Joe Dispenza: Healing and the Placebo effect
Joe Dispenza: I look at ‘You are the Placebo’ more as an empirical way to explain that it’s absolutely possible for people to do the uncommon or to change something about themselves or their lives. I never planned to write any books. After my study spontaneous remissions with ‘Evolve your Brain’, the next most common question was “How do you do it?” So that’s why I wrote ‘Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself’. It was more of a ‘how-to’ as a foundation. I wrote that book years ago and so much has happened since then in our advanced workshops as I talk about in You are the Placebo.
You are the Placebo is a way to show people that they don’t need to take a sugar pill or get a saline injection to produce some physiological change, because it’s not the substance that’s making them better, it’s thought that’s making them better. If a certain percentage of people can be healed by thought alone, because it is thought that actually does the healing, do you need that external influence to do it, or can you teach people how to do it?
If you understand the physiological and scientific things of how the placebo works, you should be able to replicate the same effect without any external substance. I wrote this book differently because I wanted to tell a lot of stories – I wanted the stories to really catch people’s attention to a degree where they have to stop reading the book for a moment and think “Oh my God, that person died by thought alone” or “Oh that person actually committed a murder because it was suggestible to the thought”. Or like a group of men who pretended they were 22 years younger and somehow their bodies began to make their own pharmacy of chemicals that began to support the physiological changes that were taking place within them. So it begs the question: “Who am I pretending to be or who am I pretending to not be?” So I wanted to tell the stories in a little different writing style than I have in the past, to get people’s attention on the idea that if anybody else can do it, they can do it and that’s why I wrote it.
