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Dr. Stephen Sideroff is an internationally recognized psychologist, executive and medical consultant and expert in resilience, optimal performance, addiction, neurofeedback, leadership, and mental health. He has published pioneering research in these fields. He is a professor at UCLA in the Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences and the Department of... Read More
Dr Joe’s passion can be found at the intersection of the latest findings from the fields of neuroscience, epigenetics, and quantum physics to explore the science behind spontaneous remissions. He uses that knowledge to teach people how to heal their bodies of health conditions, make significant changes in their lives,... Read More
- How meditation effects the brain and body
- A practical formula for transforming one’s life
- Results of research on biofeedback and other approaches to self-regulation and optimal functioning
Dr. Stephen Sideroff
Welcome to another episode of reverse inflammaging, Summit Body and Mind Longevity Medicine. And I’m very pleased in this session to have Dr Joe Dispenza, a best selling New York Times, author, lecturer, corporate consultant. And his work is focused on really making, helping people make significant changes in their lives, healing from illness and evolving their consciousness. And so Joe, it’s such a pleasure to have you here. Welcome.
Dr Joe Dispenza
Thank you, Stephen. Thank you for inviting me. It’s an honor to be here.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff
Thank you. Thank you. And one of the things that I appreciate about your work is how important you hold research. And it’s not just to do the things that you do, but to research and actually demonstrate the results of what you are of what you are doing. So I’d love to hear why and you got into doing the research, what the research is about. And I know to some degree it has to do a little bit about your own particular hearing. I’m sorry, healing. So maybe you can start from that perspective.
Dr Joe Dispenza
Sure, sure, I’m happy to do that. I just, I just think it’s a time in history where it’s not enough to know. I think this is a time in history to know how and I think that people do the best with what they think is available and if they’re unavailable, they’re unaware of it and if, if that’s the case, they continuously make the same choice. So in 1986 I got run over by a truck in a triathlon in Palm Springs, California had multiple compression fractures of my spine, 66 vertebrae. As you know, when you compressed vertebrae, the volume of votes matter has to go somewhere. And in my case, they went back on the court. I had fracture of the neural arch of T eight. You know, it was more than 60% compressed. So I said I was in trouble and as you know, the typical procedure for that is Harrington Rod surgery. I had four opinions from four leading surgeons and the prognosis wasn’t good whether I got the surgery or not, you know. So I thought, you know, I’m not going anywhere, I’m not doing anything and basically lying face down. Is it possible then that my mind could begin to influence my body? And if I’m not moving around and I’m not experiencing a lot of things and I have a little bit of time to go inward. And is it possible if I build a model or concept or, or an idea in my mind that I can construct, could I get so lost in the experience that it could begin to influence my body and, and it worked. And I was back on my feet in about 10 weeks and 10.5 weeks and back living my life again. And during that time, I just made a deal with myself that if I was ever able to walk again, I would study the mind body connection for the rest of my life and, and do my best to demystify the process. And so I got involved in studying spontaneous remissions after my own personal recovery, just wonder if anybody else, you know, ever had a similar experience.
And, and if they did, what were those elements that, that either practiced or demonstrated or thought in some way? And, and I really thought it would be about things that I, that, that I believed to be important and some of those things were important assets, but it really was how the mind could possibly change. And, and so I discovered some commonalities in people That had spontaneous remissions. They were treating conventionally or unconventionally and they were staying the same or getting worse and all of a sudden they got better. And I just really wanted to understand the cause of what was producing that effect. So I went to 17 different countries and interviewed hundreds of people. This is in the 90s and just really looked to see what they had in common. And those four commonalities really had everything to do with kind of the principles of new science, you know, like neural plasticity and neural endocrinology and psycho neuro immunology and epigenetic sauce and, and the concepts of neuroscience were beginning to change.
And then when you see that the brain could actually change. So they’re, they’re the majority of the things that they did had everything to do with them making personal changes. In other words, your personality creates your personal reality and your personality is made of how you think, how you act and how you feel. And my interest was if you’re thinking the same way, you’re making the same choices, you’re doing the same things, you’re creating the same experiences, you’re feeling the same emotions, your biology should pretty much stay the same because you’re the same. So then is it possible if you give people new information and information actually is what begins to cause new synaptic connections in the brain? And you add new stitches into the three dimensional tapestry, you got some raw materials then to begin to think differently. And that could lead to making new choices and new choices could lead to new behaviors and new behaviors, create new experiences and new, new experiences actually create new feelings and emotions with our biology change as a result of that. So the discovery of what people did when they had their own personal changes and transformations that demystifying of that process led me to see if I could reproduce the outcome.
Is it possible then to do exactly what these people did, if they changed the way they thought they changed, the way they acted and they changed the way they felt, if they really understood the science of what they were doing and why they were doing it could how become practical and could we assign meaning to the task? And if we do the prefrontal cortex turns on and you get a greater outcome, you get a greater result and you can put someone in an ice bath. And as you know, in a minute or so, they’re gonna have hypothermia, give that person the same exposure to the same conditions, but give them some information and tell them the benefits of, of ice and give them something to do. And is it possible that really assign meaning to the test that they gain value from? And the answer is absolutely yes. So I thought okay, these people were healing themselves. Now that I understand some of the things that they did that had everything to do with their own personal change, they became a new personality and in a sense, the disease existed in the old personality. And I interviewed enough people that I was really humbled and really surprised that they were from all walks of life. Some people ate certain foods, other people didn’t they just, it was just, I couldn’t find anything except this concept of how stress down regulate genes and create disease.
And everybody had some trauma, some issues, some problem in their life that was agitating them. And here’s a great example of the mind body connection. I mean, the arousal of stress hormones, you know, puts our body into a state of emergency. When we’re living in stress, we’re living in survival when we’re in that state were out of homeostasis, were mobilizing enormous amounts of resources and energy. Prepare our body for that event. Long term, it’s really, really vital for us to our attention, to be heightened in our senses, to be heightened and us to focus. It’s good for the short term. But the long term effects somehow in time rob the body of always vitality, all of its natural resources of energy. And, and if we can think about our problems and turn on the same stress response as if the event was actually happening. And is it if, if stress long term effects create disease and push the genetic buttons? That means then our thoughts could literally make us sick because we’re turning on that stress response just by thought alone and we turn on the stress response, we can’t turn it off. Now, we’re headed for some from changing our biology.
And so, so these people have had experiences where they understood that they had some hand in their own health conditions. So, so I wanted to really see if there was a neuroscience and biology of personal change and transformation. So we started doing events around the world and I was really interested in replicating a lot of the things that the people did from a neuroscience standpoint, could they get so lost in the moment that the inner world can become more real than their outer world. And if that’s the case, the experience in their mind is actually changing circuitry in the brain. And if they could feel the emotion ahead of the actual event, could they condition their body into a new emotional state? And could they trade emotions that were connected to traumas in the past? Like anxiety or fear or aggression or anger or frustration or unworthiness or suffering or pain? Could, could we train them to feel different emotions and instead of waiting for their disease to change for them to feel grateful? Is it possible if the body could be trained to be so objective that it doesn’t know the difference between the real life experience that’s creating that emotion and the emotion, that person is fabricating by thought alone? Is it possible the body as the unconscious mind could actually change its emotional state and believe it’s living in a new environment.
And if the environment signals the gene and it does in the end product of experience in the environment is an emotion, could they signal genes? Ahead of their environment. If they could understand the what and why could, how get easier. So we were interested in teaching people some of these principles because some of the things that we saw that there was a understanding that the body had an innate intelligence to heal that was common amongst many of the people that had spontaneous remissions. They understood that their thoughts were making them sick. They understood that the hormones of stress became very addictive to them and they were addicted to the life. They didn’t even like, and they needed the crisis, they needed the trauma, they needed a diagnosis. They needed the disease to go. I’m in trouble. I gotta change and nothing changes in our life until we change and started to see that they, They were able to change their emotional states and they did something really unique and that was that they reinvented themselves. You know, classic example as an attorney who hates his job, hates what he does, hates treating people that way spends 25 years of his life hating his life. And then he gets a diagnosis and he says I want to be an artist. I don’t want to. This is what I really want to got six months to live.
Well, the hell with it, I’m just going to have the best. I’m gonna do what I want to do for, for, for the next six months. And there’s this kind of reinvention process and this biological death of the old self that most people can’t go through. But when nothing else is working, no chemo, no radiation, no surgery, no diet. I mean, what are you left with? Except, you know, maybe it’s time for me to change. And so, and so it’s the motivation of the illness that gets them beyond their resistance in a sense because there’s nothing else working and now it’s game time, they’re out of the bleachers on the playing field. And now it’s no longer just like I believe in this stuff. It doesn’t work, but can I believe it works for me? Like this is a big, this is a big game, you know. So, so there was this reinvention process where the attorney became an artist and he casted these really beautiful bronze statues and, and loved waking up every morning and loved his life and it was six years later and he was still alive and didn’t have any, any sign again, became somebody else. The disease existed in the old person. So this reinvention process, could we install circuitry in the brain? Could that become the platform? Who will be comin? Can I rehearse how I’m going to be with my ex?
Can I rehearse how I’m gonna be in my life in the act of mental rehearsal was this kind of burst of neuroscience at the time that you could actually change your brain to look like you’ve already experienced the event? You can change your brain to look like you have already done it. That’s what mental rehearsal does. And so could that be become the platform of the person? How they, how they did want to believe how they did want to think? And the act of rehearsing who they were going to be in their lives began to change their brain to keep installing the hardware. The hardware becomes a software program, nerve cells that fire together, wire together. Now they’re, they’re priming their brain for the, installing the hardware. So they have something to step into, into their event. And they started, they really started giving up like the resentment and their, their, their, their frustrations and their impatience with their life and their past and what they were doing was bringing them joy and they started feeling grateful and, and they were basically changing their biology. So, well.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff
Let me ask you a question here. That’s in terms of this process you’re talking about. And, you know, I, I’m assuming that you would agree that if we’re looking at illness, that’s also a manifestation of the speeding up of the aging process, the same similar mechanisms does in your model, in your work for a person to engage in this process, do they first need to believe or belief can come as a result of the process itself? Because a lot of times belief is a very important piece here. What perspective on that.
Dr Joe Dispenza
So, so what we discovered was that when people were doing their meditations, they weren’t doing their meditations to heal. We discovered really that they were doing their meditations to change that they had to become so conscious of their unconscious thoughts, they wouldn’t go unconscious, then they had to become so aware of how they spoke and how they acted. They wouldn’t default back to the same behaviors. They had to catch themselves when they started feeling sadness and pain and victimization because they could not believe in that future when they were feeling their emotions of the past. So, they did their meditations to change their belief and, and, and it only takes a thought and feeling and image and emotion and a stimulus and response that you could actually condition that belief into the brain into the body. And so they had to get up from their meditations, you know, in a sense, actually believing that it was possible. And when they stopped believing, it was possible, is it possible to change their emotional state again and self regulate? So we wanted to teach them those tools. And so we started teaching the events around the world. And the first couple of years, we didn’t see much change. People felt better, they had a little more energy and then all of a sudden the dam broke and we started seeing people stepping out of their wheelchairs from rheumatoid arthritis and M S and lupus.
And we started seeing the tumor’s shrinking and all kinds of crazy things going on. And sometimes it was happening in a weekend. As soon as I saw that was happening, I was like, something is changing in their biology and some inward event is actually producing an effect that seems like an outward event. And so, so we, so we gathered a team of neuroscientists and, and we wanted to measure people’s brains before they came to the event, put them through four days of training or 4.5 days of training. And then see if the brain changed at the end of four days or 4.5 days. And I wanted to see the changes weren’t just in their mind, they were in the brain. And then we did something really cool and we started looking at looking how quantitative quantitative eeg es is how we started. Now we’re doing F M R I s and all kinds of things. But, but we started seeing that people’s brains were changing in four days. And then we started looking at real time measurements to demystify the process of what it looks like that change actually looks like. And we ran into some really profound a real time brain scans that were saying that there was some type of arousal that was taking place in the nervous system that was merging the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system but the arousal wasn’t fear. You know, the arousal wasn’t pain.
The arousal was an anger aggression. The arousal was kind of like an ecstasy or, or some type of elevated emotional state. And, and we saw that in this beautiful, beautiful patterns in the brain in, in high, high gamma brainwave states. And we’re not talking about A little gamma, we’re talking about 200 standard deviations, 300 standard deviations outside of normal. And, and you know, three standard deviations outside of normal, 2% of the population. So you’re looking at an enormous amount of energy in the brain, an enormous amount of coherence in the brain, that’s all orderly and all coherent. And then something really unusual, which is the autonomic nervous system, the limbic brain is on fire. And as you know, that limbic brain is the seat of the autonomic nervous system and it’s about regulating and stresses autonomic dysregulation. Somehow there was this kind of autonomic regulation and that, that autonomic regulation was really sending more coherent information to the cells and tissues in the body. And we started seeing people having very specific biological upgrades as a result of it just share with the audience what you’re referring to when you say gamma. Okay. So yeah, so it’s, so we’re hanging out right now and then our brain is busy trying to create meaning between what’s going on inside of us and what’s going on outside of us. And, and when you’re conscious and awake, your brain wave patterns are in this kind of beta brainwave pattern. You know, your, your, your conscious and you’re awake and you’re integrating all your sensory information and it takes energy to do that.
Switch on the stress response. You go on the high beta. Why? Because you get more alert, you got more, you need more arousal to pay attention, pay attention, that’s high beta is good for the short term. But some people get stuck there. We teach people how to actually slow their brainwaves down. And when they do and they can begin to change their brainwaves from beta to alpha, we discovered how to do that. Their brain stops analyzing and stops talking to them. The critic in their mind kind of goes away and they start seeing in images and pictures are super creative. That’s the imaginary state and that’s the state we learn in. That’s the state we would consolidate memories in and some people get so relaxed that they can move into the state called theta where their body is actually sleeping in a light, rest the light sleep and their mind is awake and the door between the conscious mind, the subconscious mind is wide open. We’re very programmable, the information or suggestible. A lot of times when we see this state of theta, what follows is that data becomes the wave that begins to cause like waves to carry waves and and theta starts carrying alpha and alpha starts carrying beta and beta starts carrying high bid. And the oscillation of high beta, there’s a frequency above that and that’s called gamma. And when people go into gamma, they’re super conscious or super aware, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a greater level of awareness.
And, and so when you go into gamma, that kind of heightened awareness tends to enhance energy in the brain. So we started seeing waves carrying waves and that’s called resonance. And when you get resonance and waves are carrying waves, energy builds because the interference of those waves build bigger waves. And so we started seeing these patterns started increasing in the brain. And that’s, I think that’s what started to produce those high theta states. We’ve, we’ve done 18,000 brain scans and now we run week long events around the world and we’re looking to see what type of changes could take place in seven days. So we partnered with the Heart Math Institute. We’ve got over 10,000 hr V measurements. We’ve done blood analysis. We partnered with the University of California San Diego and we measure 2,882 different metabolites in the blood before a week long event. And after a week long event, we’ve discovered really profound things about epigenetic changes that could take place literally in seven days. We’ve done DNA scrapes and samples and we got a lot of data on studying DNA. We do an enormous amount of research around mitochondrial function. And that is an example. We can take the plasma of people that are advanced meditators who have or have some type of change in their biology as a result of that brain state, there’s information in that blood that wasn’t there before. And that information, if we could take the plasma of that, that the blood of those people, and we can put it in the presence of uterine cancer cell or pancreatic cancer cell or a breast cancer cell. Is it possible that information could actually change the gene expression in, in those cells.
And the mitochondrial function goes down by 70% in the cancer cells. And cancer cells love to multiply and move and we take mitochondrial function away. They can’t, they can’t move in and they can’t multiply. So we take the information from the blood of advanced meditators and we, we expose it to some of the genes that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease and it down regulates those genes pretty quickly. If we take a virus, I know this is controversial but we started looking to see if the information in the blood of these people could cause a resistance to spike virus. and lo and behold, we isolated the protein that actually inhibits the virus from entering the cell. And we have electron microscopy to show that there’s a very strong resistance from the environment. And so we’re starting to do all, we’ve done microbiome studies. We’ve, we have probably the largest microbiome sample that’s ever been done on over 1600 people pre and post. And, and we see in seven days, the amazing partisan seven days those, those changes in the microbiome that are associated with cancer growth.
There’s a very significant phylum of microbiome that are correlated with cancer growth. And you see the dramatic reduction in that, you see the microbiome that enhances response to therapy to cancer therapies Actually improved. And so, we’ve, we’ve looked at urine now, we’re looking at breast milk, we’re looking into tears. We’re studying the language of transformation. And so we’ve got all of this amazing data to show like, like a drug studies pretty much 25% at its best causality. Our data is between 75 and 85 cause and effect. And that tells us that the nervous system is the greatest pharmacist that there is in the world. And, and, and we’re super excited about a lot of the work that we’re doing because it’s directly related to inflammation, It’s directly related to pain and it’s directly related to longevity. And so along with a lot of this evidence, Stephen that we’ve seen in, in the, in the research that we’ve been doing, you know, we studied telomeres, we, we saw that people do regular meditation for 60 days, that 74% of them, their telomeres will actually lengthen, which is pretty good data there as well. But, but if you look at that evidence, it’s really profound and it’s really important. But what’s equally important in terms of the evidence is the testimony that we’re now seeing in the community of people that, that are actually understanding what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. We’ve seen stage four cancers that have metastasized to bones, to organs, the tissues go into complete reversal. The pet scans showed absolutely no cancer in the bone any longer. So, blindness, deafness M S A L S muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injuries kind of crazy times where people are actually making significant changes in their health.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff
Yeah. So I want to definitely get more into the results that you’re getting, but taking a step back, Joe, like you refer to fatal waves and, and the benefits there. I know we, we’ve done neurofeedback research with addiction where taking them into Alpha theta States really facilitates the both the healing from trauma as well as abstinence levels. But give us a sense of what you’re actually doing in terms of the process that’s actually causing these kinds of changes.
Dr Joe Dispenza
Okay. I’ll try to keep it a little shorter then. It we, we demystify. First of all, the word meditation, I looked it up. I, I said it’s great to begin with I really appreciate that because I mean, you know, what’s happened is in tradition and culture, Stephen is that, that, that, that the description of what meditation was based on the colloquialism, the language of the time science is that language now? No, no ancient texts. I’ve been at conferences where religious scholars arguing over words, you know, we did, we demystify the process and we use science as that understanding and the word meditation actually means to become familiar with. That’s exactly what the symbol means. That’s what the Familiarization. So I thought, what does that mean? It turns out if you’re going to change, you gotta stop thinking the same way, stop doing the same things and stop feeling the same emotions. And that unlearning process just tends to be 95% of who we are hardwired beliefs and perceptions and attitudes, unconscious habits and behaviors and automatic emotional responses.
So the first step to change is becoming so conscious of those thoughts, so conscious of those behaviors, so conscious of those emotions that we don’t go unconscious any longer, that unlearning process that unscrambling and disassociating from that personality takes an enormous amount of energy, it takes an enormous amount of awareness. So if you can sit with yourself and observe those thoughts, behaviors and emotions instead of saying I can’t meditate, this is too hard. I want to quit. This emotion feels bad and you reach for your cell phone, turn on the TV. Do whatever you actually sit and are curious to see what’s on the other side and we give you a tool to practice. So think differently, act differently, feel differently. Keep practicing that you become familiar with that person and that so we teach meditation as a way to unlearn and relearn to break the habit of the old self and reinvent a new self, prune, synaptic connections, sprout new connections, deprogram, reprogram lose your mind, create a new memorized emotions that are stored in the body, recondition the body to a new mind into a new emotion. That’s one thing. The second thing is that the environment typically controls most people’s thoughts and feelings. Think about this, you watch the news, you get, you know, you, you get information from your senses through the environment. And for the most part, the environment is actually controlling the way we think and feel. And as long as we’re thinking equal to everything we know in our environment, pretty much, we stay the same and everything that’s known in our lives is mapped neurologically in the Neocortex, right?
So you, your parents, your where you’re from, where you live, who you know all of that information is the autobiographical self is stored in the thinking Neocortex. That’s a, that’s a repository of things we learn and experience. So for the most part, then if the environment controls the way we think and feel, then in order for us to change, we gotta be greater than our environment. If you wake up every morning and you think about your problems and you feel the emotions that are associated with them. The moment you remember your problems, you’re thinking in the past the moment you feel the emotion of sadness or unhappiness. Now your body is in the past, thoughts are the language of the brain. Feelings are the language of the body, the thought and feeling. The image of the emotion stimulus response. You condition your body into the emotion of the past. And now the body is actually believing it’s living in the same past experience 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 65 days a year. Okay. So then you get up every morning, you run through the same behavior and you’re on autopilot now and that automation is actually driving you into a predictable future based on what you did in the past. And you lose your free will to a set of programs.
So to change then is to be greater than the body, which has been conditioned to be the mind, you know, have it doing something so many times that knows how to do it. Your body knows how to do it better in your conscious mind. Okay. So the familiar past is known and the predictable future is unknown. Can you get a person to drop into the sweet side of the present moment? Teach them how to be present and overcome those impulses and those emotions and give them a formula of something to do. And what we discovered is that the hormones of stress cause a lot of incoherence in the brain. The arousal causes you to try to control and predict everything in your life. And brain starts firing out of order into high beta and it begins to compartmentalize okay when you’re frustrated and you’re impatient and you’re angry, your heart beats out of order. And could we teach people then how to create more regulation by changing their emotional state? So to meditate then is to disconnect from your environment, close your eyes, play music in the background to fill the space. So you forget about the environment, teach your body how to sit and be present in the moment and get beyond those emotions and states that to change really is to be greater than your body, your environment and time. That’s exactly what it takes to change. So, meditation is a great way for you to forget about your body, forget about your environment and forget about time and you can teach people how to do that. So we teach people how to do that. Third thing is, can you regulate and change your brainwaves?
And the answer is absolutely yes. What we discovered is that when people are under the gun of the fight or flight nervous system, they’re obsessive there over focused. You know, when the long term effects causes the brain to stay in that high beta state. And our attention is shifting from one person to another person to another problem. Another thing and the brain is firing completely out of order. So, and when we narrow our focus on whatever it is that’s causing the disturbance, the threat, the danger that’s important in survival because you gotta, you gotta pay attention, you need those stress hormones to stay aroused. The problem is the brain gets stuck in first gear on the freeway. And so the narrowing of focus, the obsession is causing us to move the brain further out of balance. So we thought okay, when you’re under stress and this senses are heightened, you become a materialist and you narrow your focus on everything that’s physical and material, that’s what we do. What if we taught people to do something else? What if we taught them to broaden their focus and instead of a convergent focus, what would a divergent focus do in the act of sensing the act of feeling?
The act of opening their awareness causes our brains to begin to change from beta to alpha, but not any kind of alpha. What we saw in time is the person kept doing it and they were able to get beyond their analytical mind. The sensing of space somehow caused those different compartments of the brain that were once firing incoherently to begin to synchronize, to begin to modulate and what sinks in the brain links in the brain. And all of a sudden, we started seeing people with these more whole brain states. And now this is where it got really exciting. We got, we worked with people then to combine that coherent brain with practicing how to feel elevated emotions, to create more heart coherence. And then all of a sudden, there’s this kind of interaction that takes place between the heart and the brain that we started to discover that was very profound. Somehow, there was this kind of relationship between the heart and the brain. The person actually moved into a light state of sleep, like they were resting, they were so out of survival that they could actually rest into the present moment. And when they did that, their heart started opening up beautifully, you saw it, we saw the, we saw the very low frequency of the heart start to enhance, that’s the energy that’s indigenous to the heart. So the power, sympathetic nervous didn’t come up okay, the person’s relaxing. But what we expected after that was we thought that was it when we saw the person move into that state where the body was in theta and the brain was in theta in their body was resting asleep. We started to see the sympathetic nervous system actually start climbing and and that was, that was the arousal that began to produce those gamma, those gamma states.
And so when the person moved 10 standard deviations outside of normal in theta. We saw that consistently in a real time scan, we could predict just about every time the person was going to go in the gamma and that arousal was gonna feel really good. So good that the whole entire autonomic nervous system is regulating at such high levels that the person is feeling connected, they’re feeling profoundly moved, it’s inevitable, something amazing is happening. So we teach people how to do that. And so the idea is seven days immerse yourself in the knowledge and the information, learn the information so well, they can turn to someone and teach it back to them. Understand the what and the why assign meaning to the task, the how gets easier, give people numerous opportunities to overcome themselves numerous opportunities to practice numerous opportunities to connect. And is it possible you can take a collective group of people 1718 102,000, whatever our events are and create a collective consciousness and then have a person stand on the stage. That’s the four minute mile and say, yeah, here’s my scans. I had bilateral breast cancer, metastasized to my liver. Here’s the scans, no suspicious evidence, no, no cancer. And then the whole entire audience is becoming aware of a new possibility and that’s new consciousness and just like a disease, infection spreads amongst the community and creates disease. All of a sudden you see health and wellness start becoming as infectious as disease. And we started seeing dramatic changes in people’s biology as a result of it.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff
You know, it’s, it’s interesting because exactly what you’re talking about in one of our other conversations with Stephen Porges, he talks about not only self regulate but co regulate. And what you’re talking about is co regulating a group of people who are in a positive way co regulating with each other.
Dr Joe Dispenza
Yes. Yes. Well, that’s a whole other conversation. If you want to go there, I can tell you that we’ve done something really cool. In the last couple of years and we’ve brought in random event generators and a random event generator is just a sophisticated coin toss. You know, and the more you toss a coin, the more you’re gonna get 50 50. So this, these, these machines or seven levels and they toss all these coins and as you would expect, zeros and ones and you get pretty much 50 50 over time, get a group of people together, get their brains coherent, get their hearts coherent all of a sudden they’re transcendent of anything physical and material. And in a sense they become nobody, no one, no thing, nowhere and no time they’re dissociated from their body, their environment and time they’re in a sense just consciousness. That’s all they are and, and give them a directive like to heal another person, which, which is what we do and we have great data on that as well. And watch the random event generator during those 30 minute periods of time where you have collective networks of observers with intention with brain and heart coherence. Could they cause random events become less random and more intentional? And every single time we see them, we see this collective change in the energy of the room where the random machine that’s programmed to go 50 50 is now behaving in very, very unpredictable and unusual ways. And, and, and literally when the experience is over, you see it decline back into its normal range and, and, and it is that kind of infectious kind of consciousness that’s happening in the, in material, but it’s also happening in the physical reality because I mean, people do the best with what they think is available. If you don’t know, you can heal from cancer, then you make the same choice.
But if you’re aware of it and you see somebody that just did it, you’re gonna relate with them and if they just look like a normal person and you’re standing right there, I’m standing on the stage watching people watch this person tell their story and everybody is leaning in, I mean, everybody, he or she has all of their attention. And we’ve had physicians with cancer with a cancer researcher with cancer. We’ve had all kinds of people with all kinds of different conditions stand on the stage and, and blow people’s minds with what’s possible. So you, you see like as an example, I’m changed so much because of the evidence we have in testimony. So, so changed in seeing the data, I keep telling the researchers at U C S C, there’s a bunch of them. I can’t believe this is the truth. I can’t believe this is actually the truth and, and, and belief is like pregnancy, either you have it or you don’t. Right. And so you see, we had a guy that was in a wheelchair with muscular dystrophy. I mean, there is, I have never seen anything about muscular dystrophy that says that there’s gonna be a change for the better. In fact, if you look it up, it says there is no cure. This kid came in a wheelchair and he left the event walking. I mean, I just, I was blown away by, we changed the life, you know, and other people see that and they get hope again and they start believing in themselves. And when you believe in yourself, you believe in possibility, when you believe in possibility, you gotta believe in yourself. And so people do the work here not to change.
They don’t do the meditations to get better or to increase their life, their, their lifespan, they’re actually doing the meditations to change themselves and they’re doing the meditations when they start disbelieving because now they’re back to the emotions of the past and they can only see the past, we can’t see the future through the lens of the past change, their emotional state, teach them how to change their state every day in time. Could you start seeing changes in their biology? And God, we’ve done studies on immune regulation. I G A levels going up 50% in four days. I mean, these are important things that people actually need to know. So person gets condition or symptom or a disease. And they, and they start interacting with the medical model. It’s so important to understand that chronic health conditions require you, you can’t exclude, you cannot exclude yourself from the equation any longer.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff
Right? And what you’re really talking about is empowerment that your, your results, your, the work you’re doing and the results you’re getting. And by demonstrating them from a research perspective, not just anecdotally. You’re saying that there is tremendous potential in empowering the mind and how it works.
Dr Joe Dispenza
Actually, I’m not saying it anymore. The data saying it I can, I can honestly say that with, with such pleasure. I mean, this is not pseudoscience. I can, I’m so happy. I can finally say it’s no longer pseudoscience. I’m not saying it. Stephen, the date is actually saying that the data is saying we can point the finger to the data and, and people actually when they see it God, I mean, I have to watch certain testimonials. I have to watch them over and over and over again because they’re unbelievable to me. They’re changing my belief. I have to keep asking the scientists. Are you telling me that at the end of seven days, a novice meditator in seven days can produce significant changes in their biology and their gene expression and their metabolites to suggest that they’re actually living in a new environment. Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. And they’re, they’re in a ballroom. There’s nothing happening in a ballroom. I’ve been to thousands of ballrooms. They all look the same. And I keep saying to the scientists tell me, just treat me like a child. Where is that information coming from? Where is the information in that blood coming from? Of that person? That’s an advanced meditator. Where, where is there? Where is the, where is that information coming from? They’re not taking any Exogenous substance. They’re not changing their diet.
They’re, they’re not, they’re not changing an exercise where they’re not changing their sleep patterns. We’re gonna 1700 people all doing the same thing for seven days. I keep asking them where, tell me where that information is coming. It’s coming from within us and that nervous system of ours can make its own morphine, it can make its own antidepressants. It can make its own anti carcinogens can make its own antioxidants and, and its own chemicals for the mystical moment. I mean, it’s just, we’re discovering every time we do it and I love when our scientists, by the way, Stephen run the test five times. I love when they try to break it five different ways. And they can’t, they keep getting the same outcome because I know that they’re, they’re in the process of discovery. I know that they’re changing their belief right in the moment. And now all of the scientists that are there doing our studies, they all do the work. They have a closet in the lab at UCSD where they, where they all go in the closet and they self regulate and they create brain and heart coherence and they get better at being relaxed in their heart and awaken the brain instead of stressed out unconscious. And in a program that they understand the distinct distinction between the two and the researcher that saw the, the the virus for the spike virus not enter the cell. He came to the event fully doubting still. And then he realized, he said, you know what?
I just realized that this is medicine, what I’m doing is actually medicine. Now, he will assign more meaning when he sits down to do the work because he understands what it does. And somehow when that occurs, you produce a greater outcome. We can ask people to focus on a protein like serpent, serpent, a five, we can pick some random protein in the blood. They don’t know anything about the protein, nothing. They don’t know anything about it. They don’t know what it does. They don’t know, molecular form doesn’t where it comes from. Well, just ask him to just have the intention when they’re in the right state that, that those there are levels go up in the blood and 95% of them all have an elevated, 10% elevated level of a serpent, a five and, and, and the, the autonomic nervous system somehow knows how to manufacture that on some level. But, but now that you understand that you can actually enhance your collagen, maybe you can enhance your immune function, you can enhance your elastin, you can enhance your enzymes. I don’t need your serotonin levels. I don’t know. I’m just the possibilities become endless.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff
That’s right. And it’s amazing. And I like the notion that we are generating our own medicine here. We don’t need an outside source for it. We’re doing it without thinking without visualizing with our meditating. You mentioned H R V heart rate variability, which is a way of kind of monitoring and the how well regulated the nervous system is. Are you using it just as a measurement? Are you also using it as a tool?
Dr Joe Dispenza
Oh, great question. Both, both. We, we, we teach that we partnered with the Heart Math Institute since 2012. We’ve been doing research since then. Of course, our research has evolved enormously in and even some of the technology that we’re using. So, so we understand the importance of heart coherence because that is actually getting your autonomic nervous system back into homeless states. It’s getting it out of fight or flight, you know, getting out of survival, heart centered emotions, those, those are the ones that cause us to move out of those states. And so it turns out you can be a Buddhist monk to do that. You can just practice doing that and get really good at feeling gratitude, so good at feeling gratitude that you can do with your eyes open now. And that’s the name of the game. You got to get so good at doing this with your eyes closed that you gotta be able to do with your eyes open. And, and so so we, we want people to understand that not only the measurement is important, but we’re actually teaching them how to sustain that state for extended periods of time. And, and we have really great hr v measurements of people just before. They have a change in their health. It’s such an important and significant thing to understand because when a person sustains that kind of heart coherence, not just for five minutes, but for 20 minutes or so. As I said, the body is the unconscious mind, its objective. It doesn’t know the difference between a real life experience that’s creating emotion
And the emotion that you’re fabricating by thought alone. The body’s believing in that moment that is actually living in a different environment. Well, the environment signals the gene, as I said earlier, the end product of experience in the environment is the emotion. The bodies actually believing it’s living in a new environment and we’re signaling genes ahead of the environment. So we see people many times 20 minutes of hard coherence. And then they, then they move out and they moved back in 20 minutes, 30 minutes again. And they, they moved back in and it starts to get a little bit longer. Their bodies actually believing it’s healing, it’s actually believing it’s living environment that’s nurturing, that’s loving, loving, that’s not in stress, that’s not in survival and lo and behold in a short amount of time, the person gets an upgrade, whether it’s examining their skin, whether it’s Bernard’s syndrome, whether it’s Parkinson’s somehow there’s a change in their biology. So, we discovered a formula that really is just about brain and heart coherence and you can teach that no different than dancing the salsa than macron may than hitting a golf ball. It’s the same thing. And, and, and we have all ages, we have kids that are 789 years old that come for the whole entire week. We have people in their nineties, we have people, healthy people with diseases.
We have all kinds of people coming for all kinds of different reasons, but really what everybody comes for more than anything else is wholeness. And when they take a bite of wholeness when they start feeling more balanced and feel more orderly, were more and more prone to give or more prone to love or more prone to be kind to be caring, to be supportive, to be compassionate. Then to heal one another, which is what we’re seeing that we’re capable of doing. And then, and then, you know, being the example for one another and I think that’s how we change the consciousness. So I don’t have a problem with people keeping their body physically healthy. You know, I mean, I work out and do exercise and physical stresses, trauma and injury and disease and physical balance is just as important. Move your body, right? It’s gotta move, then there’s chemical stress and that could be toxins, pesticides, pollutants, hangovers, whatever diet, whatever it is, it’s causing your body to move chemically out of balance. And it’s important to keep the body chemically balanced by doing all the right things. And sometimes you need, you need pharmacology or need intervention to keep it chemically balanced. But the big one, That’s the hard one is emotional balance and emotional stress and 75 to 90% of every person that walks into a health care facility and the western world walks in because of psychological emotional stress. That’s the bottom line. And, and, and that’s a tough one. And because if you keep living by the same emotions, you’re gonna keep signaling, the same genes and your response to the environment is gonna weaken you. So we’re gonna work on teaching people how to make those changes and sustain those changes.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff
Yeah. So just to emphasize what you were talking about with heart rate coherence is that positive emotions, like gratitude, drive coherence while negative emotions or emotions of anger, frustration, put it into a more chaotic, dysregulated state.
Dr Joe Dispenza
It’s complete. Stephen its complete dysregulation. You’re stepping on the gas and the brake. At the same time, you’re on the zoom call, it’s not tyrannosaurus rex outside the cave. It’s your coworker. And what was once very adaptive becomes very maladaptive, right? And so then, so then you’re pumping blood, you’re increasing respiratory rate, you’re increasing heart rate, but you’re pumping blood against the closed system. You’re not getting up and you’re not running, you’re not fighting, you’re in hiding, you’re actually sitting in the presence of those chemicals and it’s actually causing your heart to beat out of order. And when that occurs, the the destructive interference that’s created from incoherence actually flattens waves. And if you flatten waves, you decrease frequency and if you decrease frequency, you decrease energy.
So there’s energy that’s lost in the heart. Same thing that happens in the brain when it’s firing and dis modulated its or incoherent. It’s the energy in the brain goes down and you can’t reason you can’t think you can’t, you’re not clear Right. And, and so most people believe they need an exogenous substance, something out there that they need to do or take or whatever to change what’s going on in here and what we want to show people, it’s actually disconnect from your body. Get beyond your body, get beyond your environment to beyond time. We teach them how to do that and change your inner world and do that enough time to see if it starts producing effects in your outer world. And that’s when we start believing that we somehow can create changes in our life instead of being victim to the circumstances of our life.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff
So one of the things that I find people have resistance to is breaking out of the old patterns. And I’m hearing that like one of the techniques you do is you guide them into different ways of experiencing through their five senses, etcetera. How else do you get over people’s resistance to? Because the people are to a great extent in that survival mode as you referred to before? Creates rigidity and difficulty moving out of? Can you say some of the ways that you find help out of that?
Dr Joe Dispenza
You’d be, you’d be really straight and to be really honest with them, the moment, the hardest part about change, Stephen is not making the same choices you did the day before. And the moment you decide to make a different choice, get ready, you’re going to feel uncomfortable. It’s going to feel unfamiliar. There’s gonna, it’s gonna be unpredictable. You’re, there’s gonna be some uncertainty. You’re leaving the known, you’re leaving the same biology and you’re stepping out into the unknown. Now, we’ve been conditioned and as human beings that the unknown should turn on the stress response. Better, unknown is unsafe. It’s unpredictable. Cling to the known. So this primitive mechanisms which is done and you, you teach people once they step into that river of change, there is a biological, there is a neurological, there is a chemical, there’s a hormonal, there is a genetic death of the self is breaking the addiction of who they are. But don’t let them white knuckle. It.
Don’t, don’t let them, you know, you know, be in rehab, you know, with nothing to do. Okay. Now that you’re in the unknown, let’s teach you that, that’s exactly the perfect place that you can create instead of getting up and quitting, instead of getting frustrated, instead of getting patient, instead of running a program and wanting to do something. We’re gonna, we’re gonna train your body to a new mind every time it does that I want, you know, that’s a victory. It’s not that you can’t meditate. You’re actually doing the meditation right? You’re not doing it wrong, you’re doing it right. This is supposed to happen. And if you stay with it, research shows without a doubt, if you go past the point where you think you are done you go a little further. That’s the unknown. That’s where the brain changes the most super biology change. But there’s a letting go process and the body is literally dragged out of the past into the present moment. And somehow when we’re in the present moment, that is the unknown because the familiar past is unknown. The predictable future is no, there’s only one place left for the unknown. And if you can teach people how to be relaxing, awaken the unknown without switching on that stress response to do something really cool. Actually, their presence will cause them to relax more in the unknown. And when that occurs, energy moves into the heart, that’s just a side effect of it. And when energy makes it to the heart, I can tell you 100% of the time, it’s going to inform the brain it’s going to reach the brain and like grabbing a big sheet and going like this, you’re gonna see this wave of alpha going right to the brain saying, hey, dude, it’s safe to create. Now you’re out of survival. There’s another possibility. There’s another way. Come on, your brain starts getting super creative and, and, and that elegant state. They can only lead people to that point. They have other ones that have to execute but we give them enough time. So, but, but that’s not, it come to the event and you take a group of men in their seventies and eighties into a monastery north of Harvard. You ask them to pretend they’re 22 years younger for five days to a bunch of biological measurements.
And at the end of five days at Harvard did the study, the guys are playing touch football without their canes. Their finger lengths are longer. They’re total lengths are longer. Their cognition improved by 60%. They see better, they hear better, they lost weight, more mobile. And they weren’t reminiscent about being 22 years younger. They’re actually becoming 22 years younger. So create a monastery for seven days and asked people to become somebody else to believe in it, behave as if it’s the truth and ultimately become it. And so we do seated meditations and we do a lot of those. But then you gotta get really good at standing up and doing it with your eyes closed and changing your state. And now that you got that down with your eyes closed and open your eyes.
Gotta practice. Now with your eyes open, you gotta get really good at practicing with your eyes and you can become that and practice that rehearse it and change your biology and and then stop again, close your eyes and get back in that state. You can remember the feelings, remember everything. You can open your eyes and practice again. So we do walking meditation, standing, walking meditations, then we chase the mystical there’s brain chemistry that’s created that opens the doors that are, we have FMR data that says absolutely. The brain looks like it’s on sale aside and in this mystical moment. So your brain makes that pharmacology anyway. So lay down as it too. And if you’re spending seven days becoming somebody else and, and practicing it with your eyes open with your eyes closed, walking, standing, laying down in a matter of time. Is it possible that in seven days, just like those men, five days that produce those biological changes? Can you do the same thing in seven days? And, and I can, I can honestly say that that you can and I can honestly say there’s science to support it. And I can honestly say that when you change your life changes and, and so many changes take place in your biology as well.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff
And Joe, this has been a very inspiring conversation particularly because you can show the audience that this actually works. And so it’s encouraging to everybody listening to think about moving out of their comfort zone, letting go giving other possibilities a chance. So I really appreciate this conversation we’re having.
Dr Joe Dispenza
Thank you, Stephen. Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure to spend time with you. We were, we, we have nothing but good news in our research and, and gosh, I’m super excited because I think the world is looking for better answers.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff
And it really emphasizes the mind body connection in its fullest And how you can’t have one without the other. I really appreciate that as well.
Dr Joe Dispenza
I’m laughing because one of our scientists, at the end of his power point presentation, when he presented to 1800 people last month, his last line is you are what you think. And I just turned and looked at him and I thought never in my lifetime. What I think I would hear researchers say that I’m looking at him, who are you Buddha? And he, and then the other one the other day, he titled the evolution of the species. He’s like there is a significant evolutionary change that’s taking place in seven days. The mind blowing part is the seven day part, no drug studies, seven days. And yet there’s dramatic changes that are better than drug studies in seven days. There’s hope for people, you know, when they immerse themselves into the understanding of true change and transformation and, and what, what was once you know, a spontaneous quantum change or spontaneous remission is now becoming a collective understanding. And that collective understanding then of course is creating a new consciousness and that new consciousnesses and as people aware of new possibilities.
And if you’re unaware that you could actually change your biology, you’ll make the same choice and you rely on something outside of you to do it for you. And gosh, we’ve done enough of that. And, and I think there’s a resource of, of empowerment, as you said, Stephen, a resource of energy that people can tap into on a regular basis and, and really become the scientist in their life to, to measure the effects of them at cost to, to see. But if I can reduce the amount of pain, I have been doing this for two weeks. If I can not, not, not, not focus on changing the pain, but focus on thinking differently. Focus on acting differently. Focus on feeling differently. If I do that, That’s, that’s what I need to get good at because you can have a one hour meditation. It would be really great. We’ve seen this in so many testimonials. Then the rest of your day, your 15 hours in your day, you’re, you’re moody and you’re angry and you’re frustrated and you’re impatient and you’re judgmental, you know, one hour against 15 hours, you got to start really getting good at it with your eyes open. You got to start. Really? We’re going, oh my God. How am I gonna be in that meeting? How am I gonna be with my family? How am I gonna be with my ex and my coworker? Am I gonna let me rehearse that? Now it becomes instrumental. It’s just not philosophy. Now, now you’re actually doing it for the effect and I can’t live by this feeling if I do, I’m signaling the same genes. God, how many times do I have to forget until I stop forgetting and start remembering. I think that’s the moment of change.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff
Yeah. And these are beautiful examples about how resilient we have the potential to be. And so I really appreciate all of our conversation today, Joe, how can people reach you? Find you?
Dr Joe Dispenza
My websites, DrJoeDispenza.com. We offer courses and seminars and events and I’m a big fan of events and three dimensional reality. I think when you get people together, there’s something that transits transcendent and being in a space in a room with a, with a group of people. I mean, the exciting part and we’re doing a lot of studies next year. We are, we have the perfect environment, Stephen, we have 1800 people eating at the same time getting up at the same time doing the same thing and our participants are like, yeah, draw my blood. Yeah. You know how, you know how to study goes. It takes two years just to get people to enroll in the study. We got 1000 people, you know, 800 people sampling a microbiome and that’s unheard of like and then doing a post study like who does that? You know, so we just have a great community of people that, that are, that are, you know, excited as, as much as I am.
Dr. Stephen Sideroff
Wonderful. I appreciate all this great work that you’re doing and adding to the conversation around better health and longevity and resilience. So again, thank you so much for participating in our summit Joe. We really appreciate it.
Dr Joe Dispenza
Thank you, Stephen. Thank you for having me. Keep up the great work. Thank you.
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