I Went To A Joe Dispenza Retreat. Here's What Happened

Healing, Synchronicities, and the Heart

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I recently attended my first Joe Dispenza week long retreat in Marco Island, FL.

I first read his book Becoming Supernatural in 2019. I was enthralled by it and considered going to one his retreats retreat.

I distinctly remember after encoutering his work thinking that the reason I hadn’t gotten everything I wanted in my life was that I wasn’t manifesting using my consciousness as a first step. I had found the key!

This was in my using spirituality to get stuff phase of my consciousness journey. This is where you retrofit spiritual growth as a new pathway to satisfy old patterns and desires often coming from an unhealthy place.

As I started to realize how I was trying to use my consciousness journey as yet another method to perfect my outer world, I became less interested in his work.

Fast forward to today, a lot has changed. I no longer hold a polarized view of material success or spiritual depth. You can choose to integrate both aspects of your experience simultaneously. I think treating material reality like an illusion, although well-intended, misses that we came into form to have a material experience.

Between this updated perspective and my health struggles, I guess you could say that I was primed for a Dispenza event.

I ended up there because last December, three different people told me to go to his retreat in less than a week. I took this as a nudge and decided to go.

I hadn’t engaged with his material since 2019, so I didn’t really know what to expect. My impression of him was that he was very focused on science and material manifestation. So I kind of figured I’d get some watered-down view of spirituality that hopefully might help my health.

I’m happy to share that I was delightfully surprised.

Here’s a hodgepodge of observations that stuck out to me from the experience:

The Healing Stories Are Incredible

The number of people I met or witnessed during the week who had used their consciousness and heart to heal chronic and supposedly incurable diseases was astounding. I saw accounts of blind people seeing, people getting out of their wheelchairs, and the healing of pancreatic cancer. It was mind-blowing.

In one of the coherence healings, my group supported a paralyzed woman who had not stood up in over 20 years. After the healing occurred, we were able to lift her up, and she was able to put weight on her feet.

This was one of the more moving experiences of my life.

A Synchronicity Fest

I experience lots of synchronicities as it is, and it felt like this event took it to the next level. I thought I’d share a few cool ones.

Synchroncity 1 - In November, I did a past-life regression with podcast guest and author Rob Schwartz. During this experience, you interact with a council of elders who you can ask any questions to. The elders instructed me to go to the Joe Dispenza event and told me that I would meet him and that he’d help me in my journey as a teacher. I honestly forgot about this by the time the event came around. My main intention was physical healing.

Each day, you spend the whole day sitting next to the same person, so over time you become friends. At the end of the 2nd day, the person I was sitting next to invited me to a dinner for Joe’s nonprofit called Inner Science. The dinner was attended by a very small group of the 1,400 in attendance, and I was able to meet Joe there. I guess the elders were right!

Synchroncity 2 - On the first day of the event, I sat next to a woman in the speaking industry. The next day at lunch, she told me that she received a download that she was supposed to heal someone at the event. Later that day, she told me that she was instructed to heal me. She wasn’t a practicing healer and wasn’t sure how this would happen. I was excited at the prospect and remained open to the possibility.

A big feature of the event is the coherence healings. During these experiences, you send love and healing intention to someone who needs healing as a group. I wasn’t picked to be healed and was a healer throughout the event.

The evening of the second healing, I noticed that the woman who said she was going to heal me and I were converging on the auditorium entrance at the same time. This was pretty unexpected because there were 1,400 people trying to walk into one room at the same time. I ended up right behind her and sat next to her. We laughed at the synchronicity, knowing what she had said earlier.

While I was healing this other person, I was brought into the presence of my father, who passed away six years ago. He told me that he loved me and was proud of me. While this was happening, I released a tremendous amount of grief and cried my eyes out for about 15 minutes. Her healing prophecy came true!

Synchroncity 3 -I have been working with a Dr. who uses a technology called NuVision which uses a quantum hologram of your field to diagnose your health and provide remedies. The way it works can be applied to understand anything, including your consciousness.

A few weeks before the event, we asked the technology what the number one thing I could do to evolve my consciousness was, and the information that came back was “pineal gland.” I knew about the pineal gland but hadn’t done a ton of concerted practice around it for years. My plan was to investigate some meditations around it once I started feeling better after the event.

When I got to the event, there was an entire day dedicated to the pineal gland and meditations on it each day. I left with a complete set of tools to work on it that I didn’t even know I would be getting. It’s crazy how my growth continues to fall into my lap.

There were many other smaller synchronicities that happened throughout each day, but these were some of my favorites.

Bringing Data to Ancient Teachings

I was delighted that Joe views everything through the lens of energy and information, which largely mirrors the teachings of RenXue, which has been the primary focus of my studies.

Our consciousness has an innate capacity to direct information through intention, which then gets expressed energetically. As Joe puts it":

“You change the information in the field, you change matter.”

This is effectively how energy healing works, as well as other phenomena like manifestation.

I think there are a lot of us who believe in consciousness being primary and thus our physical condition being an expression of consciousness. However, there is a gap in our ability to measure the connection between these mechanisms as they happen. It seems like people buy into psychosomatic healing, do a bunch of inner work, and then one day wake up and feel better. This is great when it happens, but the lack of measurement that clearly demonstrates cause and effect creates a barrier to mainstream medicine embracing the consciousness connection.

What’s so compelling about Joe’s work is that he’s measured the effects of so many people who have attended these events and had healings. I’ve studied a lot of mind-body connection material and have never seen such a solid demonstration of impact as the data from their research. He’s got some great research on his website, but the depth of explanation at the event really solidified how real it is.

Focus on the Heart

Another analogous teaching to my studies and experience demonstrated at the event was the focus on the energetic heart. This is huge in RenXue and, in my opinion, one of the most overlooked aspects of many spiritual traditions that focus purely on the mind.

The heart is the doorway to the true Self, joy, and so much more. I loved seeing this emphasis and his model of how it relates to quantum phenomena.

Joe’s Teachings Are Deeper Than I Thought

As mentioned earlier, my original impression of Joe was that he loved talking about the science of everything.

Like many people, I went through a phase of obsessing over the science of spirituality. Over time, I became fatigued with the science of consciousness, as it became a lagging indicator to my direct experience. Knowing the quantum physics of reality intellectually, is just less interesting than deepening your experience of it.

There are also simply so many things that cannot be measured or explained, and you massively limit yourself when you focus on what science can or cannot prove. I also think the need to figure it all out, which can be so prominent in this overlap, often points to a consciousness pattern of the ego.

So going into the retreat, I expected Joe to be really buttoned up and stay away from more esoteric topics that interest me. I was delighted when he alluded to concepts like the soul, reincarnation, other dimensions, and higher consciousness beings.

I realized that how Joe talks on podcasts is very different from what happens at his events. Moreover, the sequencing of how he talks about these topics at his events is intelligent and something to learn from. There was an intentional arc and buildup to this type of material. I think he did a brilliant job of making things accessible without turning people off too early.

Embracing Accessibility

Coming out of this experience, I feel a shift in my perspective around communicating consciousness concepts.

I’ve noticed a lot of teachers use specific language and avoid topics in order to avoid polarizing people, even though their level of understanding is much greater than what they communicate.

Although I understood the benefit of this approach intellectually, it never appealed to me for most of my journey. If you know something to be true, why bend over backward to code language or dance around the truth? It felt inauthentic.

I’m noticing a shift in how I feel about this following Joe’s event.

If you’re really trying to create global change, you need to function within the system you’re operating within. This is simply the intelligent thing to do.

There’s also an honoring of where people are at, which can be treated separately, from where you’re at in your own experience as a guide and teacher. Props to my friend Jonathan who helped me clarify this.

The Group Field

Everything has a field defined by the information that creates it and is expressed energetically. A supportive field creates the conditions for certain things to happen that would otherwise be difficult.

I’ve seen how dramatic an impact a field can have, so needless to say, I was excited to see what a field of 1,400 people meditating and focusing on their hearts at the same time might do.

On a personal level, I noticed a heightened sensitivity to Qi and dramatic amount of love during the coherence healings. I was also able to access some grief that had previously eluded me. Many people around me had big experiences. I attribute a lot of this to the field.

Masterful Production

I like studying people in the transformation industry because at some point, I know I will be working in it more prominently.

Joe was one of the most polished and skillful communicators I have seen. The production quality of the event was world-class. This was very inspiring and motivating for me to see.

Consciousness Explorer

Some of my favorite parts of the event were when Joe told stories about his own journey. What struck me about him was his level of curiosity and experimentation around human potential. If he experienced a certain phenomenon, he seemed very determined to recreate it and understand it.

It’s easy to look at someone with the notoriety of Joe and think he’s got it all figured out. The reality is he started out as a chiropractor who was having mystical experiences. It would have been very easy for him to just stay there. However, his curiosity and devotion to his evolution kept him exploring to understand deeper truth and eventually share it with others in a unique way.

As someone who is passionate about exploring the boundaries of human potential, this was very inspiring to me. If I’m being honest, I feel like I’ve been more complacent as of late around pushing my own boundaries. I think a lot of this has to do with my health challenges, but nonetheless, seeing his passion and commitment was deeply moving and reinvigorating.

Absence of Shadow Work

One thing I noticed is that Joe didn’t really talk much about shadow work. He mentioned that things will come up as you get into deeper states that fall out of resonance with the higher frequencies, but there wasn’t much guidance how to work with these events. I think this is one reason a lot of people question the depth of his work. The peak experiences are great, but without a thorough excavation of the subconscious and all the information that is creating out experience in the first place, I’ve found you don’t change all that much.

I’ve done a lot of shadow work over the years so I was okay with the event being more oriented toward human potential, than descending into the subconscious. However, I could see that if Joe’s work is all you’re doing, there’s probably a clear ceiling to how much your life will evolve.

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Overall, I left with a sense of possibility, greater understanding, and some new practices I will be experimenting with.

I would definitely go back and will probably do one of his advanced follow-up retreats at some point.

-Scott