When one of my nieces was really young, she, like many children, refused to eat certain foods. I forget which food it was, but one day my mom made it and my niece ate it. Surprised at the sudden change, my mom asked her why she ate it now all of a sudden and my niece responded with something like, “I just told my brain to like it.”
To me, that’s Joe Dispenza’s Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself in a nutshell. Subtitled How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One, the book is essentially a nonfiction guide to manifestation and the quantum field. If I got one thing out of the book it’s the idea that we should operate as though we have already become what we want to be and have what we want to have. Dispenza gives the example of his daughter wanting to work abroad for a summer and then giving her the advice to operate as if she had already been on that trip and become the person she wanted to be, gained the things she wanted to gain. So then it worked out. There’s another anecdote of a woman who won the lottery with the exact amount of money she had in debt, manifesting herself out of crisis.
Naturally, I’m a skeptic. If it were so easy to just get the things we want, there would be a whole lot less pain in the world. I think it’s hard for me to look past the material realities of our world and the systemic issues we face. Can we just manifest our way out of capitalism? Out of racism? The idea of there being a quantum field and we just have to claim a certain reality of many possibilities is spurious, and the evidence for such is primarily anecdotal and philosophical. There is one study that was fascinating but needed a more thorough justification to be fully persuasive. The study had people pray—another form of manifestation—for sick people or not. The participants didn’t know who they were praying for, and the twist was that it was people from the past. The researchers knew who recovered and who didn’t. When they compared results, they found that the people who were prayed for in the present recovered in the past; the people who weren’t prayed for didn’t. It’s a crazy interesting study, and supposedly it’s been replicated but Dispenza’s book does not really delve into the science.
In turn, I’d say that Dispenza’s research is more valuable in terms of perspective. If you take him on trust, then I think you can explain the positive effects of shifting your mindset. We are already what we want to be; we already have everything we want and need. If we operate that way, it can allow us to be better people. For example, if I operate with the assumption that I’m already the person I want to be, it forces me now to be kinder because I want to be kind; I can choose to be happier now because I want to be happy later. It’s a shift in mindset that lets us feel more at peace with ourselves today, and I appreciate that.
Towards the end of the book, there’s a step-by-step guide to meditation. I have to admit that I didn’t actively follow the meditation practices; it was more theoretical for me. I would say, though, that Dispenza’s guide for meditation isn’t as clearly delineated as it could be. It was broken down into steps but also into days, so on Day 1 you might do 4 steps, Day 2 you might do steps 5 and 6, Day 3 you’re only doing step 7, etc. I couldn’t help but think there was a more straightforward way of building the practice.
I’ll try to live as the person I want to be and overcome my skepticism at the full power of manifestation. I’ll try to be the kind of guy that meditates and feels more connected to the quantum field of possibilities. I know, at some level, it’s true: quantum physics is a thing where both possibilities are true until one isn’t. If we extrapolate to the greater context of all matter, it stands to reason that we could decide how each particle should behave—but whether I have the brain power and meditative expertise to make all things behave as I want is another question.
Happy reading!
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