Saints and Sinners: The healing powers of the mind
Deepak Chopra had the best of credentials as a practitioner of traditional medicine.
He taught at the Tufts University and Boston University medical schools and became chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital. He also had a thriving medical practice of his own and his father was one of India’s leading cardiologists.
So why did Chopra, at 33, leave all that behind?
“I got to the point,” he says, “when I started feeling like a legalized drug-pusher who was masking symptoms instead of getting to the origins of disease.”
Today, this native of New Delhi is the guru of alternative medicine, which combines Eastern-healing techniques with modern science. Time magazine named him one of the top 100 people in the world in the 20th century.
His metamorphosis as a doctor began in the 1980s, when he picked up a book titled, “Transcendental Meditation” (Age of Enlightenment Press, 1987), at a used-book store. Chopra says that the twice-daily, 20-minute periods of meditation prescribed in the book made him 10 times more efficient in his work.
Five years later, Chopra had a chance encounter in a Washington, D.C., hotel with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who had introduced transcendental meditation into the West years before. Chopra became a convert and founded the Ayur-Veda Health Center (based on Ayur-venda, an ancient Indian healing art) in Lancaster, Mass.
Harvard Magazine assigned one of its writers to check into the health center. After five days there, the writer says he was “as relaxed as a piece of well-cooked spaghetti. Even my voice was affected.”
During one of the treatments he underwent, a steady stream of warm, herbed sesame oil was poured across his forehead for half an hour. The effect, he says, was “profoundly pleasurable and relaxing.”
Goofy? Some of his former colleagues who practice traditional medicine may be inclined to call it that. The more polite call Ayur-Veda a fad, which amuses Chopra to no end.
“One would think,” he says, “that a tradition over 6,000 years old would be difficult to label a fad. But, it’s typical of our Western bias. Fashions that come and go on the medical scene — like coronary artery bypass surgery or the appearance and disappearance of drugs every few months because they are found to have unanticipated side effects — we call that scientific medicine.”
Investigating the mind-body connection taught in Ayur-Veda, Chopra became convinced that “impulses of intelligence govern the process of maintenance, repair and creation of the body,” producing physical matter.
Thoughts in this view “express themselves as chemical molecules in the brain and throughout the body. When you have a thought, you make a molecule. If you have happy thoughts, you make happy molecules,” says Chopra. “These happy molecules activate the body’s natural healing mechanism.”
A basic principle of Ayur-Veda, says Chopra, “is that if you can make someone happy, you can trigger the healing response.”
Love is the strongest of the happiness factors, Chopra believes. He cites a study of male heart-attack victims, which “showed that the most important factor related to survival was whether the patient believed his wife loved him.”
Chopra’s headquarters are now in La Jolla, Calif., where he runs the Chopra Center for Well-Being. Most of his time, however, is spent traveling around the globe speaking to rapt audiences and writing.
His most recent book is “Grow Younger, Live Longer: 10 Steps to Reverse Aging” (Harmony, 2001). His books have sold more than 10 million copies in 35 languages.
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)