Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself

by Joe Dispenza

  One Definition of Meditation:

  Becoming Familiar with Self

  In the Tibetan language, to meditate means “to become familiar with.” Accordingly, I use the term meditation as a synonym for self-observation as well as self-development. After all, to become familiar with anything, we have to spend some time observing it. Again, the key moment in making any change is going from being it to observing it.

  Another way to think of this transition is when you go from being a doer to a doer/watcher. An easy analogy I can use is that when athletes or performers—golfers, skiers, swimmers, dancers, singers, or actors—want to change something about their technique, most coaches have them watch videotape of themselves. How can you change from an old mode of operation to a new one unless you can see what old and new look like?

  It’s the same with your old and your new self. How can you stop doing things one way without knowing what that way looks like? I frequently use the term unlearning to describe this phase of changing.

  This process of becoming familiar with the self works both ways—you need to “see” the old and the new self. You have to observe yourself so precisely and vigilantly, as I’ve described, that you won’t allow any unconscious thought, emotion, or behavior to go unnoticed. Since you have the equipment to do this because of the size of your frontal lobe, you can look at yourself and decide what you want to change in order to do a better job in life.

  Decide to Stop Being the Old You

  When you can become conscious of those unconscious aspects of the old, habituated self, rooted in the operating system of the subconscious, you are beginning the process of changing anything about yourself.

  What steps do you normally take when you get serious about doing something differently? You separate yourself from your external world long enough to think about what to do and not do. You start becoming aware of many aspects of the old self, and you begin to plan a course of action related to a new self.

  For example, if you want to become happy, the first step is to stop being unhappy—that is, stop thinking the thoughts that make you unhappy; and stop feeling the emotions of pain, sorrow, and bitterness. If you desire to become wealthy, you’ll probably decide to stop doing the things that make you poor. If you want to be healthy, you’ll have to stop living an unhealthy lifestyle. These examples are to show you that first, you have to make the decision to stop being the old you, to such a degree that you make room for a new personality—thinking, acting, and doing.

  Therefore, if you eliminated stimuli from your external world by closing your eyes and becoming quiet (decreasing your sensory input), putting your body in a state of stillness, and no longer focusing on linear time, you could become aware solely of how you are thinking and feeling. And if you began to pay attention to your unconscious states of mind and body and became “familiar with” your automatic, unconscious programs until they became conscious, would you be meditating?

  The answer is yes. To “know thyself” is to meditate.

  If you are no longer being that old personality but, instead, are noticing different aspects of it, wouldn’t you agree that you are the consciousness observing the programs of that past identity? In other words, if you consciously observe the old self, you are no longer being it. As you go from being unaware to being aware, you are beginning to objectify your subjective mind. That is, by your paying attention to the old habit of being you, your conscious participation begins to separate you from those unconscious programs and give you more control over them.

  By the way, if you are successful in consciously restraining those routine states of mind and body, then “nerve cells that no longer fire together, no longer wire together.” As you prune away the neurological hardware of the old self, you also no longer signal the same genes in identical ways. You are breaking the habit of being you.

  Contemplate a New, Greater Expression of Self

  Now let’s take it one step further. Once you have become familiar with the old self to the extent that no thought, no behavior, and no feeling will cause you to fall unconsciously into previous patterns, you might agree that it would be a good idea to begin to become familiar with a new self. Accordingly, you may ask yourself, What is a greater expression of myself that I would like to be?

  If you turn on your frontal lobe and contemplate those aspects of self, you will begin to make your brain work differently than your past self. As your frontal lobe (the CEO) entertains that new question, it looks out over the landscape of the rest of the brain and seamlessly combines all of your stored knowledge and experiences into a new model of thought. It helps create an internal representation for you to begin to focus on.

  This contemplation process builds new neurological networks. As you ponder the fundamental question above, your neurons will begin to fire and wire in new sequences, patterns, and combinations because you are thinking differently. And whenever you make your brain work differently, you’re changing your mind. As you plan your actions, speculate on novel possibilities, conjure up innovative ways of being, and dream of new states of mind and body, there will be a moment that the frontal lobe will turn on and lower the volume to the Big Three. When this happens, the thought(s) you are thinking will become an internal experience; you will install new software and hardware programs into your nervous system, and it will appear that the experience of being your new self has already been realized in your brain. And if you repeat this process every day, your ideal will become a familiar state of mind.

  One more point here. If you attend so well to the thought you are focusing on that it literally becomes an experience, then the end product of that is an emotion. Once that emotion is created, you begin to feel like your new ideal, and that new feeling will start to become familiar. Remember that when your body begins to respond as if the experience is already a present reality, you will signal your genes in new ways … and your body will commence to change now, ahead of the physical event in your life. Now you are ahead of time, and most important, you move into a state of being—mind and body working together. And if you repeat this process consistently, this state of being will become familiar to you as well.

  If you can maintain that modified state of mind and body, independent of the external environment and the body’s emotional needs and greater than time, something should show up differently in your world. That’s the quantum law.

  Let’s summarize here. According to our working model of meditation, all you have to do is remind yourself who you no longer want to “be” until this becomes so familiar that you know your old self—the thoughts, behaviors, and emotions connected to the old you that you want to change—to the extent that you “unfire” and “unwire” the old mind away and no longer signal the same genes in the same ways. Then, you repeatedly contemplate who you do want to “be.” As a result, you will fire and wire new levels of mind, to which you will emotionally condition the body until they become familiar and second nature to you. That’s change.

  A Second Definition of Meditation:

  Cultivating Self

  Besides its meaning in Tibetan, to meditate in Sanskrit means “to cultivate self.” I especially like this definition because of the metaphorical possibilities it offers—for example, gardening or agriculture. When you cultivate the soil, you take the packed-down earth that has been lying fallow for a while and you churn it up with a spade or other implement. You expose “new” dirt and nutrients, making it easier for seeds to germinate and for tender shoots to take root. Cultivation may also require you to remove plants from the previous season, attend to weeds that went unnoticed, and remove any rocks that rose to the surface by natural sifting.

  Thus, last season’s plants might represent your past creations derived from the thoughts, actions, and emotions that define the old, familiar you. Weeds could signify long-standing attitudes, beliefs, or perceptions about yourself that are subconsciously undermining your efforts, which you hadn’t noticed because you were too distracted by other things.
And the rocks can symbolize your many layers of personal blocks and limitations (which naturally rise to the surface over time and block your growth). All these need tending to so you can make room to plant a new garden in your mind. Otherwise, if you planted a new garden or crop without proper preparation, it would yield little fruit.

  My hope is that you understand by now that it is impossible to create any new future when you are rooted in your past. You have to clear away the old vestiges of the garden (of the mind) before you can cultivate a new self by planting the seeds of new thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that create a new life.

  The other key thing is to ensure that this doesn’t happen haphazardly: we’re not talking about plants in the wild, which scatter seeds roughshod over the ground, with some tiny percentage of them eventually coming to fruition. Instead, to cultivate requires making conscious decisions—when to till the soil, when to plant, what to plant, how each of the items planted will work in harmony with the others, how much water and fertilizer to mix in, and so forth. Planning and preparation are essential to the success of the endeavor. This requires our daily “mindful attention.”

  Similarly, when we talk about someone cultivating an interest in a particular subject, we mean that he has thoughtfully researched that area of interest. Also, a cultivated person is someone who has carefully chosen what to expose herself to and who has amassed a breadth of knowledge and experience. Again, none of this is done on a whim, and little is left to chance.

  When you cultivate anything, you are seeking to be in control. And that’s what is required when you change any part of your self. Instead of allowing things to develop “naturally,” you intervene and consciously take steps to reduce the likelihood of failure. The purpose behind all of this effort is to reap a harvest. When you cultivate a new personality in meditation, the abundant yield you seek to create is a new reality.

  Creating a new mind is like cultivating a garden. The manifestations you produce from the garden of your mind will be just like crops from the earth’s soil. Tend well.

  The Meditative Process for Change:

  Move from the Unconscious to the Conscious

  To sum up the meditative process, you have to break the habit of being yourself and reinvent a new self; lose your mind and create a new one; prune synaptic connections and nurture new ones; unmemorize past emotions and recondition the body to a new mind and emotions; and let go of the past and create a new future.

  Figure 8A. The biological model of change involves transforming the familiar past to a new future.

  Let’s look a bit more closely at a few elements of this process.

  Obviously, to avoid letting any thought or feeling you don’t want to experience get past you unchecked, you have to develop powerful skills of observation and focus. We humans have a limited ability to focus and to absorb input—but we can be much better at it than we normally are in our more unconscious state.

  To break the habit of being yourself, you would be wise to select one trait, propensity, or characteristic and focus your attention on that single aspect of your old self that you want to change. For example, you might begin by asking yourself: When I feel angry, what are my thought patterns? What do I say to others and myself? How do I act? What other emotions spring forth from my being angry? What does anger feel like in my body? How can I become conscious of what triggers my anger, and how can I change my reaction?

  The process of change requires unlearning first, then learning. The latter is a function of firing and wiring in the brain; the former means that circuits are trimmed. When you stop thinking the same way, when you inhibit your habituations and interrupt those emotional addictions, the old self begins to be neurologically pruned away.

  And if every connection between nerve cells constitutes a memory, then as those circuits are dismantled, memories of your old self will go with them. When you think about your former life and who you used to be, it will be like another lifetime. Where are those memories now stored? They will be given to the soul as wisdom.

  When those thoughts and feelings that used to signal the body are stopped by your conscious efforts, the liberated energy from those limited emotions is released into the field. You now have energy with which to design and create a new destiny.

  When we use meditation as a means to change, when we become conscious and aware, familiar with and willing to do what is necessary to eradicate an undesirable trait and cultivate a desired one, we’re doing what mystics have been doing for centuries.

  Although I take a clearly biological approach to change, so did the mystics. They just used different terminology to describe the process. The end result is the same—breaking the addiction to the body, the environment, and time. Only when we make that separation can we change. Only when we think greater than the Big Three can we truly live independent of them, and reestablish dominion over how we think and feel on a daily basis.

  For too long, we’ve been running unconscious programs that have been controlling us. Meditation allows us to reassert control.

  Awareness comes first—recognizing when and how those programmed responses take over is essential. When you move from the unconscious to the conscious, you begin to close the gap between how you appear and who you are.

  The Waves of Your Future

  Since knowledge is, as we’ve seen, the precursor to experience, having a basic understanding of what happens in the brain during meditation will serve you well when you begin to learn and experience the meditative process coming up shortly in Part III.

  You probably know that the brain is electrochemical in nature. When nerve cells fire, they exchange charged elements that then produce electromagnetic fields. Because the brain’s diverse electrical activity can be measured, these effects can provide important information about what we’re thinking, feeling, learning, dreaming, and creating and how we are processing information. The most common technology scientists use to record the brain’s changing electrical activity is an electroencephalograph (EEG).

  Research has discovered a wide scope of brain-wave frequencies in humans, ranging from the very low levels of activity found in deep sleep (Delta waves); to a twilight state between deep sleep and wakefulness (Theta); to the creative, imaginative state (Alpha); to higher frequencies seen during conscious thought (Beta waves); to the highest frequencies recorded (Gamma waves), seen in elevated states of consciousness.1

  To help you better understand your journey into meditation, I’m going to give you an overview of how each of these states relates to you. Once you know what all of these domains are, you will be more adept at knowing when you are in the brain-wave state where the ego tries in vain to change the ego (God knows, I’ve been there), and when you are in the brain-wave state that is the fertile ground of true change.

  As children grow, the frequencies that predominate in their brains progress from Delta to Theta to Alpha and then to Beta. Our job in meditation is to become like a child, moving from Beta to Alpha to Theta to (for the adept or mystic) Delta. So understanding the progression of brain-wave changes during human development can help demystify the process of how we experience meditation.

  Brain-Wave Development in Children:

  From Subconscious to Conscious Mind

  Delta. Between birth and two years old, the human brain functions primarily in the lowest brain-wave levels, from 0.5 to 4 cycles per second. This range of electromagnetic activity is known as Delta waves. Adults in deep sleep are in Delta; this explains why a newborn usually can’t remain awake for more than a few minutes at a time (and why even with their eyes open, young babies can be asleep). When one-year-olds are awake, they’re still primarily in Delta, because they function principally from their subconscious. Information from the outside world enters their brains with little editing, critical thinking, or judgment taking place. The thinking brain—the neocortex, or conscious mind—is operating at very low levels at this point.

  Theta. From about ages two to five or six, a child begi
ns to demonstrate slightly higher EEG patterns. These Theta-wave frequencies measure 4 to 8 cycles per second. Children functioning in Theta tend to be trancelike and primarily connected to their internal world. They live in the abstract and in the realm of imagination, and exhibit few of the nuances of critical, rational thinking. Thus, young children are likely to accept what you tell them. (P.S. Santa is real.) At this stage, phrases such as the following have a huge impact: Big boys don’t cry. Girls should be seen and not heard. Your sister is smarter than you. If you get cold, you’ll catch a cold. These types of statements go straight to the subconscious mind, because these slow brain-wave states are the realm of the subconscious (hint, hint).

  Alpha. Between ages five and eight, brain waves change again, to an Alpha frequency: 8 to 13 cycles per second. The analytical mind begins to form at this point in childhood development; children start to interpret and draw conclusions about the laws of external life. At the same time, the inner world of imagination tends to be as real as the outer world of reality. Children in this age-group typically have a foot in both worlds. That’s why they pretend so well. For instance, you may ask a child to pretend that he is a dolphin in the sea, a snowflake in the wind, or a superhero coming to the rescue, and hours later, he is still in character. Ask an adult to do the same, and well … you already know the answer.

  Beta. From ages 8 to 12 and onward, brain activity increases to even higher frequencies. Anything above 13 cycles per second in children is the frontier for Beta waves. Beta goes on and up to varying degrees from there throughout adulthood, and is representative of conscious, analytical thinking.

  After age 12, the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind usually closes. Beta is actually divided into low-, mid-, and high-range Beta waves. As children progress into their teens, they tend to move from low-range Beta up into mid-and high-range Beta waves, as seen in most adults.