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Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza. Many times we find that even when we want to make a change, we're not able to make it or stick to it because old habits die hard. The reason for this, according to Joe Dispenza, is that our conscious mind only plays a five percent role in how we live our life, but the subconscious mind plays a 95% role. So even when we are intellectually, logically, 100 percent convinced that a certain habit is not working for us and we're ready to change it, we don't succeed because we are only working with the conscious mind which will only help five percent.

So how do we access and use our subconscious mind which is driving 95% of how we live our lives? It is through meditation that we can access the subconscious mind and rewire the old circuits in our brain that are no longer serving us. Joe Dispenza has listed guided meditations at the end of the book that will help you in breaking the habit of being yourself. These meditations are organized into Week 1, Week 2, Week 3 and Week 4 meditations.

The idea is that in your first week, every day you will only do the Week 1 meditation. Joe recommends doing this meditation either first thing in the morning or the last thing in the evening. You can find these guided meditations on YouTube by searching for “Joe Dispenza meditation week one” and so on.

There is a section in this book about midlife crisis which I absolutely loved because it was so true for me! Joe says that in your mid 30s or 40s, you face some kind of a midlife crisis. We all have insecurities — they start in our teenage years but continue to stay with us long after that. We all have some kind of pain that we're always trying to find ways to escape from. Also, there's usually a gap between who we really are and the image of ourselves that we want others to perceive.

So in addition to our insecurities and our pain, there's also the pressure of looking a certain way to other people. By the time we hit our mid 30s or 40s, this pain in our lives becomes more and more visible to us. People around this age usually go one of two ways. Either they start distracting themselves more and more with external stimulation like buying a bigger house or a car, vacations, making new friends, or they go internally and ask themselves questions like “Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? What is God?”

The people in the first group who try to numb their pain by seeking external distractions will start to find that they need more and more of that because the novelty of these distractions wears off, and the same things which used to numb their pain before, don't do it anymore. People in the second group begin to have a kind of awakening and start realizing that the external things are never going to take their pain away. They also realize that they're done putting up this facade for other people and worrying about how they look to other people.

They start to understand themselves better, and the gap between who they really are and the image they present to the world starts to narrow down. This is exactly what has happened to me in my mid-30s! I was quite blown away when I was reading this part of the book because I felt, wow! How could you know exactly what is going on in my head?!

There is other cool stuff in the book too about the brain, neuroplasticity, the different kinds of brain waves. For example, in our waking state our brain waves are mostly beta waves. In meditation, we try to go from beta waves to alpha or theta waves. In sleep, we mostly have delta waves. I find all this kind of stuff very interesting to read.

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