by Joe Dispenza
Next, choose one of your afflictive emotional states and limited states of mind (the following examples can help you get started)—one of the habits of being yourself that you want to relinquish. Since memorized feelings condition the body to be the mind, these self-limiting emotions are responsible for your automatic thought processes, which create your attitudes, which influence your limited beliefs (about self in relationship to everyone or everything), which contribute to your personal perceptions. Every one of the emotions listed below originates from the chemicals of survival, which strengthen the ego’s control.
Opportunity to Write
Pick one emotion that is a big part of who you are (your chosen emotion may be one that’s not listed below) and that you want to unmemorize. Remember that this word has meaning to you because it is a feeling that is familiar to you. It is one aspect of the self that you want to change. I recommend that you write down the emotion you came up with, because you will be working with it throughout this and later steps.
Examples of survival emotions:
Insecurity Shame Sadness
Hatred Anxiety Disgust
Judgment Regret Envy
Victimization Suffering Ager
Worry Frustration Resentment
Guilt Fear Unworthiness
Depression Greed Lack
Most people see these examples and say, “Can I pick more than one?” It is important in the beginning to work with one emotion at a time. In any case, they are all linked together neurologically and chemically. For example, have you ever noticed that when you’re angry, you’re frustrated; when you’re frustrated, you hate; when you hate, you judge; when you judge, you’re envious; when you’re envious, you’re insecure; when you’re insecure, you’re competitive; when you’re competitive, you’re selfish? All of these emotions are run by the same combined survival chemicals, which then stimulate related states of mind.
On the other hand, the same is true for elevated states of mind and emotion. When you’re joyous, you love; when you love, you feel free; when you’re free, you’re inspired; when you’re inspired, you’re creative; when you’re creative, you’re adventurous … and so on. All of these feelings are driven by different chemicals that then influence how you think and act.
Let’s use anger as an example of a recurring emotion you might choose to work with. As you unmemorize anger, all of the other self-limiting emotions will incrementally decrease within you as well. If you become less angry, you’ll be less frustrated, hateful, judgmental, envious, and so on.
The good news is that you are actually taming the body to no longer run unconsciously as the mind. Consequently, as you change one of these destructive emotional states, the body will be less prone to live out of control, and you will change many other personality traits.
Observe How the Unwanted Emotion
Feels in Your Body
Next, close your eyes and think about how you feel when you experience that particular emotion. If you can observe yourself overcome by that emotion, pay attention to how it feels in your body. There are different sensations that correlate to different emotions. I want you to become aware of all of those physical signs. Do you become hot, irritated, jittery, weak, flushed, deflated, tight? Scan your body with your mind and notice in what area you feel that emotion. (If you do not feel anything in your body, that’s okay; just remember what you want to change about yourself. Your observation is changing it moment by moment.)
Now, become familiar with your body’s present state. Does your breathing change? Do you feel impatient? Are you physically in pain, and if so, if that pain had an emotion, what would it be? Just notice what physiologically is happening in the moment and don’t try to run from it. Be with it. The host of different feelings in your body becomes an emotion when you name it as anger, fear, sadness, or whatever the case may be. So let’s get down to all of those feelings and physical sensations that create the emotion you want to unmemorize.
Allow yourself to feel that emotion without being distracted by anything or anyone. Don’t do anything or try to make it go away. Almost everything you have done in your life has been to run from this feeling. You used everything outside of you to try to make it go away. Be present with your emotion and feel it as energy in your body.
This emotion has motivated you to appropriate everything you know in your environment to fashion an identity. Because of this feeling, you created an ideal for the world instead of an ideal for yourself.
This feeling is who you really are. Acknowledge it. It is one of the many masks of your personality that you have memorized. It started from an emotional reaction to an event in your life, which lingered into a mood, which developed into a temperament, which created your personality. This emotion has become the memory of yourself. It speaks nothing about your future. Your attachment to it means that you are mentally and physically bound by your past.
If emotions are the end product of experiences, then by embracing the same emotion every day, the body is being fooled into believing that your external world is staying the same. And if your body is being conditioned to reexperience the same circumstances in your environment, you can never evolve and change. As long as you live by this emotion daily, you can only think in the past.
Define the State of Mind
Associated with the Emotion
Next, ask yourself this simple question: “How do I think when I feel this way?”
Let’s say that you want to change anger as one of your personality traits. Ask yourself, “What is my attitude when I feel anger?” The answer might be controlling or hateful, or it might be self-important. By the same means, if you want to overcome fear, you might have to address the state of mind of feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or desperate. Suffering might lead to feeling victimized, depressed, lazy, resentful, or needy.
Now, become aware of or remember your thinking when you feel this way. What is the state of mind that is powered by this emotion? This feeling influences everything you do. States of mind represent an attitude that is driven by the memorized feelings subconsciously anchored in the body. An attitude is a series of thoughts that are connected to a feeling, or vice versa. It is the repetitive cycle of thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking. Therefore, you need to define your neural habit that is influenced by your particular emotional addiction.
Opportunity to Write
Become aware of how you think (your state of mind) when you are feeling the emotion you want to change. You may pick from the list below, or add any that are not listed. Your selection will be based on the unwanted emotion you identified previously, but it’s natural to be in one or more limiting states of mind relating to that emotion. So write down one or two that resonate with you, because you will work with these in upcoming steps.
Examples of limiting states of mind:
Competitive Lacking Controlling
Overwhelmed Overly intellectual Deceptive
Complaining Self-important Conceited
Blaming Shy/timid/introverted Dramatic
Confused Needing recognition Rushing
Distracted Under-/overconfident Needy
Self-pitying Lazy Self-involved
Desperate Dishonest Sensitive/insensitive
Most of your behaviors, choices, and deeds are equal to this feeling. Therefore, you will think and act in predictable, routine ways. There can be no new future, just more of the same past. It’s time to remove the colored lenses and no longer see life through a filter of the past. Your job is to be with that emotional attitude without doing anything but observing it.
You’ve just identified an unwanted emotion and its corresponding state of mind that you want to unmemorize. But remember that you still have a couple of steps to read through before you integrate them all into your daily meditation….
STEP 3: ADMITTING AND DECLARING
Admitting: Acknowledge Your True Self
Rather Than the Self You Show to Other People
Allowing yourself to be vulnerable, you
move beyond the realm of your senses and begin to introduce yourself to the universal consciousness that is the giver of your life. You develop a relationship with this greater intelligence, telling it who you have been and what you want to change about yourself, and admitting what you have been hiding.
Owning up to who we really are and what our past mistakes have been and asking to be accepted are among the most challenging things for us to do as humans. Think of how you felt as a child when you had to fess up to your parents, a teacher, or a friend. Have those feelings of guilt, shame, and anger changed now that you’re an adult? Most likely you still experience them, but maybe not as strongly.
What makes achieving Step 3 possible is knowing that we are admitting our faults and failures to our higher power and not to another similarly flawed human. As a result, when we admit to ourselves and to that universal power, there is:
No punishment
No judgment
No manipulation
No emotional abandonment
No blame
No scorekeeping
No rejection
No loss of love
No damnation
No separation
No banishment
All of the preceding acts are derived from the old paradigm of God, which has been shrunk to the likeness of an insecure man, completely self-absorbed, steeped in the concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, positive and negative, success and failure, love and hate, heaven and hell, pain and pleasure, and fear and more fear. This traditional model must be addressed, because one must enter this consciousness with a new consciousness.
This enigma can be called innate intelligence, chi, divine mind, spirit, the quantum, the life force, infinite mind, the observer, universal intelligence, the quantum field, invisible power, mother-father life, cosmic energy, or higher power. Regardless of what name you give it, you must see this energy as an unlimited source of power within you and around you, which you utilize and create from throughout your life.
It is the consciousness of intent and the energy of unconditional love. It is impossible for it to judge, punish, threaten, or banish anyone or anything because it would be doing those very things to itself.
It only gives in love, compassion, and understanding. It already knows everything about you (it’s you who has to make an effort to know and develop a relationship with it). It has been observing you from the moment you were created. You are an extension of it.
It only waits in hope, in admiration, and in patience … it only wants you to be happy. And if you are happy being unhappy, that’s fine, too. That’s how much it loves you.
This self-organizing invisible field is wise beyond comprehension because it exists through an interconnected matrix of energy that extends in all dimensions in space and time, past, present, and future. It records the thoughts, desires, dreams, experiences, wisdom, evolution, and knowledge from all of eternity. It is an immense, immaterial, multidimensional field of information. It “knows” much more than you and I do (even though we think we know it all). Its energy can be likened to many levels of frequency; and like radio waves, every frequency carries information. All of life on a molecular level vibrates, breathes, dances, shimmers, and is alive; it is completely receptive and malleable to our willful intentions.
Let’s suppose you want joy in your life. So you ask the universe for it every day. However, you’ve memorized suffering into such a state of being that you whine all day long, you hold everyone responsible for the way you feel, you make excuses for yourself, and you mope around constantly feeling sorry for yourself. Can you see that you can declare joy all you want, but you are demonstrating being a victim? Your mind and body are in opposition. You are thinking a certain way one moment; then you are being something else the remainder of the day. Hence, can you humbly and sincerely admit who you have been, what you have been hiding, and what you want to change about yourself, so that you eliminate unnecessary pain and suffering before you create the related experiences in your reality? To vacate and lay down your familiar personality for a brief period of time and knock on the door of the infinite in a state of joy and reverence is so much more conducive to change than allowing your personality to be fractured by your insistent course of destiny, created by who you were repeatedly “being.” Let’s change in joy instead of changing in pain.
Opportunity to Write
Now, close your eyes and become still. Look into the vastness of this mind (and into yourself) and begin to tell it who you have been. Develop a relationship with the greater consciousness that is giving you life, by honestly and inwardly talking to it. Share with it the details of those stories that you have carried around with you. Writing down what comes to you will be useful in later steps.
Examples of what you might admit
to your higher power:
I am afraid of falling in love because it hurts too much.
I pretend I am happy, but I am really suffering because I am lonely.
I do not want anyone to know that I feel so guilty, so I lie about myself.
I lie to people so that they like me and so I won’t feel so unloved and unworthy.
I can’t stop feeling self-pity. I think, act, and feel this way all day long because I do not know how else I can feel.
I have felt like a failure most of my life, so I try extra hard to be a success.
Now, take a moment and review what you have written and what you want to admit to this power.
Declaring: Outwardly Acknowledge
Your Self-Limiting Emotion
In this part of the meditation process, you actually speak out loud who you have been and what you have been hiding about yourself. You tell the truth about self, put the past to rest, and close the gap between how you appear and who you really are. You give up your façade and the constant effort of being someone else. By declaring the truth about yourself out loud, you are breaking the emotional ties, agreements, dependencies, attachments, bonds, and addictions to all those external cues in your life.
In the workshops that I conduct around the world, this is the most difficult part of the steps. No one really wants anyone to know who they really are. They want to maintain how they appear. However, as you have learned, it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep up this ongoing image. This is the point where you want to release that energy.
And remember: since emotions are energy in motion, everything that you’ve experienced and interacted with in your external life has an energetic emotion attached to it. Essentially, you are bonded to some person, thing, or place by an energy that exists beyond time and space. This is how you continually remember yourself as an ego with a personality, identifying emotionally with and being tied to everything in your life.
For example, if you hate someone, that hate keeps you emotionally attached to the other person. Your emotional bond is the energy that keeps this individual in your life so that you can feel hate and thus reinforce one aspect of your personality. In other words, you use that person to stay addicted to hatred. By the way, it should be obvious by now that your hatred is primarily hurting you. As you release chemicals from your brain to your body, you truly hate yourself. To speak the truth about yourself out loud in this step empowers you to become free from hatred and less connected to the person or thing in your external reality that reminds you of who you have been.
If you recall the gap discussed earlier, you know that most people rely on the environment to remember themselves as a “somebody.” Therefore, if you have memorized an emotion as part of your personality and you are addicted to it, then when you declare who you have been emotionally, you are calling energy back (releasing it) to you from your emotional bonds with everything and everyone in your life. This conscious statement by you will free you from the old self.
In addition, by claiming your limitations and consciously revealing what you have been hiding, you are freeing the body from being the mind; and for that reason, you are closing the gap between how you
appear and who you really are. When you verbalize who you have been, you also liberate energy stored in your body. This will become “free energy” for you to use later on in the meditation to create a new self and life.
Bear in mind that your body will not want to do this very readily. Your ego automatically hides this emotion because it doesn’t want anyone to know the truth about itself. It wants to remain in control. The servant has become the master. But the master now must let the servant know that he or she has been delinquent, unconscious, and absent. So it makes sense that your body will not want to relinquish control, because it does not trust you. But if you just open your mouth and speak out in spite of the body’s control, it will begin to feel lighter and relieved, and you will begin to be back in command.
This is how you define who you really are without any associations to your external environment. You are severing your energetic bond to the emotional attachment of all of the elements in the outer world. If admitting is an inner acknowledgment, then declaration is an outward one.
What Is It That You Want to Declare?
It’s time to merge this part of Step 3 with the previous part. Remember that you’re building this section into one fluid process. Using the example of anger, you might say aloud, “I have been an angry person my whole life.”
Remember the general aim of what you want to declare. In this part of your meditation for the week, while you are sitting up with eyes closed, you’ll open your mouth and softly say the emotion that you are declaring: anger.
While you prepare yourself to do this and while you are engaged in verbalizing your declaration, it probably will not feel good to you. Do it anyway; that’s your body talking to you.
Your end result is that you are inspired, uplifted, and energized. Make this step simple, easy, and lighthearted. Do not overanalyze what you have done. Just know that the truth shall set you free.