Blinks:
1. Matter and energy - You can shape the world around you with you consciousness because you emit energy.
2. The quantum: realm of infinite possibilities.
3. The connection between mind and body.
4. Harnessing the mind-body connection.

It’s hard to critique a spirituality book but I will say this book contains very clear instruction and explanation in order to practice the techniques taught by Joe D. His strength is marrying science with spirit. It’s interesting reading about how ancient practices like meditation affects the brain and nervous system. Definitely a book to consider opening if you’re looking for the next step in your daily meditation practice.

Lots of great information. Although the medical topics can be hard to follow at times. I still haven’t gotten around to do the meditations in the book yet but that’ll be on my todo list.

There's so much in here and I think the meditations and practices can be as powerful as Dr. Joe Dispenza tells us they are! In my own daily meditations, while contemplating the pineal gland and the unified field, I've recently seemed to connect just a bit with the unified field and hold a sustained period of elevated emotions. I can see why allocating up to two hours for these meditations is practical, because mine are only about 35-40 minutes and that's definitely NOT enough time! Along with some other work that I've been doing (teachings from Wayne Dyer), I do feel a slight shift occurring for me. And it feels good. And powerful. Though that can also feel a little scary at times. Mostly because it's the unknown and I admit that it's uncomfortable to be away from the familiar, even if the familiar has been keeping me down.

I appreciate the reputation of concepts throughout the book, as it helps the information absorb because there’s a lot of important things to consider/remember while getting into these practices. I excerpted many passages from the book, all throughout the book, but you'll see that the passages I was able to include here only go up to page 40 and than I included a passage from the end because it's pretty powerful.

“The key to the yogi’s teaching is this: when we experience for ourselves, or witness in another person, something that we’ve once believed to be impossible, we are freed in our beliefs to transcend those limitations in our own lives. And this is precisely why the book you’re holding has the potential to change your life. By showing you how to accept your future dream as your current reality, and to do so in a way that your body believes is happening ‘now,’ you discover how to set into motion a cascade of emotional and physiological processes that reflect your new reality. The neurons in your brain, the sensory neurites in you heart, and the chemistry of your body all harmonize to mirror the new thinking, and the quantum possibilities of life are rearranged to replace the unwanted circumstance of your past with the new circumstances that you’ve accepted as the present.” pg. xiv

“I wrote this book to take what I’ve always thought was possible to the next level of understanding. I wanted to demonstrate to the world that we can create better lives for ourselves—and that we are not linear beings living linear lives, but dimensional beings living dimensional lives. Hopefully, reading it will help you understand that you already have all the anatomy, chemistry, and physiology you need to become supernatural sitting latent within you, waiting to be awakened and activated.” pg. xviii

“We have also recorded amazing changes in heart rate variability (HRV). That’s when we know a student is opening their heart and maintaining elevated emotions like gratitude, inspiration, joy, kindness, appreciation, and compassion, which cause the heart to beat in a coherent fashion—that is, with rhythm, order, and balance. We know that it takes a clear intention (a coherent brain) and an elevated emotion (a coherent heart) to begin to change a person’s biology from living in the past to living in the future. That combination of mind and body—of thoughts and feelings—also seems to influence matter. And that’s how you create reality.” pg. xx

“Our students know how to influence the autonomic nervous system (ANS)—the system that maintains health and balance by automatically taking care of all our bodily functions while we have the free will to live our lives. It is this subconscious system that gives us our health and gives life to our bodies. Once we know how to gain access to this system, we can not only make our health better, but we can also transform unwanted self-limiting behaviors, beliefs, and habits into more productive ones.” pg. xxi

“Because of our large brains, human beings are capable of thinking about their problems, reliving past events, or even forecasting future worst-case situations and thus turning on the cascade of stress chemicals by thought alone. We can knock our brains and bodies out of normal physiology just by thinking about an all-too-familiar past or trying to control an unpredictable future.” pg. 3

“Emotions are the chemical consequences (or feedback) of past experiences. As our senses record incoming information from the environment, clusters of neurons organize into networks. When they freeze into a pattern, the brain makes a chemical that is then sent through the body. That chemical is called an emotion. We remember events better when we can remember how they feel. The stronger the emotional quotient from any event—either good or bad—the stronger the change in our internal chemistry. When we notice a significant change inside of us, the brain pays attention to whoever or whatever is causing the change outside of us—and it takes a snapshot of the outer experience. That’s called a memory.” pg. 3-4

“When the fight-or-flight nervous system is switched on and stays on because of chronic stress, the body utilizes all its energy reserves to deal with the constant threat it perceives from the outer environment. Therefore, the body has no energy left in its inner environment for growth and repair, compromising the immune system. So because of her repeated inner conflict, Anna’s immune system was attacking her body. She had finally physically manifested the pain and suffering she’d emotionally experienced in her mind. In short, Anna could not move her body because she wasn’t moving forward in her life—she was stuck in her past.” pg. 5

“It’s amazing how this can happen to so many people. Because of a shock or trauma in their lives, they never get beyond those corresponding emotions, and their health and their lives break down. If an addiction is something that you think you can’t stop, then objectively it looks as though people like Anna become addicted to the very emotions of stress that are making them sick. The rush of adrenaline and the rest of the stress hormones arouses their brain and body, providing a rush of energy. In time, they become addicted to the rush of that chemistry—and then they use the people and conditions in their lives to reaffirm their addiction to the emotion, just to keep feeling that heightened state. Anna was using her stressful conditions to re-create that rush of energy, and without realizing it, she became emotionally addicted to a life she hated. Science tells us that such chronic, long-term stress pushes the genetic buttons that create disease. So if Anna was turning the stress response on by thinking about her problems and her past, her thoughts were making her sick. And since stress hormones are so powerful, she had become addicted to her own thoughts that were making her feel so bad.” pg. 7-8

“By going within and changing her unconscious thoughts, automatic habits, and reflexive emotional states—which had become hardwired in her brain and emotionally conditioned in her body—Anna was now more committed to believing in a new future than believing in her same familiar past. She used her meditations, combining a clear intention with an elevated emotion, to change her state of being from biologically living in the same past to living in a new future.” pg. 9

“Anna also learned a specific breathing technique I teach in our work to liberate all the emotional energy that is stored in the body when we keep thinking and feeling the same way. By constantly thinking the same thought, Anna had been creating the same feelings, and then by feeling those familiar emotions, she would think more of the same corresponding thoughts. She learned that the emotions of the past were stored in her body, but she could use this breathing technique to liberate that stored energy and free herself from her past. So every day, with a level of intensity that was greater than her addiction to past emotions, she practiced the breath and got better and better at doing it. After she learned to move that stored energy in her body, she learned how to recondition her body to a new mind by embracing the heart-centered emotions of her future before her future unfolded.” pg. 11

“From the backyard, I smiled. I was so in love with him. I saw his sincerity; I saw his struggles; I saw his passion; I saw his love; I saw his mind busy, as always, constantly attempting to dovetail concepts into meaning; and among other things, I saw some of his future. Like a great parent, I was proud of him and had nothing but admiration for who he was in that moment.” pg. 20 [Joe speaking about his present past self; a reminder for me of how to think about myself and another]

“But this time, instead of trying to make something happen, I just let go and said to myself, Whatever . . . Apparently, that was the magic word. I know what that means now. I surrendered, got out of the way, let go of any specific outcome, and simply opened up to possibility.” pg. 23

“Let’s take a closer look at what happens biochemically inside your body when you think a thought or feel an emotion. When you think a thought (or have a memory), a biochemical reaction begins in your brain causing the brain to release certain chemical signals. That’s how immaterial thoughts literally become matter—they become chemical messengers. These chemical signals make your body feel exactly the way you were just thinking. Once you notice you are feeling a particular way, then you generate more thoughts equal to how you’re feeling, and then you release more chemicals from your brain to make you feel the way you’ve been thinking.
For example, if you have a fearful thought, you start to feel fear. The moment you feel fear, that emotion influences you to think more fearful thoughts, and those thoughts trigger the release of even more chemicals in the brain and body that make you continue to feel more fear. The next thing you know, you get caught in a loop where your thinking creates feeling and your feeling creates thinking. If thoughts are the vocabulary of the brain and feelings are the vocabulary of the body, and the cycle of how you think and feel becomes your state of being, then your entire state of being is in the past.
When you fire and wire the same circuits in your brain over and over again because you keep thinking the same thoughts, you are hardwiring your brain into the same patterns. As a result, your brain becomes an artifact of your past thinking, and in time it becomes easier to automatically think in the same ways. At the same time, as you repeatedly feel the same emotions over and over again—since as I just said, emotions are the vocabulary of the body and the chemical residue of past experiences—you are conditioning your body into the past.” pg. 29

“In a very real sense, your body is dragging you into the same predictable future based on what you have been repeatedly doing in the same familiar past. You will think the same thoughts and then make the same choices that lead to the same behaviors that create the same experiences that produce the same emotions. Over time, you’ve created a set of hardwired neurological networks in the brain and you have emotionally conditioned your body to live in the past—and that past becomes your future.” pg. 31

“We need to look at one more aspect of thinking and feeling to get the full picture of what’s happening when you keep living in the same state of being. This thinking-feeling loop also produces a measurable electromagnetic field that surrounds our physical bodies. In fact, our bodies are always emitting light, energy, or frequencies that carry a specific message, information, or intention. (By the way, when I say ‘light,’ I am not just referring to the light we see but to all spectrums of light—including x-rays, cell phone waves, and microwaves.) In the same way, we also receive vital information that is carried on different frequencies. So we are always sending and receiving electromagnetic energy.” pg. 33

“As you might expect, different emotions produce different frequencies. The frequencies of creative, elevated emotions like love, joy, and gratitude are much higher than the emotions of stress, such as fear and anger, because they carry different levels of conscious intent and energy.” pg. 33

“So now let me ask you this: Could it ever be possible for your body to start following your mind to the unknown? If so, you can see that you would have to change where you put your attention, and that would lead to changing your energy, which would require you to change how you think and how you feel long enough for something new to happen. While it may sound incredible, this is indeed possible. It makes sense that just as your body has been following your mind to every known experience in your life (like the coffeemaker each morning), if you were to start investing your attention and energy into the unknown, your body would then be able to follow your mind into the unknown—a new experience in your future.” pg. 36

“What do I mean by the environment within our body? As I said previously, emotions are chemical feedback, the end products of experiences we have in our external environment. So as we react to a situation in our external environment that produces an emotion, the resulting internal chemistry can signal our genes to either turn on (up-regulating or producing an increased expression of the gene) or to turn off (down-regulating, or producing a decreased expression of the gene). The gene itself doesn’t physically change—the expression of the gene changes, and that expression is what matters most because that is what affects our health and our lives. Thus, even though someone may have a genetic predisposition for a particular disease, for example, if the genes continue to express health instead of expressing that disease, they won’t develop the condition and will remain healthy.” pg. 40

“While it appears old structures and paradigms are collapsing, we should not face this with fear, anger, or sadness, because this is the process by which evolution and new things occur. Instead we should face the future with a whole new light, energy, and consciousness. As I have mentioned, the old has to fall apart and fall away before something new flourishes. Integral to this process is not squandering our energy by emotionally reacting to leaders or people in power. When they capture our emotions, they capture our attention, and thus they have captured our energy. This is how people gain power over us. Instead we must make a stand for principles, values, and moral imperatives like freedom, justice, truth, and equality. When we achieve this through the power of the collective, we will unite behind the energy of oneness rather than be controlled by the idea of separation. This is when standing up for truth is no longer personal, but through unifying and building community, becomes universal.” pg. 321-322

Book: borrowed from SSF Main Library.

Having practised meditation for over 25 years, I loved learning the science behind what actually happens in your brain when you meditate. Joe outlines the research he has done on how people can impact their brain through their thoughts and simply explains complex quantum concepts to the reader.

I've also downloaded his meditations and found them very powerful along with the examples in his book. Your thoughts do create your reality and Joe shows you why this happens and teaches you how to do it. Well written and insightful - full of facts not just fantasy.

DNF at 31%. I tried so, so hard to get through this book, but his mix of pseudoscience and actual fact is so dangerous. Do NOT tell people that they can manifest cancer away. HES NOT EVEN A REAL DOCTOR!!!!