Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself

by Joe Dispenza

  Preparing Your Body

  Position, position, position. I sit up very straight. My back is totally vertical, my neck is erect, my arms and legs are resting poised and still, and my body is relaxed. What about using a recliner? Just as with sitting in bed, many people fall asleep in recliners. Sitting upright in a regular chair, limbs uncrossed, is best. If you prefer to sit on the ground and cross your legs “Indian-style,” that’s fine, too.

  Preventing bodily distractions. In effect, you want to “put the body away” so that you can focus without needing to pay it any attention. For example, use the restroom. Dress in loose clothes, remove your watch, drink a little water, and have more within reach. Take care of any hunger pangs before you begin.

  Head nodding vs. nodding off. Since we’re talking about the body, let me address an issue that may come up in your own meditation practice. Although you are sitting upright, you may find your head nodding as though you are about to fall asleep. This is a good sign: you are moving into the Alpha and Theta brain-wave states. Your body is used to lying down when your brain waves slow down. When you suddenly “nod” like this, your body wants to doze off. With continued practice, you’ll become accustomed to your brain slowing down while you sit upright. The head nodding will eventually stop, and your body won’t tend to fall asleep.

  Making Time to Meditate

  When to meditate. As you know, daily changes in brain chemistry result in easier access to the subconscious mind just after you wake up in the morning and before you go to bed at night. These are the best times to meditate because you can more readily slip into the Alpha or Theta states. I prefer to meditate around the same time every morning. If you are really enthusiastic and would like to meditate at both these times of day, go for it. However, I suggest that folks just starting out do so once daily.

  How long to meditate. Take a few minutes before each day’s meditation session to review any writing you have done in connection with the steps you are about to practice—as I said, think of these notes as your road map to the journey you are about to take. You may also find it helpful to reread portions of the text—to remind you of what you’re about to do—before you go into meditation.

  While you’re learning the process, every session will start with 10 to 20 minutes for induction. As you add steps, your time frame should lengthen by about 10 to 15 minutes per step. Over time, you will move more rapidly through the steps with which you are already familiar. By the time you learn how to do all those in this process, your daily meditation (including induction) will generally take 40 to 50 minutes.

  If you need to finish by a certain time, set a timer to go off ten minutes before you must end your session. That will give you a “heads-up” to complete the session, rather than having to stop abruptly without bringing what you were doing to a close. And set aside enough time to meditate so that the clock doesn’t become a concern. After all, if you are meditating and find yourself thinking about your watch, you haven’t overcome time. Essentially, you may have to wake up earlier or go to bed later in order to carve out a slot in your day.

  Preparing Your State of Mind

  Mastering the ego. To be honest, I do have those days where I battle my ego tooth and nail, since it wants to be in control. Some mornings as I begin the process, my analytical mind starts thinking about flights to catch, meetings with staff, injured patients, reports and articles I need to write, my kids and their complexities, phone calls I have to make, and random thoughts from nowhere that pop into my head. I’m obsessing about everything predictable in my external life. Typically, my mind, like most people’s, is either anticipating the future or remembering the past. When that occurs, I have to settle down and realize that those are all known associations that have nothing to do with creating something new in the present moment. If this happens to you, it is your job to go beyond the tedium of normal thinking and enter into the creative moment.

  Mastering the body. If your body bucks like an unbridled stallion because it wants to be the mind—to get up and do something, think about someplace it has to go in the future, or remember a past emotional experience with some person in your life—you must settle it down into the present moment and relax it. Every time you do, you are reconditioning your body to a new mind, and in time, it will acquiesce. It was conditioned by an unconscious mind, and it has to be retrained by you—so love it, work with it, and be kind to it. It will ultimately surrender to you as its master. Remember to be determined, persistent, excited, joyful, flexible, and inspired. When you do so, you are reaching for the hand of the divine.

  Now let’s begin….

  CHAPTER TEN

  OPEN THE DOOR TO

  YOUR CREATIVE STATE

  (Week One)

  At an early point in my professional career, I learned about and eventually taught hypnosis and self-hypnosis. One of the techniques that hypnosis experts use to get individuals into a so-called trance is called induction. Simply put, we teach people how to change their brain waves. All someone has to do in order to be hypnotized or to hypnotize him- or herself is to move down from high- or mid-range Beta waves into a more relaxed Alpha or Theta state. Thus, meditation and self-hypnosis are similar.

  I could have included induction with the preparatory information in the last chapter, because induction prepares you to enter a coherent brain-wave state that is conducive to meditation. By mastering induction, you will build a solid foundation for the meditative practices you will learn in upcoming steps. However, unlike those arrangements that you will make before you begin each day’s meditation, such as turning off your phone and putting your dog or cat in another room, induction is a step you will include during the session—in fact, it must be the first step you master, and it will lead off every session.

  Just to head off any confusion, after opening each meditative session with induction, you will not be in what the entertainment industry misleadingly depicts as a hypnotic trance. You will be perfectly primed and able to complete all steps in the process that follows over the next three chapters.

  STEP 1: INDUCTION

  Induction: Open the Door to Your Creative State

  I urge you to spend at least a week of daily sessions, or more if needed, devoted to practicing induction. Remember that this process will take up the first 20 minutes of every meditation session. You want this to become a familiar and comfortable habit, so don’t rush through it. Your objective is to “stay present.”

  Preparation for induction. In addition to the aspects of preparation I discussed earlier, here are some further tips: First, sit up straight and close your eyes. As soon as you do so, blocking some sensory/environmental input from coming in, your brain waves lessen in frequency, moving toward that desirable Alpha state. Then surrender, stay present, and love yourself enough to move through this process. You may find that soothing music aids in the progression from high Beta to Alpha, although it isn’t necessary to use sounds.

  Induction techniques. There are many similar variations on induction techniques. Whether you use either the Body-Part or Water-Rising Induction, alternate them on different days, employ some other method you’ve used in the past, or devise a different one altogether isn’t important. What is important is that you move from that analytical Beta state to the sensory state of Alpha, and focus on the body, which is the subconscious mind and the operating system, where you can then make the changes you want.

  Overview: Body-Part Induction

  One induction technique may at first seem contradictory—you’ll focus attention on your body and environment. Those are two of the Big Three that you have to overcome, but in this case, you’re in control of your thoughts about them.

  Why is it desirable to focus on the body? Remember, it and the subconscious mind are merged. So when we become acutely aware of the body and sensations related to it, we enter the subconscious mind. We’re in that operating system I’ve mentioned often. Induction is a tool that can be used to get into that system.

&n
bsp; The cerebellum plays a role in proprioception (awareness of how our bodies are positioned in space). So in this induction, as you rest your awareness on different parts of your body in space and the space around your body in space, you’re using your cerebellum to perform this function. And since the cerebellum is the seat of the subconscious mind, as you place your consciousness on where your body is oriented in space, you access your sub-conscious mind and bypass your thinking brain.

  Moreover, induction shuts down the analytical mind by forcing you into a sensing/feeling mode. Feelings are the language of the body, which in turn is the subconscious mind, so induction allows you to use the body’s natural language to interpret and change the language of the operating system. In other words, if you’re sensing or putting your awareness on different aspects of your body, you would be thinking less, shifting your analytical thoughts from past to future less, and broadening your focus more to encompass a very different scope—not narrowly obsessive, but rather, creative and open—and you would move from Beta to Alpha.

  All of this happens as you move from that narrow-minded range of attention to an expanded focus on the body and the space around it. Buddhists refer to this as an open focus, occurring when brain waves naturally become orderly and synchronized.1 Open focus produces a new, powerfully coherent signal that allows parts of the brain that were not communicating with other parts to now do so. That enables you to produce an extremely coherent signal. While you can measure that on a brain scan, more important is that you can feel the difference in the clarity and focus of your thoughts, intentions, and feelings.

  Body-Part Induction:

  The How-to*

  Specifically, you will focus on the location or orientation of your body in space. For example, think about the location of your head, starting at its top and gradually moving down. As the induction progresses from body part to body part, sense and become aware of the space that each occupies. Also sense the density, the weight (or heaviness), or the volume of space that it occupies. By focusing your attention on your scalp, then next on your nose, then your ears, and so on, moving down the body until you’ve focused on the bottoms of your feet, you will notice some changes. This movement from part to part, and the emphasis on the spaces within the spaces, is the key to this.

  Next, become aware of the teardrop-shaped area surrounding your body, and the space it takes up. When you can sense that area of space around your body, your attention now is no longer on your body. Now you are not your body, but something grander. This is how you become less body and more mind.

  Finally, become aware of the area that the room you are in occupies in space. Sense the volume that it fills. When you reach this point, this is when the brain begins to change its disorderly wave patterns to more balanced and orderly ones.

  The Why

  We can measure these differences in how you are thinking—we can view your thought patterns on an EEG to see how you’ve moved from Beta- to Alpha-wave activity. We’re not interested in just getting you into an Alpha state of any kind, though; you want to be in a highly coherent, organized Alpha. That’s why you will concentrate first on your body and its orientation in space, then move from those individual parts to the volume or perimeter of space surrounding the body, and eventually focus your observation on the entire room. If you can sense that density of space, if you can notice it and pay attention to it, you will naturally move from a state of thinking to feeling. When that happens, it’s impossible to maintain the high-Beta state that characterizes the emergency mode of survival and an overfocused condition.

  Water-Rising Induction*

  Another similar induction technique you can use is to imagine water moving into the room where you are sitting, then gradually rising. Observe (sense) the space in which the room is situated, and the space that the water occupies. At first, the water would rise to cover your feet; move up the shins to the knees; spill over them and into your lap; move up your abdomen and chest, covering your arms, rising to your neck … up past your chin, lips, and head … until the water fills the entire room. While some people may not like the idea of being covered completely by water, others find it soothingly warm and inviting.

  WEEK ONE

  GUIDE TO MEDITATION

  As a reminder, during your Week One meditations, your job is to practice the induction technique. If you record this induction yourself, make certain that you repeat the same questions that I have provided in my guided-induction instructions in the Appendices, with their emphasis on words and phrases such as sense, notice, feel, become aware of, become conscious of, and attend to. Also, words such as volume, density, perimeter of space, weight of space, and so forth will help you focus your observation.

  Instead of moving quickly from one part to another, allow some time to pass (a good 20 to 30 seconds or more) for those sensory inputs and the feelings of those parts in space to really settle in. Roughly, allow about 20 minutes to do the Body-Part Induction from head to toe, or in the case of the water immersion, from toe to head. If you have meditated before, you will no doubt understand that eventually you lose any sense of time passing as your brain waves diminish in frequency and you move into that calm and relaxed Alpha state where the inner world is more real than the outer world.

  _______________________

  * * *

  * Condensed; see Appendix A for full version.

  * Condensed; see Appendix B for full version.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PRUNE AWAY THE HABIT OF BEING YOURSELF

  (Week Two)

  During Week Two, it’s time to add three steps in pruning away the habit of being yourself: recognizing, then admitting and declaring, followed by surrendering. First, read through all these steps and answer the related questions. Then devote at least a week to daily meditation sessions in which you first go into induction, then move through the three steps. Of course, if you need more than one week to feel competent at all this, that’s fine.

  STEP 2: RECOGNIZING

  Recognizing: Identify the Problem

  The first move necessary in fixing anything is to understand what is presently not working. You have to know what the problem is and then name it in order to have power over it.

  Many people who have had a near-death experience report that they underwent a “life review” in which they saw, as if watching a movie, all of their covert and overt actions, their expressed and suppressed sentiments, their public and private thoughts, and their conscious and unconscious attitudes. They saw who they were and how their thoughts, words, and deeds affected everyone and everything in their lives. Afterward, they typically describe having a greater understanding about themselves and a desire to do a better job of living from then on. And as a result, they perceive new possibilities and better ways “to be” in any opportunity. Having seen themselves from a truly objective point of view, they clearly know what they want to change.

  Recognition is like having a life review every day. Since you have all of the equipment in your brain to notice who you are being, why not do this before you die, and, in effect, be reborn in the same life? With practice, this type of awareness can help you override what would otherwise be the predetermined destiny of your brain and body—the automatic, enslaving hardwired programs of the mind and the memorized emotions that have chemically conditioned the body.

  Only when you are truly conscious and aware do you begin to wake up from the dream. To become still, quiet, patient, and relaxed, and then be attentive to the habits of the old-personality self, disengages your subjective consciousness from overutilized attitudes and extreme emotional states. You no longer are the same mind, because you are now freeing yourself from the chains of the self-centered nature of the ego lost in itself. And when you see who you have been, by means of the observer’s watchful eye, you will crave life more, because you will truly desire to make a greater difference the next day.

  As you develop the skills of contemplation and self-observation, you are cultivating t
he ability to separate your consciousness from the subconscious programs that have defined the old self. To move your consciousness from being the old self to being the observer of the old self loosens the connection to the old you. And as you recognize who you have been through the skill of metacognition (your ability via the frontal lobe to observe who you are being), for the first time your consciousness is no longer immersed in unconscious programs; you are becoming conscious of what was once unconscious. This is making the first strides toward personal change.

  Begin Your Own Life Review

  In order to discover and explore aspects of the old self that you want to change, it is necessary to pose some “frontal lobe” questions.

  Opportunity to Write

  Take some time to ask yourself questions such as these, or any others that occur to you, and write down your answers:

  What kind of person have I been?

  What type of person do I present to the world? (What is one side of my “gap” like?)

  What kind of person am I really like inside? (What is the other side of my “gap” like?)

  Is there a feeling that I experience—even struggle with—over and over again, every day?

  How would my closest friends and family describe me?

  Is there something about myself that I hide from others?

  What part of my personality do I need to work on

  improving?

  What is one thing I want to change about myself?

  Choose an Emotion to Unmemorize