by Joe Dispenza
The body becomes addicted to guilt or any emotion in the same way that it would get addicted to drugs.2 At first you only need a little of the emotion/drug in order to feel it; then your body becomes desensitized, and your cells require more and more of it just to feel the same again. Trying to change your emotional pattern is like going through drug withdrawal.
Once your cells are no longer getting the usual signals from the brain about feeling guilty, they begin to express concern. Before, the body and the mind were working together to produce this state of being called guilt; now you are no longer thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking, in the same way. Your intention is to produce more positive thoughts, but the body is still all revved up to produce feelings of guilt based on guilty thoughts.
Think of this as a kind of highly specialized assembly line. Your brain has programmed the body to expect one part that will fit into this larger assembly. All of a sudden, you’ve sent it another part that doesn’t fit into the space where the old “guilty” part once did. An alarm goes off, and the whole operation comes to a standstill.
Your cells are always spying on what is happening in the brain and the mind; your body is the best mind reader ever. So they all stop what they are doing, look up toward the brain, and think:
What are you doing up there? You insisted on being guilty, and we loyally followed your commands for years! We subconsciously memorized a program of guilt from your repetitive thoughts and feelings. We changed our receptor sites to reflect your mind—modified our chemistry so that you could automatically feel guilty. We have maintained your internal chemical order, independent of any external circumstances in your life. We are so used to the same chemical order that your new state of being feels uncomfortable, unfamiliar. We want the familiar, the predictable, and what feels natural. All of a sudden you’re going to change? We can’t have that!
So the cells huddle up and say: Let’s send a protest message to the brain. But we have to be sneaky, because we want her to think that she’s actually responsible for these thoughts. We don’t want her to know they came from us. So now the cells send a message marked URGENT right up the spinal cord to the surface of the thinking brain. I call that the “fast track,” because the message goes straight up the central nervous system in a matter of seconds.
At the same time this is happening, the chemistry of the body—the chemistry of guilt—is now at a lower level, because you’re not thinking and feeling the same way. But this drop does not go unnoticed. A thermostat in the brain called the hypothalamus also sends out an alarm that says: Chemical values are going down. We’ve got to make more!
So the hypothalamus signals the thinking brain to revert back to its old habitual ways. This is the “slow track,” because it takes longer for the chemicals to circulate through the bloodstream. The body wants you to return to your memorized chemical self, so it influences you to think in familiar, routine ways.
These “fast track” and “slow track” cellular responses occur simultaneously. 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. And my favorite: This doesn’t feel right.
If that doesn’t work, a second sneak attack occurs. The body-mind wants to be in control again, 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. On a rational level, that is absurd. But obviously, on some level it feels good to feel bad.
The moment we listen to those subvocalizations, believe those thoughts, and respond by feeling the same familiar feelings, mental amnesia sets in and we forget our original aim. The funny thing is that we actually begin to believe what the body is telling the brain to say to us. We immerse ourselves back into that automatic program and return to being our old self.
Most of us can relate to this little scenario. It’s no different from any 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. The thoughts we embrace are intimately identified with the feelings of what it would be like to experience the indulgence. When we give in to the cravings, we will keep producing the same outcomes in our lives, because the mind and body are in opposition. Our thoughts and feelings are working against each other, and if the body has become the mind, we will always fall prey to how we feel.
As long as we use familiar feelings as a barometer, as feedback on our efforts to change, we’ll always talk ourselves out of greatness. We will never be able to think greater than our internal environment. We will never be able to see a world of possible outcomes other than the negative ones from our past. Our thoughts and feelings have that much power over us.
Help Is Only a Thought Away
The next step in breaking the habit of being ourselves is understanding how important it is to get the mind and body working together and to break the chemical continuity of our guilty, ashamed, angry, depressed state of being. Resisting the body’s demand to restore that old unhealthy order isn’t easy, but help is only a thought away.
You will learn in the following pages that for true change to occur, it is essential to “unmemorize” an emotion that has become part of your personality, and then to recondition the body to a new mind.
It’s easy to feel hopeless when we realize that the chemistry of our emotions has habituated our bodies to a state of being that is too often a product of anger, jealousy, resentment, sadness, and so forth. After all, I’ve said that these programs, these propensities, are buried in our subconscious.
The good news is that we can become consciously aware of these tendencies. I’ll deal more with this concept in the pages ahead. For now, I hope you can accept that to change your personality, you need to change your state of being, which is intimately connected to feelings that you’ve memorized. Just as negative emotions can become embedded in the operating system of your subconscious, so can positive ones.
By Itself, Conscious Positive Thinking Cannot
Overcome Subconscious Negative Feelings
At one time or another, we’ve all consciously declared: I want to be happy. But until the body is instructed otherwise, it’s going to continue expressing those programs of guilt or sadness or anxiety. The conscious, intellectual mind may reason that it wants joy, but the body has been programmed to feel otherwise for years. We stand on a soapbox proclaiming change to be in our best interests, but on a visceral level we can’t seem to bring up the feeling of true happiness. That’s because mind and body aren’t working together. The conscious mind wants one thing, but the body wants another.
If you’ve been devoted to feeling negatively for years, those feelings have created an automatic state of being. We could say that you are subconsciously unhappy, right? Your body has been conditioned to be negative; it knows how to be unhappy better than your conscious mind knows otherwise. You don’t even have to think about how to be negative. You just know that it’s how you are. How can your conscious mind control this attitude in the subconscious body-mind?
Some maintain that “positive thinking” is the answer. I want to be clear that by itself, positive thinking never works. Many so-called positive thinkers have felt negative most of their lives, and now they’re trying to think positively. They are in a polarized state in which they are trying to think one way in order to override how they feel inside of them. They consciously think one way, but they are being the opposite. When the mind and body are in opposition,
change will never happen.
Memorized Feelings Limit Us to Re-creating the Past
By definition, emotions are the end products of past experiences in life.
When you’re in the midst of an experience, the brain receives vital information from the external environment through five different sensory pathways (sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch). As that cumulative sensory data reaches the brain and is processed, networks of neurons arrange themselves into specific patterns reflecting the external event. The moment those nerve cells string into place, the brain releases chemicals. Those chemicals are called an “emotion” or a “feeling.” (In this book, I use the words feelings and emotions interchangeably because they are close enough for our understanding.)
When those emotions begin to chemically flood your body, you detect a change in your internal order (you’re thinking and feeling differently than you were moments before). Naturally, when you notice this change in your internal state, you’ll pay attention to whoever or whatever in your external environment caused that change. When you can identify whatever it was in your outer world that caused your internal change, that event in and of itself is called a memory. Neurologically and chemically, you encode that environmental information into your brain and body. Thus you can remember experiences better because you recall how they felt at the time they happened—feelings and emotions are a chemical record of past experiences.
For example, your boss arrives for your performance review. You notice immediately that he looks red faced, even irritated. As he starts speaking in a loud voice, you smell garlic on his breath. He accuses you of undermining him in front of other employees, and says he has passed you over for a promotion. In this moment you feel jittery, weak in the knees, and queasy; and your heart is racing. You feel fearful, betrayed, and angry. All of the cumulative sensory information—everything you’re smelling, seeing, feeling, and hearing—is changing your internal state. You associate that external experience with a change in how you’re feeling internally, and it brands you emotionally.
You go home and repeatedly review this experience in your mind. Every time you do, you remind yourself of the accusing, intimidating look on your employer’s face, how he yelled at you, what he said, and even how he smelled. Then you once again feel fearful and angry; you produce the same chemistry in your brain and body as if the performance review is still happening. Because your body believes it is experiencing the same event again and again, you are conditioning it to live in the past.
Let’s reason this a bit further. Think of your body as the unconscious mind, or as an objective servant that takes orders from your consciousness. It is so objective that it doesn’t know the difference between the emotions that are created from experiences in your external world and those you fabricate in your internal world by thought alone. To the body, they are the same.
What if this cycle of thinking and feeling that you were betrayed continues for years on end? If you keep dwelling on that experience with your boss or reliving those familiar feelings, day in and day out, you continually signal your body with chemical feelings that it associates with the past. This chemical continuity fools the body into believing that it is still reexperiencing the past, so the body keeps reliving the same emotional experience. When your memorized thoughts and feelings consistently force your body to “be in” the past, we could say that the body becomes the memory of the past.
If those memorized feelings of betrayal have been driving your thoughts for years, then your body has been living in the past 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. In time, your body is anchored in the past.
You know that when you repeatedly re-create the same emotions until you cannot think any greater than how you feel, your feelings are now the means of your thinking. And since your feelings are a record of previous experiences, you’re thinking in the past. And by quantum law, you create more of the past.
Bottom line: Most of us live in the past and resist living in a new future. Why? The body is so habituated to memorizing the chemical records of our past experiences that it grows attached to these emotions. In a very real sense, we become addicted to those familiar feelings. So when we want to look to the future and dream of new vistas and bold landscapes in our not-too-distant reality, the body, whose currency is feelings, resists the sudden change in direction.
Accomplishing this about-face is the great labor of personal change. So many people struggle to create a new destiny, but find themselves unable to overcome the past memory of who they feel they are. Even if we crave unknown adventures and dream of new possibilities ahead in the future, we seem to be compelled to revisit the past.
Feelings and emotions are not bad. They are the end products of experience. But if we always relive the same ones, we can’t embrace any new experiences. Have you known people who always seem to talk about “the good old days”? What they’re really saying is: Nothing new is happening in my life to stimulate my feelings; therefore I’ll have to reaffirm myself from some glorious moments in the past. If we believe that our thoughts have something to do with our destiny, then as creators, most of us are only going in circles.
Controlling Our Inner Environment:
The Genetic Myth
So far, in discussing how the quantum model of reality relates to change, I’ve spent most of the time talking about our emotions, the brain, and the body. We’ve seen that overcoming the recurring thoughts and feelings that the body memorizes is a must if we are to break the habit of being ourselves.
Another major aspect of breaking this habit has to do with our physical health. Certainly, in the hierarchy of things that most of us want to change about our lives, health issues rank way up there. And when it comes to what we’d like to change about our health, there is one set of dogmas that we’re going to have to examine and dispel—the myth that genes create disease and the fallacy of genetic determinism. We will also look at a scientific understanding that may be new to you, called epigenetics: the control of genes from outside the cell, or more precisely, the study of changes in gene function that occur without a change in DNA sequence.3
Just as we can create new experiences for ourselves, like my daughter did, we can also gain control of a very important part of our lives—what we commonly think of as our genetic destiny. As we go along, you will see that knowing something about your genes and what signals them to be expressed or not is crucial to understanding why you have to change from the inside out.
Scientific dictum used to declare that our genes were responsible for most diseases. Then a couple of decades ago, the scientific community casually mentioned that they had been in error, and announced that the environment, by activating or deactivating particular genes, is the most causative factor in producing disease. We now know that less than 5 percent of all diseases today stem from single-gene disorders (such as Tay-Sachs and Huntington’s chorea), whereas around 95 percent of all illnesses are related to lifestyle choices, chronic stress, and toxic factors in the environment.4
Yet factors in the outer environment are only part of the picture. What explains why two people can be exposed to the same toxic environmental conditions and one gets sick or diseased while the other doesn’t? How is it that when someone has multiple personality disorder, one personality can demonstrate a severe allergy to something, while another personality in that same body can be immune to the same antigen or stimulus? Why, when most health-care providers are exposed to pathogens on a daily basis, aren’t doctors and others in the medical community continually ill?
There are also numerous case studies documenting identical twins (who share the same genes) who have had very different experiences when it came to their health and longevity. For example, if both shared a family history of a particular disease, that illness often manifested in one twin but not the other. Same genes, different outcomes.5
In all these cases, could the person who remains healthy have such a coherent, balanced, vital internal order that even when his or
her body is exposed to the same hazardous environmental conditions, the external world does nothing to his or her gene expression, and so doesn’t signal the genes to create disease?
It’s true that the external environment influences our internal environment. However, by changing our internal state of being, can we overcome the effects of a stressful or toxic environment so that certain genes do not become activated? We may not be able to control all the conditions in our external environment, but we certainly have a choice in controlling our inner environment.
Genes: Memories of the Past Environment
To explain how we can control our inner environment, I need to talk a bit about the nature of genes, which are expressed in the body when cells manufacture specific proteins, the building blocks of life.
The body is a protein-producing factory. Muscle cells make muscle proteins that are called actin and myosin, skin cells make skin proteins called collagen and elastin, and stomach cells make stomach proteins called enzymes. Most of the cells of the body make proteins, and genes are the way we make them. We express particular genes via certain cells making particular proteins.
The way most organisms adapt to conditions in their environment is through gradual genetic modifications. For example, when an organism is faced with tough environmental conditions such as temperature extremes, dangerous predators, fast prey, destructive winds, strong currents, and so on, it is forced to overcome the adverse aspects of its world in order to survive. As organisms record those experiences, in the wiring in their brains and the emotions in their bodies, they will change over time. If lions are chasing prey that can outrun them, then by actively engaging the same experiences for generations, they will develop longer legs, sharper teeth, or bigger hearts. All of these changes are the result of genes making proteins that modify the body to adapt to its environment.