How much can meditating for one month actually change you?
To be completely honest, the answer to that question is ambiguous at best, and is different for every individual person. But I tried meditating with one of the most popular authors today every single day for one month so you don't have to. I read Dr. Joe Dispenza's book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, and discovered that after explaining the ways in which the universe operates, the book culminates with a four week guided meditation program in order for you to begin breaking the habit of being yourself. So I decided to go through with Dr. Dispenza's suggestions on how to begin tackling this intimidating feat of becoming a brand new person.
Week 1
The four week meditation program begins with a stage Dispenza calls induction. He references that induction techniques are similar to what hypnotherapists use to get their patients to relax and enter their subconscious minds. Practicing an induction technique gets you into a sort of trance state, which is ideal for getting to the root of whatever issue, emotion or belief that you are tackling with this process. By practicing this technique, you are moving from being analytical and over-thinking to sensory and present.
The induction meditation from this book focused on stimulating parts of the brain directly linked to the subconscious mind and the memories stored there. There are two options presented for the induction meditation: the body-part induction and the water rising induction. Both essentially perform the same function, so it is not important on which one you decide to do over the other.
After performing this step every single day for a week, I didn't notice anything too noticeable change in my day-to-day life, but I also didn't expect for anything to immediately change either. If anything, I noticed that it was easier for me to feel present during the meditation. As someone who has regularly practiced meditation prior to this challenge, I found it difficult to stay engaged and fully present during a guided meditation. However, this induction technique of directing your conscious attention on various parts of your body and surroundings kept me generally more focused than other techniques have in the past. It allowed for me to enter that meditative state much quicker and with greater ease.
Week 2
The second week of the program begins with recognizing. This stage tasks you to identify what you want to change about yourself and reflect on what kind of person you have been in the past. You recognize what the problem is in how you've been living your life so that you can actively work towards solving it. The next step is admitting and declaring, where you become honest about how you have been in the past, admit any faults or failures, and outwardly acknowledge your self-limiting emotion. This is where you identify exactly what emotions or thoughts you struggle with on a daily basis and choose one of those to dig deeper with. The final step for this week is surrendering, involving letting go and releasing the past, limiting beliefs and negativity to a higher power. *I also want to clarify that for each new week you meditate with, you complete those new steps, along with all of the steps from the previous week(s).*
For this week, I identified judgment as the emotion that I wanted to work on: judgment of myself and others. This is the point where I really began to recognize the automatic and often negative opinions I held about people in my life. I saw that I judged other people as quickly as possible in order to make myself feel like I was better than them in some way. This led to a lot of unnecessary friction in my personal relationships. The meditation prompted me to get real with myself: Why was I so unhappy with my life? Are the snap judgments I held about people (and myself) even true?
After admitting and declaring, I surrendered my past mistakes, limiting beliefs and general negativity relating to judgment to the universe. I asked the universe to take my judgment and to transform it into something even greater and more powerful. Though this step may seem strange to you if you don't believe in any higher powers existing, Dispenza's explanation of how the universe operates is scientific and evidence-based. After reading Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, I saw the universe and my place within it in a whole new perspective. I practiced this step, following the induction, for my second week, and I became so much more aware of the negative impacts of my judgment. I saw how judging others caused for healthy friendships in my life to become tainted with jealousy and competition. I saw how judging myself harshly caused for me to hate myself and to doubt my skills and abilities. I began to recognize how I no longer wanted to live.
Week 3
The third week consists of observing and reminding, where you observe the old self and it's habits relating to the emotion you chose to work on in the prior week. This functions as a reminder to yourself of who you no longer want to be. Dispenza guides you to think about how you would typically think and act when you are wrapped up in the emotion that you are trying to forget. Actually feeling how that emotion affects you, physically and mentally, allows for you to affirm to yourself how living like your past self no longer serves who you are becoming. Then you start redirecting, or catching yourself in negativity, and then changing your state of mind to how you desire for it to be. This step sounds complex, but all the tools required to complete this step are in your arsenal. Dispenza guides you through a series of scenarios where you feel that old emotion creeping up on you, prompting you to become aware of that negative state of mind in casual contexts. Through becoming aware of that emotion, you are able to consciously choose to think, act and feel differently.
Personally, this is the phase of the meditation process that I feel like most easily translates into everyday life. I meditated on how I usually thought, felt and acted when I was being judgmental. It turns out that I felt overwhelmingly negative, no matter who I was focused on judging. It also turns out that I judged the people closest to me harshly on an everyday basis. By focusing on how unproductive and useless judging myself and others actually is, I began to engage in that behavior less and less. Through rehearsing how I planned to redirect my attention if I caught myself being judgmental, I found myself thinking about my thoughts more and more. Though I am not perfect and still find myself being judgmental at times, I am able to catch myself and really evaluate why I am thinking/acting/feeling in this way that is not loving or beneficial to anyone.
Week 4
The final stage in Dr. Dispenza's month-long meditation program is creating and rehearsing. This is when you consciously and energetically create a new self. During the meditation, Dispenza prompts you to consider what the greatest ideal of yourself is. This encourages you to use the energy you have released in the previous steps to create a new you without limitations. Then, you are asked to try to recreate that state of mind of your ideal self a second time so that this state becomes easier to conjure up at any moment you choose to. Then, you are guided to imagining a few scenarios where your deepest desires have come true, sending a signal to the universe to bring you more of what you "already have". At the very end of the meditation, you ask the universe for a sign if you were able to contact it at any point in the process.
This is the part of the meditation that I most look forward to in my daily routine. This is also the phase of the meditation that most closely echoes law of attraction and manifestation techniques that I frequently practice and explore. I find myself smiling and sometimes even crying tears of joy in this step. I see myself accomplishing my goals, being fulfilled, and living in love instead of fear. I am reminded that anything is possible for me. This phase of the meditation process is so valuable, as it allows you to connect to what you do want for yourself and your life. This final part allows for you to visualize the infinite possibilities that the future holds instead of being tied down to the limitations of the past.
In Essence...
I don't think that I am exactly the person I want to be currently. But I am definitely making major progress and experiencing breakthroughs about the person I have been and the person I am becoming in ways that I have never felt before. Of course, this entire meditation program is more enhanced and easier to make sense of if you've read the book that precedes the meditation.You can purchase the book, or listen along to this free audiobook version on Youtube here. I find that if I skip a day of this meditation program, I find that I feel a bit out of touch with my own limitations, progress and desires. That is why I prefer Dr. Dispneza's meditations to any other creators' at the moment. This is the meditation I personally do!
Now that you can see how Joe Dispenza's meditations have changed me, I am curious to see what your experiences with his work in specific, or with meditation in general, are. Let me know in the comments below!
