“When you think from your past memories, you can only create past experiences. As all of the ‘knowns’ in your life cause your brain to think and feel in familiar ways, thus creating knowable outcomes, you continually reaffirm your life as you know it. And since your brain is equal to your environment, then each morning, your senses plug you into the same reality and initiate the same stream of consciousness… If you want a new outcome, you will have to break the habit of being yourself, and reinvent a new self.” Dr. Joe Dispenza
This book, by Dr. Joe Dispenza, is one of my all-time favorite books. Dr. Joe is a chiropractor and trained hypnotherapist who had the incredible experience of breaking his back and using his healing skills to restore his body from the inside out. Dr. Joe is also one of my favorite kinds of people - he is one of the cutting edge individuals on the planet right now who are exploring the boundary between science and spirituality.
In this book, he explores how we can interact with our brains to intentionally improve our thinking, feeling, behaving, and ultimately our experience of reality. To do so, Dr. Joe uses a powerful illustration. He says that we have a “pharmacy” in our brains and that each thought we think is like a recipe. No matter if the thoughts that we think are sad, or angry, or hopeless, or joyful, or content - each unique thought instantly produces a correlating concoction of hormones and chemicals in our brains and bodies; AND we can become addicted to them just like any other drug. So we can literally become addicted to thinking in a certain way.
I tell each and every one of my clients, “Therapy is time-consuming, emotionally intensive, and takes a financial investment. Nobody comes to therapy unless they are ready to make a big change in their lives.” However, being addicted to our old way of thinking can make it hard to create lasting change in our lives. Thinking new thoughts, results in feeling new feelings, but those new thoughts and feelings can feel so different than we are used to that we may not even feel like “ourselves”. That can be an uncomfortable experience for lots of us and cause us to want to run back to what we knew before, what felt comfortable, even if it wasn’t we want in the long run. To change, we have to bury the old way of thinking and become someone new, with a rewired brain.
If you are in the process of rewiring your brain, and creating a new life, this book can help you understand that, while creating change can be challenging, it doesn’t have to be impossible.
