by Joe Dispenza
Shopping and spending more than you have
Procrastinating
Gossiping or spreading rumors
Lying about yourself
Throwing a temper tantrum
Treating fellow employees with disrespect
Flirting with other people when you are married
Bragging
Yelling at everyone
Gambling too much
Driving aggressively
Trying to be the center of attention
Sleeping in every day
Talking too much about the past
If you are having difficulty coming up with answers, ask yourself what you think about during various situations in your life, and inwardly “watch” how you think and respond. You can also inwardly “look through the eyes” of other people. How would they say they see you? How do you act?
Reminding: Recall the Aspects of the Old Self
You No Longer Want to Be
Now review and memorize your list. This is an essential part of meditation. Your goal is “to become familiar with” how you think and act when this specific emotion is driving you. It is to remind you how you no longer want to be, and how you were making yourself so unhappy. This step helps you become aware of how you unconsciously behave and what you say to yourself while you’re thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking, so that you have more conscious control in your waking day.
Executing this step is a work in progress. In other words, if you sit down every day for a week to focus on this, you will probably find that you continue to modify and refine your list. That’s good.
When you do this step, you enter the operating system of the “computer” programs in the subconscious mind and throw the spotlight on them for your review. You ultimately want to become so familiar with these cognitions that you inhibit them from firing in the first place. You will prune away the synaptic connections that made up the old self. And if everywhere that a neurological connection is formed constitutes a memory, then you are in fact dismantling the memory of the old you.
Throughout this next week, continue to review the list again so that you know even better who you no longer want to be. If you can memorize all these aspects of the old self, you will separate your consciousness even further from the old self. When your habitual, automatic thoughts and reactions are completely familiar to you, they will never slip by unnoticed or unrecognized. And you will be able to anticipate them before they are initiated. This is when you are free.
In this step, remember: awareness is your goal.
You know the drill by now … read Step 6 and do your writing; then you’ll be ready to start your Week Three meditations.
STEP 6: REDIRECTING
Here’s what happens when you use the tools of redirecting: You prevent yourself from behaving unconsciously. You stop yourself from activating your old programs, and you biologically change, causing unfiring and unwiring of nerve cells. Similarly, you stop the same genes from being signaled in the same ways.
If you’ve struggled with the idea of surrendering control, this step allows you to more consciously and judiciously take back the reins in order to break the habit of being yourself. When you become masterful at being able to redirect yourself, you’re building a solid foundation on which to create your new-and-improved self.
Redirecting: Play the Change Game
During your meditations this week, take some of the situations you came up with in the step just before, and as you picture them or observe yourself in your mind, tell yourself (out loud), “Change!” It’s simple:
Imagine a situation where you are thinking and feeling in an unconscious way.
… Say “Change!”
Become aware of a scenario (with a person, for example, or a thing) where you could easily fall into an old behavior pattern.
… Say “Change!”
Picture yourself in an event in your life where there is a good reason to fall short of your ideal.
… Say “Change!”
The Loudest Voice in Your Head
After you remind yourself to stay conscious throughout your day, as you learned in the previous step, you can now use a tool to change right in the moment. Whenever you catch yourself in real life thinking a limiting thought or engaging in a limiting behavior, just say “Change!” out loud. Over time, your own voice will become the new voice in your head—and the loudest one. It will become the voice of redirection.
As you repeatedly interrupt the old program, your efforts will begin to further weaken the connections between those neural networks that make up your personality. By the principle of Hebbian learning, you will unhook the circuits connected to the old self during your daily life. At the same time, you are no longer epigenetically signaling the same genes in the same ways. This is another step so that you will become more conscious. It is developing “conscious control” of yourself.
When you can stop a knee-jerk emotional reaction to some thing or person in your life, you are choosing to save yourself from returning to the old you that thinks and acts in such limited ways. By the same idea, as you gain conscious control over your thoughts that may be initiated from some stray memory or association connected with some environmental cue, you will move away from the predictable destiny in which you think the same thoughts and perform the same actions, which will create the same reality. It is a reminder placed by you in your own mind.
As you become aware, redirect your familiar thoughts and feelings, and recognize your unconscious states of being, you are also no longer using up your valuable energy. When you are living in a state of survival, you are signaling your body into emergency status by knocking it out of homeostasis and thus mobilizing a lot of energy. Those emotions and thoughts represent a low frequency of energy that is consumed by the body. So when you are conscious and change them before they make it to the body, then every time you notice or redirect them, you are conserving vital energy you may use for creating a new life.
Associative Memories Trigger Automatic Responses
Since staying conscious is crucial to creating that new life, it is important to understand how associative memories have made it so difficult for you to stay conscious in the past, and how practicing redirection can help free you from your old self.
Earlier in this book, we saw that Pavlov’s classical-conditioning experiment with dogs beautifully illustrates why it can be so hard for us to change. The dogs’ reaction in that experiment—learning to salivate in response to a bell—is an example of a conditioned response based on an associative memory.
Your associative memories exist in the subconscious mind. They are formed over time when the repeated exposure to an external condition produces an automatic internal response in the body, which then elicits an automatic behavior. As one or two of the senses respond to the same cue, the body reacts without much of the conscious mind’s involvement. It turns on by a thought or a memory alone.
By the same token, we live by numerous similar associative memories in our lives, triggered by so many known identifications derived from our environment. For instance, if you see someone you know well, chances are that you are going to respond in automatic ways without ever consciously knowing it. Seeing that individual will create an associated memory from some past experience that is connected to some emotion, which then triggers an automatic behavior. The chemistry of your body changes the moment you “think” about him or her in the past memory. A program runs from the repeated conditioning that you memorized about that person into your subconscious mind. And just like Pavlov’s dogs, in moments you are physiologically responding unconsciously. Your body takes over and begins to run you subconsciously, based on some past memory.
Your body is now predominantly in control. You’re out of the driver’s seat consciously because your subconscious body-mind is now controlling you. What are the cues that cause this to occur so quickly with you? They can be anything or everything in your external world. Their source is your relatio
nship to your known environment; it is your life, which is connected to all of the people and things you experienced at different times and places.
This is why it is so difficult to stay conscious in the process of change. You see a person, hear a song, visit a place, remember an experience, and your body begins to immediately “turn on” from a past memory. And your associated thought about how to identify with someone or something activates a cascade of reactions below the conscious mind that then returns you back to the same personality self. You think, act, and feel in predictable, automatic, memorized ways. You subconsciously reidentify with your past known environment, which then returns you to your known self living in the past.
When Pavlov continued to ring the bell without the reward of food being present, in time the dogs’ automatic response lessened because they no longer maintained the same association. We could say that the dogs’ repeated exposure to the bell without the food dwindled their neuroemotional response. They stopped salivating because the bell became a sound without any associative memory.
Catch Yourself Before “Going Unconscious”
As you run through a series of situations in your mind’s eye in which you stop yourself from being the old self (emotionally), your repeated exposure to the same stimuli (mentally) will, over time, weaken your emotional response to that condition. And as you consistently present yourself to the same motives of the old identity and notice how you automatically responded, you will become conscious enough in your life that you catch yourself from going unconscious. In time, all of those associations that turned on the old program will become just like the dogs’ experience of the bell without the food—you no longer knee-jerk back physiologically to the neurochemical you, connected to familiar people or things.
Thus, your thought about a person who makes you angry or your interaction with the ex-boyfriend can no longer tug on you because you’ve mindfully stopped yourself enough times. As you break the addiction to the emotion, there can be no autonomic response. It is your conscious awareness in this step that then frees you from the associated emotion or thought process in your daily life. Most of the time, these reflexive reactions go by unchecked by you because you are too busy “being” the old you.
It is important that you rationalize beyond the barometer of your feelings to understand that these survival emotions are affecting your cells in adverse ways by pushing the same genetic buttons and breaking down your body. It raises the question: “Is this feeling, behavior, or attitude loving to myself?”
After I say “Change,” I like to say, “This is not loving to me! The rewards of being healthy, happy, and free are so much more important than being stuck in the same self-destructive pattern. I don’t want to emotionally signal the same genes in the same way and affect my body so adversely. Nothing is worth it.”
WEEK THREE
GUIDE TO MEDITATION
During your Week Three meditations, your aim is to now add Step 5: Observing and Reminding, then Step 6: Redirecting, to the previous steps, so that you are doing all six. Steps 5 and 6 will ultimately merge to become one step. Throughout your day, as limiting thoughts and feelings come up, observe yourself and automatically say “Change!” out loud; or hear this—instead of the old voice(s)—as the loudest voice in your head. When that happens, you will be ready for the creation process.
Step 1: As usual, begin by doing the induction.
Steps 2–5: After you recognize, admit, declare, and surrender, it’s time to continue to address the specific thoughts and actions that naturally slip past your awareness. Observe the old you until you become completely familiar with those programs.
Step 6: Then, as you are observing the old you while you are in your meditation, pick a few scenarios in your life and say “Change!” out loud.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CREATE A NEW MIND FOR YOUR NEW FUTURE
(Week Four)
STEP 7: CREATING AND REHEARSING
Week Four will be a bit different from previous weeks. First, as you read and write for Step 7, you will receive knowledge about creating and instruction on the “how-to” process of using mental rehearsal. Then you’ll read the Guided Mental-Rehearsal Meditation to follow, to familiarize you with this new process.
Next, it’s time to do what you have learned. Every day this week, you will practice the Week Four meditation, which includes Steps 1 through 7. As you listen, you will apply the focused attention and repetition you have employed to create the new you and your new destiny.
Overview: Creating and Rehearsing the New You
Before you begin the final series of steps, I want to point out that the preceding steps were all designed to help you break the habit of being yourself so that you could make room both consciously and energetically for reinventing a new self. Up until this point, you’ve worked at pruning away old synaptic connections. Now it’s time to sprout new ones, so that the new mind you create will become the platform of who you will be in your future.
Your previous efforts have facilitated unlearning some things about your old self. You’ve weeded out many aspects of the old you. You’ve become familiar with your unconscious states of mind that represent how you thought, behaved, and felt. Through the practice of metacognition, you’ve consciously observed the routine, habitual ways your brain fired within the box of your former personality. The skill of self-reflection has allowed you to separate your free-willed consciousness from the automatic programs that caused your brain to fire in the exact same sequences, patterns, and combinations. You’ve examined how your brain has probably been working for years now. And since the working definition of mind is the brain in action, you’ve objectively looked at your limited mind.
Creating the New You
Now that you are beginning to “lose” your mind, it’s time to create a new one. Let’s begin to “plant” a new you. Your daily meditations, contemplations, and rehearsals will be like tending to a garden to yield a greater expression of you. Learning new information and reading about great people in history who represent your new ideal is like sowing the seeds. The more creative you are in reinventing a new identity, the more diverse the fruits you will experience in your future. Your firm intention and conscious attention will be like water and sunlight for your dreams in your garden.
As you emotionally rejoice in your new future before it is made manifest, you cast a safety net and fence protecting your vulnerable potential destiny from pests and difficult climatic conditions, because your elevated energy shields your creation. And by falling in love with the vision of who you are becoming, you are nurturing the potential plants and fruit with a miracle fertilizer. Love is a higher-frequency emotion than those survival emotions that allowed the weeds and pests to come in the first place. To eliminate the old and make way for the new is the process of transformation.
Rehearsing the New You
Next, it’s time to practice creating a new mind over and over again until it begins to become familiar to you. As you know, the more you fire circuits together, the more you wire them into lasting relationships. And if you fire a series of thoughts related to a particular stream of consciousness, it will be easier to produce that same level of mind the time after that. Therefore, as you repeat the same frame of mind every day by mentally rehearsing a new ideal of self, over time it will become more routine, more familiar, more natural, more automatic, and more subconscious. You will begin to remember you as someone else.
In the previous steps, you also unmemorized an emotion that was stored in your body-mind. Now it’s time to recondition your body to a new mind and signal your genes in new ways.
Your goal in this final step is to master a new mind in the brain as well as the body. Thus, it becomes so familiar to you that you are able to reproduce that same level of being at will and make it look natural and easy. It’s important that you memorize this new state of mind by thinking in new ways; equally relevant is to then memorize a new feeling in the body so that nothing in you
r outer world can move you from it. This is when you are ready to create a new future and then live in it. When you rehearse, you bring the new you out of nothing repeatedly and consistently, so that you “know how” to call it up at will.
Creating: Use Imagination and Invention
to Bring Your New Self into Existence
In this step, you’ll start by asking yourself some open-ended questions. As you pose questions that cause you to speculate, to think in different ways than you typically think, and to entertain new possibilities, this turns on your frontal lobe.
This entire contemplation process is the building method for making a new mind. You are creating the platform of the new self by forcing the brain to fire in novel ways. You’re beginning to change your mind!
Opportunity to Write
Please take time to write down your answers to the following questions. Then review them, reflect on them, analyze them, and think about all the possibilities your answers raise.
Questions to turn on your frontal lobe:
What is the greatest ideal of myself?
What would it be like to be ________?
Who in history do I admire, and how did they act?
Who in my life do I know who is/feels ________?
What would it take to think like ________?
Whom do I want to model?
How would I be if I were ________?
What would I say to myself if I were this person?
How would I talk to others if I were changed?
How or whom do I want to remind myself to be?
Your personality consists of how you think, act, and feel. So I’ve grouped some questions to help you determine more specifically how you want your new self to conduct itself. Remember, when you come up with your own answers, then contemplate them, you are installing new hardware in your brain and signaling your genes to activate in new ways in your body. (Feel free to continue to list your answers in your journal if you don’t think you can mentally keep track of them.)