August 19, 2021 • 38 mins
In this episode, Dr. Joe Dispenza shares with us techniques to heal the body through meditation. When Joe was a young man he had his spine crushed in a biking accident. Doctors told him that without invasive surgery he may never walk again. Defying the odds, he was able to rebuild his spine in just a few short months using nothing but his thoughts. Since then, he’s devoted his life to the healing potential of the mind-body connection. //
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Dr. Joe Dispenza website: drjoedispenza.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to The Laverne Cox Show, a production of Shonda
Land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. It's the
tough moments where you don't want to self regulate. It's
the tough moments where you're in such panic and fear
where you don't you think you can't control it. Those
(00:20):
are the moments where if you really go at it
and you really work on it, now you're you're really
employing the biggest challenge of all and if you can
overcome that, and the rest is easy. And so they've
practiced the tools, sooner or later they're going to break through.
(00:46):
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Laverne Cox Show. I'm
Laverne Cox. So a few years ago I was on
Instagram as I often am, and so a video from
Louis House and there was a man in the video
named Dr Joe Dispensa talking about healing the body through meditation,
(01:07):
like healing physical ailments through meditation. And I just started meditation,
transcenental meditation to be specific. So I was really intrigued,
and so I went into a deep dive in his
into his work and was fascinated. But also he was
talking about quantum physics and epigenetics and neural plasticity and
(01:29):
all this stuff I made a's and everything except math
and science. So it was just kind of like, um what.
But as I continue to explore his work, the idea
of personal transformation, the idea of creating the future we
want not from the known but from the unknown, deeply
(01:49):
intrigued me. He talks about creating an experience in our
bodies in the present moment that can make us feel
as if we've already experienced it. As an actor. That
makes a lot of sense to me. I do that
all the time, So of course when I got this podcast,
I was like, I would really love to interview that
(02:10):
Dr Joe dispends a guy and try to like break
down some of his concepts with him himself. Since two
thousand ten, Dr Joe Dispends his partner with scientists and
universities to perform extensive research on the effects that meditation
has on the brain and body. His team has gathered
more than eight thousand brain scans and four thousand heart
(02:33):
rate variability measurements to try and correlate how various levels
of emotion affect heart and brain function, immune response, and
overall mind body Health. He is the author of You
Are the Placebo, Making your Mind Matter, evolve your brain
and more. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr Joe dispends Up. Hello,
(03:04):
Doctor Doti Spenser, Welcome to the podcast How are you
Failing Today? I'm very excited to spend an hour with you. Awesome, awesome, awesome.
I'd like to begin with your story from when you
were in a triathlon and you had an accident. Can
you talk to us about that? Sure, I'll give you
the short story. But I think for many of us,
in order for us to to wake up, we need
(03:26):
a wake up call. And and my wake up call
happened in six I was in the traathlon in Palm Springs, California,
and I was on the biking portion of the race
when I was coming up to this corner and there
was a police officer around the corner and he was
pointing at me to signal me to make the turn.
The problem was he had his back to the oncoming
traffic behind him, so he was telling me to turn.
(03:48):
And so when I made the turn, this four well
drive Bronco going about sixty miles an hour, hit me
from behind and catapulted me out of my bike. And
when you land that hard on the ground, when you're
in the air, the force of compression takes the columns,
the blocks of the vertebrae and compresses them and they break.
And so in my case, I broke six of those
(04:08):
vertebrae when I hit the ground. And when you take
a volume of matter and you compress it, fragments gotta
go somewhere. So I had bone fragments on my spinal cord,
and the arch that the spinal cord passes through had
broken like a pretzel. So I had multiple compression fractures.
So it was a it was a difficult situation for me.
In the typical procedure for something like that, laver is
(04:29):
a Harrington rod surgery, and in my case, it would
cut off the back parts of my vertebrae from the
base of my neck to the base of my spine
and then screwing these long, stainless steel rods in an
attempt to candel ever, you know, to pull the spine
off the cord. And I was a twenty four year
old kid, and I was living a great life in
San Diego, and I and I just couldn't imagine me
(04:52):
be compromised to that degree and living with an addictive medications,
or if I chose that radical type of treatment, I
wouldn't have many options. In other words, there would be
much for me to do after that point. And so
they told me, if I didn't have the surgery, I
probably never walk again. And so I had four opinions
from four the leading surgeons in southern California, and they
(05:14):
were all very fixed on the idea of me having
this radical surgery. And I had five days to decide.
And if you don't make that decision within those five days,
and the bones automatically start to heal. And if I
decided to have the surgery afterwards, they'd have to cut
me open from the front and the back, and that's
a very aggressive surgery. So for me, um, I had
to make a decision. And I think that one of
(05:35):
the worst of human sufferings is in decision. When I
was weighing what I knew against what I didn't know,
and was I willing to take a risk and a chance,
And I kept hearing this voice in my head that said,
the power that made the body heals the body, you know,
And I thought, well, goodness, I'm not going anywhere I'm
laying face down, I can't move. Had you heard that before?
The power that makes the body heals the body hit
(05:55):
to hit. Someone said that you before. Yeah, I had
that principle kind of in my mind, but I never
really took it to the test, like to this degree.
So I figured that there is this intelligence that lives
within us is a consciousness, and consciousness is awareness, and
awareness is paying attention. So I thought, if I could
take all of my attention off all the things in
(06:16):
my life and be present with it and give it
a plan, give it a formula, give it an understanding,
a template of what I wanted, and when I was
satisfied with what I wanted, I would surrender that image
or that vision to this greater mind than allow it
to do the healing for me, because I knew that
I couldn't do it. I knew that my body had
to do it for me. So I think that when
you're injured or in crisis like that, we focus on
(06:38):
what we don't want to have happened instead of what
we do want to have happened. So I would start
this inward process and start reconstructing my vertebrae, and then
I'd start thinking, Oh my god, I'm gonna be living
in a wheelchair. Should I sell my home? Should I
sell my practice? And I kept catching myself and that
wasn't what I wanted to show this intelligence. And so
I went through six and a half weeks of probably
(06:59):
the darkest night of the soul I had ever been in,
and then I just kept with it. It took me
two or three hours to go through the whole process,
and then about six weeks or so, it started getting
really easy. I could do it in a shorter amount
of time, and I wasn't frustrated or impatient or sad
or any of those emotions. When I was done, I
felt lifted. I felt like I had accomplished something. And
(07:19):
then I started noticing dramatic changes in my body. My
sensory function came back, my motor function came back, and
I was back on my feet in ten and a
half weeks and back to training at twelve weeks. And
I just made a deal with myself that if I
was ever able to walk again, I'd spend the rest
of my life studying this mind body connection and mind
over matter. And I've been doing that since. That's incredible
(07:42):
what practice were you practicing at twenty four you said
you were going to leave your practice. Yes, I was
a chiropractor at the time. I had a multi disciplinary clinic,
and I was treating a lot of try athletes, and
it was just kind of my life. And so I
knew enough about the spine to know that if I
went with that surgery, that procedure, I probably wind up
in trouble later on in my life, and I was
(08:04):
just not willing to take that chance. Have you had
any issues with your back or spine since? Like, what? Nothing? No? No,
In fact, I trained six days a week. I'm super active.
I never have pain in my spine, and I do
all the things that I want to do and I'm
not compromised in any way. Yeah, that's incredible. This is
(08:25):
a good time to take a little break. We'll be
right back though. Alright, now that's all taken care of,
Let's get back to our chat. Yea. So one of
(08:53):
my favorite quotes of yours is the best way to
predict your future is to create it, not from the known,
but from the un known. Can you talk about where
you are now with breaking the habit of being yourself? Right?
I mean that's the name of one of your books.
Then that feels like the crux of what your work
is about, giving us a new template to be a
(09:14):
new self. And what that processes is like it's a
really intense process, I know. But well, what I've come
to learn is that our our personality creates our personal reality,
and our personality is made up of how we think,
how we act, and how we feel. So the present
personality who's listening to this podcast has created the present
personal reality called their life. Which means if you want
(09:37):
to create a new personal reality, a new life, you've
got to change your personality. You have to change, and
I think most people try to create a new life
without changing, and that's one of the challenges that we have.
So if you believe in any measure that your thoughts
have something to do with your destiny, or your thoughts
have something to do with your life, your life is
(09:58):
going to stay the same because the same thoughts lead
to the same choices, the same choices lead to the
same behaviors. So the side effect of that is that
our biology, our neurocircuitry, our neurochemistry, our hormones, and even
our gene expressions stays the same because we're staying the same.
So there's a principle in neuroscience that says that nerve
(10:20):
cells that fire together wire together, with nerve deals that
fire together wire together nerve deals that fire together. What
does that mean? What if you keep thinking the same thoughts,
if you keep making the same choices, if you keep
doing the same things, if you keep creating the same experiences,
and you keep feeling the same emotions, you keep firing
the same circuits in your brain in the same way.
(10:40):
And if you keep firing and wiring those circuits, you
begin to hardwire your brain into a very finite signature.
That finite signature literally solidifies by the time where in
our mid thirties, By the time when our mid thirties,
we become a memorized set of automatic behaviors or unconscious habits.
Needs are emotional responses, hardwired attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that
(11:05):
function just like a computer program. So then most people
that are trying to create a new reality, they're thinking
positively and they're saying I'm healthy, I'm healthy and wealthy
and wealthy and free and free, and that thought is
never making it past the brainstem because the body is
saying no, you're not You're miserable, you're unhappy. You're programmed
this way. So so the first part to change is
(11:29):
to become conscious of those unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions.
And this is lighting a match in a dark place. Now,
what do you think your body is gonna say. Your
body's gonna say, oh, no way, it's gonna start influencing
the mind. You're gonna start hearing chatter, that says Laverne.
I think this thought, and this thought leads to this choice.
This choice leads this behavior. This behavior creates the same experience,
(11:51):
and the same experience produces the same feeling. You say, oh,
this feels right, No, that feels familiar. So going from
the old self to the new self, there's a neurological
death that has to take place. And most people they
can't tolerate that unknown place because we've been conditioned in
survival that the unknown is unpredictable and it's scary. And
(12:11):
I say that unknown is the perfect place to create from.
And we teach people how to get to that place
and work on being comfortable in that place. To say
to themselves, if I pay attention and I have intention,
I'm gonna be installing neurological hardware. Keep firing and wiring
those thoughts and they become like a software program. And
(12:34):
that's the new voice in your head that says you
can anything as possible. If you close your eyes and
you say to yourself, one day is one lifetime, and
you began to rehearse what you were going to do
in that day. If you were truly present, your brain
would not know the difference between the outer world experience
and what you were imagining in your mind. There's research
(12:54):
on this, and you would begin to install more neurological hardware.
Keep doing it every day and it becomes more automatic,
and all of a sudden you start behaving like a
happy person. No magic there, You rehearsed it. Now here's
the challenge. Can you teach your body emotionally what that
future reality will feel like before it happens. That means
(13:16):
you can't wait for your healing to feel gratitude. You
can't wait for your wealth to feel abundance. You can't
wait for your new relationship to feel love. That's that's
the old model of of cause and effect. Waiting for
something in your outer world to change that take away
your emptiness or lack. The quantum model of reality is
embracing the emotion before it happens, and it causes the
(13:38):
body to believe it's living in that future in the
present moment, and that's when we see traumatic changes in
people's biology. I love that. I love that. I wonder
why is it called a quantum model. I guess for
those of us who are not into quantum theory, Well,
you know, quantum physics says that mind and matter are
so intimately connected that it's impossible to separate the two.
(14:00):
That if you study sub atomic particles, no matter who
you are, when you look to measure that electron, that photon,
it mysteriously appears when you look for it, turn your
back on it, and it goes from a particle back
to possibility, back to energy. So then some way your
mind has an effect on the external world. And we
(14:21):
teach people instead of being the victim of their life,
you know, to say to them, why are you unhappy?
I'm unhappy because of this person or the circumstance. What
they're saying, really is that person or that circumstances is
controlling the way I feel and the way I think. Well,
anything that controls the way you feel and the way
you think, you're victim too. But if you teach people
(14:42):
that the way they think in the way they feel
produces outcomes in their life, then it says that mind
has an effect on mattering. My interest is teaching people
how to shorten the gap between cause and effect, between
the thought and the experience. And when we do that,
I would say that you would start believing you're more
of the creator of your life and less of a
(15:04):
victim of your life. Amazing. When you talked about the
one of some of the research I was I'm doing
on you, you talked about an experiment with piano playing.
Can you tell us about that experiment. I think it
really illustrates a lot of what you're saying through brilliantly. Sure, sure,
if you were truly present in the moment, your brain
would believe that that's exactly what you were experiencing. So
(15:24):
they took a group of people that never played the
piano before, and they divided them to do different categories.
In one group, they had them common play these one
handed scales and chords for two hours a day for
five days. They did a brain scan on them before
and then they had a brain scan on them five
days later, and as you would expect, five days later,
(15:46):
they grew a whole another set of circuits in their
brain as a result of that experience. Why you learn
something new, Learning is making new connections in your brain.
You get some instruction. If you get some instruction, you
get your body involved. If your body involved, you're gonna
have experience. Keep repeating the experience over and over again,
keep paying attention. You're gonna fire and wire new circuits,
and you're gonna install new neurological hardware in your brain.
(16:09):
Take another group of people, do a brain scan at
the beginning, and but this time, instead of them actually
physically playing the piano, have them close their eyes and
mentally rehearse playing those scales and chords for two hours
a day for five days, and scan their brain at
the end of five days. And at the end of
five days, they grow the same amount of circuits in
(16:30):
their brain. The brain did not know the difference between
the real life experience of playing the scales and chords
and what they were imagining in their mind without ever
lifting a finger. You take those people never played the
piano before you set up in front of a piano
and like magic, they can play the scales and chords. Well,
they prime their brain for the experience. So if you're
(16:50):
working with a CEO, if you're working with a single
mother with three children, if you're working with anybody wants
to improve anything, every single one of those people mentally
rehearsed their game. Now the brain is no longer a
record of the past. Now it's a map to the future. Okay,
so you say, well that changes the brain. What about
(17:10):
the body. Take a group of men and have them
come for an hour day and close their eyes and
mentally rehearsed doing bicep curls, and add an emotional component
like stronger, harder, more intense. One hour a day for
two weeks. At the end of two weeks, thirteen point
five increase in muscle strength and never lifted away. Now
(17:32):
the body looks like it was in the experience for
the last two weeks. Now we teach this model to
teach people how to get healthy, because if it looks
like you've already had the experience in your brain and body,
because you rehearsed it enough times, it has to come
to you into your life. That's so amazing. So these
are all things that require lots of rehearsal, lots of practice,
(17:55):
and practice sort of makes perfect and so so much
of what it sounds like you're talking about is changing
our lives through practice. Right, basically practice is only through meditation.
Are there other ways for us to basically use the resource? Well, um,
I'll give you the short answer. The more you can
lay that old self down, Like actors and actresses do
(18:15):
this so well, they lay down their persona and they
literally becomes somebody else. They think differently, they act differently,
they feel differently. They become that person and there's a
principle in neuroscience called neuroplasticity, and plasticity is the ability
for the brain to reshape and rewire itself, and that's
exactly what you're doing. You're literally becoming someone else. As
(18:38):
an example, is really a person that has a problem
with anxiety. Then they're mismanaging their thoughts, they're mismanaging their emotions,
they're mismanaging their behaviors. And they have to get so
conscious of that old self that they won't go unconscious
to any thought, behavior, or emotions. So in meditation, you
have to become very familiar with the old self, so
(18:59):
that in your way in day you don't go unconscious.
But if you say how am I going to think?
How am I going to act? And how am I
going to feel, and you begin to bring up those emotions,
and you begin to rehearse who you're going to be,
and you begin to think about how you do want
to think. If you keep doing it over and over again,
it will begin to become familiar to you. So the
process of change requires unlearning and relearning. It's breaking the
(19:21):
habit of the old self and reinventing a new self.
It's pruning synaptic connections and sprouting new connections. And so
when you become the person that you want to be,
then you don't need anyone or anything outside of you
to make you happy. That's the name of the game here.
You want to be able to bring that up on
your own and when you're living in the emotions of
your future. What we found out was if you're feeling empowered,
(19:43):
if you're feeling lifted, if you're feeling unlimited, if you're
feeling abundant, if you're feeling an incredible amount of love,
you never look for it to happen. You already feel
like it has happened, and that's when you all of
a sudden start having these synchronicities, these coincidences, these serendipities,
these opportunities that begin to come to you. That's the
(20:04):
name of the game. What is fascinating about about your
work is that you talk about frequency and energy, right
that when we do create this new person, that we
started vibrating in a new frequency, and that frequency begins
to attract different things that certainly experience that just in
my dating life that like I there's just things that
became unacceptable for me with men. I just wouldn't, you know.
(20:26):
And I kept working on myself and I definitely noticed
that I started attracting different kinds of men that the
men who there trifling, they just wouldn't even look my
way anymore because they just they weren't even on the
same frequency. And I was like, this is fascinating, and
it feels like that's kind of what you're what you're
talking about here. Sure, well, I've been at this for
a very long time, and I can honestly tell you
(20:48):
that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when
you change your energy, you change your life. And the
stress responses with the body naturally doesn't. And I think
people when they're threatened or they feel fear, or they
feel aggression, or they feel whatever, the emotion is resentment.
In patients, they try to control everything in their life
and they start shifting their attention to different people in
(21:09):
different meetings and different objects and different and their brain
starts firing really out of order. If the thought sends
a signal out, then the feeling starts to draw experiences
to us. So instead of doing it that way, we've
all done it that way. If I could open my
heart and feel the emotion of my future and I
could sustain it, and I know that if I feel
that emotion, I'm drawing my future to me. If I
(21:32):
could synchronize my energy and every single day to a
new future, then the side effects should be synchronicities in
my life. This is the work to be able to
maintain that modified state of mind and body your entire day,
independent of any condition in your outer world. Because the
moment I say to you, lookver and what happened you look?
(21:53):
It looks like you're unhappy. You'd say, Oh, it's this
person or this thing I got to deal with. While
we're back to the unconscious growth. Being a victim. That's
something in our outer world, change the way we're feeling
and thinking, and we disconnected from the energy of our future,
and now we're back to the energy of our past.
Don't expect anything to change in your life now. You
have one of two choices to stay in that those
(22:14):
emotions complain blame, be a victim, make excuses, feel sorry
for yourself, or you excuse yourself and say I need
five minutes and get right back into the emotion if
your heart and begin to connect to the emotion of
your future. And people who do this that can do
it with their eyes open, they have really profound, unusual,
(22:34):
miraculous things that begin to occur in their world. And
the beauty behind all of this is you get to
be anybody you want. You have the free will. The
spark of the divine lives in you, and you have
the free will to create life exactly the way you want. Oh, honey,
has that for a little truth. After a tiny break,
(22:56):
we've got more for you. We are back and we're
ready to pick up where we left up. I'm glad
(23:22):
you mentioned stress hormones because I think you know I've
talked a lot on this podcast about trauma, trauma resilience.
It's a huge part of my therapeutic practice. I've become
aware that, um, I'm forty nine years old that from
most of my life, I've sort of lived in this
sort of survival, perpetual survival state, right, And I'm definitely
experiencing health consequences as a result of that excess cortisol
(23:44):
on adrenaline. It is presenting in my life and unfortunate ways.
I had a panic attack a couple of weeks ago,
and so I'm someone who really works on myself, and
so I guess my whole thing is like the only
way that this is possible for us to be in
the present moment, to become pure consciousness. Is another phrase
that you use is that we have to be able
(24:04):
to let go of the fight or flight response. We
have to be able to let go of those stress hormones.
And that is easier said than done for some of us,
especially when I'm hyper aware that I never feel safe. Right,
there's so much trauma and again and I want to
be a victim, Like what's my responsibility in this? Right?
I want to I'm very committed to getting over this
(24:25):
and like, you know, being the master of my faith,
the captain of my soul. So for folks who are
dealing with a lot of trauma and and whatnot, what
but just just get over it. No, no, no, it's
not it's not that easy, you see. No, I know.
The stronger the emotion, the stronger the emotional response that
we have to some experience in our life, the more
altered we feel inside of us, the more we pay
(24:49):
attention to the cause. And when that happens, the brain
takes a snapshot and that's called the long term memory.
The problem is that every time you think about that event,
you're using the same chemistry in your brain and body
as if it was happening. So again, the thought and
the feeling, the memory and the emotion, the stimulus response,
it's not in the conscious mind now, it's in the body.
(25:10):
Right So the body is trying to predict when the
next bad moment's going to happen and prepare for the worst.
Eat at that point, your body has been programmed. You
could say stop while you want, but the body is
already in the experience right now. The problem with that
is you lose control and then you think, what if
it happens again. Now you start worrying about when it's
gonna happen again, and it's the fear of happening again.
(25:32):
Then all of a sudden list it's the same response.
So I could show you hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
of brain skins of people in this work that labored
for that present moment and started to catch the thought,
catch the feeling, become aware of those subtle sensations in
(25:53):
their body, and worked with their eyes closed, with their
body to settle the body back down, training the animal
as the body. You got aroused, and they started to
settle the body back down to the presment. Just like
loving a dog to stay. You stay, and the body stays,
and it goes what about this starts? Ah, you bring
it back down. And this is the battle. This is
David and Goliath. This is facing the necromancer. Because survival,
(26:16):
it's literally life or death when we're in survival. And
that is the intense part about this, that survival survival
is you gotta take care of your body. So when
we perceive a threat or a danger in our outer world,
we switch on that primitive nervous system called the fight
or flight nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system. Now, human beings,
we can turn on that stress response just by thought alone.
(26:39):
We could think about our problems and produce that same effect.
What we've noticed is that that arousal that comes from
the stress response gives the brain and body a rush
of adrenaline. And now people in a sense become conditioned,
like addicted to that rush of those chemicals. And so
they need the bad job, they need the bad relationship,
(27:02):
they need the poor circumstances in their life because it
reaffirms that kind of addiction, that kind of conditioning. So then,
just like breaking any addiction, whether it's chocolate or alcohol
or cocaine or whatever you're into, the body is going
to go through cravings. It's gonna crave the substance. So
when a person is going through the change and they're
(27:23):
lowering the volume to that emotion, they need to replace
that emotion with another emotion. The stronger the emotion we
feel to some problem, some trauma, some past event, the
more we pay attention to it. But if you keep
lowering the volume to that emotion, you'll keep taking your
attention off that person or problem. Now where you place
your attention is where you place your energy. But makes
sense then that as you begin to lower the volume,
(27:46):
you're calling energy back to you, you're taking your power
back and you're building your own field. Now there's energy
to heal, Now, there's energy to create the life that
you want. But with stress, we tap the body's resources
and there's no energy for long term bill thing projects.
There's no energy to create with because in survival, it's
not a time to create. In survival, it's time to run,
(28:06):
fight or hide. And in your in your work in
terms of building that when my my therapists, we call
it trauma resilient. I've done a few of your I
haven't want of your meditations that I have been doing.
So it's about focusing that meditation on that future that
we want and then the trauma just gets turned down.
Or do we need to do specific work more? My
(28:26):
therapists they may do specific work E. M, D R
or something where it's their trauma is reprocessed. What are
your thoughts on on that? Well, it's so the answer
is yes to both. So I want people in our work,
I want people to come up against those emotions and
I want them to sit in the fire. I don't
ask them to go to the past event I will
(28:47):
have them keep working with their body and lowering the
volume to that that's a victory. You start noticing your
body getting aroused and starts getting anxious, that starts getting
in patient. You can't feel like you can't take it anymore.
Instead of saying I can't meditate or is too much,
you settle that body back down into the present moment
and you tell it it's no longer the mind, that
you're the mind. That's a victory. And the body says,
I want to get up, I want to quit. This
(29:08):
is going too long, and you go whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
We're not going anywhere until I say, and you settle
the body back into the present moment. Now you're executing
a will that's greater than the program. That's a victory too.
And if you keep doing this over and over again,
sooner or later, the body is going to surrender to
a new mind. And there's a liberation of energy that
(29:29):
takes place. All of a sudden, the person is no
longer entangled to their past. That emotion is causing them
to dream a whole new future, not like they're trying
to dream the future. It's just that their their physiology
has changed enough that now they're in the creative state
to see a future that they really can embrace emotionally.
And so when trauma is reset through the amygdala, it's
(29:52):
not happening in the brain, it's happening from the heart,
signaling the amigdala and all of a sudden, traumas reset,
and all of a sudden, the person looks back at
their past and they don't want to change anything in
their past because it brought them to that elegant moment
where they feel a level of love that they haven't
felt since they were a kid or since they could remember.
And it's a it's a very familiar, unfamiliar feeling. Wow, Wow,
(30:17):
that sounds so beautiful. Again. I like to always think
about like, I think most of us have had those moments,
right Like, if we think about the resilience that's already
inside of us, that's what you're talking about, and that
we've had moments when we've overcome those things where we've
learned something new, where we sat in discomfort and been
able to get to the other side. And feels like
with your processes about honing it and getting really specific
(30:39):
about what is already possible inside of our bodies and
making that conscious, making ourselves aware of that, and then
using what we already have inside of us. Sure, and
you know, I want to teach people a simple way,
the practical tools. It's not the good meditations that people
remember when they breakthrough, it's the tough ones. You know,
(31:02):
that's when you start falling in love with yourself. When
you stretch yourself outside of the known and you're not
injured and you're not damaged, you're not traumatized the unknown,
all of a sudden, the space of the unknown begins
to broaden, and you're more comfortable and more relaxed in
the present moment. That is so essential in terms of
transformation that we see with people, because people think they
(31:22):
come to our work for wealth or health or mystical experience,
But everybody's coming for wholeness. That's where the real reason
they're coming. When they start having that kind of wholeness
take place in their nervous system, and you see a
reintegration in the autonomic nervous system and the whole biology
biology changes. Now they no longer want anything, because how
could you want when you feel whole. And it's the
(31:44):
tough moments where you don't want to self regulate. It's
the tough moments where you're in such panic and fear
where you don't you think you can't control it. Those
are the moments where if you really go at it
and you really work on it, now you're you're really
employing the biggest challenge of all. And if you can
overcome that, then the rest is easy. And so if
(32:07):
they practice the tools, sooner or later, they're going to
break through. And and and when they do and they
realize that joy or that love or that gratitude, it's
not coming from anywhere out there, it's coming from within them,
they'll stop looking for it out there and they'll start
looking for it more within them. And the cool part
about this is that nobody is so special to be
(32:28):
excluded from the process. I you can't tell me you're
too sick to do this work anymore. I've seen people
really sick turn it around. You can't tell me you're
too old. We have elders that man. They know how
to change their brain waves and they know how to
move into elegant states. You can't tell me you never
meditated before. And I tell you, the people who never
meditated before I have the best brain scans that I've seen.
(32:48):
I think that the big piece for me is they
listen to all that is that it's not none that
this is possible with the hormones of strat that streads
response has to be lowered to that we can actually
get in the present and get out of survival to
actually be able to do the work. And so that
for those folks out there struggling, that is a key
component we have to wrap dcor. This has been so
(33:13):
incredible and I'd like to end every podcast with a
question that comes from my somatic therapy, from the community
resiliency model. It's really um. The question is what else
is true that even if there's something challenging in our lives,
something that is pulling us down, there's something else that
might be true in our lives that can get us through,
that can be a resource, that can be a place
(33:34):
of resiliing in So for you today, Dr Joe, dispense
out what else it's true? For you, Well, I'm a
practical person and I think that we just took a
moment at the end of the day ask ourselves Where
did I fall from grace? When did I lose? How
could I respond better in the different situations? I think
(33:55):
just that simple process of self discovery every single day.
I think we make great strides, and there could be
so much unity in this planet that we live in.
And survival and stress creates division and contrasts and polarity
and and wholeness and elevated emotions. Somehow caused the species
of human beings to kind of sea beauty and everything
(34:18):
and on. And that's my hope, you know, for all
the work that we're doing. O. That's incredible. That reminds
me of what Oprah says about Gary Zookov See to
the Soul. The way he defines authentic power, she says,
is authentic power is when our personality comes to serve
(34:41):
the energy of our soul. Yeah. Yeah, I believe that firmly. Amazing, amazing,
Thank you so much, Dr Joe to spends it. Where
can folks find you? Are you on the internet? I
know you have a new course the formula? What else
do you? Um? We can folks bother you? Sure? I
mean our our website is just Dr Joe this under
dot com and and so the formula we just released
(35:03):
because some people say, how do I introduce my boss
to this or my partner and and they're not ready
for you know, an intensive, our progressive workshop and the
formulas just you know, twelve simple thirty to forty minute
talks and five meditations that go with it to really
practice the formula of brain and heart coherence. And the
real magic happens really at our week long events and
(35:25):
you get together with a community of people that are
really craving the unknown and really craving change. So so
check out the website. I mean, there's lots of different
things that we have, all kinds of meditations. But if
you can start practicing and be the scientists in your
life and see if you change your energy, if your
life changes that that would be a great start and practice,
you know, practice, trying it out, practice makes perfect. I'm
(35:49):
so grateful we were able to find the time to
do this today. Thank you Dr Joe to spend out.
Thank you Dr Joe Dispenser. Dr Joe gave us so
(36:12):
much to think about and so much to work on.
I'm kind of at a loss for words really because
I feel at this point in my life it's about
the doing it's about committing to changing my life a
day at a time. And I've certainly done this before.
I've changed a lot about my life, so I know
it's possible, right, And that is a beautiful thing that like,
(36:36):
when he talks about these concepts, that sounds sort of
out there maybe to some people, even though the theory
is based in science. It's like, how can I do that? Well,
I know that I've already been in the space of
practice and rehearsing the life that I want. I used
to stand in the mirror as a kid and rehearse
awards acceptance speeches, and I would like rehearse lines from commercials,
(37:02):
and like, my whole childhood was like fantasizing about living
the life I'm actually living right now. And it took
a while, but it happened. And so that deeply resonates
with me when he talks about that. What Dr Joe
despends it seems to be offering us is a way
to practice and cultivate being the person that I would say,
(37:26):
the person that God intended us to be, the person
that is the very best version of ourselves. So for me,
I think it's just about getting to work. I'm going
to get to work on it and I'll let you
know how it goes. Thank you so much for listening
(37:50):
to The Liver and coluc Show. Please rate, review, subscribe,
and share with everyone you know. Join me in September
for another round up and credible guest like actress, singer
and playwright Billy Porter, my therapist Jennifer Burton Flyer. She
makes an encore appearance because we got more to talk about,
and you'll get to meet the cops, the Council of Transistors,
(38:13):
my very best girlfriends. They're an incredible group of women
and I can't wait. Look for me on September six,
but you can still find me on Instagram and Twitter
at Laverne Cox and on Facebook at Laverne Cox for
rio Until next time, stay in the life. The Laverne
(38:41):
Cox Show is a production of Shonda land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shonda
land Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to The Laverne Cox Show, a production of Shonda
Land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. It's the
tough moments where you don't want to self regulate. It's
the tough moments where you're in such panic and fear
where you don't you think you can't control it. Those
(00:20):
are the moments where if you really go at it
and you really work on it, now you're you're really
employing the biggest challenge of all and if you can
overcome that, and the rest is easy. And so they've
practiced the tools, sooner or later they're going to break through.
(00:46):
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Laverne Cox Show. I'm
Laverne Cox. So a few years ago I was on
Instagram as I often am, and so a video from
Louis House and there was a man in the video
named Dr Joe Dispensa talking about healing the body through meditation,
(01:07):
like healing physical ailments through meditation. And I just started meditation,
transcenental meditation to be specific. So I was really intrigued,
and so I went into a deep dive in his
into his work and was fascinated. But also he was
talking about quantum physics and epigenetics and neural plasticity and
(01:29):
all this stuff I made a's and everything except math
and science. So it was just kind of like, um what.
But as I continue to explore his work, the idea
of personal transformation, the idea of creating the future we
want not from the known but from the unknown, deeply
(01:49):
intrigued me. He talks about creating an experience in our
bodies in the present moment that can make us feel
as if we've already experienced it. As an actor. That
makes a lot of sense to me. I do that
all the time, So of course when I got this podcast,
I was like, I would really love to interview that
(02:10):
Dr Joe dispends a guy and try to like break
down some of his concepts with him himself. Since two
thousand ten, Dr Joe Dispends his partner with scientists and
universities to perform extensive research on the effects that meditation
has on the brain and body. His team has gathered
more than eight thousand brain scans and four thousand heart
(02:33):
rate variability measurements to try and correlate how various levels
of emotion affect heart and brain function, immune response, and
overall mind body Health. He is the author of You
Are the Placebo, Making your Mind Matter, evolve your brain
and more. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr Joe dispends Up. Hello,
(03:04):
Doctor Doti Spenser, Welcome to the podcast How are you
Failing Today? I'm very excited to spend an hour with you. Awesome, awesome, awesome.
I'd like to begin with your story from when you
were in a triathlon and you had an accident. Can
you talk to us about that? Sure, I'll give you
the short story. But I think for many of us,
in order for us to to wake up, we need
(03:26):
a wake up call. And and my wake up call
happened in six I was in the traathlon in Palm Springs, California,
and I was on the biking portion of the race
when I was coming up to this corner and there
was a police officer around the corner and he was
pointing at me to signal me to make the turn.
The problem was he had his back to the oncoming
traffic behind him, so he was telling me to turn.
(03:48):
And so when I made the turn, this four well
drive Bronco going about sixty miles an hour, hit me
from behind and catapulted me out of my bike. And
when you land that hard on the ground, when you're
in the air, the force of compression takes the columns,
the blocks of the vertebrae and compresses them and they break.
And so in my case, I broke six of those
(04:08):
vertebrae when I hit the ground. And when you take
a volume of matter and you compress it, fragments gotta
go somewhere. So I had bone fragments on my spinal cord,
and the arch that the spinal cord passes through had
broken like a pretzel. So I had multiple compression fractures.
So it was a it was a difficult situation for me.
In the typical procedure for something like that, laver is
(04:29):
a Harrington rod surgery, and in my case, it would
cut off the back parts of my vertebrae from the
base of my neck to the base of my spine
and then screwing these long, stainless steel rods in an
attempt to candel ever, you know, to pull the spine
off the cord. And I was a twenty four year
old kid, and I was living a great life in
San Diego, and I and I just couldn't imagine me
(04:52):
be compromised to that degree and living with an addictive medications,
or if I chose that radical type of treatment, I
wouldn't have many options. In other words, there would be
much for me to do after that point. And so
they told me, if I didn't have the surgery, I
probably never walk again. And so I had four opinions
from four the leading surgeons in southern California, and they
(05:14):
were all very fixed on the idea of me having
this radical surgery. And I had five days to decide.
And if you don't make that decision within those five days,
and the bones automatically start to heal. And if I
decided to have the surgery afterwards, they'd have to cut
me open from the front and the back, and that's
a very aggressive surgery. So for me, um, I had
to make a decision. And I think that one of
(05:35):
the worst of human sufferings is in decision. When I
was weighing what I knew against what I didn't know,
and was I willing to take a risk and a chance,
And I kept hearing this voice in my head that said,
the power that made the body heals the body, you know,
And I thought, well, goodness, I'm not going anywhere I'm
laying face down, I can't move. Had you heard that before?
The power that makes the body heals the body hit
(05:55):
to hit. Someone said that you before. Yeah, I had
that principle kind of in my mind, but I never
really took it to the test, like to this degree.
So I figured that there is this intelligence that lives
within us is a consciousness, and consciousness is awareness, and
awareness is paying attention. So I thought, if I could
take all of my attention off all the things in
(06:16):
my life and be present with it and give it
a plan, give it a formula, give it an understanding,
a template of what I wanted, and when I was
satisfied with what I wanted, I would surrender that image
or that vision to this greater mind than allow it
to do the healing for me, because I knew that
I couldn't do it. I knew that my body had
to do it for me. So I think that when
you're injured or in crisis like that, we focus on
(06:38):
what we don't want to have happened instead of what
we do want to have happened. So I would start
this inward process and start reconstructing my vertebrae, and then
I'd start thinking, Oh my god, I'm gonna be living
in a wheelchair. Should I sell my home? Should I
sell my practice? And I kept catching myself and that
wasn't what I wanted to show this intelligence. And so
I went through six and a half weeks of probably
(06:59):
the darkest night of the soul I had ever been in,
and then I just kept with it. It took me
two or three hours to go through the whole process,
and then about six weeks or so, it started getting
really easy. I could do it in a shorter amount
of time, and I wasn't frustrated or impatient or sad
or any of those emotions. When I was done, I
felt lifted. I felt like I had accomplished something. And
(07:19):
then I started noticing dramatic changes in my body. My
sensory function came back, my motor function came back, and
I was back on my feet in ten and a
half weeks and back to training at twelve weeks. And
I just made a deal with myself that if I
was ever able to walk again, I'd spend the rest
of my life studying this mind body connection and mind
over matter. And I've been doing that since. That's incredible
(07:42):
what practice were you practicing at twenty four you said
you were going to leave your practice. Yes, I was
a chiropractor at the time. I had a multi disciplinary clinic,
and I was treating a lot of try athletes, and
it was just kind of my life. And so I
knew enough about the spine to know that if I
went with that surgery, that procedure, I probably wind up
in trouble later on in my life, and I was
(08:04):
just not willing to take that chance. Have you had
any issues with your back or spine since? Like, what? Nothing? No? No,
In fact, I trained six days a week. I'm super active.
I never have pain in my spine, and I do
all the things that I want to do and I'm
not compromised in any way. Yeah, that's incredible. This is
(08:25):
a good time to take a little break. We'll be
right back though. Alright, now that's all taken care of,
Let's get back to our chat. Yea. So one of
(08:53):
my favorite quotes of yours is the best way to
predict your future is to create it, not from the known,
but from the un known. Can you talk about where
you are now with breaking the habit of being yourself? Right?
I mean that's the name of one of your books.
Then that feels like the crux of what your work
is about, giving us a new template to be a
(09:14):
new self. And what that processes is like it's a
really intense process, I know. But well, what I've come
to learn is that our our personality creates our personal reality,
and our personality is made up of how we think,
how we act, and how we feel. So the present
personality who's listening to this podcast has created the present
personal reality called their life. Which means if you want
(09:37):
to create a new personal reality, a new life, you've
got to change your personality. You have to change, and
I think most people try to create a new life
without changing, and that's one of the challenges that we have.
So if you believe in any measure that your thoughts
have something to do with your destiny, or your thoughts
have something to do with your life, your life is
(09:58):
going to stay the same because the same thoughts lead
to the same choices, the same choices lead to the
same behaviors. So the side effect of that is that
our biology, our neurocircuitry, our neurochemistry, our hormones, and even
our gene expressions stays the same because we're staying the same.
So there's a principle in neuroscience that says that nerve
(10:20):
cells that fire together wire together, with nerve deals that
fire together wire together nerve deals that fire together. What
does that mean? What if you keep thinking the same thoughts,
if you keep making the same choices, if you keep
doing the same things, if you keep creating the same experiences,
and you keep feeling the same emotions, you keep firing
the same circuits in your brain in the same way.
(10:40):
And if you keep firing and wiring those circuits, you
begin to hardwire your brain into a very finite signature.
That finite signature literally solidifies by the time where in
our mid thirties, By the time when our mid thirties,
we become a memorized set of automatic behaviors or unconscious habits.
Needs are emotional responses, hardwired attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that
(11:05):
function just like a computer program. So then most people
that are trying to create a new reality, they're thinking
positively and they're saying I'm healthy, I'm healthy and wealthy
and wealthy and free and free, and that thought is
never making it past the brainstem because the body is
saying no, you're not You're miserable, you're unhappy. You're programmed
this way. So so the first part to change is
(11:29):
to become conscious of those unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions.
And this is lighting a match in a dark place. Now,
what do you think your body is gonna say. Your
body's gonna say, oh, no way, it's gonna start influencing
the mind. You're gonna start hearing chatter, that says Laverne.
I think this thought, and this thought leads to this choice.
This choice leads this behavior. This behavior creates the same experience,
(11:51):
and the same experience produces the same feeling. You say, oh,
this feels right, No, that feels familiar. So going from
the old self to the new self, there's a neurological
death that has to take place. And most people they
can't tolerate that unknown place because we've been conditioned in
survival that the unknown is unpredictable and it's scary. And
(12:11):
I say that unknown is the perfect place to create from.
And we teach people how to get to that place
and work on being comfortable in that place. To say
to themselves, if I pay attention and I have intention,
I'm gonna be installing neurological hardware. Keep firing and wiring
those thoughts and they become like a software program. And
(12:34):
that's the new voice in your head that says you
can anything as possible. If you close your eyes and
you say to yourself, one day is one lifetime, and
you began to rehearse what you were going to do
in that day. If you were truly present, your brain
would not know the difference between the outer world experience
and what you were imagining in your mind. There's research
(12:54):
on this, and you would begin to install more neurological hardware.
Keep doing it every day and it becomes more automatic,
and all of a sudden you start behaving like a
happy person. No magic there, You rehearsed it. Now here's
the challenge. Can you teach your body emotionally what that
future reality will feel like before it happens. That means
(13:16):
you can't wait for your healing to feel gratitude. You
can't wait for your wealth to feel abundance. You can't
wait for your new relationship to feel love. That's that's
the old model of of cause and effect. Waiting for
something in your outer world to change that take away
your emptiness or lack. The quantum model of reality is
embracing the emotion before it happens, and it causes the
(13:38):
body to believe it's living in that future in the
present moment, and that's when we see traumatic changes in
people's biology. I love that. I love that. I wonder
why is it called a quantum model. I guess for
those of us who are not into quantum theory, Well,
you know, quantum physics says that mind and matter are
so intimately connected that it's impossible to separate the two.
(14:00):
That if you study sub atomic particles, no matter who
you are, when you look to measure that electron, that photon,
it mysteriously appears when you look for it, turn your
back on it, and it goes from a particle back
to possibility, back to energy. So then some way your
mind has an effect on the external world. And we
(14:21):
teach people instead of being the victim of their life,
you know, to say to them, why are you unhappy?
I'm unhappy because of this person or the circumstance. What
they're saying, really is that person or that circumstances is
controlling the way I feel and the way I think. Well,
anything that controls the way you feel and the way
you think, you're victim too. But if you teach people
(14:42):
that the way they think in the way they feel
produces outcomes in their life, then it says that mind
has an effect on mattering. My interest is teaching people
how to shorten the gap between cause and effect, between
the thought and the experience. And when we do that,
I would say that you would start believing you're more
of the creator of your life and less of a
(15:04):
victim of your life. Amazing. When you talked about the
one of some of the research I was I'm doing
on you, you talked about an experiment with piano playing.
Can you tell us about that experiment. I think it
really illustrates a lot of what you're saying through brilliantly. Sure, sure,
if you were truly present in the moment, your brain
would believe that that's exactly what you were experiencing. So
(15:24):
they took a group of people that never played the
piano before, and they divided them to do different categories.
In one group, they had them common play these one
handed scales and chords for two hours a day for
five days. They did a brain scan on them before
and then they had a brain scan on them five
days later, and as you would expect, five days later,
(15:46):
they grew a whole another set of circuits in their
brain as a result of that experience. Why you learn
something new, Learning is making new connections in your brain.
You get some instruction. If you get some instruction, you
get your body involved. If your body involved, you're gonna
have experience. Keep repeating the experience over and over again,
keep paying attention. You're gonna fire and wire new circuits,
and you're gonna install new neurological hardware in your brain.
(16:09):
Take another group of people, do a brain scan at
the beginning, and but this time, instead of them actually
physically playing the piano, have them close their eyes and
mentally rehearse playing those scales and chords for two hours
a day for five days, and scan their brain at
the end of five days. And at the end of
five days, they grow the same amount of circuits in
(16:30):
their brain. The brain did not know the difference between
the real life experience of playing the scales and chords
and what they were imagining in their mind without ever
lifting a finger. You take those people never played the
piano before you set up in front of a piano
and like magic, they can play the scales and chords. Well,
they prime their brain for the experience. So if you're
(16:50):
working with a CEO, if you're working with a single
mother with three children, if you're working with anybody wants
to improve anything, every single one of those people mentally
rehearsed their game. Now the brain is no longer a
record of the past. Now it's a map to the future. Okay,
so you say, well that changes the brain. What about
(17:10):
the body. Take a group of men and have them
come for an hour day and close their eyes and
mentally rehearsed doing bicep curls, and add an emotional component
like stronger, harder, more intense. One hour a day for
two weeks. At the end of two weeks, thirteen point
five increase in muscle strength and never lifted away. Now
(17:32):
the body looks like it was in the experience for
the last two weeks. Now we teach this model to
teach people how to get healthy, because if it looks
like you've already had the experience in your brain and body,
because you rehearsed it enough times, it has to come
to you into your life. That's so amazing. So these
are all things that require lots of rehearsal, lots of practice,
(17:55):
and practice sort of makes perfect and so so much
of what it sounds like you're talking about is changing
our lives through practice. Right, basically practice is only through meditation.
Are there other ways for us to basically use the resource? Well, um,
I'll give you the short answer. The more you can
lay that old self down, Like actors and actresses do
(18:15):
this so well, they lay down their persona and they
literally becomes somebody else. They think differently, they act differently,
they feel differently. They become that person and there's a
principle in neuroscience called neuroplasticity, and plasticity is the ability
for the brain to reshape and rewire itself, and that's
exactly what you're doing. You're literally becoming someone else. As
(18:38):
an example, is really a person that has a problem
with anxiety. Then they're mismanaging their thoughts, they're mismanaging their emotions,
they're mismanaging their behaviors. And they have to get so
conscious of that old self that they won't go unconscious
to any thought, behavior, or emotions. So in meditation, you
have to become very familiar with the old self, so
(18:59):
that in your way in day you don't go unconscious.
But if you say how am I going to think?
How am I going to act? And how am I
going to feel, and you begin to bring up those emotions,
and you begin to rehearse who you're going to be,
and you begin to think about how you do want
to think. If you keep doing it over and over again,
it will begin to become familiar to you. So the
process of change requires unlearning and relearning. It's breaking the
(19:21):
habit of the old self and reinventing a new self.
It's pruning synaptic connections and sprouting new connections. And so
when you become the person that you want to be,
then you don't need anyone or anything outside of you
to make you happy. That's the name of the game here.
You want to be able to bring that up on
your own and when you're living in the emotions of
your future. What we found out was if you're feeling empowered,
(19:43):
if you're feeling lifted, if you're feeling unlimited, if you're
feeling abundant, if you're feeling an incredible amount of love,
you never look for it to happen. You already feel
like it has happened, and that's when you all of
a sudden start having these synchronicities, these coincidences, these serendipities,
these opportunities that begin to come to you. That's the
(20:04):
name of the game. What is fascinating about about your
work is that you talk about frequency and energy, right
that when we do create this new person, that we
started vibrating in a new frequency, and that frequency begins
to attract different things that certainly experience that just in
my dating life that like I there's just things that
became unacceptable for me with men. I just wouldn't, you know.
(20:26):
And I kept working on myself and I definitely noticed
that I started attracting different kinds of men that the
men who there trifling, they just wouldn't even look my
way anymore because they just they weren't even on the
same frequency. And I was like, this is fascinating, and
it feels like that's kind of what you're what you're
talking about here. Sure, well, I've been at this for
a very long time, and I can honestly tell you
(20:48):
that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when
you change your energy, you change your life. And the
stress responses with the body naturally doesn't. And I think
people when they're threatened or they feel fear, or they
feel aggression, or they feel whatever, the emotion is resentment.
In patients, they try to control everything in their life
and they start shifting their attention to different people in
(21:09):
different meetings and different objects and different and their brain
starts firing really out of order. If the thought sends
a signal out, then the feeling starts to draw experiences
to us. So instead of doing it that way, we've
all done it that way. If I could open my
heart and feel the emotion of my future and I
could sustain it, and I know that if I feel
that emotion, I'm drawing my future to me. If I
(21:32):
could synchronize my energy and every single day to a
new future, then the side effects should be synchronicities in
my life. This is the work to be able to
maintain that modified state of mind and body your entire day,
independent of any condition in your outer world. Because the
moment I say to you, lookver and what happened you look?
(21:53):
It looks like you're unhappy. You'd say, Oh, it's this
person or this thing I got to deal with. While
we're back to the unconscious growth. Being a victim. That's
something in our outer world, change the way we're feeling
and thinking, and we disconnected from the energy of our future,
and now we're back to the energy of our past.
Don't expect anything to change in your life now. You
have one of two choices to stay in that those
(22:14):
emotions complain blame, be a victim, make excuses, feel sorry
for yourself, or you excuse yourself and say I need
five minutes and get right back into the emotion if
your heart and begin to connect to the emotion of
your future. And people who do this that can do
it with their eyes open, they have really profound, unusual,
(22:34):
miraculous things that begin to occur in their world. And
the beauty behind all of this is you get to
be anybody you want. You have the free will. The
spark of the divine lives in you, and you have
the free will to create life exactly the way you want. Oh, honey,
has that for a little truth. After a tiny break,
(22:56):
we've got more for you. We are back and we're
ready to pick up where we left up. I'm glad
(23:22):
you mentioned stress hormones because I think you know I've
talked a lot on this podcast about trauma, trauma resilience.
It's a huge part of my therapeutic practice. I've become
aware that, um, I'm forty nine years old that from
most of my life, I've sort of lived in this
sort of survival, perpetual survival state, right, And I'm definitely
experiencing health consequences as a result of that excess cortisol
(23:44):
on adrenaline. It is presenting in my life and unfortunate ways.
I had a panic attack a couple of weeks ago,
and so I'm someone who really works on myself, and
so I guess my whole thing is like the only
way that this is possible for us to be in
the present moment, to become pure consciousness. Is another phrase
that you use is that we have to be able
(24:04):
to let go of the fight or flight response. We
have to be able to let go of those stress hormones.
And that is easier said than done for some of us,
especially when I'm hyper aware that I never feel safe. Right,
there's so much trauma and again and I want to
be a victim, Like what's my responsibility in this? Right?
I want to I'm very committed to getting over this
(24:25):
and like, you know, being the master of my faith,
the captain of my soul. So for folks who are
dealing with a lot of trauma and and whatnot, what
but just just get over it. No, no, no, it's
not it's not that easy, you see. No, I know.
The stronger the emotion, the stronger the emotional response that
we have to some experience in our life, the more
altered we feel inside of us, the more we pay
(24:49):
attention to the cause. And when that happens, the brain
takes a snapshot and that's called the long term memory.
The problem is that every time you think about that event,
you're using the same chemistry in your brain and body
as if it was happening. So again, the thought and
the feeling, the memory and the emotion, the stimulus response,
it's not in the conscious mind now, it's in the body.
(25:10):
Right So the body is trying to predict when the
next bad moment's going to happen and prepare for the worst.
Eat at that point, your body has been programmed. You
could say stop while you want, but the body is
already in the experience right now. The problem with that
is you lose control and then you think, what if
it happens again. Now you start worrying about when it's
gonna happen again, and it's the fear of happening again.
(25:32):
Then all of a sudden list it's the same response.
So I could show you hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
of brain skins of people in this work that labored
for that present moment and started to catch the thought,
catch the feeling, become aware of those subtle sensations in
(25:53):
their body, and worked with their eyes closed, with their
body to settle the body back down, training the animal
as the body. You got aroused, and they started to
settle the body back down to the presment. Just like
loving a dog to stay. You stay, and the body stays,
and it goes what about this starts? Ah, you bring
it back down. And this is the battle. This is
David and Goliath. This is facing the necromancer. Because survival,
(26:16):
it's literally life or death when we're in survival. And
that is the intense part about this, that survival survival
is you gotta take care of your body. So when
we perceive a threat or a danger in our outer world,
we switch on that primitive nervous system called the fight
or flight nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system. Now, human beings,
we can turn on that stress response just by thought alone.
(26:39):
We could think about our problems and produce that same effect.
What we've noticed is that that arousal that comes from
the stress response gives the brain and body a rush
of adrenaline. And now people in a sense become conditioned,
like addicted to that rush of those chemicals. And so
they need the bad job, they need the bad relationship,
(27:02):
they need the poor circumstances in their life because it
reaffirms that kind of addiction, that kind of conditioning. So then,
just like breaking any addiction, whether it's chocolate or alcohol
or cocaine or whatever you're into, the body is going
to go through cravings. It's gonna crave the substance. So
when a person is going through the change and they're
(27:23):
lowering the volume to that emotion, they need to replace
that emotion with another emotion. The stronger the emotion we
feel to some problem, some trauma, some past event, the
more we pay attention to it. But if you keep
lowering the volume to that emotion, you'll keep taking your
attention off that person or problem. Now where you place
your attention is where you place your energy. But makes
sense then that as you begin to lower the volume,
(27:46):
you're calling energy back to you, you're taking your power
back and you're building your own field. Now there's energy
to heal, Now, there's energy to create the life that
you want. But with stress, we tap the body's resources
and there's no energy for long term bill thing projects.
There's no energy to create with because in survival, it's
not a time to create. In survival, it's time to run,
(28:06):
fight or hide. And in your in your work in
terms of building that when my my therapists, we call
it trauma resilient. I've done a few of your I
haven't want of your meditations that I have been doing.
So it's about focusing that meditation on that future that
we want and then the trauma just gets turned down.
Or do we need to do specific work more? My
(28:26):
therapists they may do specific work E. M, D R
or something where it's their trauma is reprocessed. What are
your thoughts on on that? Well, it's so the answer
is yes to both. So I want people in our work,
I want people to come up against those emotions and
I want them to sit in the fire. I don't
ask them to go to the past event I will
(28:47):
have them keep working with their body and lowering the
volume to that that's a victory. You start noticing your
body getting aroused and starts getting anxious, that starts getting
in patient. You can't feel like you can't take it anymore.
Instead of saying I can't meditate or is too much,
you settle that body back down into the present moment
and you tell it it's no longer the mind, that
you're the mind. That's a victory. And the body says,
I want to get up, I want to quit. This
(29:08):
is going too long, and you go whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
We're not going anywhere until I say, and you settle
the body back into the present moment. Now you're executing
a will that's greater than the program. That's a victory too.
And if you keep doing this over and over again,
sooner or later, the body is going to surrender to
a new mind. And there's a liberation of energy that
(29:29):
takes place. All of a sudden, the person is no
longer entangled to their past. That emotion is causing them
to dream a whole new future, not like they're trying
to dream the future. It's just that their their physiology
has changed enough that now they're in the creative state
to see a future that they really can embrace emotionally.
And so when trauma is reset through the amygdala, it's
(29:52):
not happening in the brain, it's happening from the heart,
signaling the amigdala and all of a sudden, traumas reset,
and all of a sudden, the person looks back at
their past and they don't want to change anything in
their past because it brought them to that elegant moment
where they feel a level of love that they haven't
felt since they were a kid or since they could remember.
And it's a it's a very familiar, unfamiliar feeling. Wow, Wow,
(30:17):
that sounds so beautiful. Again. I like to always think
about like, I think most of us have had those moments,
right Like, if we think about the resilience that's already
inside of us, that's what you're talking about, and that
we've had moments when we've overcome those things where we've
learned something new, where we sat in discomfort and been
able to get to the other side. And feels like
with your processes about honing it and getting really specific
(30:39):
about what is already possible inside of our bodies and
making that conscious, making ourselves aware of that, and then
using what we already have inside of us. Sure, and
you know, I want to teach people a simple way,
the practical tools. It's not the good meditations that people
remember when they breakthrough, it's the tough ones. You know,
(31:02):
that's when you start falling in love with yourself. When
you stretch yourself outside of the known and you're not
injured and you're not damaged, you're not traumatized the unknown,
all of a sudden, the space of the unknown begins
to broaden, and you're more comfortable and more relaxed in
the present moment. That is so essential in terms of
transformation that we see with people, because people think they
(31:22):
come to our work for wealth or health or mystical experience,
But everybody's coming for wholeness. That's where the real reason
they're coming. When they start having that kind of wholeness
take place in their nervous system, and you see a
reintegration in the autonomic nervous system and the whole biology
biology changes. Now they no longer want anything, because how
could you want when you feel whole. And it's the
(31:44):
tough moments where you don't want to self regulate. It's
the tough moments where you're in such panic and fear
where you don't you think you can't control it. Those
are the moments where if you really go at it
and you really work on it, now you're you're really
employing the biggest challenge of all. And if you can
overcome that, then the rest is easy. And so if
(32:07):
they practice the tools, sooner or later, they're going to
break through. And and and when they do and they
realize that joy or that love or that gratitude, it's
not coming from anywhere out there, it's coming from within them,
they'll stop looking for it out there and they'll start
looking for it more within them. And the cool part
about this is that nobody is so special to be
(32:28):
excluded from the process. I you can't tell me you're
too sick to do this work anymore. I've seen people
really sick turn it around. You can't tell me you're
too old. We have elders that man. They know how
to change their brain waves and they know how to
move into elegant states. You can't tell me you never
meditated before. And I tell you, the people who never
meditated before I have the best brain scans that I've seen.
(32:48):
I think that the big piece for me is they
listen to all that is that it's not none that
this is possible with the hormones of strat that streads
response has to be lowered to that we can actually
get in the present and get out of survival to
actually be able to do the work. And so that
for those folks out there struggling, that is a key
component we have to wrap dcor. This has been so
(33:13):
incredible and I'd like to end every podcast with a
question that comes from my somatic therapy, from the community
resiliency model. It's really um. The question is what else
is true that even if there's something challenging in our lives,
something that is pulling us down, there's something else that
might be true in our lives that can get us through,
that can be a resource, that can be a place
(33:34):
of resiliing in So for you today, Dr Joe, dispense
out what else it's true? For you, Well, I'm a
practical person and I think that we just took a
moment at the end of the day ask ourselves Where
did I fall from grace? When did I lose? How
could I respond better in the different situations? I think
(33:55):
just that simple process of self discovery every single day.
I think we make great strides, and there could be
so much unity in this planet that we live in.
And survival and stress creates division and contrasts and polarity
and and wholeness and elevated emotions. Somehow caused the species
of human beings to kind of sea beauty and everything
(34:18):
and on. And that's my hope, you know, for all
the work that we're doing. O. That's incredible. That reminds
me of what Oprah says about Gary Zookov See to
the Soul. The way he defines authentic power, she says,
is authentic power is when our personality comes to serve
(34:41):
the energy of our soul. Yeah. Yeah, I believe that firmly. Amazing, amazing,
Thank you so much, Dr Joe to spends it. Where
can folks find you? Are you on the internet? I
know you have a new course the formula? What else
do you? Um? We can folks bother you? Sure? I
mean our our website is just Dr Joe this under
dot com and and so the formula we just released
(35:03):
because some people say, how do I introduce my boss
to this or my partner and and they're not ready
for you know, an intensive, our progressive workshop and the
formulas just you know, twelve simple thirty to forty minute
talks and five meditations that go with it to really
practice the formula of brain and heart coherence. And the
real magic happens really at our week long events and
(35:25):
you get together with a community of people that are
really craving the unknown and really craving change. So so
check out the website. I mean, there's lots of different
things that we have, all kinds of meditations. But if
you can start practicing and be the scientists in your
life and see if you change your energy, if your
life changes that that would be a great start and practice,
you know, practice, trying it out, practice makes perfect. I'm
(35:49):
so grateful we were able to find the time to
do this today. Thank you Dr Joe to spend out.
Thank you Dr Joe Dispenser. Dr Joe gave us so
(36:12):
much to think about and so much to work on.
I'm kind of at a loss for words really because
I feel at this point in my life it's about
the doing it's about committing to changing my life a
day at a time. And I've certainly done this before.
I've changed a lot about my life, so I know
it's possible, right, And that is a beautiful thing that like,
(36:36):
when he talks about these concepts, that sounds sort of
out there maybe to some people, even though the theory
is based in science. It's like, how can I do that? Well,
I know that I've already been in the space of
practice and rehearsing the life that I want. I used
to stand in the mirror as a kid and rehearse
awards acceptance speeches, and I would like rehearse lines from commercials,
(37:02):
and like, my whole childhood was like fantasizing about living
the life I'm actually living right now. And it took
a while, but it happened. And so that deeply resonates
with me when he talks about that. What Dr Joe
despends it seems to be offering us is a way
to practice and cultivate being the person that I would say,
(37:26):
the person that God intended us to be, the person
that is the very best version of ourselves. So for me,
I think it's just about getting to work. I'm going
to get to work on it and I'll let you
know how it goes. Thank you so much for listening
(37:50):
to The Liver and coluc Show. Please rate, review, subscribe,
and share with everyone you know. Join me in September
for another round up and credible guest like actress, singer
and playwright Billy Porter, my therapist Jennifer Burton Flyer. She
makes an encore appearance because we got more to talk about,
and you'll get to meet the cops, the Council of Transistors,
(38:13):
my very best girlfriends. They're an incredible group of women
and I can't wait. Look for me on September six,
but you can still find me on Instagram and Twitter
at Laverne Cox and on Facebook at Laverne Cox for
rio Until next time, stay in the life. The Laverne
(38:41):
Cox Show is a production of Shonda land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shonda
land Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Laverne Cox
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