Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself

by Joe Dispenza

  To fully break the habit of being yourself, say good-bye to cause and effect and embrace the quantum model of reality. Choose a potential reality that you want, live it in your thoughts and feelings, and give thanks ahead of the actual event. Can you accept the notion that once you change your internal state, you don’t need the external world to provide you with a reason to feel joy, gratitude, appreciation, or any other elevated emotion?

  When your body experiences that the event is occurring in that moment and it feels real to you, based solely on what you’re focused on mentally and are feeling emotionally, then you are experiencing the future now. The moment you are in that state of being, in that now moment and present in that experience, that’s when you are connected to all possible realities that exist in the quantum field. Remember that if you are in the past or the future, based on your familiar emotions or anticipation of some effect, you don’t have access to all possibilities the quantum field holds. The only way to access the quantum field is by being in the now.

  Keep in mind that this cannot be just an intellectual process. Thoughts and feelings must be coherent. In other words, this meditation requires that you drop down about ten inches out of your head and move into your heart. Open your heart and think about how it would feel if you embodied a combination of all the traits that you admire and that make up your ideal self.

  You may object that you can’t know how it would feel, because you’ve never experienced what it’s like to have those traits and to be that ideal self. My response is that your body can experience this before you have any physical evidence, ahead of your senses: If a future desire that you’ve never experienced actually does manifest in your life, you’d have to agree that you would experience an elevated emotion such as joy, excitement, or gratitude … so those emotions are what you can naturally focus on. Instead of being enslaved to emotions that are only the residue of the past, you are now using elevated emotions to create the future.

  The elevated emotions of gratitude, love, and so forth all have a higher frequency that will help you move into a state of being where you can feel as though the desired events have actually occurred. If you are in a state of greatness, then the signal you send into the quantum field is that the events have already come to pass. Giving thanks allows you to emotionally condition your body to believe that what is producing your gratitude has already happened. By activating and coordinating your three brains, meditation allows you to move from thinking to being—and once you are in a new state of being, you are more prone to act and think equal to who you are being.

  Perhaps you’ve wondered why it may be hard to move into a state of gratitude or to give thanks ahead of the actual experience. Is it possible that you’ve been living by a memorized emotion that has become so much a part of your identity, on a subconscious level, that now you cannot feel any other way than you’re accustomed to? If so, maybe your identity has become a matter of how you appear to the world on the outside, to distract you and change how you feel on the inside.

  In the next chapter, we’re going to examine how to close that gap and bring about true liberation. When you can readily feel gratitude or joy, or fall in love with the future—without needing any person, thing, or experience to cause you to feel that way—then these elevated emotions will be available to fuel your creations.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE GAP

  I was sitting on my couch one day, thinking about what it means to be happy. As I contemplated my utter lack of joy, I thought about how most people who were important to me would have given me a pep talk right on the spot. I imagined it verbatim: You’re so incredibly lucky. You have a wonderful family, which includes beautiful kids. You are a successful chiropractor. You lecture to thousands of people, you travel the world going to unusual places, you were featured in What the BLEEP Do We Know!?, and many people loved your message. You even wrote a book, and it is doing well. They would have hit all of the right emotional and logical notes. But to me, something wasn’t right.

  I was at a point in my life where I was traveling from city to city every weekend doing lectures; sometimes I was in two cities within three days. It occurred to me that I was so busy that I had no time to actually practice what I was teaching.

  This was an unnerving moment, because I began to see that all of my happiness was created from outside of me, and that the joy I experienced when I was traveling and lecturing had nothing to do with real joy. It appeared to me that I needed everyone, everything, and everyplace outside of me in order to feel good. This image that I was projecting to the world was dependent on external factors. And when I was not out lecturing or doing interviews or treating patients, and I was home, I felt empty.

  Don’t get me wrong; in some ways those things outside of me were great. If you had asked anyone who saw me lecturing, deeply engrossed in working on a presentation during a flight, or answering dozens of e-mails while in an airport or hotel lounge, such an observer would have said that I appeared to be pretty happy.

  The sad truth is that if you had asked me at one of those moments, I would have probably responded in much the same way: Yes, things are great. I’m doing well. I’m a lucky guy.

  But if you had caught me in a quiet moment, when all those other stimuli weren’t bombarding me, I would have responded in a completely different manner: Something’s not right. I feel unsettled. Everything feels like the same old, same old. Something is missing.

  On the day I recognized the core reason for my unhappiness, I also realized that I needed the external world to remember who I was. My identity had become the people I talked to, the cities I visited, the things I did while I was traveling, and the experiences I needed in order to reaffirm myself as this person called Joe Dispenza. And when I wasn’t around anyone who could help me recall this personality that the world might know as me, I wasn’t sure who I was anymore. In fact, I saw that all of my perceived happiness was really just a reaction to stimuli in the external world that made me feel certain ways. I then understood that I was totally addicted to my environment, and I was dependent on external cues to reinforce my emotional addiction. What a moment for me. I had heard a million times that happiness comes from within, but it never hit me like this before.

  As I sat on the couch in my house that day, I looked out the window and an image came to me. I envisioned my two hands, one above the other, separated by a gap.

  HOW WE APPEAR

  • The identity I project to the outer environment

  • Who I want you to think I am

  • The facade

  • Ideal for the world

  WHO WE REALLY ARE

  • How I feel

  • Who I really am

  • How I am an the inside

  • Ideal for self

  Figure 7A. The gap between “who we really are” and “how we appear.”

  The top hand represented how I appeared on the outside, and the bottom was how I knew myself to be on the inside. In my self-reflection, it dawned on me that we human beings live in a duality, as two separate entities—“how we appear” and “who we really are.”

  How we appear is the image or the façade that we project to the world. That self is everything we do in order to show up looking a certain way and to present to others a consistent exterior reality. This first aspect of the self is a veneer of how we want everyone to see us.

  How we really are, represented by that bottom hand, is how we feel, especially when we are not distracted by the external environment. It is our familiar emotions when we are not preoccupied by “life.” It’s what we hide about ourselves.

  When we memorize addictive emotional states such as guilt, shame, anger, fear, anxiety, judgment, depression, self-importance, or hatred, we develop a gap between the way we appear and the way we really are. The former is how we want other people to see us. The latter is our state of being when we are not interacting with all of the different experiences, diverse things, and assorted people at various times
and places in our lives. If we sit long enough without doing anything, we begin to feel something. That something is who we really are.

  THE LAYERS of EMOTION

  WE MEMORIZE that

  CREATE the GAP

  Unworthiness

  Anger

  Fear

  Shame

  Self-doubt

  Guilt

  PAST EXPERIENCES WITH REFRACTORY PERIOD

  Figure 7B. The size of the gap varies from person to person. “Who we really are” and “how we appear” are separated by the feelings we memorize throughout different points in our lives (based on past experiences). The bigger the gap, the greater the addiction to the emotions we memorize.

  Layer by layer, we wear various emotions, which form our identity. In order to remember who we think we are, we have to re-create the same experiences to reaffirm our personality and the corresponding emotions. As an identity, we become attached to our external world by identifying with everyone and everything, in order to remind us of how we want to project ourselves to the world.

  How we appear becomes the façade of the personality, which relies on the external world to remember who it is as a “somebody.” Its identity is completely attached to the environment. The personality does everything it can to hide how it really feels or to make that feeling of emptiness go away: I own these cars, I know these people, I’ve been to these places, I can do these things, I’ve had these experiences, I work for this company, I am successful. … It is who we think we are in relation to everything around us.

  But that is different from who we are—how we feel—without the stimulation of our outer reality: Feelings of shame and anger about a failed marriage. Fear of death and uncertainty about the afterlife, related to the loss of a loved one or even a pet. A sense of inadequacy due to a parent’s insistence on perfectionism and achievement at all costs. A sense of stifled entitlement from having grown up in circumstances barely above poverty. A preoccupation with thoughts of not having the right body type in order to look a certain way to the world. These kinds of feelings are what we want to conceal.

  This is who we truly are, the real self hiding behind the image we are projecting. We can’t face exposing that self to the world, so we pretend to be someone else. We create a set of memorized automatic programs that work to cover the vulnerable parts of us. Essentially, we lie about who we are because we know that societal mores do not have room for that person. That is the “nobody.” That is the person whom we doubt others will like and accept.

  Particularly when we are younger and are forming our identity, we are more likely to engage in this kind of masquerade. We see young people trying on identities like they try on clothes. And in truth, what teens wear is often a reflection of who they want to be, more than it reflects who they really are. Ask any mental-health professional who specializes in working with young people, and she will tell you that one word defines what it is like to be an adolescent: insecurity. As a result, teens and preteens seek comfort in conformity and in numbers.

  Rather than let the world know what you are really like, adopt and adapt (because everyone knows what happens to those who are perceived to be different). The world is complex and scary, but make it less frightening and much simpler by lumping everyone into groups. Pick your group. Pick your poison.

  Eventually, that identity fits. You grow into it. Or at least that’s what you tell yourself. Along with the insecurity comes a great deal of self-consciousness. Questions abound: Is this who I really am? Is this who I really want to be? But it’s so much easier to ignore those questions than to answer them.

  Life Experiences Define Our Identity …

  Staying Busy Keeps Unwanted Emotions at Bay

  All of us have been emotionally scarred from traumatic or difficult experiences as young people. Early in life, we experienced defining events, the emotions of which contributed, layer by layer, to who we became. Let’s face it: we all have been branded by emotionally charged events. As we mentally reviewed the experience repeatedly, the body began to relive the event over and over, just by thought alone. We kept the refractory period of emotion running for so long that we journeyed from a mere emotional reaction to a mood, to a temperament, and ultimately, to a personality trait.

  While we are young, we keep busy doing things that, for a while, stave off those old, deep emotions, sweeping them under the rug. It is intoxicating to make new friends, travel to unknown places, work hard and achieve a promotion, learn a new skill, or take up a new sport. We seldom suspect that many of these actions are motivated by feelings left over from certain earlier events in life.

  Then we really get busy. We go to school, then possibly college; we buy a car; we move to a new town, state, or country; we begin a career; we meet new people; we get married; we buy a house; we have kids; we adopt pets; we may get divorced; we work out; we start a new relationship; we practice a skill or a hobby…. We use everything that we know in the external world to define our identity, and to distract us from how we really feel inside. And since all of these unique experiences produce myriad emotions, we notice that those emotions seem to take away any feelings that we are hiding. And it works for a while.

  Don’t get me wrong. We all reach greater heights from applying ourselves throughout different periods in our growing years. In order to accomplish many things in our lifetimes, we have to push ourselves outside our comfort zones and go beyond familiar feelings that once defined us. I am certainly aware of this dynamic in life. But when we never overcome our limitations and continue carrying the baggage from our past, it will always catch up with us. And this usually happens starting around our mid-30s (this can vary greatly from one person to another).

  Midlife: A Series of Strategies

  to Make Buried Feelings Stay Buried

  By our mid-30s or 40s, when the personality is complete, we have experienced much of what life has to offer. And as a result, we can pretty much anticipate the outcome of most experiences; we already know how they’re going to feel before we engage in them. Because we’ve had several good and bad relationships, we’ve competed in business or settled into our career, we’ve suffered loss and encountered success, or we know what we like and dislike, we know the nuances of life. Since we can predict the likely emotions ahead of an actual experience, we determine whether we want to experience that “known” event before it actually occurs. Of course, all of this is happening behind the scenes of our awareness.

  Here is where it gets sticky. Because we can predict the feelings that most events will bring, we already know what will make our feelings about who we really are go away. However, when we reach midlife, nothing can completely take away that feeling of emptiness.

  You wake up every morning and you feel like the same person. Your environment, which you relied on so heavily to remove your pain or guilt or suffering, is no longer taking away those feelings. How could it? You already know that when the emotions derived from the external world wear off, you will return to being the same leopard who hasn’t changed its spots.

  This is the midlife crisis that most people know about. Some try really hard to make buried feelings stay buried by diving further into their external world. They buy the new sports car (thing); others lease the boat (another thing). Some go on a long vacation (place). Yet others join the new social club to meet new contacts or make new friends (people). Some get plastic surgery (body). Many completely redecorate or remodel their homes (acquire things and experience a new environment).

  All of these are futile efforts to do or try something new so that they can feel better or different. But emotionally, when the novelty wears off, they are still stuck with the same identity. They return to who they really are (that is, the bottom hand). They are drawn back to the same reality they have been living for years, just to keep the feeling of who they think they are as an identity. The truth is, the more they do—the more they buy and then consume—the more noticeable the feeling of who they “really are” becomes
.

  When we’re trying to escape this emptiness, or when we’re running from any emotion whatsoever that is painful, it is because to look at it is too uncomfortable. So when the feeling starts to get a bit out of control, most people turn on the TV, surf the Internet, or call or text someone. In a matter of moments we can alter our emotions so many times … we can view a sitcom or a YouTube video and laugh hysterically, then watch a football game and feel competitive, then watch the news and be angered or fearful. All of these outer stimuli can easily distract us from those unwanted feelings inside.

  Technology is a great distraction and a powerful addiction. Think about it: You can immediately change your internal chemistry and make a feeling go away by changing something outside of you. And whatever it was outside of you that made you feel better inside of you, you will rely on that thing in order to sidetrack yourself over and over again. But this strategy doesn’t have to involve technology; anything momentarily thrilling will do the trick.

  When we keep that diversion up, guess what eventually happens? We grow more dependent on something outside of us to change us internally. Some people unconsciously delve deeper and deeper into this bottomless pit, using different aspects of their world to keep themselves preoccupied—in an effort to re-create the original feeling from the very first experience that helped them escape. They become overstimulated so that they can feel different from how they really are. But sooner or later, everyone realizes that they need more and more of the same to make them feel better. This becomes an all-consuming search for pleasure and ways to avoid pain at all costs—a hedonistic life unconsciously driven by some feeling that won’t seem to go away.