Joe Dispenza ON: Why Stress and Overthinking Negatively Impacts Your Brain and Heart & How to Change Your Habits on Autopilot

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27:55Discover more with Chase Sapphire Reserve at chase.com forward slash sapphire reserve. cards issued by jp morgan chase bank na member fdic subject to credit approval terms apply yeah and i i think you're right that i've thought about this for a while that i feel most people know that they want to change and most people know what they want to change but they still struggle to make a change and so i found that we don't often have a values crisis we have a habits crisis because people don't know how to reprogram their habits and they've started to assume that the way they feel is who they are and i wonder how you think about this because i think we're living at a time where what you just said is like you either kind of find a way to numb your feelings so you're turning towards something external to numb how you feel or today we're being told well feel every feeling and emotion completely and then often we don't kind of get to the reprogramming phase so i guess how do you know how how long to take a feeling seriously effectively and assessing it before you kind of take action on it feelings and emotions are the end product of past experiences and we can remember experiences better because we can remember how they feel.

29:21The stronger the emotion we have to some experience in our life, the more altered we are inside of us. The more the brain freezes a frame and takes a snapshot, and that's called a long-term memory. That image is being bossed neurologically in the brain. So then what most people don't know is that every time they remember that event, that trauma, that betrayal, that loss, whatever it is, they're producing the same chemistry in their brain and body as if the event is occurring. So what happens over time is that conditioning process conditions the body to literally live in the past. So if a person is living by the same familiar feeling every single day, whether it's guilt or unworthiness or pain or suffering or victimization or depression or whatever it is, it's so important for them to come right up against that emotional state because they're coming up against the known.

30:14The question fundamentally becomes for that person, is it possible then to feel a different feeling? Now, if you cannot feel a different feeling other than the feeling that you're used to feeling, it should tell you volumes about that feeling because it's going to influence your very same thoughts. So the research that we've done over and over again is that the only way you're actually going to reprogram your brain to work in your favor is you got to learn how to regulate your brainwaves. And you know this, of course. Beta brainwave patterns are thinking brainwave patterns. It's the analytical mind.

30:52It's our critical facilities. We're in beta right now. We're aware of our bodies. We're aware of the environment. We're aware of time. The neocortex is switched on. It's what plugs us into three-dimensional reality. It's the seat of the autobiographical self. There's a lot of circuits in there from things you've learned intellectually in things you've experienced in your life. So for the most part, it's a repository of the past, right? And so 90 % of those thoughts that we think being the same thoughts as the day before tend to become like automatic programs and they become more subconscious and more unconscious.

31:24So in order for us to begin to change those programs, we got to get into the operating system. And the only way we do that is we got to slow our brainwaves down in that thinking neocortex. The challenge for most people is they have so many demands in their life they have so many emotional responses to circumstances in their life that they're living in a state of stress and living in a state of survival in a state of stress and survival you don't close your eyes you got to keep your eye on the ball you got to keep your attention on the outer environment so their brains tend to work in a higher brainwave pattern a mid-range or high level beta brainwave pattern that's like driving your sports car in first gear.

32:08It's a lot of energy for the brain. So learning how to regulate and slow your brain waves down is something that we've been very, very interested in. When you teach people how to do that, it could become a skill. And when the brain starts to relax and it moves into less of that chatter that takes place in your brain and more of kind of an imaginary state, the brain sees in pictures and images, it's more creative. We're moving into that alpha state. So now the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind opens up as we get beyond our analytical mind. And our analytical mind is actually what separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind.

32:46So as you slow your brainwaves down, you get into alpha, you're entering the operating system. And that's where you can rewrite a new program. That's where you can rehearse a new script. That's where you can begin to plan your behaviors in an intentional way. If you can't change your brainwaves, then it's like your computer running amok with all of those programs and you yelling at it, telling it to stop. You're not in the operating system. Some people can get to the point where they're so relaxed that the body's in a light sleep and yet they're conscious and awake and now they're in this theta brainwave pattern.

33:24And in theta, that's a hypnotic state. We're very suggestible to our thoughts we're very suggestible to information in that state and that state then is where we see the most change take place and so the person can literally change from the inside out when they learn how to get into the operating system you've just hit the nail on the head with the constant experience everyone has to think again going back to what i was saying that when we're trying to make a change the thing that blocks us from making the change is usually stress if i'm trying to be a kind loving compassionate person but i'm stressed out i'm likelier to be snappy and rude and condescending if i'm trying to be healthier in my diet but i'm stressed out or burnt out i'm going to reach for the sugary food or the carbs and the fat like that doesn't come from anything else but stress to take away the feeling to take away the feeling take away the feeling right yeah so let's get real clear because i think it's important for people to understand when we're talking about stress and we're talking about living and survival, it's so important to name those emotions because anger and frustration and control and hatred and envy and jealousy and insecurity and unworthiness and guilt and shame and suffering and depression, those are all derived.

34:46Those are emotions that are derived from the hormones of stress. And psychology calls those normal states of consciousness, those are altered states of consciousness. Because in stress, the physiology is that we're knocked out of homeostasis, we're knocked out of balance, because we're perceiving some threat, some danger, some emergency. And so the stronger the emotion you feel to whatever stressor there is in your life, the more you pay attention to it. And so in time, then, you have to keep your attention on all the important elements in your life. So you sit down to do a meditation. And when you're living in stress and you're living in survival, there's only three things that are important in that moment.

35:24Your attention is on your body because you got to preserve it. Your attention is on something in your environment. And what's in your environment? People, objects, things, places. And you're very preoccupied with time. And when you're in stress and you're in survival, the brain goes onto a default mode and it's naturally trying to predict the next moment based on what it's learned in the past and so as you'd always try to forecast the future based on your memory of the past you can't be in the present moment right so and yet our our model of change what we discovered is that the only way a person can change is when they get beyond their body they get beyond all the elements of their environment and they get beyond that predictable fusion familiar past and they sink into the present moment, which is the unknown.

36:12So if you can't do that because of the hormones of stress, most people will sit down and they'll say, okay, I'm going to close my eyes. I'm going to start this process where I'm going to rehearse how I'm going to be today. And they start thinking about their cell phone. They start thinking about all their emails and they start thinking, I can't meditate. There's something wrong with me. It's my mother's fault. And they actually believe that thought to be the truth. And then they get up and they actually reaffirm it and They say, I can't meditate. Now, I can tell you that if you are willing to see that thought as just a thought in your brain and you're curious what's on the other side of that thought, yeah, you're going to feel uncomfortable.

36:53But if you had some tools and skills to apply and you were able to take your attention off your cell phone and settle your body back down into the present moment, that would be a victory. And then your body would say, come on, you gotta feel a little frustration now. You gotta be impatient. You gotta be judgmental. Come on, that's what you always think. That's how you always feel. And you like an animal. You settle the body back down into the present moment and you tell it it's no longer the mind that you're the mind. That's a victory. Then the body says, hey dude, you're super busy. You've got a lot of things to do.

37:30You got a lot of people to see. You got a lot of places to go. You got a lot of things to do. and you've been doing the same thing every day, your body's going to want to get up and do something. You're going to want to quit because your brain's telling you that you can't do this. If you had the awareness to settle the body back down into the present moment, you would be executing a will that's greater than the program because most people lose their free will to those programs. And it's that tedium in the beginning that is an uncompromising will where you keep training the animal to stay, to take all of its attention off the environment, to get beyond all the cravings, the feelings, the habits of the body, the drives of the body, and catch yourself defaulting to that predictable future, bringing your body back into the present moment, siphoning energy back, your attention into the past based on those familiar emotions of the past.

38:28We've discovered that if you're willing to do that for just a few days, you could actually liberate an enormous amount of energy from your body. You go from particle to wave, from matter to energy, and you're literally transmuting those limited emotions into elevated emotions. And something really beautiful happens. If you're willing to fire the crucible and sit through that long enough, all of these emotions move, that energy moves right up into the heart and the person starts falling in love with life they start feeling this state of gratitude this gratefulness to be alive this ineffable word of relaxed and awake and something really magical happens when we've discovered this little simple thing when that energy makes it to the heart, there's only one place it wants to go, and it goes straight to the brain.

39:29So the person starts relaxing into their heart when they feel this feeling, and the more they relax into the heart, the more their brain all of a sudden starts becoming aroused, and they start going into these elevated gamma brainwave patterns. Now, gamma is not unconscious. Gamma is actually super conscious. It's actually super aware. You're outside the program now. So when that occurs and the brain goes into gamma brainwave patterns, what we discovered is not, it's not a little gamma. It's not a lot of gamma. It's not a whole lot of gamma. It's a supernatural amount of gamma. And we start seeing these brainwaves where we see theta start carrying alpha and alpha starts resonating with beta and beta starts creating high beta and high beta starts creating gamma and you see these standing waves of brain coherence happening and the person feels so amazing that they don't want the moment to end and so we see when they put their attention on their heart like like filling a gas tank we see on the gauge of the on the scan this very low frequency start rising in the heart.

40:44The energy that the heart uses to function actually goes up because they're placing their attention there. And where they place their attention is where they place their energy. And then you see the parasympathetic nervous system come up with it. That's the nervous system of relaxation. And then we see it kind of drop. And we see the sympathetic nervous system starting to go up. And now sympathetic regulation is an arousal, right? But the arousal isn't fear. The arousal isn't hatred or aggression. The arousal isn't pain. That's the arousal created from survival. There's only one other arousal and that's ecstasy.

41:23That's bliss. And the person all of a sudden feels connected to something greater. Now here's the beauty. We can see people do this in 15 minutes. The most important takeaway around all of this is that feeling that they're feeling is not coming from anywhere outside of them. No person's doing that. No wardrobe change is doing that. No sports car, no football game. Nothing is doing it to them. It's actually coming from within. That is the moment they stop looking for it outside of them, and the love affair begins. And so when we start feeling these elevated emotions, these more selfless emotions, it's not like you have to try to forgive it actually is the side effect of you changing your emotional state you no longer want uh because you feel so whole how could you want anything so we we started interviewing people when they had these moments and and they had such an incredible amount of love that they felt there we measure their oxytocin levels their love chemicals, very elevated.

42:33The amount of gamma in terms of coherence was 200, 300, 400 standard deviations outside of normal in coherent gamma. Now, three standard deviations outside of normal in gamma is about 2 % of the population. 200, 300 formed a lot of energy in the brain. So the brain all of a sudden is receiving an enormous amount of energy. So we've discovered relaxed in the heart and awaken the brain and that process of transformation is your willingness to sit past that thought past that emotion and keep training the animal and sooner or later you can recondition it to a new mind and the system for this new mind in this journey that you're talking about is meditation and this is coming through a meditative practice is that similar to the breathwork meditation practice that you just did research on or is that totally separate these wow Okay.

43:28Yeah. Yes. So our week long events are a full immersion experience. We've done the largest studies on meditation and have ever been done just because we have a community of 1800 people that come to an event that are going to be getting up at the same time, doing the same thing, pretty much eating, making the same food choices and pretty much a big laboratory. Right. And so our discoveries in working with 1 ,800 people in measuring brain waves, their brain function before and after the event, measuring their gene expression before and after the event. We're measuring 2 ,882 metabolites in their blood.

44:10We're measuring DNA expression. We're measuring urine. We're measuring saliva. We're measuring the energy of the room. We're measuring everything. and meditation in a sense that it's not in the traditional way. What we do is we look at what really works. You know, we're actually looking to say, well, that's something that we can actually see a change in. So we teach meditation three ways, to become familiar with your old self and to become familiar with your new self. That's what the word meditation means, familiarization, to become familiar with. So we use that model for change. To slow your brainwaves down and get beyond your analytical mind is meditation.

44:45And you teach your body how to do that. and we've discovered a formula that simply makes it very easy for people to do it. You practice it, you'll get good at it just like anything else you practice. So to get beyond the analytical mind is another way to reprogram ourselves. And then meditation is really about getting beyond your body or disconnecting from your body, disconnecting from your environment and forgetting about time. And that is that eye of the needle where we begin to make the most significant changes. So we're data-driven. You know, we're really looking to see what it is. And when we see brains respond in the same way, it helps me enormously to teach the material better.

45:26And so the more people understand what they're doing and the more they understand why they're doing it, the more naturally the how becomes easier. And nothing is left to conjecture. If nothing is left to superstition or dogma or even spiritual, you know, traditional words. use science as the contemporary language to demystify that process you need to give new people numerous times to overcome themselves and numerous times to connect sooner or later you'll start watching transformation right before your eyes and so one of the cool things that we've discovered is that we have so much compelling data to suggest that you're greater than you think more powerful than you know more unlimited than you could ever dream we have compelling data that suggests that your nervous system is the greatest pharmacist in the world, that it makes drugs that work better than any drug in a drugstore.

46:24A drug study is about 18 % to 25 % cause and effect causality. Our data is between 75 % and 85 % cause and effect. This is a person creating their own pharmacy of anti-inflammatories, their own pharmacy of anti-carcinogenic chemicals, their own pharmacy of pain relievers who are seeing this over and over again so we have this incredible data that says that this is no longer pseudoscience this is the real this is really science the side effect of a person's transformation is it has changed my belief in what's possible i have seen people stand on the stage with stage four cancers that were in every single organ in their body that metastasize them and they have no sign of cancer in their body and we have data that suggests that you put the blood of an advanced meditator in a uterine cancer cell a pancreatic cancer cell 70 of the mitochondrial function in the cancer cell is diminished the mitochondria stuff energy packets of the cell it's taking energy out of the cancer cell works perfect with what we're seeing with uh the testimonials that that people are telling around the world we've seen blind people see we've seen deaf people here we've seen people with spinal cord injuries walk again we've seen als change we've seen all kinds of unbelievable health conditions changed by a person simply changing the way they think the way they act and the way they feel how long have you seen certain things lost like how much does the practice have to continue daily to sustain impact because i feel that you know this isn't as you know isn't a one-off thing and that isn't what you're encouraging like this is the experience of when someone's coming to a retreat or an event they're having this incredible experience but then do you measure how people continue to practice yeah it's important yeah it's super important for us um uh and of course we have mounds of data but let's see if i can say this as clear as I possibly can.

48:31When a person has that arousal, where they're feeling that elevated emotion, and their eyes are closed, they're in a room with 1 ,800 people, there's music playing in the background, they're not eating, they're not smelling, they're not tasting, they're not moving about and feeling. On some level, they're having an inner experience, right? And the body is so objective that it's literally believing it's living in a new environment. And so that elevated emotion somehow tends to drag the body right out of the past into the present moment. So many people with everything from eczema to muscular dystrophy, when they have those events, there's a biological change that takes place in their body where they feel completely differently.

49:19Now, some people heal all the way. Some people are out of their wheelchair and they're walking again, but they're limping. And that doesn't mean it's over. It just means they made contact or they hit gold. And so there's varying degrees that we see. We've seen people for seven years work on a terminal health condition. It took them seven years to heal that health condition. Some people it takes two years, three years. Some people they do it in three months. We, there's no predictable menu that we can say it's this way. Now, when people have those more profoundly aroused states, it seems like their change is much more immediate and much more permanent.

50:07But for the most part, we see people's response pretty dramatic. Now, it's also important to say that we have seen people heal from terminal cancers, stop feeling those elevated emotions and return to responding to the circumstances and conditions in their life and return back to the same personality. The same personality is the same personal reality and their body's believing it's living in that same environment and they're feeling the same way and they're in the habit of acting the same way and thinking the same way and lo and behold, the condition returns. We've seen people heal themselves of Parkinson's disease more than once have one response to some very serious event in their life that produced a very strong emotion and in one hour their condition returned because they literally went back to their old self and we've seen that person turn around and reverse the condition again again people do the best with what they think is available the person standing on the stage who's we've had numerous physicians and researchers stand on the stage, they're the four-minute mile.

51:16They're telling the community, I'm the example of truth. This is no longer philosophy. This is no longer theory. Here's my scans. We had someone with bilateral breast cancer just recently. No evidence of cancer in our breasts or any lymph nodes no longer in our liver. I'm looking out at the audience and everybody's leaning in. There's the four-minute mile And that person's telling the truth and they're telling a story and it's not pretty. It's not always rosy. They went through a lot of dark nights. They went through a lot of their condition getting worse. But every day they had to show up for themselves.

51:54If they stopped showing up and doing the work, they would really not believe it was possible. But if they showed up and did the work, it means that they believe it's possible. And I think when you believe in possibility, you got to believe in yourself. when you believe in yourself you got to believe in possibilities so it used to be a few examples of of that now we have so many great testimonials so many great stories that now people it's becoming infectious just like a virus or any bacteria becomes infectious now health and wellness becomes as infectious as disease and you get a community of people starting to break through and you start seeing these changes where people stand on the stage invariably you're going to see a very strong shift in consciousness and consciousness is awareness and if you're unaware that you could actually heal yourself you'll make the same choice once you see it i think it starts creating a brush fire and and that's really the exciting part so we've seen so many great testimonials that are undeniably great stories of transformation many many of those people still no longer have their eczema still no longer have their parkinson's still no longer have their cancer.

53:04Yeah, since the last time we spoke, I know your team of researchers went and did some work. I wanted to ask you some questions about this. You did some research on the impact of one-minute breath work. How does this impact our heart rate variability, and how does HIV impact our anxiety? Let's talk about heart rate variability, because it's an important thing. So your brain is trying to control and predict everything that's taking place in your life, because stress is actually created when you can't predict something, you can't control something, or you have the perception that something's going to get worse, okay?

53:37So you switch on that primitive nervous system, the fight-or-flight nervous system, and as you shift your attention from one person to another person to another thing to another place to another problem, every one of those different elements has a neurological network in your brain. So the arousal of the hormones that say, pay attention, there's danger. As you start shifting your attention to each one of these elements that have neurological networks in your brain, your brain starts firing very incoherently. And in fact, you could actually, by thinking about your problems, turn on the stress response just by thought alone.

54:09And that's what most people do. So now there you are, you're sitting in traffic. The heart is pumping because it's trying to get blood to the extremities because a primitive system's switching on saying that there's a predator, there's danger. And the heart is beating against closed arteries. and the heart starts beating out of rhythm it starts beating out of order and it starts beating very incoherently so when you have incoherence in the brain and you have incoherence in the heart when waves are incoherent when they intersect with each other they cancel each other out and when they cancel each other out that's less energy in the brain there's less energy in the brain you're going to default to some of those reflexive systems if energy is diminished in the heart you're not going to trust.

54:56You're not going to be vulnerable. You're not going to want to commune. You're not going to want to connect. You're not going to want to feel grateful. It's not a time to feel any of those things. It's time to run, fight, and hide. Okay, so most people say, okay, well, I had a stressful day. I was stressed out the entire day. At the end of the day, they turn on the TV and they relax. The important thing to realize is that if you're relying on something outside of you to change that emotional state, you'll become dependent on it. So is it possible then to begin to create more coherence in the brain?

55:29And the answer is yes, because when you're under the gun of those chemicals of survival, you're narrowing your focus on the cause. You hear something moving in the bushes, you freeze, and you narrow your focus. And it's that narrowing of focus that tends to be obsessive. When we're in stress, we overthink things, we overanalyze. That actually, we've discovered, makes the brain worse. And it actually makes the heart regulate more out of order. So then we said, okay, if the brain is narrowing its focus and it's becoming over-attentive, what if we teach it how to do something else? What if we teach it how to broaden its focus?

56:06And instead of focusing on something material or something known, just open up and focus on nothing. and the act of broadening focus actually caused a person to stop thinking and doing and start sensing and feeling is actually what starts to slow their brain waves down the redundancy of shifting your attention from one person to another person to another problem to another thing causes the brain to fire like a lightning storm in the clouds very incoherently so as you start to open your awareness and sense nothing we've seen this thousands of times those different networks that are firing out of order start to synchronize and what sinks in the brain links in the brain and the brain becomes more orderly it starts to become more coherent if you could learn how to rest your attention in your heart and where you place your attention is where you place your energy regulate your breath start slowing your breathing down even if you did it for one minute, you could actually begin to change your brainwaves and you could actually cause your heart to start functioning more regulation and more order.

57:14If you said, okay, I'm going to work with my body and I'm going to start breathing and I'm going to start feeling emotions that I do want to feel. Yes, it may take you a few minutes to get there, but if you keep practicing it over and over again, the heart starts producing a very profound signal. It starts to produce an external magnetic field. It's measurable. So now you have a coherent brain, which means you can get very intentional, and you have a coherent heart, which means you can feel the emotions of your future before it happens, somehow you have this broadcasting of this Wi-Fi signal. And the brain tends to be electrical in nature, so it sends out an electrical charge into the field.

58:04The heart is the magnetic charge. It's what draws things to us. It's the magnetic field. And now you actually, by changing the way you think and the way you feel, you're changing the signal in the field, then if you're able to maintain that state for an extended period of time, I say something magical is going to happen in your life. Something unusual, some unknown experience is going to occur. If you keep thinking the same way and feeling the same way, your life should stay the same. So we do one-minute practices. We do five-minute practices. We do 30-minute practices. We want to get so good at doing it with our eyes closed that we can do it with our eyes open.

58:47One thing I've been reflecting on lately is how even the smallest choices can create a big impact over time. Whether it's choosing to spend a quiet night in to recharge or making a decision that brings you closer to a long-term goal, those moments of intention really matter. And when it comes to the choices we make with our money, that same mindset applies. I've learned that saving for the things that truly matter, like your first home or a reliable car, starts with small, thoughtful decisions. That's why I appreciate what State Farm is doing with their personal price plan It gives you the power to personalize your plan And create an affordable price that works for your life You can bundle your home and auto insurance in a way that supports your journey and your goals Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the personal price plan Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state coverage options are selected by the customer, availability amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

59:56Support for this podcast is brought to you by Walden University. If you're listening right now and feeling that pull to grow in your career or make a bigger impact, Walden is designed exactly for that. For over 50 years, they've helped working adults get the W with the knowledge, confidence and real skills to create meaningful change. What makes Walden stand out is how flexible it is. With Walden's tempo learning, you're in control. No set weekly deadlines, no rigid schedules, just a pace that actually fits your life. And everything you learn is practical. You're working through real-world scenarios that prepare you to make a positive difference in your community and beyond.

1:00:37You're also guided by faculty who've lived the work themselves, scholars and practitioners with real experience this is the kind of opportunity that reminds you it's never too late to go after what you want if you've been waiting for the right moment this is it head to waldenu.edu and take that first step walden university set a course for change certified to operate by chev yeah no i when i hear that like i've had personal genuine experience of that where I've done that when I've had when I'm having a moment where I'm feeling anxious or I'm feeling stressed or you know something unpredictable has happened and I feel that change in my heart rate and I notice my breathing change I notice it become more shallow I notice it become more random I know that when I'm practicing breath work I'm able to come back to stillness I'm able to come back to that sense of balance and I'm able to actually approach the issue at hand with more clarity with more connectedness and a feeling of confidence but when someone else who may not have had that experience yet or may not be trained in that they're just thinking well how do i solve the problem right like they're they're listening to me and you're going well but i can't because i just i need to solve this problem like you're saying like i'm going to be 30 minutes late for a job interview or i just had an argument with my partner this morning and i've got a big presentation this morning as well at work now i'm stressed about it because i'm thinking about that or my kid just had got yeah i had to rush him to hospital and now i'm late like i guess when you're looking at it from a very human point of view it's really hard to understand the value in this what do you say to anyone who's thinking and feeling that way uh no i think it's i think it's a reasonable conversation i mean um uh sometimes we have to be super aroused and sometimes we really have to pay attention and sometimes there are threats and dangers where that primitive nervous system actually works in our favor and and that's the emergency system but you got to also realize that you only have a certain amount of energy and if you're living in emergency mode for an extended period of time there's no energy for growth and repair there's no energy for long-term building projects and so when it's needed and you have to outrun the predator you go you don't sit and try to make friends with the predator we're not that good you run right the problem is if you keep that alarm system switched on all the time it gets very addictive it's a great answer it gets very addictive right and so i've looked at people's brain scans uh and watch their brain get worse in the early days and tap them on the head and say what were you doing in there 100 of the time they were analyzing the problems in their life within that disturbing emotion and if an emotion is a record of the past and they can't think greater than how they feel they're thinking in the past there's no solution there cross the river get beyond the emotion and you'll see possibility because you're no longer in the box of that emotional state now that's so much easier said than done because you're going against thousands of years of programming of living and survival i mean 200 years ago it wasn't easy being human i mean we're in survival all the time and famine you know disease i mean it was it was hard to be human 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 it goes against thousands of years of programming it's not something that you get good at doing once you got to keep practicing so so so you really have two ways to look at it if you're if you're living in stress and you're living in survival and that system is switched on then everything will be a threat everything will be a danger everything will be a reason to rush to be impatient to be frustrated to be judgmental because that's that's the consciousness that's the emotion we're living by.

1:04:37So now you have a problem with a coworker, you have a problem with your partner, whatever it is that you use as an example, and you have to give a presentation. Now, you really have one of two choices. Either be victimized by those conditions in your life, and you stay in that emotional state. And I'll say to you, Jay, why are you that way? Well, I'm this way because of this person, the circumstance, the person or circumstance is controlling the way I feel and the way I think. Anything that controls the way I feel and the way I think I'm victim to, right? Okay. Or I actually can be a creator now.

1:05:08Okay. So when it's the hardest, it matters the most. Okay. So there's going to be a story, a valid story that's going to go along with those emotions that you're going to have to give up, that you can address at another time from a different state. If you're altered in that state and you say something, you do something, you write the email, you send the text, you'll always regret it. You'll always say, I should have never said that. I should have never done that. We've got to learn that we're in an altered state at that time. So there's only one of two choices. You either stay there the whole day and tell everybody that story, or you say, okay, let me take a moment.

1:05:44Remember that this is the experiment called life. Okay, let me practice getting relaxed in my heart. Let me slow the animal down. Let me practice that. It took a few minutes. Now, let me breathe. Let me get my state back. Let me change everything. Okay, let me remember who I am, who I want to be when I open my eyes and let me practice that again. Now, even if you had to do that 10 times in one day, I would say it was a day worth living. I would say it was a day worth living. And when we do walking meditations in our retreats, we're doing walking meditations so you can practice doing it with your eyes open.

1:06:18Like if you're going to be relaxed in your heart and awake in your brain, and you can do it with your eyes closed, okay, let's take it out for a test drive. Let me open my eyes. Let me pay a little bit more attention to my inner world. Let me practice feeling this feeling let me practice feeling this way and let my brain do what it does let me get to finally change my physiology let me change my state let me walk as the healed person let me walk as the abundant person let me walk as if my prayers are answered me walk in the state if i keep practicing that over and over it's going to become a habit right yeah so so we hit it as many ways as we can we have at least seven or eight different breaths that we do because we see how they all work in the brain.

1:06:59We have all kinds of meditations. We have sitting meditations. We have standing and walking meditations. We're laying down meditations because we want you to be able to do it with your eyes open, with your eyes closed, standing, walking any way you can so that you don't default and return back to that person. Now, if you do default, you didn't fail. That's a program. You just went unconscious. And how many times do we have to forget until we stop forgetting and start remembering that's the moment of change no one cares how many times you fell off the bicycle if you ride the bicycle now you ride the bike so it's it's the constant process uh every single day and i think that sometimes we look for evidence in our life and it hasn't happened and i think it's so important that we still show up yeah yeah because that's the that's where you're changing the most and when you get to that point where you could care less if it happens or not because you feel so happy, so grateful for who you are.

1:07:56Get ready because your life is going to begin to change in magical ways. I'm so proud of our community, not because they do the work every day, not because they're trying to be good or please anybody. They do it because they don't want the magic to really end. And the experiment is too good. They're going to continue to be a creator in their life. So then when they change the way they feel and the way they think and they start seeing evidence in their life, they're going to remember what they did inside of them to produce that outcome and they're going to believe they're the creator of their life and less of the victim of their life and that's empowerment.

1:08:27And you can't take that away from anybody. You can't tell me now you're too sick to do that. You can't tell me you're too old to do that. You can't tell me you had a horrible past. You're too out of shape. You can't even tell me that you never meditated before because people that come, they know nothing, they get dragged by somebody and they have the most profound experience because they're not expecting anything. And we have data that suggests that when you don't expect anything, you're going to have a profound moment. So everybody can do it. There's nobody that's so special to be excluded from this process.

1:08:59And we have had people that have had brutal pasts with abuse, with trauma. We've seen Navy SEALs and prisoners with horrible, horrible memories literally transformed, literally transformed in seven days. And I could say right now that you make the time every single day to decide who you're going to present to the world. and you get up as that person, you're gonna fall a lot of times. But sooner or later, once you start to change, it's pretty hard to go back. Yeah, I think we so easily forget that anything that we've achieved today, any place we've got to, was a commitment to refining the process.

1:09:37It was a disciplined effort to make a tiny improvement on something else. When you give the cycle example, the bike example, the idea that you got back up and you maybe changed one thing. You knew to shift your balance differently. You knew to pedal at a different pace. Like you tried these different things. And it's what you're saying, that it's an experiment. If we keep trying the same thing, we get the same result. But the point that I love that you brought up to that answer was the idea that sometimes you do need to be in emergency, but don't make emergency a habit. Exactly. And I think that's where most of us veer off on the wrong path.

1:10:15I was asked recently, anyone who knows me today knows that I'm a hardworking, productive, high-performance type of individual. I live a very scheduled life and a disciplined life. And the biggest question I get around the holidays is, Jay, are you able to switch off? And I always go back and give the credit to my monk training and say, I switch off immediately. As soon as I'm on the flight home, I remember before Christmas, I was getting on a flight home back to London and I was off the moment I stepped onto the flight. And it was because I was, it's not because I'm special or because I'm unique or I have superpowers.

1:10:53It's because I've simply done what you said, where it's I've trained myself to always be present. And so if I'm really present in my work, like I am with you now, then when I'm on the plane, I'm just present. And I know that it's time to switch off. And so I think the idea that our presence bleeds and our lack of presence bleeds, and it's not that you can selectively be in emergency here and not in emergency here, the state you're feeling is going to spread across your whole life. Like I know a lot of people who are high performance and I've had to be mindful of this as well. It's like they're high performance at work, but then they take that high performance and they give it to their family.

1:11:32And now their family is getting a high performance dad and they don't want that. They just want their dad or they want their mom. And so how do we develop that? I guess that's a highly trained ability is what you're saying is we get the ability then to say, OK, I know when to use this and when not to. That's that's a more heightened state. Yeah, I mean, look, there's nothing wrong with hormones of stress. I mean, that's the only way we could actually survive. We're part human, part animal, part divine. I mean, we have two things at work here. I think the biggest challenge for a lot of people, and 70 % of the time, people are living in that state of survival, living in that state of stress.

1:12:10The more you understand what that actually does to you, the more you can make better choices on how long you actually do want to stay there. Here's an example. Many people who are changing a health condition in our work, they start to do the work. They start noticing, I'm sleeping better. I have less pain. I got my appetite back. I feel like I have more energy. They start noticing these subtle subjective changes that go to the doctor, and their scans still show that they have their health condition. So they're noticing a change, but they're not healed all the way. Now, they don't say it didn't work.

1:12:48They say, what is it about me that I still have to change in order to heal? What thought, what behavior, what emotion? So they're a work in progress, right? Many of those people discover that they have one really good hour of meditation where they feel connected, they feel like their heart is opening up, they feel like their brain is coherent, they feel really great, they don't want the moment to end, and then they spend 15 or 16 hours of their day back in a program, rushing around back in their emotional states, responding and reacting. And they realize that how could one hour of an elevated state weigh against 15 or 16 hours of my response to everyone and everything in my life emotionally is derived from those familiar emotions of fear or anger or hatred or pain or suffering, whatever.

1:13:37okay so now this is where the practicum actually goes to the next level because they're no longer just sitting down and rehearsing who they want to be they're actually rehearsing for their life they're saying okay when i see that person when i'm in that circumstance i can't go unconscious and feel this emotion and i can't go unconscious and say these things or act this way how am i going to act? What would love do? What would greatness look like? They don't know. They read about it. They get more information and they're building this model. And now all of a sudden, their response to people, to circumstances, to problems in their life are changing.

1:14:20That's because they're changing. Then they notice that their health condition starts to improve a little bit more. Now they don't say, how come my Alzheimer's or my Parkinson's or my ALS hasn't healed they're saying how much more can i open my heart in my day and feel this with my eyes open all day long if i understand that if i live by these emotions i'm signaling genes ahead of the environment oh i'm going to stay in this state because it's this emotional state that is actually going to heal me so i gotta remember this feeling i remember this feeling i remember this feeling and now they're no longer trying to remember the feeling just for any other reason but because i want to remember the feeling when they're with their eyes open now it's they're understanding that is the more that they change the more that their health changes and and and you can have the best diet and you could do the best exercise and you could be really rigid in the food choices and vitamins and minerals and keep your body chemically balanced and physically balanced but if you're not emotionally balanced and you're constantly in that fight-or-flight system stress is when your body's knocked out of homeostasis the stress is when your brain body are knocked out of balance so so you you could have all those things working for you but if you are living in fear or you're controlling and you're rigid and you're perfectionist and you're hard on yourself it's going to make sense that that is going to have to change in order for you to change right and so people start getting they start getting it that's the only way i'm going to change if i don't change it's not going to change yeah one of my favorite things as a practical exercise i ever did was I literally had scripts, and I mean handwritten, like I wrote scripts for how I wanted to feel when I experienced ego or envy.

1:16:02And so for every emotional challenge I had, something that I thought was an unhealthy thought, I literally had like pages and pages and pages of scripts that were built up from research, that were built up from spiritual literature, that were built up from science, whatever it may be, of what did I want to be able to say to myself when this thought or that thought came up. And it sounds so basic, but it really does rewire your thoughts when now all I can think of is that script. Sure. And I need to update that script regularly. Sure, sure. That's a good point. I mean, I'm constantly upgrading.

1:16:40Yeah, it's not once. I'm constantly. I mean, 95 % of who we are by the time of middle age is a set of unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. I mean, those are beliefs and perceptions that we have about ourselves and our lives. So, I mean, this is a never-ending process of self-discovery. I mean, there's always challenges that you'll have in your life that are going to initiate you into becoming conscious of what you're unconscious to. And you've got to meet those challenges from a greater level of consciousness than the consciousness that's created. And if you don't, your response in the way you feel and the way you think being the same, and if you believe that how you think and how you feel creates your life, if you don't change the way you think and the way you feel, your life's going to stay the same because you're the same.

1:17:21I mean, that's the way it works. So fundamentally, it's so important for people to understand that it is actually possible to change. It really is possible. It is, yeah. I love that you keep repeating that because it's, I think that's the hardest part where you've just, again, the broken record is, I can't change, nothing will change. And not realizing that it's just a set of habits, it's just a set of routines that you've adopted as your reality. And you're gonna be uncomfortable, so get used to it. And so you could either stay uncomfortable or you could actually say, how do I wanna feel? Let me, instead of memorizing this emotion, let me memorize this emotion.

1:17:56Let me open my heart when it goes against everything that I've been taught and programmed to do. I mean, and that's really when it really begins to matter the most. So it's really an exciting time. And I'm so happy to see that people are wrapping their minds around all of this and doing it, you know, doing it for themselves. Absolutely, absolutely. Have you found a difference? And I want to get a bit more technical here. Have you found a difference between meditation with breath work and without breath work? Because I know you do both. And what do you find is the usefulness and benefits of either?

1:18:26So we do so many different types of breath for so many different types of reasons. The breath that we were talking about with Inspire, pulling the mind out of the body, we do that breath to take that creative life force that sits at the base of the spine, that energy that can create another life form, the energy we use to digest a meal, the energy that we use to run from a predator. We're taking all that energy that's stored in the body emotionally and we're pulling that energy back up into the brain. If you practice this breath repeatedly, there will be a release of energy into the brain. We have the data to show that you're going to have a lot more energy in your brain.

1:19:06You're going to be way more coherent in your brain and you're going to be more conscious, right? And so why is that important? Why? Because when you regulate your brain waves, we don't want you to fall asleep. We want you to actually be really relaxed and awake at the same time. So we do this one breath called pulling the mind out of the body. That's the Inspire series where we're taking all that creative energy and we're with the breath, pulling that energy right up to a specific area of the brain. When you do that properly, your brain will go into an altered state. That's the reason why we do it.

1:19:36Then we do all kinds of other breathing, like breathing to change the heart rhythm. Sometimes when we're doing a laying down breath, when we're practicing getting into that mystical state, just when the audience is just starting to move into a slower brainwave state we'll do a very forced inhalation exhalation inhalation over and over again like a hiker's breath only so that the person feels euphoric and so euphoric that they don't want to fall asleep and they'll move into a slower brainwave pattern and the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind opens and many times there's a mystical experience waiting for that person that's transcendental so So we do all kinds of different breathing techniques because we have different intentions behind each one of them.

1:20:22If people want to dive into those, where should they go? If they want to kind of grab some of those techniques or get access, are they only at the events? There's an online course that we offer called the Progressive Workshop. Great. In the Progressive Workshop, we teach a few of those breaths. And if you come to a week-long event, you'll have an opportunity to do all of them. And we start at 6 in the morning. We finish at, I don't know, Cancun, the last one we did, I think we finished at 8 or 8.30 every night. It was just a great group of people. And we go seven days and some mornings are a little earlier.

1:20:51But you get a lot of practice. You got a lot of tools. So by the time you leave, you can use them in your life. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, for anyone who can't obviously get to the live events, then the online course will be helpful. But if you can, go along to one of them. And I think there's some good descriptions also in Becoming Supernatural, my last book, where we break it all down. And then there's some tutorials that we have on our website to help you with some of the breathing here. I love that. Joe, is there anything I haven't asked you about today or anything that's on your mind and heart that you really want to share with everyone or something you've been working on or anything you feel compelled to share?

1:21:24Gosh, we covered a lot. We've covered a lot. We're doing some really cool research with random event generators and random event generators are sophisticated coin tosses. The more you toss a coin, the more you're going to get 50-50 heads or tails, right? So this program machine generates about 1 ,000 tosses in a second. So you're looking at a very, very sophisticated machine. And if you run it for 30 minutes, you're going to see in time an equal number of ones or zeros or heads or tails. And you're going to see the straight line. When you get a group of people together with brain coherence and heart coherence, they're emitting a field.

1:22:07And when we do healings in our events, 100 % of the time when we do those healings, those random event generators have dramatic skews to show that random events become less random and more intentional. And it's collective networks of observers that determine reality. And it's not the number of people. it's not the amount of energy because it could be entropic it's the most coherent energy and we're causing a machine that's programmed to behave in a very very different way and i think that idea of community of people coming together when everybody else is in fear to show courage when everybody else is in pain to show compassion when everybody else is in anger or hatred that to show love i mean i think by nature as human beings i think we are wired to give to connect to commune to take care of one another to heal one another to shine for one another and our data is so exciting to actually support that theorem yeah i love that you brought that up and i'm that's you know that's very macro and big as well but also micro in that you're you're measuring people's daily experience i think you know when i think about families who live together or couples or partners or whoever you may be you know when you're sleeping together when you're waking up together at the same time when you're sitting for meals together when you know we've realized and we know that the science shows that your heart rates sync up like your heartbeats sync up when you're with someone and i think it's really interesting because i think today in our individualistic world there's a big desire to do things at our own time when we want how we want but if you're truly trying to build a relationship with someone else or build community there's so much to be said for doing these basic practices at the same time together right it's really hard to be in community when you're in survival because survival makes us put our attention on ourselves right and i think that when people are not living in survival when they're out of survival our nature really is community is is culture is connection and it starts with the self then it starts with our closest relationships and builds out from there and i think that's a healthy model you know for for the world i mean when you're working on yourself and i'm working on myself and i'm okay with me and you're okay with you we're going to be okay with everybody you know and i think when we're not okay with ourselves uh that's when it gets complicated that's amazing everyone who's listening and watching make sure you go and follow joe across social media we'll put the links to everything uh in the sections there so you can follow along but i want to make sure that you share with me your greatest insights tag me and joe on instagram on twitter on tiktok whatever platform you're using let us know what you'll be practicing i hope that there's parts of this conversation that you'll listen to again and again and again because you have to realize that the first time you hear it there may be some inspiration there may be some insight but the second time that repetition is going to help you actually apply rewire and reconfigure so make sure you repeat listen and make sure you share this with a friend as well so you can discuss it talk about it put it into your own language and your vocabulary that's such an important part of putting this into practice as well uh joe as ever thank you so much for making the time and effort i know that you've always got unpredictable things happening in your life like this morning but you chose to be here and uh thank you so much for being here i really appreciate it thank you jay thank you for having me thank you if you love this episode you'll enjoy my interview with dr daniel amon on how to change your life by changing your brain you want to drip dopamine don't dump it because when you dump it with the fries and the alcohol the porn you don't have much left.

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