Dr Joe Dispenza Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself Review Chapter 2

Chapter two in Dr. Joe Dispenza's book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself is called Overcoming Your Environment. If I were to pick one sentence from that chapter it would be this

To change, be greater than your environment.

His idea is that every time you respond to your familiar reality you are recreating the same mind. That is, turning on the same nerve cells to make the brain work In the same way.

This created a habit which hardwired your brain to match the customary conditions in your personal reality be they good or bad. This is related to a famous Canadian psychologist named Donald Hebb.

There is a principle in neuroscience called Hebb's law and it basically states that nerve cells that fire together wire together. Hebb's credo demonstrates that if you repeatedly activate the same nerve cells, then each time they turn on it will be easier for them to fire in unison again. Eventually those neurons will develop a long term relationship. This is from a heavy duty classic called The Organization of Behavior.

This was a groundbreaking book that set forth the theory that the only way to explain behavior was in terms of brain function. Donald Hebb blended his understanding of brain surgery with the study of human behavior and together he brought these two realms of human perception under one book. The forceful ideas that Hebb wrote in 1949 are now applied in engineering, robotics, computer science as well as neurophysiology, neuroscience and sight ecology. Here's a quote from The Organization of Behavior.

"An excited neuron tends to decrease its discharge to inactive neurons and to increase this discharge to any active neuron and therefore to form a route to it whether they are intervening neurons between the two or not, with repetition this tendency is proponent in the formation of neural roots.""

In other words this is the powerful way for neural roots to be formed.

To contextualize this let's say that you had to tell a joke. In one room there is people in a nightclub and they're laughing. Now imagine you also had to tell that joke to somebody that was sitting in a dentist's chair. It could be the exact same joke, same delivery with your wonderful timing and your impeccable delivery.

If you tell it in the one room there's a great likelihood people will laugh, but if you tell it in the dentist room there's a great probability that they're not going to laugh as much. They might feel an increase in stress. This is because people have learned to be able to think what they were feeling and then link, learn and associate it with their environment. A dental procedure isn't associated with laughter. One of the key functions of the brain for maximizing predictive power is being able to find patterns and create these neural roots in order to speed up learning. The challenge is that we've learned a personality that's not really conducive towards creating the life that you want and it's not your fault. It's your brain.

In Dr. Joe's book he says the environment is actually controlling you since the neuroscientific definition of mind is the brain in action. You repeatedly reproduce the same level of mind by reminding yourself who you think you are in reference to the outside world.

So your identity becomes defined by everything outside of you because you identify with all of the elements that make up your external world. For example, I feel happy because I'm in a comedy club. I feel stressed because I'm in a dentist's chair. We have a mind, we are steering the bus sometimes aren't we? To create more control with the direction of your life is to be able to overcome your environment and the Hebbian learning that's occurred along the way.

To change you've got to be greater than your environment. Dr. Joe explains Hebbian learning as the more you fire the same circuits by reacting to your external life the more you'll wire your brain to be equal to your personal world. You'll become neural chemically attached to the conditions in your life and time you'll begin to think in the box because your brain will fire circuits that creates a very specific mental signature called your personality.

If you keep reinforcing and refining your neurological hardware, the end result of that repetition is a neural network. In effect this is a new software program just like computer software.

This program for example a behavior or an attitude or an emotional state now runs automatically just like the way we'd feel when you sit into a dentist's chair or the way you'd feel when you walk into a comedy club. In a sense your identity becomes defined by everything outside of you because you identify with all of the elements that make up your external world. One of the big challenges a person will have is that they'll just continually look at what is to look at the problem that they're in or the environment that they're in and keep thinking that that is reality, that's how it is. So they keep reminding themselves in that way and conditioning themselves to believe in that when the solution is to be able to overcome that environment by thinking outside of that environment.

For example he talks about Gandhi who believed in a future that he could not yet see or experience with his senses but which was so alive in his mind that he could not live any other way. Dr. Joe Dispenza also mentions other visionaries such as Joan of Arc and Thomas Edison and Martin Luther King.

Joe Dispenza says they were all completely unrealistic and so were their dreams, the event they were embracing, thoughts, actions and emotions was not realistic because the reality had not yet occurred.

Some might also have said their vision was nonsense and such naysayers would have been right. A vision of reality was non sense because it existed in a reality beyond the senses.

If you're looking to be breaking the habit of being yourself then one of the things that is crucial is to unlearn the conditioning you've associated to your environment.

For the review of chapter three, click here
https://reprogrammingmind.com/joe-dispenza-breaking-the-habit-review-chapter-3/

To order Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself click here.

At the end of the book are meditations to follow which some find difficult to relax too. There’s a better option. Check out this brainwave guidance therapy audio session for yourself, from Brainwave Research UK. This free audio session will benefit anyone looking to normalize brain activity (get out of being stuck in beta and into the tranquility of alpha), to feel more empowered, clearer, balanced, calmer, happier, and more peaceful.