By Deepak Chopra, MD

A genuine social upheaval has begun, its theme is the empowerment of women. Old attitudes that have resulted in many kinds of unfairness are being challenged. The long-suppressed outrage of sexual harassment has been exposed to the light of day. No one with a heart and a conscience can do anything but respond with encouragement. It’s about time.

 

Rising from a position of weakness to become stronger, turning old wounds into a source of healing—these are important changes in anyone’s life. The eternal feminine has been a running thread in human culture for thousands of years, but each generation has to reinterpret it, and at the moment, embedded in a secular society where daily demands and distractions are the rule, envisioning the eternal feminine requires going deeper into our self-awareness.

 

Everyone’s source is pure awareness, which has no gender. When pure awareness manifests into creation, gender isn’t in evidence, either. When you wake up from deep sleep and become aware of your existence, the experience has no labels. The issues of masculine and feminine enter in a social context, defined by your beliefs, attitudes, and mental conditioning. To be a woman is to be a creation of many factors, going far beyond the physiological.

 

The eternal feminine isn’t found in any kind of belief, attitude, or conditioning, however. It isn’t restricted to women, because in reality the eternal feminine is part of everyone’s wholeness. When we divide women as being from Venus and men from Mars, that wholeness has been lost. In order to truly love women, and for them to love themselves, both sexes must nurture the universal values that belong to the eternal feminine. Every human quality that we cherish has a pure source, and the closer you are to the source, the more intense, personal, and lasting your values will be.

 

What does the eternal feminine add to everyone’s life? In one way or another we express the eternal feminine wherever there is motherliness, inner beauty, devotion, nurturing, loving kindness, inspiration, and creativity. The Goddess has always been about these things. When the feminine is ignored, distorted, or wounded, the same values are undermined. Hardness, cruelty, war, ruthless competitiveness—it’s not that these are bad masculine values. They are exaggerated and divorced from wholeness.

 

On the individual level, the loss of the eternal feminine can be devastating. There is an imbalance toward the masculine, which no one can sustain without damaging their capacity for loving acceptance, beginning with self-acceptance. I doubt there is anyone, man or woman, who can’t benefit from healing their feminine side. We regain wholeness in meditation, yet it is in daily life, where we apply self-awareness, that healing steps can be taken.

 

Take a moment every day and look through the feminine values I’ve listed above. Think of one value you’d like to encourage and enhance, then make a mental note of the action you’ll take that day to implement it. At night before you go to bed, reflect on your day to see if you carried out the action you planed. If so, how did it make you feel?

 

Here are some suggestions about how you might carry out healing the feminine side of wholeness:

Motherliness is warm, caring, accepting, and embracing. You might show someone close to you that you care by listening without judgment. You might include a person who seems like an outsider to your group and make them feel welcome.

Inner beauty is about letting the light of your awareness shine through. The key is to find the courage to show your true self to others, dropping the social mask to reveal sympathy, innocence, openness, and your joy in life.

Devotion is about the heart’s need to surrender to something outside yourself, pouring out love and appreciation. Devotion is private and happens in silent communion. It doesn’t have to be showy or even outwardly expressed. But when you feel the impulse to express loving devotion, act upon it.

Nurturing is about all the things a mother does to raise her child, and we often identify it with helping the young. But adults also need support, encouragement, protection from harm, and wise guidance. These are nurturing values too often neglected in our relationships. We forget that the child within us hasn’t vanished with the passage of time. So acting as a nurturing figure in anyone else’s life is deeply appreciated.

Loving kindness is about compassion, and the values that flow from it, such as empathy, acceptance, and non-judgment. Being easy with yourself and ending your own self-judgment are acts of loving kindness. The same is true when you extend the same attitude to others. As exalted as compassion sounds, it comes down to deciding that you are on the side of acceptance and kindness rather than judgment and harshness.

Inspiration and creativity are about making life new by living from the source. We make a mistake setting creativity apart as the domain of artists. Pure consciousness endlessly creates, and every day can be based on the flow of renewal. The opposite of renewal is habit, routine, mental conditioning, and fixed beliefs. So rather than struggling to be more creative, use your efforts to remove the obstacles that block inspiration and creativity. Once you stop identifying with habit and routine, life’s freshness returns naturally, like water gushing from a spring.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

By Deepak Chopra, MD

 

A crucial fact about American medicine goes largely ignored, even by doctors. Dollar for dollar, more people will gain years of healthy lifespan from prevention than from drugs or surgery. We don’t tend to think that prevention costs money. Once you learn that cigarettes cause lung cancer, you can decide not to smoke. The choice is free if you were a non-smoker to begin with. If you get up off the couch and start a brisk walking program to help prevent heart disease, that choice also doesn’t cost a penny.

 

What isn’t free, however, is getting information out there. Poor and less educated Americans are known to have a higher prevalence of major lifestyle disorders like heart disease, obesity, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. The reverse is also true: better lifestyle choices are made by the affluent and well educated.

 

You can’t prevent what you don’t know about. That makes it essential that we keep funding the most dollar-wise education for physicians so that young residents can go on to spearhead prevention programs. America cannot continue to rely on a reactionary stance of simply treating health issues.  It must refocus its efforts and investments in prevention.  The surgery to treat a lung cancer patient is highly unlikely to succeed and will be very expensive. Informing a middle-school classroom about the risks of smoking potentially saves lives at a fraction of the cost.

 

It’s alarming, in the face of these facts, that the President’s proposed budget for the fiscal years 2018 and 2019 calls for eliminating funds to Preventive Medicine residencies. Residencies (training programs after medical school) provide the knowledge base, skills, and experience to be experts at preventive medicine and public health. Compared to overall healthcare dollars, these programs cost pennies. It’s unreasonable, inefficient, and against the public interest to cut these residencies.

 

Prevention is neither glamorous nor lucrative, but its importance is greater than ever. While the 20^th century saw the average lifespan increase by 30 years (thanks to vaccinations, controlling infectious diseases, declines in heart disease, motor-vehicle safety, and reductions in smoking), life expectancy has now declined in this country for two consecutive years[1]. Medical costs continue to rise, and serious new threats arise like the opioid epidemic, the Zika virus, and the decreased effectiveness of standard antibiotics.

 

Health care spending is out of control, which worries everyone. There is no medical argument against prevention as the best way to dramatically reduce the nation’s medical bill. Who will avoid the ill effects of obesity? The person who doesn’t gain weight to begin with. How do you increase the number of these people? Good habits go viral in a society, and so do bad habits. Teach the good habit of sensible eating on a wide basis, and you can start a lifestyle movement that will be set for coming generations.

 

America faces a serious problem over income inequality. The richest are getting richer while average income barely increases or stagnates for decades. When a Rolls-Royce passes you on the road, it’s easy to see who’s prosperous. Information inequality, however, is invisible, and far more crucial. The world’s most expensive car won’t add years of healthspan, which is a better measure than simple lifespan. Living longer when you’re sick or disabled is not as valuable as a longer healthy life.

 

The average life expectancy in the U.S. is now 79.3 years, but there is no reliable statistic on how many of those years are healthy. What is known, however, is that the onset of major disorders of old age is either the same as in the recent past or getting worse. As more people live longer, they need to get sick at a later age, and that’s not happening.

Yet the concept of healthspan is just now catching on in the general public, a prime example of why information is critical.

 

The future of preventive medicine in this country will be threatened if lawmakers don’t take action. You must contact your members of Congress today and ask them to join two champions of prevention in Congress, Representative Gene Green and Senator Tom Udall—they are leading the fight for funding residencies in preventive medicine.

 

American healthcare costs are nearly three times developed countries, but our life expectancy is shorter than 30 other nations. We all need to build a future where a culture of prevention becomes a dominant force.  The Center for Disease Control (CDC) acknowledges this; the science is there; the economic benefits are clear. What’s needed now is to get Congress to do the right thing.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

 

 

 

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fueled-by-drug-crisis-us-life-expectancy-declines-for-a-second-straight-year/2017/12/20/2e3f8dea-e596-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html?utm_term=.18737215abd2

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

 

Although most people still view being sick in terms of germs, catching a cold, and getting a flu shot, the question of who gets sick and who stays well is far more complex. Everyone is exposed to thousands of microbes a day, and some of these are disease-causing pathogens. But we have immunity to a wide range of pathogens, and although sickness is fended off by the cells of the immune system, staying well involves the whole person.

There is a medical concept known as “control by the host,” which focuses on how much of staying well is an internal process that calls upon both mind and body. The invisible roots of lifelong wellness turn out to be surprising. For example, researchers at the University of Texas Medical School looked at mortality rates among a group of men and women who had received open heart surgery, including heart bypass and replacement of the aortic valve. If you take the routine medical approach, the reason someone dies six months after open heart surgery while someone else doesn’t must come down to a physical difference. But the team headed by Dr. Thomas Oxman took an unorthodox approach. They asked these patients two questions about their social situation: Do you participate regularly in organized social groups? Do you draw strength and comfort from your religion or spiritual faith?

These are simple yes or no questions, and when assessing the answers, the researchers excluded the typical risk factors for dying after heart surgery, including age, severity of the disease, and severity of a previous heart attack. With these factors zeroed out, the findings were startling:

A person who answered Yes to both questions had less than a 5 percent chance of being dead six months after their surgery.

A person who answered No to both questions had between a 20 percent and 25 percent chance of being dead six months after the surgery.

Overall, being socially supported and taking comfort from your faith makes you seven times more likely to survive major heart surgery than someone who has neither of those things in their life. This outcome is almost certainly the only sevenfold difference in any risk for heart mortality, even bad cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, and a genetic history of heart attacks in the family. While asking somebody if they belong to social groups like a club or church is an objective measure, the question about religious or spiritual faith is entirely about how the persons feels.

In our new book, The Healing Self, Harvard Medical School professor Rudy Tanzi and I explore a new path to lifelong wellness that supercharges a person’s immunity.  We expand immunity to include mental and emotional states, which are now known to be absolutely critical.

For example, we all experience a sense of well-being from being loved, and even though the feeling is subjective, there are important implications for overall immunity. Is it really possible that your cells can feel loved, too? Before reacting to what seems like a ridiculous assertion, consider the following study:

Yale researchers looked at 119 men and 40 women who received the most accurate test for detecting blockages in the coronary arteries, known as coronary angiography. (It’s an anxiety-provoking procedure for many people, although relatively noninvasive. Typically a narrow catheter inserted in the forearm is threaded into the arteries of the heart. A dye is injected that will show up the interior of the artery using a CT or MRI scan. In this way the size of the vessel’s opening or blockage can be seen directly.) Patients who told the researchers that they felt loved and emotionally supported generally exhibited less blockage in their coronary arteries, the main cause of heart attacks and strokes.

There are other risk factors that predict the presence of heart disease, such as diet, exercise, smoking, and family history, but even when these were taken out of the equation, the feeling of being loved and emotionally supported was a predictor of who would have more or less arterial blockage. A study of 131 women in Sweden came to the same conclusion. But perhaps the most striking research was based on asking a single question. A team at Case Western Reserve University surveyed 10,000 married men with no history of angina pectoris, the typical chest pain associated with heart disease (although heart attacks can occur without this previous symptom).

As expected, the men who scored highest on the familiar risk factors for heart disease, such as high cholesterol, hypertension, and older age, were more than twenty times more likely to develop angina over the next five years. Then the researchers asked a simple question: “Does your wife show you her love?” The men who answered Yes were less likely to develop angina even when they had high scores on known risk factors. The reverse was also true. A man with high risk factors who said his wife didn’t show him her love was almost twice as likely to develop angina.

The lesson to learn is that wellness is a holistic state embracing mind and body. The one is just as critical as the other, because thanks to the mind-body connection, there is a constant exchange of information between body and mind, thoughts and cells. This fact can be the basis for a higher state of wellness that lasts a lifetime.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

 

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestsellers, Super Brain, and Super Genes. His latest book is The Healing Self co-authored with Deepak Chopra. He is also an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer’s disease and brain health with over 500 research publications. He was included in TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World.”

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

Not getting enough sleep bothers many people, but it can’t be addressed alone. As a society, we’ve created a situation with sleep that works against the biorhythms governing the whole bodymind system. The sleep cycle is our most important biorhythm, yet it fits into the larger scheme of rest and activity that operates throughout the day. If you sit all day and get no significant exercise, you can wind up “too tired to go to sleep,” because the rhythm of sleep is connected with what you do during your waking hours. Research has shown how interlocked our need for rest and activity actually is. To keep your biorhythms synchronized, four elements must be present:

            Standing: Simple as it sounds, the human physiology depends on gravity. Seminal research in the 1930s showed that college athletes, when confined to bed for two weeks, lost months’ worth of muscle tone in their training. Standing up for only a few minutes a day keeps muscle tone intact. It also appears to aid in recovery from surgery, which is why patients are no longer advised to get constant bed rest in the hospital but encouraged instead to stand up and walk if they are able.

            Walking: Although exercise delivers more benefit the harder and more frequently you exercise, the baseline for activity is walking. Research has shown that the widest gap in levels of physical activity, medically speaking, occurs between those who take zero exercise and those who get up off the sofa and do something, no matter how meager. Walking is now a regular practice in recovery from serious illnesses and surgery.

            Rest: After heavy physical exertion, rest is necessary to replenish your muscles and restore internal balance—most people have no difficulty with this because they feel exhausted after heavy work or exercise. But the need for mental rest has only recently been taken seriously. If you equate mental rest with lethargy and dullness, that image is misleading. People who practice meditation, which among other things rests the mind, emerge with sharper alertness. Meditation doesn’t dull the mind or put the brain to sleep—there is actually increased brain activity (in alpha waves, for example, which are associated with creativity), resulting in a state previously unknown to neuroscience: restful alertness.

            Sleep: Researchers still don’t know why we need to sleep at all, except that undeniably we do. The most recent theory is that sleep allows the brain to rid itself of built-up toxins during the day. These include, during the deepest stage of sleep, the removal of senile plaques that can cause Alzheimer’s disease. It is also during deep sleep that we consolidate what we have learned all day as short-term memories into long-term memories. Without these activities, our brain (as well as the rest of our body) can undergo damage done by lack of sleep and poor sleep.

The first thing everyone notices when they spend a sleepless night is feeling tired and groggy in the morning, sometimes throughout the day. This becomes a constant complaint for chronic insomniacs, yet even when someone says, “I didn’t sleep a wink last night,” in fact, controlled studies reveal that intermittent episodes of sleep do occur, even though they may be fitful and shallow. If someone is forced to literally stay awake the entire night in a sleep clinic laboratory, serious deficits begin to show up, such as lack of motor coordination and attention—these are common causes of motor vehicle accidents. Chemical imbalances start to show up, particularly in the flow of hormones, which are precisely balanced according to our circadian (daily) clock. Not getting enough sleep can disturb your appetite because the balance of leptin and ghrelin, the two hormones that govern hunger and satiation, has been throw off.

Our other biorhythms haven’t risen to the same importance, because something like not standing enough doesn’t lead to immediate deficits the way sleep deprivation does. In our new book, The Healing Self, we dive deep into the linkage between standing walking, resting and sleeping.  Here’s a list we came up with for positive changes in your biorhythms, consisting of things to do and things to stop doing. 

Our advice is to adopt only one item from either list, let it settle into your routine, and then add another item. 

DO

Stand up and move around once an hour if you are working at the computer or at a desk job.

Walk 5 minutes for every hour you work.

Take the stairs instead of the elevator.

Park your car far away in the lot when you shop or go to work.

Be regular in your sleep routine.

Make your bedroom an optimal sleeping environment that’s as silent and dark as possible.

Walk for 20 to 30 minutes in the evening.

Take 10 minutes of quiet alone time, preferably in meditation, twice today.

Spend more time with a physically active friend or family member.

 

UNDO

Replace 10 minutes of sofa time in front of the TV with a walk instead.

Break the habit of waiting until the weekend to catch up on lost sleep.

If you drink alcohol, do it early in the evening—go to bed without alcohol in your bloodstream.

Replace the midmorning coffee-and-doughnut break with a walk.

Walk to one place close by that you usually drive to.

Examine your excuses for not being more active.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self  co-authored with Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

 

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestsellers, Super Brain, Super Genes and The Healing Self.  He is also an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer’s disease and brain health with over 500 research publications. He was included in TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World.”