By Naveen Jain and Deepak Chopra™, MD

In very important ways mind and body are being connected as never before. The separate specialities that modern medicine is divided into are blurring around the edges. This is particularly true when it comes to mental health, which has long been outside the skill, or interest, of M.D.s who are not psychiatrists.

As mental health is increasingly connected to the body, it is becoming clear that a faraway region like the intestine, and its population of micro-organisms known as the microbiome, plays a major role in a person’s moods and general susceptibility to anxiety and depression, both of which rose alarmingly during the COVID crisis.

By now most people have learned at least the basics about the gut microbiome. Its teeming microbes are essential for digestion, and the proportions of thousands of species of bacteria are dynamically changing all the time. The advent of the microbiome is barely a decade old as a serious subject of study, but research has progressed rapidly.

You don’t really know your own body unless you have absorbed the following facts:

In these difficult times the issue of vulnerability needs to be addressed directly, because so many people feel powerless and anxious, and the social trends that undermine personal power only seem to grow stronger.  It’s crucial to find a way to secure in your day-to-day life.

Let’s clarify what being secure isn’t. It isn’t achieving a confident self-image and suppressing what you feel inside.  Also, security isn’t something that can be created through externals like money, status, possessions, or any other material surrogate. There are countless people sitting in the lap of luxury who feel even more insecure than the average person. Overcoming vulnerability happens “in here,” where you relate to yourself.

Now we can address the five things that actually do create security as a personal quality in everyday life.

By Srinivasan S. Pillay, M.D. and Deepak Chopra™, M.D.

A strange fact that nobody seems to act upon is this: The body you see in the mirror isn’t your real body. The image you see is of a solid physical object, stable and fixed like a table or chair. But in reality your body is fluid, constantly changing, filled with numerous spaces, and the host of trillions of bacteria. All of this is more you than the you see in the mirror.

The old saying, “What you see is what you get” doesn’t fit our bodies. Consider the billions of cells that die and are replaced every day. They are like the bricks in a house that vanish while building remains intact. If you accept this as the truth, modern medicine is challenged at the core, because medical students are taught to treat the body they see. You might even say that in most cases they are taught to treat only the body they see.

The model taught in medical school is common to all the sciences. It is known as naïve realism. What makes it naïve is the assumption that the world delivered by the five senses, but especially the visible world of objects, is enough to describe reality. In other words, “What you see is what you get.” Develop the most powerful microscope you can imagine, and you will see what Nature is all about.

By Uma Naidoo, MD and Deepak Chopra™ MD

While the physical pandemic has gained all the headlines, and people are coming out of lockdown with renewed optimism and energy, everyone needs to come out of the psychological pandemic that has gained much less publicity. What makes the emotional costs of this “parallel pandemic” worse is that it potentially affected everyone who was in lockdown.

Research shows that Americans have suffered emotionally during the pandemic, and you didn’t have to catch the virus to feel anxious or depressed. Both have dramatically increased around the world. No one can calculate the potential costs when mental health is so widely affected, but you can be part of the healing.

It’s an invaluable role for meeting an urgent need—needless to say, there aren’t enough professional therapists to fill the need, and there’s always the lingering hesitation even to admit that you or someone close to you is suffering emotionally.  Shame and the fear of being seen as “not normal” are powerful inhibitors.

By Christine Tara Peterson, PhD AHP and Deepak Chopra, MD

From being unknown in the West, the past twenty years have seen a rise of popularity in the West for Ayurveda, the traditional medical system of India. From an Ayurvedic perspective, disease originates in the digestive tract. A potential disorder is identified during the first stage of imbalance as it develops in the gut.  Considering the huge interest that has developed around the microbiome, Ayurveda has for centuries looked to the digestive tract as the root cause of disease, and the location of prevention and cure.

Medicinal herbs play a key role in the Ayurvedic treatment plan. They’ve now caught on throughout integrative medicine, but how do they work? Herbs might promote therapeutic benefits via a variety of mechanisms, not all of them known or even discovered yet. The known mechanisms are already quite intriguing. They include the direct absorption across the intestinal lining into the bloodstream, taste receptor signaling on both the tongue and intestinal walls, bacterial metabolism in the gut, and secretions of various health-promoting products called postbiotics by the intestinal microbes upon breaking down the herbs.

If you are attracted to the herbal applications of Ayurveda, looking into how they work is fascinating. It is also chemically complex, much more than the word “herb’ usually implies—Ayurvedic herbs potentially yield a host of medicinal properties with far-reaching effects on multiple targets and body systems. Their complexity stands in stark contrast to drugs that affect single targets. Therefore, many herbs commonly used in Ayurveda are adaptogens: they have the chemical“intelligence,” based on their complexity, to perform multiple services for the body.

By Cassandra Vieten, PhD, Gabriella Wright, Poonacha Machaiah and Deepak Chopra™ MD

No crisis in recent memory has shown us the urgent need for a new approach to mental health like the Covid pandemic. The post-pandemic future can be a transformation of humanity on a global scale. A new paradigm of mental health offers the possibility of an awakening of the human family.

The past year of pandemic has exacted deep emotional costs in the form of social isolation, anxiety, grief and fear of the unknown. It’s been tough for parents and children, for front-line workers and teachers, for each of us. Yet this very experience may turn out to be the opportunity we so often find in crisis – the emergence of a new mental health culture.

People are talking more openly about their feelings. Empathy has emerged out of distress, because no one has been immune from feeling anxious, depressed, and vulnerable. We know without a shadow of a doubt that we need each other. Self-care is expanding to embrace everyone.

If the pandemic offers a silver lining, it is this.

By James Arbib, Tony Seba and Deepak Chopra™ MD

2020, the year of the global pandemic, was in many ways an urgent wake-up call for humanity – demonstrating perhaps more clearly than ever that our conventional models of reality are deeply out of sync with the real world. The confused and incoherent responses to COVID-19 highlight the inadequacy of our collective sense-making and governance systems. But the pandemic might be just the catalyst for a profoundly disruptive and unstable decade. Driven, on one hand, by a convergence of complex global crises, from climate change to economic instability, from food scarcity to mental health as our current world order begins to fall apart; and on the other, by the cascading impacts of disruption to every sector of the economy as a new order emerges. Never has the need to understand the underlying processes of change that drive these extraordinary occurrences been more acute and consequential.

This speaks to a much deeper problem than recognised by conventional analysts – that our underlying models of thought and reality are increasingly out of touch with the interconnected complexity of global systems. If we are to successfully navigate the coming decades of crisis and disruption, then, we require not merely technocratic external solutions applied as a kind of ‘band aid’ to these mounting challenges, but rather a fundamental reset of how we think and see these challenges in the first place.

The metaheuristic of reductionism

At the core of the problem is a reductionist model of the world that has outlived its usefulness. Although reductionism as reflected across society has indeed enabled huge progress such as enabling incredible medical advances, the model is not adequate to the current crises, and now has become our biggest impediment.

With the heightened promise and potential threats of artificial intelligence (AI) constantly in the news, people have become more deeply confused. Should they welcome the AI revolution or fear it? In either case, robotics and super-computers march ahead with inexorable momentum.

There are warnings from top-level scientists about a future in which computers become so advanced that they will leap into autonomy. Freed to make their own decisions the way humans do, AI machines conceivably might create catastrophes like starting a war. On a more mundane level, robotics has steadily replaced humans in many jobs.

Of course AI is also touted as a huge advance, yet the irony is that the direst perils of AI are already here, in the form of our own human intelligence. We feel intuitively that we have natural intelligence, not the artificial kind. After all, nobody built us from mechanical parts. We lead emotional lives; we are capable of insight and self-reflection. Despite these things, however, the human mind is deeply artificial in many ways, and the negative connotations of the word “artificial”—fake, lifeless, illusory, mechanical, arbitrary—apply to everyday life.

The word “path” has been adopted by people who are on an inner spiritual journey, but it has much wider implications. Everyone is on a path, even if they don’t always realize it.

There are two basic paths we take through life: thinking and feeling. To think your way through life appeals to rationalists, but they are fooling themselves. Feeling is always a part of every experience, every decision, and every life choice. Here are some examples of how the mixture of thought and feeling operates, often to our confusions.

• Think of a food you hate (an American President made headlines by hating broccoli). See yourself putting a bite of this food in your mouth. It could be snails, a raw oyster, or boiled cabbage. Try to taste it as if you loved it instead. You can’t, because the taste is cemented with your feeling about it.

• Put yourself in the place of a homeless person living with small children on the street. Visualize the situation; no doubt you’ve observed something similar in real life. Imagine that a stranger walks up to you and hands you $1,000 in cash. You thank him profusely, but then he laughs scornfully and snatches the money back. Can you see the situation without any emotion? This is a dramatic example of how everything we see comes with an interpretation at the level of feeling. 

By Deepak Chopra™ MD and Dr. David Frawley (Vamadeva Shastri)

We all know the importance of physical immunity, the body’s ability to resist disease and ward off invaders. But what is psychological immunity? It is the ability of the mind to resist disease, ward off emotional toxins, and endure the pendulum swing of gain and loss, joy and sorrow, attraction and repulsion. If your psychological immunity is strong, you also have mental stamina, which is associated with steady concentration and having no memory loss with age.

Medicine has been slow to recognize that non-physical immunity exists.  The focus has been on the physical pathogens like bacteria and viruses that abound in the external world. But over a century ago Freud wrote about the “psychopathology of everyday life,” from which everyone needs protecting. Mental pathogens are invisible but potent, beginning with the universal experience of negative emotions like fear, anger, hatred, greed, and jealousy.

Reality, that most important concept about everything that exists, has gotten out of kilter, and yet very few people have noticed or are paying attention. The problem goes deep into the heart of things, however, so deep that future generations may look back and wonder why this generation didn’t wake up. The reason isn’t mysterious, actually. Modern secular society is based on materialism.

Materialism is a worldview based on physical objects as the stuff of creation. Worldview is a big concept that most people don’t bother to think about. As long as technology keeps progressing on all fronts, materialism seems workable. The only problem is that reality can’t be squeezed into a materialist framework. Materialism, it turns out, is just a plausible story, not a viable way to explain the world around us and certainly not the world “in here” where the mind operates.

Just last week physicists at Fermilab in Illinois announced that an obscure elementary particle, the muon, doesn’t behave the way it was supposed to. As a result, the standard model by which the universe is explained may totter. How can something infinitesimally tiny rock the cosmos? It didn’t. The muon rocked the story about reality we’ve been telling ourselves.

Renewal holds an immediate appeal. In marketing, it is the magic word motivating buyers of vitamins, diets, skin creams, and exercise machines.  But in reality, your existence depends on every cell in your body knowing with perfect precision how to renew itself. There are hardly any cells in your body today that were there when you were born, and certain types of cells (skin, stomach lining, and red blood corpuscles) renew themselves very quickly, in a matter of weeks.

These well-known medical facts point to a hidden secret, for it isn’t physical renewal that holds the key. Imagine a house where the bricks fly in and out of the walls, yet the building is always standing. Its blueprint remains intact even as physical objects constantly change. Your body’s blueprint remains intact thanks to the invisible intelligence contained in every cell.

Instead of looking to DNA for the source of this intelligence—DNA is just another piece of the physical picture—the secret lies with how your body uses its intelligence. You can renew yourself by consciously using the same principles that keep your body in a natural state of renewal.

An adage I first heard growing up in India goes, “As you are, so is the world.” At first glance these words are easy to agree with. Everyone has an impact on the world. You can’t expect to live in a clean town if you throw litter out of your car window. You can’t expect to live in a better world if you identify with the worst aspects of the world today.

Some people think the worst aspect of the world is that ice is melting at the poles and the whole climate crisis. But violence is worse when you consider the innocent casualties of war, and yet in the tradition of Yoga, worst of all is to be asleep. When horrible things are done by governments, the people tacitly give permission for those horrible things by self-blindness. I choose not to look’ therefore, nothing bad is happening. For all practicalities, identity involves a single choice. Either I am involved in everything around me, because everything is part of me, or I am alone and isolated.

Most people naturally want to be comfortable, and the easiest way to do that is to identify with “me” as a separate ego looking out for itself, although also including close family members. Your ego fools itself into believing that the rising oceans will never get to your doorstep, and dirty air will never reach suffocating levels where you live. More than that, the ego never believes that it could be held responsible for violence, war, racism, poverty, and famine. Those things exist somewhere else, caused by people unlike “me.”

Various scientific fields over the course of history have hoped to master Nature for the benefit of humankind. At the top of the heap right now is artificial intelligence (AI), which has allied itself with the technology of robotics. Between them AI and robotics are having a sizable impact on the work force as more and more jobs get automated. Advocates of AI are both supremely optimistic and nervous. Both relate to the possibility of a super-intelligent machine that would far surpass human intelligence.

If you are an optimist, this so-called Singularity, as the hypothetical machine is called, would become self-improving. Its software would become free of human constraints, and in a “runaway reaction,” it would keep improving its knowledge and the technology that knowledge creates. The result would be a revolution in human civilization—or its demise. The worriers are nervous that the Singularity could initiate global war on its own, or perhaps turn on us as its inferior and deal us some other kind of fatal blow, for the good of life on Earth.

By Deepak Chopra™ MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D.

We’re living in a golden age for brain research, which could revolutionize how we think, feel, and behave.  Thanks to advanced brain scans like the fMRI, brain activity can be localized and even the most precise activity pinpointed. For example, researchers can spot the minuscule area in the visual cortex that, when damaged, prevents a person from recognizing faces, including his own.

Now the goal of neuroscience is to map the brain’s 100 billion cells and perhaps a quadrillion connections down to the tiniest detail. But what will we use the map for? One obvious area is medicine. The more we know about what goes wrong in Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s, the closer we get to a cure.  But the highest good would be to reinvent the brain.

“Reinvent” isn’t an exaggeration. Ten thousand years ago Homo sapiens had evolved the same genetic array that modern people inherit, which includes the same brain structure. But in the intervening millennia since then, there arose reading, writing, advanced art and music, mathematics, and science.  Each advance required a new relationship between mind and body.

Human beings reinvent the brain as we go along, day by day. You are doing it right now. In short, the brain is a verb, not a noun. It is reshaped by thoughts, memories, desire, and experience.

If genes and a fixed structure of brain cells told the whole story, it would remain a total mystery why a cave dweller after the last Ice Age should have just the right complement of neurons to discover gravity or write a symphony. Now we realize that the human brain is far from fixed, at any level. New brain cells are being formed throughout life; trillions of connections between neurons are developed; and the genetic activity inside each neuron is dynamic, responding to every experience and every stimulus from the outside world.

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.

History is filled with powerful forces that change the face of the Earth, and right now we are experiencing one, an explosion of a new coronavirus that has upended daily life. Forecasts of a changing world are in the air once the pandemic is over, but no one really knows what the reset will be, if there is going to be one.

I think the best reset would be over happiness. There is an unquenchable drive for humans to seek happiness, but this means very different things at different times. A day laborer hauling stone to build a cathedral in the Middle Ages was happy, even inspired, by backbreaking physical work that never changed and ended with the breakdown of the body.

That way of being happy is unimaginable to modern people. In developed societies, our formula for happiness generally involves the following: physical comfort, ample leisure, scientific medicine, higher education, endless distractions through entertainment and social media, and a steady supply of consumer goods. In the developing world these values are dominant, not as what people already have but what they aspire to have.

One hears a lot about the power of now and the value of living in the present.  To achieve this state of awareness requires a major change in everyday life. This much is clear, but producing such change is confusing and frustrating. When people seek personal change in their lives, they often don’t get very far. Even in this day when online advice is bewilderingly abundant and self-improvement books are at our fingertips, change eludes us. One way to remedy this is to start from the ground up. Normally, we feel compelled to start where we are right now, and that’s a tremendous problem.

No matter how different people are, each of us woke up this morning to the same situation. We are constantly involved in thinking, feeling, and doing. No one starts this activity afresh. Instead, we are heavily invested in habits, beliefs, opinions, hopes, dreams, and fears collected from the past. So our thinking, feeling, and doing is entangled with the past even when we want something new, better, fresh, and different.

It’s natural in troubled times for people to reflect on God and religion as a source of solace and hope, which matters more in a crisis. But with church services being so limited, not to mention the decline in organized religion that has continued for fifty years, God isn’t the pillar of faith that past generations relied on.

I don’t find myself thinking about spirituality in those terms, however. Like a winter coat that’s put away in spring, for many people religion gets put away once the crisis has passed. Crises by their nature go up and down, but the deeper need for spirituality remains. This need is rooted deeper than solace and hope. It’s the need for wisdom.  Wisdom is a word that’s open to skepticism and dismissal. Even people who think of themselves as spiritual are likely to think much more about issues like self-esteem and love.

It’s time to talk seriously about the blame game. In a divided nation everyone finds reasons to blame, and the only choice is who deserves the blame. Targets are easy to find, because they are everywhere. Somebody, somewhere is behaving in ways you disapprove of. When the situation is us-versus-them, has it ever been hard to name “them”?

That, in the simplest outline, is the blame game. Calls for unity have no chance for success as long as the blame game keeps going. It ruins the very basis of negotiation, which rests on mutual respect. The outcome of the blame game is always escalation: you find more reasons to attack “Them.” If you are lucky enough to gain more power than “they” have, you can turn your blame into domination—until the tables turn and your adversary is in power.

Yet the blame game isn’t innate in human nature. We are a species capable of imagination and choice. At any moment we can alter any mental construct, and the first step is to realize that the blame game is in fact just a mental construct. When you recognize this fact, you are beginning to see a way out. You can’t force or cajole someone else to stop playing the blame game, but you certainly can stop playing it yourself.