Becoming Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon

There is a moment in every Joe Dispenza workshop — usually around day three or four — when the room shifts. You can feel it before you can measure it, though Dispenza’s team measures it too. The EEG caps start registering gamma coherence patterns that neuroscientists previously associated only with decades-long Tibetan monks or high-dose psilocybin sessions. The heart rate variability monitors show autonomic nervous systems flipping from sympathetic overdrive into deep parasympathetic coherence within minutes. The GDV cameras — Gas Discharge Visualization devices that photograph the biophotonic field around the body — show energy fields expanding from dim, fragmented haloes into luminous, symmetrical spheres.

And the people wearing these sensors are not monks. They are accountants, teachers, nurses, retired engineers. Common people doing the uncommon.

The Origin Story

You cannot understand Dispenza’s work without understanding his body. In 1986, at twenty-three years old, he was competing in the cycling leg of a triathlon in Palm Springs, California, when a Ford Bronco traveling at fifty-five miles per hour struck him from behind. The impact shattered six vertebrae in his thoracic and lumbar spine. His T8 vertebra had collapsed by more than sixty percent, and the arch protecting his spinal cord was compressed into what surgeons described as a pretzel shape. Bone fragments pressed against the cord itself.

Four surgeons independently recommended a Harrington rod procedure — steel rods bolted to the spine to prevent paralysis. Without it, they said, he would likely never walk again. The surgery itself carried significant risk and would severely limit his mobility for life.

Dispenza refused. He left the hospital with a single conviction borrowed from chiropractic vitalism: “The power that made the body heals the body.” For the next twelve weeks, lying face down on a gurney, he spent two hours twice daily in deep mental rehearsal. He reconstructed his spine vertebra by vertebra in his imagination — not as wishful thinking but as a disciplined act of neurological repetition. He visualized the same spinal architecture over and over until his brain could fire the circuits of a healthy spine as fluently as it once fired the circuits of walking.

Twelve weeks later, he was back in his chiropractic clinic. Sixteen weeks after the accident, he was training again. No surgery. No rods.

That experience became the seed of everything that followed.

The Meditation Protocol

Dispenza’s meditation system is not a single technique but a layered architecture. Each layer addresses a different dimension of the human system — breath, attention, energy, emotion, intention. The sequence matters because each stage prepares the neurophysiology for the next.

The Breath: The foundational technique involves a slow, deliberate inhalation paired with the contraction of the intrinsic muscles — the perineum, the lower abdomen, the upper abdomen — in a sequential squeeze that moves cerebrospinal fluid upward along the spinal canal toward the brain. Think of it as a hydraulic pump. The meninges that surround the spinal cord are continuous with the meninges around the brain, and cerebrospinal fluid flows between them. By contracting these muscles during inhalation, you accelerate that flow, pushing fluid up against the ventricles and ultimately toward the pineal gland in the center of the brain. At the top of the inhale, you hold and squeeze further — creating intrathecal pressure that Dispenza believes mechanically stimulates the pineal gland’s piezoelectric calcite microcrystals.

Convergent Focus: After the breath sequence, practitioners shift into a narrowed, convergent attention — focusing on a single point, a single intention, a single image. This is the “particle” mode of consciousness: specific, localized, matter-oriented. Neurologically, convergent focus activates the prefrontal cortex and produces high-frequency beta waves.

Divergent Focus: The critical shift happens next. Practitioners are guided to release the convergent focus and expand awareness into the space around and beyond the body — sensing the volume of the room, the field around them, the space between objects. This is the “wave” mode: nonlocal, expansive, energy-oriented. The brain transitions from beta to alpha, then alpha to theta. In advanced practitioners, sustained theta becomes the launching pad for explosive gamma — the brainwave signature of heightened awareness, integration, and what meditators across traditions describe as mystical experience.

Elevated Emotion: Throughout, Dispenza instructs practitioners to generate and sustain elevated emotions — gratitude, love, joy, awe — not as abstract concepts but as embodied states. The instruction is precise: feel the emotion before the event that would normally cause it. This is the reversal of the Newtonian cause-and-effect loop. Instead of waiting for something to happen in the external world and then reacting emotionally, you generate the emotional signature first and let it become the magnetic attractor for a new experience.

What the Instruments Show

Since 2012, Dispenza’s research team has been bringing laboratory-grade equipment into workshops and retreats. The numbers are now substantial: more than 20,000 quantitative electroencephalograms (QEEG), more than 10,000 heart rate variability measurements, GDV energy field scans, and — more recently — electrocardiograms synchronized with brain scans to study real-time heart-brain coherence.

The QEEG findings are striking. During deep meditation, many participants show a pattern that neuroscientist Dr. Jeffrey Fannin described as “brain coherence” — a state where multiple brain regions that normally operate independently begin firing in synchrony, producing broadband gamma oscillations (above 40 Hz) with unusual power and coherence. In November 2025, UC San Diego researchers published their findings in Communications Biology, a Nature portfolio journal, under the title “Neural and Molecular Changes During a Mind-Body Reconceptualization, Meditation, and Open Label Placebo Healing Intervention.” The study documented that during intensive meditation at a Dispenza seven-day retreat, participants exhibited brain activity patterns previously seen only with psychedelic substances — specifically, dramatic quieting of the default mode network (the brain’s self-referential chatter center) coupled with hyper-connectivity between normally isolated brain regions.

The GDV measurements, conducted by Dr. Konstantin Korotkov using his Electrophotonic BioWell camera, tell the energy side of the story. In one five-day workshop of eighty-one participants, ninety-three percent showed significant increases in their measurable energy field, stress levels dropped across the board, and energy balance improved in one hundred percent of participants. During collective meditations, the environmental sensor (GDV Sputnik) showed measurable changes in the room’s ambient energy field — decreasing during meditation sessions and increasing during breaks, with an overall day-to-day increase across the workshop.

The heart rate variability data is perhaps the most clinically relevant. HRV is a validated biomarker for autonomic nervous system function, stress resilience, and overall health. High HRV indicates a system that can flexibly shift between sympathetic activation and parasympathetic recovery. Dispenza’s workshops consistently show participants moving from low, chaotic HRV patterns (indicative of chronic stress and survival-mode living) to high, coherent HRV patterns within days.

Documented Healings

The data is one thing. The stories are another — and they accumulate with the persistence of a rising tide.

A woman named Alethea was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer, underwent treatment, and was told the cancer had returned and metastasized throughout her body. She began attending Dispenza’s workshops and practicing his meditations daily. She describes learning to “feel the feeling” of health before her body had any reason to feel healthy. Her medical records show the metastatic breast cancer resolving.

A twenty-four-year-old named James was diagnosed with diffuse midline glioma, a grade 4 brain tumor that carries one of the worst prognoses in oncology. After aggressive chemotherapy and radiotherapy, he was given one to two years to live. He attended a Coherence Healing session at a Dispenza retreat and committed to the daily practice. His story is documented on Dispenza’s site as ongoing transformation.

Ann was told by her oncologists that her stage IV lung cancer had metastasized throughout her body and she had one month to live. She endured seven years of conventional treatment — radiation, chemotherapy, surgery — but the cancer kept returning. When she discovered Dispenza’s work, she began applying the meditation protocols. Her cancer resolved.

These stories are self-reported through Dispenza’s platform, and they carry the caveat that self-selection bias is real — people who heal tell their stories; people who do not heal are less visible. But the sheer volume of testimonials, combined with the growing body of objective measurements, creates a pattern that is increasingly difficult to dismiss as mere placebo or coincidence.

The Coherence Healing Protocol

One of the most radical elements of Dispenza’s advanced workshops is Coherence Healing — a group healing practice where trained meditators direct coherent heart-based intention toward a single individual (the “healee”). The practice runs through a volunteer force called COHERENCE, comprising 180 experienced advanced students from around the world who conduct more than 120 remote healing sessions per week, 365 days a year.

In a year-long study of this practice, 1,218 healees (1,171 humans and 47 animals) received remote coherence healing. Thirty-nine percent reported significant improvement, and an additional five percent reported complete healing — totaling forty-four percent with meaningful positive outcomes.

In collaboration with the HeartMath Institute, Dispenza’s team published findings in EXPLORE, a peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, examining whether emotionally coherent group meditations produce measurable effects beyond the human body. They placed random number generators (RNGs) at retreat sites during fifteen live healing meditations across five retreats. The RNGs showed statistically significant correlations during — and only during — the Coherence Healing sessions, suggesting that collective coherent intention creates measurable effects in the physical environment.

What It Means

The criticism is predictable and partly valid: the studies lack randomized controls, the sample sizes are modest, the self-report data is subject to bias, and the theoretical framework borrows liberally from quantum physics in ways that make physicists uncomfortable. These are real limitations.

But there is also something happening in those rooms that the instruments detect and the stories confirm. When thousands of ordinary people sit together, pull their breath up their spines, shift their attention from particle to wave, generate elevated emotions without external cause, and hold that state for forty-five minutes to an hour — something changes. Brain coherence spikes. Heart fields expand. Gene expression shifts. And sometimes, against all medical expectation, tumors dissolve.

The question is not whether it works for everyone. It does not. The question is whether the phenomena are real enough and repeatable enough to warrant serious scientific attention. The UC San Diego study, published in a Nature portfolio journal with proper methodology and peer review, suggests the answer is yes.

Dispenza often says that the best way to predict the future is to create it — not by manipulating external circumstances but by changing your internal state so fundamentally that your biology has no choice but to follow. Whether you call that supernatural or simply natural-but-forgotten, the data keeps accumulating.

What would change in your life if you treated your inner state not as a reaction to your circumstances, but as the cause of them?