about someone else—they were always about her. In her old state of being, she’d had the firm belief that she was a victim of her relationship and of her external circumstances and that life was always happening to her. Becoming aware of this work and taking full responsibility for herself and her life—and realizing that what had happened never had anything to do with what was outside of her—was not only a huge empowerment, but also one of the greatest gifts Candace could’ve ever asked for.

  Joann’s Story

  Joann lived most of her life in the fast lane. The 59-year-old mother of five was also a committed wife, a successful businesswoman, and an entrepreneur who constantly juggled her home life, family dynamics, growing career, and thriving business. Although her goal was to stay sane, healthy, and balanced, she couldn’t imagine her life any other way than intense, fast paced, and busy; she was living on the edge and proving to everyone that her mind was active and sharp. Joann constantly pushed herself to take on as much as possible, all the while maintaining exceptionally high standards. She was a leader, admired by many and regularly sought out for advice. Her peers called her “Superwoman,” and she was—or so she thought.

  All that ended abruptly in January 2008, when Joann stepped off the elevator in her apartment building and then just collapsed, about 50 feet from her front door. She hadn’t felt well that day, so she’d gone to a walk-in clinic for help and been on her way back home. In a matter of moments, everything in her world had changed, and she found herself clinging to life.

  After eight months of testing, the doctors diagnosed her with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (SPMS), an advanced stage of multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic disease in which the immune system attacks the central nervous system. Symptoms vary widely depending on the individual, but can start with conditions such as numbness in a leg or an arm, progressing as far as paralysis and even blindness. These symptoms can include not only physical but also cognitive and psychiatric problems.

  Joann’s symptoms had been so vague and sporadic over the previous 14 years that she’d easily brushed them off as by-products of a hectic lifestyle. But now her condition had a label, and it felt like a life sentence—with no chance of parole. She found herself thrown into the depths of the Western medical world, challenged by its strong belief that MS is a permanent disease.

  A few years before the diagnosis, Joann had put the family business in Calgary on hold and made a life-changing move to Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada, something her family had wanted to do for years. After the move, Joann struggled with one challenge after another as the family’s eroding finances and resources put them in a very precarious situation. Joann’s self-esteem, confidence, and health all took a nosedive. Once she found herself unable to become greater than her environment, her mental and physical state bega
n to decline. Money became tighter and tighter as other stressors began to increase. Soon, the family couldn’t even meet their basic needs of food and shelter. In early 2007, the woman everyone else had always seen as Superwoman hit bottom, and before the end of the year, the family returned to Calgary.

  MS is an inflammatory disease in which the insulating coverings of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord are damaged, along with the nerve fibers themselves. The condition disrupts the nervous system from communicating and sending signals to various parts of the body. The type of MS Joann developed is a progressive type that builds up over time, often causing permanent neurological problems, especially as the disease advances. Her doctors told her it was incurable.

  Initially, Joann was determined that her MS wouldn’t define her. Yet she quickly spiraled downward into physical disability and cognitive decline. Joann had to depend on others for basic care as her limitations increased. Because of her sensory and motor problems, she began to rely on crutches, walkers, and a wheelchair. Eventually she had to rely on a mobility scooter to get around.

  It wasn’t much of a surprise that she crashed when her life did. Joann’s body finally did her the favor she wouldn’t do herself—that is, to stop and say, “No more!” She’d pushed herself too hard. Even though she’d achieved success in her early years, deep down inside, she felt like a failure most of the time because she constantly judged herself and thought that she could always do a better job. She was never satisfied. Whatever she did or achieved was never good enough.

  Most important, Joann didn’t want to stop doing, because then she would have to attend to that impending feeling of failure. So instead, she stayed busy by putting all of her attention on her outer world—various experiences with people and things at different times and places—so that she wouldn’t have to put any attention on her inner world of thoughts and feelings.

  The majority of Joann’s life had been filled with supporting others, by celebrating their successes and encouraging them, yet she’d never allowed anyone to see what wasn’t working in her own life. She hid her pain from everyone. Joann constantly gave but never received—because she never allowed herself to receive—so she’d spent a lifetime denying herself her own personal evolution by never expressing herself. It makes sense that when Joann tried to change her inner world by using the conditions in her outer world, she would inevitably manifest only failure.

  When she finally collapsed, Joann was so weak and defeated that she barely had the strength to fight for her life. All that time spent living in emergency mode, constantly reacting to the conditions in her external world, had robbed Joann of her life force, draining all the energy from her internal world—the place for repair and healing. She was simply tapped out.

  Joann Changes Her Mind

  The one thing Joann knew without a doubt was that the damage that the MRIs showed was riddling her brain and spinal column hadn’t appeared overnight. Her body had slowly been eaten away at her core—the central nervous system. After all those years of ignoring symptoms, she’d become unnerved because she was afraid to look inside herself. Those daily toxic chemicals were repeatedly knocking on the door of her cells, and finally the gene for the disease answered the door and switched on.

  Bedridden, Joann made her first goal to slow down the progression of the MS in her body. She knew from reading my first book that the brain doesn’t know the difference between what she could make real internally by thought alone and the real external experience, and she knew that mental practice could change her brain and her body. She started mentally rehearsing doing yoga, and after just a few weeks of daily practice, she was able to do some actual physical poses—even some standing ones. These results highly motivated her.

  Every day, Joann primed her brain and body by thought alone. Just like the piano players in Chapter 5 who mentally rehearsed playing the piano and grew the same neurological circuits as the subjects who physically practiced the exercises, Joann was installing the circuits in her brain to look as if she were already physically walking and moving. Remember the subjects in the various weight-lifting studies who increased their strength just by mentally practicing lifting weights or flexing their biceps? Just like them, Joann knew she could make her body look as if the experience of healing had already started to happen—by literally changing her mind.

  Soon she was able to stand briefly, and then she could walk with support. Joann was quite wobbly and otherwise still dependent on a mobility scooter, but at least she was no longer confined to bed and feeling sorry for herself. She had turned a corner.

  When Joann began to meditate regularly to simply quiet her mind chatter, she became aware of how sad and angry she really was. The floodgates opened. Joann realized she felt weak, isolated, rejected, and unworthy most of the time. Out of balance, ungrounded, and disconnected, she felt as though she’d lost a vital part of herself. She observed how she denied herself by pleasing others and how she couldn’t acknowledge herself without feeling guilty. She recognized that she was always trying to control what seemed to be a spiraling chaos around her, yet it never worked. On a deeper level, she had known this all along but had chosen to ignore it, pushing herself relentlessly and pretending that everything was okay.

  Painful as it was, Joann was now looking at how she’d created her disease. She decided to become conscious of all of those subconscious thoughts, actions, and emotions that were defining her as the same personality who’d created this particular personal reality. She knew that once she could look at who she was being, it meant that she’d be able to change those aspects of herself. The more she became conscious of her unconscious self and aware of her state of being, the more she gained dominion over what she’d hidden from view.

  By early 2010, Joann felt that the progression of the MS had indeed slowed. Her goal then became to stop it altogether. In May, when she mentioned this idea to a neurologist who asked what her goals were with her disease, the doctor abruptly terminated her appointment. Instead of becoming discouraged, Joann was more intent after this incident.

  Taking Her Healing to the Next Level

  When Joann attended a workshop in Vancouver, she couldn’t walk on her own. During the weekend, I asked the participants to set a firm intention in their minds and combine it with an elevated emotion in their bodies. The goal was to recondition the body to a new mind, instead of continuing to condition it with survival emotions. I wanted participants to open their hearts and teach their bodies emotionally what their future would feel like. This was the missing ingredient to Joann’s daily mental practice. Embracing thoughts of walking across a 20- to 25-foot floor with only her cane for support excited her beyond belief. She was now adding the second element of the placebo effect to the equation: expectation with emotion.

  It was this combination—convincing her body emotionally that the future event of healing was happening to her in the present moment—that would take Joann to the next level. Her body, as the unconscious mind, had to believe it for it to be so. If she were to embrace the joy of being well and give thanks before the healing occurred, then her body would be getting a sampling of her future in the present moment.

  I suggested to Joann that she really pay attention to her thoughts, because it was her thoughts that had truly made her sick. I pressed her to get beyond the personality that was connected to her condition, which was necessary before she could create a new personality and a new personal reality. Now she could apply meaning and intention to what she was doing.

  Two months after that workshop, Joann attended a second, more advanced workshop in Seattle. Her scooter had broken down the day before she left for that event, so she used her motorized wheelchair to get around. Despite initially feeling more vulnerable because of that, at the workshop, Joann soon felt better able to move. Her associative memory related to the positive experience of the last event, and the expectation of getting better in the current event, was what initiated that process. If 29 percent of chemo patients can
experience anticipatory nausea before their chemo treatments (as you read in Chapter 1), then maybe it’s possible for some of the workshop participants to experience anticipatory wellness when they’re back in the workshop setting. Whatever the trigger, Joann saw a new possibility and, with enthusiasm, began once again to emotionally embrace that future in the present moment.

  During the last meditation of that workshop, the magic happened for her. Joann experienced a huge internal shift, and she felt something that moved her profoundly. She felt her body changing automatically, once she entered her autonomic nervous system and it received the new instructions and took over. She felt lifted, overjoyed, and free. After the meditation, Joann got up from her chair a different person than she’d been when she’d sat down—she was in a new state of being. She then walked to the front of the room—without any support, not even her cane. She strutted across the room wide-eyed, laughing like a child. She could feel and move her legs, which had been dormant for years.

  She’d gotten out of the way—and it felt incredible! To my amazement, Joann had signaled new genes in new ways right during that one meditation. She’d actually changed her condition in just one hour!

  When she got beyond her MS identity, she became a different person, and that’s when she stopped trying to slow, stop, or reverse her MS. She no longer tried to prove anything to herself, her family, her doctors, or anyone else. She understood and experienced for the first time that her true journey was always about wholeness, which is what verifiable healing is always about. She forgot that she had an official disease, and she dissociated from that identity for a moment. The freedom that doing so engendered and the amplitude of that elevated emotion were strong enough to switch on a new gene. Joann knew that MS was simply a label, like “mother,” “wife,” or “boss.” She had changed that label by simply giving up her past.