Rehearse the person you're becoming

Joe Dispenza is a chiropractor who, after a serious accident in his twenties, spent years studying how the mind might take part in the body's healing, and in 2012 wrote Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. His retreats fill arenas. His claim is that through meditation you can rewire the brain, change the body, and become someone new.

Here's how we hold him. The larger claims, about healing illness and bending reality through meditation, go well beyond the evidence, and I'd be doing you a disservice to say otherwise. But underneath the big claims is a practice that's older than him and well supported: mental rehearsal. Athletes have used it for decades. Musicians use it. Surgeons use it. You sit, you settle the body, and you practice, in vivid detail, being the person you intend to be, feeling what they feel, until the practice begins to show up in how you actually act.

That's the same thing Maltz said on day ten, and Peale on day nine, with a different vocabulary. The nervous system rehearses what you give it. If you give it the same old thoughts every morning, it rehearses the same old person. Dispenza's real contribution is the insistence that you do this daily, as a discipline, with the body settled first, and that you rehearse the feeling, not just the picture. Feel the gratitude before the thing arrives. Feel the steadiness before the hard meeting.

It belongs in the second month because his method begins with the body: breath, stillness, and the release of the body's habitual bracing, before any thought is rehearsed. Seven weeks in, you know how to do that part.