You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

that is, can we cultivate it?
Where Our Beliefs Come From
Our beliefs aren’t always as conscious as we think they are. We may very well accept an idea on the surface, but if deep down, we don’t really believe it’s possible, then our acceptance is just an intellectual process.
Because calling upon the placebo effect requires us to truly change our beliefs about ourselves and what’s possible for our bodies and our health,
we need to understand what beliefs are and where they come from.
Let’s suppose a person goes to the doctor with certain symptoms and is diagnosed with a condition based on the physician’s objective findings.
The doctor gives the patient a diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment options based on the average outcome. The moment the person hears the doctor say diabetes cancer hypothyroidism or chronic fatigue syndrome a series of thoughts, images, and emotions is conjured up based on his or her past experience. That experience could be that the patient’s parents had the condition, that he or she saw a show on TV in which one of the characters died of that disease, or even that something the person read on the Internet scared him or her about the diagnosis.
Once the patient sees the doctor and hears a professional opinion, the patient automatically accepts the condition, then believes what the confident doctor has said, and finally surrenders to the treatment and possible outcomes—and this is done without any real analysis. The patient is suggestible (and susceptible) to what the doctor says. If the person then embraces the emotions of fear, worry, and anxiety, along with sadness, then the only possible thoughts (or autosuggestions) are those that are equal to how he or she feels.
The patient can try to have positive thoughts about beating the disease,
but his or her body still feels bad because the wrong placebo has been given, resulting in the wrong state of being, the signaling of the same genes, and the inability to see or perceive any new possibilities. The patient is pretty much at the mercy of his or her beliefs (and the beliefs of the doctor) about the diagnosis.
So when people like the folks you’ll read about in the next few chapters healed themselves using the placebo effect, what did they do differently?
First, they didn’t accept the finality of their diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment. Nor did they believe in the most probable outcome or future destiny that their doctors had authoritatively outlined. Finally, they didn’t surrender to the diagnosis, prognosis, or suggested treatment.
Because they had a different attitude from those who did accept, believe,
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and surrender, they were in a different state of being.
They weren’t suggestible to the doctors advice and opinions, because they didn’t feel fearful, victimized, or sad. Instead they were optimistic and enthusiastic, and those emotions drove anew set of thoughts, which enabled them to see new possibilities. Because they had different ideas and beliefs about what was possible, they didn’t condition their bodies to the worst-case scenario, they didn’t expect the same predictable outcome as others who’d received the same diagnosis, and they didn’t assign the same
meaning to the diagnosis as everyone else with the same condition. They assigned a different meaning to their future, so they had a different intention. They understood epigenetics and neuroplasticity, so instead of passively seeing themselves as victims of the disease, they used that knowledge to become proactive, fueled by what they’d learned in my workshops and events. As a result, these folks also got different and better results than other people who’d received the same diagnosis—just as the hotel maids got better results after the researchers gave them more information.
Now think about the average person who receives a diagnosis and promptly announces, “I’m going to beat this Someone may not accept the condition and the outcome the doctor outlines, but the difference is that most people haven’t truly changed their beliefs about not being sick.
Changing a belief requires changing a subconscious program—since a belief, as you’ll soon learn, is a subconscious state of being.
Folks who use only their conscious minds to change never come out of the resting state to reprogram their genes, because they don’t know how to do that. This is where their healing stops. They’re unable to surrender to possibility, because they’re not truly able to become suggestible to anything different from what the doctor tells them.
Is it possible that, whenever people don’t respond to treatment or when their health stays the same, they’re living by the same emotional state everyday, accepting, believing, and surrendering to the medical model without too much analysis, based on the social consciousness of millions of other people who’ve done exactly the same thing Does a doctor’s diagnosis become the modern-day equivalent of a voodoo curse?
So now, let’s dissect belief a little further, backing up just slightly to begin with the following idea When you string a succession of thoughts and feelings together so that they ultimately become habituated or automatic, they form an attitude. And since how you think and feel creates a state of being, attitudes are really just shortened states of being.
They can fluctuate from moment to moment as you alter how you think and feel. Any particular attitude can last for minutes, hours, days, or even
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a week or two.
For example, if you have a series of good thoughts that are aligned with a series of good feelings, you might say, I have a good attitude today.”
And if you have a sequence of negative thoughts that’s connected to a sequence of negative feelings, then you might say, I have a bad attitude today.” If you revisit the same attitude enough times, then it becomes automatic.
If you repeat or maintain certain attitudes long enough and you string those attitudes together, that’s how you create a belief. A belief is just an extended state of being—essentially, beliefs are thoughts and feelings
(attitudes) that you keep thinking and feeling over and over again until you hardwire them in your brain and emotionally condition them into your body. You could say that you become addicted to them, which is why it’s so hard to change them and why it doesn’t feelgood on a gut level when they’re challenged. Because experiences are neurologically etched into your brain (causing you to think) and chemically embodied as emotions (causing you to feel, most of your beliefs are based on past memories.
So when you revisit the same thoughts over and over by thinking about and analyzing what you remember from your past, these thoughts will fire and wire into an automatic unconscious program. And if you cultivate the same feelings based on past experiences and you feel the same as you did when the event originally occurred, you’ll condition your body to subconsciously be the mind of that emotion—and your body will unconsciously be living in the past.
And if the redundancy of how you think and feel overtime conditions your body to become the mind, and it becomes programmed subconsciously, then beliefs are subconscious and also unconscious states of being derived from the past. Beliefs are also more permanent than attitudes they can last for months or even years. And because they last longer, they become more programmed within you.
A casein point is a story from my childhood that’s stamped in my memory. I grew up in an Italian family, and when I was going into fourth grade, we moved to another city that had a mixture of both Italian and
Jewish residents. On my first day of school that year, the teacher assigned me to a seat in a group of six desks along with three Jewish girls. That was the day the girls broke the news tome that Jesus wasn’t Italian. It was one of the most memorable days of my life.
When I came home that afternoon, my little Italian mother kept asking me how my first day of school went, and I wouldn’t talk to her. After I
ignored her enough times, she finally grabbed me by the arm and insisted
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I tell her what was wrong.
“I thought Jesus was Italian I blurted out angrily.
“What are you talking about she responded. Hes Jewish!”
“Jewish?” I shot back. What do you mean He looks Italian in all those pictures, doesn’t he Grandma talks in Italian to him all daylong. And what’s the deal with the Roman Empire Isn’t Rome in Italy?”
So the belief that I had—that Jesus was Italian—was based on my past experiences, and how I thought and felt about Jesus had become my automatic state of being. This belief took some getting over, because changing deep-seated beliefs isn’t easy. Needless to say, I succeeded.
Now let’s move the concept forward a little further. If you string a group of related beliefs together, they form your perception. So your perception of reality is a sustained state of being that’s based on your longstanding beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, and feelings. And since your beliefs become subconscious and also unconscious states of being (that is,
you don’t even know why you believe certain things, or you aren’t really conscious of your beliefs until they’re tested, your perceptions—how you

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