Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself

by Joe Dispenza

  How Do I Want to Think?

  How would this new person (my ideal) think?

  What thoughts do I want to put my energy behind?

  What is my new attitude?

  What do I want to believe about me?

  How do I want to be perceived?

  What would I say to myself if I was this person?

  How Do I Want to Act?

  How would this person act?

  What would he or she do?

  How do I see myself behaving?

  How would I speak as this new expression of self?

  How Do I Want to Feel?

  How would this new self be?

  What would I feel?

  What would my energy be like as this new ideal?

  When you meditate to create the new you, your job is to reproduce the same level of mind every day, to think and feel differently than you usually do. You should be able to repeat that same frame of mind at will and make it commonplace. Furthermore, you have to allow your body to feel that new feeling until you actually are that new person. In other words, you cannot get up as the same person who sat down. Transformation must occur in the here and now, and your energy should be different from when you started. If you get up as the same person, feeling just as you did when you started, nothing has really happened. You are still the same identity.

  Therefore, if you say to yourself, “I didn’t feel like it today; I’m too tired; I have too much to do; I am busy; I have a headache; I’m too much like my mother; I can’t change; I want to get something to eat; I can start tomorrow; this doesn’t feel good; I should turn on the TV and watch the news,” and so on; and if you allow those subvocalizations to take the stage of the frontal lobe, you will invariably get up as the same personality.

  You must use your will, intention, and sincerity to go beyond these urges of the body. You must recognize this banter and chatter as a fight by the old self for control. You must allow it to rebel, but then bring it back to the present moment, relax it, and then start over again. And over time, it will begin to trust you to be the master again.

  Rehearsing: Memorize the New You

  Now that you’ve contemplated your answers, it’s time to rehearse them. Review how you will think, act, and feel as your new ideal. Let’s be clear here. I don’t want you to become too mechanistic or rigid. This is a creative process. Allow yourself to be imaginative, free, and spontaneous. Don’t force your answers to be one way or another. Don’t try to go through your list in the same exact way during each meditative session. There are many different means to arrive at your end.

  Just think about the greatest expression of yourself and then remind yourself how you will act. What will you say, how will you walk, how will you breathe, and how will you feel if you become that person? What will you say to others and to yourself? Your goal is to move into a “state of being” and become this ideal.

  For instance, think back to those piano players who mentally rehearsed piano exercises without touching any keys, and how they achieved almost the same brain changes as people who physically played the same scales and chords for the same length of time. The “mental” players’ daily rehearsal changed their brains to look like they had already had the experience of physically executing the activity. Their thoughts became their experience.

  If you recall the finger-exercise experiment involving mental rehearsal, there were also significant physical changes demonstrated in the body, without the subjects’ ever lifting a finger. In this step, your daily rehearsals will change your brain and your body to be ahead of time.

  That’s why it’s so important to rehearse—to bring up again—how you will act as your new self. This is how you biologically change the brain and body to no longer live in the past but rather to chart a map to the future. If the body and brain are changed, then there is physical evidence that you are changed.

  Becoming Very Familiar with the New You

  This part of Step 7 is about making the leap to get to the “unconsciously skilled” level of expertise. When you are unconsciously skilled at something, that means you just do it without having to place a great deal of conscious thought or attention on the activity. It’s like going from a novice driver to an experienced one. It’s like being able to knit without having to consciously will each of the actions into motion. It’s like the old Nike ad slogan: you are just doing it.

  If you are getting bored around this point in the exercise, take that as a good sign. It means that your new mode of operation is beginning to become familiar, common, and automatic. You have to get to this juncture in order to hardwire and embody this information into long-term memory. You must make an effort to go beyond your boredom, because each time you engage in your new ideal, you manage to be more of the new you with less effort. You engrave your new model of you into a memory system that then becomes more subconscious and natural. If you keep practicing it, you won’t have to think about being it. You will have become it. Bottom line, practice makes perfect. You are training yourself in this process, like any sport.

  If you’re doing rehearsal correctly, then each time you practice, it should be easier for you to accomplish. Why? Because you’re primed; you already have those circuits firing in tandem in your brain, and it’s already warmed up. You also manufactured the right chemistry, and it’s circulating in your body, selecting a new genetic expression; your body is naturally in the right state. In addition, you have restrained and “quieted down” other brain regions connected to the old you. Consequently, the feelings that were associated with the old you are less likely to stimulate your body in the same inherent ways.

  Bear in mind that most of the mental-rehearsal exercises that activate and grow new circuits in the brain involve learning knowledge, getting instruction, paying attention, and repeating the skill over and over. As you know, learning is making new connections; instruction is teaching the body “how to” in order to create a new experience; paying attention to what you are doing is absolutely necessary to rewire your brain, because it involves your being present to the stimuli … both physical and mental; and last, repetition fires and wires long-term relationships between nerve cells. These are all the ingredients that it takes to grow new circuits and make a new mind—and this is exactly what you’re doing in your meditations. Repetition is what I want to emphasize here.

  Cathy’s story illustrates every facet of mental rehearsal. A massive stroke had damaged the language center in her brain’s left hemisphere, leaving her unable to talk for months. Doctors told Cathy, a corporate trainer, that she would probably never speak again. Having read my book and completed one of my workshops, Cathy refused to accept this devastating prognosis.

  Instead, based on knowledge she had learned and instruction she received, and applying focused attention and repetition, Cathy mentally rehearsed speaking in front of groups of people. Every day, she practiced this in her mind. Over a period of several months, she demonstrated physical changes in her brain and body, to the extent that she repaired the language center in her brain … and completely regained her ability to speak. Today Cathy once again addresses audiences fluently and flawlessly, with no hesitation.

  In your own study of this material, you made some important synaptic connections as the precursor for you to have new experiences. Both of these elements—studying information and having experiences—evolve your brain. You are also being given the proper instruction in the unlearning and relearning process of change. You understand the importance of focus in attending to both mental and physical activity to mold your brain and change your body to reflect your efforts. And finally, it is your repeated efforts to rehearse your new ideal that will produce the same level of mind and body, over and over again. Repetition will seal long-lasting circuits and activate new genes for you to revisit the next day with greater ease. This step is for you to practice reproducing the same state of being so it gets simpler.

  The keys for you to focus on are frequency, intensity, and duration. T
hat is, the more you do it, the easier it gets. The better your focus and concentration are, the easier it is for you to tap into that particular mind the next time. The longer you can linger in the thoughts and emotions of your new ideal, without letting your mind wander to extraneous stimuli, the more you will memorize this new state of being. This step is all about getting into becoming your new ideal in your waking day.

  Becoming a New Personality Produces a New Reality

  Your goal in this step is to become a new personality, a new state of being. So if you are a new personality, you are being somebody else, right? Your old personality, based on how you thought, felt, and acted, has created the reality that you presently are experiencing. In short, how you are as a personality is how you are in your personal reality. Remember, also, that your personal reality is made up of how you think, feel, and act. By doing each of those in a new way, you are creating both a new self and a new reality.

  Your new personality should produce a new reality. In other words, when you are being someone else, you naturally will have a different life. If you suddenly changed your identity, you would be another person, and therefore, you would certainly live as someone else. If the personality called John became the personality known as Steve, we could say that John’s life will change because he is no longer being John but is now thinking, acting, and feeling like Steve.

  Here is another example. One time while I was lecturing in California, a woman approached me in front of the audience with her hands on her hips, intensely focused, angrily exclaiming, “How come I’m not living in Santa Fe?!”

  I calmly replied, “Because the person who was just talking to me is the personality who is living in Los Angeles. The personality who would be living, and is already, in Santa Fe looks nothing like that.”

  Thus, from a quantum perspective, this new personality is the perfect place to create from. The new identity is no longer emotionally anchored to known situations in your life that keep recycling the same circumstances; therefore, it is a perfect place from which to envision a new destiny. This is the place you want to be to call out a new life. The reason why your prayers were hardly ever answered in the past is that you were trying to hold a mindful intention while being lost in lower emotions such as guilt, shame, sadness, unworthiness, anger, or fear connected to the old self. It was those feelings that were governing your thoughts and attitude.

  The 5 percent of your mind that is conscious was fighting against the 95 percent that is the subconscious body-mind. Thinking one way and feeling another cannot produce anything tangible. Energetically, that broadcasts a mixed signal to the invisible web that orchestrates reality. Thus, if you were “being” guilty because your body memorized the mind of guilt, then you probably received whatever you were being—situations in your life that evoked more reasons to feel guilty. Your conscious aim could not stand up against your being that memorized emotion.

  As this new identity, however, you are thinking and feeling differently than the old identity. You are in a state of mind and body that now is sending a perfect signal free from your past memories. For the first time, the lens of your mind is now lifted above the present landscape to see a new horizon. You are looking to the future, not your past.

  Simply said, you can’t create a new personal reality while you are still being the old personality. You have to become someone else. Once you are in a new state of being, now is the time to create a new destiny.

  Creating a New Destiny

  This part of the step is where you, as this new state of being, this new personality, create a new personal reality. The energy that you released from the body earlier is now the raw ingredient to create a new future with.

  So what do you want? Do you want healing in some area of your body or your life? Do you want a loving relationship, a more satisfying career, a new car, a paid-up mortgage? Do you want the solution to overcoming an obstacle in your life? Is your dream to write a book, to send your kids to college or go back to school yourself, to climb a mountain, to learn to fly, to be free from an addiction? In all of these examples, your brain automatically creates an image of what you want.

  From an elevated state of mind and body; in love, joy, self-empowerment, and gratitude; in a greater, more coherent energy, here is where you see those images in your mind of what you want to create in your new life as this new personality. Craft the specific future events you want to experience, by observing them into physical reality. Let yourself go and begin to free-associate without analysis. The pictures you see in your mind are the vibrational blueprints of your new destiny. You, as the quantum observer, are commanding matter to conform to your intentions.

  With clarity, you will hold the image of each manifestation in your mind for a few seconds, and then let it go into the quantum to be executed by a greater mind.

  Just like the observer in quantum physics, who looks for an electron and it collapses from a wave of probabilities into an event called a particle—the physical manifestation of matter—you are doing the same on a much larger scale. But you are using your “free energy” to collapse waves of probability into an event called a new experience in your life. Your energy is now entangled with that future reality, and it belongs to you. Thus, you are entangled with it, and it is your destiny.

  Finally, give up trying to figure out how or when or where or with whom. Leave those details to a mind that knows so much more than you do. And know that your creation will come in a way that you will least expect, that will surprise you and leave no doubt that it came from a higher order. Trust that the events in your life will be tailored to your conscious intentions.

  Now you are developing a two-way communication with this invisible consciousness. It shows you that it noticed you emulating it as a creator; it speaks to you directly; it demonstrates that it is responding to you. How does it do all this? It creates and organizes unusual events in your life; these signify direct messages from the quantum mind. Now you have a relationship with a supreme, loving consciousness.

  Overview: Guided Mental-Rehearsal Meditation

  It’s time to reinvent a new you, by moving into a new state of being that reflects your new expression of self. After you do so—by priming a new mind and body—then you rehearse that state of being again. Your efforts to re-create the same familiar state will biologically change your brain and body ahead of the new experience. Then once you are a new being in your meditation, a new being is a new personality, and a new personality creates a new personal reality. Here is where you, from an elevated energy, create the specific events in your life as the quantum observer of destiny. Although this Guided Mental-Rehearsal Meditation has three parts, when it is incorporated into your Week Four meditation (as the Guided Meditation in Appendix C), the parts blend seamlessly together.

  Guided Mental-Rehearsal Meditation: Creating the New You

  Now close your eyes, eliminate the environment, and let yourself go by “creating” how you want to live your life.

  Your job is to move into a new state of being. It’s time to change your mind and think in new ways. When you do, you will emotionally recondition your body to a new mind by signaling new genes in new ways. Let the thought become the experience, and live that future reality now. Open your heart and give thanks ahead of the actual experience so much so that you convince your body to believe that future event is unfolding now.

  Pick a potential in the quantum field, and live it completely. It is time to change your energy from living in the emotions of the past to living in the emotions of a new future. You cannot get up as the same person you were when you sat down.

  Remind yourself who you will be when you open your eyes. Plan your actions with regard to how you will be in your new reality. Imagine the new you and how you will speak and what you will say to yourself. Think about what it will feel like to be this ideal. Conceive of yourself as a new person—doing certain things; thinking certain ways; and feeling the emotions of joy, inspiration, love, empowerment, gratit
ude, and power.

  Become so attentive to your intention that your thoughts of a new ideal become the experience internally, and as you feel the emotion from that experience, you go from thinking to being. Remember who and what you really are in your new future.

  Rehearsing the New You

  Now, relax for a few seconds. Then “re-view,” re-create, and rehearse what you just did; do it over again. Let go and see if you can do it repeatedly and consistently.

  Can you initiate being that new ideal with greater ease than the last time? Can you bring it out of nothing one more time? You should naturally be able to recall who you are becoming so that you know how to call it up at will. Your repeated efforts will mean doing it so many times that you’ll just “know how” to. When you move into this new state of being, “memorize the feeling.” This is a great place to be.

  Creating Your New Destiny

  Now, it’s time to command matter. From this elevated state of mind and body, what do you want in your future life?

  As you unfold the new self, remember to move into that state of mind and body that feels invincible, powerful, absolute, inspired, and overjoyed. Let the pictures come; see them with certainty, with a knowingness that unifies you to those events or things. Bond with your future as if it is yours, without any concern other than expectancy and celebration. Let yourself go and begin to free-associate without concern. Become empowered by your new sense of self. With clarity, hold the image of each manifestation in your mind for a few seconds, and then let it go into the quantum to be executed by a greater mind … then go to the next one … keep going … this is your new destiny. Allow yourself to experience that future reality in the present moment until you convince your body to emotionally believe that the event is coming to pass now. Open your heart and experience the joy of your new life before it actually manifests….