Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself:
How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One
by Dr. Joe Dispenza
A Summary of Key Points
Your thoughts shape your reality. Change requires breaking your addiction to familiar emotions and ingrained thought patterns. People get trapped in the ‘known past’ and the ‘predictable future’. They wake up, think the same thoughts, feel the same emotions, and act the same way… and so their lives never really change.
Prune the Old Self/Leaving Habits of the Past Behind (meditation is very useful and helps install a new emotional baseline)
Habits are built through repetition and emotional reinforcement. You must interrupt the habitual neural network by:
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- Becoming aware of unconscious thoughts and reactive behaviors
- Going to the balcony to observing your behaviors and the emotions and thoughts behind them
- Feeling the emotions tied to your identity—and then detaching from them
- Feeling familiar emotions without acting on them weakens the neural circuits tied to your past self.
Creating the New Self
- Visualize who you want to become: your ideal emotional state, values, and behaviors.
- Generate elevated emotions (gratitude, joy, love) to wire this new self into your brain.
- The combination of clear intention (thought) and elevated emotion (feeling) sends a stronger signal into the quantum field.
Reconditioning the Body
- The body will resist change. It will crave old emotional states.
- Your task is to sit in discomfort without reacting—to “teach the body emotionally what the future feels like.”
- It’s not enough to think positively; you must feel and embody the new reality.
- Thinking one way while feeling another (e.g., thinking “I’m abundant” while feeling fear) sends mixed signals to the field.
- Over time, the body becomes aligned with the mind.
Closing Quotes:
“The armor we put on to survive childhood is the same armor that suffocates us in adulthood.” – Glennon Doyle, Untamed
“You can’t heal in the same environment that made you sick, especially if that environment is in your head.” – Thema Bryant (psychologist)
“Defenses are not inherently bad. They’re brilliant strategies… until they start running the show in environments where you’re no longer in danger.” – Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy
As always, I share what I most want and need to learn. – Nathan S. Collier
Note: Every effort has been made to properly source any 3rd person material. I am, however, a voracious reader. If anyone finds any unattributed material, pls let me know asap and I will be delighted to give credit where credit is due.
“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832