by Joe Dispenza
Figure 3C. The neurochemical relationship between the brain and the body. As you think certain thoughts, the brain produces chemicals that cause you to feel exactly the way you were thinking. Once you feel the way you think, you begin to think the way you feel. This continuous cycle creates a feedback loop called a “state of being”
We will delve deeper into this idea throughout the book, but consider that thoughts are primarily related to the mind (and the brain), and feelings are connected to the body. Therefore, as the feelings of the body align to thoughts from a particular state of mind, mind and body are now working together as one. And as you’ll recall, when the mind and body are in unison, the end product is called a “state of being.” We could also say that the process of continuously thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking creates a state of being, which produces effects on our reality.
A state of being means we have become familiar with a mental-emotional state, a way of thinking and a way of feeling, which has become an integral part of our self-identity. And so we describe who we are by how we are thinking (and thus feeling) or being in the present moment. I am angry; I am suffering; I am inspired; I am insecure; I am negative….
But years of thinking certain thoughts, and then feeling the same way, and then thinking equal to those feelings (the hamster in the wheel) creates a memorized state of being in which we can emphatically declare our I am statement as an absolute. That means we’re now at the point when we define ourselves as this state of being. Our thoughts and feelings have merged.
For example, we say: I have always been lazy; I am an anxious person; I am typically uncertain of myself; I have worthiness issues; I am short-tempered and impatient; I am really not that smart; and so on. And those particular memorized feelings contribute to all our personality traits.
Warning: when feelings become the means of thinking, or if we cannot think greater than how we feel, we can never change. To change is to think greater than how we feel. To change is to act greater than the familiar feelings of the memorized self.
As a practical example, let’s say you’re driving to work this morning and you begin to think about the heated encounter you had a few days ago with a co-worker. As you think the thoughts associated with that person and that particular experience, your brain starts releasing chemicals that circulate through your body. Very quickly, you begin to feel exactly the way you were thinking. You probably become angry.
Your body sends a message back to your brain, saying, Yup, I’m feeling really ticked off. Of course, your brain, which constantly communicates with the body and monitors its internal chemical order, is influenced by the sudden change in the way you’re feeling. As a result, you begin to think differently. (The moment you begin to feel the way you think, you begin to think the way you feel.) You unconsciously reinforce the same feeling by continuing to think angry and frustrated thoughts, which then make you feel more angry and frustrated. In effect, your feelings are now controlling your thinking. Your body is now driving your mind.
As the cycle goes on, your angry thoughts produce more chemical signals to your body, which activate the adrenal chemicals associated with your angry feelings. Now you become enraged and aggressive. You feel flushed, your stomach is twisted into a knot, your head pounds, and your muscles start to clench. As all those heightened feelings flood the body and change its physiology, this chemical cocktail fires up a set of circuits in the brain, causing you to think equal to those emotions.
Now you’re telling your associate off ten different ways in the privacy of your own mind. You indignantly conjure up a litany of past events that validate your present upset, brainstorming through a letter recounting all those complaints you’ve always wanted to lodge. In your mind, you’ve already forwarded it to your boss before you even arrive at work. You exit the car dazed and crazed and a breath away from homicidal. Hello, walking, talking model of an angry person … and all of this started with a single thought. In this moment, it seems impossible to think greater than you feel—and that’s why it’s so hard to change.
The result of this cyclic communication between your brain and body is that you tend to react predictably to these kinds of situations. You create patterns of the same familiar thoughts and feelings, you unconsciously behave in automatic ways, and you are mired in these routines. This is how the chemical “you” functions.
Does Your Mind Control Your Body?
Or Does Your Body Control Your Mind?
Why is it so hard to change?
Imagine that your mother loved to suffer, and through long observation, you unconsciously saw that this behavior pattern enabled her to get what she wanted in life. Let’s also say that you’ve had a few tough experiences in your own life, which created quite a bit of suffering for you. Those memories still elicit an emotional reaction, centered around a specific person at a particular place at a certain time in your life. You’ve thought about the past often enough, and somehow, those memories are easy to recall, even automatic. Now imagine that for more than 20 years, you’ve practiced thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking, about suffering.
Actually, you no longer need to think about the past event to create the feeling. You can’t seem to think or act any other way than how you always feel. You’ve memorized suffering by your recurrent thoughts and feelings—those related to that incident, as well as other events in your life. Your thoughts about yourself and your life tend to be colored by feelings of victimization and self-pity. Repeating the same thoughts and feelings you’ve courted for more than 20 years has conditioned your body to remember the feeling of suffering without much conscious thought. This seems so natural and normal now. It’s who you are. And anytime you try to change anything about yourself, it’s like the road turns back on you. You’re right back to your old self.
What most people don’t know is that when they think about a highly charged emotional experience, they make the brain fire in the exact sequences and patterns as before; they are firing and wiring their brains to the past by reinforcing those circuits into ever more hardwired networks. They also duplicate the same chemicals in the brain and body (in varying degrees) as if they were experiencing the event again in that moment. Those chemicals begin to train the body to further memorize that emotion. Both the chemical results of thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking, as well as the neurons firing and wiring together, condition the mind and the body into a finite set of automatic programs.
We are capable of reliving a past event over and over, perhaps thousands of times in one lifetime. It is this unconscious repetition that trains the body to remember that emotional state, equal to or better than the conscious mind does. When the body remembers better than the conscious mind—that is, when the body is the mind—that’s called a habit.
Psychologists tell us that by the time we’re in our mid-30s, our identity or personality will be completely formed. This means that for those of us over 35, we have memorized a select set of behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, emotional reactions, habits, skills, associative memories, conditioned responses, and perceptions that are now subconsciously programmed within us. Those programs are running us, because the body has become the mind.
This means that we will think the same thoughts, feel the same feelings, react in identical ways, behave in the same manner, believe the same dogmas, and perceive reality the same ways. About 95 percent of who we are by midlife1 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, not believing in ourselves, and insisting on being chronically unhappy, just to name a few.
Often We Only Appear to Be Awake
Since the body becomes the subconscious mind, it’s easy to see that in situations when the body becomes the mind, the conscious mind no longer has much to do with our behavior. The instant we have a thought, feeling, or reaction, the body runs on automatic p
ilot. We go unconscious.
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. Mom’s body is skillfully doing everything because it has memorized how to do all these deeds through much repetition. She no longer has any conscious thought about how she does them; they are habitual.
Think about that: 5 percent of the mind is conscious, struggling against the 95 percent that is running subconscious automatic programs. We’ve memorized a set of behaviors so well that we have become an automatic, habitual body-mind. In fact, when the body has memorized a thought, action, or feeling to the extent that the body is the mind—when mind and body are one—we are (in a state of) being the memory of ourselves. And if 95 percent of who we are by age 35 is a set of involuntary programs, memorized behaviors, and habitual emotional reactions, it follows that 95 percent of our day, we are unconscious. We only appear to be awake. Yikes!
So a person may consciously want to be happy, healthy, or free, but the experience of hosting 20 years of suffering and the repeated cycling of those chemicals of pain and pity 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 Is Running the Show
Here are some practical illustrations of the body being in a habitual state. Have you ever been unable to consciously remember a phone number? Try as you may, you can’t even recall three digits out of the string of numbers required to make the call. And yet, you can pick up the phone and watch as your fingers dial the number. Your conscious, thinking brain can’t remember the number, but you’ve practiced this action so many times with your fingers that your body now knows and remembers better than your brain. (That example was for those of us who grew up before speed dial or cell phones came along; perhaps you’ve had the same experience with typing your PIN into an ATM or entering a password online.)
Similarly, I can recall times when I worked out at a gym and had a locker with a combination lock. I was so tired after the workout that I couldn’t remember the combination. I’d stare at that dial, trying to recall the sequence of three numbers, and they wouldn’t surface. However, when I started to twirl the dial, the combination would come back to me, almost as if by magic. Again, this happens because we practiced something so many times that our bodies know better than our conscious minds. The body subconsciously has become the mind.
Remember that 95 percent of who we are by age 35 sits in the same subconscious memory system, in which the body automatically runs a programmed set of behaviors and emotional reactions. In other words, the body is running the show.
When the Servant Becomes the Master
In truth, the body is the servant of the mind. It follows that if the body has become the mind, the servant has become the master. And the former master (the conscious mind) has gone to sleep. The mind might think it’s still in charge, but the body is influencing decisions equal to its memorized emotions.
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? Go back to sleep. I’ve got it together here. You don’t have the will, the persistence, or the awareness to do what I have been doing all this time while you were unconsciously following my orders. I even modified my receptor sites over the years in order to serve you better. You thought you were running things, while I have been influencing you all along and urging you to make all of your decisions equal to what feels right and familiar.
And when the 5 percent that is conscious is going against 95 percent that is running subconscious automatic programs, the 95 percent is so reflexive that it only takes one stray thought or a single stimulus from the environment to turn on the automatic program again. Then we’re back to same old, same old—thinking the same thoughts, performing the same actions, but expecting something different to happen in our lives.
When we try to regain control, this is when the body signals the brain to begin talking us out of our conscious goals. Our internal chatter comes up with a battery of reasons why we should not attempt to do anything out of the ordinary, not break out of the habituated state of being that we’re used to. It will pick up all of our weaknesses, which it knows and fosters, and hurl them at us one by one.
We create worst-case scenarios in our minds so that we don’t have to rise above those familiar feelings. Because when we try to break the internal chemical order we have made so second nature, the body goes into chaos. Its internal badgering feels nearly irresistible—and plenty of times, we succumb.
Enter into the Subconscious to Change It
The subconscious mind only knows what you have programmed it to do. Have you ever been typing along on your laptop, and all of a sudden your computer starts running automatic programs that you have no control over? When you try to use the conscious mind to stop the automatic, subconscious programs stored in your body, it’s like yelling at a computer that’s gone rogue, with several programs running while windows are popping up and showing more than you can handle. Hey! Stop that! The computer isn’t even going to register that. It’s going to keep doing what it does until there is some sort of intervention—until you get into its operating system and change some settings.
In this book, you will learn how to get into the subconscious, and reprogram it with a new set of strategies. In effect, you have to unlearn, or unwire, your old thinking and feeling patterns and then relearn, or rewire, your brain with new patterns of thinking and feeling, based on who you want to be instead. When you condition the body with a new mind, the two can no longer work in opposition, but must be in harmony. This is the point of change … of self-creation.
Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Let’s use a real-life situation to illustrate what happens when we decide to break from some memorized emotional state and change our minds. I think we can all relate to one common state of being: guilt. So I’m going to use that to illustrate in practical terms how this cycle of thinking and feeling works against us. Then we’ll identify some of the efforts the brain-body system is going to make to remain in control and preserve that negative state of being.
Imagine that you frequently feel guilty about one thing or another. If something goes wrong in a relationship—a simple miscommunication, someone unreasonably misplacing his or her anger on you, or whatever—you wind up taking the blame and feeling bad. Picture yourself as one of those people who repeatedly say or think, It was my fault.
After 20 years of doing this to yourself, you feel guilty and think guilty thoughts automatically. You have created an environment of guilt for yourself. Other factors have contributed to this, but for now, let’s stay with this notion of how your thinking and feeling have created your state of being and your environment.
Every time you think a guilty thought, you’ve signaled your body to produce the specific chemicals that make up the feeling of guilt. You’ve done this so often that your cells are swimming in a sea of guilt chemicals.
The receptor sites on your cells adapt so that they can better take in and process this particular chemical expression, that of guilt. The enormous amount of guilt bathing the cells begins to feel normal to them, and eventually, what the body perceives as normal starts to be interpreted as pleasurable. It’s like living for years near an airport. You get so used to the noise that you no longer hear it consciously, unless one jet flies lower than usual and the roar of its engines is so much louder that it gets your attention. The same thing happens to your cells. As a result, they literally become desensitized to the chemical feeling of guilt; they will require a stronger, more powerful emotion from you—a higher threshold of stimuli
—to turn on the next time. And when that stronger “hit” of guilt chemicals gets the body’s attention, your cells “perk up” at that stimulation, much like that first cup of java feels to a coffee drinker.
And when each cell divides at the end of its life and makes a daughter cell, the receptor sites on the outside of the new cell will require a higher threshold of guilt to turn them on. Now the body demands a stronger emotional rush of feeling bad in order to feel alive. You become addicted to guilt by your own doing.
When anything goes wrong or is awry in your life, you automatically assume that you’re the guilty party. But that seems normal to you now. You don’t even have to think about feeling guilty—you just are that way. Not only is your mind not conscious of how you express your guilty state by way of the things you say and do, but your body wants to feel its accustomed level of guilt, because that’s what you have trained it to do. You have become unconsciously guilty most of the time—your body has become the mind of guilt.
Only when, say, a friend points out that you needn’t have apologized to the store clerk for giving you the wrong change do you realize how pervasive this aspect of your personality has become. Let’s say that this triggers one of those moments of enlightenment—an epiphany—and you think, She’s right. Why do I apologize all the time? Why do I take responsibility for everyone else’s missteps? After you reflect on your history of constantly “pleading guilty,” you say to yourself, Today I’m going to stop blaming myself and making excuses for other people’s bad behavior. I’m going to change.
Because of your decision, you’re no longer going to think the same thoughts that produce the same feelings, and vice versa. And if you falter, you’ve made a deal with yourself that you’re going to stop and remember your intention. Two hours go by and you feel really good about yourself. You think, Wow, this is actually working.
Unfortunately, your body’s cells aren’t feeling so good. Over the years, you’ve trained them to demand more molecules of emotion (guilt, in this case) in order to fulfill their chemical needs. You had trained your body to live as a memorized chemical continuity, but now you’re interrupting that, denying it its chemical needs and going contrary to its subconscious programs.