Finding Your Way to Gratitude

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Although Thanksgiving Day has become a time for turkey and football, its true purpose lingers, often as a wistful hope that one could be truly thankful. You cannot conjure up thanks if you are focused on the world’s troubles and a constant stream of bad news. So how is true gratitude found?

As writer and teacher Dana Arcuri has said, “The more you are grateful for what you have, the more you can live fully in the present.”. Psychologically, research has shown that practicing gratitude measurably improves your well-being and on the physical side, your heart health.

Gratitude begins when we change our relationship with life from an attitude of rejecting and defending to one of acceptance and appreciation. We all need reminding about a truth expressed by the Greek philosopher Epicurus, “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

When you spontaneously feel grateful for anything, don’t let the moment slip by. Pause, put your attention on the heart region in your chest, and experience the warm emotion suffusing it—this is how gratitude opens up the experience of love and bliss. At the same time you are making a mind-body connection. The sensation of warmth in your heart tells you that the message of gratitude has been sent and received by your cells. You can reinforce this connection by visualizing what you are grateful for; visualization is a powerful way to focus your intention.

Another very good practice is to lie in bed for a few minutes before falling asleep to review your day, bring to mind the things you are grateful for but were too busy to notice. Another quote is relevant, this one from the poet Maya Angelou: “Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer.” In other words, feeling grateful can be a devotional meditation.

Many people feel grateful in a way that doesn’t go very deep, especially if their motivation is material. Being grateful for a great job, big house, and new car keeps everything on the surface. At a deeper emotional level we are grateful for our families and good health. But at the deepest level, gratitude acknowledges that you have the support of nature. This support underlies your whole existence. It comes to you from pure consciousness, expressing itself through your true self.

Your true self is connected to pure consciousness and everything that flows from it. There is also another self, the ego, that manipulates life for its own purposes. The ego constantly chooses between “I want this” and “I don’t want that.” Life proceeds by getting more of what you want and less of what you don’t want. But this process overlooks the values located in the true self: love, compassion, truth, beauty, discovery, creativity, and evolution.

Some of these values do manage to make it to the surface of life, but our birthright is to have much more of them. Gratitude is a way of opening the channel that will bring more, by contacting the true self and speaking from your heart. Buddha taught a gratitude meditation called “gladdening the heart,” instructing the aspirant to consider the wonderful circumstances that led them to seek spiritual awakening and the ability to achieve it. Thanksgiving Day may never match the wisdom of this kind of meditation, but you can start, beginning her and now to bring the power of gratitude into your life.

 

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. He is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of over 89 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. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

 

The Future of Personal and Planetary Well Being : An invitation to Sages and Scientists Symposium, Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville Arkansas

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Despite a steady increase in life expectancy, medical science is facing diminishing returns. It has been estimated that every increase in lifespan since 1990 has resulted in only ten months of increased healthy life; the rest is only prolonged suffering and the decline of aging. Globally more people now die of so-called “lifestyle diseases” than from infectious diseases. Doctors cannot make choices about lifestyle; only the patient can. Finally, half of all heart attacks before old age occur in people who live a good lifestyle, managing their weight, eating right, and exercising regularly.

What lies beyond lifestyle? That’s a matter of much speculation. Will human existence be improved in the future through technology, genetic manipulation, nano-robots in the bloodstream serving as cancer hunters? Or will it take a new philosophical conception, one that entices people away from a life of speed, constant activity, and stress?

By all odds it will take both, because innovations in technology can’t succeed if we continue to define well-being in old, outworn ways. Consider the following statements, which almost everyone, including doctors, take as fact:

  • The body is a machine, and like all machines it breaks down.
  • Aging is a pre-determined process, probably controlled by our genes.
  • The body is a mindless lump of matter except for the brain, which has evolved to produce mind or consciousness.]
  • The causes of most diseases are now known. What remains is to find effective drugs to target each malady.
  • You are healthy until something goes wrong, which is signaled by the appearance of symptoms.

In reality none of these statements is correct. The body isn’t a machine; machines cannot heal themselves. The body isn’t mindless; every cell is imbued with vast knowledge that far surpasses anything found in medical textbooks. The brain doesn’t produce the mind; that’s merely an assumption that has never been proved.

The most urgent need facing each of us is how to envision our bodies without the burden of outworn assumptions, which is why, starting in two weeks, an annual symposium known as Sages & Scientists Symposium will bring together the best thinkers with views both humanistic and scientific. This year’s theme is “The Future of Well-Being,” and the public is invited to attend. There is nothing on the planet as open to the free exchange of ideas, from every kind of thinker and researcher, all aiming to find a way forward into a viable future.

In my view a total rethink of the human body is long past due. To begin with, the division between mind and body is totally arbitrary. The body is a super-highway of information traveling to every cell, and thousands of different molecules inside a cell know exactly what their precise function is. The body’s ability to heal, along with the immune system’s encyclopedic knowledge of all the disease organisms our ancestors encountered (and defeated), far exceeds current medicine.

To get real about your body, you need to see it as a bodymind, a wholeness whose capacity for survival is only exceeded by its capacity to evolve. As the British physicist David Deutsch pointed out in a TED talk this past April, human beings have freed ourselves from the laws of nature that govern the physical universe, and this freedom has allowed us to define entirely how our future will look. That’s a startling reinvention of what it means to be human, because everyone assumes that the laws of nature are vastly more powerful than human beings.

In reality the possibilities created in our consciousness are infinite, but we will remain limited, insecure, and fearful until a new vision tells us who we really are. The body is as conscious as any thought, which is why bodymind is the right conception of our wholeness. Consciousness creates, governs, and organizes every process in the bodymind, and the source of this unlimited knowledge is you. There is no higher power or law of nature dictating your future. The limitations we ascribe to illness, aging, and death are largely mind-made, and the worst of these limitations is our belief that we must be limited.

In reality there is no “must” about it. The reason science talks about biology as destiny and evolutionists talk about humans as higher apes rests upon a deeply rooted mistake, that we are physical creations glommed together from bits and pieces of matter. This is the same as saying that a masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso is just daubs of oil paint. The entire point of a great painting is the consciousness that goes into it, fashioning beauty and meaning first and foremost.

Likewise, human beings are conscious agents whose existence, first and foremost, is rooted in beauty and meaning also, to which can be added everything else we most value: love, compassion discovery, curiosity, creativity, and evolution. These are aspects of consciousness, and the bodymind is our vehicle for exploring them. The future will be viable only if we have the confidence to see ourselves as expressions of higher consciousness.

I inaugurated Sages & Scientists Symposium so that the best thinkers would feel comfortable in each other’s company. Instead of compartmentalization, which is the norm in the academic world, there is a free and open field in which anything, from artificial intelligence to Vedanta, from virtual reality to epigenetics, is given time and space to be expressed. The concept has borne fruit beyond anything I originally envisioned. Now it can be truly said that well-being has a future and not simply a repeat of the past. The only way to know if human potential is unlimited is to test it through unlimited imagination, discovery, and deep understanding. The sooner every individual grasps this, the more we can live in hope and optimism.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and founder of Chopra Global and co-founder of Jiyo, 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 and Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book is Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify www.deepakchopra.com 

The Balanced Mind: A Better Model

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Now that meditation has caught on widely, it’s time to understand why it works. The physical findings measured by neuroscience gives intriguing hints about changes in brain wave activity, but that’s an effect, not a cause. The same holds true for physiological changes outside the brain, such as lowered heart rate and blood pressure. The how and why of meditation must be sought “in here,” in the meditator’s subjective experience.

This isn’t a mysterious route to take. Pain studies are based on how much pain a subject feels; there is no objective way to measure this. In the case of meditation, I believe the correct model is that the mind in meditation is rebalancing itself. Medical studies have known for a long time that the body tends toward a state of dynamic balance known as homeostasis. If you push your body out of balance by shoveling snow off the driveway or running a marathon, as soon as you stop that activity, heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen use in the muscles, and even digestion and the immune system return to homeostatic balance.

Something similar is supported by psychological studies into emotion—everyone seems to have a set point for a level of mood to which they return after an emotional event, whether the event is happy or sad. But the notion that the mind rebalances itself is new. We all pay attention chiefly to the activity whirling around in our heads, and this activity takes only brief pauses here and there, awaiting the time when we fall asleep, where conscious activity ceases (except in dreams). So it has never seemed that the mind is rebalancing itself. Indeed, what would that even feel like?

I believe that meditation wouldn’t work unless the mind already had a rebalancing mechanism. It’s not as if meditation is magical. It only deepens what the mind naturally does already, the way that relaxation techniques deepen the relaxed state that the body returns to in homeostasis.

If we look closely into our own experience, it isn’t hard to identify the states of mind that rebalance it. The names we give to different kinds of meditation techniques shows the way.

Mindfulness

Self-Inquiry

Reflection

Contemplation

Concentration

Prayer

Quiet mind

Controlled breathing

Bliss

I believe that these techniques are simply ways of deepening a process that the mind already uses to rebalance itself.

Mindfulness is how your mind rebalances distraction. You are brought back into the present moment. This is naturally where every cell in your body lives. It is also where the mind should live.

Self-Inquiry is how your mind rebalances habits. By asking yourself, “Why am I doing this?” you bring conscious choice into a situation where you have been ruled by habits, routines, obsessive behavior, knee-jerk reactions, and outworn beliefs.

Reflection is how your mind rebalances thoughtlessness. You regard your behavior, see what is self-defeating or heedless about it, and realize what is actually going on. The mind is naturally thoughtful when it reflects upon itself.

Contemplation is how your mind rebalances confusion. When faced with multiple choices, each with its points pro and con, you sort everything out by contemplating the situation until you have clarity. The mind naturally prefers clarity over confusion.

Concentration how your mind rebalances pointlessness. It is pointless to do a careless job, having careless opinions, and relate to other people in a lazy, careless way. It creates many kinds of trouble when you feel that life is pointless. By concentrating itself, the mind gets absorbed in something deeply enough that it has a point. This satisfied the mind’s natural urge to find life meaningful.

Prayer how your mind rebalances helplessness. By contacting a higher power, you no longer feel isolated, alone, small, and lost. Those are the qualities of helplessness, and for centuries humans have summoned God or the gods to bring a higher power into their lives. The mind naturally wants to be rid of feeling powerless.

Quiet mind how your mind rebalances restlessness. The mind is constantly processing daily life and its challenges, but when mental activity becomes restless, there is a risk of exhaustion, anxiety, and mental agitation. The mind naturally wants to be quiet when no activity is necessary. In peace and quiet lies the simple contentment of existence, but also the potential for confronting the next situation that demands a response.

Controlled breathing is how your mind rebalances stress. Stress is the term we’ve devised for an imbalanced state of mind and body under pressure. Breathing becomes rapid and irregular. Behind the scenes many other signs of imbalance are occurring, but breathing is connected to the whole issue of responding to pressure. By taking a few deep breaths, sighing deeply, or falling asleep (a natural state of regular, relaxed breathing), a choice has been made to return to balance.

Bliss is how your mind rebalances suffering. The mind naturally prefers well-being to suffering, no matter how much we rationalize that certain forms of suffering are good for us. Bliss, joy, or ecstasy is a state of perfect happiness. It seems to arrive unpredictably, but we all have experienced it, and the mind wants to be there as much as possible. Bliss is a natural state; suffering is an unnatural distortion, a kind of persistent bad vibration that destroys the mind’s good vibrations.

This new model contrasts with age-old viewpoints about the mind being like a monkey, a metaphor often cited from Indian traditions, or like the struggle between virtue and sin or angels and demons, which is more Christian. We need to go beyond metaphors now. Clearly the human mind is the source of our greatest achievements. This alone is enough to support the notion that the mind isn’t a battlefield of happiness versus suffering. The mind is a self-balancing process in constant dynamic motion that is subject to imbalances that create conflict, confusion, and suffering.

The advantage of this model is that it allows meditation to become more central as a healing mode. By accentuating the mind’s rebalancing ability and deepening it, by bringing the mind’s natural tendencies under our conscious control, meditation in all its forms is the most natural way to heal our minds of everyday difficulties, without any side effects. From this modest basis all the promises of higher consciousness can be explored, because they are only a further deepening of the same processes.

 

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. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His anticipated book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, (October 1, 2019) unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities.
Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify  www.deepakchopra.com 

accel-kkr.com

By Deepak Chopra, MD
It feels to many people as if we’re living in a Humpty-Dumpty time, when everything has gone smash. A sense of chaos and disorder permeates everything, and as you look around, there’s no longer any consensus about the most basic facts. Reality has become the clash of opposing viewpoints. When the phrase “alternative facts” first hit the media, it was met with jeers. Now it’s the definition of our troubling times.

What’s missing isn’t what people usually point to—order, tradition, solid values, and cooperation. Those things depend entirely on the real missing element, which T.S. Eliot poetically called “the still point of the turning world.” For the fact is that chaos isn’t new; disorder has threatened humanity throughout recorded history. The only way for chaos to be defeated is to have a firm foundation, something so solid, immovable, and permanent that we can build upon it. Otherwise, anything we try to build stands on sand.

A phrase like “solid foundation” sounds physical and rock-like, but Eliot understood that nothing more is needed than a fixed point. In his mind that point was God, and civilization has agreed with him. Organized religion issues articles of faith and dogma, on which an entire culture can rise. All of these proclamations of truth stem from truth with a capital T, the almighty. God is like a point because in an age of faith, God is always at the center of everything, the way a merry-go-round might have, at its very center, an invisible dot that doesn’t turn.

The trend in modern society for two generations at least has been the steady dissolution of faith in organized religion. Its replacement was science, whose foundation isn’t a still point but a methodology: the search for objective facts. Whatever you think about science, its methodology has been supremely successful in discovering the mechanics behind the universe, but it has done nothing to cure our unease over disorder and chaos. Quite the opposite—with every passing year the universe can feel more unstable, unknowable, and mysterious.

This, however, is not the business of the average person going about the routines of daily life. Even if the New York Times announced tomorrow that physics has achieved its holy grail, a Theory of Everything that can predict the movement of every single particle in the universe since the big bang, this epic achievement would do nothing about our unease over climate change, refugees, Putin’s Russia, or anything else in the Humpty-Dumpty world.

If religion has lost its authority and science is occupied with cosmic issues, who or what will heal this chaos?

The answer is at once reassuring and bothersome. The only still point of the turning world is you. Until you discover your own center, a place immune to change, the world will be an out of control merry-go-round. This isn’t a glib metaphor. Imagine a carnival carousel in your mind’s eye. Once you see it, shift your viewpoint to the following different perspectives:

  • See the carousel spinning as you stand outside it on the ground.
  • Take a bird’s eye view and see the carousel rotating from above.
  • Get on a horse and see the world as you go around and around, up and down.
  • Find the center post of the carousel and lean against it, watching the world spin while you appear to be stationary.

What you’ve done is an exercise in non-Einstein relativity. You have shifted viewpoints in any direction you want to—this isn’t limited to the viewpoints listed above. You could if you wanted to view the carousel from the moon, or Alpha Centauri, or any place in the cosmos. The ability of the human mind to change viewpoints makes us unique among living creatures (we assume).

This isn’t just a special talent—it is who we are. Take any situation in world history, and it is open to countless viewpoints. It is mind-blowing enough to realize that reality is different for each person, but inside each person there are as many viewpoints as you happen to want. Think of any historical figure: Buddha, Napoleon, Mozart, Rudolf Valentino, anybody.

With no effort at all, you can imagine this person from the viewpoint of:

  • A historian describing the march of history.
  • The person’s mother or father.
  • A doctor listening to his heart.
  • A tailor measuring him for clothes.
  • A beggar watching him go by on the street.

These are only the tiniest quotient of viewpoints. You could take any figure in history—or in your private life—and have a different reaction to him or her at every moment in your life.

Now we are at the heart of the issue. Chaos and disorder are mental points of view. We construct them out of thoughts, beliefs, opinions, prejudices, expectations, and fears. There is nothing about reality that is not structured “in here” in our own consciousness. The fact that there are infinite viewpoints isn’t the problem. Without shifting viewpoints, we’d never have art, music, literature, science, medicine, and so on.

The problem arises when we forget that these constructs are mind-made and can be unmade. Once you decide that chaos is real, you become the victim of your own forgetfulness. Truth with a capital T isn’t God, not anymore in the modern secular world. Truth with a capital T is the immutable, changeless, eternal, ever-present awareness that is the still point of the restless mind.

Therefore, there is nothing outside us that needs to be discovered in order to turn chaos into orderliness. Chaos and orderliness are like a stream that flows without end that also has standing eddies. The river sends water downstream without apparent design, yet the eddies remain constant even as they are in motion. Which do you prefer to see, the river or the eddies?

The fact that you even have this choice proves that you are beyond order and chaos. I hope that this conclusion surprises or even shocks you. What would it be like to live as the still point of the turning world? We will discuss this unique possibility next.

(To be cont.)

 

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. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
 www.deepakchopra.com 

Higher Consciousness in Less than a Minute

By Deepak Chopra, MD

There are very old, rich traditions of higher consciousness around the world, and diverse as they are, they seem to have one thing in common: Arriving at higher consciousness takes time, perhaps a lifetime. Along with this idea comes other, closely related ones. Higher consciousness is exceptional. It requires intense inner work. Only a select few ever reach the goal.

The overall effect of these ideas is to discourage the average person from even considering that higher consciousness is within reach. For all practical purposes, society sets those apart who have become enlightened, saintly, or spiritually advanced. In an age of faith such figures were revered; today they are more likely to be viewed as beyond normal life, to be admired, shrugged off, or forgotten.

Much of this is a holdover from the merger of religion, spirituality, and consciousness. For centuries there was no separating the three. Most traditional societies developed a priestly class to guard the sanctity—and privileged status—of reaching near to God. But these trappings are now outdated and even work against the truth, which is that higher consciousness is as natural and effortless as consciousness itself. If you are aware, you can become more aware. There is nothing to higher consciousness than this logical conclusion.

No matter who you are or what level of consciousness you think you are in, two things always apply. The first is that you use your awareness every day in all kinds of ways. You think, feel, wish, perceive, etc. The second thing is that you have constricted your awareness, through a process that the English writer Aldous Huxley called the reducing valve. Instead of finding yourself in a state of expanded awareness, you edit, censor, ignore, and deny many aspects of reality. The reducing valve squeezes “whole mind,” another term favored by Huxley, to a small flow of permissible thoughts, perceptions, and feelings.

The reducing valve takes years to form, and much of what happens consists of social conditioning, which shapes us almost unconsciously. There is the huge influence of negative experiences that give rise to fear, the memory of pain, and the desire to be less open and more closed off for the sake of defending yourself. But positive experiences also can constrict your awareness, because likes and dislikes operate together. “Yes to this” and “No to that” is like a pendulum whose swing we ride for a lifetime. So powerful are our reasons for reducing reality that we grow to fear, dislike, and deny the possibility of whole mind.

Yet by definition whole mind cannot be destroyed, only distorted. A simple example is contained in the word “Hello.” Whenever someone says hello, they open a channel of experience that has little to do with the dictionary definition of the word.

If you aren’t using the reducing valve, this is what “hello” can communicate:

  • Tone of voice
  • Mood
  • State of two people’s relationship
  • Memories of past encounters
  • Foretelling of what might happen next\
  • Signals of acceptance or rejection
  • Alerts to possible threat or, possible welcome.

Can so much be contained in a single word? Absolutely. The study of linguistics packs all these layered experiences inside everyday language. The next time someone says hello, open yourself to the wider experience you are having. Is the other person feeling friendly or indifferent? Are you reminded of old thoughts of this person? Does your mood suddenly change? What’s the vibe being created between you?

If a traffic cop stops you and walks up to your car, his hello and yours in reply have the same dictionary definition as when someone you are deeply infatuated with says hello. But the two encounters carry vastly different meanings, which our antennae always pick up. They pick up everything unless we use the reducing valve. But 99% of the time we do use it. We don’t want the traffic cop to see that we are angry, scared, annoyed, or guilty. Or we don’t want the lover we are infatuated with to see anything but what we think will seem desirable.

In a word, we feel safer and more in control by editing reality, and yet even if such feelings are attained, we pay a high cost. The reducing valve makes every situation a reflection or repetition of an older experience. It enforces routine. It puts other people, and ourselves, into a box. Very little is actually new and fresh, even though as viewed by whole mind, every moment is unique and unpredictable, open to infinite possibilities. Great painters have looked at the same trees, grass, clouds, and flowers that you pass by without notice and turned them into beautiful visions. Nothing is so mundane that is cannot be a source of wonder, creativity, love, and the deep satisfaction of being alive, here and now.

“Nothing is so mundane that is cannot be a source of wonder, creativity, love, and the deep satisfaction of being alive, here and now.”

That last sentence is the key—it opens the door to higher consciousness not just in a minute but instantly. You are naturally nothing less than whole mind; the reducing valve minimizes your potential by an unmeasurable extent. How do you measure the next opportunity to feel wonder after the opportunity has vanished? What value is lost when “hello” is a ritualized word with hardly any meaning once all the possible meanings have been squeezed out of it?

The motivation for expanding your awareness lies in those questions. You can do it here and now, without effort. Just realize clearly that higher consciousness is the most natural, effortless, and fulfilling way to live. From there, infinity follows.

 

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. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
 www.deepakchopra.com