Your thoughts have consequences so great that they create your reality.

—Joe Dispenza

By Joe Dispenza, DC

Connecting the dots between the outer, physical world of the observable and the inner, mental world of thought has always presented quite a challenge to scientists and philosophers. To many of us, even today, the mind appears to have little or no measurable effects on the world of matter. Although we’d probably agree that matter affects our minds, how can our minds possibly produce any physical changes affecting the solid things in our lives? 

Mind and matter appear to be separate, that is, unless there’s a shift in our understanding about the way the mind can shape our reality. 

Always Matter, Never Mind? Always Mind, Never Matter?

I want to share with you a remarkable study that demonstrates how our thoughts and feelings influence matter. Cellular biologist Glen Rein, PhD, conceived of a series of experiments to test healers’ ability to affect biological systems. Since DNA is more stable than substances such as cells or bacterial cultures, he decided to have healers hold test tubes containing DNA.¹ 

This study took place at the HeartMath Research Center in California. The folks there have conducted extraordinary research into the physiology of emotions, heart-brain interactions, and much more. Essentially, they and others have documented a specific link between our emotional states and our heart rhythms. When we have negative emotions (such as anger and fear), our heart rhythms become erratic and disorganized. In contrast, positive emotions (love and joy, for instance) produce highly ordered, coherent patterns that HeartMath researchers refer to as heart coherence. 

In Rein’s experiment, he first studied a group of ten individuals who were well practiced in using techniques that HeartMath teaches to build heart-focused coherence. They applied the techniques to produce strong, elevated feelings such as love and appreciation, then for two minutes, they held vials containing DNA samples suspended in deionized water. When those samples were analyzed, no statistically significant changes had occurred. 

A second group of trained participants did the same, but instead of just creating positive emotions (a feeling) of love and appreciation, they simultaneously held an intention (a thought) to either wind or unwind the strands of DNA. This group produced statistically significant changes in the conformation (shape) of the DNA samples. In some cases, the DNA was wound or unwound as much as twenty-five percent!

A third group of trained subjects held a clear intent to change the DNA, but they were instructed not to enter a positive emotional state. In other words, they were only using thought (intention) to affect matter. The result? No changes to the DNA samples. 

The positive emotional state that the first group entered did nothing by itself to the DNA. 

Another group’s clearly held intentional thought, unaccompanied by emotion, also had no impact. Only when subjects held both heightened emotions and clear objectives in alignment were they able to produce the intended effect. 

An intentional thought needs an energizer, a catalyst—and that energy is an elevated emotion. Heart and mind working together. Feelings and thoughts unified into a state of being. If a state of being can wind and unwind strands of DNA in two minutes, what does this say about our ability to create reality? 

Keep in mind, conscious positive thinking cannot overcome subconscious negative feelings. You may want wealth, you may think “wealthy” thoughts, but if you feel poor, you aren’t going to attract financial abundance to yourself. Why not? Because the mind is in opposition to the body (or vice versa) and your message isn’t consistent. You’re thinking one way and feeling another way. Instead, when mind and body are working together, when our thoughts and feelings are aligned, anything is possible—even on a genetic level.

Mind Over Genetics

In Japan, a study was conducted to find out what effect one’s state of mind might have on genetic health and disease. The subjects were two groups of patients with type II diabetes, all of whom were dependent on insulin. Remember, most diabetics medicate with insulin to remove sugar (glucose) out of the bloodstream and deposit it in the cells, where it can be used for energy. 

At the time of this study, the people involved were being treated with insulin pills or injections to help control their elevated blood-sugar levels.² Each group had their fasting blood-sugar level tested to establish a baseline. Next, one set of subjects watched a comedy show for an hour, while the control group watched a boring lecture. The test subjects then ate a delicious meal, after which their blood glucose levels were checked again. 

There was a significant discrepancy between the subjects who enjoyed the comedy show and those who viewed the uneventful lecture. On average, those who watched the lecture had their blood-sugar levels rise 123 mg/dl—high enough that they would need to take insulin to keep themselves out of the danger zone. In the joyful group, who had laughed for one hour, their after dinner blood-sugar values rose about half that amount (slightly outside of normal range). 

Initially, the researchers who performed the experiment thought that the lighthearted subjects had lowered their sugar levels by contracting their abdominal and diaphragm muscles when they laughed. They reasoned that when a muscle contracts, it uses energy—and circulating energy is glucose. But the research went further. They examined the gene sequences of the jovial individuals and discovered that these diabetics had altered twenty-three different gene expressions just by laughing at the comedy show. Their elevated state of mind apparently triggered their brains to send new signals to their cells, which turned on those genetic variations that allowed their bodies to naturally begin to regulate the genes responsible for processing blood sugar. 

Our emotions can turn on some gene sequences and turn off others, this study clearly showed. Just by signaling the body with a new emotion, the laughing subjects altered their internal chemistry to change the expression of their genes.

Story of Transformation

Bill, 57, was a roofing contractor. A lesion had appeared on his face, and a dermatologist diagnosed malignant melanoma. Although Bill underwent surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, the cancer recurred in his neck, then his side, and finally his calf. Each time, he underwent a similar course of treatment. 

Naturally, Bill experienced “Why me?” moments. He acknowledged that his excessive sun exposure was a risk factor, but he knew others who had been similarly exposed and didn’t develop cancer. He fixated on that unfairness. 

In a moment of self-reflection, Bill realized that for more than thirty years, he had been stuck in resentment, and feeling that he always had to give up what he wanted for the sake of others. For example, he had wanted to become a professional musician after high school. But when an injury left his father unable to work, Bill had to join his family’s roofing company. 

Whenever something didn’t go his way, such as the housing market collapsing just after he expanded the business, he always found someone or something to blame. Bill had so memorized the emotional response pattern of bitterness that it dominated his personality and became an unconscious program. His state of being had signaled the same genes for so long that they had created the disease that now afflicted him. 

No longer could Bill allow his environment to control him: the people, places, and influences in his life had always dictated how he thought, felt, and behaved. He sensed that to break the bonds with his old self and reinvent a new one, he would have to leave his familiar environment. So, for two weeks in Baja, Mexico, he retreated from his familiar life.

The first five mornings, Bill contemplated how he thought when he felt resentment. He became an observer of his thoughts and feelings; he became conscious of his unconscious mind. Next, he paid attention to his previously unconscious behaviors and actions. He decided to halt any thought, behavior, or emotion that was unloving toward himself. 

After the first week of this vigilance, Bill felt freer, because he had liberated his body from its emotional addiction to resentment. By inhibiting the familiar thoughts and feelings that had driven his behaviors, in a sense he impeded the signals of the survival emotions from conditioning his body to the same mind. 

His body then released energy, which was available to use to design a new destiny for himself. For the next week, Bill became so uplifted that he thought about the new self he wanted to be, and how he would respond to the people, places, and influences that previously controlled him.

For instance, he decided that whenever his wife and kids expressed a wish or need, he would respond with more kindness and generosity instead of making them feel like a burden. In short, he focused on how he wanted to think, act, and feel when presented with situations that had challenged him in the past. 

He was creating a new personality, a new mind, and a new state of being. Bill began to put into practice what he’d placed in his mind while sitting on that Baja beach. Shortly after his return, he noticed that the tumor on his calf had fallen off. In a week or so, when he went to his doctor, he was cancer free. He has remained that way. 

By firing his brain in new ways, Bill changed biologically and chemically from his previous self. As a result, he signaled new genes in new ways; and those cancer cells couldn’t coexist with his new mind, new internal chemistry, and new self. Once trapped by negative emotions of the past, he now lives in a more positive future.

Weird Science: Can the Mind Affect the Past (and One Another)? 

In July 2000, Israeli doctor Leonard Leibovici, MD, conducted a double-blind, randomized controlled trial involving 3,393 hospital patients, divided into a control group and an “intercession” group. He set out to see whether prayer could have an effect on their condition.

Prayer experiments are great examples of mind affecting matter at a distance. But stay with me here, because everything is not always what it seems. Leibovici selected patients who had suffered sepsis (an infection) while hospitalized. He randomly designated half of the patients to have prayers said for them, while the other half were not prayed for. He compared the results in three categories: how long fever lasted, length of hospital stays, and how many died as a result of the infection.

The prayed-for benefited from an earlier decrease in fever and a shorter hospitalization time; the difference in the number of deaths among the prayed-for and not-prayed-for groups was not statistically significant, although greater in the prayed-for group.

That’s a powerful demonstration of the benefits of prayer and how we can send an intention out through our thoughts and feelings. However, there’s one additional element to this story that you should know about. Did it strike you as slightly odd that in July 2000, a hospital would have more than 3,000 cases of infection at once? Was it a very poorly sterilized place, or was some kind of contagion running rampant?

It turns out, those who were praying weren’t praying for patients who were infected in 2000. Instead, unbeknownst to them, they were praying for lists of people who had been in the hospital from 1990 to 1996—four to ten years prior to the experiment. The prayed-for patients actually got better during the 1990s from the experiment conducted years later. Let me say this another way: the patients who were prayed for in 2000 all showed measurable changes in health, but those changes took effect years before.

A statistical analysis of this experiment proved that these effects were far beyond coincidence. This demonstrates that our intentions, our thoughts and feelings, and our prayers not only affect our present or future, but they can actually affect our past as well.

Now, this leads to the question: if you were to pray (or focus on an intention) for a better life for yourself, could it affect your past, present, and future? Quantum law says that all potentials exist simultaneously. Our thinking and our feelings affect all aspects of life, beyond both space and time.

—

As an author of several scientific articles on the close relationship between the brain and the body, Joe Dispenza, DC, explains the roles played by brain chemistry and neurophysiology in physical health and disease. In his research into spontaneous remissions, Dispenza has found similarities among people who have experienced so-called miraculous healings, showing that they have actually changed their minds, which then changed their health. When not traveling and writing, Dispenza is busy seeing patients at his chiropractic clinic near Olympia, Washington. He can be contacted at: www.drjoedispenza.com.

Well Being Journal adapted the above excerpt from Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza, DC, and reprinted with permission of Hay House, Inc. Copyright 2012 by Joe Dispenza.

References

1. McCraty, Rollin, et al, “Modulation of DNA conformation by heart-focused intention.” HeartMath Research Center, Institute of HeartMath, Boulder Creek, CA, publication no. 03-008 (2003).
2. Murakami, Kazuo, PhD, The Divine Code of Life: Awaken Your Genes and Discover Hidden Talents (Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Words Publishing, 2006).