Lessons Learned from Joe Dispenza

Notice the familiar patterns you repeat, then practice a different future.

I found Joe Dispenza while watching television in bed. My husband was asleep, I was looking through Amazon, and I came across a presentation called Mind Over Matter. I watched it and wanted more.

I bought his books, studied his work, and went to hear him speak. So much of what he teaches resonated with what I teach. There are differences in some of our words and details, but his work gave me another way to understand how thoroughly we practice being who we are.

Of his books, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself is the one I recommend starting with. That title gets right to the work: if you want a different experience of your life, you have to practice something other than the thoughts and feelings you have already memorized.

You can become familiar with feeling bad

One of the ideas that stopped me as I was reading was his description of the body becoming accustomed to guilt. You can consciously decide you want to feel differently while your body is used to the old feeling.

Think about how many things you do automatically. You drive, brush your teeth, and carry out familiar routines without deliberately thinking through every movement.

We can do the same thing emotionally. We practice worrying, judging, complaining, and blaming. We keep thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings, and reacting in the same ways. Eventually, that experience seems like who we are.

Then we decide to think positively and wonder why one new thought doesn't change everything. We are asking ourselves to practice a different state of being after years of rehearsing the familiar one.

Your thoughts and feelings work together

Dispenza describes thoughts as the language of the brain and feelings as the language of the body. Together, they create a state of being.

This is why I spend so much time teaching you to feel on purpose. It isn't enough to repeat words while continuing to feel the emotion created by your old thinking.

Can you practice gratitude? Can you feel joy, excitement, enthusiasm, appreciation, compassion, or empowerment? Can you let your body experience those emotions rather than only understand them intellectually?

We often wait for something outside us to give us a reason to feel good. We want a circumstance to change first. But our thoughts create our feelings. We can learn to generate a different emotional experience without waiting for the world to provide it.

That feeling affects what we do. What we do affects the results we create. Deliberately practicing an emotion is a huge part of this work.

Feeling good and creating the result you want

I also want you to notice that a feeling can feel good and still drive an action you don't want.

Desire is a good example. The desire to overeat or overdrink can feel compelling and pleasurable. Acting on it can create a result you don't want in your life.

So the work isn't simply to chase whatever feels good in the moment. It is to understand which thoughts are generating the desire and whether acting from it creates the result you want.

When you change the thinking that creates the desire, you change the emotional drive behind the action. You aren't only trying to control the action while leaving the desire untouched.

Stop rehearsing the past as your future

Another idea I loved from Dispenza is that a memory without its emotional charge becomes wisdom.

We can remember an experience and learn from it without continuing to recreate the same emotional state. But if we repeatedly think about the past in the same way, we repeatedly feel it. We keep practicing a past version of ourselves.

His work asks us to put our attention on the experience we want to create. New input matters. New thinking matters. Practicing a new feeling matters.

He describes a new state of being creating a new personality and a new personal reality. What I take from that is how much of our familiar life we continue creating through familiar thoughts, feelings, and reactions.

You can't keep living in your past emotionally and expect to experience an entirely different future.

Meditation as a practice

Meditation is central to Dispenza's work. He teaches it as a way to move beyond the analytical mind, become aware of familiar programs, and practice a different state of being.

His approach also includes a spiritual understanding of creation: holding a vision of the future, feeling whole in the present, and surrendering that creation to a greater mind. That is part of the way he teaches manifestation.

What resonated with me was the practice of bringing your thinking and feeling together. Instead of waiting for your future to arrive so you can feel grateful, you practice gratitude now. Instead of waiting for an outside reason to feel empowered, you practice empowerment.

This takes more than wishing. It requires becoming familiar with the person you are choosing to be.

Have compassion for your brain, then teach it

Our brains are very good at looking for danger and helping us survive. I think understanding that gives us compassion for the way we think.

But we can also learn to think in ways that help us thrive. We can become conscious of the programs we have been practicing and decide what we want to practice next.

That's what I love about this work. You can study your mind, understand your emotional habits, and teach yourself a different experience. You don't have to keep rehearsing the same thoughts and feelings simply because they are familiar.