Deepak Chopra: The Power Within

How can we bring health and happiness into our lives without altering our true self?

By discovering the true self! Suffering is caused by identifying with illusions, conditioning, habits, and beliefs that we incorporate into our mind and body. The negative ones damage us both physically and mentally. In the whole systems approach I write about in The Healing Self, we use expanded awareness to get at the deeper part of the mind, where the true self is capable of healing us.

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Is there an effective way of managing stress?

Yes, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that stress isn’t taken seriously enough by people in their everyday lives. The reality is that urban dwellers are in overdrive, as far as the nervous system is concerned. Everyone needs to have some quiet time every day. Everyone needs that ‘alone’ time, exposure to nature, good sleep, and some activity. The ideal of working hard, going to the gym, and constantly striving for goals and deadlines overlooks how stressful such a regimen is. How many people bother to get eight hours of good sleep every night? Too few, and yet this is one of the top ways to fight stress. Meditation is another one, and of course a fulfilling job and loving relationships. None of this is a mystery.

How can self-realisation heal?

Self-realisation is just another term for expanded awareness. Much of our suffering and illness involves constricted awareness, which puts us into denial, self-judgment, tolerating stress, feeling unhappy, and so on. Escaping those conditions is a broad form of healing, even before we start talking about spirituality and enlightenment. Expanded awareness should be everyone’s everyday goal, via meditation, to which can be added hatha yoga and various contemplative practices, both Eastern and Western.

How can alternative therapies help in alleviating a disease or pain?

The most important help from traditional, alternative, and integrative modes of healing is to improve the body’s healing response. Doctors don’t heal. They aid nature in the process of healing built into every cell. We now know that serious chronic diseases, including heart disease and probably most cancers, begin years and even decades before the symptoms begin to show. A healing lifestyle is your best shot at achieving immunity and fending off disease of every type. Such a lifestyle is why I wrote The Healing Self with my co-author, the noted Harvard geneticist Rudolf Tanzi.

Can we change the way we are built or is how our brain programmed?

You are changing your brain with every experience, as you have since birth. Huge brain changes occur in addition to the features we assume are permanent or programmed. The secret is to consciously change brain function in a positive direction. This is accomplished by meditation and yoga, but because mind and body function as one process, all choices that feel positive enhance brain activity, while all choices that feel negative are potentially damaging and never healing.

How can we take help of our powerful mind to not only get by at office, but also have a fulfilling career?

There are two projects that merge with one another. First, the mind must be used to address stress at work, sincerely making plans to stop tolerating the kind of lowlevel everyday stress that is ve damaging.

Workers tend to put up with such stress, not knowing how harmful it actually is. The second project is to set a personal vision for oneself that truly expresses the highest goals in one’s life. Great achievement is reached by employing deep intentions that express the true self.

Is there a way to create a workplace without friction and jealousy?

I have my doubts, because once the workplace is infected with such things psychologically, pulling back would require getting rid of some people, rehabilitating others, and convincing management that the whole project is worthwhile. The best advice is to find a workplace that feels positive and to leave a workplace that doesn’t. We have to vote with our feet!

Is aligning mind, body and soul possible?

They are already aligned, perfectly and naturally. You’d quickly perish if your brain were not in constant communication with every cell, regulating every vital physical process. It’s in the expansion of consciousness that we add voluntary elements — love, meaning, purpose, spiritual awakening, and so on. So, the project in the life of a seeker is to undo the obstacles that keep awareness imprisoned and constricted, while also spending some time and effort in pursuit of a higher vision.

How can families bring their members closer, even as we live in a digital world?

I imagine that physical closeness is probably bound to be on a steady decline. This started long ago, as you can read in earlier generations that lamented central heating because it took the family away from the fireplace. What is needed is emotional closeness — that’s what I focus on. In an incidental way it’s probably good to make a rule that everyone joins at the dinner table, but perhaps this is already a habit in France?

How can we teach children about the importance of positive thoughts?

In reality I think that children have positive thoughts quite naturally—we tend to look back on childhood as a positive time of life unless there is unhappiness in the family. The trick is to make children feel safe, loved, and valued. Then their positive thoughts have a basis that can last for a lifetime.

From the June–July 2018 issue of L’Officiel India.