Think Yourself Happy: Midsummer Rising Pt. 1
Reflections from reading Joe Dispenza's Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself
I’m a little bit woo.
Okay.
I’m a lot of bit woo.
This essay is part of the Midsummer Rising series, a month of productivity, self-actualization, and manifestation through books taking place here, on my podcast Broken Spine Social Club, and across my social media pages.
You might know this if you know me in life offline, although it’s an aspect of my person I’ve largely tried to keep under wraps when it comes to my online presence. Why? I have no good answer, except being online grants access to my thoughts, opinions, and self to the kind of people I feel a bit cringe about thinking of me.
I will happily bare my heart and soul to complete strangers, but when it comes to the pretty girls from high school, ex-boyfriends, or old work colleagues, I start to perceive myself through this third, awful lens. I can tell exactly what they’re thinking like an unwanted psychic power: Zoe wants without earning.
Manifestation, or the law of attraction, is a spiritual belief that suggests that focusing on positive or negative thoughts will bring in material experiences of the same. In my lifetime, the concept has been popularized by Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (the film version of which I remember watching at my mother’s best friend’s house when I was around thirteen, maybe my earliest introduction to the World of Woo), and in recent years has become a cultural touchstone for my demographic.
Manifesting manifests (no pun intended) in various rituals: scripting (writing a diary entry from your future self, a self that possesses everything you desire); vision boarding (collecting images that reflect your desired reality either digitally or in an analog collage); guided meditations; visualizations; role-playing; and more. The basic premise is if you want it bad enough, it will come to you. And even deeper: our thoughts create our material reality.
And this is the foundational belief behind Dr. Joe Dispenza’s Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself.
Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself is Dr. Joe Dispenza’s 2013 treatise on quantum mechanics, neuroscience, and spiritual thought. The book is the author’s second, a writer with Dr. in his title, but a person best known as a motivational speaker, thought leader, and guru who has been credited with healing everything from depression to low self-esteem to autoimmune disorders with the framework he outlines in Breaking the Habit.
If you are on the fence about manifestation, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself is a good place to start, with the caveat that this is not an easily digestible read. Dispenza layers quantum theory with neuroscience, braiding in only a small bit of anecdotal storytelling to drive his point home. Brilliant if you’re in need of some grounded scientific / psychological proof before you hit the scripting journal, challenging if you absorb information best via entertainment and real-life examples.
I won’t go into the quantum mechanics of it all, but here’s what you need to know:
Quantum physics speak to idealism as a philosophy, as opposed to materialism, because atoms change depending on the attention we pay to them. As atoms can be both everywhere and nowhere, anytime and no time, depending on observance, they have the possibility to arrange themselves into any reality - including the one where you are as healthy, happy, and successful as your wildest dreams will allow. This is called quantum possibility.
Personality is formed from years of repeated chemical reaction. For example, when your boss yells at you for the first time, you release a flood of cortisol, which causes a feeling of anxiety. Over time, certain thoughts trigger the release of cortisol, becoming your body’s go-to reaction and turning you into an anxious person - the anxiety is part of your personality. This goes for any number of feelings: anger, fear, lack.
The above means you are living in the past. The chemical reaction that’s triggered by an email typo is no different from the chemical reaction triggered by being berated by your first boss. It feels the same in your body. The experience is the same. Your body doesn’t know the difference. Thus - you are reliving the past. And if you can relive the past via chemical reactions and feelings…you can live the future before it happens by focusing on cultivating these reactions and feelings purposefully.
Purposefully cultivating = The Joe Dispenza Rubber Stamp of Approval Meditation Method = observing feelings, patterns, and behaviors you want to release + visualizing the experiences, feelings, and person you want to call in + feeling the feelings
It’s as simple as that. Or, not so much.
Much of online manifestation discourse centers around the things you want to bring in. The $750k annual salary. The BMW. The emotionally available boyfriend. The idea being that as long as you really really really want it, it will come to you. No work required, which is precisely why I have such trouble coming clean about my manifestation habit. Because in the above version of manifesting, you don’t earn it. You just receive it. Which is both entirely true and entirely false of true manifesting.
One of the aspects of my person I’m currently working through is divesting myself of the belief that anything good must be earned. The underlying faith system of such a belief is that I am not a good enough, smart enough, a kind enough or intelligent or creative enough person to enjoy what I want to enjoy, or to receive what I want to receive. I have to put in the hours.
Telling people I have a manifestation practice feels like admitting I don’t think I need to work hard to have the career I want or the friendships I want. And even more to the point, there’s an awkwardness with admitting want in general. It’s greedy to want. It’s lazy to want without earning the want.
But this is exactly what Dr. Joe Dispenza - and more advanced practitioners of manifestation - attempt to heal. It’s not about receiving things. It’s about healing the parts of yourself that don’t believe you deserve to or can or should receive things. That’s the work: overcoming want to achieve enough.
What does enough look like?
It looks like presence. It looks like acceptance. It looks like clarity. And all of this can and should be achieved without any change to your material circumstances, i.e., the house you live in, the job you have, the clothes in your closet. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself doesn’t require you to do anything outside of feel better. That doesn’t negate the wanting or the real hardships out there. Rather, Dispenza’s practice asks you to take 30 minutes a day to sit with more nourishing emotions. It’s a duality - experiencing, in the present, the feelings you want more of in future. Time stops existing in this space. You don’t need the things you want, because you are triggering the feelings you believe those things will bring you.
I can’t write a piece on manifestation without acknowledging that this practice has its faults. Toxic positivity masks the very real feelings of hurt, loneliness, and fear we need to process to overcome them (although, Dispenza’s formula does work in 15 minutes of “observance” of these feelings, perhaps a moment that could be better spent “processing”). Likewise, practitioners with OCD (me included!) need to be mindful that this process can slip into magical thinking, and not to demonize the quote-unquote “negative” thoughts or feelings that arise.
But what is perhaps most helpful with establishing a manifestation practice is not necessarily getting the BMW or landing the catch at the prom. It’s becoming honest with yourself about your wanting, and further - a belief in yourself that want is warranted, and that the want is deserved simply because of the person you are. Not what you do. Not how hard you work. Not the acts of service for others. Seeing yourself as enough.
Thank you for being here for our first post of Midsummer Rising. All month long, I’m exploring cultural must-reads when it comes to spirituality and self-development. If you enjoyed this, maybe you’d like to…
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