How to See a Beautiful Person in the Mirror

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Kimberly Snyder, CN

Society has allowed our notion of beauty to go awry. Countless women–and not just women–look in the mirror and see a reflection of inadequacy. They have fallen short of an ideal that was defective to begin with. But conditioned since childhood to equate a “perfect” body with being beautiful, they blame themselves for being the defective one.

The situation is filled with cruel ironies. Children are naturally beautiful until they are taught to stop thinking that way and to start measuring themselves by an unnatural standard. Even the small percentage of women who are super-model thin suffer anxiety over gaining a pound. The first gray hair and wrinkles create panic. The worship of perfection belies the epidemic of obesity that constitutes reality for millions.

The problem has been diagnosed many times without a workable solution. One study after another has proven without a doubt that fad diets don’t work; in fact, the chances of becoming obese are higher for chronic dieters. Billions of dollars spent on cosmetics and plastic surgery have done nothing to solve a prevailing sense of not being beautiful enough. All of this points to a single underlying issue: a woman’s sense of lack.

In our view, this is the issue that must be addressed head on. If a person looks in the mirror and doesn’t see someone who is lacking, the way is open for seeing someone who is beautiful. A radical turn-around in social measures of beauty is necessary, and yet the good news is that such a turn-around is accessible by everyone. Let’s look at a few facts about the mind-body system that support our optimism. Untitled design(23)

1. Mind and body are connected through a network of messaging that alerts every cell in the body to our thoughts, moods, beliefs, hopes, fears, and expectations.

2. As a result, the body is amazingly sensitive to shifts in our mental state.

3. By using a simple measure–the percentage of positive input the mind-body system receives–the messaging to every cell can be improved and even optimized.

4. Working from the inside out, practices like yoga, meditation, and stress management have holistic benefits.

These facts have far-reaching implications for beauty. As a woman gains more positivity about herself, grounded in lifestyle changes in any area, the feedback loop that connects mind and body gets stronger. The person’s increased wellbeing increases, and with each step in this direction, a shift occurs in the brain, favoring even more positivity and less negativity. So what do we mean by positive input? In our holistic approach to beauty, which we call Radical Beauty, the range of possibilities is very broad:

* Pure food, water, and air.

* Avoiding physical and emotional toxins.

* Unprocessed, natural, organic food.

* Nurturing relationships.

* Good sleep.

* Exercise that favors lightness, balance, flexibility, and gracefulness.

* Attitudes of appreciation and gratitude.

* A higher vision of life.

* Service to others.

* Satisfying, meaningful work.

* Mediation and yoga.

* Increased self-esteem.

* The sense of being in control.

* Feeling safe.

* Feeling as if you belong.

* Daily close contact with family and friends.

* Generosity of self through acts of giving.

* Being loved and loving in return.

This is just a start on the holistic path, and every aspect comes naturally once we drop our unrealistic ideals and realize how fulfilling reality can be instead. Beauty should be measured by these things, and yet we aren’t shying away from or giving up on traditional beauty, which still has a place. The skin, for example, is the body’s largest organ and secrets more endocrine hormones than the endocrine glands. These hormones are carriers and signals of emotion. therefore, in the mind-body feedback loop, a glowing mood gets translated into glowing skin.

In the next post we’ll give more details about how our radical revision of beauty works, in what we call Radical Beauty. Here we wanted to open the discussion on a topic that everyone is involved in, leading to life-enhancing or self-destructive results. The purpose of beauty should always be life-enhancing, and we believe it can be, in very practical terms.

 

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph Tanzi, PhD  and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

 

KIMBERLY SNYDER, C.N., is a nutritionist and the New York Times bestselling author of the Beauty Detox book series. Snyder has appeared as a nutrition and beauty expert on Good Morning America, Dr. Oz, Ellen, Access Hollywood, The Doctors, and Today and has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Elle, InStyle, as well as many others. The go-to nutritionist for many of the entertainment industry’s top performers, Snyder is also the creator of Glow Bio, an organic juice, smoothie and cleanse company. She hosts the top-rated podcast Beauty Inside Out on iTunes, and her blog, website, and products have spread the Beauty Detox movement to more than 150 countries. For more information, visit KimberlySnyder.com and  RadicalBeauty.com.

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Self Directed Biological Transformation

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

This week some exciting news has come out about the effect of meditation on personal wellbeing. Adding to the mounting evidence that meditation has a number of beneficial effects on things like blood pressure and depression, what’s crucial in the new study, which just appeared in Springer Nature’s journal Translational Psychiatry, is that meditation actually causes changes at the deepest level, in our genes. The study was top level, involving scientists from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the University of California, San Francisco, and Harvard Medical School. Before detailing the research, let us paint the broader picture, because that’s where the real breakthrough is occurring.

Potentially the most fruitful discovery in medical science over the past two decades has been occurring at the genetic level. The standard view, ever since the mapping of DNA in the early 1950s, was that our genes are fixed and unchanging. Whatever the 20,000-25,000 genes we inherited from our parents at birth, these remain permanently with us throughout life. That part hasn’t changed. No one gains or loses a gene after conception. So how could the picture change?

Leaving aside random mutations (the cause of cancer in a cell), the fixed nature of our genes cuts off any chance of evolving after we are born. Evolution is a slow process involving millions of years of random mutations coupled with selective pressures. Most mutations die out quickly because they adversely affect our fitness, or they are randomly fixed because they are neutral (offer no benefit but also cause no harm). But there’s another side of the story, known as gene expression, i.e. the activity of the genes. DNA turns out to be incredibly dynamic and responsive to a person’s lifestyle. Genes regulate every chemical reaction inside a cell, and as a result, thousands of variations in gene activity are possible. You can think of genetic switches operating like rheostats rather than on-off switches. Or there’s an alternative image of a jukebox sitting in the corner. The jukebox is fixed in place, yet it can play many records, and each record contains a different message.

The big question, then, is how to get cells to send and receive the most positive messages. “Positive” means a response that enhances the life of a cell, which is how the life of tissues and organs improves, and from there the life of the individual. It would be tremendous if a person can make choices that lead immediately and directly to enhancing bodily functions from the genetic level. In fact, this is what the new study confirms. We quote directly from the press release from Mt. Sinai in New York:

The study involved 94 healthy women, aged 30-60. Sixty-four women were recruited who were not regular meditators. Participants stayed at the same [La Costa} resort in [Carlsbad] California for six days, and randomized so that half were simply on vacation while the other half joined a meditation training program run by the Chopra Center for Wellbeing. The meditation program included training in mantra meditation, yoga, and self-reflection exercises. It was designed by Deepak Chopra, MD, who did not participate in data collection or analysis.

For greater insight into the long-term effects of what scientists dubbed the ‘meditation effect’ compared to the “vacation effect,” the team also studied a group of 30 experienced meditators who were already enrolled in the retreat that week. Researchers collected blood samples, and surveys, from all participants immediately before and after their stay, as well as surveys one month and ten months later.

The research team examined the changes in 20,000 genes to determine which types of genes were changing before and after the resort experience. Scientists performed an integrative transcriptomic analysis, comparing gene expression networks across all three groups of participants and finding unique molecular profiles and pathway enrichment patterns. Study results show that all groups — novice meditators, experienced meditators, and vacationers — had significant changes in molecular network patterns after the week at the resort, with a clear signature distinguishing baseline from post-vacation biology. The most notable changes in gene activity were related to stress response and immune function.

Researchers assessed self-reported measures of wellbeing. While all groups showed improvements up to one month later, the novice meditators had fewer symptoms of depression and less stress much longer than the non-meditating vacationers. The psychological effects appear to be enduring and it is unknown how much of this longer lasting benefit may be due to continued practice or lasting changes in how people view events in their lives.

“It’s intuitive that taking a vacation reduces biological processes related to stress, but it was still impressive to see the large changes in gene expression from being away from the busy pace of life, in a relaxing environment, in such a short period of time,” said Elissa S. Epel, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco and first author of the study.

 

Although the findings will need to be replicated, this study, which agrees with similar findings about meditation and gene expression, is likely to be far reaching. It is safe to say that meditation is an ideal way to engage in restorative activities that may provide relief for our immune systems, easing the day-to-day stress of a body constantly trying to protect itself. The prediction is that this would also lead to healthier aging.

As promising as that is, the prospect that should excite everyone is that we can self-direct our own biology. Meditation is only one avenue; diet, exercise, stress managements, psychotherapy, and various contemplative practices, Eastern and Western, are beginning to dawn as changers of genetic expression. In other words, your cells are eavesdropping on every part of your lifestyle, responding to what you think, do, and feel. Suddenly there is no longer a gap between mind and body. We have genetic proof that the two are merged into one system, and a “whole system” approach should be taken if we want to thrive throughout a lifetime.

 

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph Tanzi, PhD and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

Dr. Rudolph Tanzi is the Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit and Vice-Chair of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Tanzi discovered several Alzheimer’s disease (AD) genes and directs the Alzheimer’s Genome Project. He is now actively developing therapies for treating AD based on knowledge gained from genetics and lifestyle interventions. Dr. Tanzi has published over 475 papers and has received the Metropolitan Life Foundation Award, Potamkin Prize, the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award, and was on the 2015 TIME100 Most Influential People in the World list. He also co-authored the New York Times Bestseller, “Super Brain” and “Super Genes” with Dr. Deepak Chopra.

The Health Benefits of Meditation and Vacation

The systems biology research study indicates that meditation provides a clear and quantifiable change in how the human body functions, appearing to provide relief for the immune system, and ease the daily stress of the body constantly trying to protect itself.

Rudy Tanzi Meditation 2016

 

View the Study Systems biology research study reveals benefits of vacation and meditation

 

READ The Health Benefits of Meditation and Vacation:http://go.nature.com/2bPHw2Z #Meditation #Health #WellBeing #Vacation

Press release: Systems biology research study reveals benefits of vacation and meditation

What Is Your DNA Doing For You Right Now?

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

Ever since its structure was unraveled in the early Fifties, DNA has been considered the mastermind of the cell. Sitting in splendid isolation in the cell’s nucleus, DNA encodes all of life. It sends duplicates of itself (RNA) to direct the manufacture of proteins; and proteins, as high-school biology teaches, are the building blocks of the cell. In terms of biological machinery. The genetic picture has gotten more and more sophisticated ever since.image1-5

But something doesn’t look quite right here. If every cell is a biological robot, and the entire body is made up of cells, then we must be biological robots too. This view, which a surprising number of geneticists believe in, cannot be true. It is a conclusion that the old model of DNA supported because that model was reductionist–that is, all complex processes can be explained by breaking them down into more basic processes. The whole approach is totally logical, but nobody can seriously claim that the works of Shakespeare and Mozart are explainable by protein manufacture. And in our daily lives we think thoughts and feel emotions, which proteins don’t, or cells for that matter.

As a result, genetics has been racing to catch up with human reality. On several fronts there has been progress, of a sort. So-called Systems Biology has emerged to examine how the body works as a dynamic, changing organism responding to input from the environment. In this way DNA stopped being so rigid and got into the game. On another front a field known as epigenetics began to study how everyday experience, including our lifestyle and memory, actually gets chemically imprinted on our genes. Again, DNA became more dynamic and responsive.

But while DNA was getting liberated, what was really happening? One could argue that the only thing changing was a scientific model. Reality wasn’t changing at all. Now it is dawning that DNA is fundamentally so mysterious, biology can’t even contain it, much less explain it. The crack in mainstream genetics came from the huge shock administered by the Human Genome Project, which discovered, to widespread dismay, that the complexity of human life came down to only 20,000 genes. This number was ridiculously small, about 20% of the previous guesstimate. To quote geneticist John Mattick, “that number is tiny. It’s effectively the same as a microscopic worm that has just 1,000 cells.”

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New Body, New Mind, New Medicine

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

Since one of us (Deepak) began advocating the mind-body connection thirty years ago, a time of great opposition among physicians to the very notion that thoughts have physical consequences, the trend has been entirely against the physicalist position, i.e., that the human body is a machine that needs fixing when it gets broken. One research after another has validated what should have been obvious in the first place: mind and body are too intimately related to be seen as separate entities.
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Several principles can be listed that are backed by the best science, and yet which have had minimal impact in a doctor’s daily practice.

* Every cell is in some form of communication with the brain, either directly or indirectly, is receiving messages triggered by all of our thoughts, feelings, moods, expectations, and beliefs.

* Experience gets transformed and metabolized, exactly as food, toxins, pollutants, air, and water get metabolized. In a word, if you want to see what your experiences were like yesterday, look at your body today. If you want to see what your body will be like tomorrow, look at your experiences today.

* The body is a verb, not a noun. In other words, it’s a continuous unbroken process.

* Cells are born and die; atoms and molecules fly in and out of each cell constantly. Yet despite this constant flux, the blueprint of the cell remains intact. This blueprint is invisible, intelligent, dynamic, and self-organizing.

* Lifestyle choices make the dominant difference between wellness and chronic illness. Years, sometimes decades before symptoms appear, cells can be gaining negative input that lead to the onset of disease.

* Our genes are dynamic and respond to everyday experiences and lifestyle choices. Habits lead to longer term changes in the programming of our gene expression via “epigenetics”, as explained in our book “Super Genes”.

* If we knew the pivot point that creates positive cellular activity out of positive experiences, a state of radical well-being is possible.

* Purely mental practices, especially meditation, have been shown over and over to improve various physical functions, and these improvements are now known to extend all the way down to gene activity.

This is an impressive list of mind-body insights, and the rising field of integrative medicine takes advantage of them, unlike mainstream medicine, which remains wedded to two fix-its: drugs and surgery. In the ancient Indian system of Ayurveda one can find a level of the mind-body connection that is profound, and the same holds for other traditional medicines around the world. But for the average person, the actual pivot point where positive input improves well-being hasn’t been touched. Ultimately, the mind-body connection will not vie with the physicalist (body as machine) position until it is proven that cells, and especially the gene, predictably responds to experience.

The point here is that experience, although a very broad term, can be divided into positive input for our cells or negative input. A cell innately knows how to thrive, nourish itself, repair damage, repel invaders, and multiply without our conscious intervention. This much was already known in modern medical science. What wasn’t known and slowly became convincing, is that while the cell is processing its own existence biologically, it is also processing a person’s entire range of life experience, from birth to death, from joy to sorrow, from hopes to fears, optimism to pessimism, victory to defeat, and on and on. Much of this occurs via epigenetics – chemical modifications to our genes resulting in changes in their activity (expression) programs.

What that says, if you extend the logic, turns out to be both simple and radical. Perhaps experience holds the key to wellness, healing, anti-aging, and psychological fulfillment. The reason each of these things has become impossibly complex as far as medical science is concerned is that experience has been left out of the equation. In a sense, we have treated the human body like a car whose engine we understand incredibly well, only we insist there is no driver. Experience, processed by the mind and recorded in our cells, is the driver in the case of the mind-body system.

With that in mind, perhaps the real future of healing, wellness, self-care, and anti-aging lies with some kind of “experience medicine,” or to use a better term, qualia medicine. Qualia, from the Latin word for quality, is what each experience is all about. The five senses deliver the qualia of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Our emotions color experiences with other kinds

of qualia, such as happy, sad, hopeful, anxious, depressing, etc. At the deepest level our hidden beliefs, wounds, and lifelong condition cause us to interpret experience a certain way, adding another level of qualia.

The mind-body system is an almost infinite qualia processor. Through each person’s unique lens, personal reality gets created day by day, minute by minute. This, we believe, is the pivot point where experience gets metabolized into cellular activity. Qualia medicine would be based on quantifying how that transformation works. A skeptic would say that the whole enterprise is apples and oranges. Qualia and quantity are opposites, or so it seems. We don’t say “I need an optimistic bag of flour” or “My hope weighs seven ounces.” But there actually is a junction point, and it is very real: the cell. When a cell reacts to your feelings of joy or grief, qualia turns into quantity–a feeling gets metabolized into changes in gene expression, biochemistry, and proteins in the brain and body. In the same way, when meditation lowers blood pressure, a state of awareness turns into a physical change.

Skeptics would say that we may have misrepresented a key point. Meditation, they would claim, is a physical process to begin with, occurring in the brain, so the actual subjective experience doesn’t matter. But this objection is misguided; it is mounted simply to defend physicalism, which as research abundantly proves, is totally at odds with the mind-body connection. In the placebo effect, when someone’s headaches improve because they believe that a dummy sugar pill is actual medicine, the outcome is physical but the input (believing that you will be cured) is completely mental. The placebo effect is one of the solidest scientific proofs of the mind-body connection. We will cover this topic in our new book, currently being written.

We choose to celebrate the victory of the mind-body perspective. But, it will take a fusion of psychology, genetics research, brain studies, and wisdom from the world’s healing traditions to actually break though to a practical kind of qualia medicine. The challenge is clear, and so is the positive trend toward solving it. On this basis, the possibility of radical well-being exists here and now, with every hope that it will expand into an unlimited future.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He

is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph Tanzi, PhD and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

Dr. Rudolph Tanzi is the Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit and Vice-Chair of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Tanzi discovered several Alzheimer’s disease (AD) genes and directs the Alzheimer’s Genome Project. He is now actively developing therapies for treating AD based on knowledge gained from genetics and lifestyle interventions. Dr. Tanzi has published over 475 papers and has received the Metropolitan Life Foundation Award, Potamkin Prize, the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award, and was on the 2015 TIME100 Most Influential People in the World list. He also co-authored the New York Times Bestseller, “Super Brain” and “Super Genes” with Dr. Deepak Chopra.