by Joe Dispenza
So either we anticipate stress-response-producing experiences or we recollect them; our bodies are either existing in the future or in the past. To our detriment, we turn short-term stressful situations into long-term ones.
On the other hand, as far as we can tell, animals don’t have the ability (or should I say disability) to turn on the stress response so frequently and so easily that they can’t turn it off. That deer, back to happily grazing, isn’t consumed with thoughts about what just happened a few minutes ago, let alone the time a coyote chased it two months ago. This kind of repetitive stress is harmful to us, because no organism was designed with a mechanism to deal with negative effects on the body when the stress response is turned on with great frequency and for long duration. In other words, no creature can avoid the consequences of living in long-term emergency situations. When we turn on the stress response and can’t turn it off, we’re headed for some type of breakdown in the body.
Let’s say you keep turning on the fight-or-flight system due to some threatening circumstance in your life (real or imagined). As your racing heart pumps enormous amounts of blood to your extremities and your body is knocked out of homeostasis, you’re becoming prepared by the nervous system to run or fight. But let’s face it: you can’t flee to the Bahamas, nor can you throttle your fellow employee—that would be primitive. So as a consequence, you condition your heart to race all the time, and you may be headed for high blood pressure, arrhythmias, and so on.
And what’s in store when you keep mobilizing all that energy for some emergency situation? If you’re putting the bulk of your energy toward some issue in your external environment, there will be little left for your body’s internal environment. Your immune system, which monitors your inner world, can’t keep up with the lack of energy for growth and repair. Therefore, you get sick, whether it be from a cold, cancer, or rheumatoid arthritis. (All are immune-mediated conditions.)
When you think about it, the real difference between animals and ourselves is that although we both experience stress, humans reexperience and “pre-experience” traumatic situations. What is so harmful about having our stress response triggered by pressures from the past, present, and future? When we get knocked out of chemical balance so often, eventually that out-of-balance state becomes the norm. As a result, we are destined to live out our genetic destiny, and in most cases that means suffering from some illness.
The reason is clear: The domino effect from the cascade of hormones and other chemicals we release in response to stress can dysregulate some of our genes, and that may create disease. In other words, repeated stress pushes the genetic buttons that cause us to begin to head toward our genetic destiny. So what was once very adaptive behavior and a beneficial biochemical response (fight or flight) has become a highly maladaptive and harmful set of circumstances.
For instance, when a lion was chasing your ancestors, the stress response was doing what it was designed to do—protect them from their outer environment. That’s adaptive. But if, for days on end, you fret about your promotion, overfocus on your presentation to upper management, or worry about your mother being in the hospital, these situations create the same chemicals as though you were being chased by a lion.
Now, that’s maladaptive. You’re staying too long in emergency mode. Fight-or-flight is using up the energy your internal environment needs. Your body is stealing this vital energy from your immune, digestive, and endocrine systems, among others, and directing it to the muscles that you’d use to fight a predator or run from danger. But in your situation, that’s only working against you.
From a psychological perspective, overproduction of stress hormones creates the human emotions of anger, fear, envy, and hatred; incites feelings of aggression, frustration, anxiety, and insecurity; and causes us to experience pain, suffering, sadness, hopelessness, and depression. Most people spend the majority of their time preoccupied with negative thoughts and feelings. Is it likely that most of the things that are happening in our present circumstances are negative? Obviously not. Negativity runs so high because we are either living in anticipation of stress or re-experiencing it through a memory, so most of our thoughts and feelings are driven by those strong hormones of stress and survival.
When our stress response is triggered, we focus on three things, and they are of highest importance:
The body. (It must be taken care of.)
The environment. (Where can I go to escape this threat?)
Time. (How much of it do I have to use in order to evade this threat?)
Living in survival is the reason why we humans are so dominated by the Big Three. The stress response and the hormones that it triggers force us to focus on (and obsess about) the body, the environment, and time. As a result, we begin to define our “self” within the confines of the physical realm; we become less spiritual, less conscious, less aware, and less mindful.
Put another way, we grow to be “materialists”—that is, habitually consumed by thoughts of things in the external environment. Our identity becomes wrapped up in our bodies. We are absorbed by the outer world because that is what those chemicals force us to pay attention to—things we own, people we know, places we have to go, problems we face, hairstyles we dislike, our body parts, our weight, our looks in comparison to others, how much time we have or don’t have … you get the picture. And we remember who we are based primarily on what we know and the things we do.
Living in survival causes us to focus on the .00001 percent instead of the 99.99999 percent of reality.
Survival: Living as a “Somebody”
Most of us embrace the traditional notion of ourselves as a “somebody.” But who we really are has nothing to do with the Big Three. Who we are is a consciousness connected to a quantum field of intelligence.
When we become this somebody, this materialistic physical self living in survival, we forget who we truly are. We become disconnected and feel separate from the universal field of intelligence. The more we live impacted by stress hormones, the more their chemical rush becomes our identity.
If we fancy ourselves solely physical beings, we limit ourselves to perceiving only with our physical senses. The more we use our senses to define our reality, the more we allow our senses to determine our reality. We slip into that Newtonian mode of thinking, which locks us into trying to predict the future based on some past experience. If you recall, the Newtonian model of reality is all about predicting an outcome. Now we are trying to control our reality instead of surrendering to something greater. All we’re doing is trying to survive.
If the quantum model of reality ultimately defines everything as energy, why do we experience ourselves more as physical beings than as beings of energy? We could say that the survival-oriented emotions (emotions are energy in motion) are lower-frequency or lower-energy emotions. They vibrate at a slower wavelength and therefore ground us into being physical. We become denser, heavier, and more corporeal, because that energy causes us to vibrate more slowly. The body quite literally becomes composed of more mass and less energy … more matter, less mind.1
Figure 5A. The higher-frequency waves at the top are vibrating faster and therefore are closer to the vibratory rate of energy and less to that of matter. Moving down the scale, you can see that the slower the wavelength, the more “material” the energy becomes. Thus, the survival emotions ground us to be more like matter and less like energy. Emotions such as anger, harted, suffering, shame, guilt, judgment, and lust make us feel more physical, because they carry a frequency that is slower and more like that of physical objects. However, the more elevated emotions such as love, joy, and gratitude are higher in frequency. As a result, they are more energy-like and less physical/material
So it might make sense that if we inhibit our more primitive survival emotions and begin to break our addiction to them, our energy will be higher in frequency, and less likely to root us to the body. In a way, we can liberate energy from the body, when the body has “become”
the mind, into the quantum field. As our emotions become more elevated, we will naturally ascend to a higher level of consciousness, closer to Source … and feel more connected to universal intelligence.
Addicted to Being a Somebody
When the stress response is turned on, whether in response to a real or conjured-up threat, a powerful cascade of chemicals rushes into our system and gives us a strong jolt of energy, momentarily “waking up” our bodies and certain parts of the brain to put all of our attention on the Big Three. This is very addictive to us because it’s like drinking a triple espresso—we get turned “on” for a few moments.
In time, we unconsciously become addicted to our problems, our unfavorable circumstances, or our unhealthy relationships. We keep these situations in our lives to feed our addiction to survival-oriented emotions, so that we can remember who we think we are as a somebody. We just love the rush of energy we get from our troubles!
Moreover, we also associate this emotional high with every person, thing, place, and experience in our outer world that is known and familiar. We become addicted to these elements in our environment as well; we embrace our environment as our identity.
If you agree that we can turn on the stress response just by thinking, then it stands to reason that we can get the same rush of addictive stress chemicals as if we were being chased by a predator. As a consequence, we become addicted to our very thoughts; they begin to give us an unconscious adrenaline high, and we find it very hard to think differently. To think greater than how we feel or to think outside of the proverbial box becomes just too uncomfortable. The moment we begin to deny ourselves the substance we are addicted to—in this case, the familiar thoughts and feelings associated with our emotional addiction—there are cravings, withdrawal pains, and a host of inner subvocalizations urging us not to change. And so we remain chained to our familiar reality.
Thus, our thoughts and feelings, which are predominantly self-limiting, hook us back to all the problems, conditions, stressors, and bad choices that produced the fight-or-flight effect in the first place. We keep all these negative stimuli around us so that we can produce the stress response, because that addiction reinforces the idea of who we are, only serving to reaffirm our own personal identity. Simply put, most of us are addicted to the problems and conditions of our lives that produce stress. No matter whether we’re in a bad job or a bad relationship, we hold our troubles close to us because they help reinforce who we are as a somebody; they feed our addictions to low-frequency emotions.
Most harmful of all, we live in fear that if those problems were taken away, we wouldn’t know what to think and how to feel, and we wouldn’t get to experience the rush of energy that causes us to remember who we are. For most of us, God forbid we not be a somebody. How awful would it be to be a “nobody,” to not have an identity?
The Selfish Self
As you can see, what we identify as our self exists within the context of our collective emotional association with our thoughts and feelings, our problems, and all those elements of the Big Three. Is it any wonder that people find it so hard to go within and leave this self-produced reality behind? How would we know who we are if it weren’t for our environment, our bodies, and time? That’s why we are so dependent upon the external world. We limit ourselves to using our senses to define and cultivate emotions, so that we can receive the physiological feedback that reaffirms our own personal addictions. We do all this to feel human.
When our survival response is way out of proportion to what is happening in our outer world, that excess of stress-response hormones causes us to become fixated within the parameters of self. So we become overly selfish. We obsess about our bodies or a particular aspect of our environment, and we live enslaved to time. We’re trapped in this particular reality, and we feel powerless to change, to break the habit of being ourselves.
These excessive survival emotions tip the scales of a healthy ego (the self we consciously refer to when we say “I”). When the ego is in check, its natural job is to make sure we are protected and safe in the outer world. As an example, the ego makes sure we stay far away from a bonfire or a few steps away from the cliff’s edge. When the ego is balanced, its natural instinct is self-preservation. There’s a healthy balance between its needs and those of others, its attention to itself and to others.
When we’re in survival mode in an emergency situation, it makes sense that the self should take priority. But when chronic, long-term stress chemicals push the body and brain out of balance, the ego becomes overfocused on survival and puts the self first, to the exclusion of anything else—we’re selfish all the time. Thus, we become self-indulgent, self-centered, and self-important, full of self-pity and self-loathing. When the ego is under constant stress, it’s got a “me first” priority.
Under those conditions, the ego is primarily concerned with predicting every outcome of every situation, because it is overfocused on the outer world and feels completely separated from the 99.99999 percent of reality. In fact, the more we define reality through our senses, the more this reality becomes our law. And material reality as law is the very opposite of the quantum law. Whatever we place our awareness on is our reality. Consequently, if our attention is focused on the body and our physical realm, and if we become locked into a particular line of linear time, then this becomes our reality.
To forget about the people we know, the problems we have, the things we own, and the places we go; to lose track of time; to go beyond the body and its need to feed its habituations; to give up the high from emotionally familiar experiences that reaffirm the identity; to detach from trying to predict a future condition or review a past memory; to lay down the selfish ego that is only concerned with its needs; to think or dream greater than how we feel, and crave the unknown—this is the beginning of freedom from our present lives.
If Our Thoughts Can Make Us Sick,
Can They Make Us Well?
Let’s go one step further. I explained earlier that we can turn on the stress response by thought alone. I also mentioned the scientific fact that the chemicals associated with stress pull the genetic trigger by creating a very harsh environment outside of our cells and thus creating disease. So by pure reason, our thoughts can actually make us sick. If our thoughts can make us sick, might they also make us well?
Let’s say that a person had some experiences within a short time frame that caused him to feel resentful. As a result of his unconscious reactions to those occurrences, he held on to his bitterness. Chemicals corresponding to this emotion flooded his cells. Over weeks, his emotion turned into a mood, which continued for months and changed into a temperament, which was sustained for years and formed a strong personality trait called resentment. In fact, he memorized this emotion so well that the body knew resentment better than the conscious mind, because he remained in a cycle of thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking, that way for years.
Based on what you learned about emotions as the chemical signature of an experience, wouldn’t you agree that as long as this person clings to resentment, his body will react as though it is still experiencing the long-ago events that first caused him to embrace this emotion? Moreover, if the body’s reaction to those chemicals of resentment disrupted the function of certain genes, and this sustained reaction kept signaling the same genes to respond in the same way, might the body eventually develop a physical condition such as cancer?
If so, is it possible that once he unmemorized the emotion of continuous resentment—by no longer thinking the thoughts that created the feelings of resentment, and vice versa—his body (as the unconscious mind) would be free from that emotional enslavement? In time, would he stop signaling the genes the same way?
And finally, let’s say he began thinking and feeling in new ways, to such a degree that he invented a new ideal of himself related to a new personality. As he moved into a new state of being, might he signal his genes in beneficial ways and condition the body into an elevated emotional
state, ahead of the actual experience of good health? Could he do this to the extent that the body would begin to change by thought alone?
What I just described in simple terms happened to a student in one of my seminars, who overcame cancer.
Bill, 57, was a roofing contractor. A lesion had appeared on his face, and a dermatologist diagnosed malignant melanoma. Although Bill underwent surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, the cancer recurred in his neck, then his side, and finally his calf. Each time, he underwent a similar course of treatment.
Naturally, Bill experienced “Why me?” moments. He understood that his excessive sun exposure was a risk factor, but he knew others who had been similarly exposed and didn’t develop cancer. He fixated on that unfairness.
After treatment for the same cancer on his left flank, Bill pondered whether his own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors had contributed to his condition. In a moment of self-reflection, he realized that for more than 30 years, he had been stuck in resentment, thinking and feeling that he always had to give up what he wanted for the sake of others.
For example, he had wanted to become a professional musician after high school. But when an injury left his father unable to work, Bill had to join his family’s roofing company. He habitually reexperienced his feelings upon being told he had to give up his aspirations, to the extent that his body still lived in that past. This also set up a pattern of dreams deferred. Whenever something didn’t go his way, such as the housing market collapsing just after he expanded the business, he always found someone or something to blame.
Bill had so memorized the emotional response pattern of bitterness that it dominated his personality and became an unconscious program. His state of being had signaled the same genes for so long that they had created the disease that now afflicted him.