Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself

by Joe Dispenza

  Picture yourself standing in a room with arms outstretched, pushing the opposite walls apart. Do you have any idea how much energy you would consume if you were trying to keep those walls from crushing you? Instead of doing that, what if you released those two walls, took a couple of steps forward (after all, that gap is kind of like a door, isn’t it?), and walked out of that room and into a completely new one. What about that other room you left behind? Well, the walls have come together in such a way that you can’t ever get back inside it. That gap has closed, and the separate parts of you have become unified. And what’s going to happen to all that energy you were expending? Physics states that energy can’t be created or destroyed; it can only be transferred or transformed. That’s exactly what’s going to happen to you when you get to the point that no thought, no emotion, no subconscious behavior goes unnoticed.

  You can think of this another way: You’ll be going into the operating system of the subconscious and bringing all that data and those instructions into your conscious awareness, to truly see where those urges and proclivities that have taken control of your life are located. You become conscious of your unconscious self.

  When we break the chains of that bond, we liberate the body. It is no longer the mind, living in the same past day after day. When we liberate the body emotionally, we close the gap. When we close the gap, we release the energy that was once used to produce it. With that energy, we now have the raw material we can use to create a new life.

  Figure 7E. As you unmemorize any emotion that has become part of your identity, you close the gap between how you appear and who you really are. The side effect of this phenomenon is a release of energy in the form of a stored emotion in the body. Once the mind of that emotion is liberated from the body, energy is freed up into the quantum field for you to use as a creator.

  Another side effect of breaking the bonds of your emotional addictions is that this release of energy is like a healthy shot of some wonderful elixir. Not only are you energized, but you feel something you likely haven’t felt in quite a while—joy. When you liberate the body from the chains of an emotional dependency, you will feel uplifted and inspired. Have you ever taken a long car trip? When you get out of your vehicle and finally stretch a bit and breathe fresh air, and the sound of the car’s tires on the pavement or the heater’s fan or the air conditioner’s whir falls silent, that’s a great feeling. Imagine how much better those new sensations would feel if you’d been locked in the trunk for 2,000 miles! For a lot of us, that’s exactly how we’ve been feeling for a significant stretch of time.

  Keep in mind that it’s not enough merely to notice how you’ve been thinking, feeling, and behaving. Meditation requires you to be more active than that. You also have to tell the truth about yourself. You have to come clean and reveal what you’ve been hiding in that shadow part of the gap. You have to drag those things out into the bright light of day. And when you really see what you’ve been doing to yourself, you have to look at that mess and say, This is no longer serving my best interests. This is no longer serving me. This has never been loving to myself. Then you can make a decision to be free.

  From Victimization to Unexpected Abundance:

  How One Woman Closed the Gap

  One person who reaped the rewards of facing her life with the courage of a quantum observer is Pamela, a participant in one of my seminars. Pamela struggled financially because for two years, her unemployed ex-husband hadn’t paid the mandated child support. Frustrated, angry, and feeling victimized, she even reacted negatively to unrelated situations.

  The meditation we did that day was about how the end product of any experience is an emotion. Because so many of our experiences involve family and friends, we share the resultant emotions with them. That’s usually a good thing: bonds related to places we’ve been, things we’ve done—even objects we’ve shared—can strengthen our connection with people. But the flip side is that we also share the emotions associated with negative experiences.

  We bond energetically with one another in a place beyond time and space. Because we are entangled with others (to use quantum terms) and frequently bond through survival-oriented emotions, it is almost impossible for us to change when we are still connected by negative experiences and emotions. Thus, reality stays the same.

  In Pamela’s case, her ex-husband’s anxiety, guilt, and feelings of inferiority about not being able to support his children were interwoven into the fabric of her state of being, along with her own emotions of victimization, resentment, and lack. Whenever opportunity knocked, her victimhood reared its ugly head and produced an undesirable outcome. Her destructive emotions and the energy associated with them had virtually frozen her in a stagnant state of thinking, doing, and being. No matter what she did to try to change this situation, she and her ex-husband were bonded together by their mutual negative experiences, emotions, and energies; and thus none of her efforts ever changed her circumstances with him.

  The workshop helped Pamela realize that she had to break this bond. She had to let go of the emotions that defined her in her present reality. She also learned how a cycle of thinking, feeling, and acting in the same way for years could produce a cascade effect that might trigger genes for disease—and she didn’t want that to happen. Something had to give.

  I like that phrase, because as Pamela told me afterward, during the meditation she recognized the injurious emotions that her victimization had set in motion—impatience with her kids, complaining and blaming, and feelings of desperation and lack. She let go of those emotions associated with past experiences, simultaneously releasing her self-involved state of being, and gave them up to the greater mind.

  In so doing, Pamela released all of that frozen energy into the quantum field, closing the gap between who she thought she was and who she presented to the world. She did this so well—she started to feel so overjoyed and grateful—that she wanted abundance for everyone, not just herself. She moved from selfish emotions to selfless emotions. She got up from that meditation a different person from who she was before it.

  Pamela’s energy release signaled the field to begin organizing outcomes that were just right for the new self she was in the process of becoming. Almost immediately, she received evidence of this in two forms.

  The first involved her Internet business. When she had previously tried a promotion, she fretted about the response to it, constantly checking her website, and saw only mediocre results. She initiated her second promotion the morning of the workshop, but was too busy to think about the results during the day. That evening, she was feeling the positive effects of having let go of the past. She felt even better when she discovered that she had earned nearly $10,000 that day from the promotion she’d run!

  Pamela received the second piece of evidence three days later when her caseworker called to report that her ex had sent a check not just for that month, but for the full $12,000 in back support payments that he owed. She was beyond pleased to have “made” nearly $22,000 after doing that meditation. She did nothing in the physical realm to bring about those results, and couldn’t have predicted how that money would find its way to her, but she was enormously grateful that it had.

  What Pamela’s story illustrates is the power of letting go of negative emotions. When we are mired in our timeworn mind-set and habitual behaviors and perceptions, there’s no way for us to find solutions to problems rooted in the past. And those problems (experiences, really) produce powerful energetic emotions. Once we relinquish those, we experience an enormous release of energy, and reality magically rearranges itself.

  By Moving Out of the Past,

  We Can Set Our Sights on the Future

  Think about how much of your creative energy is tied up in guilt, judgment, fear, or anxiety related to people and experiences from your past. Imagine how much good you could do by converting any destructive energy to productive energy. Contemplate what you could accomplish if you weren’t focused on survival (a selfish
emotion), but instead worked to create out of positive intentions (a selfless emotion).

  Ask yourself: What energy from past experiences (in the form of limited emotions) am I holding on to that reinforces my past identity and emotionally attaches me to my current circumstances? Could I use this same energy and transform it into an elevated state from which to create a new and different outcome?

  Meditating will help you peel away some of the layers, remove some of the masks you’ve worn. Both of those things have blocked the flow of that grand intelligence within you. As a result of shedding those layers, you will become transparent. You are transparent when how you appear is who you are. And when you live your life that way, you will experience a state of gratitude, of elevated joy, which I believe is our natural state of being. As you do this, you begin to move out of the past so that you can set your sights on the future.

  As you remove the veils that block the flow of this intelligence within you, you become more like it. You become more loving, more giving, more conscious, more willful—because that is its mind. The gap closes.

  At that stage, you feel happy and whole. You no longer rely on the external world to define you. The elevated emotions you are feeling are unconditional. Nobody else and no event can make you feel that way. You are happy and feel inspired just because of who you are.

  You no longer live in a state of lack or want. And do you know the funny thing about not wanting or lacking for anything? That’s when you can really begin to manifest things naturally. Most people try to create in a state of lack, unworthiness, separation, or some other limited emotion rather than from a state of gratitude, enthusiasm, or wholeness. That’s when the field responds most favorably to you.

  All this starts with recognizing that the gap exists, and meditating on the negative emotional states that have produced that gap and dominated your personality. Unless you are prepared to look closely at yourself, and assess your propensities with tender honesty (not beating yourself up for your failings), you will forever be mired in some past event and the negative emotions it produced. See it. Understand it. Release it. Create with the energy available to you by taking the mind out of the body and releasing it into the field.

  The Advertising Connection

  Please understand that advertising agencies and their corporate clients fully understand the notion of lack and how it plays a commanding role in our behavior. They want us to believe that they have the answers to take away that emptiness, by our identifying with their product.

  Advertisers even put famous faces in their ads to subconsciously plant the seed that the consumer can surely relate to this person as the “new you.” Feeling bad about yourself? Buy something! Don’t fit in socially? Buy something! Feeling a negative emotion because of some sense of loss, separation, or longing? This microwave/big-screen TV/car/cell phone … whatever … is just the ticket. You’ll feel better about yourself, be accepted by society, and have 40 percent fewer cavities as well! We are all controlled emotionally by this notion of lack.

  How My Transformation Began …

  and Perhaps Some Inspiration for Your Own

  I started this chapter by telling you of that moment when I was sitting on my couch and realized that there was quite a gap between who I really was and the identity I presented to the world. So I’d like to close this chapter by telling you the rest of the story….

  Around the time this happened, I was traveling frequently, lecturing to people who had seen me in the movie What the BLEEP Do We Know!? When I was speaking in front of groups, I felt really alive, and I’m sure I came across as happy. But in that moment, I was feeling numb. That’s when it hit me. I had to show up being how everybody expected me to be, based on how I appeared in the movie. I’d started believing I was somebody else, and I needed the world to remind me of who I thought I was. I was actually living two different lives. No longer did I want to be trapped by that.

  As I sat alone that morning, I felt my heart beating, and I started thinking about who was beating my heart. I realized in one instant that I had distanced myself from this innate intelligence. I closed my eyes and put all of my attention on it. I started to admit who I’d been, what I’d been hiding, and how unhappy I was. I began to surrender some aspects of myself to a greater mind.

  I then reminded myself of who I no longer wanted to be. I decided how I no longer wanted to live based on that same personality. Next, I observed my unconscious behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that reinforced my old self and reviewed them until they became familiar to me.

  Then I thought about who I did want to be as a new personality … until I became it. Suddenly I began to feel different—joyful. This had nothing to do with all of those things outside of me; it was part of an identity that was independent of any of that external stuff. I knew that I was on to something.

  I had an immediate reaction after that first meditation on the couch, and it caught my attention, because I didn’t get up as the same person who had sat down. I stood up and I felt so aware and so alive. It was like I was seeing so many things for the first time. Some mask was removed from me, and I wanted more of that.

  So I retreated from my life for about six months. I kept up my clinical practice to some degree, but I canceled all my lectures. My friends thought I was losing my mind (I was), because What the BLEEP was at its height, and they reminded me about how much money I could have been making. But I said I would never walk onstage again until I was no longer living an ideal for the world, but one for myself. I didn’t want to lecture again until I was the living example of everything that I was talking about. I needed to take time for my meditations and to make true change in my life, and I wanted to have joy from within me and not from outside of me. And I wanted that to come across when I lectured.

  My transformation wasn’t immediate. I meditated every day, looking at my unwanted emotions, and one by one, I began to unmemorize them. I started my meditative processes of unlearning and relearning, and I worked for months to change myself. In the process, I was intentionally dismantling my old identity and breaking the habit of being myself.

  That’s when I began to feel joyful for no reason. I became happier and happier, and it had nothing to do with anything outside me. Today, I make time to meditate every morning because I want more of that state of being.

  Whatever has drawn you to this book, when you make up your mind to change, you have to move to a new consciousness. You must become very clear about what you’re doing, how you’re thinking, how you’re living, how you’re feeling, and how you’re being … to the point that it isn’t you, and you don’t want to be it any longer. And that shift has to reach you on a gut level.

  What you’re about to learn is what I did, the steps I took in making my own personal changes. But take heart—you very well may have done something similar in your life already. There is just a little more knowledge to come, related to the meditative process, in order for you to make this method of change a skill. So let’s get to it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MEDITATION, DEMYSTIFYING THE MYSTICAL, AND WAVES OF YOUR FUTURE

  In the previous chapter, I wrote about the need to bridge the space between who we really are and the image we present to the world. When we’re able to do that, we can take steps toward freeing up the necessary energy to become that ideal self, modeled after some of the great people in the history of the world, such as Gandhi and Joan of Arc.

  And as I’ve said, one of the keys to breaking the habit of being yourself is working toward being more observant—whether that entails being more metacognitive (monitoring your thoughts), embracing stillness, or focusing more attention on your behaviors and how elements in your environment might trigger emotional responses. So the big question here is: How do you do all this?

  In other words, how do you become more observant; break your emotional bonds with the body, the environment, and time; and close the gap?

  The answer is simple: meditation. You may have noticed that
up to this point in the book, I have teased you with brief allusions to meditation as the way to break the habit of being yourself and begin to create a new life as your ideal self. I told you that the information in Parts I and II of this book would prepare you to understand what you will be doing when you apply the meditative steps you will practice in Part III. Now it’s time to explain the inner workings of the process that I refer to as meditation.

  When I use the term meditation, an image of a person seated cross-legged in front of a shrine at home, a bearded and gowned yogi sitting in a secluded cave in the Himalayas, or some other visual may come to mind. That individual may be a representation of what you understand is the way to “go quiet,” empty the mind, focus all of one’s attention on a thought, or engage in any of the other variations of the practice of meditation.

  There are a lot of meditative techniques, but in this book, my wish is to help you produce the most desirable benefit of meditation—being able to access and enter the operating system of the subconscious mind so that you move away from simply being yourself and your thoughts, beliefs, actions, and emotions, to observing those things … and then once you’re there, to subconsciously reprogramming your brain and body to a new mind. When you move from unconsciously producing thoughts, beliefs, actions, and emotions and take control of them through the conscious application of your will, you can unlock the chains of being your old self to become a new self. How you get to the point at which you are able to access that operating system and bring the unconscious into your consciousness is the subject we’ll cover through the rest of this book.