Deepak Chopra - The Chopra Foundation

Is Failure Necessary for Success?

Originally published by The San Francisco Chronicle on September 21, 2015

By Deepak Chopra, MD

In a society that places a high value on competition and winning, everyone wants to succeed. It becomes difficult to discuss failure, which somehow translates into personal weakness, lack, or vulnerability. I’d like to reframe the whole relationship between success and failure so that both become part of a single process: your personal evolution.

As you evolve and grow, certain conditions appear on the path, and as they do, some people feel a sense of failure while other people don’t. Yet in both cases, the same situation has occurred:

An obstacle or resistance is blocking the way forward.
A fear of inadequacy has undermined one’s confidence.
An outcome expected to be positive turns negative instead.
Support from people you counted on isn’t there anymore.
A manageable task starts to become overwhelming and unmanageable.
The work environment and/or key relationships become hostile.

Evolution never requires failure. Such situations are part of everyone’s life. What actually matters is your interpretation of what’s going on, and then your response based on this interpretation. Any situation, no matter how frustrating or challenging, can be interpreted as evolutionary. I don’t mean that you apply positive thinking to mask your fear and insecurity.

(more…)

How Meditation Can Help Anxiety

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Fear is a negative emotion unless you are facing an actual threat and need to fight or flee. The usefulness of fear is minimal in daily life, particularly in the form of anxiety. Stressful events can produce short-term anxiety in almost everyone, which disappears after the event. But for an estimated 6.8 million Americans with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), anxiety is a chronic condition they can’t shut off. All of us know people we accept as “born worriers,” but in reality being in a state of chronic anxiety can severely limit their daily activity.

You probably know already if you worry excessively. Almost nothing is free from worry, in fact, if you have chronic anxiety, even the smallest thing can trigger it. You find yourself with fearful thoughts about finances, family, your health, and what’s happening at work. Some days you’d rather hide under the covers. (more…)

Feeding America San Diego

1 in 7 people in San Diego face hunger. Deepak posted his #Spoontember selfie to raise awareness and we invite you to join!

For every post with @FeedingSanDiego tagged, generous supporters have pledged to donate 8 meals. Let’s make a difference today!

Learn more at: http://feedingamericasd.org

Sowing Seeds of Gratitude to Cultivate Wellbeing

By Paul J. Mills, Tiffany Barsotti, Meredith A. Pung, Kathleen L. Wilson, Laura Redwine, and Deepak Chopra

Gratitude, along with love, compassion, empathy, joy, forgiveness, and self-knowledge, is a vital attribute of our wellbeing. While there are many definitions of gratitude, at its foundation, gratitude is a healing, life-affirming, and uplifting human experience that shifts us from focusing on the negative to appreciating what is positive in our lives. Gratitude provides us with a more intimate connection to ourselves and the world around us. In the feeling of gratitude, the spiritual is experienced.

For those who are ill, feelings of gratitude and awe may facilitate perceptions and cognitions that go beyond the focus of their illness, and include positive aspects of one’s personal and interpersonal reality in the face of disease. Such beneficial associations with gratitude have accelerated scientific interest in and research on gratitude and wellbeing. The number of publications on gratitude appearing in the biomedical literature in 5-year increments,since 1960-1965 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) shows almost no publications until 1996-2000 with about 20 studies. That number doubled from 2001-2005. From 2006-2010 publications jumped to 150, and from 2011 to the present over 275 studies on gratitude have been published.

(more…)

Which Universe Do You Want to Live In? It’s Your Choice

By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Menas Kafatos, PhD

The night sky that you can view from your back yard is roughly the same, given a few changes in the positions of stars, as the night sky Galileo turned his telescope on to. But visual similarity is misleading. There have been half a dozen different universes conceived of in the human mind. As each conception changes, so does reality. We like to think that science steadily marches forward, but with each new universe something is lost and something is gained. Here we take the term universe to imply a world view, rather than just the large-scale universe explored with telescopes and deep space probes.

(more…)