Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself

by Joe Dispenza

  No longer could Bill allow his environment to control him: the people, places, and influences in his life had always dictated how he thought, felt, and behaved. He sensed that to break the bonds with his old self and reinvent a new one, he would have to leave his familiar environment. So for two weeks in Baja, Mexico, he retreated from his familiar life.

  The first five mornings, Bill contemplated how he thought when he felt resentment. He became a quantum observer of his thoughts and feelings; he became conscious of his unconscious mind. Next, he paid attention to his previously unconscious behaviors and actions. He decided to halt any thought, behavior, or emotion that was unloving toward himself.

  After the first week of this vigilance, Bill felt free, because he had liberated his body from its emotional addiction to resentment. By inhibiting the familiar thoughts and feelings that had driven his behaviors, in a sense he impeded the signals of the survival emotions from conditioning his body to the same mind. His body then released energy, which was available to use to design a new destiny for himself.

  For the next week, Bill became so uplifted that he thought about the new self he wanted to be, and how he would respond to the people, places, and influences that previously controlled him. For instance, he decided that whenever his wife and kids expressed a wish or need, he would respond with kindness and generosity instead of making them feel like a burden. In short, he focused on how he wanted to think, act, and feel when presented with situations that had challenged him in the past. He was creating a new personality, a new mind, and a new state of being.

  Bill began to put into practice what he’d placed in his mind while sitting on that Baja beach. Shortly after his return, he noticed that the tumor on his calf had fallen off. In a week or so, when he went to his doctor, he was cancer free. He has remained that way.

  By firing his brain in new ways, Bill changed biologically and chemically from his previous self. As a result, he signaled new genes in new ways; and those cancer cells couldn’t coexist with his new mind, new internal chemistry, and new self. Once trapped by the emotions of the past, he now lives in a new future.

  Creation: Living as a Nobody

  At the end of the previous chapter, I briefly described what it is like to live in creative mode. Those are the moments of being fully engaged and in flow so that the environment, the body, and time all seem immaterial and don’t invade our conscious thoughts.

  Living in creation is living as a nobody. Ever notice that when you’re truly in the midst of creating anything, you forget about yourself? You dissociate from your known world. You are no longer a somebody who associates your identity with certain things you own, particular people you know, certain tasks you do, and different places you lived at specific times. You could say that when you are in a creative state, you forget about the habit of being you. You lay down your selfish ego and become self-less.

  You have moved beyond time and space and become pure, immaterial awareness. Once you’re no longer connected to a body; no longer focused on people, places, or things in your external environment; and beyond linear time, you’re entering the door of the quantum field. You cannot enter as a somebody, you must do so as a nobody. You have to leave the self-centered ego at the door and enter the realm of consciousness as pure consciousness. And as I said in Chapter 1, in order to change your body (to foster better health), something in your external circumstances (a new job or relationship, perhaps), or your timeline (toward a possible future reality), you have to become no body, no thing, no time.

  Thus, here is the grand hint: to change any aspect of your life (body, environment, or time), you must transcend it. You must leave behind the Big Three in order to control the Big Three.

  The Frontal Lobe: Domain of Creation and Change

  When we are in creation, we are activating the brain’s creative center, the frontal lobe (part of the forebrain and comprising the prefrontal cortex). This is the newest, most evolved part of our human nervous system and the most adaptable part of the brain. It tends to be the creative center of who we are, and the brain’s CEO or decision-making apparatus. The frontal lobe is the seat of our attention, focused concentration, awareness, observation, and consciousness. It is where we speculate on possibilities, demonstrate firm intention, make conscious decisions, control impulsive and emotional behaviors, and learn new things.

  For the sake of our understanding, the frontal lobe performs three essential functions. These will all come into play as you learn and practice the how-to meditative steps for breaking the habit of being yourself in Part III of this book.

  1. Metacognition: Becoming Self-Aware to Inhibit

  Unwanted States of Mind and Body

  If you want to create a new self, you first have to stop being the old self. In the process of creation, the first function of the frontal lobe is to become self-aware.

  Because we have metacognitive capabilities—the power to observe our own thoughts and self—we can decide how we no longer want to be … to think, act, and feel. This ability to self-reflect allows us to scrutinize ourselves and then make a plan to modify our behaviors so we can produce more enlightened or desirable outcomes.2

  Your attention is where you place your energy. To use attention to empower your life, you will have to examine what you’ve already created. This is where you begin to “know thyself.” You look at your beliefs about life, yourself, and others. You are what you are, you are where you are, and you are who you are because of what you believe about yourself. Your beliefs are the thoughts you keep consciously or unconsciously accepting as the law in your life. Whether you are aware of them or not, they still affect your reality.

  So if you truly want a new personal reality, start observing all aspects of your present personality. Since they primarily operate below the level of conscious awareness, much like automatic software programs, you’ll have to go within and look at these elements you probably haven’t been aware of before. Given that your personality comprises how you think, act, and feel, you must pay attention to your unconscious thoughts, reflexive behaviors, and automatic emotional reactions—put them under observation to determine if they are true and whether you want to continue to endorse them with your energy.

  To become familiar with your unconscious states of mind and body takes an act of will, intention, and heightened awareness. If you become more aware, you will become more attentive. If you become more attentive, you will be more conscious. If you grow to be more conscious, you will notice more. If you notice more, you have a greater ability to observe self and others, both inner and outer elements of your reality. Ultimately, the more you observe, the more you awaken from the state of the unconscious mind into conscious awareness.

  The purpose of becoming self-aware is so that you no longer allow any thought, action, or emotion you don’t want to experience to pass by your awareness. Thus, in time, your ability to consciously inhibit those states of being will stop the same firing and wiring of the old neural networks that are related to the old personality. And as a result of no longer re-creating the same mind on a daily basis, you prune away the hardware that is related to the old self. In addition, by interrupting the feelings that are associated with those thoughts, you are no longer signaling genes in the same way. You are stopping the body from reaffirming itself as the same mind. This process is whereby you quite simply begin to “lose your mind.”

  So as you develop the skill of becoming familiar with all aspects of your old self, you will ultimately become more conscious. Your goal here is to unlearn who you used to be, so that you can free up energy to create a new life, a new personality. You can’t create a new personal reality as the same personality. You have to become someone else. Metacognition is your first task in moving from your past to creating a new future.

  2. Creating a New Mind to Think about

  New Ways of Being

  The second function of the frontal lobe is to create a new mind—to break out of the neural networks produced by the
ways that your brain has been firing for years on end, and influence it to rewire in new ways.

  When we set aside time and private space to think about a new way of being, that is when the frontal lobe engages in creation. We can imagine fresh possibilities and ask ourselves important questions about what we really want, how and who we want to be, and what we want to change about ourselves and our circumstances.

  Because the frontal lobe has connections to all other parts of the brain, it is able to scan across all the neural circuits to seamlessly piece together stored bits of information in the form of networks of knowledge and experience. Then it picks and chooses among those neural circuits, combining them in a variety of ways to create a new mind. In doing that, it creates a model or internal representation that we see as a picture of our intended result. It makes sense, then, that the more knowledge we have, the greater the variety of neural networks we’ve wired, and the more capable we are of dreaming of more complex and detailed models.

  To initiate this step of creation, it is always good to move into a state of wonder, contemplation, possibility, reflection, or speculation by asking yourself some important questions. Open-ended inquiries are the most provocative approach to producing a fluent stream of consciousness:

  What would it be like to … ?

  What is a better way to be … ?

  What if I was this person, living in this reality?

  Who in history do I admire, and what were his/her admirable traits?

  The answers that come will naturally form a new mind, because as you sincerely respond to them, your brain will begin to work in new ways. By beginning to mentally rehearse new ways of being, you start rewiring yourself neurologically to a new mind—and the more you can “re-mind” yourself, the more you’ll change your brain and your life.

  Whether you want to be wealthy or a better parent—or a great wizard, for that matter—it might not be a bad idea to fill your brain with knowledge on your chosen subject, so you have more building blocks to make a new model of the reality you want to embrace. Every time you acquire information, you’re adding new synaptic connections that will serve as the raw materials to break the pattern of your brain firing the same way. The more you learn, the more ammo you have to unseat the old personality.

  Figure 5B. When the frontal lobe is working in creative mode, it looks out over the landscape of the entire brain and gathers all of the brain’s information to create a new mind. If compassion is the new state of being that you want to create, then once you ask yourself what it would be like to be compassionate, the frontal lobe would naturally combine different neural networks together in new ways to create a new model or vision. It might take stored information from books you read, DVDs you saw, personal experiences, and so forth to make the brain work in new ways. Once the new mind is in place, you see a picture, hologram, or vision of what compassion means to you.

  3. Making Thought More Real Than Anything Else

  During the creative process, the frontal lobe’s third vital role is to make thought more real than anything else. (Stay tuned for the how-to in Part III.)

  When we’re in a creative state, the frontal lobe becomes highly activated and lowers the volume on the circuits in the rest of the brain so that little else is being processed but a single-minded thought.3 Since the frontal lobe is the executive that mediates the rest of the brain, it can monitor all of the “geography.” So it lowers the volume on the sensory centers (responsible for “feeling” the body), motor centers (responsible for moving the body), association centers (where our identity exists), and the circuits that process time … in order to quiet them all down. With very little neural activity, we could say that there is no mind to process sensory input (remember that mind is the brain in action), no mind to activate movement within the environment, and no mind to associate activities with time; then we have no body, we have become “no thing,” we are no time. We are, in that moment, pure consciousness. With the noise shut off in those areas of the brain, the state of creativity is one in which there is no ego or self as we have known it.

  When you are in creation mode, the frontal lobe is in control. It becomes so engaged that your thoughts become your reality and your experience. Whatever you’re thinking about in those moments is all there is for the frontal lobe to process. As it “lowers the volume” from other areas of the brain, it shuts out distractions. The inner world of thought becomes as real as the outer world of reality. Your thoughts are captured neurologically and branded into your brain’s architecture as an experience.

  If you effectively execute the creative process, this experience produces an emotion, as you know, and you begin to feel like that event is actually happening to you in the present. You are one with the thoughts and feelings associated with your desired reality. You are now in a new state of being. You could say that in that moment, you are now rewriting the subconscious programs by reconditioning the body to a new mind.

  Figure 5C. When the thoght that you are attending to becomes the experience, the frontal lobe quiets down the rest of the brain so that nothing else is being processed but that single-minded thought. You become still, you no longer feel your body, you no longer perceive time and space, and you forget about yourself.

  Lose Your Mind, Liberate Your Energy

  In the act of creation, when we become that nobody or no thing in no time, we no longer create our customary chemical signature, because we are not the same identity; we don’t think and feel in the same way. Those neural networks our survival thinking had wired are turned off, and the personality that was addicted to continually signaling the body to produce stress hormones is … gone.

  In short, the emotional self that lived in survival mode is no longer functioning. The moment that happens, our former identity, the “state of being” bound by survival-based thinking and feeling, is no more. Since we are no longer “being” the same being, emotional energy that had been bound to the body is now free to move.

  So where does the energy go that once fed that emotional self? It has to go somewhere, so it moves to a new place. That energy in the form of emotion moves up the body from the hormonal centers to the heart area (on its way to the brain) … and all of a sudden we feel great, joyful, expanded. We fall in love with our creation. That’s when we experience our natural state of being. Once we stop energizing that emotional self powered by the stress response, we have moved from being selfish to selfless.4

  With that old energy transmuted into a higher-frequency emotion, the body is liberated from its emotional bondage. We are lifted above the horizon to behold a whole new landscape. No longer perceiving reality through the lenses of those past survival emotions, we see new possibilities. We are now quantum observers of a new destiny. And that release heals the body and frees the mind.

  Let’s revisit the chart of energy and frequencies from the survival emotions to the elevated emotions (see Figure 5A). When anger or shame or lust are released from the body, they will be transmuted into joy, love, or gratitude. On this journey to broadcasting higher energy, the body (which we conditioned to be the mind) becomes less “of the mind” and becomes more coherent energy; the matter that makes up the body expresses a higher vibratory rate, and we feel more connected to something greater. In short, we are demonstrating more of our divine nature.

  When you’re living in survival, you’re trying to control or force an outcome; that’s what the ego does. When you’re living in the elevated emotion of creation, you feel so lifted that you would never try to analyze how or when a chosen destiny will arrive. You trust that it will happen because you have already experienced it in mind and body—in thought and feeling. You know that it will, because you feel connected to something greater. You are in a state of gratitude because you feel like it’s already happened.

  You may not know all the specifics of your desired outcome—when it will take place, where, and under what circumstances—but you trust in a future that you can’t see or otherwise perceive
with your senses. To you it has already occurred in no space, no time, no place, from which all things material spring forth. You are in a state of knowingness; you can relax into the present and no longer live in survival.

  To anticipate or analyze when, where, or how the event will occur would only cause you to return to your old identity. You are in such joy that it’s impossible to try to figure it out; that’s only what human beings do when they are living in limited states of survival.

  As you linger in this creative state where you are no longer your identity, the nerve cells that once fired together to form that old self are no longer wiring together. That’s when the old personality is being biologically dismantled. Those feelings connected to that identity, which conditioned the body to the same mind, are no longer signaling the same genes in the same ways. And the more you overcome your ego, the more the physical evidence of the old personality is changed. The old you is gone.

  Figure 5D. Survival mode versus creation mode.

  By completing Part I of this book, you have intentionally acquired a knowledge base that will help you create your new self. Now let’s build on that base.

  We’ve covered a lot of possibilities: the concept that your subjective mind can affect your objective world; your potential to change your brain and body by becoming greater than your environment, your body, and time; and the prospect that you can move out of the reactive, stressful mode of living in survival, as though only the outer world is real, and enter the inner world of the creator. It is my hope that you can now view these possibilities as possible realities.

  If you can, then I invite you to continue on to Part II, where you will gain specific information about the role of your brain and the meditative process that will prepare you to create real and lasting change in your life.