Breaking The Habit Of Being Yourself
Spring In Paris: A Dr Joe Dispenza Progressive Retreat Review
‘Embracing the same emotions everyday keeps you in the past.’ Dr Joe Dispenza
Emotional states can be addictive and often our loyal animal body doesn’t know the difference between a difficult past event - replayed over in the mind and strengthening neural pathways - and an imagined predictable future, triggering a cascade of feelings.
I’ve felt these entrenched states loosen and still pop up in my own awareness over the years through meditation and various energy medicine practices.
I’ve attended Buddhist meditation retreats and felt the power of presence and stillness heal many inherited patterns, bringing compassion through acceptance to more challenging emotions and experiencing a real shift in my internal world.
However, Joe Dispenza’s work has attracted me over the past few years with his pioneering combination of going deeply into the physiology of emotional change, explaining the science behind meditation as a transformational practice, and inviting his students to actively choose a new way to be in the world, a whole identity in fact.
Like a bridge between yogi-in-a-cave and an entrepreneurial sailor of personal growth Joe Dispenza’s work attracts the part of me that used to be involved in a lot of social activism and then dived deeply into my own inner healing, sensing the truth of Mahatma Ghandi’s adage ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world’.
What currently fascinates me is this: how much of our personality and soul path is predestined, inherited from the past/environment, and what is truly malleable.
Where are the leading edges of personal growth in the human collective and how does this intersect with concepts of healthy abundance and the individual’s place in society? Are we all meant to be spiritually unlimited beings?
Luckily in Paris in February I got to explore this for myself at his weekend progressive retreat, gaining some clarity as well as healing a very deep emotional imprint of unworthiness (which spookily I sensed was connected to a past life in Paris).
I was raw when I went and nearly didn’t go.
Five days previously my younger sister had died from late stage cancer and it felt jarring visiting a city renowned for love and inspiration, especially as I’d not been abroad for seven years and was tenderly preparing for a whole new foreign environment in the midst of tragedy.
Luckily my good friend Bao Diep, another quantum seeker who’d suggested the trip last November, supported and encouraged me in my choice to uplift my heart.
And I am so relieved I did.
I felt my sister Gemma’s presence with me the whole time. Her dream was to eventually live in France so there was an uncanny parallelism to the whole experience.
As soon as we enrolled for the first evening at the Grand Rex, the largest cinema in Europe in the city’s 2nd arrondissement, the atmosphere felt palpably uplifting.
Spirit definitely wanted us there. We manifested the most gorgeous Parisian studio flat at a crazy low price five minutes from the venue. Handy for the 8am starts!
What I can share about the next 48 hours was how the combination of intellectual clarity on the potentials of healing, embodied into the audience through JD’s encouragement for us to continuously share with the person next to us our own interpretation, inter-weaved with the group meditations (and lots of dancing to uplifting music at the start of each session💃) embodied a new sense of faith and strength in my path.
I was navigating a strange energetic thread with my ancestral roots and childhood, feeling like my soul was swimming between two lives after spending a lot of time with my family in my birth town during my sister’s illness, that I didn’t realise how much I needed the strong confident spiritual embodiment of Joe Dispenza to land me back on my journey as a soul 111% committed to living a life of authenticity and freedom in this lifetime, regardless of mainstream three dimensional norms.
These retreats are super powerful if you’re doubting in any shape or form your personal right to grow and ascend beyond cultural expectations and dominant beliefs about materialist five-sense reality. This is quantum work, breaking barriers on how to heal intractable issues whether in physical health or life path possibilities.
The highlight for me was practising the pineal gland meditation then witnessing nine of his team go into the kundalini-activated Oneness state live on stage.
These people were not faking it. The energy palpably changed and they were each in their own trance of Samadhi with Source, the zero-point field moment where you plant the seed of intention and watch it (or something better) manifest effortlessly.
I came away with the following observations overall on his gifts and encourage you to check out his books and teachings.
Firstly, Dr Joe’s work is radical for me because he encourages us to understand the depths of our co-creative power - we can create a state of being free from the shackles of the past.
We can dismantle through practice old ways of being and develop a new personal and creative template for how we think, feel and act. This isn’t a passive witnessing approach to life as inevitable suffering. As he states, his workshops attract doers and he loves hanging out with highly creative people.
If you’re at the stage of your life where you’re tired of your current reality and have a sense that your subconscious is playing a role in this then his work will resonate.
Secondly, he really gets how our biology, especially the autonomic nervous system, is one of the biggest hurdles and tools for change. Changing thought patterns and beliefs through will power alone won’t achieve this.
There’s a lot in his books, backed by data including the scientists he works with at his events, to demonstrate how chemically addictive emotional states can be, how ‘neurons that fire together wire together’, and that kicking habitual patterns can trigger an onslaught of withdrawal survival mechanisms from the body where the subconscious lies and requires a deep present listening and dedicated reprogramming through meditation and conscious choice.
As a long time runner who learnt at a young age to push through resistance I feel an affinity with this type of discipline. There are benefits to sympathetic energy.
However, I suspect if I hadn’t done a lot of somatic trauma release feminine-arriving-in-the-body work I wouldn’t be ready for the pineal gland activation meditation he leads us through.
This is a trance state you can learn more about in his books and I suspect is contraindicated for attachment/developmental trauma whereby the nervous system may require sensitive slow care in order to develop its primal wiring/capacity to self regulate and hold these states (there are similar concerns with plant medicine rituals).
Thirdly - and please don’t underestimate how important this is - he co-creates with Source (or whatever term feels right to describe the divine mystery) beyond time and space.
So many in the fields of personal growth talk as if humans are independent isolated creatures, divorced from nature, soul and God. Or we see the opposite - spiritual communities going into the fathomless Field of Oneness and not asking for anything!
Joe Dispenza breaks the taboo and plants seeds.
He acknowledges desire and a wish to live a life of abundance and freedom. He allows will and purpose a seat at the spiritual table.
This is the revolution in consciousness unfolding on planet earth. The common people are becoming super-natural, accessing the divine beyond the old outdated caste systems of the religious, political and financial elites.
And I feel tremendously grateful I am a part of it.
On the Monday morning afterwards sitting in the Parisian sun with Bao, enjoying a coffee and reflecting on how different I felt, I received what I can only describe as a random What’s app message from my brother-in-law.
He wanted to pass on to me my late sister’s car OR pay for me to go on a once in a lifetime retreat anywhere in the world as a thank you for the healing and spiritual support I had offered. This was right after Bao and I had decided we were going to find a way to attend JD’s advanced week event later in the year.
I stared at the phone in bewilderment…but not surprise.
That weekend I had broken a habit even with the broken heart of my sister’s passing.
Somehow, some-frickin-dancing-how! I still felt worthy and capable of receiving a miracle through that loving mystery beyond and yet within us.
Thanks for reading