The Chopra Foundation Announces Initiative in Africa, Aims to Impact One Billion Lives

NEW YORKJuly 18, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — The Chopra Foundation (CF), a global nonprofit organization committed to fostering a more just, healthy, sustainable, and joyful world, is delighted to announce our focused effort to bring this mission to communities and individuals across Africa. The Foundation has formed strategic partnerships with impactful non-profit organizations already making a difference across multiple African countries with the intention of leveraging their collective strengths and expertise to effect meaningful change on a large scale.

Through these collaborations, we aim to create a ripple effect that will reverberate throughout communities and transform lives across a wide range of crucial issues, including universal education and poverty alleviation, and with an initial focus on two key areas: eradicating Gender-Based Violence including Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C); and bridging the hunger and nutritional gaps prevalent within communities.

Never Alone

Addressing gender-based violence, specifically FGM, is a critical aspect of the CF’s vision. We are proud to bring this to life in partnership with The Girl Generation, a non-profit organization operating across multiple African countries, including Kenya, Somaliland, EthiopiaSenegal, and more, to create a world where girls have agency, freedom and are free from violence. The CF contributes through fundraising and by offering consciousness-based mental health resources that address survivors’ holistic well-being through our Never Alone Mental Health Initiative. Our ultimate goal is to create a network of support and resources that fosters empowerment and contributes to a more equitable and safe society.

Leyla Hussein, Global Advocacy Director for TGG, said, “TGG has made remarkable strides in their work to support FGM survivors , bringing attention to this critical issue and advocating for change. Their partnership with the Chopra Foundation has been invaluable, combining their expertise, resources, and networks to amplify their impact.”

Gabriella Wright, co-founder of Never Alone, shared her vision that “together, we are moving forward to create a powerful movement of loving action by providing young girls and women with tangible mental hygiene tools that will support their path to freedom from suffering, self-actualization and leadership within their homes, communities, and beyond.”

Closing the hunger and nutritional gaps within communities is another fundamental objective of the CF’s initiative. In partnership with Cup of Uji, a Kenya-based non-profit, the CF is fundraising to provide meals to less privileged primary-school children, and in the long-term, is focused on empowering communities to utilize local herbs and spices to enrich their meals with essential nutrition. This long-term vision seeks to create a sustainable and locally driven approach to address hunger and malnutrition, ensuring that communities are consuming nutritional food that is also rooted in the wisdom of their own traditions and resources.

Francis Otieno Amonde, Founder and Executive Director of Cup of Uji, believes the collaboration with the Chopra Foundation will be crucial in tackling classroom hunger, teenage pregnancies, child marriages, nutrition, education, and mental health issues among underprivileged school children in Kenya. This partnership aims to alleviate poverty and drive positive change in the communities they serve.”

Poonacha Machaiah, CEO of the Chopra Foundation, reflected on this important work, stating that “The CF is proud to announce the launch of our community initiatives in Africa. Our partnerships with The Girl Generation and Cup of Uji demonstrate our commitment to nurturing the whole person – body, mind, and spirit – and building communities that can thrive today and into the future.”

For more information about the Chopra Foundation’s Africa Initiative and to donate to this effort, please visit https://choprafoundation.org/africa/

 

About The Chopra Foundation and Never Alone

The Chopra Foundation is a 501 (c) (3) organization (#36-4793898) dedicated to improving health and well-being, cultivating spiritual knowledge, expanding consciousness, and promoting world peace to all members of the human family. The Foundation’s Never Alone movement will be providing the world with the tools to proactively pursue their path to joy and freedom from suffering.

 

About The Girl Generation

The Girl Generation (TGG)-Support to the Africa Led Movement to End FGM/C Programme (ALM), is a consortium led by Options Consultancy Services and includes Amref Health Africa, ActionAid, Orchid Project, Africa Coordination Centre for Abandonment of FGM/C and University of Portsmouth. The programme envisions a world where girls and women can exercise their power and rights and have expanded choice and agency and be free from violence, including FGM/C.

 

About Cup of Uji

Cup of Uji is a non-profit school feeding organization based out of KenyaAfrica, founded by Francis Otieno Amonde in 2011. Cup Of Uji started with 1 school, Nyatwere Primary School and has grown to add 10 more schools. Cup of Uji provides Porridge supplies: porridge flour and sugar to select schools and leaves the school cooks to prepare and serve porridge to all learners on school-going days and the same applies whenever we are able to provide a lunch of rice and yellow beans.

Coming to Peace with the World Is Coming to Peace with Yourself

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

No one fails to react when public violence is flagrantly incited, which happened at the Capitol this week. As a political philosophy, or a way of life, disorder doesn’t work. Violence might not be inevitable, but chaos is.

But in the face of chaos, some facts remain constant and stable:

  • Peace is a state of awareness.
  • To advance the cause of peace, you must be at peace.
  • External conflict reflects the inner conflicts of human nature.
  • No dispute is ever settled unless both sides achieve a level of mutual satisfaction.

When politics comes down to rigidly opposing views, all of these facts are being ignored. Nothing gets resolved so that all sides achieve mutual satisfaction, and therefore grudges simmer, awaiting sudden eruptions and the pot boils over.

But the fact that is critical is the first one. You can’t help the cause of peace unless you are peaceful in yourself. This means several things on the personal level:

  • You sympathize with all suffering, no matter which side you take in a conflict.
  • You don’t see violence as the solution.
  • You can detach yourself from judgment and blame.
  • You don’t give in to us-versus-them thinking.

If you can achieve these things, you will stop being inflamed by constant streams of bad news that never gets resolved. You will be detached from partisanship, and you won’t buy into demagoguery. People who aren’t at peace are sucked in by the fascination and anguish of catastrophic events.

It’s sometimes hard to accept that being at peace is actually a form of “active detachment.” It’s active in that you want to help the situation. It’s detached in that you keep your head about you and see that the world doesn’t change from crisis to crisis–it changes when people’s awareness changes. To an outsider, religious disputes seem pointless and totally unnecessary. But if your worldview tells you that God is testing your faith every moment, detachment isn’t possible.

To be at peace doesn’t detach you from the values you want to uphold, but it guards you against the constricted awareness that fuels conflict. I think that Pope Francis understands active detachment. He stands above the fray to minister to humanity, but at the same time, unlike many of his predecessors, Francis doesn’t stand idly by. He offers practical proposals, deals justly with wrongdoing, and favors needed reforms. It’s totally worthwhile, and a moral obligation, to aid the programs that might heal divisions and ultimately the planet. But a viable action plan must come from peace or else it has no chance of succeeding.

 


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

You and Your Brain: Upgrading the Relationship

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Although the marvels of the brain as an organ have been wondered at for decades,
there’s a risk that science will make us feel like brain puppets. Neuroscience runs this
risk by assuming, without any proof, that our brains think, feel, perceive the world, and
make choices. In reality the brain is an instrument at the service of the mind. We cannot
live without it, just as we cannot live without a heart, but by promoting the brain into a
thinking machine (an M.I.T. professor who championed Artificial Intelligence dubbed the
brain “a computer made of meat”), we demote ourselves.

You are much more in charge of your biology than you think. Your experiences
constantly change your brain. Much of the time we fail to pay attention to how we
relate to the brain, but no relationship is more important. One thing the human brain
does, in fact, share with computers: It is programmable. We primarily use this fact the
wrong way around. Instead of programming our brains to be open, creative, alert, and
quiet, we program it to carry out a hundred short cuts.

For example, when a server asks you how you want your burger done or whether you
want brown, white, or fried rice with your Chinese meal, it typically takes approximately
one-fifth of a second to give your response. In a restaurant this trained reflex is
harmless, but it also takes the same amount of time to shoot back a response if
someone asks, “Do you believe in God?” or “Who are you voting for?”

In place of a dynamic relationship, being driven by habits, reflexes, conditioning, and
thoughtless opinions gives the brain too much power. In sci-fi a standard plot has robots
taking over the world, but right now most people are dominated by a robotic brain. The
old view of the brain as fixed for life, constantly losing neurons and declining in function,
has been abolished. The new brain is a process, not a thing, and the process heads in
the direction you point it in.

A Buddhist monk meditating on compassion develops the brain circuitry that brings
compassion into reality. Depending on the input it receives, you can create a
compassionate brain, an artistic brain, a wise brain, or any other kind. That’s why your
brain is—or should be—your most important relationship.

The agent that makes these possibilities become real is the mind, or consciousness. The
brain doesn’t create its own destiny. Genetics delivers the brain in a functioning state
so that the nervous system can regulate itself and the whole body. It doesn’t take your
personal intervention to balance hormone levels, regulate heartbeat, or do a thousand
other autonomic functions. But you can have a powerful experience, such as falling in
love, going to war, or winning the lottery, and your experience will alter all these
processes.

If you think of everyday experience as input for your relationship with your brain, with
your actions and thoughts as output, a feedback loop is formed. The old adage about
computer software—garbage in, garbage out—applies to these feedback loops. Toxic
experiences shape the brain quite differently from healthy ones. Neuroscience has
joined forces with genetics to reveal that right down to the level of DNA, the feedback
loops that unite mind and body are profoundly changed by the input being fed the
brain.

If input is everything, then happiness and well-being are created by giving the brain
positive input. Without realizing it, you are here to inspire your brain to be the best it
can be. This is much more than positive thinking, which is often too superficial and
masks underlying negativity. The input that inspires the brain includes a wide array of
things. They form a matrix with you at the center. Here’s what you want in your matrix.

Matrix for a Positive Lifestyle

  • Have good friends.
  • Don’t isolate yourself.
  • Sustain a lifelong companionship with a spouse or partner.
  • Engage socially in worthwhile projects.
  • Be close with people who have a good lifestyle – habits are contagious.
  • Follow a purpose in life.
  • Leave time for play and relaxation.
  • Maintain satisfying sexual activity.
  • Address issues around anger.
  • Practice stress management.

 

Your brain will thrive in such a matrix, even as life brings its ups and downs. By the same token, the brain can’t arrive at any of these things on its own. You are the leader of your brain. The whole issue of feedback loops turns out to be vital for all kinds of brain functions, including memory and the prevention of feared disorders like Alzheimer’s. A healthy relationship with your brain leads to a state of peak living over a long, healthy lifetime. Society failed to teach us this invaluable lesson, but it’s never too late to learn. 

 


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