Like any other morning, the other day I sat down to meditate with one of Dr. Joe Dispenza’s guided meditation tracks*. I have been studying his work for nearly a year and find it to be a tremendous method to rework deeply-entrenched emotional patterns in an experiential way. In this post I’d like to share with you a bit of my experience, as well as some insights into how to use this kind of meditation in order to truly grow.
With my eye mask on and headphones in, I found my spot on the couch where I always meditate. The session the day before didn’t seem to go very deeply, and I was hoping this one would go further. (That self-judgment is so insidious!) It was my day off, so maybe not having anything scheduled later on would make for a more relaxed state and hopefully allow me to go deeper than the day before.
“NOW,” says Dr. Dispenza at the beginning of one of his many meditations. “Can you REST your awareness on the SPACE… between… your… eyes…”
That’s not too difficult to do, so I’m off to a great start. The next few instructions take me to a relaxed but present state. “This is going well,” I implicitly say to myself. I’m doing it “right”. (More self-evaluation — so challenging to let go of!) But, the meditation continues… Trance-like music fills my awareness for a while as I settle in.
“And NOW…” — some time later, Dr. Dispenza’s next directive suddenly jolts me. I’d gone into a sleepy state and now bobbed my head awake. Damn. Gotta get more “with it”, I gotta focus more. Shoot, what am I supposed to be focusing on now? I didn’t even realize that I hadn’t actually heard what the next point of focus should be.
The next chunk of instructions have me going between being able to stay focused and nodding off, each time mentally berating myself for it. Why can’t I get it together? Why can’t I really show up for myself? (Judgy, judge judge!!)
I remind myself that Dr. Joe has said himself that getting sleepy is not a bad thing when you’re meditating — it’s a sign that you’re able to get relaxed and that your brainwaves are actually slowing down. So now, every time my head bobs, I use the jolt to refocus as best I can — and this is an opportunity to use the process positively rather than judging myself in a familiar, but self-sabotaging way. It’s an opportunity to practice a different way of perceiving my efforts. It’s not about failing or doing it wrong — it’s about earnestly showing up, in as many moments as possible. If I were to judge each moment I realized I’d nodded off, I’d waste my meditation time judging myself (or likely check out altogether!)
The second part of the guided process involves focusing on an emotional state you are wanting to rework and change. This doesn’t mean what you’re feeling that moment — instead, you’re asked to choose an entrenched way of being in the world that actually inhibits your self-expression in your life. For example, people who have an illness often choose to rework their belief that it is incurable, and use the meditation to see and feel themselves being completely healthy. Others choose to rework feeling sorry for themselves as their way of being in the world (i.e. being stuck in victim mentality), or their sense of themselves as worthless or abandoned, and so on. Yet others might use it to zoom in on unproductive emotional reactivity or anger.
As you follow the meditation, Dr. Dispenza asks you to recognize the ways in which you embody those limiting beliefs about yourself, and then to envision a different version of yourself.
Psychoanalytically speaking, the method of this practice is two-fold:
- To bring into conscious awareness those unconscious ways of being and behaving that are based in one’s defensive structures. These ways had formed automatically at a very young age as a necessary means of self-protection in childhood, but now, in adulthood, actually prove to be inhibiting and even damaging.
- Once you have the awareness of these erroneous beliefs and ways of being in the world — i.e., once you have brought them out of the unconscious, the next part of the work of meditation is to consciously choose a different way of being, to literally practice, right then and there in the meditative space, a different sense of yourself, one without those defenses that are now causing you pain.
This is where the meditation can really get surprisingly challenging — because we are so used to those familiar feelings. It’s easy to see yourself as the suffering self. But envisioning and experiencing a different version of yourself tends to be more difficult than it sounds. The familiar ways of thinking and feeling show up with a vengeance, right then and there in the moment.
As I emerged from that meditation practice, I caught myself wanting to scrap it, wanting to say that I failed at it “because it didn’t go very deep” and therefore I had not accomplished anything with it. But thenI realized that although I was no longer expressly meditating in that moment, I could apply the same method of awareness to my familiar way of thinking about myself. That moment of becoming aware of my self-judgment was one more opportunity to rework my familiar ways of thinking and being.
I immediately reminded myself that my earnest intention and effort really matters. Despite not “going deep” or achieving some thought-free inner state, I still tracked and reworked many moments where I was reverting to suffering and self-judgment, the places that I am so used to that they show up unbidden, and tend to slip by my awareness over and over. For example, during the practice, I would go into an emotional state of “I suck at this” or “See? I knew it wouldn’t go well again today”, or even “Well, this whole session is a wash” — and for a moment, I would actually believe each of those thoughts.
But those tiny moments when I could catch myself right there and consciously choose a different perspective (which leads to a different feeling) really count. They count for a lot. That’s because while some part of me wanted to “scrap” the whole thing as a way of sabotaging even the future moments I had remaining, I kept reminding myself that it’s not just the whole practice that day — but each moment of meditation is its own opportunity. I don’t say this as a pithy, new-agey way of trying to encourage you to “never give up”. I fully believe that these are the micro-moments in which change actually happens. Each of them adds to and builds on the previous one. My old, familiar self wanted to sabotage the whole of that day’s practice, even before it was done, because then I would be off the hook and my internal status quo would get to go unchallenged for one more day. I could tell myself that I’ll try again tomorrow as a way of avoiding myself today.
We tend to think — and expect — that it’s the big, profound moments of meditation that have the “real” impact. For some people they do happen, and certainly do have an impact. But even for them, in actuality it’s these micro-events in which you are creating a new way of being and literally restructuring your biology.
Every time you catch yourself at reverting back to your self-sabotaging ways, you make that pattern a little more conscious. And then, every time you consciously choose a different way of being for that moment, you actually create those new neural pathways that lead to a new personality.
The familiar, self-pitying or self-denigrating ways of thinking and being shaped your personality from years of “practicing” them implicitly, first as a young child and then by default as an adult. The real gift of Dr. Dispenza’s work is that you can apply this method to make these old, unconscious programs conscious. And then, in a very similar way, the consciously-chosen, new ways of being which you practice in meditation can eventually become a new way of being in the world, as well.
*Note: I am in no way affiliated with Dr. Joe Dispenza. I am a student of his work because I find it useful and am sharing the above as a personal experience and hope that it helps others to make use of either his meditations or any other form of meditation.
Some useful links:
One of Dr. Joe Dispenza’s meditations (similar to what I’ve described here)
Loving Psychoanalysis 