You Are the Placebo

You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter by Dr. Joe Dispenza, was recommended to us by Nancy Pickard and it may be the most important book I’ve read in years.

In April 1986, Joe Dispenza was a 23-year-old athlete and chiropractor, competing in a Palm Springs triathlon. He had just finished the swimming segment and was in the biking portion of the race when a red four-wheel drive Bronco going 55 mph slammed into his bike from behind. He was catapulted into the air and landed on his backside. The Bronco kept coming toward him and in order to avoid being run over, Dispenza grabbed the bumper and was dragged down the road before the elderly driver of the Bronco realized what had happened.

The diagnosis wasn’t good. He had broken six vertebrae and a number of shattered bone fragments went back toward his spinal cord. The orthopedic surgeon told him that in order to contain the bone fragments he needed surgery to implant a Harrington rod. This would entail cutting out the back parts of the vertebrae from two to three segments above and below the fractures and clamping two 12-inch stainless steel rods along both sides of his spinal column. If he didn’t have the surgery, paralysis seemed certain. Three other orthopedic surgeons concurred with the first surgeon.

But Dispenza decided against the surgery. “I believe that there’s an intelligence, an invisible consciousness, within each of us that’s the giver of life. It supports, maintains, protects, and heals us every moment.” He was taken by ambulance to the home of a friend and began his journey toward healing. For two hours twice a day, “I went within and began creating a picture of my intended result: a totally healed spine.”  

His description of this process is riveting. He admits that in the beginning, he didn’t really know what he was doing, but now he does. “I was actually starting to think about all these future potentials that existed in the quantum field, and then I was emotionally embracing each of them. And as I selected that intentional future and married it with the elevated emotion of what it would be like to be there in that future, in the present moment my body began to believe it was actually in that future experience. “ And his spine began to heal.

Dispenza said that what he was learning during this process is one of the main principles of quantum physics: that mind and matter aren’t separate, “that our conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings are the very blueprints that control our destiny. The persistence, conviction, and focus to manifest any potential future lies within the human mind and within the mind of the infinite potentials in the quantum  field. Both of these minds must work together in order to bring about any future reality that potentially already exists.”

Nine and a half weeks after the accident, Dispenza  was able to walk again. And his true journey began.

The book’s content has many parallels to the Seth material and to Abraham/Hicks philosophy that we all create our own realities through our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. But You Are the Placebo breaks things down in a way that demysitifies the process of manifestation. He includes fascinating stories about the placebo effect in the brain and the body, and illustrates how thoughts change both body and brain.

In one chapter, he dissects the nature of beliefs, illustrates how they originate, and how we’re suggestible only to what we consciously or unconsciously believe to be true.  And what we believe may limit us in some way, keep us from getting well, or make us utterly miserable!

In order to change a belief, says Dispenza, you have to begin by accepting that it’s possible. Then you have to alter your energy with heightened emotion and then allow your biology to reorganize itself. “Once the amplitude or energy of that decision becomes greater than the hardwired programs in your brain and the emotional addiction in your body, then you are greater than your past, your body will respond to a new mind, and you can effect real change.”

Included in the book are three stories of personal transformation – three different women of various ages – and their journey toward healing and wholeness. The focus in part 2 is on meditation, specifically on how to change beliefs and perceptions through meditation.

Dispenza’s afterword is entitled Becoming Supernatural. It’s stunning. Here’s a taste of it:

“Imagine a world inhabited by billions of people…living as one, where everyone is embracing similar uplifting thoughts connected to unlimited possibility, and these thoughts allow people to make more inspired choices, demonstrate more altruistic behaviors, and create more enlightening experiences.  People would then no longer be living by survival-based emotions we’re so familiar with now: feeling more like matter than energy, separate from possibility. Instead, they’d be living by more expanded, selfless, heartfelt emotions – feeling more like energy than matter, connected to something greater.  If we could do this, then en entirely different world would emerge, and we would be living by a new credo based on the open heart.”