Dr Joe in the temple (thanks to Liz Tucker for photo)

“Turn to the person next to you and tell them, you’re a genius.” This is how Dr Joe Dispenza, chiropractor, neuroscientist and author of Evolve your Brain: the Science of Changing your Mind, begins his talk. His small stature, curly dark blond hair and black jeans and t-shirt give him a boyish air, but he says his children are in their twenties so he must be pushing 50. He’s also very energetic and able to talk effortlessly and compellingly about how you can change your life for well over an hour.

His listeners are enrapt. After all, don’t we all want to change our lives? Isn’t there something that we all really want? The audience Joe is addressing tonight is an unusual one. I’m in a Hindu temple at a Sivananda ashram in the Bahamas and it’s filled with students on yoga teaching courses. They’re mainly in their twenties and thirties and they sit cross-legged on the floor in regulation yellow t-shirt and baggy white trousers. In the front row are the teachers: swamis and celibates dressed from head-to-toe in either orange, yellow or white.

The nub of Joe’s talk is the basis for a thousand self-help books — i.e. your thoughts affect your reality and if you programme your mind to really believe that you have something, it can really happen. His philosophy fits in with yogic beliefs. Swami Sivananda says in Sure Ways for Success in Life and God Realisation (first published in 1936) “If the will is pure and strong, man gets the [desired] objects in the twinkling of an eye.” He then continues to give some fantastical examples of what can be achieved with will power:  “Nimbarka Acharya willed that the sun should not pass beyond the Nim tree that was in front of his house; it came to pass exactly.” In yogic philosophy, getting what we want is accomplished by strengthening the will through self-discipline, and the moral implications of what we think and want are always taken into consideration.

What makes Joe different from other speakers on the subject of manifestation is not only his charisma, but also as a scientist he is able to put a scientific spin on things Change is our minds making new connections, he says. He shows us a grainy black-and-white video of two neurons joining to form a new thought. “This,” he says, “ is change happening.”

So what stops us from changing? Joe believes that we “live by our subconscious mind,” and that we are “programmed to do the same things.” It takes considerable effort to alter this programming, especially as we can get addicted to emotions, even really bad ones, as they tell us who we really are, he explained.

How exactly can we bring about change? Joe says first you have to be clear what you want, and then teach your body how to live in that experience (the body is linked to subconscious mind.) It’s also important to give thanks as if you’ve already achieved your desires, he adds.

But does this actually work? Joe cites experiments where subjects were told to imagine themselves doing exercise and the results of their muscle growth were compared against a control group who didn’t do any visualization. The people who thought about exercise showed a 13.5% increase in strength, while with the control group there was no change. (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1591-mental-gymnastics-increase-bicep-strength.html)

I believe that there is truth to what Joe says, and the visualization technique is now commonly used in sports. But there must be limits to how much it can achieve. I’m sure most people have know someone who was really ill, stayed positive, mentally wished themselves to be better with all their might, but still succumbed. I also think it’s worth taking into consideration the moral consequences of your thoughts and desires, like the yogis advise and which so many self-help books skip over, wanting to appeal to our more materialistic side. After all, getting what you wanted is not the same as being happy.