How to End the Blame Game

By Deepak Chopra™ MD

It’s time to talk seriously about the blame game. In a divided nation everyone finds reasons to blame, and the only choice is who deserves the blame. Targets are easy to find, because they are everywhere. Somebody, somewhere is behaving in ways you disapprove of. When the situation is us-versus-them, has it ever been hard to name “them”?

That, in the simplest outline, is the blame game. Calls for unity have no chance for success as long as the blame game keeps going. It ruins the very basis of negotiation, which rests on mutual respect. The outcome of the blame game is always escalation: you find more reasons to attack “Them.” If you are lucky enough to gain more power than “they” have, you can turn your blame into domination—until the tables turn and your adversary is in power.

Yet the blame game isn’t innate in human nature. We are a species capable of imagination and choice. At any moment we can alter any mental construct, and the first step is to realize that the blame game is in fact just a mental construct. When you recognize this fact, you are beginning to see a way out. You can’t force or cajole someone else to stop playing the blame game, but you certainly can stop playing it yourself.

The most effective way to end your participation lies in the following realizations:

  • There is no “them,” meaning a class of people you can assign wholesale blame. Among “them” are reasonable people like “us.”
  • As long as you keep on blaming, you are stuck in the same behavior as the people you are blaming.
  • Since you are part of the game, it is your responsibility to end your participation. It is pure fantasy to believe that one day “they” will see the light of day and realize how right and virtuous you are and how wrong and bad they are.
  • The first thing to take responsibility for is your anger. Blame is anger directed at someone else. But it is you who are harboring the anger, and therefore you must own it.
  • Owning your anger is harder than attacking someone else, but who says that this means you shouldn’t try?
  • Blame feeds on self-righteousness. You hold yourself above those you choose to blame. But when you sit in judgment, you are blinded to an important truth, which is this: Everyone is doing the best they can at their level of awareness.
  • Blame is never part of the solution. It exists at the level of the problem, mixed in with anger, judgment, self-righteousness, and other psychological issues such as jealousy, resentment, and holding grudges. Stop and ask yourself how much happiness exists at this level.
  • At the level of the solution, answers can be found without blame. The level of the solution is a deeper awareness based on a quiet sense of personal peace, balance, optimism, and the absence of the every-demanding, judgmental ego. Learn to recognize this state of mind and cultivate it.

None of these points are arcane; they are basic psychology in many ways. What is required is something people are reluctant to do, to look in the mirror and honestly assess if they are part of the problem. At the present moment in these stressful times, the blame game seems to be everyone’s favorite. Turn on the cable network that spouts the ideas, beliefs, and opinions that are the opposite of your own. You will notice within a few minutes that instead of “us,” you are “them.”

Your first reaction will be to snort in disgust. How can these commentators be blaming you? You are absolutely in the right, and they are bad people for not recognizing this. Of course there are issues where it is totally justified to choose the side that is moral, just, equal, and solution-minded. People who put up stubborn, irrational, pointless resistance are not making the right choice.

But if you keep watching the cable channel that holds the opposite of your opinion, no matter what the issue is, you might be amazed to discover that your side is being labeled as stubborn, irrational, and the real cause of the problem.

If I’ve described the blame game accurately, there is a lot to think about. You cannot cry out for unity and the end of divisiveness while at the same time playing the blame game. In frustrating times, blame is tempting. It keeps the emotional pot on the simmer, which many people like to experience. Unfortunately, anger begets more anger, and eventually the pot boils over.

You can’t end the blame game all by yourself, but you can end the part you are playing. By backing out of the game, you will improve your own emotional life, and with clear eyes you might even become part of the solution. At the very least you will have discarded a mode of behavior that hasn’t worked up to now and never will.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a 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 and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), 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 latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books, 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

How to Get the Other Side to Yes

By Deepak Chopra™ MD

Watching mainstream coverage of the Biden inauguration, you couldn’t miss the much-repeated call for uniting a divided nation. Commentary was quite approving; no one seemed to disagree with the theme or the need. But if you turned to right-wing media, the notion of uniting the country was derided as a ploy and scorned as bad faith. This indicates that gulf that lies between vision and outcome.

It is much better to have a vision than not, because a vision makes your intentions clear and keeps the goal in sight. A vision that is destined to fail, however, has no real use. Bringing the country together isn’t different from bringing a wounded relationship together. The needed skills are psychological. The right wing has taken advantage of this fact for decades, as many commentators have noted, by tapping into grievances. But stoking people’s complaints, grudges, fears, and fantasies of revenge is a negative vision. As recent events have shown, the people you manipulate this way eventually leads to bad faith and eruptions of a violent, chaotic kind.

So how do you get someone to yes when that person is dead set against you? The necessary tactics depend on understanding two things: 1. The basic principles of negotiation and 2. Putting yourself in the other side’s shoes. Both are always workable, no matter whether we are talking about a broken relationship or a broken political culture.

Principles of negotiation

  • Give up fantasies of controlling, demanding, or persuading the other side.
  • Sit down in a state of rational calmness.
  • Show respect for the other side’s position.
  • Do more listening than talking.
  • Be prepared for compromise.
  • Drop us-versus-them thinking.
  • Look for win/win options.
  • Don’t display anger and impatience.
  • Find a place of nonjudgment inside yourself.
  • Don’t quit until both sides are satisfied.

These principles are well known in diplomatic circles but they are flouted in everyday life all the time. The main reason is that people don’t try to learn how successful negotiating works. Instead, they fall back on tactics that hardly ever work, or when they seem to, leave residues of resentment from the other side. The tactics that don’t work are easily recognized in our current state of deep division.

How to stay at no

  • Keep up the rhetoric of blame and complaint.
  • Make the other side your enemy.
  • Talk about differences rather than points of agreement.
  • Try to win while making sure the other side loses.
  • Make a list of demands and don’t back down from them.
  • Enter the fray when you are angry and upset.
  • Attack the other side.
  • Walk away angry, with nothing settled.
  • Ignore the other side’s viewpoint.

It is worth the time to sit down and reflect on both lists. Getting what you want is a natural impulse, but using the wrong means leads to frustration and futility.

The second thing needed in order to change no to yes is to put yourself in the other side’s shoes. One might call this the path of empathy. Nobody really disagrees with the Golden Rule in their heart of hearts, but treating others the way you want to be treated remains hypothetical without an understanding of psychological wants and needs. The most basic wants and needs are common to everyone.

  • The need to feel safe and secure.
  • Wanting achievement and success.
  • Feeling that you are heard and understood.
  • Wanting to bond in like-minded groups.
  • Needing to have a purpose in life.
  • Wanting everyday existence to be meaningful.
  • Needing to feel good about yourself.
  • A basic feeling of contentment and fulfillment.

You can’t put yourself in someone else’s shoes by pretending that you agree with their beliefs, prejudices, and social conditioning when those things are foreign to you. Much less does it work to adopt false empathy with positions you abhor. Divisions don’t go away as a condition for getting to yes. Instead, they stop being obstacles.

You put yourself in someone else’s shoes by shifting to the needs and wants listed above. They constitute the unspoken agenda in everyone’s life. Once you see that you and the other side share the same needs and wants, you can start to talk about them. Speak about the unspoken, and you will get much further than keeping silent.

I’ve devoted a small space to issues that fill many books, but I think it is necessary to understand that there is a way to clear up the fog of war. War isn’t always conducted with armed weapons. Armed words do the job quite well. If there is to be an end to deep divisiveness, one side must be the first to step up and use the tactics that actually work. The situation can’t be made any simpler than this.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a 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 and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), 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 latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books, 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

Five Fantasies That Keep Us Apart

By Deepak Chopra,™ MD

When a society is deeply divided, a paradox is in force. On the one hand, people cry out for unity, while on the other hand, they keep on doing the very things that incite division. We are seeing this paradox grow stronger year by year in politics, but at the bottom what we’re facing is a broken relationship. Society is a huge bundle of relationships, nothing more.

To stop being trapped in a paradox, you need a little practical psychology. The first step when a relationship falters if you consider the situation psychologically, is to stop doing more of what didn’t work in the first place. The same holds true in a divided society.

As long as both sides engage in futile behavior, ending the divide between them isn’t going to happen. At a certain point, a futile tactic turns into fantasy. Here I’d define fantasy as a belief that runs contrary to reality. If you confront the realities of a situation but continue to ignore them, you are indulging in a fantasy.

Here are five fantasies that surround us right now. I’ll couch them in terms of a broken relationship.

Fantasy No. 1: “You need to listen to me. Meanwhile, I refuse to listen to you.”

When two opposing sides stop listening to each other, the relationship has reached an impasse. Communication has shut down. In its place, rigid rituals are acted out. These rituals consist of repeating the same argument over and over, shouting to try and be heard, and freezing the other side out with rude contempt or silence.

Fantasy No. 2: “Everything will be okay if you change. I certainly don’t need to change.”

This is the classic disguise for blame. When you demand that the other person change, you are judging against them without really coming out and saying so. What fuels this fantasy is the delusion that others change if you blame them enough. The other part of the fantasy is a self-righteous confidence that you don’t need to change because the other person has no right to blame you.

Fantasy No. 3: “You are here to make me happy. Until you do that, I can’t relate to you.”

This fantasy is a holdover from childhood. Young children pout and cry when they are unhappy, and as long as they are unhappy, they don’t relate. They are too sunk in their own feelings. When carried over into adulthood, however, the same attitude becomes narcissistic. No one outside your marriage or intimate partnership is here to make you happy. To cut off ties because you are waiting to be made happy leads nowhere if your aim is to bring people together.

Fantasy No. 4: “I’m better than you. That’s why I have the right to tell you what to do.”

Much of social discord can be laid down to a mutual superiority complex. Tune in to commentators for the other side, and you will probably be shocked at their sense of superiority, especially if you think that only your side has the right to feel superior. In reality neither side has the right to feel superior. If this fact is ignored, there is no chance for reconciliation.

Fantasy No. 5: “I deserve to win, and once I do, you will be sunk once and for all.”

This is the emotional equivalent of a zero-sum game. The Super Bowl is a zero-sum game because only one side can win. But human affairs are tidal. One day you are down, the next day you are up. The belief that you can be up forever and never down again is pure fantasy.

If two people, two factions, or two nations find themselves stuck at an angry impasse, these five fantasies are almost always in play. Perhaps not all of them at once, and perhaps not everyone is honest about how they feel, yet this makes no difference. Each fantasy is based on two underlying tendencies. The first tendency is holding judgments; the second tendency is us-versus-them thinking. Each fantasy expresses these two tendencies in a slightly different way. But you can be sure that they are present.

Calls for unity, comity, and healing don’t lead to actual healing until both sides stop engaging in more of what never worked in the first place. By looking closely at how we indulge in fantasy, we can get much closer to turning good intentions into reality.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a 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 and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), 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 latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books, 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

Take Hope from the Healing Cycle

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Right now the push to control the latest surges in Covid have focused on three things that have gained around-the-clock publicity: masks, distancing, and vaccines. Relying on them has given people hope in the face of the pandemic. But there are sources of hope, including a new one just added to the mix, that everyone should know about.

These sources of hope are based on an aspect of daily life that is ordinary and at the same time extremely complex and mysterious. Every day your body goes through a healing cycle. This cycle is the product of billions of years of evolution, setting in place many cycles, clocks, feedback loops, and chemical messaging. But the upshot is a total reset of the mind-body system every day. Anything that has gone out of balance is reset, and all the parts of the system once again mesh as they were designed to.

Your lifestyle either supports the healing cycle or hinders it. After decades of progress in the area of wellness, people’s lifestyles have been improving, but for many the onset of the Covid pandemic causes a major disruption, and for some, the roof caved in. Their lifestyles began to hinder the healing cycle in crucial ways.

  • Daily routines were thrown into chaos.
  • Exercise got neglected.
  • Passive distractions like texting and surfing the Internet took up more time.
  • Meaningful work declined.
  • Human contact was severely diminished.
  • Symptoms of anxiety and depression were magnified.
  • Stress took a larger toll than normal.
  • Sleep became erratic.

Some fascinating new research from many sources is pointing to sleep as the key. For a long time our busy modern lifestyles have worked to the detriment of getting a good night’s sleep. At the same time, ironically, the importance of regular sound sleep has grown enormously. The arrival of the Covid pandemic has widened this gap between how we live and how we should live.

Specifically, researchers have spotted that levels of melatonin, the “Sleep Hormone,” seem to be involved in who gets infected and suffers serious illness, followed by potentially long-lasting damage to the nervous system. The conclusion of a long, detailed article at The Atlantic website offers a remarkably hopeful possibility: Melatonin might block the virus.

After reading the article you might be motivated to start taking melatonin, which is readily available over the counter, but one shouldn’t blithely alter the body’s hormone cycles. Covid isn’t going to be prevented with a supplement. The larger picture concerns the healing cycle. Melatonin levels point to a deeper factor, which is sleep itself. Sleep is connected to everything that happens when you undergo the healing cycle every day.

Insomnia and various sleep irregularities throw off biorhythms and hormone cycles—that much has been well established. Sleep deprivation is associated with almost anything that a hormone influences, which makes things so all-embracing that medical research is forced to isolate and study small parts of the entire picture, such as the relationship between bad sleep and type 2 diabetes, obesity, sleep apnea, and depression.

Medicine is concerned with pathologies of every kind, but the healing cycle is about wellness as a whole. To support the healing cycle, you need to address your daily routine and do everything you can to correct the disruptions caused by the pandemic. Passively waiting for the vaccine has no prevention value, and there is some research connected to flu vaccines showing that people who get a good night’s sleep in the days before getting a flu shot receive more effectiveness form the vaccination.

In practical terms, the following steps should be given priority, because they relate directly to improving your sleep and getting the most out of the healing cycle:

  • Go to sleep at the same time every night, including weekends.
  • Spend time out in the sun on a daily walk, since sunlight promotes melatonin levels.
  • Exercise every day, at the least getting up and stretching every hour.
  • Don’t look at bright screens for two hours before bedtime. Their blue light suppresses melatonin levels.
  • Reduce passive distractions and increase creative activities and work that is challenging to your mind. The healing cycle is thrown off by a passive lifestyle.
  • Give sleep a priority rather than doing other things late at night.

The need for these measures has always existed; Covid simply brought them into high relief. Restoring the healing cycle to its natural functioning has benefits extending far beyond the pandemic. But you should consider this a foundation, not the complete answer.

The other disruptions I mentioned above can’t be overlooked. Lockdowns and social distancing automatically reduce human contact. People at younger ages are prone to sudden exposure to what a bad old age feels like: isolated, lonely, depressing, and boring. At a minimum, you need to keep up human contact and become part of an active support system, even if this contact is at a distance and involves phone calls rather than going out to lunch or meeting at work.

From every direction, one hears that the pandemic is leading to a major reset on a global scale. What will actually come about is still speculative. We are living under emergency conditions, which gives priority to emergency measures. But on your own, you can undertake the most important reset that matters personally. Reset the healing cycle, and you will be prepared for emergency conditions and the world that will emerge after the emergency subsides.

 

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

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