The other day I received an email newsletter from Kripalu, the mind/body center in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.  I was especially drawn to this this article advertising a new presentation/workshop by Dr. Joe Dispenza, who was one of the experts interviewed in the movie What the Bleep Do We Know?

change your mind, change your life

Joe Dispenza, DC, known as Dr. Joe from the award-winning movie What the Bleep Do We Know!?, teaches and writes internationally on the untapped potential of the mind. Bridging the worlds of science and personal growth, he draws on scientific breakthroughs in neuroscience, and findings on the brain's ability to continually grow and change, to prove to people that you can teach an old dog new tricks-- lot of new tricks. In this essay, he shares his own remarkable healing story and invites us to consider the ultimate implications of the power of the mind.

It sounds crazy, but in 1986 I had the privilege of getting run over by a truck in a triathlon. When I received the diagnosis that I had broken six vertebrae, that I had bone fragments on my spinal cord, and that I probably would never walk again, I had to make some important decisions. After I opted against a radical surgery recommended by four different experts, I left the hospital facing the prognosis of paralysis and with only one conviction: The power that made the body, heals the body. My mission was to make contact with this innate intelligence, give it a template or a design with very specific orders, and finally surrender my healing to this unlimited power.

For two hours twice a day I went within and began creating a picture of my intended result: a healthy, healed spine. If my mind wandered to any extraneous thoughts, I would start from the beginning and do the whole scheme of imagery over again. I reasoned that the final picture had to be clear, unpolluted, and uninterrupted for this intelligence to take my condition to the next level.

Over the course of 10 weeks, I experienced an amazing and veritable healing. At 11 weeks, I was back in my office seeing patients again without surgery or a body brace (both of which were recommended by physicians at the time of my injury). As a result of this experience more than 20 years ago, I have spent the remainder of my life investigating and researching the mind-body connection, as well as the concepts of mind and matter.

What I loved about the article was that he described his own personal journey of healing his body through using his mind to envision a completely healthy and strong body. Going against conventional thought and advice is pretty brave, but it is even more so when you're wracked with pain and bedridden, facing the prospect of never walking again.

I often feel that the missing link in healing are the residual perceptions and beliefs of the person who receives the healing. We can address the actual energetic or physical difficulty, clean and clear the luminous field from affinities, but if the person continues to see his or her self as ill or a victim of an incurable malady, the energies that manifested into the physical symptoms of that illness will do so again.

Before I meet with a client, I often sit and meditate and enter into the temple of love that sits within my heart. I have to see that person in a whole and completely healed state and know without reservation that that purity of health is available and attainable. That it is already there.

The funny thing is that it is often easier to do so for another than it is for ourselves. Perhaps its because we're free of someone else's pains and discomforts, but we live within our own.  So that our body constantly re-informs our brain, which tells our mind that indeed, we're not healthy and whole.

It's been said that our bodies create a whole new body every 8 months; that no part within us is older than that. So it makes sense that by using your mind, you can re-construct the body into a new order by giving the proper instructions to the DNA that produce the cells.  The interesting thing is that he was able to do so within 11 weeks. Clearly, something else was going on, and he had tapped into the creative power of the mind to adjust his physical reality in a manner that wasn't simply waiting for one damaged cell to die to replace it with a healthy one.

It's pretty cool stuff and an amazing time we live in.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)