Shawn Stevenson : Welcome to The Model Health Show. This is fitness and nutrition expert Shawn Stevenson and I am so grateful for you tuning in with me today.

I don't know about you, but I love movies. I am a big fan of movies ever since I was a kid and just going on these epic adventures, and the characters, and the stories, it's just such a great medium to communicate a message. And there was a time in my life, and I know this might be true for you maybe, there was a time where I started to dive in deep on different documentaries and looking at different aspects of reality from very tangible things to conspiracies.

And there was a documentary that really, really baked my noodle. Now, full disclosure, I'm a very curious human being, all right. And so being a very curious person and just a fan and a lover of movies, I've only fallen asleep on 2 movies, ever, in my life. The first one was Sleepy Hollow.

I don't know if it was the name, I don't know if it was the vibe, I don't know, but I fell asleep on Sleepy Hollow twice. All right, the same movie, so it still counts as one, twice. I went to the movie theater which who falls asleep in the movie theater, right? Now, that was the first movie I fell asleep on.

The second movie I fell asleep on, this was around 2005. 2002 big transformation of my health and I had still been trying to figure out like how did this actually take place because it wasn't just a change in my activities, in the food that I was eating and the exercise that I was doing and my improved sleep, but it was a change in my thinking.

And how can I help to replicate this in more people? But some messages you have to be ready for. And so my mother in law gave my then-girlfriend and I this movie, this documentary called "What The Bleep Do We Know." That's the actual title, not putting a bleep in, it's "What the Bleep Do We Know." And I put it in, I'm watching and I fell asleep.

I'm like, "What is this quantum, whatever," like you know, I just was not ready for it. Cut to, I begin to do meditation training with my mother in law and just looking at things from a new perspective, really waking up to my potential and kind of seeing the internal world that was a causative factor in my external changes that I was seeing in my life, but there were still a lot of the problems, a lot of things that I was struggling with.

And so, but now my mind was awakened, through the meditation process I became aware that I was aware, and I wasn't just a victim of my thoughts, I thought that my thoughts were me and that was the end of the story. Now I realize that there was this an awareness there and I could change my thoughts, I could choose to think and feel different ways.

And so now we put "What the Bleep" on and my job, like I had to hold my jaw from just hanging on the floor, it was the most incredible thing I've ever seen, up until that point. And it just really affirmed and spoke to so many things that I was seeing in my reality and so many things that I had questions about what I was wanting to improve on.

And it had such a big impact on me, but specifically, there was one person in that film who really spoke to me and his name is Dr. Joe Dispenza. And when I started The Model Health Show, I had a very short list of people who've had a big impact on my life and he was on that list that I wanted to have on the show for you, that I wanted to be able to share my resources, my teachers with the rest of the world.

And so in truth, I just put that list together and I just moved on and we've been moving and shaking and making a big impact and helping a lot of people and changing a lot of lives and diving on into different subject matters over the years. And I kind of forgot, I kind of forgot about Dr. Joe being on that list.

And then maybe about a year or 2 ago I started to see him popping up on some of my friends' shows and I'm like, "Oh no, that's my guy, I know him, I know the works." I'm like really attached, they're just putting their toes in the water. I really know this guy and these principles and things he's been teaching, I would love, it rekindles that flame of wanting to have him on to be able to share this in a different perspective, maybe go a little bit deeper than he's talked about before previously.

And so I'm really excited about this because him being here today is an affirmation of the fact that we create our reality. I saw this guy on a television screen, I had no wherewithal of how I was going to get from my one-bedroom college apartment with my broken down couch because you know, prior I was a little overweight and I broke the couch— but anyways, my broken down couch and seeing this man on a movie screen on a television screen to having him be in my world, in my reality and to shake his hand and to bring him here on the show.

I didn't see the steps from there to here. But this is just an affirmation that if you hold something top of mind that you want to have in your reality, you don't know the in-betweens, I didn't know podcast exists, it wasn't a thing; I didn't know that I was going to be more than somebody who's working as a personal trainer and helping people in that domain or becoming a nutritionist, I didn't, I couldn't see beyond that.

I know I want to help people, but there are so many things that seem like magic, like these magical moments, these synchronicities that happen in between from the outcome you want and the decision. And what you're going to learn today is that this stuff in between is— in many ways, it's none of your business, the important thing is to have that outcome in mind, your intention, that thing that you want to achieve and making the decision to make it happen.

And so we're going to dive into a different reality today, we're going to be talking about quantum physics, we're going to be talking about particles and waves, but we're going to talk about this in a way that has context and relevance for our life today. I am really, really excited about this episode.

And, of course, just talking about the mind itself, we also have to be able to fuel and feed our incredible brain as well, we don't have a hungry brain. And I was just doing some research and I came across a study from researchers at Yale University, and listen to this: there are very few nutrients that can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and get into the VIP section in your body which is your brain, right? Just a handful of receptor sites that allow stuff in there.

Your brain is mostly fat, you know this, but this doesn't mean that all the fats that you eat go to your brain, it doesn't work like that, it's very selective in the types of fats that it will absorb into use. Yale University researchers found that MCTs are able to cross the blood-brain barrier and to feed your neurons, number one.

They also found that these MCTs being able to directly feed your brain cells are also a very powerful treatment that's being utilized right now and they're trying to pin this down for protection against Alzheimer's disease and dementia. So there's a lot of value to be taken from medium-chain triglycerides and these MCT oils. But, of course, we want to get the best quality, we want to get them from great resources, Earth-grown nutrients, coconut-derived, not palm, better for your body and better for the environment.

And the MCT oil that I use, that I've been using for years and it tastes so good, is the MCT oil from Onnit. They have the emulsified MCT oils, they have the traditional MCT oil which is kind of this clear liquid, but the emulsified MCT oil as well which is sort of like a coffee creamer, really looks and functions in that way.

You don't need to like have a fancy contraption to try to blend MCT oil into it, to throw it into a blender, you can literally just use— sometimes you've been on the road and you use a little straw or a little fork or something you whip it real quickly, or they also, there's hand froth, I don't know if you guys have a hand frother, amazing, life-changer.

But bottom line is it mixes easily with your teas, coffees whatever you're into, smoothies and the important thing is that this is something that we all really do need to pay attention to to start adding into our nutrition protocol, to give our bodies and feed our brains. All right, super-powerful stuff and the research, like there's a lot more clinical trials going on right now on the benefits of MCTs because they're really remarkable.

Again, it's one of those VIP nutrients that can cross the blood-brain barrier and feed your brain cells. So onnit.com/model you get 10 percent off, that's O-N-N-I-T.com/model, for 10 percent off the MCT oil, their incredible protein, their Alpha brain, their Shroom Tech sport as well for your pre-workout, so many cool things. Pop over there, check them out, onnit.com/model. Now let's get to the Apple podcast review of the week.

iTunes Review: Another 5-star review titled "Appreciation" by monique_moments. "When I started listening to the podcast The Model Health Show so was my favorite and I still love the educational episodes. I think my favorite episode was about the fizzy drinks and their history.

For some reason, that one stands out all the time. The amount of information about the human body for free is great. I've always taken an interest in the way my body works. Listening to The Model Health Show is a call to action continue making good nutritional choices for a healthy lifestyle."

Shawn Stevenson: Awesome, thank you so much for leaving me that review over on Apple podcasts, and what a cool name as well. And just thank you for that acknowledgment. And everybody if you've yet to do so, please pop over to Apple podcasts and leave a review for the show, it means so much. And on that note, let's get to our special guest and topic of the day.

Our guest today is Dr. Joe Dispenza, and he's an international lecturer, researcher, corporate consultant, author of several books and an esteem educator. As a researcher, Dr. Joe's passion can be found at the intersection of the latest findings from the fields of neuroscience, epigenetics and quantum physics to explore the science behind spontaneous remissions.

And as I've seen in my own life, spontaneous remission really just means that they don't know how it happened, but Dr. Joe has really been diving in to see what is the science behind these incredible healings that take place.

And I think that you're going to be very, very empowered with what you hear today. And again, I am just really pumped about this, excited and grateful for that outcome that I once saw and that decision that I made to finally intersect and we're going to jump into this conversation with Dr. Joe Dispenza.

Dr. Joe, I am pumped to have you here today and for me, I'm a big fan, I have been listening to your audiobook, your recordings, your lectures for a while. But I don't know your story, like your superhero origin story, like little Dr. Joe, was he always interested in the bigger picture. When did you start to kind of fall in love with this?

Dr. Joe Dispenza: Well, I came from a really great family, my parents were always supporting my brother and I in being curious and investigating. And so they wanted the best for their kids, so they always provided opportunities for us to really question reality and then take a step.

My father's theory was if anybody else can do it, you can do it, so I was encouraged throughout my life about potential. But I mean, in order for us to wake up some of us need a wake-up call. And when I was in my twenty's I got run over by a truck in triathlon and broke 6 vertebrae in my back and was told I'd never walk again. And so that was a defining moment for me, because I was weighing what I knew against what I didn't know, and the recommendation was a radical surgery where they put in stainless steel rods, in my case it would be from the base of my neck to the base of my spine to stabilize the compression fractures.

So I had 4 opinions from 4 leading surgeons in Southern California and they all said Harrington rod surgery or I'll never walk again. And I decided against the surgery, Shawn because I was in my twenty's and I just couldn't imagine living on addictive medication or just being restricted in some ways.

So I thought I had nothing to lose, so I just had this idea that there's a principle that says that power that made the body heals the body. And so I wasn't going anywhere, I wasn't doing anything and I thought if I could connect with this intelligence that's really, that's giving us life and begin to give it a plan or an instruction, to give it some template, and then when I was pleased with the design and then surrender that idea to a greater mind.

Because I couldn't do the healing, something innate in me would do that healing. And it worked. And I was back on my feet in about 10 and a half weeks and back into my life at 12 weeks. And then I started getting curious, like what happened, I mean, how did all this change.

And so you can't, you won't find those answers in conventional textbooks, you have to start looking outside the box, and looking at neural plasticity and epigenetics and psychoneuroimmunology and electromagnetism and in the quantum theory of reality.

And so it started me on this journey to really just see, well if it worked for me is it possible that it works for other people. So I started studying spontaneous remissions and interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the world that were treated conventionally and the unconventionally, they were staying the same then they got worse.

And then all of a sudden, they did something and they all of a sudden started to improve. And I wanted to know what the cause was that was producing that effect. And so I started doing the research, I wrote a book and then you know, it was in "What The Bleep" and then I noticed there was a shift after "What the Bleep".

And what I noticed was that people were asking, "How, how do you do it?" And I think that's a really important question because I think this is a time in history where it's not enough to know. This is a time in history to know how. And how is it going to affect us, how is it going to affect your life, how is it going to affect my life? What am I going to do with this information?

And so we started teaching workshops and teaching people how and how to change their brain waves and what is meditation, and do thoughts really become things and what are those principles. And we started seeing people were starting to heal, we started seeing people creating better jobs, better opportunities, more wealth.

And then we started seeing people having really profoundly mystical experiences, transcendental moments and when we started doing a lot of research we brought in a team of scientists and researchers. And my interest is to demystify that process that we can reproduce it.

And probably in the last 10 years we have made such great strides and we now know there's a formula, just on all the research that we've done that we can teach people how to begin to change their mind and really begin to produce an effect in their body and then ultimately create change in their life. And wow, what a great time to be alive.

Shawn Stevenson: Absolutely. I agree with that so much. And I think this is a good segue because talking about the mind and changing our mind in order to change what's happening with our bodies, our thoughts really do create our biology. But one of things I've heard you say is that our biology is redundant. So can you talk a little bit about that? How our thoughts create our biology?

Dr. Joe Dispenza: Well if you think about it, I mean it's really common sense, I mean some of the research shows that 90 percent of the thoughts that we think on a daily basis are the same thoughts as the day before.

So if you think that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny, and 90 percent of your thoughts are the same known thoughts that you're always thinking, then your life should stay the same, because the same thoughts lead to the same choices, the same choices lead to the same behaviors, same behaviors create the same experiences, the same experiences produce the same emotions, those same emotions tend to influence the way we think.

And our biology, our neurocircuitry, our neurochemistry, our hormones and even our gene expression is equal to how we think, how we act and how we feel. And how you think how you act and how you feel is called your personality. And your personality creates your personal reality, that's it.

So then it makes sense that if you want to create a new personal reality, a new life, you're going to have to change your personality, and you've got to start thinking about what you've been thinking about and change it. You have become aware of your unconscious habits and behaviors, even how you speak.

I mean, you have to look at the emotions that you live by every single day and decide, "Do these emotions belong in my future?" So many people try to create a new life as the same person. In order to create a new personal reality, you've got to change your personality.

So the principle in neuroscience says that nerve cells that fire together wire together, thinking the same way, making the same choices, demonstrating the same actions, creating the same experiences that stamp the same networks of neurons into the same patterns, all for the familiar feeling called you, and you do that for 10 years in a row.

We're going to hardwire your brain into a very finite signature because you're firing and wiring that way and that box in the brain, that becomes our personality, becomes our identity and by time we're 35 years old for the most part we've done something so many times that the body now knows how to do it as well as the mind and that's a habit.

So we have these unconscious programs of behaviors, automatic habits, redundant emotional reactions, hardwired beliefs, perceptions, attitudes that function just like a computer program— you press go and it runs automatically. So then when it comes time to change, thinking positively is going to do nothing because your body has been conditioned for the most part into a program in the past.

So the thought never makes it to the body because the body's on a different program. So how do we begin to influence the body so that the thought actually produces some type of change? So think about it, if you think an unhappy thought you're going to feel unhappy. If you think you're a failure you're going to feel like a failure.

Once you feel like a failure going to think you're a failure. And people get caught in these loops of thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking, and that redundancy is a conditioning process because all you need is an image or a picture, or a thought, and a feeling, a response, stimulus response and so the people tend to condition their brain and body into the past.

And so when it comes time to change, you've got to leave that familiar territory and any choice that you make if you said, "Hey, I'm going to eat a better diet, I am going to wake up early and work out, I'm going to do meditation," the moment you decide to do something differently— get ready because it's going to feel uncomfortable, it's going to feel unfamiliar, there's going to be someone uncertainty, you're not going to be able to predict the next moment.

That means you've left your known biology and you're stepping into the unknown. Now, theoretically that sounds great, but if the body has been conditioned into a familiar feeling that it's in the known, the moment used take it outside the familiarity it wants to go back to where it's comfortable.

So the body starts influencing the mind, and this is where people say, "Why don't you start your diet tomorrow?" "Why don't you start working out this evening?" "You're really never going to change, you're too tired, you have a headache, this doesn't feel right."

And this is where people talk themselves out of it because if they respond to that thought, that thought leads to the same choice which leads to the same behavior, it creates the same experience, it produces the same feeling and then they say, "This feels right." No, that feels familiar.

So going from one state of mind and body to another state of mind and body you've got to cross a river. And the hardest part about change is not making the same choice as you did the day before. Now, once people understand that they're going to be uncomfortable, then the question is what thoughts do you want to fire and wire in your brain?

What behaviors will you demonstrate and one day in the act of closing your eyes and rehearsing who you're going to be when you open your eyes, it begins to install neurological hardware in your brain to look like you've already done it. Now the brain, which is typically a record of the past, now becomes a map to the future. And if you keep doing it, the hardware begins to become a software program, and you start behaving differently.

And then if you can teach your body emotionally what the future will feel like, that means that you're not going to wait for your wealth to feel abundant or your success to feel empowered or your new relationship to feel love. In fact, the moment you start feeling abundant you're generating wealth; the moment you start embracing empowerment, you're stepping towards your success.

The moment you're in love with yourself and you're in love with life, you start creating equals in your life. Now that's causing and affecting your life . Many people, they already know how to do this but they usually wait for the worst thing to happen in their life before they get the wake-up call.

Shawn Stevenson: And that's actually my story. I spent many years just kind of believing that I was my mind, and just I realized once I started meditation process that I'd really not had a conscious thought my entire life, I was just going through the motions. And in the environment that I came from, there are a lot of unhealthy habits.

And so I found myself in a place where I broke my hip at track practice, just running time trial, a 20-meter time trial. And I was 15 years old, nobody stopped to ask how did the 15-year-old kid break his hip from running? It sounds very unusual. But it wasn't until about 4 years later things got so bad that I started having difficulty walking, and come to find out I had degenerative bone disease, degenerative disc disease. 2 herniated disk, just from living.

And so my doctors told me I had the spine of an 80-year-old man. And so very similar to your story, I saw 4 physicians and they recommended same thing, just be careful, wear a back brace, potential surgery. But after all of those "No's", I had to say "Yes" to myself at a point, and I had to change the way I was thinking. And for me, a big lead in was through food.

And so all of these mediums really do matter. And so for all of us, and this is what I want to ask you about— we think that when we want to get this new result, that we can just do it, we can just try. But what you're saying is you've got to be ready because a lot of hell's going to break loose once you try to change who you are, if you're not prepared by changing what you're thinking first.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: Yeah, we've actually studied this on functional scans, many times. You know, when we're looking at a person's brain in real-time when they're going through some type of change or transformation, you see this massive amount of disorderliness going on in the brain, like the person is really losing their mind, all the circuitry is coming unglued and there's all this cognitive dissonance taking place, that's the moment they want to quit, that's the moment they want to give up, that's the moment they don't believe in anything, they don't believe in themselves.

That is the prime moment where change takes place, right there, because that's the end they are on the edge there. So it's important for people to understand that if you're going about living every single day in the familiar life that you're living in and you don't have a vision of the future, then you'll continue to live in routine.

And if you wake up every morning and you do the same thing as you did the day before, over time your body is going to be on autopilot, and it's going to drag you into a predictable future based on what you did in the past. And many people lose their free will to a bunch of programs.

So then when you sit down and you become conscious of your unconscious thoughts, when you're in the program you're unconscious, right, so the moment you become conscious of that thought you're no longer the thought, you're observing the thought and you begin to objectify your subjective self, you start pulling out of the unconscious program.

And consciousness, awareness is the first step to do that. And so many people don't want to light a match in a dark place because all the sudden when they decide to be defined by a vision of the future, they're stepping out of the known, you're going to hear, "I can't, it's too hard, it's not going to work, what about this."

And those are the thoughts that are standing in the way between that person and that vision, and it has to come up. And if a person has been in the habit of unconsciously complaining and making excuses and feeling sorry for themselves and judging other people, that's their habit. The moment they become conscious of it, now they're out of the bleachers and they are on the field, right, because now you have to not let that thought slip by your awareness unnoticed.

And then if you're living in guilt or suffering or pain, or unhappiness, but you live that way every day and it just feels like you and all of a sudden you become aware, "Oh my God, I've been guilty for the last 10 years, I didn't even know it, it just felt like me". You're starting to separate yourself from your biology. And so you have to go through the process of unlearning before you re-learn and that 95 percent of who we are, that is what's stopping us from stepping into a new future.

So then if people then are waking up every single day and, think about this, the brain is a record of the past— if you wake up every morning and you start thinking about your problems and your problems are just memories that are etched in your brain that are connected to certain people and problems and certain objects and things, and certain times and places, the moment you start remembering your problems, you're thinking in the past, right.

And every one of those problems has an emotion associated with it and you start feeling bad or unhappy, now your body's in the past. So thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of your body, and how you think and how you feel creates your state of being.

So most people then, they start their day in the familiar past, then they get up and they run through a routine series of behaviors and their bodies now habituated on autopilot into a predictable future, that's the known, so the familiar past, the predictable future are both the known, there's only one place where the unknown exists and that's the present moment.

So then when you're creative, you've got to be present, you've got to pay attention to be creative, that defies or it goes against the programming. And so then there's this, there has to be some type of waging of intention that's greater than those programs, and most people they get uncomfortable, they'd rather just get on their cell phone or you know turn on the TV and watch a football game or distract themselves from that feeling.

But when people really make up their mind to change, they have to come up against those feelings, those habits, those hard-wired attitudes and it takes a great act of will but when we do it, the side effect is we see changes not only in our health but in our lives as well. And then we say, "Wow, that really worked." And now we're the example of truth, that's what makes it so cool.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, so the goal is to lose our minds.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: You literally have to lose your mind and create a new one.

Shawn Stevenson: That's so funny, I've never thought about it like that. And that's powerful. I mean, it also would seem like that from the outside world as well, your friends, family, when you're working on changing who you are, obviously, it's one of the things people say like you're losing your mind, and that's the goal.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: You should take it as a compliment, you should tell them, "I'm losing the mind that I need to lose."

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, I love that.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: Because you don't leave everything. You have certain skills, certain good habits, certain ways that you execute and you think you want to take that into your future. But don't take your lack or your insecurity, don't take your pain or your misery, that stays. And if you can't think greater than how you feel in your life then you're thinking in the past, and your life will stay the same.

So teaching people how to break out of the biology of their hardwired programs, the biology of the conditioning emotionally of their body, the biology of their habituations is a process that requires a great amount of energy and awareness, but people are doing it and they're doing it really successfully.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. I love that analogy of lighting a match in a dark place. And when you said it I thought about Lord Of The Rings, like Gandalf, he has a staff and there are all this darkness and he lights and there's like unpleasant things around them, right. And it's kind of like creating this opportunity to see this stuff that is kind of hidden in our minds.

And so when I started the process of meditation and I've done shows just talking about the science behind meditation, the benefits like it is just the stuff and the data in the clinical evidence, it's phenomenal, but what I don't talk about often is that it's not necessarily easy. I kind of had to learn how to live my life again after I was awake to the fact that I was awake in a sense.

And just kind of pointing back to when we light that and we see some of these negative qualities, for example, like it wasn't the fact that all these bad things were happening around me, it was me, like I had these negative perceptions about life, I was living my life— you talk about these patterns and personality traits, I believe that life was a struggle, like everything had to be hard. I couldn't just graduate from high school, I had to get kicked out of high school in order to graduate; I couldn't just graduate from college, I had to get kicked out first.

I couldn't just have the things I wanted, I had to go through all the struggle. And so I would manifest more of that and like that was a thing that switched for me, I started to think differently that, "What if I fall in love with this process," like even the challenges are fun now.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: That's how powerful we are. The story we tell ourselves is how we perceive the world. And so then when we create the difficulties in our life it reaffirms the belief that life is hard, that it's really someone out there that's doing it to us, that it's the circumstance in the past that created this.

Okay, let's take away the person that did it, let's shoot them to the moon, let's erase your past. Now, what are you going to do now? You still got to do something, right, you're still alive. And I say we already know how to do this, we already know how to do this, we're wired to be creators, we're wired to do this.

The thing that stops us for the most part in doing it is really the hormones of stress, because living in stress constantly is living in survival, and living in survival is living in an emergency. And an emergency it's not a time to create. An emergency is not a time to open your heart, it's not a time to learn, it's not even a time to sit still.

So most people then that are living in stress and living in survival, they can't believe in the future yet because it's not a time to create. So getting people to that point where they make up their mind and they make up their mind enough to begin to think, "There's got to be a better way, there's got to be something else."

That awakening process typically happens when people reach their lowest denominator, they hit rock bottom, because then they can see themselves through the eyes of somebody else. You feel so altered you're not returning any texts, you feel so altered you want to go to dinner with your buddies; you feel so altered you don't want to watch your favorite TV show, you're just disconnected.

And that's when you start observing yourself. But my message is why wait for that? I mean, you can learn change and pain and suffering or you can learn change and joy and inspiration. If you're waking up every morning being defined by a vision of the future instead of the memories of the past, and you get up and you're inspired from an elevated self now instead of a limited self, you could observe the old self from an elevated state instead of that diminished state, and people are doing that.

So they are aware of those thoughts, and yes, it takes effort and if it was easy everybody would be doing it. But just because you have a thought doesn't necessarily mean it's true. And when you start looking and observing those thoughts and I think you are like Gandalf because Gandalf also said, "You may not pass," when he meant like that's kind of severity when it comes to how we make up our mind about things, that's the kind of energy or intention that begins to create the biggest volume of change in our life.

I've interviewed thousands of people in our work that have healed from really serious health conditions. And I would say about 90 percent of them when I asked them, "So what happened?" The first thing they say all the time is, "I just made up my mind. I just made up my mind I was going to do this."

And they made a decision with such firm intention that the amplitude of that decision carried a level of energy that was greater than the hardwired programs in their brain and the emotional conditioning in their body, and the choice that they made caused their body to respond to a new mind.

In fact, the choice they made became a moment that they would never forget. It was an event and the stronger the emotion they felt the more they paid attention to the choice, and the sense they were remembering their future and the body emotionally was getting a sampling, a taste of the future. And they're aligned to that future.

And that's when the body's healing began, that's when the miracle started, right in that moment, that's how powerful we really are. Now, what if you did that every day? What if you made up your mind every single day you weren't going to get up from your meditation until you were that person you wanted to be, game on now.

Because you'd have to do battle with all the things that are not consistent with that and that's exactly how our brain works. So then if you want to be wealthy, you can't feel lack, you want to be a master and you can't judge your coworker; you want to be like somebody great in history then you better execute peace in every area of your life, that's the law. So you take the prayer out on the road now, you take the prayer, you're the living example of the prayer, that's what it matters the most.

And that's when people start getting suspicious and say, "Shawn, man, did you change your medication, I mean you're looking way too happy all of a sudden." Well, you're not relying on anything outside of you to bring you joy, you're overcoming yourself every day.

And people say to me, "Well why do you do your meditations in the morning?" I always would say, "Easy, because if I can overcome myself at the beginning of the day the rest of the day is easy." Because that's the biggest, that's the biggest mastery, right, is the self.

And so people are waking up to that and they enjoy the process of seeing when they make those types of changes. The feedback that's happening in their lives, the synchronicities, the opportunities, the coincidences, those serendipities. They're starting to happen and they're going, "Wow, I am powerful. Hey I am a creator," and nobody's excluded from the equation, that's what makes it so cool.

So people that are really sick, really, really sick, that are healing, they'll tell you that when they go to the doctor and the doctor said, "Where's the stage 4 cancer?" They'll tell the doctor, "It's in the old person, I'm somebody else." "Well, how did you do it?" "Well I downregulated the genes for a disease by overcoming these emotions and these behaviors and thoughts, and I upregulated the genes for health." The doctor kind of looks at him and was like, "Wow."

Because it is possible to do that, and we've actually measured it. We know that in 4 days you can really change your gene expression, genes that help restore balance for cancer cells and tumors, the genes that activate stem cells to repair cells that are damaged, genes for neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons in your brain. Genes for oxidative balance for the microtubules the cellular structure and the replication of cells, these are all activated in 4 days by people thinking differently, making different choices, doing different things, having new experiences, feeling new emotions, your genes actually change.

And so we're not doomed by our genes, we're not hardwired to be a certain way for the rest of our lives. We are marvels of adaptability and change. So then what does it mean the change? Change means then to be greater than your body, greater than the body that has been conditioned emotionally to be the mind. greater than the body habituated into a predictable future; to be greater than the environment, to be greater than the conditions in your life.

And if you're not being defined by a vision in the future and you wake up every morning, it makes total sense then when you see the same people and you go to the same places and you do the exact same thing at the exact same time. Now your personality is no longer creating your personal reality, your personal reality is creating your personality, because every person, every object everything every place is mapped neurologically in your brain.

And since you've experienced your boss, since you've experienced your coworkers, since you've experienced your X, the moments you've experience them at some point there was an emotion associated with them. So then all of a sudden people wake up and they're not aware of this but their environment is influencing the way they think and the way they feel.

So when things are going good they feel good, when things are bad they feel bad which means they're victims to their environment. "Why are you unhappy?— Well, this person made me unhappy." This means unconsciously that person is actually controlling the way I feel and the way I think, now I'm a victim to that circumstance.

So to change then is to be greater than that environment, so then you would have to reprogram the way you think and the way you'd feel to no longer return back to the same state of being. That's the mastery because it isn't just you're having a great meditation and then getting on the freeway and flipping everybody off or judging your coworker, you just returned back to the old self.

You've got to be able to maintain that modified state of mind and body your entire day and if you can, get ready because weird things are going to happen in your life. So the person who's starting to try it out in a curious way, like, "Let's just do the experiment, let's just see if I change my energy, I change the way I think and feel is it going to be some effect in my life?"

When they start seeing that, they're no longer like, "Oh, I got to go create my life today," they're actually excited to do it because they don't want the magic to end, they want to keep it going. Now, that's when it gets kind of cool because this is when you start believing in yourself and when you believe in yourself you believe in possibilities.

When you believe in possibilities you've got to believe in yourself. When you stop believing in possibilities you can't believe in yourself, so people are waking up and going, "Wow—" it doesn't matter your skin color, it doesn't matter how rich you are, it doesn't matter how healthy you are, it doesn't matter how young you are, how old you are or in shape, out of shape.

Not even if you ever meditated before, it doesn't even matter, it's a formula. And you don't need 40 years of dedication to meditation to get it, you just got to understand the formula. And like playing ping pong or hitting a golf ball or dancing the salsa, you're going to figure it out sooner or later, and it's going to get easier and it's going to get fun. That's what we want for people.

Shawn Stevenson: Oh my goodness. There were several times that I got the chills. Of course, a lot of people know my story but to hear you articulate some of these things and nobody's ever said before in almost 400 episodes, I've mentioned them but you consolidated it in such a way that my rock bottom was sitting there and it was like a meta-perspective of myself.

And I could see myself sitting on the edge of the bed, holding these bottles of pills to knock myself out so I can sleep. And that's when I decided, I decided to get well in that moment, after I had gotten all those "No's".

Dr. Joe Dispenza: You'll never forget that moment, that is the moment that defined you.

Shawn Stevenson: It's crazy. And so that was that moment where I started to lose my mind, basically. I've never said those words before, but it's like, like you said, like I made up my mind. When you said that earlier, that the person, they say, "I made up my mind," that's exactly what happened, I felt chills in my body from that.

And so to fast forward that a little bit, getting back to something you said— actually we're going to step back to go forward but you mentioned the present moment and really this is where all the stuff is happening, but I think that that word can be a little bit vague. So can you define what that means for us?

Dr. Joe Dispenza: I'm so glad you said that, because it means you're engaged. I assert that if you're not in the present moment you're running a program, right? And paying attention is being present, and it's a skill just like anything else, the more you practice it the better you get at it.

And you know when someone's present with you in your life because they're paying attention to you and you know when they're not present with you because they're not paying attention to you. So where you place your attention is where you place your energy. So if you have all of your attention in the present moment, you're conserving a lot of energy to create with.

If I'm talking to you and you're thinking about where you going to go for lunch and who you're going to go with and how are you going to get there and I'm talking to you, you left the present moment and your attention went to some future, and your energy will go down and you won't be able to comprehend what I said.

If you start thinking about what you should have said at the staff meeting 3 days ago and I'm talking to you when your mind is back in the past you're siphoning energy out of the present moment into the past. So people are constantly siphoning their energy into a familiar past or a predictable future because that's where their attention is.

And the stronger the emotions that we feel to certain problems and conditions in our life the more we pay attention to them, so we give our power away to our acts, we give our power away to that big problem and that's creative energy that we should be able to use to create a new future.

So then when a person is sitting in a meditation and they're doing absolutely nothing and it's 8 o'clock in the morning and their body for the last 10 years has been going in traffic and getting angry and frustrated in traffic and now they're sitting in a meditation at 8 o'clock in the morning, the body's going to say, "Hey you're off schedule, I'm used to suffering and getting angry here."

So the body is going to start looking for that emotion and it's going to start influencing the mind, and it's going to start getting images and memories just so you could feel that emotion. Now, the person's back in the past, but if they become aware that they're siphoning energy out of the present moment into the past and they settle the body back down into the present moment, that's a victory.

And those victories add up and you're telling the body in that moment that it's no longer the mind, that you're the mind and that's a victory. And then people get frustrated and they say, "I can't meditate." "Oh really?" Well actually you're doing it right, that's actually what meditation is, you're doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing.

And then all of a sudden the body says, "Well, it's 8.15 now, this is when you normally go get something to eat and you have your coffee, and your body started to want to get up and do something, you become aware that your body wants to get up and move and you're in the meditation.

And you tell your body, "A-a, you bring it back to the present moment", you settle it back down, you are training the animal. That's a victory. Now you're executing a will that's greater than the program, because most people lose their free will to a program.

Now you're telling the body, "I'll tell you when we get up, not when you want to get up, you're not the mind, I'm the mind." And that's a victory. Now, we've done the research on this. If you keep doing this and you stay with it, sooner or later the body is going to surrender to a new mind.

And when that happens, Shawn, there's a liberation of energy, the body is freed from those habituations and those emotions, the body's going from particle to wave, from matter to energy and all of a sudden, you're dialing down the anger, you're dialing down the vigilance.

And the body now is being conditioned to a new mind. That is the present moment. And when you're in that present moment, something really amazing happens— you forget about you. All of a sudden you're not your face, you're not your culture, you're not your marital status, you're not your diet, you're not your past, you're basically just awareness, you're in the unknown, and that is the perfect place to create from.

So it turns out that when people do this properly they heal themselves of anxiety— why, because they are no longer obsessing about some future. When they find the present moment they heal from their depression because they're not hopeless and powerless in their past, the body's condition now.

And so then when they overcome themselves in their meditation and they step out into their life they are more present, they can connect, they are more patient, they are more loving because they overcome the animal part of themselves. And the beauty behind that is that all of the sudden— you're not predictable. All of a sudden, "Something's different about Shawn, I'm noticing he's not behaving the same way", you're out of the known, you're in the unknown.

And all of the sudden people, it's no longer what you're saying to them, it's who you are they're just kind of scratching their head going, "Hey, he looks like he's really happy I want some of that." And now we're out of the philosophical, theoretical realm, we're in the practical, which is where really the magic happens.

So the eternal present moment, the sweet spot of the generous present moment is the place we can create from, and when we are, when we're there, we disconnect from our bodies, we become nobody, we disconnect from people in our lives, we're not thinking about our ex or our boss. We are no-one.

We're not thinking about our cell phone or a computer, we are no-thing. We are not thinking about where we live, where we work, where we sleep we are no-where, and we're not thinking about the predictable future and the familiar past, we're a no-time. And when you're disconnecting or dissociating from everything known, you're in the unknown and that's where the magic happens.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, oh my gosh. I just want to shout out to everybody who's been working on themselves to experience some of this. I know a lot of people listening have touched many of these moments and to know, I just want to give everybody a little bit of a heads up, if you haven't, when people say those things like, "You've changed," or, maybe, "You forgot where you come from," say, "Thank you."

Because that means you're progressing. And I love, I was going to ask you about this like now that we understand that we are really a function of the personality that we've created, for me, immediately comes up it can be scary to change the personality, the person that I am, that I know, that I'm comfortable with in and of itself.

But also I understand a personality is really a function of our behaviors and our patterns and things that we've been accustomed to. Changing that personality, again, it starts by having those little moments of victory. So I was going to ask you like how do we change all this? How do we change the way that we feel habitually? How do we change our habitual thoughts? Is that part of it, with meditation?

Dr. Joe Dispenza: The word meditation means to become familiar with, that's exactly what that symbol means, familiarization. So if you're sitting in your meditation and your brain is going, "You can't quit it's too hard," you're becoming familiar with those thoughts, that's meditation. There's no such thing as a bad meditation, there's just overcoming yourself.

You're sitting there and your body wants to get up and do things and check your email and check your texts and you become aware that it's doing that, you become familiar with that, you're in meditation. If you're realizing that you're angry and frustrated and resentful and all you're doing is sitting there, that's in there, now you're becoming familiar with that old self, that's a good thing.

And if you start saying what thoughts do I want to fire and wire in my brain and you keep firing and wiring them, you are going to become familiar with those. You start reviewing who you're going to be when you open your eyes and you keep reviewing it, you keep reviewing.

You keep firing and wiring it's going to become familiar to you, and if you trade resentment and impatience for gratitude and freedom and joy, you start making those chemicals in your meditation every single day. I swear to you, you'll get familiar with that.

So the process of change is unlearning and relearning, it is breaking the habit of the old self and reinventing a new self. And we use meditation as a way to change our brain and body to be different, be greater than the environment, be greater than our emotions and habits and be greater than a predictable future and the familiar past.

Meditation is a way then to get us in the right state of mind and body, so when we present ourselves to the world, we have a better expression of it and then practicing and staying aware your entire day, so that you can actually master something about yourself. And what's the side effect of that? You're more in love with you because you overcame you.

And as you overcome and you overcome and you keep overcoming, you going to become somebody else. And so the beauty behind that is then your life begins to change in really mysterious and unusual ways. And people say, "Oh my God I was so happy I forgot about my back pain/ my neck pain," or, "I forgot about my food allergies," or whatever people are dealing with.

Something biologically shifts in them. And they're freer, they're more whole, they're less separate, they feel more pleased and satisfied with themselves and they really don't care what people think of them. And they really stop judging other people because they're not judging themselves any longer.

So you can only talk around these concepts, you really have to really apply them to really begin to see the fruits of your efforts. But common people around the world are doing the uncommon because of it.

Shawn Stevenson: And I think it's important for us to realize and I really want you to talk about this, that the possibility of that life that you want already exists.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: Yeah, this is a big thing for people to wrap their head around because you'd have to step out of the classical physics of the Newtonian world where we live in this realm of 3-dimensional reality and we experience with our senses and everything has height and depth and width, and we narrow our focus on the material world and we navigate in this way.

And this realm has an infinite amount of space, space is eternal. And we experience time as we move through space, so we move from one point of awareness— I'm here, the door is over there, that's another point of awareness. And as I move my body from one point of consciousness to another point of consciousness, as I move through space I experience time.

So if we're going to create matter to matter, 3-dimensional reality and we're going to get things done, it's just going to take time for us to get the new house and new car because we've got work and save our money and do all that stuff. Well, that's playing by the rules of Newtonian physics in 3-dimensional reality.

When you play it by the rules of the quantum, in the quantum there's an infinite amount of time. Now time is eternal. Now imagine if you had an infinite amount of time, how many things could you get done? An infinite number of things equal to your thoughts, right? That's the quantum.

So the quantum is time is eternal and there's all possibilities exist in the present moment in the quantum. So in 3-dimensional reality, Newtonian physics, it's about the predictable. The quantum is immaterial, nothing's local yet in space in time, all possibilities exist as frequency, as energy, as vibration, as information, as consciousness, in the realm of thought. So in the quantum, anything is possible.

And it's no different than looking in a dressing room where there's mirrors this way and mirrors this way and you see an infinite number of you's, there's an infinite number of possible realities where one small thing is changed, just one small thing, you shave with your left hand today, now you're in a different reality. You did your meditation, you've connected, you come back, you've just moved out of that dressing room and now you're in a dressing that looks just like that but something's different.

Your wife still looks the same, everybody looks the same, but all of a sudden, here's that phone call, here is that email, here is that opportunity. Now I'm in a whole new dimension, right? So in that quantum realm then, because it's non-local, we have to actually create not with our bodies, we have to dissociate from our bodies, we can't enter the quantum field as a somebody, we have to enter as a no-body.

So teaching people how to pass through the eye of the needle is that moment they become no-body, no-one, no-thing, now-here, no-time, and that's the moment they're pure consciousness. Now, teaching people how to create from the field instead of from matter has taken me many, many years but now people that are doing it are seeing those kinds of instantaneous changes taking place.

Because when they begin to change their energy and all potentials in the quantum field exist as electromagnetic potentials and thoughts of the electrical charge and feelings are the magnetic charge and how you think and how you feel is broadcasting information on a daily basis.

So when a person changes their thoughts and feelings and they are creating from the field, when there's a vibration a match between their energy and that potential in the quantum field and they're creating connected to the source, and that source energy is actually connecting everything material, they no longer have to go anywhere and get it.

In fact, now they're actually going to collapse time and space or the experience is going to be drawn and now they are the magnet, that's when they start drawing experiences to them. Now they're not going anywhere to get them, now they're coming to them, that's when it gets fun.

Shawn Stevenson: Listen guys, I hope that your mind is being blown like mine is and we're going to talk about a little bit of a highlight because like he said he's been trying to figure this out and teach this for many years and now he's developed a level of mastery that is just bar none. But we're going to talk about some of the highlights of this process to change your results, to change your reality and we'll do that right after this quick break. So sit tight, we'll be right back.

I was just riding in the car with my family. It was my wife and my 2 sons, Jorden who is 19 and my youngest son Braden who is 8. And Jorden was talking about how in his last year of high school he was getting that coffee hitter, like I had no idea that from time to time he would pick up a little bit of that crackbucks, Starbucks.

And he was just like, because he's not really one of those people that likes coffee necessarily, but he was just like, "Some days, you know dad, you like get up and you are just like, 'Well, not today', but then you have that coffee and you're like, 'Today, today is the day'."

And it's so funny because when I was in high school I never saw anybody drink coffee, but before Jorden got his first car, I'd drop him off at school every day and I would see the students just walking in, holding their crackbucks cups, right. It's just like it's being bred into our culture at younger and younger ages.

But the reality is, cultures throughout the world have been enjoying and utilizing coffee for centuries, right, and in childhood. And it's only recently that this mass production. mass quantity, lower quality has become so pervasive.

And so now, not only are you getting the conventional coffee, but you're also getting a lot of toxicity along with it, the mold, the pesticides, the herbicides and this is creating an atmosphere where the benefits, the potential benefits of coffee are now going down and people are just going to it because it's a source of caffeine or it's a source of sugar, right.

Because a lot of people don't even truly enjoy coffee, they love the stuff that's in it, right, the sugar and the cream and those things. But for me, and what I've been really directing people to because I was just not a fan of coffee, is let's get coffee but let's upgrade it, tremendously, by utilizing some of these powerful medicinal mushrooms along with the coffee.

And I do that through Four Sigmatic, and their incredible mushroom formulas, their mushroom coffee. Now when people hear about mushroom coffee, medicinal mushrooms, they might come out, "Well, what kind of mushrooms are those, Shawn?"

I'm not talking about psychedelic mushrooms, I'm not talking about culinary mushrooms; I am talking about the category of medicinal mushrooms. These mushrooms have been utilized, again, literally for centuries and this one, in particular, has documentation from over 2,000 years ago with Cordyceps and now today, what is so beautiful is that we have our clinical evidence to affirm the efficacy that our ancestors knew about many, many centuries ago.

And so this was a study and this was published recently in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, tested 30 healthy test subjects for 6 weeks to record the effects of Cordyceps on their performance in their sport.

And the group that added Cordyceps to their daily regiment had twice the oxygen intake of the control group and this oxygen again is essential for supplying nutrients to your cells, for preventing fatigue and buildup of lactic acid. And another study done by the same group showed that there was an overall 9 percent increase in aerobic activity, in aerobic performance from taking and utilizing Cordyceps.

Now, this is real whole food, Earth grown nutrient sourced ingredient, this isn't a hyper stimulant which caffeine in and of itself can be. And what Four Sigmatic was able to do is to reduce the amount of caffeine and add in another natural adaptogen and supporter of your energy that really helps to create this balanced energy.

You'll never have those crashes or these strange, crazy coffee jitters that you can get when you utilize Four Sigmagic. So pop over there, check them out, get your hands on some, like yesterday. It's foursigmatic.com/model, that's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com/model, you get 15 percent off the Cordyceps coffee.

The Lion's Mane coffee, if you really want to focus on that mental fortitude because the Lion's Mane mushroom, this was from the University of Malaya found that Lion's Mane is able to actually create new brain cells, that's right, it has neurogenesis capabilities, literally the creation of new brain cells, and it is found to be neuroprotective and now it's being studied for use for traumatic brain injuries as well.

Wow, like you can't get that from crackbucks, but you can get that from Four Sigmatic. Alright, so pop over there, check them out, foursigmatic.com/model for 15 percent off everything. If you're not a fan of coffee, they've got the mushroom coffees and they're just straight mushroom elixirs as well, so whether it's Cordyceps, Lion's Mane, Reishi, you can get the real thing.

Dual extracted, you're not getting this from other companies, they are doing a hot water extract and an alcohol extract to actually get all the nutrients you're looking for. Alright, so pop over there, check them out, foursigmatic.com/model. Now back to the show.

We're back and we're talking with Dr. Joe Dispenza, the author of pretty much every book that I love. I've got "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself" right here right now, and I'm listening to "Becoming Supernatural" on audiobook simultaneously.

So just packing as much as I can in here. And before the break we were talking a little bit about being able to actually change our reality, to change our results because everything that we can imagine, if we can imagine it— it's possible. And that's really, really powerful and something to wrap our minds around, but something specifically in "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself" that you said.

Because I did a show talking about the science of gratitude, but something you said just stuck out and I wish that I had known this before. So in the book you state that when you express gratitude for something that hasn't happened yet, "You are moving from cause and effect waiting for something outside of you to make a change inside of you to causing an effect so you're moving from cause an effect to causing an effect, changing something inside of you to produce an effect outside of you." Right? So let's talk about how gratitude plays into this, because I think it's very practical.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: Yeah. Well, this took me a long time, Shawn, to figure out because I think that when people say want a new job, or they want to new relationship, or they want to be healthy, they're actually waiting for their health to improve to feel gratitude. They are waiting for their new relationship to feel joy and gratitude and thankfulness.

They're waiting for the new career to happen and once it happens then they celebrate and feel gratitude. Well if you believe that your thoughts and feelings produce an effect in your life and you're living in the lack every single day waiting for it to happen, you're separate from the experience.

So if you think about the emotional signature of gratitude, when you are receiving something that you like that's pleasurable, you've just gotten or receive something that is pleasurable, something just happened to you or something's happening to you that you like, you say thank, you feel gratitude.

So the emotional signature of gratitude is that something has already happened and it is the absolute perfect state of receiving, it is the absolute state of receivership. So here's an example. A person gets a diagnosis. The diagnosis is something like cancer the first moment they hear that word they feel fear, they feel a change in their internal state and they pay attention to what the doctor says, they take a snapshot and they create that memory, they will remember the moment the doctor said that.

So now they're in fear, they're scared and they're going to think positively or they're saying, "I'm going to beat this thing." Well, if they're feeling fear they can only accept, believe and surrender to the thoughts equal to their emotional state. Fear thoughts will be the only ones that will make it in there.

Now if the person changes fear to gratitude as an example and they really start training the heart, we can measure when a person feels gratitude what happens to their heart, the heart gets regulated, it starts beating more coherently, it starts increasing energy to the brain, it starts creating ambient field around the body, this is when your heart starts working for you.

When a person starts feeling gratitude, then the emotional signature in the body is that something's happening to them, or something's just happened to them. So if you're in a state of gratitude, you're in a state of receiving then the thoughts that you think will make it to the body and program the autonomic nervous system into a different destiny, so just in 4 days we found that when people 10 minutes a day, for 4 days traded anger, frustration, fear all those limited emotions for gratitude, that their immune system improved by 50 percent, they made immunoglobulins that made their body stronger.

Now if a pharmaceutical company had a drug that could strengthen immunoglobulin in your body would be on every television commercial during the news and yet your body, your nervous systems is the greatest pharmacist there is. So then your body is objective, it's your unconscious mind. It doesn't know the difference between a real-life experience that creates an emotion and the emotion that you're creating by thought alone.

So if your body is feeling gratitude it's believing that something's happening to you. So in the beginning you go, "Well I'm going to try gratitude," and then you think, "Well this feels really weird, why would I give gratitude until it happens?" Well because actually you've been hypnotized, you've been programmed that way.

But what if you change it around, the moment you feel gratitude your healing begins; the moment you feel grateful for your life, your life is going to change. Now you're causing an effect. So we have to embrace the emotion before it happens. Now, why? Well, let's just say you just had a great meditation and your heart is blown wide open and you feel grateful for life.

Or you're connected to the emotions of your new career, your new job, your new life. If you're feeling the feeling that your the new life has already happened you wouldn't be looking for it any longer, you would be feeling like it's already happened so you wouldn't look and be separate from it, you would feel connected to it.

And then if you lost it and you started feeling angry because of traffic I'd say, "Oh my God you're back to the unconscious program again of allowing something outside of you to control your feelings and thoughts, you're back to that victimization program."

So then when you start playing this game and you catch yourself and you self correct and you get back into gratitude and feeling it then your body is no longer preoccupied of when it's going to happen and where it's going to happen, if you feel it, it feels like it's already happened. So that's the moment you're no longer separate from it, that's the moment you start drawing or magnetizing experiences.

Shawn Stevenson: It's not just the thought of gratitude, it's a feeling.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: You've got to make it visceral. And we actually we use HRV monitors we put heart rate monitors on people we study them for 24 hours, we want to know if they're actually doing it. And we have great results, people could actually sustain that state for over 45 minutes, it's just a skill. Now why is that important? Because in their life they should be able to do with their eyes open, that's the game, right?

Practice with your eyes closed if you want to be distracted; get good at it, stand in line, sit in traffic, listen to your best friend complain. If you stay gratitude, you're doing something really well, you are self-regulating.

So much of our attention is on our outer environment and we want to put a little bit more attention on our inner environment, and we want to create that coherence between the outer world and our inner world that's when we start to master things.

Shawn Stevenson: Absolutely, yeah. We want to be able to mediate our emotions because I think it's so easy again to get trapped in those old patterns if you don't catch it and you can decide how you want to feel in that moment rather than being just a victim to circumstance.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: Listen, I react, we all react but the question is— how long are you going to react? Because those chemicals really last 90 seconds to 2 minutes after that you're faking it. You're keeping it going. So shortening the refractory period of your emotional reactions is really emotional intelligence.

If you are going to teach your kids anything teach them that, because if you don't it'll turn out to be part of their personality and they are going to work really hard the rest of their life to not be angry or to have a short temper or to be impatient. I think that people who self regulate, who mediate in that way internally are just generally happier people.

Shawn Stevenson: Absolutely, I can attest to that. So in creating our reality and visualizing an outcome for ourselves, I think it's really important like that crossing the river process. You say something in breaking the habit of being yourself that is so profound and this is so important for people to get. You say that to change a reality those outcomes that we attract to ourselves have to surprise and even astonish us in a way in which they come about.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: Yeah, this is the fun part about life. I mean, most people are expecting the worst thing to happen to them, they're bracing themselves for whatever it is around the corner that's going to go wrong. Because in survival, if you prepare for the worst you're going to survive. But if we're creating something new and unknown, creating a new thing in your life it can't come in a way that you can predict or expect because if you can predict it or expect it is the known.

So then the moment you start trying to figure out how it's going to happen or when it's going to happen you've got in the way. The universe just back softens, "Hey, Shawn wants to do it, go ahead." But when you are open to being astonished and surprised and it comes in a way that you haven't expected, you wake up you kind of wake up from the dream and you go, "Oh my God it happened."

And then you will look back at your entire past and you will want to change one thing in your past, we see this all the time because it brought you to the present moment, that's the moment the past no longer exists. So the surprise, the brain learns by mistakes and surprises which would you like a few of, how about some surprises?

So when it comes in a way that's just like out of nowhere and you haven't thought of and it's your creation and you're surprised, you're not unconscious any longer, you're more conscious, you're more awake, you're awakened and you're starting to believe, "Oh my God I'm the creator of my life. I'm not the victim of my life I actually did that."

And now you take your foot off the gas and you trust a little bit more that things are going to organize in a way that's right for you, that's the divine aspect in a starting to happen instead of that animal aspect. And so we have to lay down the very thing we used our whole life to get what we want for something greater to occur, and that is the greatest habit we have to break because we have to stay out of the way.

Shawn Stevenson: Oh, I love this so much, I do. That is really profound. Just going through this process and for me this moment of decision was 2002, "What the Bleep" showed up in my radar, I think was like 2005, something around there. And it was just affirming some of the things that I was experiencing and I never heard it spoken outside of like what was going on my head.

I knew that so many things in my reality were changing but the ways that they were happening were very unexpected. I had an intention about what I wanted but the way they were coming about was not up to me in a sense, because we can labor and try to make this outcome happen in the way that we think, but you're saying to allow some space so that this greater thing that we're connected to that we can really span—

Dr. Joe Dispenza: There's room for the unknown.

Shawn Stevenson: Yes. It reminds us that we're that powerful to affect those outcomes, but we need something to remind us.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: Well here's the deal. It's a habit. If you're creating matter to matter and you're living in stress and survival the chemicals of stress actually heighten your senses and we become materialists. So then when we're matter we're trying to change matter we're always trying to force the outcome, we're trying to control the outcome, we're trying to predict the outcome, we're in the way.

That's because you're experiencing separation so you try harder, you fight for it, you compete, you manipulate, you do everything you can because you got limited resources matter to matter. So then when you create from the feelings that are from matter and you feel connected to your vision and you understand that when your heart is open your heart is actually drawing the experience to you.

Now think about this— if you understood that on a gut level, where would you rush to? Do we know the place to rush to? You would never leave the present moment, you would just tune in and draw things to you, that's a very much healthier way to live.

So we force outcomes and we control outcomes because we're in the program of thinking that we're separate, but if you're feeling like your dream has already happened then you wouldn't be forcing anything, it would be relaxed in the present moment. Because the emotion of your future keeps you in the present moment.

And so yeah, it's not something you do in one swing, you've got to practice a lot, you've got to stay conscious, it's trial and error. But I tell you what, it's it's always worth the effort. Because when it finally happens, you don't even care that it happened any longer because you're so happy with yourself that you're no longer controlling, and the moment you just let go is the moment it always shows up, and that's the surprise like, "Wow, I did it," or, "Here it is."

And then that energy, that surprise or the synchronicity helps us with the next creation, we can use that energy and, wow I'm thrilled, I'm in awe, I'm in love, I'm inspired, I'm grateful. Hey, you sit down to create the next day, it's a little easier, and wow, there's even more miracles happen.

Oh well, let's keep it going who wants to stop that? That's when it gets kind of fun. So synchronicities and surprises that is the unknown, but the unknown isn't going to be something scary like we're used to, it's going to be something thrilling, something really ecstatic, something that's going to wake us up that's what we want.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. And we want more training, we want more of you to really learn how to do this because I know that it's a lot, this is just a tiny, tiny scratch of the service of what's possible. So can you let everybody know where they can connect with you?

Dr. Joe Dispenza: Sure. My website is just DrJoeDispenza.com. We have monthly teleclasses and Dr. Joe LIve, we have online courses, we have events, we have live streams for events workshops that we do, books, meditations, it's all there.

Shawn Stevenson: And so your live events are just getting sold out very quickly now, but if anybody has the opportunity, many of my friends have attended and it totally transformed their lives.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: I have to tell you, Shawn, that if you asked Joe Dispenza a year ago or 2 years ago if he would believe he would be witnessing what he's presently witnessing right now— I would probably, I would have said maybe once or twice in my lifetime, but when we have these week-long events, I mean there are miracles that are of biblical proportion.

I mean, I'm talking about blind people seeing, deaf people hearing, tumors disappearing, stage 4 cancer is going to remission, people stepping out a wheelchair, stroke patients that were paralyzed lifting their arms, blind people that were brain injured seeing again, I mean it's just insane.

I think I'm more surprised than anybody, to be honest with you. So I mean the weak-longs are an intensive week of personal change and transformation and people are going to come up against themselves, I want them to, they're going to come up against her limitations, I want them to. And then they're going to have numerous opportunities to connect, numerous opportunities to break through and sooner or later the whole entire group breaks through, and when that happens then the party just starts.

Shawn Stevenson: Awesome. This has been a highlight for me, we shared this before the show but I've been doing this for a while and I had a very small list of people who've had impact on my thinking and you're one of those people. And even during the break, I was shouting just in happiness to have you here and to share your insight with everybody. So just truly thank you, I'm just grateful that you exist.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: Thank you. Listen, you're coming to a week-long as my guest.

Shawn Stevenson: Awesome, I'm there.

Dr. Joe Dispenza: You come as my guest.

Shawn Stevenson: I'm there, awesome. Everybody, thank you so much for tuning into the show today, I hope you got a lot of value out of this and this is definitely one to share with your friends and family and, of course, you could tag me on social media and tag, Dr. Joe, as well, and just share what you thought about the episode.

And there was a lot here, of course, but some of the big takeaways for me is this concept of losing your mind, like this is this is something that Dr. Joe was there measuring, we had guests like Dr. Daniel Amen who are doing spec scans and cool stuff like that, Dr. Lisa Mosconi, we can actually look and see what's going on with the brain when it's trying to change itself, when it looks like chaos, and those are the moments that we tend to retreat because things are firing differently in our brains and we want to get back to what is familiar.

And what I'm encouraging you to do today is, of course, to ease into that discomfort instead of setting out to change something in your reality like we do kind of haphazardly, it's to set out with that intention but to know like you're going to come up against some opposition.

This is not going to be a walk in the park but it's going to be so worth it. And for me, and you guys know my story, where I came from, I used to actually keep a small journal of when these seemingly random, amazing synchronicities would happen in my life. And I stopped even a journal because it happened so much and I live in that now.

Sometimes, of course, like we're all human, we can get off track and we can forget, but it's that practice of remembering that's what the great ones really do. And Dr. Joe stated it as well like we're going to react but it's how quickly we can remember.

And for me, this is a very special episode because it's just again scratching the surface, opening the conversation to something much, much bigger and reminding you how powerful you are to affect change in your life and also the reality of everyone, period. You're very, very powerful.

And so again, thank you so much for hanging out with us today, share this out with social media, tag me, tag Dr. Joe. We've got some powerhouse stuff coming your way. So make sure to be ready. Take care, have an amazing day and I'll talk with you soon.

And for more after the show, make sure to head over to The Model Health Show.com, that's where you can find all of the show notes, you can find transcriptions, videos for each episode and if you've got a comment you can leave me a comment there as well.

And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome. And I appreciate that so much. And take care, I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.