The Planetary Biome: A New Theory of Life and Survival

By Deepak Chopra™ MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

The global pandemic has disrupted everything we call normal life. The disruption has been so catastrophic that there is fear among experts that this is only a “starter pandemic.” COVID is less infectious than the measles and less fatal than SARS. Instead of using this fact to stoke fear, we can do a great deal to heed COVID’s wakeup call.

A new way of looking at life itself holds out hope and optimism, because the popular image of deadly viruses assaulting humans like microscopic aliens is incorrect. Microbes are the very basis of life. We interact with them constantly, and much more than 99% of the time life is enhanced. Every advanced life form, including us, has microbial DNA woven into its own genome. A vast colony of bacteria known as the microbiome together with viruses (the virome) and fungi (the mycobiome) that inhabit every animal’s digestive tract, and when it comes to mammals, the microbiome not only makes digestion possible, but it connects us to the planetary biome—the totality of viruses, bacteria, and fungi that truly rules the earth.

It is a very benign rule. Look around at the astonishing diversity of life that evolution has produced. Evolution in higher life forms is the visible outcome of activity in the planetary biome. To keep the creation of new life beneficial, as it has been for billions of years, the first lesson of the new model is to realize that we are life itself. Our actions affect Nature directly in ways that either enhance life or lead it into destructive patterns.

If we look at COVID as a response, or even a message from the planetary biome, what is the message about? It is about disruption and imbalance. The microbial world responds quickly, at times instantly, to aberrant conditions. Fortunately, it can also respond quickly to rebalance itself, since balance is the natural tendency of every level of life.

Human beings are responsible for imbalance and disruption in many ways, most of them the product of modern life. We can begin with viruses. The earth has a global virome, which is currently being mapped at Stanford. This Earth database, once completed, which also allow us to identity the viruses in the human virome.

As in the human virome (and the microbiome and mycobiome), there can be dysbiosis, when one microbe goes out of balance and becomes opportunistic, amplifying itself at the expense of others. On a larger scale, humans, among all mammalian species, are being opportunistic as we remove forests and wetlands and pollute the land and oceans, leading to an unprecedented rate of extinction of species.

The novel COVID virus was most likely introduced into humans from other mammals as we insist on eating food from species that are too close to our genetic makeup (a notorious example being China’s so-called wet markets). By design in our evolution, the human microbiome prefers plants (our teeth, stomach acid, colon structure, and our need for plant fiber to feed our gut microbiome all support this conclusion).

The consumption of animals, especially mammalian species that are genetically more similar to humans, leads to putrefaction and microbial dysbiosis. As we make ourselves sick, we also propagate the production of opportunistic bacteria that disrupt the earth’s microbiome. Through the same meat diet we also propagate viruses and fungi that disrupt the earth’s virome and mycobiome. Our disruption extends to inducing and accelerating new mutations across all species on Earth with increasing levels of pollution at the chemical, electromagnetic, and radioactive levels.

As essential as electricity is to modern life, our pollution-generating activities accelerate mutation in ourselves as well as in life forms below us. We, and the planet as a whole, are healthiest when we create maximal evolutionary and genetic distance in our food chains. “Genetic distancing” is now needed more than ever. Otherwise, our many activities that pollute the earth first accelerate the introduction of new mutations in viruses and bacteria in ourselves and in other mammals (we aren’t the only species susceptible to COVID, for example). Then we eat these other mammals and disrupt our own microbiomes with new infections, some of which are potentially fatal.

The message from the pandemic won’t be received immediately or completely understood and accepted. But hope arises because the planetary biome is the true foundation of life and the ecology that entangles all living things. Humans are the pivot point, now and in the future. We are the mirror of the earth and of life itself. A conscious alliance with the evolutionary gifts of the biome opens the way for a future free of pandemics and many disorders that can be treated from the microbial level on up to cells, tissues, and the whole person. The potential in medicine alone is enormous. What we need to do now is to take this new model seriously and to learn how best of live as part of the planetary biome.

 

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 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, Total Meditation (Harmony Book, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com
Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi is the Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Vice-Chair of Neurology and Co-Director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi has discovered numerous Alzheimer’s disease genes, including the first one, and is developing new Alzheimer’s therapies using human mini-brains pioneered in his laboratory. Dr. Tanzi has published 600 research papers, received numerous awards and was on the 2015 TIME100 Most Influential People in the World list. He has also co-authored several books, including “Decoding Darkness” and three bestsellers with Deepak Chopra: “Super Brain”, “Super Genes”, and “The Healing Self”. In his spare time, he plays keyboards with guitarist, Joe Perry of Aerosmith and other musicians.

How to Make Your Meditations Effortless

By Deepak Chopra,TM MD

 

Meditation has a built-in problem that needs solving, the problem of noncompliance. Countless people have taken up the practice, motivated by the benefits of meditation supported by literally thousands of studies. The first few sessions go well, which is encouraging, but it is only a matter of time before meditation becomes one more thing we don’t have time for.

Letting your meditation drop away seems to affect every kind of practice, no matter how simple, including mindfulness, mantra meditation, Buddhist Vipassana, and so on. Even sitting for 10 minutes following your breath, which is the simplest meditation of all, doesn’t manage to stick. The result is that the vast majority of people stop meditating and never go back, while a much smaller number meditate “when I feel I need it.”

The number one reason for noncompliance is that everyday life is too busy, too full of work, family, TV, texting, eating out, and all the rest. But if we reframe the situation, meditation can be effective and effortless at the same time. Let’s accept that occasional meditation, although it might bring a moment’s respite from a busy day, hasn’t worked out for you. Instead of feeling guilty, you can begin a radically different practice.

In place of occasional meditation, you can shift to “total meditation,” a useful term for bringing the mind into a meditative state anytime you want. The technique is simplicity itself. Whenever you notice that you are distracted, stressed, feeling burdened, anxious, or out of sorts, use this as a trigger to return to the mind’s natural state of inner peace and quiet. The steps are as follows:

  • Find a quiet place where you can be alone and undisturbed.
  • Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths.
  • Put your attention on the area of your heart.
  • Breathe easily until you feel relaxed and quiet inside.

Total meditation, being spontaneous, is effortless. And because you do it anytime you like for a few minutes, the practice fits into the busiest days. At first you might find yourself doing the practice six or more times a day. but over time your mind will become trained to seek the meditative state more quickly and easily.

I describe the implications of this practice in a new book, Total Meditation, whose basic principle will surprise many people. In medicine it has long been known that the body automatically seeks a balanced state known as homeostasis. If you go for a run or a session at the gym, your body adapts to the increased activity in many ways that include changes in heart rate, blood pressure, oxygenation of muscles, digestion, and much more. Homeostasis is dynamic and holistic.

But there has been a reluctance to grant the mind the same automatic return to a state of balance, even though the evidence is quite clear. Between every thought your mind goes into a silent gap from which the next thought emerges. If you experience a momentary emotional upset, your mind can stay there only so long before the upset is gone. Even long-term upsets like grief over losing a loved one will eventually, for the vast majority of people, return to the person’s emotional set point.

Without knowing it, perhaps, you are already experiencing how important the mind’s rebalancing ability is. The chief benefit is a healing one. Every school and type of meditation takes advantage of this healing effect.

Mindfulness is the way your mind recovers from distraction. You are brought back into the present moment.

Self-Inquiry is the way your mind recovers from habits. By asking yourself, “Why am I doing this?” you bring conscious attention to a situation where you have been ruled by habit, routine, obsessive behavior, knee-jerk reactions, and stagnant beliefs.

Reflection is the way your mind recovers from thoughtlessness. You regard your behavior, see what is self-defeating or troubling about it, and realize what is actually going on.

Contemplation is the way your mind recovers from confusion. When faced with multiple choices, each with its pros and cons, you sort everything out by contemplating the situation until you have a certain level of clarity.

Concentration is the way your mind recovers from pointlessness. It is pointless to do a careless job, having careless opinions, and relate to other people in an unconcerned or arbitrary way.

Prayer is the way your mind recovers from helplessness. By contacting a higher power, you are acknowledging a need for connection.

Quiet mind is the way your mind recovers from overwork. The mind is constantly processing daily life and its challenges, but when mental activity becomes burdensome, there is a risk of exhaustion, anxiety, and mental agitation. The mind naturally wants to be quiet when no activity is necessary.

There is no firm dividing line among these practices, and all arise naturally out of the mind’s natural tendency to rebalance itself whenever it detects a state of imbalance. Total meditation expand upon this natural tendency and consciously directs it as needed. It is effortless to center yourself during the day, and the more you make it a habit, the deeper your meditative state will be. More importantly, your life outside meditation will become more conscious, again without effort on your part. (In the book I address examples of stress, habits, and old conditioning that have become chronic. They can be serious conditions, but they are still open to the healing touch of meditation, if approached in the right way.)

I’ve come to feel that occasional meditation’s problems can be solved in this simple way. The problems won’t go away simply by promising yourself that you will try harder to keep up your practice. It’s good news, I think, that a better way exists.

 

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 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 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

The Clash between Truth and Reality

By Deepak Chopra™, MD

Every person wakes up in the morning to join the struggle between truth and reality. Yet almost no one realizes that this is what they are doing. Life contains struggles—no one disagrees with that sad fact—but what are we struggling against? The answers seem obvious. We struggle to stay healthy, make a living, maintain our relationships, and in general to keep our heads above water.

Where does truth enter into this? Imagine someone sitting in a chair wearing state-of-the-art virtual reality gear. In the simulation bombarding his senses, he is racing in the Indy 500, running away from tigers in the jungle, or walking a tightrope. These are perilous adventures that he is immersed in, where survival itself is at stake. His body will exhibit all the signs of a stress response. But his experience is entirely fake, a construct by clever VR engineers. The truth is that he is sitting still in a chair, perfectly safe and sheltered from struggle.

This imaginary setup is actually what occurs to all of us in daily life. We inhabit a virtual reality that is so powerful it blinds us to the truth. What we accept as real is mind-made, but when you are inside this spell/illusion/dream, your struggles totally envelop you. Even the words we speak encase us in limitation: the instant you say the word “tree,” you have shoved into a box an immensely complex living organism with thousands of cellular processes occurring every second. The minute you think of the tags that we apply to ourselves and other people—age, race, gender, religion, political persuasion, nationality, income level, occupation, etc.—you shove that person into a box.

When life is relatively comfortable, we can afford to overlook the false position that mental constructs have placed us in—all the prejudices, painful memories, fixed beliefs, personal disasters, failures, and wishful thinking that the mind is prey to. After thousands of years of philosophy, religion, and science, each field seeking to discover the truth, virtual reality remains in charge. Its shell has barely been cracked, which is why we don’t perceive the struggle between truth and reality. Mind-made reality (the spell/illusion/dream) keeps the world going. Only on a side tangent will someone say something extraordinary like “Know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” But this can be ignored as a religious thought, and when the Persian mystical poet declares, “God speaks in silence, everything else is a mistranslation,” that can be dismissed as poetry or once again religion.

Yet somehow, on the remote frontier where virtual reality and “real” reality meet, the truth is trying to contact us, and doing so all the time. The human mind has incredibly powerful tools at its disposal to keep virtual reality in place; we call these tools thinking, feeling, remembering, desiring, wishing, fearing, and dreaming. Against this armada, the truth (“real” reality) has only one tool: waking up. Waking up is the process of becoming more conscious. You cannot change what you aren’t aware of. In this case, becoming more aware is the truth.

In every other aspect of life, there is something to discover and learn about; we spend every waking hour since birth using the mind’s tools to learn the skills it takes to survive, be accepted, take care of ourselves and our families, and so on. Desire constantly pushes us forward. But here are some bald facts about “real” reality:

  • Nobody taught you to know.
  • Knowing is built into consciousness.
  • Without this innate knowing, you would be blind, deaf, and deprived of the other three senses, because the raw data that reaches you is meaningless unless you know how to interpret them.
  • The most basic thing knowing tells us is that we exist.
  • If existence and consciousness are tied to one another, then without a doubt, they are the foundation of reality.

Behind the spell/illusion/dream of everyday reality, “real” reality simply exists, making everything else possible. You can’t put awareness in a box (although you can scientifically measure how it operates); you can’t stand outside it; you can’t do without it.Before waking up happens, there is already a ratio between the things we do consciously and the things we do unconsciously. This is the primary evidence telling us that we are conscious beings. Blind prejudice, social conditioning, denial, ignorance, bad faith, habits, and the drama of pleasure and pain occupy the domain of unconscious life. Love, compassion, curiosity, creativity, insight, empathy, and inner growth occupy the domain of conscious life. It’s obvious which domain contains the values we hold most precious.

So we are not that far from waking up. Consciousness prevails in many areas of life, even though war, violence, crime, natural disasters, and other forms of bad news grab the headlines. If you want proof that consciousness is the basis of your own life, sit down and make a list. Write down everything that has been fulfilling in your life, and when you examine the list, you will discover that the values of consciousness lie behind every meaningful, fulfilling experience.

You don’t even have to accept the argument about virtual reality and the spell/illusion/dream. Once you see what you truly value, you will automatically want to be more conscious. The motivation to wake up is built into consciousness itself. Even the concept of truth struggling against reality is just an eye-catching phrase. Truth doesn’t struggle against anything. It exists, and it knows. All we need to do is to realize this truth.

When Plato wrote that we are like creatures living in a cave watching a shadow play on the cave’s walls, he came up with the simplest and most powerful metaphor for waking up. The shadow play is mesmerizing, but then you realize that shadows need light to project them. So you turn around to face the light, and when you do, you say, “”Aha, so that’s how the shadow play works.” From that moment of awakening, the shadows can never again hold you in their grip.

 

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 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 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

The Surprising Success of Wholeness

By Deepak Chopra™, MD, Tiffany J Barsotti, MTh, Paul J. Mills, PhD

As the notions of “holistic” and “wholeness” became popular in recent decades, they also turned into a paradox. People who focused on holistic health, diet, and wellness found themselves to be cut off from people who didn’t care about such things (which is the majority). Trying to be holistic wound up making you separate, which is the opposite of being whole. The meditation/wholefoods/yoga people are a splinter group from the McDonald’s/Monday Night Football/TGIF people.

Perhaps a misunderstanding lies at the bottom of this situation. Wholeness people tend to feel that they are waiting for non-wholeness people to catch on, a little like non-smokers and teetotalers waiting for chain-smokers and beer drinkers to catch on. This divide disappears, however, once you realize that you cannot make yourself whole, while on the other side of the coin you cannot make yourself unwhole. Everyone is whole already.

A simple observation is enough to clarify why wholeness is inescapable. Imagine someone sitting at a computer doing a task. You cannot see the monitor, so you don’t know what their task is. The physical body you see is a person; the thinker responding to the computer screen is a person. The two must co-exist, uniting two sides of reality, physical and mental. This union defines everyone’s existence. You were born whole, and the only thing that separates you from a random stranger is what you decide to do with your wholeness.

Here we are looking beyond lifestyle, although that would seem to be the most glaring difference between people. Instead, how you use your wholeness primarily centers on something else: awareness. Someone in the meditation/whole foods/yoga group can be miserable, conflicted, and anxious while someone in the other group is content, loving, and secure. Clearly awareness is involved in this difference, but how?

The problem is that everyone, with the tiniest fraction of exceptions, lives as if they are not whole. There are all kinds of reasons for this, but chief among them is that almost everyone, however competent they are at the business of living, knows next to nothing about how awareness works. We live with mental activity every waking moment, but all our thinking, feeling, and sensing reveals very little about the nature of the mind itself. We are left with a version of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” because the human mind is the source of the best and worst things that life has to offer.

To resolve this state of confusion, there have been quiet steps taken by researchers interested in holistic medicine, the wellness movement, psychotherapy, and spirituality. Different as these fields might be, each researcher has taken heed of what the groundbreaking psychologist Abraham Maslow called self-transcendence. Instead of being satisfied with an everyday life guided by the ego’s demands, duties, and desires, in the process of self-transcending (going beyond the ego) the individual begins to experience more holistic levels of their own consciousness. Maslow’s self-transcendence is akin to the concept of self-realization, often espoused by Eastern traditions.

The general public doesn’t’ yet realize that wholeness has become a surprising success story, which can be scientifically verified. Here are some highlights from a number of fields.

  • Mainstream medicine is being surpassed by a better way to keep people healthy. As the scientific evidence grows, with over 100,0000 studies to date, complementary and alternative medicines have become much more accepted in the West. Something new is evolving called Integrative Health, where being healthy is a state of body, mind, and spirit.
  • Spirituality has been brought into the fold. Supporting someone’s spiritual health is understood to be crucial for establishing wellbeing. A cue is being taken from Eastern medicine, in which meditation and yoga are as beneficial to wellbeing as any medical prescription, and much more useful in preventing future problems.
  • Mediation works, in a very big way, but it opens the door to a wider domain. Beyond inner peace and quiet is wholeness, now generally called nondual awareness. Freed of all the demands of mental activity, a person experiences what it is like to be aware in a simple, present-moment fashion.
  • “Who am I?” is being reframed. Instead of identifying with the “I” that constantly deals with the ups and downs of life, one learns how to remain centered in nondual awareness. An agitated state is exchanged for a steady state. “I am” is the baseline, not “I think, feel, and do.”
  • Existence has become a solid foundation of life. It might seem that “I am” is a poor relation to “I think, feel, and do,” but the actual experience of “I am” brings about a deep realization. Awareness is the source of love, compassion, creativity, personal growth, purpose, and meaning. From this foundation, thinking, feeling, and doing are infused with spiritual value, and well-being is nurtured throughout the whole person.

Integrative Health is not an invention or discovery but a journey back to who we really are. It’s only natural to see that life is better when it is lived with far less attachment to the drama of pain and pleasure, ups and downs, failure and fulfillment. Nondual awareness brings the needed detachment that allows us to respond from a deeper self, one that is always connected to our source in pure awareness. These are profound matters, but the state of wellbeing is natural to the whole person. In that light, the surprising success of wholeness needs to be shouted from the rooftops, especially in the turbulent times we find ourselves in.

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 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 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”
TIFFANY J. BARSOTTI, MTh, is an internationally renowned medical intuitive, clinician and researcher of subtle energy and biofield therapies. With spiritual and intuitive guidance, she serves as an integrative practitioner working alongside physicians and other allied health professionals.
PAUL J MILLS, PhD, is Professor and Chief at the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) Department of Family Medicine and Public Health and Director of the UCSD Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health. He is Director of Research for the Deepak Chopra Foundation, with a focus on meditation and yoga within the context of Traditional Medical Systems. In the early 1980s, he published some of the earliest scientific research on meditation. His work has been featured in Time Magazine, The New York Times, National Public Radio, US News and World Reports, Consumer Reports, The Huffington Post, Gaia TV, and WebMD, among others.

Switching from Lifespan to Healthspan

By Naveen Jain and Deepak Chopra™, MD

Some pessimism has been circulating about lifespan recently. In the modern era lifespan has increased every decade, and dying before you turn seventy would now be considered a premature death. Three score and ten is no longer a destination for a normal life, and average lifespans among people who are not underprivileged could easily top ninety in the near future.

The difference in quality of life is now more important than lifespan on its own, because the health status of two seventy-year-olds can vary wildly. The concept to keep in mind is healthspan, defined as the years you spend without infirmity, chronic disease, and dementia. Right now healthspan is a hit and miss proposition.

While we are told that our genes determine how we age, this needs to be clarified. Research on identical twins reveals that it’s not your genes that determine your healthspan but your lifestyle, nutrition, and gut microbiome that play a much more important role. Identical twins are born with the same genes, a fact that will not change over the decades, but by age seventy, many identical twins are as unalike in their health status as two people chosen at random.

What makes the difference is known as gene expression. DNA is an inactive molecule, but its expression into active molecules (proteins), is influenced by all the factors that determine the difference between aging well or badly. The active side of genetics belongs to the field of epigenetics, which controls whether a gene is turned on or off. You carry around at the epigenetic level all the major experiences of your lifetime. As these accumulate, they automatically divide into experiences that promote a long healthspan and those that do the opposite.

Here is where a breakthrough is possible that could make an enormous difference. We said that you cannot change the genes you were born with, which has been gospel in genetics for decades. Even though you can not change the genes you are born with, you can change their expression, which is what matters. Also, 90% of your genes are not in your cells but in your gut microbiome. Trillions of bacteria in your digestive tract do more than digest food. They constitute an immense chemical factory sending messages to every part of the body. Humans have evolved in cooperation with these bacteria. They are not alien or separate from you; they are part of your evolution, affecting you every moment.

Chemical messages can be harmful, such as those that create inflammation or promote stress, or beneficial. Your microbiome is unique to you and constantly shifting. In essence, you are changing the vast majority of your genes through your lifestyle, for the gut microbiome amounts to 90% of your genes. The genes you were born with amount to only 10% of your total genome. The good news here is that you can change their expression, also.

Healthspan, therefore, depends on living in such a way that the entire genetic complement functions properly. The enemies of beneficial gene expression are now pretty well known:

  • Impure water, air, and food
  • Lack of hygiene and sanitation
  • Stress
  • Chronic inflammation
  • Depression and anxiety
  • Toxins like alcohol and tobacco
  • Sedentary lifestyle
  • Inherited predisposition (normally a minor factor if you are healthy)

These negative factors take years to develop before symptoms appear and a doctor must be visited. In the meantime, people shorten their healthspan simply through everyday choices. It’s the small things accumulating over a long time that determine who is healthy at seventy and who isn’t. Similarly, the choices that support the best functioning at the cellular level are well know.

  • Pure food, water, and air
  • Absence of additives and toxins
  • Moderate physical activity
  • Meditation
  • Lowered stress
  • Good level of mood
  • Close fulfilling relationships
  • Having a good support system
  • Overall happiness and well-being

These influences go far beyond preventive medicine and depending on a doctor to keep you healthy. You can lower your biological age by the choices you make, and your entire complement of genes will benefit. They express the benefit by exchanging chemical messages that promote their own lives at the cellular level. Those messages are chemical and therefore do not speak in the language humans share. But every aspect of consciousness, going beyond the physical, lies at the heart of healthspan.

That’s why a direct connection can be made between meditating, even for a short period, and the level of telomerase in your cells. Telomerase is a chemical that is vital to keeping DNA intact without fraying from age. It took years of intense research to uncover the role of telomerase, yet the bottom line is that your consciousness, not just your positive lifestyle choices, is key to what your cells are doing, including the one-celled microbes in your intestinal tract.

More importantly, however, is the message that healthspan should be everyone’s top priority when thinking about present and future health. What makes you young and keeps you young is the healthy functioning, right this minute, of your cells and microbiome. How do you actually know that your lifestyle is contributing towards healthy aging or in other words are you biologically becoming younger or older than your chronological age. Viome is a company that recently launched a health intelligence service that gives you insight into your microbial health, cellular health, immune system health, mitochondrial health, stress response health and your biological age. For fair disclosure authors are founders and advisor to Viome. Your microbiome are living solely for your benefit, and by giving them some attention in return, you are caring for your future far beyond what a doctor can do after symptoms appear.

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 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 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”
Naveen Jain is the founder of Viome and many other successful companies. Viome’s Health Intelligence service assesses your gut microbiome health, cellular health, mitochondrial health, immune system health, and your stress response health. Viome can even reveal your biological age. Naveen is the author of the award-winning book Moonshots– Creating the World of Abundance, has been awarded E&Y “Entrepreneur of the Year”, and “Most Creative Person” by Fast Company.