OPENING THE DOOR TO THE SUPERNATURAL
As spring was ending and the first glimpse of summer was approaching, what first appeared to be a typical Sunday afternoon in June 2007 turned out to be anything but typical for Anna Willems.
The French doors from the living room to the garden were open wide, and the thin white curtains danced lightly in the breeze as scents from the garden floated inside. Streams of sunlight shone brightly all around Anna as she lounged comfortably. A chorus of birds chirped and trilled outside, and Anna could hear the distant melody of children’s laughter and playful splashing coming from a neighbor’s swimming pool. Anna’s 12-year-old son reclined on the sofa, reading a book, and she could hear her 11-year-old daughter in the room directly above her, singing to herself as she played.
A psychotherapist, Anna worked as a manager and board member for a major psychiatric institution in Amsterdam whose profits totaled more than 10 million euros annually. She often caught up on professional reading on the weekends, and on this day she was sitting in her red leather chair reading a journal article. Little did Anna know that what looked like the perfect world to anyone peering into her living room that day would become a nightmare within minutes.
Anna felt a bit distracted, noticing that her attention wasn’t fully engaged in the material she was attempting to study. She set her papers down and paused, suddenly wondering again where her husband had gone. He had left the house early that morning while she was taking a shower. Without saying where he was headed, he had simply disappeared. The children had told her that their father had said good-bye, giving each of them a big hug before he left. She’d tried to reach him on his cell phone many times, but he hadn’t returned her calls. She tried one more time—no answer. Something definitely felt odd.
At 3:30 P.M. the doorbell rang, and when Anna opened the front door, she found two police officers standing outside.
“Are you Mrs. Willems?” one of them asked. When she confirmed that she was indeed Mrs. Willems, the officers asked if they could come in and talk to her. Concerned and a bit confused, she complied. Then they delivered the news: Earlier that morning, her husband had jumped off one of the tallest buildings in the center of the city. Not surprisingly, the fall was fatal. Anna and her two children sat in shock and disbelief.
Anna’s breath momentarily stopped, and as she then gasped for air, she started to shake uncontrollably. The moment seemed frozen in time. While her children sat paralyzed in shock, Anna tried to hide her pain and stress for their sakes. An intense pain suddenly shot through her head, and she simultaneously felt a deep, hollow ache in her gut. Her neck and shoulders instantly stiffened as her mind frenetically raced from thought to thought. The hormones of stress had overtaken her. Anna was now in survival mode.
How Stress Hormones Take Over
From a scientific standpoint, living in stress is living in survival. When we perceive a stressful circumstance that threatens us in some way (one for which we cannot predict or control the outcome), a primitive nervous system called the sympathetic nervous system turns on and the body mobilizes an enormous amount of energy in response to the stressor. Physiologically, the body is automatically tapping into the resources it will need to deal with the current danger.
The pupils dilate so we can see better; the heart rate and respiratory rate increase so we can run, fight, or hide; more glucose is released into the bloodstream to make more energy available to our cells; and our blood flow is shunted to the extremities and away from our internal organs so we can move quickly if we need to. The immune system initially dials up and then dials down as adrenaline and cortisol flood the muscles, providing a rush of energy to either escape or fend off the stressor. Circulation moves out of our rational forebrain and is instead relayed to our hind-brain, so we have less capacity to think creatively and instead rely more on our instinct to instantly react.
In Anna’s case, the stressful news of her husband’s suicide threw her brain and body into just such a state of survival. In the short term, all organisms can tolerate adverse conditions by fighting, hiding, or fleeing from an impending stressor. All of us are built for dealing with short-term bursts of stress. When the event is over, the body normally returns to balance within hours, increasing its energy levels and restoring its vital resources. But when the stress doesn’t end within hours, the body never returns to balance. In truth, no organism in nature can endure living in emergency mode for extended periods of time.
Because of our large brains, human beings are capable of thinking about their problems, reliving past events, or even forecasting future worst-case situations and thus turning on the cascade of stress chemicals by thought alone. We can knock our brains and bodies out of normal physiology just by thinking about an all-too-familiar past or trying to control an unpredictable future.
Every day, Anna relived that event over and over in her mind. What she didn’t realize was that her body did not know the difference between the original event that created the stress response and the memory of the event, which created the same emotions as the real-life experience all over again. Anna was producing the same chemistry in her brain and body as if the event were actually happening again and again. Subsequently, her brain was continuously wiring the event into her memory bank, and her body was emotionally experiencing the same chemicals from the past at least a hundred times each day. By repeatedly recalling the experience, she was unintentionally anchoring her brain and body to the past.
Emotions are the chemical consequences (or feedback) of past experiences. As our senses record incoming information from the environment, clusters of neurons organize into networks. When they freeze into a pattern, the brain makes a chemical that is then sent throughout the body. That chemical is called an emotion. We remember events better when we can remember how they feel. The stronger the emotional quotient from any event—either good or bad—the stronger the change in our internal chemistry. When we notice a significant change inside of us, the brain pays attention to whoever or whatever is causing the change outside of us—and it takes a snapshot of the outer experience. That’s called a memory.
Therefore, the memory of an event can become branded neurologically in the brain, and that scene becomes frozen in time in our gray matter, just as it did for Anna. The combination of various people or objects at a particular time and place from that stressful experience is etched in our neural architecture as a holographic image. That’s how we create a long-term memory. Therefore, the experience becomes imprinted in the neural circuitry, and the emotion is stored in the body—and that’s how our past becomes our biology. In other words, when we experience a traumatic event, we tend to think neurologically within the circuitry of that experience and we tend to feel chemically within the boundaries of the emotions from the event, so our entire state of being—how we think and how we feel—becomes biologically stuck in the past.
As you can imagine, Anna was feeling a rush of negative emotions: tremendous sadness, pain, victimization, grief, guilt, shame, despair, anger, hatred, frustration, resentment, shock, fear, anxiety, worry, overwhelm, anguish, hopelessness, powerlessness, isolation, loneliness, disbelief, and betrayal. And none of those emotions dissipated quickly. As Anna analyzed her life within the emotions of the past, she kept suffering more and more. Because she couldn’t think greater than how she constantly felt, and since emotions are a record of the past, she was thinking in the past—and every day she felt worse. As a psychotherapist, she could rationally and intellectually understand what was happening to her, but all her insights couldn’t get beyond her suffering.
People in her life started treating her as the person who had lost her husband, and that became her new identity. She associated her memories and feelings with the reason she was in her present state. When anyone asked her why she felt so bad, she told the story of the suicide—each time reliving the pain, anguish, and suffering over again. All along, Anna kept firing the same circuits in her brain and reproducing the same emotions, conditioning her brain and body further into the past. Every day, she was thinking, acting, and feeling as if the past were still alive. And since how we think, how we act, and how we feel is our personality, Anna’s personality was completely created by the past. From a biological standpoint, in repeatedly telling the narrative of her husband’s suicide, Anna literally couldn’t get beyond what had happened.
Anna could no longer work and had to take a leave of absence. During that time, she found out that her husband, although a successful lawyer, had made a mess of their personal finances. She would have to pay off significant debts that she had previously been unaware of—and she didn’t have the money to even begin. Not surprisingly, even more emotional, psychological, and mental stress began to add up.
Anna’s mind went in circles, constantly flooded with questions: How will I take care of our children? How will all of us deal with this trauma in our future and how will it affect our lives? Why did my husband leave without saying good-bye to me? How could I not know that he was so unhappy? Did I fail as a wife? How could he leave me with two young children and how will I manage to raise them by myself?
Then judgments crept into her thoughts: He shouldn’t have committed suicide and left me in this financial mess! What a coward! How dare he leave his children without a father! He didn’t even write a message for the children and me. I hate him for not even leaving a note. What a jerk to leave me and make me raise these kids alone. Did he have any idea what this might do to us? All these thoughts carried a strong emotional charge, further affecting her body.
Nine months later, on March 21, 2008, Anna woke up paralyzed from the waist down. Within hours she was lying in a hospital bed, a wheelchair beside her, diagnosed with neuritis—inflammation of the peripheral nervous system. After several tests, the doctors could not find anything structural as the cause of the problem so they told Anna that she must have an autoimmune condition. Her immune system was attacking the nervous system in her lower spine, breaking down the protective layer that coats the nerves and causing paralysis in both of her legs. She could not hold her urine, had difficulty controlling her bowels, and had no feeling or motor control in her legs and feet.
When the fight-or-flight nervous system is switched on and stays on because of chronic stress, the body utilizes all its energy reserves to deal with the constant threat it perceives from the outer environment. Therefore, the body has no energy left in its inner environment for growth and repair, compromising the immune system. So because of her repeated inner conflict, Anna’s immune system was attacking her body. She had finally physically manifested the pain and suffering she’d emotionally experienced in her mind. In short, Anna could not move her body because she wasn’t moving forward in her life—she was stuck in her past.
For the next six weeks, Anna’s doctors treated her with huge doses of intravenous dexamethasone and other corticosteroids to reduce inflammation. Because of the added stress and the types of drugs she was taking—which can further weaken the immune system—she also developed an aggressive bacterial infection for which her doctors gave her huge doses of antibiotics. After two months, Anna was released from the hospital and had to use a walker and crutches to get around. She still could not feel her left leg and found standing very difficult. She couldn’t walk properly. Although she could hold her bowels a bit better, she still couldn’t control her urine. As you can imagine, this new situation was adding to Anna’s already high stress levels. She had lost her husband to suicide, she could not work very much to support herself and her children, she was in serious financial crisis, and she had been living in a hospital paralyzed for more than two months. Her mother had to move in to help.
Anna was an emotional, mental, and physical wreck, and although she had the best doctors and the latest medications from a reputable hospital, she was not getting any better. By 2009, two years after the death of her husband, she was diagnosed with clinical depression—so she started taking even more medication. Consequently, Anna’s moods swung widely from anger to grief to pain to suffering to hopelessness to frustration to fear to hatred. Because those emotions influenced her actions, her behavior became somewhat irrational. At first, she fought with almost everybody around her except her children. But then she started to have conflicts with her youngest daughter.
The Dark Night of the Soul
In the meantime, many more physical problems started showing up and Anna’s journey became even more painful. The mucous membranes in her mouth started to develop large ulcerations that spread into her upper esophagus as the result of another autoimmune disease called erosive lichen planus. To treat it, she had to use corticosteroid ointments in her mouth, in addition to more pills. These new medications caused Anna’s saliva production to stop. She couldn’t eat solid foods, so she lost her appetite. Anna was living with all three types of stress—physical, chemical, and emotional—at the same time.
In 2010, Anna found herself in a dysfunctional relationship with a man who traumatized her and her children with verbal abuse, power games, and constant threats. She lost all her money, her job, and her feeling of safety. When she lost her house, she had to move in with her abusive boyfriend. Stress levels continued climbing. Her ulcerations started to spread to other mucous membranes, including her vagina, her anus, and further down her esophagus. Her immune system had totally collapsed and now she was experiencing several different skin conditions, food allergies, and weight problems. Then she started having problems swallowing and developed heartburn, for which the doctors prescribed still more medications.
Anna started a small psychotherapy practice at home in October. She could only handle seeing clients for two sessions a day in the morning after her children went to school, three days a week. In the afternoon, she was so tired and sick that she would lie in bed until her children returned from school. She tried to be there for them as much as possible, but she had no energy and didn’t feel well enough to leave the house. Anna hardly saw anyone. She had no social life.
All the circumstances in her body and in her life constantly reminded her of how bad things were. She automatically reacted to everyone and everything. Her thinking was chaotic and she could not concentrate. She had no vitality or energy to live anymore. Often, when she exerted herself her heart rate exceeded 200 beats per minute. She found herself sweating and gasping for breath all the time, and she felt an enormous pain in her chest on a regular basis.
Anna was passing through her darkest night of the soul. Suddenly, she understood why her husband had taken his life. She wasn’t sure she could go on anymore and started thinking of committing suicide herself. She thought, It can’t get any worse than this . . .
And then it did. In January 2011, Anna’s medical team found a tumor near the entrance of her stomach and diagnosed her with esophageal cancer. Of course, this news severely increased Anna’s stress levels. The doctors suggested a rigorous course of chemotherapy. No one asked her about emotional and mental stress; they only treated the physical symptoms. But Anna’s stress response was fully turned on and it couldn’t turn off.
It’s amazing how this can happen to so many people. Because of a shock or trauma in their lives, they never get beyond those corresponding emotions, and their health and their lives break down. If an addiction is something that you think you can’t stop, then objectively it looks as though people like Anna become addicted to the very emotions of stress that are making them sick. The rush of adrenaline and the rest of the stress hormones arouses their brain and body, providing a rush of energy.1 In time, they become addicted to the rush of that chemistry—and then they use the people and conditions in their lives to reaffirm their addiction to the emotion, just to keep feeling that heightened state. Anna was using her stressful conditions to re-create that rush of energy, and without realizing it, she became emotionally addicted to a life she hated. Science tells us that such chronic, long-term stress pushes the genetic buttons that create disease. So if Anna was turning the stress response on by thinking about her problems and her past, her thoughts were making her sick. And since stress hormones are so powerful, she had become addicted to her own thoughts that were making her feel so bad.
Anna agreed to start chemotherapy, but after her first session she had an emotional and mental breakdown. One afternoon after her kids went to school, Anna collapsed on the floor crying. She had finally reached the bottom. It occurred to her that if she continued this way, she would not survive for long and she would leave her children alone without either parent.
She started to pray for help. She knew in her heart that something needed to change. In utter sincerity and surrender, she asked for guidance, support, and a way out, promising that if her prayers were answered, she would be thankful and grateful every day for the rest of her life and she would help others to do the same.
Anna’s Turning Point
The choice to change became Anna’s quest. She first decided to stop all the treatments and all the medications for her various physical illnesses, although she continued to take her antidepressants. She didn’t tell the doctors and nurses that she was not coming back for treatment. She simply did not show up anymore. No one ever called her to ask why. Only her family doctor contacted Anna to express concern.
On that cold winter’s day in February 2011 when Anna was on the floor crying for help, she made a choice with a firm intention to change herself and her life, and the amplitude of that decision carried a level of energy that caused her body to respond to her mind. It was that decision to change that gave her the strength to rent a house for herself and her children and move away from the negative relationship she was in. It was as if that moment redefined her. She knew she had to start all over.
When I first saw Anna, it was one month later. One of the few friends she had left had reserved a seat for Anna at a Friday evening talk that I was giving. Her friend made Anna an offer: If she liked the evening lecture, she could stay for a full two-day weekend workshop. Anna agreed to go. The first time I saw her, she was sitting in a packed conference room on the left side on the outer aisle, her crutches leaning against the wall near where she sat.
As usual, I was carrying on that night about how our thoughts and feelings affect our bodies and our lives. I lectured about how stress chemicals can create disease. I touched on neuroplasticity, psychoneuroimmunology, epigenetics, neuroendocrinology, and even quantum physics. I will go into more detail on all of these later in this book, but for now it’s enough to know that the latest research in these branches of science point to the power of possibility. That night, filled with inspiration, Anna thought, If I created the life I have now, including my paralysis, my depression, my weakened immune system, my ulcerations, and even my cancer, maybe I can uncreate everything with the same passion I created it with. And with that potent new understanding, Anna decided to heal herself.
Immediately after her first weekend workshop, she started meditating twice a day. Of course, sitting and doing the meditations was difficult at the beginning. She had a lot of doubt to overcome, and some days she did not feel mentally and physically well—but she did her meditations anyway. She also had a lot of fear. When her family doctor called to check up on her because she’d stopped her treatments and medications, he told Anna that she was being naïve and stupid and that she would get worse and die soon. Imagine the memory of an authority figure telling you that! Even so, Anna did her meditations every day and began to move beyond her fears. She was often consumed with financial burdens, her children’s needs, and various physical limitations, yet she never used those conditions as an excuse to not do her inner work. She even attended four more of my workshops during that year.
By going within and changing her unconscious thoughts, automatic habits, and reflexive emotional states—which had become hardwired in her brain and emotionally conditioned in her body—Anna was now more committed to believing in a new future than believing in her same familiar past. She used her meditations, combining a clear intention with an elevated emotion, to change her state of being from biologically living in the same past to living in a new future.
Every day, Anna was unwilling to get up from her meditations as the same person who sat down; she decided that she wouldn’t finish until her whole state of being was in love with life. To the materialist, who defines reality with the senses, of course, Anna had no tangible reason to be in love with life; she was a depressed, widowed single parent who was in financial debt and had no real job, she had cancer and suffered from paralysis and ulcerations in her mucous membranes, and she was in a poor living situation with no partner or significant other and no energy to tend to her children. But in the meditations, Anna learned that she could teach her body emotionally what her future would feel like ahead of the actual experience. Her body as the unconscious mind did not know the difference between the real event and the one she was imagining and emotionally embracing. She also knew through her understanding of epigenetics that the elevated emotions of love, joy, gratitude, inspiration, compassion, and freedom could signal new genes to make healthy proteins affecting her body’s structure and function. She fully understood that if the stress chemicals that had been coursing through her body had been turning on unhealthy genes, then by fully embracing those elevated emotions with a passion greater than the stressful emotions, she could turn on new genes—and change her health.
For a year, her health didn’t change very much. But she kept doing her meditations. In fact, she did all the meditations I designed for students. She knew it had taken several years to create her current health conditions, and so it would take some time to re-create something new. So she kept doing the work, striving to become so conscious of her unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that she would not let anything she did not want to experience slip by her awareness. After that first year, Anna noticed that she was slowly starting to get better mentally and emotionally. Anna was breaking the habit of being herself, inventing a whole new self instead.
Anna knew from attending my workshops that she had to move her autonomic nervous system back into balance because the ANS controls all the automatic functions that happen beyond the brain’s conscious awareness—digestion, absorption, blood sugar levels, body temperature, hormonal secretions, heart rate, and so on. The only way she could slip into the operating system and affect the ANS was to change her internal state on a regular basis.
So first, Anna began each meditation with the Blessing of the Energy Centers. These specific areas of the body are under the control of the ANS. As I mentioned in the Introduction, each center has its own energy or frequency (which emits specific information or has its own consciousness), its own glands, its own hormones, its own chemistry, its own individual little mini-brain, and therefore its own mind. Each center is influenced by the subconscious brain sitting under our conscious thinking brain. Anna learned how to change her brain waves so she could enter the operating system of the ANS (located in the midbrain) and reprogram each center to work in a more harmonious manner. Every day, with focus and passion, she rested her attention in each area of her body as well as the space around each center, blessing it for greater health and the greater good. Slowly but surely, she began to influence her health by reprogramming her autonomic nervous system back to balance.
Anna also learned a specific breathing technique I teach in our work to liberate all the emotional energy that is stored in the body when we keep thinking and feeling the same way. By constantly thinking the same thoughts, Anna had been creating the same feelings, and then by feeling those familiar emotions, she would think more of the same corresponding thoughts. She learned that the emotions of the past were stored in her body, but she could use this breathing technique to liberate that stored energy and free herself from her past. So every day, with a level of intensity that was greater than her addiction to past emotions, she practiced the breath and got better and better at doing it. After she learned to move that stored energy in her body, she learned how to recondition her body to a new mind by embracing the heart-centered emotions of her future before her future unfolded.
Since Anna also studied the model of epigenetics I teach in our workshops and lectures, she learned that genes don’t create disease; instead, the environment signals the gene to create disease. Anna understood that if her emotions were the chemical consequences of experiences in her environment, and if she lived every day by the same emotions from her past, she was selecting and instructing the same genes that might be causing her poor health conditions. If she could instead embody the emotions of her future life by embracing those emotions before the experience actually happened, she could change her genetic expression and actually change her body to be biologically aligned with her new future.
Anna did an additional meditation that involved resting her attention in the center of her chest, activating the ANS with those elevated states to create and maintain a very efficient type of heart rate we call a coherent heart rate (which I will explain in detail later in the book) for extended periods of time. She learned that when she felt resentment, impatience, frustration, anger, and hatred, those states induced the stress response and caused the heart to beat incoherently and out of order. Anna learned in my workshops that once she could sustain this new heart-centered state, just as she had gotten used to feeling all those negative emotions on a regular basis, in time she could feel these new emotions more fully and deeply. Of course, it took quite a bit of effort to trade anger, fear, depression, and resentment for joy, love, gratitude, and freedom—but Anna never gave up. She knew that those elevated emotions would release more than a thousand different chemicals that would repair and restore her body . . . and she went for it.
Anna then practiced a walking meditation I designed in which she walked as her new self every day. Instead of sitting down and meditating with her eyes closed, she started these meditations standing up with her eyes closed. While standing, she got into the meditative state that she knew would change her state of being, and then while still in that state, she opened her eyes, staying in a meditative state, and walked as her future self. By doing so, she was embodying a new habit of thinking, acting, and feeling on a regular basis. What she was creating would soon become her new personality. She never wanted to go unconscious again and return to her old self.
Because of all this work, Anna could see that her thought patterns had changed. She was no longer firing the same circuits in her brain in the same way, so those circuits stopped wiring together and starting pruning apart. As a result, she stopped thinking in the same old ways. Emotionally, she began to feel glimpses of gratitude and pleasure for the first time in years. In her meditations, she was conquering some aspect of her body and her mind every day. Anna calmed down and became much less addicted to the emotions derived from stress hormones. She even started to feel love again. And she kept going—overcoming, overcoming, and overcoming every day on her way to becoming someone else.
Anna Grabs Ahold of Possibility
In May 2012, Anna attended one of my four-day progressive workshops held in upstate New York. On the third day, during the last of four meditations, she completely surrendered and finally let go. For the first time since she had started meditating, she found herself floating in an infinite black space, aware that she was aware of herself. She had moved beyond the memory of who she was and became pure consciousness, totally free of her body, of her association to the material world, and of linear time. She felt so free that she no longer cared about her health conditions. She felt so unlimited that she couldn’t identify with her present identity. She felt so elevated that she was no longer connected to her past.
In this state, Anna had no problems, she left her pain behind, and she was truly free for the first time. She wasn’t her name, her gender, her disease, her culture, or her profession—she was beyond space and time. She had connected to a field of information called the quantum field, where all possibilities exist. Suddenly, she saw herself in a brand-new future, standing on a huge stage, holding a microphone, and talking to a crowd as she told them the entire story of her healing. She wasn’t imagining or visualizing this scene. It was as if she got a download of information, a glimpse of herself as a totally different woman in a new reality. Her inner world appeared much more real to her than her outer world, and she was having a full-on sensory experience without using her senses.
The moment Anna experienced this new life in the meditation, a burst of joy and light came into her body and she felt relief on a deep, visceral level. She knew she was something or someone greater, much grander than her physical body. In this state of intense joy she felt such delight and such immense gratitude that she burst into laughter. And at that moment, Anna knew she was going to be okay. From then on, she developed so much trust, joy, love, and gratitude that her meditations became easier and easier, and she began to go much deeper.
As Anna moved out of her past, she felt this new energy opening her heart further and further. Instead of seeing her meditations as something she had to do every day, she started looking forward to them. It became her way of life—doing the work became her habit. Her energy and vitality returned. She stopped taking antidepressants. Her thought patterns completely changed and her feelings were different. She felt like she was in a new state of being, so her actions changed drastically. Anna’s health and life improved tremendously that year.
The next year, she attended several more events. By keeping connected to the work, Anna started to develop relationships with more people in our community and she received more and more support to keep her going on her journey back to health. Like many of our students, she sometimes found it challenging not to take a few steps back into the old programs and the old patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting once she returned home after a workshop. But even so, she kept doing her meditations every day.
In September 2013, Anna’s doctors gave her a very thorough medical checkup that included many different tests. One year and nine months after her cancer diagnosis and six years after her husband’s suicide, Anna’s cancer had completely healed and the tumor in her esophagus had vanished. Her blood tests showed no cancer markers. The mucous membranes in her esophagus, vagina, and anus were completely healed. Only a few minor problems remained: The mucous membranes in her mouth were still slightly red, although she no longer had any ulcerations, and because of the medication she had taken for the ulcerations, she still didn’t produce saliva.
Anna had become a new person—a new person who was healthy. The disease existed in the old personality. By thinking, acting, and feeling differently, Anna reinvented a new self. In a sense, she had become reborn in the same life.
In December 2013, Anna came to an event in Barcelona with the friend who had introduced her to my work. After hearing me tell the participants a story about a remarkable healing of another student in our community, Anna decided it was time to share her story with me. She wrote it all down and gave the letter to my personal assistant. Like many letters I get from students, the first line read, “You are not going to believe this.” After I read what she’d written, the next day I asked Anna to come up onstage and share her story with the audience. And there she was, a year and a half after the vision she’d had during her meditation in New York (unbeknownst to me), standing on a stage talking to an audience about her journey healing herself.
After the Barcelona event, Anna was inspired to work on her mouth even more. About six months later, I was lecturing in London and Anna attended. I spoke in detail about epigenetics. Suddenly a light went on for Anna. I’ve healed myself of all these medical conditions—including cancer, she thought. I should be able to signal the gene for my mouth to produce more saliva. A few months later, during another workshop in 2014, Anna suddenly felt saliva dripping in her mouth. Ever since then, Anna’s mucous membranes and her saliva production have returned to normal. The ulcerations never came back.
Today, Anna is a healthy, vital, happy, stable person with a very sharp and clear mind. Spiritually, she has grown so much that she goes very deep in her meditations and has had many mystical experiences. She is living a life full of creation, love, and joy. She has become one of my corporate trainers, regularly teaching this work to organizations and companies. In 2016, she founded a successful psychiatric institution, employing more than 20 therapists and practitioners. She is financially independent and earns enough money to live a rich life. She travels around the world, visits beautiful places, and meets very inspiring people. She has a very loving and joyful partner, as well as new friends and new relationships that honor both her and her children.
When you ask Anna about her past health problems, she will tell you that having those challenges was the best thing that ever happened to her. Think about it: What if the worst thing that ever happened to you turns out to be the best thing that has ever happened to you? She often tells me that she loves her present life, and I always respond, “Of course you do, you created your life every day by not getting up from your meditations until you were in love with that life. So now, you get to love your life.” It was through the course of her transformation that Anna had, in effect, become supernatural. She had overcome her identity, which was connected to her past, and she literally created a new, healthy future—and her biology responded to a new mind. Anna is now the living example of truth and possibility. And if Anna healed herself, so can you.
Getting Mystical
Healing all sorts of physical conditions may be a very impressive benefit of doing this work, but it’s not the only one. Because this book is also about the mystical, I want to open your mind to a realm of reality that will be just as transformative as healing but that works on a deeper and different level. Becoming supernatural can also involve embracing a greater awareness of yourself and who you are in this world—and in other worlds as well. Let me share some stories about this from my own life to illustrate exactly what I mean and to show you what is possible for you too.
One rainy winter evening in the Pacific Northwest, as I sat on my couch after a very long day, I listened to the branches of the tall fir trees outside my window filtering the gusts of wind through their canopies. My children were in bed, deep asleep, and at last I had a moment to myself. As I got comfortable, I began to review all the things I needed to accomplish the following day. By the time I’d made my mental list, I was too exhausted to think so I just sat still for a few minutes, my mind empty. As I watched the shadows from the flames in the fireplace flicker and dance on the walls, I began to move into trance. My body was tired but my mind was clear. I wasn’t thinking or analyzing anymore; I was simply staring into space, being in the present moment.
As my body relaxed more and more, I slowly and consciously let it fall asleep as I simultaneously kept my mind conscious and awake. I wouldn’t let my attention narrow in on any object in the room but instead kept my focus open. This was a game I often played with myself. I liked the practice because every once in a while, if everything lined up, I had very profound transcendental experiences. It was as if a door of sorts opened somewhere between wakefulness, sleep, and normal dreaming and I slipped into a very lucid mystical moment. I reminded myself to not expect anything but to simply stay open. It took a lot of patience to not rush it or get frustrated or try to make something happen but instead to slowly slip into that other world.
That day, I had finished writing an article about the pineal gland. After spending several months researching all the magical derivatives of melatonin that this little alchemical center had up its sleeve, I was overjoyed about linking the scientific world and the spirit world. For weeks, my entire mind had been consumed with thinking about the role of the pineal metabolites as a possible connection to the mystical experiences most ancient cultures knew how to elicit, such as Native American shamanic visions, the Hindu experience of samadhi, and other similar rituals involving altered states of consciousness. Some concepts that had been loose ends for years had suddenly clicked for me, and my discoveries left me feeling more whole. I thought I was one step closer to understanding the bridge to higher dimensions of space and time.
All the information I had learned inspired me to a deeper awareness about what is possible for human beings. Yet I was still curious to learn more—curious enough to move my awareness to where the pineal gland existed in my head. I casually thought, speaking to the gland, Where are you, anyway?
As I rested my attention in the space the pineal gland occupies in my brain, and as I was drifting off into the blackness, suddenly, out of nowhere, a vivid image of my pineal gland appeared in my mind as a three-dimensional round knob. Its mouth was wide open in a spasm and it was releasing a white milky substance. I was shocked by the intensity of the holographic image, but I was too relaxed to be aroused or react, so I simply surrendered and observed. It was so real. I knew what I was seeing before me was my own tiny pineal gland.
In the next instant, a huge timepiece appeared right in front of me. It was one of those old-fashioned pocket watches with a chain, and the vision was incredibly vivid. The moment I put my attention on the timepiece, I received very clear information. I suddenly knew that linear time as I believed it to be—with a definite past, present, and future—was not the way the world really works. Instead, I understood that everything is actually happening in an eternal present moment. In this infinite amount of time there exist infinite spaces, dimensions, or possible realities to experience.
If there is only one eternal moment happening, then it makes sense that we would have no past in this incarnation, let alone no past lives. But I could see every past and future like I was looking at an old-fashioned piece of movie film with an endless number of frames—with the frames representing not single moments but windows of limitless possibilities that existed as scaffolding and went on in all directions forever. It was much like looking into two mirrors opposite one another and seeing infinite spaces or dimensions reflected in both directions. But to understand what I was seeing, imagine that those infinite dimensions are above and below you, in front and behind you, and to your left and to your right. And each one of those limitless possibilities already existed. I knew that by putting my attention on any one of these possibilities, I would actually experience that reality.
I also realized I wasn’t separate from anything. I sensed oneness with everything, everyone, every place, and every time. I can only describe it as the most familiar unfamiliar feeling I have ever had in my life.
The pineal gland, as I soon understood I was being shown, serves as a dimensional timepiece that, when activated, we can dial in to any time. When I saw the hands of the timepiece move forward or backward, I understood that, like a time machine set to any particular time, there is also a reality or a dimension to experience in a particular space. This amazing vision was showing me that the pineal gland, like a cosmic antenna, had the ability to tune in to information beyond our physical senses and hook us up to other realities that already exist in the eternal moment. While the download of information I received seemed limitless, no words exist that can completely describe the magnitude of this experience.
Experiencing My Past and Future Selves Simultaneously
As the hands of the watch moved backward to a past time, a dimension in space and time came to life. I immediately found myself in a reality relevant to me personally—although amazingly, that past moment was still occurring in the present moment I was experiencing while sitting on my couch in the living room. I next became aware that I was in a physical space at that specific time. I observed myself as a young child—again, while simultaneously having the experience of being the adult me on the couch. The child version of me was about seven years old and had a very high fever. I remembered how much I loved fevers at that age because I could go deep within and have the kind of abstract dreams and visions that often come with the delirium produced by high body temperatures. This specific time, I was in my room in bed with the covers up to the bridge of my nose and my mother had just left the room. I was happy I was alone.
The moment she closed the door, I somehow innately knew to do exactly what I had just been doing in my living room as an adult—continuously relaxing my body and remaining somewhere between sleep and wakefulness as I stayed present to whatever came up. Up to this point in my present life, I had completely forgotten about the memory of this childhood experience, but when I lived it again in that moment, I saw myself in the midst of a lucid conscious dream, comprehending possible realities like the squares on a chess board.
As I observed myself as this young boy, I was deeply moved by what he was attempting to understand, and I wondered how he could grasp such complicated concepts at his age. In that moment as I watched him, I fell in love with that little guy—and the second I embraced that emotion, I somehow felt a simultaneous connection to both that point in time and the one I was experiencing as my present time back in Washington State. I had such a strong knowingness that what I was doing then and what I am doing now were happening at the same time, and that those moments were significantly connected. In that split second, the love I felt for him as my present self was drawing that young boy to the future I was living now.
Then the experience got even stranger. That scene faded away and the watch appeared again. I became aware that the hands of the timepiece could also move forward. Filled with a sense of wonder, and without any trepidation or fear, I simply observed the watch move forward in time. Instantaneously, I was standing barefoot in my backyard in Washington in the cold night. It’s difficult to explain what time it was because it was the same night I was in my living room, but the me who was outside the house was the me from the future in that now. Again, words are limited here, but the only way I can explain this experience is that the future personality called Joe Dispenza had changed immensely. I was so much more evolved, and I felt amazing—euphoric, in fact.
I was so aware—or should I say, as that person I am so aware. By aware, I mean superconscious, as if all my senses were heightened 100 percent. Everything I saw, touched, felt, smelled, tasted, and heard was amplified. My senses were so elevated that I was acutely aware of and paying attention to everything around me, wanting to experience the moment completely. And because my awareness increased so drastically, so did my consciousness and therefore my energy. Feeling so full of this intense energy caused me to be more conscious of everything I sensed simultaneously.
I can describe this feeling only as consistent, unwavering, highly organized energy. It was nothing like the chemical emotions we normally feel as human beings. In fact, in that moment I knew I couldn’t even feel those normal human emotions. I had evolved beyond them. I did, however, feel love, although it was an evolved form of love that was not chemical but electric. I felt almost as though I was on fire, passionately in love with life. I was in an incredibly pure form of joy.
I was also walking around my backyard in the middle of winter with no shoes and no jacket—yet I was so aware of the feeling of the cold that it was actually intensely enjoyable. I didn’t have an opinion about how ice cold the ground under my feet was; I just loved having my feet touch the frozen grass on the earth, and I felt very connected to both the feeling and the grass. I understood that if I entertained the typical thoughts and judgments I normally would have about being cold, it would cause me to create a sense of polarity, dividing the energy I was experiencing. If I judged it, I would lose the feeling of wholeness. The amazing feeling of energy that I was experiencing inside my body was so much greater than the conditions in my surrounding environment (the cold). And as a result, I effortlessly embraced the cold with zeal. It was simply life! In fact, it was so pleasurable that I didn’t want the moment to end. I wanted it to last forever.
I walked as this upgraded version of myself with strength and knowingness. I felt very empowered and calm, yet overflowing with joy for existence and love for life. Passing through my garden, I intentionally walked on huge basalt columns that were laid on their sides, stacked like huge stairs to create levels to sit at the fire pit. I loved the experience of walking barefoot on those huge pieces of stone. I truly honored their magnificence. As I continued walking, I approached a fountain that I had built, and I smiled at the memory of my brother and me creating such a marvel.
Suddenly, I saw a tiny woman in a glowing white garment. She was no more than two feet tall, and she was standing a little behind the fountain with another woman of normal size who was dressed similarly and was also radiant and full of light. The other woman stood in the background observing, seemingly acting as the tiny woman’s protector.
When I looked at the tiny woman, she turned to me and gazed into my eyes. I felt an even stronger energy of love, as if she were sending it to me. Even as this evolved version of myself, I realized I had never felt anything like that before. The feelings of wholeness and love amplified exponentially, and I thought to myself, Wow—is there even more love than the love I was just experiencing moments ago? It wasn’t at all a romantic love. It was more of that exhilarating, electrifying energy, and it was being awakened from inside of me. I knew she was acknowledging that there was indeed even more love within me to experience. I also knew she was more evolved than I was. When I felt that electricity, it carried a message to look toward the kitchen window, and I instantly remembered why I was there.
I turned and looked into the kitchen, where my present self, a few hours before I went to the couch to relax, was busy washing dishes. From the backyard, I smiled. I was so in love with him. I saw his sincerity; I saw his struggles; I saw his passion; I saw his love; I saw his mind busy, as always, constantly attempting to dovetail concepts into meaning; and among other things, I saw some of his future. Like a great parent, I was proud of him and had nothing but admiration for who he was in that moment. As I was feeling that intense energy increase inside of me while I observed him, I witnessed him suddenly stop washing the dishes and look out the window, staring out and panning the backyard.
While I was still my future self, I was able to remember the moment as my present self, and I remembered that I had indeed stopped and looked outside in that instant because I felt a spontaneous feeling of love in my chest, and I sensed that I was being watched or that someone was outside. I further recalled that while I was washing a glass, I actually leaned forward to minimize the glare in the window from the kitchen light above me and peered into the darkness for a few minutes before returning to the remaining items in the sink. My future self was doing to my present self what the beautiful luminous lady had done to me moments before. Now I understood why she was there.
And like looking at the child in the previous scene, once again, the love that my future self was feeling for my present self somehow connected me to my future self. My future me was there to call my present self to that future, and I knew that it was love that made that bond possible. The evolved version of me had such a sense of knowing. The paradox is that it is all me living at the same time. In fact, there is an infinite number of me’s—not just the one in the past, the one in the present, and the one in the future. There are so many more possible me’s in the realm of infinity, and there is not just one infinity but multiple infinities. And all of this is happening in the eternal now.
When I came back to physical reality as we know it on the couch, which paled in comparison to the other dimensional world I was just in, my first thought was Wow! My view of reality is so limited! The rich inner experience provided such a sense of clarity and the understanding that my beliefs—that is, what I thought I knew about life, God, myself, time, space, and what is even possible to experience in this infinite realm—were so very limited, and I hadn’t even realized it until that moment. I knew I was like an infant with little comprehension of the magnitude of how big this thing we call reality is. I understood, without fear or anxiety, what the phrase “the unknown” meant for the first time in my life. And I knew I would never be the same person again.
I’m sure you can imagine that when something like this happens, trying to explain it to your family or friends suggests some chemical imbalance in the brain. I was hesitant to talk about the event to anyone because I didn’t even have the words to describe the experience and I didn’t want to jinx it from happening again. For months, I was very preoccupied with reviewing the entire process that I thought may have created the experience. I was also mystified about the concept of time and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Aside from the paradigm shift about the eternal moment in time, I discovered something more. I realized after the transcendental event that night, when I came back to the world of three dimensions, that the whole experience had transpired in about 10 minutes. I had just lived two extensive events, and it should have taken much more time for that entire experience to unfold. This time dilation further piqued my interest in committing more of my energy to investigating what had happened to me. Once I understood more, I hoped I might be able to reproduce the experience.
For days after that important night, the center of my chest was electric in the same way I had felt when that beautiful tiny woman activated something within me. I kept thinking, How can this feeling still be lingering inside of me unless something real happened? When I put my attention on the center of my chest, I noticed the feeling amplify. Understandably, I wasn’t very interested in any social interaction during this period because the people and conditions in the outer world distracted from that feeling in my inner world, and the special feeling diminished. In time, it finally faded completely, but I never stopped thinking about the idea that there is always more love to experience and that the energy I had embraced in that realm still lived within me. I wanted to activate it again but I didn’t know how.
For a long time, even though I tried and tried to reproduce the experience, nothing happened. I now realize that the expectation of the same outcome, combined with the frustration of trying to force it to happen, is the worst combination for creating another mystical experience (or anything, for that matter). I became lost in my own personal analysis, trying to figure out how it occurred and how I could make it happen again. I decided to add a few new approaches. Instead of trying to re-create the experience in the evening, I decided to wake up early in the morning and meditate. Since melatonin levels are the highest between 1:00 A.M. and 4:00 A.M., and the mystical chemical metabolites of melatonin are the very substrates responsible for creating a lucid event, I decided I would practice my inner work at 4 every morning.
Before I share what happened next, I want to ask you to keep in mind that this was an unusually difficult time in my life. I was deciding whether it was worth it for me to continue to teach. I’d experienced a fair amount of chaos in my life after appearing in the 2004 documentary What the Bleep Do We Know!? I was considering stepping away from the public world and disappearing into a simpler life. It seemed so much easier to just walk away.
Living a Past Incarnation in the Present Moment
One morning about an hour and a half after I started my meditation in a seated position, I finally reclined. I put some pillows under my knees so I wouldn’t fall asleep too quickly, allowing me to linger between wakefulness and sleep. As I lay down, I simply put my attention in the place the pineal gland occupies in my head. But this time, instead of trying to make something happen, I just let go and said to myself, Whatever . . . Apparently, that was the magic word. I know what that means now. I surrendered, got out of the way, let go of any specific outcome, and simply opened up to possibility.
The next thing I knew, I was experiencing myself as a stout man in a very hot region of the world that seemed to be in what we now call Greece or Turkey. The terrain was rocky, the ground was parched, and stone buildings like those in Greco-Roman times were interspersed with many small tents made of brightly colored fabrics. I was wearing a one-piece, skirted burlap garment that fell from my shoulders to my mid-thighs, and I had a thick rope tied around my waist like a belt. I wore sandals roped up to my calves. I had thick curly hair and my body felt strong. My shoulders were broad and my arms and legs were muscular. I was a philosopher and a longtime student of some charismatic movement.
I was simultaneously the self in that experience and my present self observing me in that particular time and space. Again, I was way more conscious than normal—I was superconscious. All my senses were heightened and I was very aware of everything. I could smell the familiar musk of my body, and I could taste the salt of my perspiration dripping from my face. I loved the taste. I felt grounded in the physicality and strength of my body. I was aware of deep pain in my right shoulder but it did not consume my attention. I saw the brightness of the blue sky and the richness of the green trees and mountains, as if I were living in Technicolor. I heard seagulls in the distance, and I knew I was near a large body of water.
I was on a pilgrimage and mission of sorts. I was traveling about the country teaching the philosophy that I had studied and lived by my whole life. I was under the tutelage of a grand master whom I loved very deeply because of the care, patience, and wisdom he had given me for so many years. It was my time now to be initiated and to deliver a message to change the minds and hearts of the culture. I knew that the message I was disseminating was counter to the current beliefs of that time and that the government and religious orders of the day would challenge me.
The main message of the philosophy I studied would free people from living in any type of obligation to “some thing or some one” outside of them. It would also inspire individuals to demonstrate a code of principles that would empower them to have more enriched and meaningful lives. I was passionate about this idealism, and I worked daily to live in alignment with the doctrines. Of course, the message would omit the need for religion and for any dependence on governments, and it would free people from personal pain and suffering.
As the scene came to life, I had just finished addressing a crowd in a relatively populated village. The gathering was just breaking up when suddenly, several men quickly moved through the masses to arrest me. Before I could even try to escape, I was seized. I knew that they had planned their strategy well. If they had begun to move about while I had been talking to the crowd, I would have spotted them. They timed it perfectly.
I surrendered without resistance, and they took me to a prison cell where I was left alone. Locked in a small stone cube with narrow slits for windows, I sat there knowing my destiny. Nothing I could do would prepare me for what was about to happen. Within two days, I was taken to the center of the city where hundreds of people gathered—many of them the same people who had listened to me speak just a few days earlier. But now, they eagerly anticipated the chance to watch my trial and impending torture.
I was stripped to a small cloth undergarment and then strapped to a large horizontal stone slab with large grooves notched into the corners through which ropes slid. The ropes had metal cuffs on the ends that were fastened to my wrists and ankles. Then it began. A man standing to my left started to crank a lever that moved the slab slowly from a horizontal position forward to a more vertical position. As the stone block moved upward, the ropes pulled my limbs tighter in all four directions.
When I made it to about 45 degrees, the real pain began. Someone who seemed to be a magistrate yelled out, asking me if I would continue teaching my philosophy. I did not look up or answer. He then ordered the man to crank the lever further. At a certain point, I started to hear audible noises and pops, evidence of my spine dislocating in certain areas. As the observer of this scene, I watched the look on my face as the pain increased. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing myself—I became acutely aware that it was me on that slab.
The metal cuffs around my wrists and ankles now tore into my skin and the sharp metal burned. I was bleeding. One of my shoulders dislocated and I heaved and grunted in pain. My body was convulsing and shaking as I tried to resist the tearing of my limbs by flexing and holding my muscles tight in resistance. Letting go would have been unbearable. Suddenly, the magistrate hollered out again, asking me if I would continue to teach.
I had a thought: I will agree to stop teaching, and then when they let me down from this public display of torture, I will simply start again. I reasoned that this was the right answer. It would appease the magistrate and stop the pain (and my death) while enabling me to continue my mission. I slowly shook my head from side to side in silence.
Then the magistrate pressed me to verbally say no, but I would not speak. He then motioned quickly to the tormentor on my left to push the crank even harder. I looked down at the man as he turned the gears with a clear intention to hurt me. I saw his face, and as we looked into each other’s eyes, I as the observer instantly recognized this person as someone in my present life as Joe Dispenza: the same person but in a different body. Something clicked within me as I witnessed this scene. I recognized that this tormentor is still tormenting others—including me—in my current incarnation, and I understood that person’s role in my life. It was an oddly familiar feeling of knowing, and it all made perfect sense.
As the slab accelerated upward, my lower back snapped and my body started to lose control. That was the moment that broke me. I wept from the blinding pain, and I also felt such a deep sadness consume my whole being. When the weight of the heavy stone was released, it fell quickly back to the horizontal position. I lay there quivering uncontrollably in silence. I was then dragged back to the small prison cell, where I lay curled up in the corner. For three days, I couldn’t stop the flashbacks of my torture.
I was so humiliated that I never could speak in public again. The very thought of returning to my mission created such a visceral response in my body that I stopped even thinking about it. One night they released me, and without being noticed, head down in utter shame, I disappeared. I was unable to look anyone in the eye ever again. I felt like I had failed in my mission. I spent the rest of my life in a cave by the sea, trapping fish and living in silence as a hermit.
As I witnessed this poor man’s plight and his choice to hide from the world, I understood that this was a message for me. I knew that in my present life I could not disappear and hide from the world again and that my soul wanted me to see that I had to continue my work. I had to make the effort to stand up for a message and never again retract from adversity. I also recognized that I hadn’t failed at all—I had done my best. I knew that the young philosopher still lived in the eternal present moment as a myriad of possible me’s and that I could change my future, and his, by never again being afraid to live for the truth instead of dying for it.
Each of us has myriad possible incarnations that exist in the eternal present moment, all waiting to be discovered. When the mystery of the self is unveiled, we can wake up to the understanding that we are not linear beings living a linear life but instead dimensional beings living dimensional lives. The beauty behind the infinite probabilities that await us is that the only way we can change those futures is to change ourselves in the present infinite moment.