Joe Dispenza Placebo Quotes

Your thoughts are incredibly powerful. Choose yours wisely.

And can you teach your body emotionally what it would feel like to believe in this way . . . to be empowered . . . to be moved by your own greatness . . . to be invincible . . . to have courage . . . to be in love with life . . . to feel unlimited . . . to live as if your prayers are already answered? . . .

Your thoughts and feelings come from your past memories. If you think and feel a certain way, you begin to create an attitude. An attitude is a cycle of short-term thoughts and feelings experienced over and over again. Attitudes are shortened states of being. If you string a series of attitudes together, you create a belief. Beliefs are more elongated states of being and tend to become subconscious. When you add beliefs together, you create a perception. Your perceptions have everything to do with the choices you make, the behaviors you exhibit, the relationships you chose, and the realities you create.

We can’t create a new future while we’re living in our past. It’s simply impossible.

First, every day I would put all of my conscious attention on this intelligence within me and give it a plan, a template, a vision, with very specific orders, and then I would surrender my healing to this greater mind that has unlimited power, allowing it to do the healing for me. And second, I wouldn’t let any thought slip by my awareness that I didn’t want to experience.

Your brain and body don’t know the difference between having an actual experience in your life and just thinking about the experience—neurochemically, it’s the same.

To be happy with yourself in the present moment while maintaining a dream of your future is a grand recipe for manifestation. When you feel so whole that you no longer care whether “it” will happen, that’s when amazing things materialize before your eyes. I’ve learned that being whole is the perfect state of creation. I’ve seen this time and time again in witnessing true healings in people all over the world. They feel so complete that they no longer want, no longer feel lack, and no longer try to do it themselves. They let go, and to their amazement, something greater than they are responds—and they laugh at the simplicity of the process.

We are creatures of habit. We think somewhere between 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts in one day,1 and 90 percent of those thoughts are exactly the same ones we had the day before.

Most change starts with the simple process of something outside of us altering something inside of us. If you begin the inward journey and start to change your inner world of thoughts and feelings, it should create an improved state of well-being. If you keep repeating the process in meditation, then in time, epigenetic changes should begin to alter your outer presentation—and you become your own placebo.

You must feel a new energy . . . to become some thing greater than your body, your environment, and time . . . so that you have dominion over your body, your environment, and time. . . . Become a thought that affects matter. . . .

Just as thoughts are the language of the brain, feelings are the language of the body. And how you think and how you feel create a state of being. A state of being is when your mind and body are working together. So your present state of being is your genuine mind-body connection.

What beliefs and perceptions about you and your life have you been unconsciously agreeing to that you’d have to change in order to create this new state of being?

we’re addicted to our beliefs; we’re addicted to the emotions of our past. We see our beliefs as truths, not ideas that we can change. If we have very strong beliefs about something, evidence to the contrary could be sitting right in front of us, but we may not see it because what we perceive is entirely different. We’ve in fact conditioned ourselves to believe all sorts of things that aren’t necessarily true—and many of these things are having a negative impact on our health and happiness. Certain cultural beliefs

What we’re conditioned to believe about ourselves, and what we’re programmed to think other people think about us, affects our performance, including how successful we are.

Your personality is made up of how you think, act, and feel. It is your state of being. Therefore, your same thoughts, actions, and feelings will keep you enslaved to the same past personal reality. However, when you as a personality embrace new thoughts, actions, and feelings, you will inevitably create a new personal reality in your future.

Now, when a new day dawns for us after the long night of darkness and the phoenix rises regenerated from its ashes, we have invented a new self. And the physical, biological expression of the new self is literally becoming someone else. That’s true metamorphosis.

The seemingly impossible can become possible! You Are the Placebo, the new book by Dr. Joe Dispenza

You must become conscious of the unconscious behaviors you’ve been choosing to demonstrate that have led to the same experiences, and then you must make new choices, take new actions, and create new experiences.

it makes sense that we should concentrate not merely on avoiding negative emotions, like fear and anger, but also on consciously cultivating heartfelt, positive emotions, such as gratitude, joy, excitement, enthusiasm, fascination, awe, inspiration, wonder, trust, appreciation, kindness, compassion, and empowerment, to give us every advantage in maximizing our health.

Are we more likely to suffer from arthritis, stiff joints, poor memory, flagging energy, and decreased sex drive as we age, simply because that’s the version of the truth that ads, commercials, television shows, and media reports bombard us with? What other self-fulfilling prophecies are we creating in our minds without being aware of what we’re doing? And what “inevitable truths” can we successfully reverse simply through thinking new thoughts and choosing new beliefs? The

Because consciousness is awareness, awareness is paying attention, and paying attention is being present and noticing, this consciousness would be aware of when I was present and when I wasn’t. I would have to be totally present when I interacted with this mind; my presence would have to match its presence, my will would have to match its will, and my mind would have to match its mind.

combine a clear intention with an uncompromising trust in possibility, then you’ll step into the unknown, and that’s when the supernatural starts to unfold. I think that you and I are at our best when we’re in this state of being.

Can You Be Your Own Placebo?

anything that’s repeatable is science.

Where you place your attention is where you place your energy. Once you fix your attention or your awareness or your mind on possibility, you place your energy there as well. As a result, you’re affecting matter with your attention or observation. The placebo effect is not fantasy, then; it’s quantum reality. Energy

repatterns our brains and changes our biology; the new experience will reorganize the old programming, and in so doing, it will remove the neurological evidence of that past experience. (Think of how a bigger wave breaking farther up on the beach erases any sign of whatever shell, seaweed, sea foam, or sand pattern was there before.) Strong emotional experiences create long-term memories. So this new internal experience creates new long-term memories that override our past

beliefs and perceptions are subconscious states of being. They start with thoughts and feelings that you think and feel over and over, until they ultimately become habituated or automatic—at which point they form an attitude.

The quantum model, which states that all possibilities exist in this present moment, is your key to using the placebo effect for healing, because it gives you permission to choose a new future for yourself and actually observe it into reality.

And can you teach your body emotionally . . . what it would feel like to believe in this way . . . to be empowered . . . to be moved by your own greatness . . . to have courage . . . to be invincible . . . to be in love with life . . . to feel unlimited

Meditation takes us from survival to creation; from separation to connection; from imbalance to balance; from emergency mode to growth-and-repair mode; and from the limiting emotions of fear, anger, and sadness to the expansive emotions of joy, freedom, and love.

That’s why I called my last book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, because that’s the greatest habit we have to break—thinking, feeling, and behaving in the same way that reinforces the unconscious programs that reflect our personalities and our personal realities.

self-directed neuroplasticity (or SDN).

When you feel an emotion, you can ultimately bypass your neocortex—the seat of your conscious mind—and activate your autonomic nervous system. Therefore, as you get beyond your thinking brain, you move into a part of the brain where health is regulated, maintained, and executed. So

When feelings have become the means of thinking in this manner—or we can’t think greater than how we feel—then we’re in the program. Our thinking is how we feel, and our feelings are how we think.

Attitudes strung together become beliefs, and related beliefs strung together become perceptions. Over time, this redundancy creates a view of the world and of yourself that’s largely subconscious.

how do you and I become supernatural? We have to begin to do what’s unnatural—that is, to give in the midst of crisis, when everyone is feeling lack and poverty; to love when everyone is angry and judging others; to demonstrate courage and peace when everyone else is in fear; to show kindness when others are displaying hostility and aggression; to surrender to possibility when the rest of the world is aggressively pushing to be first, trying to control outcomes, and fiercely competing in an endless drive to get to the top; to knowingly smile in the face of adversity; and to cultivate the feeling of wholeness when we’re diagnosed as sick.

habit is when your body is the mind. Ninety-five percent of who you are by the time you’re 35 years old is a set of memorized behaviors, skills, emotional reactions, beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes that functions like a

And now, surrender your creation to a greater mind . . . for what you think and experience in this realm of possibility . . . if it is truly felt . . . it will manifest in some future time . . . from waves of possibilities to particles in reality . . . from the immaterial to the material . . . from thought to energy into matter. . . .

if you can experience a healing over and over again in the inner world of thoughts and feelings, then in time, that healing should finally manifest as an outer experience. And if you make a thought as real as the experience in the external environment, shouldn’t there be evidence in your body and brain sooner or later? In other words, if you mentally rehearse that unknown future with a clear intention and an elevated emotion, and do it repeatedly, then based on what you’ve learned, you should have real neuroplastic changes in your brain and epigenetic changes in your body.

So if you want to change a belief or perception, you have to first change your state of being. And changing your state of being means changing your energy, because in order for you to affect matter, you have to become more energy and less matter, more wave and less particle. That requires you to combine a clear intention and an elevated emotion—those are the two ingredients.

Because of the size of our enormous forebrain, the privilege of being a human being is that we can make thought more real than anything else—and that’s how the placebo works. To see how the process unfolds, it’s vital to examine and review three key elements: conditioning, expectation, and meaning. As you’ll see, these three concepts all seem to work together in orchestrating the placebo response. I

By the same means, if you were to change how you feel, could you become more suggestible to a new stream of thoughts? Absolutely! By feeling an elevated emotion and allowing a whole new set of thoughts to be driven by that new feeling, you’d increase your level of suggestibility to what you were feeling and then thinking.

Stress is one of the biggest causes of epigenetic change, because it knocks your body out of balance. It comes in three forms: physical stress (trauma), chemical stress (toxins), and emotional stress (fear, worry, being overwhelmed, and so on). Each type can set off more than 1,400 chemical reactions and produce more than 30 hormones and neurotransmitters. When that chemical cascade of stress hormones is triggered, your mind influences your body through the autonomic nervous system and you experience the ultimate

This intelligence keeps your heart beating more than 101,000 times a day to pump more than two gallons of blood per minute, traveling more than 60,000 miles in each 24-hour period. As you finish reading this sentence, your body will have made 25 trillion cells. And each of the 70 trillion cells that make up your body execute somewhere between 100,000 to 6 trillion functions per second. You’ll inhale 2 million liters of oxygen today, and each time you inhale, that oxygen will be distributed to every cell in your body within seconds. Do

realized back then that when crisis or trauma occurs, we spend too much of our attention and energy thinking about what we don’t want instead of what we do want.

the human body is its own best apothecary and because the most successful prescriptions are filled by the body itself.

our bodies do have an innate intelligence that enables them to serve us with a chemical array of natural healing compounds.

move from being selfish to selfless.

In order to change your life, you have to literally become someone else.

And as a result, the effects of this new experience override the residue of the neural programming and emotional conditioning from the past experience. This

Only about 5 to 10 percent of the population are considered very susceptible to hypnosis. In

If the human body can act like its own pharmacy, producing its own pain drugs, then might it not also be true that it’s fully capable of dispensing other natural drugs when they’re needed from the infinite blend of chemicals and healing compounds it houses—drugs that act just like the ones doctors prescribe or maybe even better than the drugs doctors prescribe?

Remember in The Empire Strikes Back, when Yoda said to Luke Skywalker that there is no try, only do (or do not)? The same is true with the placebo response: There is no try; there’s only allow.

emotions like gratitude and appreciation open your heart and lift the energy in your body to a new place—out of the lower hormonal centers. Gratitude is one of the most powerful emotions for increasing your level of suggestibility. It teaches your body emotionally that the event you’re grateful for has already happened, because we usually give thanks after a desirable event has occurred.

By holding a clear and firm intention and heightening our emotional energy, we have to create a new internal experience in our minds and bodies that’s greater than the past external experience. In other words, when we decide to create a new belief, the amplitude or energy of that choice must be high enough that it’s greater than the hardwired programs and emotional conditioning in the body.

When you’re truly focused on an intention for some future outcome, if you can make inner thought more real than the outer environment during the process, the brain won’t know the difference between the two. Then your body, as the unconscious mind, will begin to experience the new future event in the present moment. You’ll signal new genes, in new ways, to prepare for this imagined future event.

What we’re conditioned to believe about ourselves, and what we’re programmed to think other people think about us, affects our performance, including how successful we are. It’s the same with placebos: What we’re conditioned to believe will happen when we take a pill, and what we think that everyone around us (including our doctors) expects will happen when we do, affects how our bodies respond to the pill.

As my ability to observe my desired destiny got sharper and sharper, my cells began to reorganize themselves. I began to signal new genes in new ways, and then my body really started getting better faster. What

Our beliefs aren’t always as conscious as we think they are. We may very well accept an idea on the surface, but if deep down, we don’t really believe it’s possible, then our acceptance is just an intellectual process. Because calling upon the placebo effect requires us to truly change our beliefs about ourselves and what’s possible for our bodies and our health, we need to understand what beliefs are and where they come from.

Strong emotional experiences create long-term memories. So this new internal experience creates new long-term memories that override our past long-term memories, thus the choice becomes an experience that we never forget.

if you can imagine a particular future event that you want to experience in your life, that reality already exists as a possibility somewhere in the quantum field—beyond this space and time—just waiting for you to observe it.

This process, if we do it right, actually repatterns our brains and changes our biology; the new experience will reorganize the old programming, and in so doing, it will remove the neurological evidence of that past experience.

And if we’re living the same life every day by doing the same things at the same time, seeing the same people at the same place, and creating the same experiences from yesterday, then we’re enslaved to having our outer worlds influence our inner worlds. It’s our environment that is controlling how we think, act, and feel. We’re victims of our personal realities, because our personal realities are creating our personalities—and it’s become an unconscious process.

In other words, if you can imagine a particular future event that you want to experience in your life, that reality already exists as a possibility somewhere in the quantum field—beyond this space and time—just waiting for you to observe it. If your mind (through your thoughts and feelings) can affect when and where an electron appears out of nowhere, then theoretically, you should be able to influence the appearance of any number of possibilities that you can imagine. From

And fewer than 5 percent of people on the planet are born with some genetic condition—like type 1 diabetes, Down syndrome, or sickle-cell anemia. The other 95 percent of us who develop such a condition acquire it through lifestyle and behaviors.

But when there isn’t a return to homeostasis (because you keep perceiving a threat), vital energy is lost in the system. You have less energy in your internal environment for cell growth and repair, long-term building projects on a cellular level, and healing when that energy is being channeled elsewhere. The cells shut down, they no longer communicate with one another, and they become “selfish.” It’s not time for routine maintenance (let alone for making improvements); it’s time for defense.

For example, researchers at the Ohio State University Medical Center found that more than 170 genes were affected by stress, with 100 of them shutting off completely (including many that directly make proteins to facilitate the proper type of wound healing).

In other words, in exactly the same environment, those with a positive mind-set tend to create positive situations, while those with a negative mind-set tend to create negative situations. This is the miracle of our own free-willed, individual, biological engineering. While

Epigenetics teaches that we, indeed, are not doomed by our genes and that a change in human consciousness can produce physical changes, both in structure and function, in the human body. We can modify our genetic destiny by turning on the genes we want and turning off the ones we don’t want through working with the various factors in the environment that program our genes. Some of those signals come from within the body, such as feelings and thoughts, while others come from the body’s response to the external environment, such as pollution or sunlight.

So let’s begin to look at how this happens. The neurological research shows something truly remarkable: If a person keeps taking the same substance, his or her brain keeps firing the same circuits in the same way—in effect, memorizing what the substance does. The person can easily become conditioned to the effect of a particular pill or injection from associating it with a familiar internal change from past experience. Because of this kind of conditioning, when the person then takes a placebo, the same hardwired circuits will fire as when he or she took the drug.

The Legacy of Negative Emotions As we keep making stress hormones, we create a host of highly addictive negative emotions, including anger, hostility, aggression, competition, hatred, frustration, fear, anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, guilt, shame, sadness, depression, hopelessness, and powerlessness,

So if you understand this model, then you should agree with me that your new thoughts should lead to new choices. New choices should lead to new behaviors. New behaviors should lead to new experiences. New experiences should create new emotions, and new emotions and feelings should inspire you to think in new ways. That’s called “evolution.” And your personal reality and your biology—your brain circuitry, your internal chemistry, your genetic expression, and ultimately your health—should change as a result of this new personality, this new state of being. And it all seems to start with a thought. A

That’s because when you fall asleep, you naturally shift though the entire spectrum of brain-wave states, going from your waking, beta state to the slower alpha state, when you close your eyes, to the slower-still theta state, when you’re half-asleep and half-awake, all the way down to the deep-sleep delta brain-wave state.

But how do you and I become supernatural? We have to begin to do what’s unnatural—that is, to give in the midst of crisis, when everyone is feeling lack and poverty; to love when everyone is angry and judging others; to demonstrate courage and peace when everyone else is in fear; to show kindness when others are displaying hostility and aggression; to surrender to possibility when the rest of the world is aggressively pushing to be first, trying to control outcomes, and fiercely competing in an endless drive to get to the top; to knowingly smile in the face of adversity; and to cultivate the feeling of wholeness when we’re diagnosed as sick. It

Since the neocortex is divided into two halves called hemispheres, it makes sense that we analyze and spend a lot of time thinking in duality: you know, good versus bad, right versus wrong, positive versus negative, male versus female, straight versus gay, Democrat versus Republican, past versus future, logic versus emotion, old versus new, head versus heart—you get the idea. And if we’re living in stress, the chemicals we’re pumping into our systems tend to drive the whole analytical process faster. We analyze even more in order to predict future outcomes so that we can protect ourselves from potential worst-case scenarios based on past experience. There

So the only way to change your beliefs and perceptions in order to create a placebo response is to change your state of being. You have to finally see your old, limited beliefs for what they are—records of the past—and be willing to let go of them so that you can embrace new beliefs about yourself that will help you create a new future.

Therefore, in a conditioned response, we could say that a subconscious program, which is housed in the body (I’ll talk more about this in the coming chapters), seemingly overrides the conscious mind and takes charge. In this way, the body is actually conditioned to become the mind because conscious thought is no longer totally in control.

For example, researchers found four times as many differentially expressed genes between one pair of 50-year-old twins as they did between a pair of 3-year-old twins. The twins were born with exactly the same DNA, but those with different lifestyles (and different lives) ended up expressing their genes very differently—especially as time went on.

we’re suggestible only to what we consciously or unconsciously believe to be true. An Eskimo who doesn’t believe in Chinese astrology is no more suggestible to the idea that he’s vulnerable to a certain disease because he was born in the year of the tiger or the year of the dragon than an Episcopalian would be suggestible to the idea that a hex from a voodoo priest could kill him or her. But once any of us accepts, believes, and surrenders to an outcome without consciously thinking about it or analyzing it, then we’ll become suggestible to that particular reality. In most people, such a belief is planted well beyond the conscious mind into the subconscious system, which is what creates the disease.

All of the elements that these cells manufacture are proteins. Proteins control our immune system, digest our food, heal our wounds, catalyze chemical reactions, support the structural integrity of our bodies, provide elegant molecules to communicate between cells, and much more. In short, proteins are the expression of life (and the health of our bodies).

So if you want to change a belief or perception, you have to first change your state of being. And changing your state of being means changing your energy, because in order for you to affect matter, you have to become more energy and less matter, more wave and less particle. That requires you to combine a clear intention and an elevated emotion—those are the two ingredients. As

By holding a clear and firm intention and heightening our emotional energy, we have to create a new internal experience in our minds and bodies that’s greater than the past external experience. In other words, when we decide to create a new belief, the amplitude or energy of that choice must be high enough that it’s greater than the hardwired programs and emotional conditioning in the body. To

Given that, we have to ask ourselves, What percentage of diseases and illnesses are due to the effects of negative thoughts in the nocebo? Considering that the latest scientific research in psychology estimates that about 70 percent of our thoughts are negative and redundant, the number of unconsciously created nocebo-like illnesses might be impressive indeed—certainly much higher than we realize.32

The neurological research shows something truly remarkable: If a person keeps taking the same substance, his or her brain keeps firing the same circuits in the same way—in effect, memorizing what the substance does. The person can easily become conditioned to the effect of a particular pill or injection from associating it with a familiar internal change from past experience. Because of this kind of conditioning, when the person then takes a placebo, the same hardwired circuits will fire as when he or she took the drug. An associative memory elicits a subconscious program that makes a connection between the pill or injection and the hormonal change in the body, and then the program automatically signals the body to make the related chemicals found in the drug. . . . Isn’t that amazing? Benedetti

Now think about the average person who receives a diagnosis and promptly announces, “I’m going to beat this.” Someone may not accept the condition and the outcome the doctor outlines, but the difference is that most people haven’t truly changed their beliefs about not being sick. Changing a belief requires changing a subconscious program—since a belief, as you’ll soon learn, is a subconscious state of being.

If it sounds as though I’m saying that we live a huge part of our lives on autopilot, that’s exactly right. Thinking the same thoughts leads us to make the same choices. Making the same choices leads to demonstrating the same behaviors. Demonstrating the same behaviors leads us to create the same experiences. Creating the same experiences leads us to produce the same emotions. And those same emotions then drive the same thoughts.

They came up with that number because genes manufacture (and supervise the production of) proteins—and the human body manufactures 100,000 different proteins, plus 40,000 regulatory proteins needed to make other proteins. So the scientists mapping the human genome were anticipating that they’d find one gene per protein, but by the end of the project, in 2003, they were shocked to discover that, in fact, humans have only 23,688 genes. From

A Spanish study illustrates this perfectly. Researchers at the Cancer Epigenetics Laboratory at the Spanish National Cancer Center in Madrid studied 40 pairs of identical twins, ranging in age from 3 to 74. They found that younger twins who had similar lifestyles and spent more years together had similar epigenetic patterns, while older twins, in particular those with dissimilar lifestyles who spent fewer years together, had very different epigenetic patterns.13

Scientists now believe it’s even possible that our genetic expression fluctuates on a moment-to-moment basis. The research is revealing that our thoughts and feelings, as well as our activities—that is, our choices, behaviors, and experiences—have profound healing and regenerative effects on our bodies, as the men in the monastery study discovered. Thus your genes are being affected by your interactions with your family, friends, co-workers, and spiritual practices, as well as your sexual habits, your exercise levels, and the types of detergents you use. The latest research shows that approximately 90 percent of genes are engaged in cooperation with signals from the environment.8 And if our experience is what activates a good number of our genes, then our nature is influenced by nurturing. So why not harness the power of these ideas so that we can do everything possible to maximize our health and minimize our dependence on the prescription pad?

When we focus on thoughts about bitter past memories or imagined dreadful futures to the exclusion of everything else, we prevent the body from regaining homeostasis. In truth, we’re capable of turning on the stress response by thought alone. If we turn it on and then can’t turn it off, we’re surely headed for some type of illness or disease—be it a cold or cancer—as more and more genes get downregulated in a domino effect, until we eventually arrive at our genetic destiny. For

wanted to give people scientific information and then provide them with the necessary instruction on how to apply that information so that they could achieve heightened degrees of personal transformation. Science is, after all, the contemporary language of mysticism. I learned that the moment you start talking in the language of religion or culture, the moment you start quoting tradition, you divide your audience members. But science unifies them and demystifies the mystical. And

67 percent of the women told the researchers that they didn’t exercise regularly, and 37 percent said they didn’t get any exercise. After this initial assessment, Crum and Langer divided the maids into two groups. They explained to the first group how their activity related to the number of calories they burned and told the maids that just by doing their jobs, they got more than enough exercise. They didn’t give any such information to the second group (who worked in different hotels from the first group and so wouldn’t benefit from conversations with the other maids). One month later, the researchers found that the first group lost an average of two pounds, lowered their percentage of body fat, and lowered their systolic blood pressure by an average of 10 points—even though they hadn’t performed any additional exercise outside of work or changed their eating habits in any way. The other group, doing the same job as the first, remained virtually unchanged. This

your body is made up of a vast array of atoms and molecules and that these atoms and molecules form chemicals. Those chemicals organize into cells, which form tissues that further organize into organs, which create various systems within your body. For example, a muscle cell is made of different chemicals (proteins, ions, cytokines, growth factors), which are made of the different interactions of molecules, which are made of various atomic bonds; those atoms share an invisible field of information to form molecules. The

They conditioned their bodies to a new mind and so began to signal new genes in new ways and express new proteins for better health—and they moved into a new state of being. Once they surrendered to a new possible scenario, they no longer analyzed how it was going to happen or when it would manifest; they simply trusted in a better state of being and maintained that new state of mind and body for an extended period of time. It was that sustained state of being that switched on the right genes and programmed them to stay on.

The word epigenetics literally means “above the gene.” It refers to the control of genes not from within the DNA itself but from messages coming from outside the cell—in other words, from the environment. These signals cause a methyl group (one carbon atom attached to three hydrogen atoms) to attach to a specific spot on a gene, and this process (called DNA methylation) is one of the main processes that turns the gene off or on. (Two other processes, covalent histone modification and noncoding RNA, also turn genes on and off,

If you continue to mentally practice enough times this new series of choices, behaviors, and experiences that you desire, reproducing the same new level of mind over and over again, then your brain will begin to physically change—installing new neurological circuitry to begin to think from that new level of mind—to look as if the experience has already happened. You’ll be producing epigenetic variations that lead to real structural and functional changes in the body by thought alone—just as do those who respond to a placebo. Then your brain and body will no longer be living in the same past; they’ll be living in the new future that you created in your mind. This is possible through mental rehearsal. This technique is basically closing your eyes and repeatedly imagining performing an action, and mentally reviewing the future you want, all the while reminding yourself of who you no longer want to be (the old self) and who you do want to be. This process involves thinking about your future actions, mentally planning your choices, and focusing your mind on a new experience.

So when people like the folks you’ll read about in the next few chapters healed themselves using the placebo effect, what did they do differently? First, they didn’t accept the finality of their diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment. Nor did they believe in the most probable outcome or future destiny that their doctors had authoritatively outlined. Finally, they didn’t surrender to the diagnosis, prognosis, or suggested treatment. Because they had a different attitude from those who did accept, believe, and surrender, they were in a different state of being.

So now let’s address the elephant in the room: No real physical, chemical, or therapeutic mechanisms made these changes happen. None of these people had actual surgery, took active medication, or received any real treatment to create these significant alterations in health. The power of their minds so influenced their bodies’ physiology that they became healed. It’s safe to say that their real transformation happened independent of their conscious minds. Their conscious minds may have initiated the course of action, but the real work happened subconsciously, with the subjects remaining totally unaware of how it happened.

In order to change a belief or perception about yourself and your life, you have to make a decision with such firm intention that the choice carries an amplitude of energy that is greater than the hardwired programs in the brain and the emotional addiction in the body, and the body must respond to a new mind. When the choice creates a new inner experience that becomes greater than the past outer experience, it will rewrite the circuits in your brain and resignal your body emotionally. Since experiences create long-term memories, when the choice becomes an experience that you never forget, you are changed. Biologically, the past no longer exists. We could say that your body in that present moment is in a new future. Now

As a result of this conscious or unconscious process, your biology stays the same. Neither your brain nor your body changes at all, because you’re thinking the same thoughts, performing the same actions, and living by the same emotions—even though you may be secretly hoping your life will change. You create the same brain activity, which activates the same brain circuits and reproduces the same brain chemistry, which affects your body chemistry in the same way. And that same chemistry signals the same genes in the same ways. And the same gene expression creates the same proteins, the building blocks of cells, which keep the body the same (I’ll go into more on proteins later). And since the expression of proteins is the expression of life or health, your life and your health stay the same.