My week-long retreat with Dr Joe Dispenza was beyond anything I could have imagined.
As some of you may know, I am a big Dispenza fan and have been ever since I read his book “You are the placebo”, several years ago, which then led to watching his videos and finally, attending his Week Long Advanced Retreat in Dubai this past January.
It has taken me that long to feel somewhat ready to write about the unique experience it was. This is partly because I think the world is going haywire and human beings need to connect to a higher level of consciousness now more than ever. I really do believe humanity is in dire of need of more connectedness with energy and less materialism. It is also because it was initially very hard to put the experience into words that would actually be meaningful to a larger audience. This is only a dent of course in explaining his work, but I hope you get the idea and feel compelled to look into him yourself through his countless youtube videos, instagram tv channel, books or other resources available on his website.
Who is Dr. Joe Dispenza?
First, a very brief intro on the man. Dispenza was a chiropractor who early on in his career, got run over by a truck and was told he would never walk again. He had a few options, including a risky operation, but chose instead to heal himself through meditation. Within a couple of months of practice, he literally rebuilt his spinal column with the power of the mind, got up and started walking again. He then decided to spend the rest of his career studying how spontaneous recoveries like his could be explained scientifically.
Today, he is a widely recognized researcher, lecturer and expert when it comes to explaining through neuroscience, epigenetics and quantum physics how meditation can produce change in our lives. He is more what I would call a man of science than a a spiritual guru, but somehow manages to link the two. He has written several books and developed several online courses around the topic as well as built a rich library of online meditations based on his teachings. He also delivers talks, workshops and week-long retreats all around the world.
There, that’s done – now I can get into his theory.
The basics
Dr. Joe (that’s what everyone calls him) believes change and healing are possible using your mind – but you can’t create change based on the person you are today, you need to rewire yourself. He says that our thoughts lead us to making certain choices, which then trigger behaviors, which in turn will create experiences that will produce emotions and a cascade of neurochemicals and hormones. And this cycle repeats itself over and over to eventually form our personality – and by age 35, 95% of our personality is basically an automated program that is very hard to change. He believes that our biology, neurochemistry, hormone levels, and even how are genes are expressed are highly dependent on how we think, act and feel. And how we think, act, and feel (our personality) creates our current personal reality.
So if you want to create change in your reality, you need to change the way you think, act, and feel. How? Well, this is where meditation, quantum physics and everything else come in. And that’s where things can get supernatural-sounding – but it isn’t. I saw people with my own eyes walk out of the Dubai retreat healed from all sorts of medical conditions, from cancer to tinnitus. Some people have even claimed to have manifested their desire of overcoming an addiction, getting a dream job, making money, living in a different country, etc. by “doing the work” as he calls it, which is basically doing his meditations daily. And it really does take time and effort – like anything you want to become good at – but I guarantee you, everyone can benefit.
The Week Long Advanced Retreat
Dr. Joe used to give shorter Beginner and Intermediate Weekend Events and Workshops. These days, he mostly offers Advanced Week Long Events where participants are required to complete almost 30 hours of online lectures and encouraged to meditate daily beforehand. These retreats take place all over the world and are really growing in popularity. Most of them are sold out in minutes online. I, therefore, felt so privileged to be able to book the Dubai one and couldn’t wait to get started on the online videos. These are gold by the way – and worth every penny should you decide to purchase them as a standalone product and never even attend one of his retreats. He goes into great detail explaining how the brain works, how meditation influences it as well as how to meditate in a way that can actually produce change in your life. The videos also include a few meditations, which I felt were difficult to get into initially, but that get a lot easier once I understood the science and theory behind it.
The format of the event consisted of one half day intro, followed by 5 pretty intense days and another half day at the end. No two days were the same – he is all about opening yourself up to the unknown, so there was no set schedule. The only certainty on the intense days was that there was over 5 hours of meditation. So for example, on Day 2, we did a 2 hour meditation at 6am, followed by a lecture, break, another meditation, lunch, another lecture and another meditation. On the other days, there were activities, group healings as well as walking meditations outdoors (we did one in a park, another in the desert – this was followed by a party and some fireworks, it was magical).
The meditations
The meditations were intense. If you have only been meditating for a few months and are accustomed to doing 30-60 minutes like I was, this might give you a little shock to the system. They are 2-hour meditations where you aren’t particularly comfortably seated. I mean, it was a huge auditorium filled with 1400 people, so whilst everyone had a chair and enough space in front of them, it was nothing like being at home, sitting with your back against the wall or feet up on the table. That was particularly hard for me because one of the first steps in all his meditations is to forget your body. Being the type who struggles sitting through an entire movie, this was damn hard. In fact, on the first day, I seriously wondered if I could make it through the week. But I quickly learned that if you stick to it, you can break in your body and train it to rest when the mind commands it to. The other challenge is to not let your thoughts wander. That is challenging even at home for a short while, but here, surrounded by so many people and for many hours at a time, it was doubly hard. I remember one particular meditation that began at 4am – lasting 4 hours in total – where I struggled to keep my mind in the zone for the first 2. But I persisted, breathed through it, shut the world out, let go of my body and it finally worked. In fact, the remaining two hours, I was in a state of total and utter bliss. Once you hit that place – somewhere between sleep and total relaxation – you feel on a strange kind of high, time flies and you start being able to kinda sorta conceive how Tibetan monks do it. And when you get out of a meditation like that, trust me, you want to repeat the experience again. One thing that helps with attaining this “place” is the breathing Dr. Joe teaches. It is often compared to kundalini breathing where you basically pull the energy up and out of your body as you breathe in. He calls it “pulling the mind out of the body”, I call it getting a natural high. Different people will react differently to it, some scream, others just get light headed or feel relaxed, it differs from one person to the next and on one’s ability to let go. It requires practice based on his explanations (once he explains it, doing it becomes so much easier) and it definitely helps you get in the zone.
Why people attend
There are myriad of reasons why people go to his events, but I would say it is centered around the desire to change something in your life. Some individuals need healing – they may have a physical and/or psychological condition they have not managed to get rid of. Others just want to change their mindset in order to overcome challenges in their lives and gain greater peace of mind.
The community
The people I met were amazing. Obviously, when you meet people who have a common practice/goal/interest you are more likely to get along and be like-minded. But it was more than that – there was a real aura of peace and acceptance throughout the event. I went alone and felt welcome at any lunch time table I sat down at. People were talking with one another without any of the barriers you would normally find in a large scale event. It was just so pleasant. I also think I was more relaxed and open than usual.
Having said that, there were people from all walks of life, ages, nationalities, religion, personality types and professions: engineers, doctors, accountants, coaches, business people entrepreneurs, singles, couples, grandparents, teenagers, rebels, abiding citizens, etc. Some had been to his events before, but the majority just knew him through his past work and were attending for the first time.
The lectures
Dr Joe had really interesting lectures. He went into details about the science behind what happens to your nervous system when you meditate, and when you get your mind out of your body, how do you physically get there, what needs to happen energetically, how to create coherence between your heart and brain, etc. He is also really engaging in the way he teaches – he will talk for 5-10 minutes about a concept and then ask everyone to turn to their neighbor and explain it to each other. This is soooo effective because it gets you out of your comfort zone and actively involved in understanding and owning the concepts. Like that, when comes time to do the meditation, you actually remember what he said, apply it and totally get why he taught it.
He also has this ability to dumb down complicated topics so that most people can understand. For example, at one point, he did a lecture on Time-Space and Space-Time and how this plays a big role in getting to a higher state of consciousness. This is where he gets into quantum physics. Ok, so I didn’t get it right away, but managed to understand most of it. And I was fortunate that day to be playing “explain what you just learned to the person sitting next to you” with an Australian engineer, who helped clear up any uncertainties I did have on the topic.
Ah – this brings me to another point: the science. A lot of speakers, gurus, etc talk about science and research but unless you are an expert in the field you don’t really know if what they are saying is true or not. For some odd reason, I ended up sitting next to quite a few scientific people who all felt that his concepts and theories were based on sound scientific reasoning. That’s always reassuring. Dr Joe also frequently shared his research and scan results that his medical team/partners did to measure brain waves of people in various meditative states to add depth to his lectures, which made them all that more captivating. And finally, he is a fantastic speaker: he speaks concisely, illustrates his teachings with a lot of anecdotes and real life examples and just so happens to have a great sense of humor. He just seemed nice and authentic.
He covered a lot of other fascinating topics throughout the week. For example, there was one talk around the pineal gland – our 3rd eye – and its key role in meditation and on our ability to access higher realms of consciousness. It was absolutely eye-opening and really helped me meditate better. Now, be warned, the Week Long Events are always evolving. Participants who had been long to his prior ones told me that he always adds new findings and tweaks the curriculum as his research progresses so you can’t expect his next retreat to include the exact same content as this one.
Does he heal chakras?
While he never actually uses the term chakra, Dr. Joe talks a lot about our energy centers and they are an important element of his meditations. These energy centers exist and his descriptions of them, for the most part, seem to correspond to chakras. His philosophy is very very similar to Eastern ones, but the way he approaches teaching it – to me anyway – feels a lot easier to understand and more convincing because he comes from a scientific angle. I honestly don’t think I would have stuck to his meditations otherwise.
Results
Now to the results – keep in mind, everyone has a different experience, but all the people I know came out of the event with some sort of change.
Have I seen any changes and would I do it again? Yes and yes. I mean, I didn’t go to heal from anything in particular but I am definitely calmer and more focused than when I went into it. “A beach holiday could also do the job” you might say, but this is very different. The serene feeling I had when I left remained with me for a while – and it’s not because we slept a lot – on the contrary, when you have daily 4am or 6am meditations and finish most days at around 7pm, sleep is minimal. But I got out of there feeling…the best way I can describe it is to say that for once in my life I felt “connected” to something bigger, a higher power, an energy within us and all around us. And the more I meditate, the more I feel this way and have the firm belief that everything is as it should be and it’s all going to be ok. Even when I do get worked up – which happens of course – I will react and be bothered but I don’t brood over it because I know the effect it will have on my thoughts, emotions, body and reality. And I know there is something a lot bigger out there that has my back.
I have also been sleeping like a baby. The week after the event, my son is the one who woke me up a few times this week because I didn’t hear the alarm! Also, I remember my dreams, which is something that has not happened in years – this is actually something that started happening a few months ago, when I first started meditating. I also noticed that when I did start remembering them, they were often negative – that could help explain why in the past few years, I was often waking up with a bloated/stressed stomach and developed this bad habit of clenching my teeth at night. Lately though, I’ve had nicer dreams that leave me waking up more chilled out.
Lastly, I have gotten so much better at meditating. One hour meditations go by really fast and don’t require as much will power as they used to, which means I am more likely to keep them as part of my daily routine. No, I haven’t gotten suddenly rich and I haven’t opened a booming food business in the Mediterranean somewhere yet, but it doesn’t sound as unrealistic to me as it once did ;-).
UPATE ON THIS POST:
When I did this retreat, it was Jan 2020, right before COVID hit and looking back I think of how lucky I was to have been able to do this. Anyway, I still think this retreat was life-changing. Currently, we live in Southern France, and I have officially launched my online whole-foods cooking business here where I sell e-books and offer zoom cooking classes with people all over the world (see last sentence in last paragraph). So in many ways, I feel like what I wanted to have happen is manifesting itself in ways I could not have necessarily predicted. I continue to meditate with Dr Joe and with other meditations and feel even more connected to the universe than before. So if you do get a chance to do his retreats, GO FOR IT! And if not, then I highly recommend his online courses and meditations.
