Dear Friends,
I have a treat for you today--an interview with Deepak Chopra. I remember first learning about Deepak while watching an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show many years ago. I was so impressed with his knowledge and presence. He spoke of ideas I had never heard before, but they resonated deep within me. I've read many of his books, and we are really honored and inspired to have him as a course author on DailyOM. I could have asked a million questions about his course, Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul, but I kept it within reason. Enjoy!
In this life-changing course, Deepak Chopra reveals "the forgotten miracle"--your body's infinite capacity for change and renewal. You'll discover five recent breakthroughs that can help you achieve total self-transformation by changing distorted energy patterns that are the root cause of aging, infirmity, and disease. Through a series of 14 easy-to-follow lessons, you'll learn how to commit yourself to deeper awareness, prioritize your focus on relationships over consumption, embrace every day as a new world, and reach your full potential. Get ready to transcend the obstacles that currently afflict your body and mind, and invite more intelligence, creativity, and awareness into every aspect of your life--starting today.
- Receive one lesson every week for 14 weeks (14 lessons total).
- Have lifetime access to the course for reference whenever you want.
- If you are not 100% satisfied, you may request a refund.
$25
This is the total amount for all 14 lessons
Madisyn Taylor: In lesson one you write about how our "bodies are a process." What do you mean by this?
Deepak Chopra: Something very basic but extremely important: The body isn't a physical object but a state of constant change. Nothing stands still. At every biological level of the body, chemicals are rushing around carrying food, air, and water to 50 trillion cells. Just as important, messages from the brain reach every cell so that literally your heart, liver, skin, and digestive tract are participating in everything you experience in life. A hundred different processes being flawlessly orchestrated amounts to one process holistically, which we call the body. Once you start seeing this one process as the basis of every experience you will ever have, you can use your attention and intention to reinvent your body. In fact, seeing your body as a process of constant flow and flux is the reinvention.
MT: Our bodies are so amazing! What do you mean when you say "our physical body is fiction"?
DC: Two reasons. First, it's not true that the body is a self-enclosed object freestanding in space. Your body is actually an ecology merged seamlessly into the global ecology. Second, you've adopted a story about your body that has many fictitious elements in it. You've attached all kinds of memories, conditioning, and old hurts to the story you call your body. As the story unfolds, your body expresses four core beliefs that can be positive or negative. These core beliefs center on love, self-worth, security, and fulfillment. Your body reflects the state of your core beliefs because every cell is participating in them as it eavesdrops on your mind. When your core beliefs are life-enhancing, they look like the following:
- I am loving and lovable.
- I am worthy.
- I am safe and trusting.
- I am fulfilled and whole.
MT: Why do so many people not realize that they have a physical body and a soul body?
DC: The soul cannot be "in" a body the way your breakfast goes in your stomach. The soul is an aspect of consciousness--a label, really, for higher consciousness--and consciousness isn't contained in time and space. Consciousness is without form and dimension. Imagine the color blue. How big is it? The question is silly because blue doesn't fit a confined space. While seeing the blue sky, take a five-minute walk outside. Did the blue of the sky last five minutes? Another silly question. If you think about it, every aspect of consciousness unfolds in a realm beyond time and space. To see this is to begin to resurrect the soul, taking it from a religious cliché to a real experience--the experiencing of going beyond or transcending the physical world's limitations. What is the experience of the soul? It covers a territory as boundless as consciousness itself. The important thing isn't to aim at some preconception of spirituality but to get the experience of going beyond and letting it unfold as it wants to, according to each person's individual life.
MT: I have taken it upon myself to make sure future generations in my family lineage are healthier in all ways, so I was particularly fascinated by your mention that what we do now with our genes/DNA affects our future generations in our family line. Talk to me about this.
DC: This is an example of modern science, specifically genetics, catching up to quite ancient notions that have always seemed mystical. By now most people have at least heard of epigenetics, which studies not the genes but the triggers that activate and regulate how DNA functions. It turns out that these regulators are influenced by everyday experience. In other words, your thoughts, words, and actions are talking directly to your DNA. So even though your genes remain the same from birth onward, how they function varies enormously. Identical twins are born with the same genes, but by age 70 their genetic output is no more alike than any two siblings.
It astonished geneticists to discover that epigenetic changes can be passed on to future generations. A mouse raised by a bad mother, one that doesn't groom and nestle it, undergoes a negative experience. This experience gets stamped into its epigenetic pattern, and it will go on to be a bad mother. The trait gets passed down the line, which shouldn't happen, because bad mothering is a behavior, not a physical trait.
Outside the lab in the human world, a particular town in Sweden has kept meticulous records for hundreds of years, and it turns out that for residents whose great-great-grandparents suffered in a famine, their present-day descendants have higher health risks. Similarly, in Holland a child carried in the womb during the suffering induced at the end of the Nazi occupation in World War II will grow up with a worse health-risk profile than a child carried in the womb under better conditions--the experience of the mother has been passed on epigenetically.
No one quite knows where this new understanding is leading, but in India the theory of karma holds that behavior and many other things are passed on down the generations. It seems only sensible, even given our limited scientific knowledge to date, to make positive lifestyle choices even after your children are born because there is an osmosis that causes the family environment to "leak" into everyone's epigenetic pattern.
MT: You write "Time doesn't cause us to age." Tell me more about this.
DC: The point is actually about the body as a process. It is necessary to see that the basis of your body is timeless. Every atom and molecule is unaffected by age, and at the quantum level every atom and molecule is grounded in the quantum field, which is beyond time. Consciousness doesn't age. If you think the word "rhinoceros," this thought is the same whether you are seven or 70.
If you appreciate from the outset that you are a consciousness-based creature, then the timelessness is your baseline. The trick is to remain timeless. That is done through living as consciously as possible. Every day you have the choice to do, think, and say those things that make you evolve or not. As long as you are evolving, the deterioration we call aging will be slowed down or reversed. Certainly there are some things, like the core beliefs I spoke about, that need never age.
If you as a self don't age, that's the big victory. Then whatever happens in the body will pose no fear or self-judgment. We don't judge a rose or a tree because they drop their leaves in winter. Time has its seasons, and we are designed to harmonize with them, not to force them to conform to our fears about growing older.
MT: In lesson eight you teach that any limitation of the mind can be traced back to distortions of energy. Please tell my readers what you mean by this.
DC: Energy in the form of electricity enters your house, lights it up, runs the electrical appliances. But the energy we experience in the bodymind has different qualities. Running five miles because you enjoy it consumes the same calories as a disgruntled soldier being forced into a five-mile run, but the quality of their energy couldn't be different.
The physical measurement of energy hardly comes close to expressing the quality of energy in human terms--that's what is really important. An ingrained cynic or pessimist or someone suffering from depression has negative mental experiences linked to the distorted quality of their energy. On the other hand, when the mind is restful, alert, and blissful, the quality of energy reaching every cell isn't distorted. That's the state that normally exists when the bodymind is connected to its source in pure consciousness.
MT: Most of us humans remain in our old conditioning without the knowledge that we can change this; we end up on the hamster wheel of life. It really caught my eye when you talked about the idea that our old conditioning has formed neural pathways that resist change. Explain.
DC: The brain faces a constant challenge from the moment you're born to keep chaos at bay. A firestorm of chemical and electrical activity in your brain cells would be useless. To impose order, the brain has evolved to have fixed pathways that are known as the default brain. This includes your automatic reflexes, ways of thinking, habitual behavior, and so on.
If these pathways were hard-wired, you couldn't change your life. But the fact that we each have our own habits, beliefs, and ways of thinking indicates that the pathways were shaped a certain way; they are partially hard-wired and partially soft-wired. The soft-wired side is perhaps 40 to 50 percent of the total, meaning that free will and choice have a huge scope for altering the default brain.
What makes bad habits stubbornly stick around is the other 50 percent, the old conditioning that keeps you stuck. Once you realize the situation, you can start to reprogram your brain's neural pathways through conscious attention to reinforcing the change you want, and over time the default brain will get unstuck.
MT: Yes, that is how I lifted myself out of illness and depression. Deepak, who should take this course, and how will my readers benefit?
DC: People set out all the time to improve their lives, and the results are mixed. Some things get better, some things don't. Some things get better only to slip back into the old grooves, leaving you stuck. But very few people want to change their reality, and it turns out that this is the only way that leads to true transformation. It sounds very grand, even inflated, to talk about reinventing the body and resurrecting the soul, but in fact you cannot achieve transformation without doing both. The state of your body and mind reflects your state of awareness. So my approach is to raise your awareness first, which will change your reality entirely. At that point, the union of body, mind, and soul opens up unlimited opportunities.
Starting today, you will receive a new lesson every week for 14 weeks (total of 14 lessons). Each lesson is yours to keep and you'll be able to refer back to it whenever you want. And if you miss a lesson or are too busy to get to it that day, each lesson will conveniently remain in your account so you won't have to search for it when you're ready to get back to it.
If you aren't satisfied with this course for any reason, we will refund your money. No hassles, and no questions asked.
$25
This is the total amount for all 14 lessons
Thank you, Deepak, for this most interesting interview. Our bodies never cease to amaze me. If you would like to join the over 75,000 people who have taken this course, you will learn even more about your infinite capacity to change and renew your body. Until next time.
Be well,
Madisyn Taylor
Cofounder, Editor-in-Chief
DailyOM
