2007
Evolve Your Brain
His first major book, about how the brain forms habits and how we can use neuroplasticity to change long-standing patterns of thinking and feeling.
Learn · Manifestation
Joe Dispenza: breaking the habit of being yourself
One of today's most popular teachers on changing your mind and your life: his main ideas, how to bring his practices into daily life, and his books.
Who is Joe Dispenza?
Dr Joe Dispenza is an American author, lecturer and chiropractor. He became widely known after appearing in the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!?, and he now runs workshops and meditation retreats around the world.
By his own account, his interest began after a serious cycling accident in his twenties, when he chose to recover without the recommended surgery and spent hours a day visualising his spine healing. His books combine ideas from neuroscience, meditation and spirituality into a practical message: you can change the habitual thoughts and feelings that keep recreating the same life.
Dispenza's main ideas
Your personality creates your personal reality
How you think, act and feel is your personality, and it shapes the life you experience. To change your life, you have to change those habitual patterns.
Living in the past
Most people wake up and think the same thoughts and feel the same feelings as yesterday. Dispenza says that keeps them living in the past and recreating it.
The body becomes the mind
When feelings like stress, guilt or worry are repeated for years, the body becomes used to them, almost addicted. That's why change can feel so uncomfortable at first.
Neurons that fire together, wire together
Repeated thoughts build strong connections in the brain. Practising new thoughts, rather than rehearsing old ones, gradually builds new patterns.
Mental rehearsal
Imagining the person you want to become in detail, again and again, prepares your brain and body to act that way.
Elevated emotions
He teaches that feeling gratitude, joy or love before the outcome arrives is the signal that you've already changed, much like Neville's feeling of the wish fulfilled.
Meditation beyond the analytical mind
In his meditations you go past constant thinking into a quiet, open state where he believes change is easiest.
Bringing Dispenza's work into daily life
His core daily practice can be simplified like this:
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Become aware
Notice the thoughts, feelings and habits you repeat each day, especially first thing in the morning.
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Decide who you won't be
Name the old self you want to leave behind: anxious, people-pleasing, stuck.
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Define the new self
How would the new you think, act and feel? Be specific.
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Meditate
Each morning, close your eyes, let go of the old self and rehearse being the new one.
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Feel it first
Feel gratitude and joy for the new life as if it is already here, before there's any evidence.
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Live it
Carry that state into your day and act from it, especially when you're tempted to go back to the old feelings.
Where hypnosis fits in
Dispenza's meditations and hypnosis have a lot in common: both quiet the analytical mind so the deeper patterns become easier to change. Many people find meditating alone hard at first. In a session I guide you there, and RTT looks for where the old feelings first began, so you're not only rehearsing the new self but releasing what kept you in the old one.
Joe Dispenza's books, and what each one is about
Start with Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, his most practical book.
2012
Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself
His most popular book. It explains why we keep recreating the same life and gives a step-by-step meditation to let go of the old self and create a new one.
2014
You Are the Placebo
Uses the placebo effect to explore how beliefs and expectations can influence the body, with meditations to change beliefs and perceptions.
2017
Becoming Supernatural
His more mystical book, about meditation, elevated emotions and mystical experience, with stories from his workshop students.
Joe Dispenza draws on science to explain his ideas, and some of his scientific claims are disputed by researchers. I share his work as a set of practices many people find transformative, not as medical science. Please don't stop medical treatment on the strength of any book, and always work with your doctor for health conditions.
Ready to become the new you?
Book a free 20-minute call. We'll talk about the old pattern you want to leave behind and the best way to change it.