Ever wondered what all the fuss is about with that Joe Dispenza bloke? Or fancy going on one of his extended retreats? Well, this one’s for you!

But it’s also for me! As Dr Joe says, knowledge is the precursor to experience and I want to help all that quantum goodness really sink in. After all, neurons that fire together, wire together!

In this post, I tell you what it was like in the first ever 10-day Dr Joe Dispenza retreat and I’ll scratch the surface of what I learned there on the Riviera Maya, Mexico.

In 2024, I went on two 10-day meditation retreats.

I kicked off the year in India with Vipassana: silent, spartan, and serious. No eye contact, no talking, no gestures — just simple food, solitude, and 11 hours of meditation per day.

I wrapped up the year with the Dr Joe Dispenza retreat experience: an explosion of energy, elevated emotions and deep connection with others, replete with music, dancing, laughing, hugging, and hanging out under palm trees in an all-inclusive Mexican resort.

While they were equally wonderful and transformative, they’re the chalk and cheese of the meditation world.

DOWN THE DR JOE RABBIT HOLE I GO!

I was living in Vietnam during Covid and was slurping away on a bowl of noodles, idly watching YouTube at home when an interview with a certain Dr Joe Dispenza came on; the name rang a bell, but I didn’t know what his thing was, he’s probably just going to tell us how to eat right, sleep, exercise, the usual stuff, I thought.

But he started talking about how to attract the right partner – that to do so, you must become that person that you want to attract. What?! I have to become a six-foot-tall bloke and grow a willy? What on earth does he mean?

He explained that it was all about energy, frequency, vibration. Take kindness, for example. If kindness is a quality we want in a partner, we must embody kindness ourselves; and I don’t mean just helping an old lady cross the road, I mean kindness to ourselves. This puts us in the frequency of kindness, and because like attracts like, we start to magnetise more of that to us, but only if we truly believe that we’re worthy to receive.

I wasn’t looking for a partner, but it made me think: if this is how we attract a partner, surely the same principle can work for everything else in our lives.

And off I scrambled down the Dr Joe rabbit hole, devouring all the podcasts, hanging onto his every word, watching with open-mouthed awe the stories of transformation by people who have healed themselves from ‘incurable’ physical conditions through his work, who have attracted new levels of abundance into their lives. In short, he teaches people how to change, with physical healing very often a by-product.

DR JOE’S STORY

Young Dr Joe was a successful chiropractor who was heavily into yoga, hypnosis, martial arts and the mystics of the far east.

During a triathlon in his early 20s, he was hit by a truck that left him with a shattered spine. Against all the pleas of doctors and loved ones, he decided to forgo surgery and set about healing himself. He embarked on a gruelling routine to reconstruct his spine through mental rehearsal, meditation and by feeling what it would be like to be healed. He vowed that if he succeeded, he would devote his life to exploring the mind-body connection and teaching others to heal.

He was up and about and pain-free within 9 weeks and was back to business as usual in 12. He began studying spontaneous remissions and what makes people bounce back from deathbed to perfect health, and he realised it’s all down to one thing: change. This remarkable recovery and the insights that followed are what feed into this formula that he shares with the world today.

WHAT’S DR JOE’S FORMULA?

Dr Joe’s work combines neuroscience, quantum physics and epigenetics to teach people how to rewire their brains, transform their lives, and achieve healing through meditation, mental rehearsal, and to change their mindset through deep presence and awareness.

He draws on ancient yogic traditions —he was deeply influenced by Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda—but the way he presents it and packages it up into a modern-day formula is what creates his uniqueness. He steers clear of lexicon such as chakras, third eye and kundalini, but it’s clear that his faith, his own mystical experiences and his healing have profoundly shaped his teachings.

I’d always been oblivious to the world of quantum physics. I mean, that’s for the science geeks. But the way Dr Joe explains it makes it all so relatable; I could see how ancient spiritual traditions were already pointing to what we now call quantum physics.

As he says, ‘Science is the contemporary language of mysticism’. Now, that crossroads between science and spirituality has become my favourite place to hang out.

MY MUCH-ANTICIPATED FIRST DR JOE DISPENZA RETREAT

Fast forward a few years and I’m in the huge ballroom of the Barceló Riviera Maya, Mexico, along with 2,300 merry souls at Dr Joe Dispenza’s first ever 10-day event. With purple neon lighting, pulsating music and captivating visuals on huge screens, it felt kind of sci-fi, cosmic, like we were all sitting in a big intergalactic spaceship, all geared up to head into the unknown, to embrace the mystical.

Intoxicating of the best kind, it was named One Mind-One Heart in celebration of the profound unity and oneness that’s possible when such a large group brings their hearts and minds into coherence.

Dr Joe’s work is all about feeling elevated emotions, and it was super easy to feel them there on the Mexican coast.

OPENING NIGHT: ALL WE KNOW IS… THAT WE DON’T KNOW MUCH

It kicked off at 7pm on a Sunday night. I found myself sitting next to Katharine, and we made an instant connection, chatting about our nomadic lives. At these retreats you meet the most inspiring of people, and Katharine is one of them for me. We checked in on each other over the next ten days, meeting for lunches by the azure water and even meeting in the dark of 5am to do our own beach meditation before the day began.

Dr Joe dropped us right in at the deep end, throwing some jaw-dropping, profound chunks of information at us that he would revisit again and again throughout the week in different ways

He told us that the probability that we are perceiving reality is nearly zero. Since 99.9999999999999% of every atom is space filled with infinite possibilities and information, we think we’re seeing the full picture of reality, but we’re only perceiving a mere sliver —less than 1%. The human eye can only detect a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, that made visible through light, yet within that vast, invisible space exists the unified field, a realm of infinite possibilities. Mind boggling, to say the least.

But we can tap into that other reality. If all our attention/energy is placed on the material, on this 1%, then we are living in a limited way. We can’t get this information from the senses, we have to take our attention off our body. We have to focus on ALL THE NOTHING….

So if we want to create something in our lives, we must trust the unknown, let go of our old beliefs and stories, and focus on the blackness of the empty space to become nothing but pure consciousness.

THE DAILY GROOVE

We often reconvened in the ballroom at 6am, and other days we headed to the beach for 6:45am to do the walking meditations, and there was one 4am start. The days unfolded with alternating lectures and meditations, two 90-minute breaks and two 30-minute breaks. We danced to uplifting music before new sessions started, the group’s high vibration palpable. We ended around 7pm each night.

We were divided into groups, and each group would sit in a different space of the ballroom each day and be assigned a different restaurant for breakfast and lunch each day. For dinner you could book a spot one of the resort’s restaurants, but sometimes I’d just have one meal; at breaktimes there are tables laden with fruit and cakes and other treats. There’s delicious food everywhere. Mealtimes are a great time to connect. You can go and sit next to anyone and they’d welcome you onto their table, zero awkwardness. There’s time for a dip in the Caribbean, a nap. Days are long and you learn a lot of information in addition to meditating, but there was more free time than I expected. We also had the second Sunday afternoon and some of Monday morning off.

LOVE, EVERYWHERE

The lectures are highly entertaining. Dr Joe has a ridiculous amount of energy, enthusiasm and he’s a hilarious storyteller, determined for us to get 100% out of the experience. After teaching something, he has us turn to the person next to us and explain it to them. This was not only a great chance to assimilate the work, but also a moment of connection. Some 75% of the attendees had been to retreats before, and many told me they had been to over 10!

Dr Joe always highlights the significance of community and shared intention in the process of transformation. Connecting with like-minded individuals can create a powerful energetic field that enhances collective growth and healing.

Conversations arise effortlessly and we were all enveloped in this non-judgemental space of safety, love and openness. I connected with people in the bathroom queue, at mealtimes, at the buffet table, walking to the ballroom. Imagine if regular life were like that. We represented 83 countries, so it was fascinating to connect.

“Group meditation is like a castle which protects the new spiritual aspirants as well as the veteran meditators. Meditating together increases the degree of Self-realization of each member of the group, by the law of invisible vibratory exchange of spiritual magnetism.”
— Paramahansa Yogananda

After one meditation, I felt strong electricity coming out of my hands coupled with this intense peacefulness and light. I walked out of the ballroom as if on air. A woman in the bathroom queue turned to me to say hi and said, “Whoa, that one was intense for you, wasn’t it?” followed by a long hug. Then another lady grabbed my hands and held them, grounding me back. We could really feel and see each other. This notion of us all being connected is no joke.

In such a caring and connected community, I felt like I was in a bubble of love and kindness for the entire 10 days. And this is precisely why people go – this is the energy of transformation, of healing. It’s no wonder the whole group starts synchronising and cohering, signalling the same genes and the same proteins by the end of the event, and leaving with an upgraded immune system. Studies on retreat participants’ lengthened telomeres suggest that just one of these week-long events can add a year to your life; love is that good for you. I felt like I had oxytocin oozing out of my pores.

The quantum journey to Oneness a la Dr Joe involves taking your attention to No-thing, No-One, No-Where, in No-Time. Yeah, you really had to have been there. He returned to this image countless times a day. 

MEDITATION MAGIC

When I first started doing Dr Joe’s meditations, I was thrown off by his voice. You usually associate guided meditations with gentle, relaxing tones but Dr Joe takes another approach. He draws out words like ‘SPAAAAAACE’, sounding robotic and can get a bit shouty at times. He does this deliberately though; apparently it helps move us into slower brainwave states, so there’s a reason behind the robot, and now I find his voice very anchoring, even more so after the retreat because there I really learned what a loving energy he has. We did 3 meditations per day on average, of varying lengths. They took the form of walking, sitting and lying down. Here’s a little about some of them:

WALKING MEDITATIONS

We did the walking meditations on the beach and started facing the sea at 6.45am in the dark with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, a magical sunrise was unfolding before us. The whole point of the walking meditations is to truly embody your future self and walk in a trance-like state into that new life.

 At first, I felt kind of weird, like I was just pretending – but a popular Dr Joeism is:

“Your body doesn’t know the difference between a real-life experience or that created by thought alone”.

Now that’s the indispenzable golden nugget. See what I did there…Ha.

You’d think we’d collide with each other along that narrow strip of beach, but somehow we managed to seamlessly glide past each other. There was so much coherence in the group that we were a flow of harmonious energy.

However, in my first walking meditation, I sidestepped to let someone past and ended up about an inch away from Dr Joe’s face. He hangs out among the masses in a baseball cap watching people have their moments. I got the fright of my life, a bit starstruck, but fake nonchalantly tried to waltz back into my new life unscathed, like nothing had happened.

PINEAL GLAND MEDITATION

One morning we had to be in the ballroom at 4am for the famous pineal gland meditation – it’s the golden hour for the pineal gland because of the high levels of melatonin, so it’s your best shot in the day to meet the mystical.

What a mega meditation fiesta! Seated, laying down, doing his signature breathwork, entranced by swirling kaleidoscopes and images of DMT molecules. At the end, a communal gasp filled the room as Dr Joe told us it was 9:15am. We’d been on that journey for 5+ hours, and later we remarked how we felt vibrant and not tired at all. If I’d woken up at 3:15am on a normal day, I’d be useless by mid-afternoon. The energy we generated among us was potent, uplifting. It carried us through the long days on a happy wave of love.

OTHER DIMENSIONS

Towards the end of the retreat, when we were all highly suggestible and open, Dr Joe started teaching us some brand new material about dimensions. He taught us how to tune into a parallel version of ourselves in order to get help with something that this current version of ourselves might be struggling with. My mind was blown open.

THE MEI-LAN SURPRISE

The angelic voice of singer Mei-Lan Maurits is featured on some of Dr Joe’s meditations. He announced that we would be treated to a live performance in some meditations. This was an unprecedented retreat treat! She has a voice that really lifts and stirs the emotions; it was like a harmonious meditation jam with her ethereal voice swirling around Dr Joe’s deep trademark tones. They did the Changing Boxes meditation live. This is when you place your attention and energy on a reality where a problem you have doesn’t exist, and your body follows your mind right to that new future. It was such a powerful moment.

They also did this Blooming Heart meditation that brings our hearts and brains into coherence. I get goosebumps watching this as I’m transported back to the charged energy of the ballroom:

HEART & BRAIN COHERENCE

Bringing your heart and brain into coherence is one of the pillars in Dr Joe’s formula. But what does mean and how do you achieve it?

Coherence means harmoniously aligning the heart and brain — when both systems are in sync physiologically and energetically.

When you reach this state, your heart rhythm becomes smooth and ordered while your brainwaves shift into balanced, calm patterns. Your heart and brain start communicating. In Dr Joe’s work, this partnership of heart and brain is one of the ways to tap into the quantum field, boosting synchronicities, intuition, and elevated emotions. The brain thinks, but the heart knows. Heart and brain coherence really brings clarity.

Organisations like the HeartMath Institute, which Dr Joe often references, have studied this extensively.

“When we’re engaged with our hearts, the mind slows down and our thoughts become more rational and focused.”
— Doc Childre, The HeartMath Solution

Ancient cultures, such as the Egyptians, saw the heart (ib) as the seat of emotion, thought, intention, and morality, placing more attention on it than on the brain. Modern science tells us that the heart has its own neural networks and electromagnetic field, so it’s through the magnetism of the heart that we bring our intentions to fruition. When we radiate emotions from this “heart bridge” — they become supercharged, and ripple out more powerfully into the energy field from this high-frequency centre.

Many of Dr Joe’s meditations guide us through a heart-brain coherence practice at the start. One way is through box breathing (inhale for a count of 4, retain at the top for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 4, retain at the bottom for a count of 4) while focusing on your heart space, and relaxing into it and feeling an elevated emotion.

GETTING INTO THE QUANTUM

Dr Joe talks a whole lot about all the nothing.

He teaches us that once we enter heart-brain coherence and begin sensing the space around us—relaxing the body—we naturally slow our brain waves into alpha or theta. This brings us to the doorway of the quantum field.

From here, this is where all the nothing comes in. We focus on the blackness, the void, all the nothiiiiiing! This means withdrawing our attention from everything material: no-thing, no-one, no-where, and no-time, becoming aware only of the energy in that ‘empty’ space. We step into the field of pure potential—the unknown, where all transformation begins. It’s also the moment we step out of our identity—beyond the stories, the illness, the past, the limitations. It’s not easy to focus on nothing, especially when my mind kept leaping forward to what buffet treats I’d stuff my face with and if I’d go for a swim or a nap in my break. There’s always something when all you want is nothing.

Anyway, once we get in that floaty headspace, with the analytical mind finally out of the way, we get our thoughts aligned with our intentions. The brain sends an electrical signal into the field through a thought. Then the heart becomes the magnet, drawing the experience to us through elevated emotion. The quantum field doesn’t respond to what we want; it responds to who we are being—the emotions we radiate. So when you’re sitting in the void and you bring up gratitude for healing already done, love for life or the unknown, joy as if you’re already free, wholeness, abundance, or trust, you’re tuning into a frequency that matches the future you wish to create. And finally, we let go. Surrender is the secret sauce.

ERUPTIONS OF BLISS

Dr Joe’s breathing technique stems from kundalini yoga and is called ‘Moving the Mind out of the Body’. It’s very common for people to have brain-gasms when the energy hits the pineal gland. Howls and loud, blissful sighs. I’m still chasing my brain-gasm, but I feel a lot of wavy energy in my brain when I do it, and it makes me feel all fuzzy and relaxes my body for meditation.

It’s not just by doing the breath that folk get vocal. During the meditations there were yells and screams erupting. It was my first experience of this, so I found them distracting and pretty funny. I felt like it was taking me away from my own inner experience, and I often went into comparison mode, wondering why I wasn’t having the same moments.

I almost shot out of my seat with a jolt when a lady next to me let out a deafening squeal of sheer delight. But I soon learned to celebrate the sonority, because those people right there next to me are having an encounter with the mystical; they are healing. Let them have their moment, and why not bask in their energy, and enjoy the renewed confirmation of what’s possible with the work.

COHERENCE HEALING

Many people battling acute health conditions sign up for a coherence healing at the event. Of course, healing can come at any time of the event, but coherence healings give us the chance to really channel our loving energy to those who really need it.

They take place in groups of 8 healers who surround the healee, lying down in the middle of them. We walk into the ballroom with our hands on our hearts; it’s such an emotional moment and just writing this brings tears to my eyes as I recall the amount of love generated.

Many healings take place during coherence healings, and not just for the healees, but also the healers. There are testimonials of people who were disappointed to not be selected as healees, but got their healings anyway through giving, proving that to give is to receive.

Dr Joe guides us through an initial heart-opening meditation. We then rub our hands together and feel the love in our hearts radiating outwards between our hands. We then turn our hands slowly into the energetic field of the person beneath us. The energy was so strong and vibrant that I could feel it beneath my hands, like it was actual solid matter. My arms shook up and down as we filled the field of the person with pure unconditional love, literally changing the information in their field. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever been part of.

The 10-day format ensured that we all got the chance to be healees, something never orchestrated before at an event. I shook so much during my healing; I felt a lot of full-body quivers and an ocean of love around me. Afterwards, one of my healers told me she saw cascades of light flowing towards me from above. She observed the whole ballroom despite wearing an eye covering, and said it was like we were all inside a big shoebox, with interdimensional beings above the shoebox sending bright beams of light down into my solar plexus area….

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

Dr Joe partners with top universities to conduct research into the effects of meditation on EVERYTHING. At this event I took part in a research study led by the amazing Dr Hemel of UC San Diego on the effects of meditation on the microbiome, blood, physiology, and human language. We gave samples, wore health trackers, and recorded daily video reflections.

When he first heard about Dr Joe’s work, Hemel was the biggest sceptic of all. When he heard that people were curing themselves of cancer at a 7-day event, he was like, Yeah, right. Whatever. He couldn’t get his scientific head around the testimonials he was witnessing. After much persuasion to study some blood samples from the event, he got fully on board, leaving his scepticism behind, doing the meditations himself and experiencing his own transformation. More details in https://sourcethefilm.org/.

He came on stage a few times to tell us all kinds of wild findings from his research:

For example, after taking blood samples from people before and after a week-long event, they found that people who had been meditating for a while had higher levels of this superhero protein in their blood called SERPINA5, which can block certain enzymes that viruses (like the one that causes COVID-19) use to get into our cells.

They then tested this meditator blood against a fake virus that acts like COVID-19. The meditator blood helped stop the fake virus from getting into human lung cells.

We saw videos of how navy seals who have overcome acute PTSD with Dr Joe’s work, particularly by using his breathing technique. And the parents of autistic children who have seen profound changes in their kids’ behaviour, sleeping habits and learning abilities through a course of REMOTE coherence healings!

The microbiome gets an upgrade, the whole body comes into balance. It’s not just meditating, it’s creating. It’s feeling elevated emotions and pairing them with a clear intention, moving from survival to creation. 

PEOPLE HEAL THEMSELVES THROUGH HIS WORK: BUT HOW…?!

“The future medicine will be the medicine of frequencies” – Einstein

When I try to explain the miraculous healings of people doing Dr Joe’s work, people are like, yeah…right…..Anyway, cup of tea?

YOUR THOUGHTS CAN MAKE YOU WELL

We all have an incredible inner pharmacy, but modern life has buried this ancient wisdom under a pile of symptom-burying pills, prescriptions, and scary diagnoses. Not that I’m against modern medicine, but this is about realising that we’re more powerful than we are led to believe and that meditation can also be your medication.

If every thought you think creates a corresponding chemical, when you’re stressed and caught up in anxious, looping thoughts, your body starts churning out stress hormones, knocking your body out of balance. When you’re reliving past dramas with your ex (like me in Vipassana!), your body thinks it’s back there, so pumps out a fresh batch of those chemicals, keeping your body emotionally stuck in the past.

But the good news is that it works in reverse. If you replace catastrophising, spiralling thoughts of worst-case scenarios with best-case scenarios, you trigger the emotions that release the corresponding chemicals, and you can literally think and feel yourself well.

If we ask ourselves, what would it feel like to have all our needs met?

By practising feeling high-vibrational emotions such as love, joy, gratitude or peace, this signals the nervous system that the desired future has already happened. This helps us rewire neural pathways, elevate energy levels, and shift from survival to creation.

By feeling the emotions of your future, you align with that all-needs-met version of you that already exists in the quantum, the space of infinite possibilities, thereby drawing it to you through the magnetism of your emotions and bringing your body back into balance.

FINAL REFLECTIONS

I saw people with MS stand up from their wheelchairs and walk down the beach or dance in the ballroom. A woman stood on stage and told us how she’d grown back 10 cm of her rectum that was accidentally removed. She literally grew back a brand new rectum. I mean, I was only joking when I said about growing a willy, but now this has got me thinking… HA! 

Sometimes when you’re so excited about something, when it finally comes round it can feel like a let-down, an anti-climax. This was certainly not the case with a Dr Joe Dispenza retreat. It wasn’t just the enlightening teaching, mystical moments and sublime location that made it so special, but the community of people there – I met the kindest, most supportive, approachable and non-judgemental of people there from all over the world.

Just like I realised during Vipassana, it’s not what happens to us that creates suffering, but how we react to them and for how long.  Blame, resentment, guilt and shame keep us stuck in the past, but Dr Joe teaches us that we are the creators of our own lives. And as the common denominator of every spiritual practice is pure presence, we can only create in the stillness of the generous present moment. Being present is always key, always transformative.

My scope of belief was expanded, my perception of reality forever shifted. If a few years ago you’d told me you’d seen blue beings walking around a Mexican hotel ballroom, I’d have scoffed and thought you needed your head checked. Now I believe in everything. Blue interdimensional beings, angels, Father fucking Christmas… The event made me realise that there is an ever-present benevolent force surrounding us, and we only need to be aware and tune into it, to make it real in our lives.

https://pages.drjoedispenza.com/begin-your-journey/