You know the drill. You make New Year’s resolutions fired with enthusiasm to change your life – lose a few kilos, stop smoking, cut out carbs and learn a new language – but before you know it, you’ve broken your resolve. Are we locked into failure?
Absolutely not, according to Dr Joe Dispenza, author of the international bestseller Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One. You are not hardwired to be a certain way for the rest of your life, he says.
A new model of reality
Mind and matter are not separate elements, says Dispenza. Your conscious, mindful observation of reality matters. If reality is an extension of mind and your reality is your life, he explains, then by changing your mind, you can produce some identifiable changes in your life.
As you sharpen your abilities to observe some desired destiny from a new ideal of yourself instead of from the same old self, your life is more likely to reorganise itself in new and unusual ways because the new ideal has the ability to create a new life.
How to change your mind
When you do the same thing every day your mind and brain remain virtually unchanged. That’s why it’s ironic that most people routinely think the same thoughts and perform the same actions, yet secretly expect something different to happen in their lives.
Before you get out of bed and begin your day, says Dispenza, take the time to ask yourself:
“What is the greatest ideal of myself that I can be today?” Doing so will enable you to begin to think differently from how you did the day before.
Dispenza says that by thinking about a greater ideal of yourself before you start your day, you can begin to make your brain fire in new sequences, patterns, and combinations:
- Close your eyes and eliminate the barrage of stimuli from your external world. In this way you can formulate a new image of yourself without distraction just by going within.
- When you are truly focused and paying attention, there comes a moment when your brain does not know the difference between what is real and what you imagine in your mind.
- The thoughts you embrace will become just like a real life experience in your mind. The moment this occurs, your brain begins to reflect what you are imagining and intentionally thinking about.
- If you spend time each day in meditation on these matters, you can make the brain fire in new patterns, create new experiences, and make new memories – you can step into a new way of being by simply focusing each day on the changes you would like to see inside and outside of yourself.
The result: when you change your mind, you change your brain, and when you change your brain, you change your mind.
Mind and body
If you commit to not arising to face the day until you actually feel like that new ideal, you will also be conditioning the body to work together with your new mind. Together, brain and body become no longer a record of the past but a map to your future. Here’s why:
- When we learn something new, what we’re actually doing is creating or making new synaptic connections within our brains.
- When we remember these new creations through conscious daily meditation, we maintain or sustain them.
- With the Law of Repetition a thought becomes an action, a feeling, and a skill. Done over and over again this new way of being becomes natural and effortless.
- New pathways in the brain are formed, creating a new level of mind. The brain begins firing in new ways forming a community of neuro-synaptic connections.
- When you change your mind with conscious daily focusing, your life also changes.
A new routine
Start out on this path by doing something that breaks your routine.
When you retreat from the world and eliminate the typical environmental stimuli that cause you to think in routine ways, you can begin the process of true change.
Remember that to change, you have to think greater than your present reality, you have to dream beyond the familiar feelings you’ve memorised that contribute to your identity-self, and you must create a life that exists in a future time.
It only takes learning and reorganising your thinking in order to prepare the mind for a better future.
