Ask Deepak: Cremation

Question:

 I am 70 years old…Thinking more now of mortality…Do you think that cremation is acceptable in the eyes of God?

 

Response:

In India, as you might know, cremation isn’t just acceptable, it is the norm. So I assume by asking me if God is okay with it, you are seeking additional assurance that cremation won’t disqualify you from the Christian Resurrection. I can’t help you on the Christian theological aspects  of your question, but on the general sense of whether God is okay with cremation, I’m going to go out on a limb and say “yes.”

Love,

Deepak

Ask Deepak: Head Turning in Meditation

Question: 

When I meditate twice a day, my head always turns to the left. I don’t do this intentionally; I just suddenly realize my head is turned. It happens almost every time for a number of years now. I have been meditating 40+ years. Can you explain why this happens? 

 

Response:

The muscles and other soft tissue in your neck has stored some old trauma and now as it is being released in meditation, the muscles are contracting and expanding as a way to facilitate that release. Don’t pay it any attention. It will eventually go away when the old trauma has healed.

Love,

Deepak

Ask Deepak: Recognizing Intuition

Question:

 Hi Deepak, Please tell me how to recognize my intuition. I have thoughts, fears, and desires, but I’m at a loss. What is intuition and how do I know what it is enough to trust it?

 

Response:

Reliable intuition should come from a very quiet comfortable feeling inside, not an agitated, excited place. Fear and desire can cloud one’s intuition. If you quiet your mind and come to that stillness within that is beyond fear or desire, you will find your source of pure intuition.

Love,

Deepak

What Happened to Emotional Intelligence?

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

For many younger people, the COVID virus outbreak will bring their first experience of fear and anxiety as a pervasive mood. Anxiety is difficult for everyone, but in the larger scheme, we need to ask: What happened to emotional intelligence? The phrase became popular for a while, but that was almost a generation ago. Right now, emotional intelligence seems to be forgotten, or to put it another way, it is unknown to most people.

Social forces can drive you to feeling anxious; politics stokes anger; personal threats to your well-being can lead to worry and depression. But none of these forces has a positive effect in giving you tools to ward off anxiety, anger, and depression. Raising your emotional IQ is something each person must confront on their own. Let’s focus on anxiety, which the current crisis has stoked more than any other negative emotion (although anger over politics runs a close second).

I believe that freeing yourself from fear and anxiety is possible. More than that, you can learn how to be free of fear long after the COVID crisis has passed.
The key is to cultivate emotional intelligence. The term might go in and out of fashion, but the value of emotional intelligence never changes, and when you focus on it, you will achieve something worthwhile for life. Here are six principles to guide you through the process.

  • Commit to never complaining, criticizing, or playing the victim.
  • Imagine a creative, positive future for yourself.
  • Don’t regret the past. It no longer exists.
  • Be present in every situation as it occurs.
  • Be independent of other people’s criticism or approval.
  • Be responsive to feedback.

It is fair to say that hardly anyone hits upon these principles by trial and error or through experience of life. A person can live a long time without paying attention to emotional intelligence, and among men, the word “emotion” too often connotes something undesirable, as if showing emotional sensitivity is a sign of weakness.

But emotional intelligence is gender-neutral. The fact that humans can observe their emotions is a remarkable trait, and once you begin to observe your own emotions, you can counter the power of an unwanted emotion like fear and anxiety. Whether we admit it or not, emotions fascinate us, as Hollywood well knows. Empathizing with emotions onscreen is easy and pleasurable, but we are too attached to our own emotions, and it takes very little experience of anxiety, humiliation, rejection, and failure to train us to avoid the minefield of emotions in general.

So it’s worth saying that developing emotional intelligence isn’t scary or difficult. All you need to do is notice and pay attention. By pausing and standing back a little, you can observe how you are reacting at any given moment. You can even turn the six principles into questions posed to yourself.

  • Am I complaining, criticizing, or playing the victim?
  • Do I see my future in a creative, positive way?
  • Am I pointlessly reliving the past?
  • Do I see what’s going on right now?
  • Am I afraid of someone else’s criticism or craving their approval?
  • Am I listening to what other people are trying to tell me?

These are not mysterious or metaphysical questions. We can pause to ask them any time we want, and we should. But we are blocked by old conditioning and the habit of feeling uneasy about our emotions. There is a great deal of social pressure to behave with very low emotional intelligence, a kind of dumbing down on the feeling level. As a result, we act in self-defeating ways. To give a few examples,

  • We repeat the same reactions in most situations.
  • We imitate how others behave, starting with our family.
  • We act on impulse without a second thought.
  • We don’t really see how others are reacting to us.
  • We let negative emotions like fear, anger, envy, and resentment have their way.
  • We easily go into denial and seek outside distractions.

A whole way of life is implied in these examples, and when collective fear mounts, as it is right now, people often have little or no idea how to escape. Denial and distraction simply become more intensified, and playing the victim is more tempting than usual. Alternatively, we tell ourselves that we need to stay in control more than ever. But what is needed isn’t emotional self-control but emotional resilience.

Resilience is the most important single aspect of emotional intelligence. You allow your emotions to rise and fall naturally, without trying to stop or control them. Once an emotion has passed, you feel better, and you are able to return to a state of peace and calm. The opposite of emotional resilience is seen when people are stiff, reserved, bottled up inside, censorious, aloof, proud, or remote. In all of these cases past experience has made certain emotions unacceptable. The only way to deal with them is through avoidance. One is reminded of the adage that trees can be blown over by a storm while grasses bend without breaking.

Because the mind by nature is restful, alert, quiet, and at peace, that state of balance is the basis for developing emotional intelligence. You need the experience of balance in order to return to it at will. The experience comes naturally to everyone unless it is thrown off by stress and crisis. Then it takes a bit of intervention on our part, through meditation preferably. Meditation no only returns the mind to its balanced state, but it also allows you to observe what is happening, to experience it directly, and to identify with the quiet state of mind.

Ultimately, this is how fear can be escaped permanently. Meanwhile, everyone can benefit from lessening the anxiety being experienced all around us. Emotional intelligence goes a very long way to expanding your awareness and making you free of stress and anxiety right now.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books) helps us to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and a joyful life. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

Where True Spirituality Begins

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Many people still view difficult times as a spiritual challenge. The numbers are less than in the distant past, when catastrophes, tragedies, setbacks, and failures were seen in religious terms. An Old Testament plague was a sign of God’s wrath, but in modern secular society medical science gives a different explanation, based on research data and the rise of the scientific worldview.

And yet millions of people would find in the COVID-19 pandemic a test of faith and perhaps even a test for whether God is paying attention to human suffering. I’d like to offer a different viewpoint—difficult times can motivate you to place a higher value on your spiritual life. Out of confusion and conflict, there is an inner journey to be made. This has been true for centuries, and modern times don’t erase the possibility.

What modern times do, however, is diminish the solace of traditional religion. The waning of organized faiths has been happening during the entire postwar era, more than two generations. Without the safety net of religion (which often offered no safety at all), the inner journey has become a do-it-yourself project. So where does it begin? How do you know you are actually on the path? What can you expect to happen in your life?

The questions are many, and the answers are slippery. Religions have the advantage that one size fits all. By contrast, an individual slant on spirituality is as unique as a person’s life story, which is filled with beliefs and expectations shared by no one else. But I think there is a universal experience that unites every genuine act of spiritual exploration. It is the experience of meeting yourself for the first time.

Everyone has more than oneself, and several versions are not what I’m referring to. You have a social self that you show to others. You have a self-image based on your ego-personality. You have a private self that harbors your fears, wishes, doubts, and dreams. For countless people, life consists of juggling the interests of these separate selves. A host of experiences springs from this activity, but this must be set aside. The inner journey doesn’t concern these different selves, which are all constructed by the mind.

The self you must meet on the spiritual journey is a kind of silent companion who has been with you all your life. Sometimes I think of it as the true self; it has also been called the witness. Names are not as useful as recognizing the experience itself, because that experience forms the foundation for all other spiritual experiences. To have the experience, simply be yourself, in a state of simple awareness.

It is easy to show that you have been having this experience all your life. It amounts to your basic sense of self. Something has remained constant despite the ups and downs of your life story, and your sense of self is as good a name as any. The reason that this basic experience hasn’t blossomed into a full-blown, satisfying spirituality is twofold. You haven’t noticed it or given it much value. In other words, it has been an unconscious experience.

If you consider the other versions of the self, the mind-made ones, they promise a reward, and so we chase after the promise. The social self promises acceptance, belonging, bonding with others, being on teams at work and play, and so on. Anything that involves a group, from a family to a corporation, nation, or tribe is the arena of the social self.

The next self, based on your ego-personality, is individualized. It promises all the rewards you can enjoy by getting what you want. Personal desires and ambitions drive everyone from the ego level. Everyone has a self-image they need to protect, so the ego provides a very full agenda between getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want.

The private self is more ambiguous. Here you conduct an internal dialogue with yourself that can be very dark or very bright or everything in between. No one eavesdrops on the private self. You relate to it alone. This can be terrifying if you are prone to anxiety and depression. It can be rewarding if you are a creative artist finding inspiration inside yourself.

By contrast, the true self seems to promise nothing. This is a major reason for overlooking it and giving it very little value. The insight that every wisdom tradition offers serves as a guide here. Your sense of self brings you close to the origin of consciousness. It is the only valid starting point for journeying to the source itself. At the source, you discover something the mind cannot make: a flow of creative intelligence. This is consciousness transforming itself from infinite possibilities into everything most valued in human existence: love, compassion, beauty, truth, empathy, wisdom creativity, devotion, the presence of the divine, and personal evolution.

When the flow of creative intelligence enters your awareness, it enters through these values. They are not mind-made. They are innate in human awareness. No matter how primitive the ancient world might look to us in the modern world, having no electricity, smartphones, satellites, and television, every culture had the same sense of human potential as unlimited—such was the vision of all wisdom traditions. Yet no matter how exalted the achievements of the human mind, a single silent source was present.

All you need for a rewarding spiritual life is to meet yourself inside and allow your awareness to settle into its simplest state. This is true meditation. What happens next is the journey itself, because simple awareness is how everything is created out of nothing. Your sense of self has no content in terms of ideas, sensations, feelings, etc. From the mind’s viewpoint, if you have no thoughts running through your head, there is nothing.

But the mind has made a mistake. This nothing is the basic “stuff” of creation; it is the threshold for everything the mind can conceive or create. When the ancient rishis of India declared, “I am that, thou art That, and all this is That,” they meant “that” to be pure awareness. One modern spiritual teacher put it very simply: “Everything the mind makes is like the products of baking, all the things that can be made flour. I am none of those things. I am the flour.”

Yet however you express it in words, the fundamental experience that ignites the spiritual journey comes down to one thing: meeting yourself. It guarantees that spirituality is open to everyone, at all times, under any circumstance.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books) helps us to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and a joyful life. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com