How to Begin a Conscious Lifestyle

By Deepak Chopra™ MD

Becoming more conscious will make you more successful in every area of life. that’s the theme I proposed in the first post of this series. This is an area that is vastly neglected by most people. They approach life on a day-to-day basis doing three things: 1. Following a set routine 2. Coping with challenges as they come up and 3. fulfilling short-term desire.

These three things fill everyone’s day is roughly the order listed. Routine dominates. Even the thoughts we have today are generally the same thoughts we had yesterday. Next come the everyday obligations and duties of life, punctuated by challenges, big or small. Last comes desire, which usually means eating when you’re hungry, looking for a little bonding with someone else, whether as love, companionship, or sex, and distracting yourself in order to wind down.

If your day follows this profile, there’s nothing bad going on (one hopes), but not much consciousness is involved. The hidden potential that doesn’t get expressed likes in only one place: your awareness. As you open your awareness, life opens its possibilities at the same time. Routine is replaced by new input into the brain. There is less need for distraction. When the fulfillment of desire comes, it sinks deeper and gives you more satisfaction.

The way to start arises from what you want to achieve.

To escape the mindlessness of routine, you need to break your routine.
To keep daily challenges from overwhelming you, you need new coping mechanisms.
To fulfill more of your desires, you need a vision that includes those things that would truly fulfill your existence.

Stand back and consider these three things carefully, because that is how you bring awareness to a situation that is running on automatic pilot. Sit down with the following lists:

My Routine – Write down the parts of your daily that are the most boring, unsatisfying, and mechanical. Now think of three specific ways to improve those areas. The key here is inertia. Routines cramp your life by creeping in over time. Announce to yourself that you welcome something new and unknown, then pursue it, no matter how small a change you might manage at first.

My coping skills – Look at how you deal with everyday challenges. Bad coping mechanisms range from denial and avoidance to rationalization, procrastination, blaming others, and digging in your heels. Good coping skills include taking responsibility, listening to others, asking for help, consulting wise advice, standing back and becoming objective, controlling emotional impulses, and making a sound plan to follow. Look at where you are weak in this areas and write down alternatives to your present coping pattern.

My desires – Write down what you want to achieve, not as a goal in your career, but for yourself as a person. You might want to be more loved and able to love, to be of service, to appreciate and be appreciated, to be rid of anxiety, to benefit everyone around you, to earn respect, or to become more spiritual. the key is to tune in to your core self. the core self is where deep fulfillment arises, not from distractions and momentary desires. Write down the qualities of the core self that you want to tune into: love, compassion, strength, truth, power, focused attention, wisdom, and so on. Make these your priority from today onward.

 

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

Why We Need the Divine Feminine

By Deepak Chopra™ MD

With the decline of organized religion and a decades-old drop in church attendance, people have largely made their spiritual life into something private and personal. The rise of meditation and yoga attests to this. But it is hard to fix your sight on a spiritual goal if you don’t believe in heaven from the Western perspective or enlightenment from the Eastern.

Looking around at the tone of modern life, I think an important goal is worth seizing on: the divine feminine. Being scientific, rational, and technical, secular society seems to have less time for values that Carl Jung would have included in the feminine archetype, that religions cast as goddesses or a motherly figure like the Virgin Mary, and which most of us identify with our mothers growing up.
But at a deeper level, the divine feminine represents certain values that human beings have long cherished. Half of human nature is represented by the feminine in both sexes, as reflected in the qualities of the ancient Greek and Roman goddesses.

  • Ceres – procreation, abundance
  • Aphrodite – sensuality, love, beauty
  • Athena – wisdom, culture, art, science
  • Artemis – Nature, connection with animals and plants
  • Persephone – alchemy, magic, transformation, healing, unconscious mind
  • Hestia – homemaker

Even though these are innate qualities in the psyche, there are times when feminine values decline, and then the resulting imbalance brings problems. Global warming is the imbalance that resulted from too much devotion to science, technology, and progress and too little devotion to nurturing the environment. The extinction of species comes about when the human drive to treat Nature exactly as we want obscures the larger picture, which is that we belong in the total scheme of nature, or Mother Nature as tradition called it.

The age of world wars is past us for the moment, but the same thirst for power and authority drives nations, and war is visited on the innocent no matter how many widows and grieving mothers appear on the news. The dreadful Syrian devastation is the rank product of masculine tolerance for utter violent annihilation without check. It would be heartbreaking to continue such a list—simply the fact that the world has lived under nuclear threat for seventy years is evidence enough that life has gone seriously out of balance.

It is up to us individually to look inside and see where we can allow feminine qualities to correct a personal imbalance. The adjectives that apply to the personal feminine are love, affection, forgiveness, compassion, allowing, nurturing, and creative. They need to be present in everyone’s life, whether you are a man or woman, and every child needs to be exposed to them.

As things stand, children hardly have a choice to find the right balance of masculine and feminine in themselves. The two halves are not rivals; One doesn’t succeed by overwhelming the other. Yet this seems to be the ethos children absorb when they look around a see a world that exults in forceful power, domination, flagrant abuse of minority rights, corporate greed without regard for human consequences, violent videos games, and online pornography.

Morality cannot be legislated, and if you tell people they are supporting the wrong values, the most likely result is that they will entrench themselves in those values even more stubbornly. The shift has to begin inside with a sense that something is missing, and that this something is connected to the feminine energy that has been allowed to dwindle almost to the vanishing point.

One now commonly hears the opinion that the world would be better off if women were heads of state instead of men. It’s hard to disagree, but at the very least this country needs more than Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris as admired role models. We also need a shift in attitude, as evidenced by the cruelty, unfairness, anti-feminine prejudice, and spite directed at Hilary Clinton in the 2016 election. It would be bad enough if she became a sacrificial lamb in the eyes of history, the victim who showed people how much they needed to wake up and reflect on their appetite for injustice and inequality.

It would be even worse if the 2016 fiasco became the model for treating women candidates in the future. The prevailing notion is that this is a man’s world, and if a woman wants to succeed in it, she deserves all the knocks that would be given to a man. Only a society blind to the value of the divine feminine thinks that way. Everyone should do everything in good conscience to overturn such an ugly, harsh, unforgiving attitude.

 

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

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

A Renewed Planet Starts with Food

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD, FACP, Poonacha Machaiah, Rajnish Khanna, PhD

The way we eat has changed the planet. In this simple idea, which few of us consider when we go to the grocery store, lies immense hope for the future—if we pay attention. On the medical front a large number of people accept the notion, once thought of as a fringe belief, that “you are what you eat.” The decisions you make today about what you eat will have a huge impact in your future health. Food plays a decisive factor in modern lifestyle diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and all the damaging side effects related to the epidemic of obesity in this country.

The next step in our growing awareness expands on the same idea. The next bite you take adds to the health of planet Earth or pushes it a tiny step toward deterioration. Unconscious eating is bad for the environment. Conscious eating puts the planet on the road to renewal and wellness.

We can heal the environment by thinking from the ground up, quite literally. The health of soils around the world is essential to keeping the entire planet in balance. This truth has dawned with the rise of the word “microbiome,” which is gaining wide circulation. The microbiome is comprised of the genetic material of all microorganisms (bacteria, fungi, and viruses) in a specific place, such as the human gut, in the soil, in water, or on the skin. Each local microbiome is intricately connected to other microbiomes, thereby linking all living organisms together.

New ideas are a motivation for rethinking old ideas, and this happened with a vengeance when the microbiome idea emerged.

To give a shortlist of mental resets that have occurred:

Old idea: Germs are dangerous and exist to attack human beings to make them sick.
Rethink: The microbiome is hugely beneficial in keeping every living thing in a state of health and balance.

Old idea: Germs invade the body like enemies from without.
Rethink: Thousands of species of micro-organisms inhabit the body and work intimately to keep us healthy, beginning with the digestion of food.

Old idea: Humans are free to dominate and change Nature according to what we want to do.
Rethink: Human survival depends on remaining in balance with Nature, who is the great sustainer and healer.

That last rethink is the big one. Greenhouse gases told us that how we live has planetary consequences. The planetary biome tells us the same thing, and for much the same reason. The industrialization of human life gave rise to excess carbon dioxide in the air. The industrialization of food production, which has exponentially increased around the world, has proceeded with reckless disregard for the planetary biome, particularly the health of soils.

Here are the trends that pose the most worry, keeping in mind that we have the power to reverse them:

  • The wide use of antibiotics in farm animals.
  • Reducing a wide variety of plant life to a small handful of food crops, such as wheat, rice, and soybeans.
  • Contaminating the soil with a huge range of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
  • Turning wildlands such as rain forests into cultivated land or stripping them bare for logging.

On the one hand these measures have produced an enormous quantity of food and established a food delivery chain capable of feeding 7 billion people and counting. But as with our carbon footprint, there are immense drawbacks at the same time.

The speed and virulence of the spread of the novel coronavirus represents the kind of drastic disruption that can occur when one microbiome in Wuhan, China goes out of balance. There have been near-misses, too, notably the SARS outbreak in Asia in 2003 and the 2013 Ebola outbreak in Africa. Someone has grimly called COVID-19 a “starter pandemic.”

It is now being dealt with on an industrial level with a global vaccination program, but we can’t afford to slip back into two old outworn ideas, that microbes are our enemy and that we should fight them with all-out war. The planetary biome is what keeps microbial life in balance, and Nature is the only force large enough to do the job. For billions of years a biome consisting of billions of species at the microscopic level has existed in balance.

However long it takes, humans will learn to think about the planetary biome. It’s part of the same planetary thinking that climate change has motived. Awareness is the first step toward change, and here we are concerned with changing your awareness. But action follows. The individual consumer holds the levers of power, and if you eat consciously, you are nudging the food supply system in the right direction.

Conscious eating means whole organic foods, locally sourced and raised with consideration for healthy farming, healthy soils, and healthy livestock raised as close to Nature as possible. We know that this sounds like a dream. Groceries are dominated by processed food, chemical additives, and all manner of produce and meat that uses antibiotics, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides in their production.

One might say, with some justification, that balance is what lies in the balance. There is no reason why Nature should be the source of balance while humans are the cause for imbalance. But that’s the present reality, just as willfully extracting natural resources is the prevailing mindset. Humans are brilliant at solving problems. We are also notorious for waiting until the last minute before facing a big problem.

What makes a planetary issue like the biome different this time around is that it is really an awareness issue. Nothing like the discovery of penicillin is going to work. Only a shift in awareness will work, and such a shift occurs one person at a time until a critical mass is reached and the whole population clamors for change. Consider this moment a tipping point in the making. Changing your eating habits looks like a small step, but the change in your awareness has momentous consequences.

 

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
Rajnish Khanna, Ph.D., founder and Chief Executive Officer of i-Cultiver, Inc. and Global Food Scholar, Inc. Rajnish has served as a lead scientist in biotechnology industry and has worked at the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University. Rajnish is a strategic biotechnology consultant, plant and soil health scientist applying multidisciplinary approaches for research and development. Known for empowering the industry through strategic partnerships with academic institutions to leverage advanced technologies, increase technology transfer and product impact. Rajnish is creating the online local food marketing platform, TerreLocal, to digitally map food supply with local demand. Rajnish is a photobiologist, interested in how information, such as light, is perceived and translated by organisms into biological responses. www.rajnishkhanna.com
Poonacha Machaiah is the CEO of The Chopra Foundation, a 501(c) (3) organization and co-founder of the Never Alone Movement for Suicide Prevention and Mental Health along with both world-renowned mind-body medicine pioneer and New York Times best-selling author Deepak Chopra, M.D, actress and humanitarian Gabriella Wright. Poonacha launched the Warrior Monk brand targeted at creating a positive societal shift through the compassionate transformation of humankind (www.thewarriormonk.com). He is the founder of Wellbeing Tech, a leading technology innovation company that has deployed transformative wellbeing solutions such as the hyper-local neighborhood app i.e. GABL (www.gabl.global) and Remote Assistance Management platform for providing assisted reality with Glass Enterprise Edition (www.wellbeingtech.com/ramp). He holds an MBA from the College of William and Mary, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering from the B.M.S. College of Engineering.