Finding Your Inner Strength: A Free Global Mental Health Summit

By Deepak Chopra™, Cassandra Vieten, Poonacha Machaiah, and Gabriella Wright

In the face of the pandemic crisis, there is a great opportunity. It is open to everyone, and it is free. We invite you, your family, and friends to this healing experience. If you want to find your inner strength, peace, and the end of anxiety, please sign up here Never Alone Summit, a global mental health event.

In the 3-day summit you will discover the inner breakthroughs that we all need to get past the mental pain and suffering that the pandemic brings in its wake.

At this moment some people have already found a creative way to move forward. They do not feel trapped, because they welcome the chance to put their everyday life on pause. Small opportunities are all around us, to bake bread from sourdough starter, finally build that raised garden bed, meditate, walk and do yoga, and work in pajamas.

For so many others, however, it is a time of depression, uncertainty, and anxiety. Some are lonely in isolation; some feel pressure from being crowded with others for extended periods.

Between the good and bad, for most of us it’s a little bit of both, depending on the day.

There is no need to wait for symptoms of anxiety and depression. There is no reason to live with the mental discomforts of the crisis when we can share in a healing experience together. That is the purpose of the 3-Day Never Alone Summit.

Here are some key points about meeting any psychological challenge:

  • You have a source of inner strength that you can directly contact.
  • You can build your mental health resilience – in other words, how you withstand and adapt to the challenges that arise.
  • You can find support from others who want to be part of the global healing.
  • You can be of service to anyone who is isolated and needs human contact.
  • You can change the tone from panic to hope, from helplessness to reassurance.

To use a metaphor, you may not be able to determine what inner obstacle course you will face, but you can become more mentally and emotionally strong, nimble, and agile.

Attending to your mental health is just as important as your physical health. In truth, the two can’t be separated. Your stress level influences everything: your immunity, inflammation, your sleep and health behaviors – all of which have a pervasive effect on your mind, body, and spirit. Taking care of your mental, emotional and spiritual health cannot be separated from protecting your physical health. They are one and the same.

If you are starting to get a little anxious, you are not alone. It is projected that overall, mental health symptoms will substantially intensify during the pandemic. Many will lose hope, lose faith, or lose someone they love. Mental health is being called the “parallel pandemic,” expected to impact more people and for a longer period of time than the COVID crisis, especially for those without a history of depression and anxiety. Check out this chart from our friends at One Mind:

 

 

This makes it crucial that we all focus just as much on building our mental, emotional, and spiritual strength as we have focused on protecting ourselves from the virus.

Building mental health resilience – whether in yourself, or in someone you love or people you work with – relies on ALL aspects of our lives. Mental health has to do with how we think and feel and how our brain works, but also with how we move our bodies, what and how we eat, the microbiome in our gut, how we sleep, how we connect with community, nature, and spirit, where we place our attention, and even how we breathe.

It may seem overwhelming, but the good news is there are hundreds of evidence-based, simple (though not always easy) and free practices in each of these areas that can be gently included over time into our lives to boost mental health resilience in a short period of time. Not to be naive, even very small lifestyle changes can be surprisingly difficult – for everyone, especially when feeling down. But behavioral science also has proven methods for gradually anchoring new practices into your life – such as linking a new behavior to one you already do (doing five minutes of stretching whenever you brush your teeth, or meditating in your car for ten minutes when you park your car for work or come home).

You can build an ecosystem that supports your mental, emotional and spiritual well-being.  What’s more, most of these practices are enjoyable, rewarding, and connect you with others – helping you to remember that you are not alone. At times, they even bring joy, wonder, and magic into your life – which are not the opposite of stress, but can be antidotes to stress.

This is why we have been pouring our hearts into creating Never Alone: A Global Mental Health Summit on May 22-24, 2020. A collaboration between our respective organizations – The Chopra Foundation’s #NeverAlone initiative and the John W. Brick Mental Health Foundation – this 3-day livestream focuses on whole-person approaches to mental health. Attending this summit can help you build your own ecosystem for mental, emotional, and spiritual health.

 

 

Featuring people like Deepak Chopra™, Arianna Huffington, Mariel Hemingway, Don Miguel Ruiz, Zak Williams, Wim Hof, Rick Hanson, Shauna Shapiro, Luisah Teish, Dan Siegel, Rhonda Magee and dozens more, the over 70 talks running about 12-minutes each are designed to share ideas, inspiration, and practices you can use right away from experts, celebrities and athletes, and ordinary people with extraordinary stories.  It is completely free, and will offer follow-up resources people can access post-summit. You can drop in and out whenever you like, and it will be viewable live or on-demand.

I hope you can join us there, and in the meantime, stay well.

 

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.”
Cassandra Vieten, PhD is Executive Director of the John W. Brick Mental Health Foundation, Scholar-in-Residence at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where she served as President from 2013-2019. She is a clinical psychologist, mind-body medicine researcher, author of three books, and an international public speaker and workshop leader. www.cassandravieten.com
Poonacha Machaiah has over 20 years of global experience as a successful serial entrepreneur and business leader in Fortune 100 companies. Poonacha is among the new breed of emerging social entrepreneurs who are using approaches from the commercial world and employing technology to tackle social and environmental problems. He is Co-Founder along with Deepak Chopra and Gabriella Wright of the #NeverAlone initiative of the Chopra Foundation, dedicated to suicide prevention and mental wellness. www.thewarriormonk.com
Gabriella Wright is an English-French actress and model, best known for playing Queen Claude of France in the series The Tudors and Viola in the film The Perfect Husband. She recently played a significant role as Gina in the action thriller The Transporter Refueled. She is cofounder with Deepak Chopra™ and Poonacha Machaiah of the #NeverAlone initiative of the Chopra Foundation. She produced and starred in the 2020 film “I Am Never Alone”.
The “Never Alone” movement aims to build communities to encourage and empower young adults to reach out to a friend who may be struggling with their mental health. The goal of the movement is to reduce the stigma and allowing people to know they are not alone, build communities of wellbeing where people can speak about it and enable them with the tools to work through it. The campaign aims to bring together a coalition of mental health charities and initiatives in order to provide support for people affected by mental illness, along with raising awareness and tackling stigma.
The mission of the John W. Brick Mental Health Foundation is to fund, conduct and promote evidence-based research on how different forms of holistic treatments – such as exercise, nutrition and healthy lifestyle choices – benefit mental health. Because the Brick Family funds all administrative expenses, all funds go directly to conducting and promoting science and programs to incorporate evidence-based holistic treatments into mental health care. The Brick Foundation has donated over $1.3M to scientific research and programs that incorporate exercise, fitness, nutrition, and mind-body practices into mental health promotion.

Self-Care, the Vagus Nerve, and COVID-19

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Gustaf Kranck, M.Sc.

There is widespread awareness of the wellness movement in this country, and the term “self-care” is being more and more recognized. Since advice has existed for decades on proper diet, exercise, sleep, and the avoidance of alcohol and tobacco, in what way is self-care an advance? This seems like a critical question during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Self-care is an advance over the usual well-known preventive measures if it can do more, in other words, if there are choices that improve the whole mind-body system. Increasingly the key to self-care seems to be the vagus nerve. The general public awaits a silver-bullet treatment and a future vaccine, but the benefits associated with the vagus nerve are accessible by anyone right now.

A bit of anatomy first: twelve major nerves radiate out from the brain, and these so-called cranial nerves connect the brain to every area of the body. They function like information superhighways, constantly sending messages back and forth from brain to body. The most important cranial nerve is called the vagus nerve, named from the Latin word for wandering. The vast majority of sensory signals to and from the heart, lungs, stomach, and intestinal tract travel along the six miles of the vagus nerve.

In the past few years, a surprising discovery was made: deep, regular breathing stimulates the vagus nerve, sending a signal of relaxation that is very effective in settling down the stress response. News stories about vagal breathing, as it was named, drew widespread attention. But as research became more focused, it emerged that the vagus nerve might be something like a master key in the body. In its wanderings the vagus nerve affects the heart, lungs, digestive tract, and the immune system. These are the critical systems involved when someone becomes infected with the COVID-19.

The implication is that by stimulating the vagus nerve, a holistic benefit might come to these systems altogether. One of the co-authors of this article, Gustaf Kranck, has a personal story connected with vagal stimulation. Among the many ways that the vagus nerve can be stimulated are meditation and yoga. After getting burned-out by stress after the 2008 great recession, Gustaf began to practice meditation and felt that it “saved his brain.” Motivated to explore further, he hit upon the wealth of research that is being conducted on the vagus nerve. At present there are thousands of scientific papers on the subject and vagus stimulation devices are FDA approved for depression. In recent months there has been published more than 150 papers on vagus nerve and Coronavirus – most of them showing clear indications that the vagus nerve is central to the disease progress.

Here it is necessary to step cautiously. Recently an eminent French researcher, Dr. Jean-Pierre Changeux, published findings that indicated a kind of medical benefit from nicotine – which neurologically acts as a vagus stimulant. The findings from France were that those who were active smokers, even while contracting Coronavirus, seemed to have a more favourable disease progress than those who had recently stopped smoking. Needless to say –, a controversy erupted. Promptly after the publication of these studies in late April, the French government ordered limitations on the sale of nicotine patches from pharmacies in order to prevent hoarding.

Yet it is completely non-controversial to state that activating the vagus nerve with meditation and yoga, along with deep regular breathing and good sleep, are known conclusively to improve functioning in the systems most affected by the virus, particularly the respiratory system. Just as thoroughly documented is meditation’s benefit in reducing the stress response, with implications for reducing inflammation, one of the key dangers when the body’s immune system overreacts to the virus.

Gustaf made another striking observation. When meditating and doing controlled breathing practice, he could measure how this vagus nerve activation brings heartbeat and breathing rhythms to perfect sync – if he was in good health. His discovery was that with a hand-to-hand wearable electrocardiogram (EKG) he could simultaneously measure with high precision both the heart rate and breathing– and therefore instantly test how well they were synchronized.

This synchronization is very important. There is a sound physiological reason behind this. The vagus nerve regulates oxygen delivery in the body, so that it is used most efficiently and without waste. You need more oxygen to muscles during exercise and to the gut when relaxed. Vagal nerve stimulation seems to be crucial here, and a test of breathing and heartbeat rhythms, which is non-invasive and quite simple, may be useful in determining who is well and who is sick (we are not claiming, however, that the sickness would specifically be COVID-19). In healthy people the breath and heartbeat are in sync; in sick people the two functions go out of sync.

We hope this information is useful in promoting self-care through the methods for vagus nerve stimulation already mentioned. It costs nothing to do vagal breathing, get a good night’s sleep, meditate, and practice yoga. We feel this is the direction that self-care and the virus should take.

 

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.”
Gustaf Kranck, founder of Vagus.co – a Cambridge (UK) producer of health monitoring wearables and vagus stimulation devices. He has a M.Sc. from Aalto University in Finland and in 2019 authored the study ‘Vagal Tone Diagnostics with hand-to-hand ECG’.

The Key to Handling Stress and COVID-19

By Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD, Michelle Williams, ScD, Ryan Castle, William C. Bushell, PhD, Kimberly Brouwer, PhD, and Paul J. Mills, PhD

Although COVID-19 is very easily transmitted from person to person, the risk of subsequent hospitalization and death primarily affects people who are already at risk because of old age, infirmity and/or chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, autoimmune illness, obesity, and heart disease. All of these chronic illnesses are associated with measurable low-grade inflammation in the body. The chronic low-grade inflammation that develops with advanced age has become known as “inflammaging”. Most people with chronic illness unknowingly have low-grade inflammation. Recent research points to a second finding: these same disorders are often accompanied by persistent low-grade anxiety and depression.

All of this as a background increases the danger for a person when acute illness strikes. In addition to the elderly and chronically ill, COVID-19 is causing acute respiratory illness and stroke sometimes leading to death in seemingly otherwise healthy younger individuals. The transition from SARS-CoV-2 infection to diagnosed COVID-19 is typically accompanied by a “cytokine storm.” Cytokines are proteins that are major drivers of inflammation, and their rapid increase, or “storm” is one of the body’s immune responses to acute threat.

In addition, studies have connected pro-inflammatory cytokines to the stress response; they regulate well-known stress hormones such as ACTH and cortisol. Three major systems are involved: the immune system, the central nervous system and the endocrine hormone system.

In the face of these connections, we are coming forward to suggest that complementary practices—deep breathing, yoga, and meditation—can play an important role during this pandemic. These practices have been confirmed by hundreds of scientific studies to bring down over-activity of the autonomic nervous system, calm the mind from anxiety, reduce the stress response, regularize heartbeat, and lower blood pressure. Together, all of these diverse benefits are associated with reducing the invisible presence of chronic low-grade inflammation, especially if added to good sleep, exercise, and proper diet.

We don’t fully understand how the immune response, linked to stress and inflammation, can turn lethal. As a response to cuts, wounds, invading pathogens, and other threats, prior to antibody formation, the body first responds with inflammation as a normal yet crucial healing function. But it has long been known that inflammation is paradoxical. Acute inflammation can over-react, harming or even killing the patient. (Instances of strokes and heart attacks among young COVID-19 patients might be linked to micro-cytokine storms in the brain and heart.)

The threat from low-grade chronic inflammation was not discovered until recently but seems to be widespread. It is unaccompanied by the swelling, burning, and redness of the skin that marks acute inflammation and therefore goes undetected by the patient or physician. Preventing and addressing chronic low-grade inflammation and its significant adverse consequences are urgent issues, even more urgent during a pandemic. There seems to be every reason to make the public aware how deep breathing, meditation, yoga, and other healthy lifestyle practices can help during this crisis and long afterwards.

 

Deepak Chopra™ MD, FACP, Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego
Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD, Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School/MGH
Michelle Williams, SM, ScD, Dean of the Faculty, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Kimberly Brouwer, PhD, Professor and Chief, Department of Family Medicine and Public Health, Division of Global Health, Infectious Diseases Epidemiology, at the University of California, San Diego
Ryan Castle, Executive Director of the Chopra Library
William C. Bushell, PhD, medical anthropologist and research director of the Chopra Library
Paul J. Mills, PhD, Professor and Chief, Department of Family Medicine and Public Health, at the University of California, San Diego

Shakespeare, COVID, and the Plague

By Deepak Chopra, MD
Social isolation gives us time to examine our lives in a new light, suddenly faced with economic collapse, empty streets, current panic and future uncertainty, and death appearing out of nowhere—in other words, the conditions that confronted every person on a daily basis during the lifetime of Shakespeare. What feels horribly abnormal to us was routinely normal for him and every member of the human race in the 16th century.

In statistical terms, Shakespeare is just another survivor. Unlike his son, Hamnet, who died at 11, Shakespeare didn’t die as a child, nor did his mother die giving birth to him. He also escaped the plague. Ever since the Black Death swept across the globe in the 14th century, bubonic plague remained a threat, killing on average one to three people in every house where it struck. In Shakespeare’s lifetime, there were four plague years, 1582, 1592, 1603, and 1607, when London, including its theaters, shut down because of the disease.

Syphilis had arrived in Europe from the New World in 1495, first appearing in a French garrison outside Naples, and it quickly infected every level of society. But Shakespeare didn’t die of it, either, or of smallpox. He wasn’t murdered in the street even though there was no London police force. He couldn’t have been executed as a witch, not being a woman, although the practice was not only current but growing. Finally, unlike his father, John Shakespeare, Will’s life and reputation weren’t ruined overnight due to charges brought against him by Queen Elizabeth’s huge network of internal spies.

As a survivor, Shakespeare stands out because of his genius, but the horrible conditions surrounding him persisted more or less unchanged until the middle of the 19th century. The causes of plague syphilis, and deaths in childbirth started to emerge, and more mundane but equally life-saving advances occurred in public health, like the first sewer system in America, which was built in Chicago in the late 1850s.

If humans were simply higher primates with very big brains, survival would be the beginning and end of our story. The Darwinian model for survival requires only getting enough food and finding a willing mate so that you didn’t starve before you were able to pass on your genes to the next generation. Nothing much mattered after that momentous event.

Evolutionists persist in seeing Homo sapiens through the lens of basic survival, but we do all kinds of things to deliberately imperil our survival, from taking care of our weak and sick instead of abandoning them, to stockpiling nuclear warheads, just to make sure that total war can erupt if we feel like it. War, crime, and violence do nothing to improve human genes and in fact work against simple survival.

But if you put Shakespeare and the plague together, something mysterious emerges. Despite every threat of disease and death, crime, poverty, political oppression, and religious fanaticism (the Puritans in Shakespeare’s day railed against the London theaters as ungodly, but luckily they didn’t shut them down until 1642, 26 years after his death), not to mention widespread illiteracy, no public sanitation, and no police force, these horrendous circumstances didn’t wipe out creativity, discovery, love, compassion, and a vision of a higher ideals.

Homo sapiens is the only species that liberated itself from natural evolution, and this unprecedented achievement involved one thing only: going beyond. Not our higher brain but human nature envisioned life independent of physical circumstances. Miraculously, if you peer at the oldest cave paintings in Europe, such as those in Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, France, you don’t see primitive scratching from 30,000 years ago.

You see art. The animals depicted are done with confident, artistic lines that are also scientifically accurate, depicting a wide range of Paleolithic creatures precisely enough that they can be identified by species. No one knows why sophisticated cave paintings suddenly appeared. The Chauvet depictions lie deep in the darkest heart of the caves. No sunlight penetrated, so the painters worked by the quavering light of torches. In addition, since the animals were not right before them, they worked from memory of how each one looked.

This act of going beyond exemplifies a trait that belongs to the human condition, the trait of creativity for its own sake. In fact, even though the modern world owes everything to discoveries that improved life, the rise of technology and all the practical benefits it has brought, going beyond has always happened “in here” before anything could happen “out there.” Before the first primitive flint blades could be hacked out, the concept of “tool” and “weapon” had to come first. And before a concept can be born, there has to be a mind capable of concepts.

My point is that you and I, like our ancestors, are the product not of genetic evolution but the evolution of consciousness. We were liberated from the Darwinian scheme by self-awareness. In other words, we said to ourselves, “I just thought of what I’d like to do,” and with the combination of awareness, vision, and desire, we evolved into the human condition. The Greek word for beyond is meta, and we should apply it to ourselves more often. To be human is an expression of the metahuman. Shakespeare was a meta-genius, but everyday people are just as meta in their own way. Parents sacrifice for their children, even die for them, because they go beyond their own selfish needs. Any creative hobby is meta, because it has nothing to do with surviving.
The higher your vision, the more meta you are. Buddha was extraordinarily meta, but his followers, seeing the worth of his vision, had to be meta or Buddha would have preached in the wilderness. Likewise, without metahumans among Jesus’s disciples, Christianity would have perished on the cross.

The COVID virus has put everyday life in peril for countless people, but it has actually risen the level of self-sacrifice, service, sharing, cooperating for the common good, laying down political antagonisms, seeking a global solution, and reflecting upon what really matters. Those are all meta qualities; they are perfect examples of going beyond. The fact that we can see a future past the devastation of the pandemic is a meta trait of huge importance. We aren’t human without being metahuman. For me, this is the lasting lesson and the deeper meaning to be taken away form a terrible time.

 

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.”

Emotional Intelligence: Escaping the Matrix of Fear

By Deepak Chopra™, MD

For many young people, the COVID virus outbreak will bring their first experience of fear and anxiety as a pervasive mood. As a society we are afraid of fear, and most of the time we can turn our backs on it. But this kind of denial is unworkable in a crisis. As bad news mounts daily and society becomes ever more anxious, countless people become enmeshed in the matrix of fear without knowing how to escape.

Social forces can drive you to participate in the matrix of fear, but society cannot get you out of it. Escape is something each person must confront on their own. 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 had a burst of attention some years ago, 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 mine field 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 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.”