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" As you begin the meditation, close your eyes and take a few slow, deep breaths. Soon you should drop from a beta brain-wave state into an alpha state. This more restful, but still focused, state activates your frontal lobe, which as you read, lowers the volume on the circuits in your brain that process time and space. Although at first you might not be able to slip easily into the next slower brain-wave state, theta, with practice you’ll be able to slow your brain waves down even further. Theta is the brain-wave state where the body is asleep but the mind is awake, and it’s where you can more readily change your body’s automatic programs. How "
― Joe Dispenza , You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
105
" If you’re like most people, a string of nerve-racking incidents keeps you in fight-or-flight response—and out of homeostasis—a large part of the time. Maybe the car cutting you off is the only actual life-threatening situation you encounter all day, but the traffic on the way to work, the pressure of preparing for a big presentation, the argument you had with your spouse, the credit-card bill that came in the mail, the crashing of your computer hard drive, and the new gray hair you noticed in the mirror keep the stress hormones circulating in your body on a near-constant basis. Between remembering stressful experiences from the past and anticipating stressful situations coming up in your future, all these repetitive short-term stresses blur together into long-term stress. Welcome to the 21st-century version of living in survival mode. In fight-or-flight mode, life-sustaining energy is mobilized so that the body can either run or fight. But when there isn’t a return to homeostasis (because you keep perceiving a threat), vital energy is lost in the system. You have less energy in your internal environment for cell growth and repair, long-term building projects on a cellular level, and healing when that energy is being channeled elsewhere. The cells shut down, they no longer communicate with one another, and they become “selfish.” It’s not time for routine maintenance (let alone for making improvements); it’s time for defense. It’s every cell for itself, so the collective community of cells working together becomes fractured. The immune and endocrine systems (among others) become weakened as genes in those related cells are compromised when informational signals from outside the cells are turned off. It’s like living in a country where 98 percent of the resources go toward defense, and nothing is left for schools, libraries, road building and repair, communication systems, growing of food, and so on. Roads develop potholes that aren’t fixed. Schools suffer budget cuts, so students wind up learning less. Social welfare programs that took care of the poor and the elderly have to close down. And there’s not enough food to feed the masses. Not surprisingly, then, long-term stress has been linked to anxiety, depression, digestive problems, memory loss, insomnia, hypertension, heart disease, strokes, cancer, ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, colds, flu, aging acceleration, allergies, body pain, chronic fatigue, infertility, impotence, asthma, hormonal issues, skin rashes, hair loss, muscle spasms, and diabetes, to name just a few conditions (all of which, by the way, are the result of epigenetic changes). No organism in nature is designed to withstand the effects of long-term stress. "
― Joe Dispenza , You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
106
" The subjects became tipsy and acted drunk, with some even showing physical signs of intoxication. They didn’t get drunk because they drank alcohol; they got drunk because the environment, by associative memory, cued their brains and bodies to respond in the same old, familiar way. When the researchers eventually told the students the truth, many were amazed and insisted that they really did feel drunk at the time. They believed they were drinking alcohol, and those beliefs translated into neurochemicals, which altered their states of being. In other words, their beliefs alone were sufficient to fire up a biochemical change in their bodies that was equal to being drunk. That’s because the students conditioned themselves enough times to associate alcohol with a change in their internal chemical states. As the subjects expected or anticipated the future change in their inner states based on their past associative memories of drinking, they were cued by the environment to physiologically change, just as did Pavlov’s dogs. There "
― Joe Dispenza , You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
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" The Legacy of Negative Emotions As we keep making stress hormones, we create a host of highly addictive negative emotions, including anger, hostility, aggression, competition, hatred, frustration, fear, anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, guilt, shame, sadness, depression, hopelessness, and powerlessness, "
― Joe Dispenza , You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter