USE THIS TRICK To Be More Present & Stop Feeling OVERWHELMED | Deepak Chopra

and so that spiraled in my life into a crisis most of your reactions to the world are not coming from conscious awareness it's a reactive state if you had those four qualities every day in your body and your mind you're free so it's a very powerful technique [Music] there's a part in the book where you say i think it's back in the 1970s when you were an intern or you were certainly a busy stressed out doctor in the united states you would help relieve that stress with booze and and for me as someone who's familiar with your work it was it was really it was really nice to read that but also quite interesting so i wonder if you can sort of explain what was going on there and at what point did you start to look at things in a different way so it's a very interesting thing i did my internship at a small community hospital in plainfield new jersey and then i went to boston and i was with all the academic hospitals you know bu and harvard and tufts and i remember my first grand rounds at the boston va hospital and you know we had this very famous speaker he was the editor of the new england journal of medicine his name was franz engelfinger the new england journal of medicine at least in the u.s is the most pretty prestigious journal he was a medical doctor gastroenterologist and as soon as he started to speak all of us residents fellows and other doctors they lit up a cigarette in grand rounds okay and i also remember as a resident uh taking care of uh patients that i had treated you know put a pacemaker in or put a ventilate put a patient on a ventilator resuscitated a patient and then go outside the hospital and smoke a cigarette having done that so it was part of our culture to get drunk on fridays if you were not on call the other guys were on call so they couldn't get drunk but we could the rest of us and so that spiraled in my life into a crisis it spiraled into a situation where i had 20 patients out on the outside and the on opd as we call it outpatients 20 patients in the icu and 20 patients in the hospital 60 patients a day and uh you know trying to cope up with that and also trying to cope up with the demands of the relatives you know it's not just the patients you have to talk to the relatives everything and i was experiencing in in hindsight i was experiencing what is very common amongst medical doctors and especially psychiatrists but all medical doctors emergency room doctors as well and that is what we now call burnout physician burnout so i was experiencing that now the other thing was that in the 70s late 70s i was a fellow at new england medical center and and the boston va and my um my immediate boss was the boss seymour reichler who's now 96 by the way and he was at that moment the president of the endocrine society and we were actually looking at neuropeptides like serotonin dopamine oxytocin opiates and one of my colleagues used the word these are molecules of emotion and i got kind of captivated by that phrase molecules of emotion then of course we later discovered that they're not only molecules of emotion they're immunomodulators they modulate the effect of the immune system so this was the era when we started to talk about neuro psycho endocrine immune modulation so the brain the mind the endocrine system and the immune system were entangled in what we call homeostasis and that was for me exhilarating just to think of you know we learn in medical school about the immune system the endocrine system this that the other way we never talk about the healing system and yet when we go to medical school the first lesson you learn in physiology is homeostasis and inflammation which are both self-regulating as the intention behind inflammation and homeostasis is self-regulation which is healing basically so this was exhilarating but at the same time very challenging because nobody was talking in those days about mind or body or stress yeah stress but not solutions to stress yeah no thank you really really illuminating to and that was that was roughly when in the late 70s in the early 80s yeah and then i wrote a book in 1985 and i wrote quantum healing and i was vilified i mean i was totally attacked for those books earlier books now quantum healing which was released in 1988 is now re-showed with rudy chansey writing the forward he's runs in the neuroscience department at mass general at harvard so we've seen a turnaround in the in the mainstream circles of medicine yeah i mean it really incredible to see that incredible tim for me as you know i came out of edinburgh medical school in 2001 and then had to go on my own journey uh with you know all kinds of reasons in my own career where i started to question everything i was taught and started to look at things differently i think it was always there within me but it takes a while to sort of undo some of the things that you've learned right and actually that's that really is one of the underlying themes to me throughout the book total meditation there really is this emphasis on awareness and how do people become more aware and i've got to say for me i talk a lot about this and i think a lot about this because awareness is the first step really to make any kind of change and i think early on in the book i think you make the case that you you were asked i think what is the single most important lifestyle practice um and do correct me if i've if i'm sort of got this slightly wrong but your answer is to wake up and i found that so powerful what does waking up mean and what would you say to people who are listening to this right now who have no concepts of waking up and how would you make it relevant to them okay so every day we go through three cycles of what you might call awareness three cycles this morning i woke up so that's the first cycle it's called the waking state and we are in that state right now and then at night when we close our eyes we go through what we call the sleep state which has two phases deep sleep and dreams okay during deep sleep we have no experience consciously we have no experience consciously but there is awareness even in deep sleep if i make a loud noise or if i pinch you you respond which means at some level there is awareness even in deep sleep and deep sleep as we know is rejuvenating and you know triggers homeostasis self-regulation removes amyloid fine-tunes the immune system endocrine system etc deep sleep is very important not only for the human species but every living organism and there are species by the way like some birds and other species underwater animals that sleep during migration even with half the brain navigating the migration and half the brain sleeping there's nothing that doesn't sleep no living organism that doesn't go through these cycles so what is dream state deep dream stage is the fluctuation of consciousness without conscious experience you have this fuzzy experience that you call sleep dreams in the morning when you wake up you know that you dream but most frequently it's very vague it's very kind of ephemeral you know it's kind of evanescent you can't capture the dream so to speak and then you're in the waking state and you say well this is the waking state but actually you're sleepwalking and the reason you're sleepwalking is that most of your reactions to the world are not coming from conscious awareness or choices that you're making at this moment we are constantly bamboozled by the hypnosis of social conditioning so all our responses to the world are automatic you're like biological robots so that means we are in a daze we are actually very predictable in our responses every situation every circumstance every news event it's pandemic elections a stranger on the street can offend you but by insulting you flatter you etc you have no freedom whatsoever in this so-called waking state because it's a reactive state and you're a bundle of conditioned nerves and reflexes constantly being triggered by people and circumstance into predictable outcomes that's not being awake that's being asleep now of course if you go a little deeper you look at uh you know philosophers like wittgenstein who said we are asleep our life is a dream but once in a while we wake up enough to know that we're dreaming so what does he mean what he's saying is that every experience like this experience we are having right now is part of the dreamscape and that your body and mind are also fictional characters in the dreamscape why do i say this if you say i am my body in my mind then i'll ask you which one you were once a fertilized egg then you were a zygote then you were an embryo then you were an infant then you were a child then you were a teenager then you were a young adult then you are what i'm seeing right now which one is the real you okay which one is you which body is you the fertilized egg or this one or the one that's going to get old and firm and die or the one that you had as a teenager when you were going through puberty you see when you try to figure out what's your identity as a body there's no solution when you try to figure out your identity as a mind there's no solution because your body is constantly recycling of earth water and air your mind is the recycling of everybody else's thoughts there's no original thought unless you're einstein or you know your beethoven or your bach or your bibaldi or you're a rishi from ancient india there's no creativity just recycling social constructs and therefore you're asleep if i asked you what happened to your childhood it's gone it's not a dream if i asked you what happened at 5 47 last tuesday what were you thinking you can't tell me in all probability so that's now a dream what happened to five minutes ago that's a dream what happens to my words by the time you hear them they don't exist so any encounter you have with the physical world is an encounter of the past there is never an encounter of reality as soon as i see an object i say oh what is this it's an iphone what's this this is a hand what is this this is a headphone these are human constructs you know on the sensory level this is a combination of sensations it is texture it is smell it is taste it is sound it's a shape it is color you show this to a baby no idea this is called an iphone or this is called a headphone these are human constructs all we experience is awareness and its fluctuations which are sensations perceptions images feelings thoughts and then we label them as mind body and universe there is no such thing the whole thing is a dream and you are part of the dream as a body mind you're part of the dream but we use a very interesting word in our language it's the most common word in every language it's called i say i was a baby i was a child i was in love i am out of love i lost my job i was a very careless teenager i was you know an addict who's the i that never changes despite everything else that changes that's you that's the real you and when you encounter that real you you wake up and you wake up to creativity you wake up to love you wake up to compassion you wake up to truth goodness beauty harmony you wake up to inspiration insight imagination creativity vision you wake up to a higher calling that's what it means to wake up um you sort of say that babies have got that awareness haven't they what babies i'm guessing don't need to wake up babies are already there does that mean then that actually it's society is it schooling the way we talk to our kids is it all this conditioning that actually takes us away from being fully aware so that when we get to our midlife crises we then have to really try and unlearn what we've learned in society to go back to what we once intuitively knew well there are two sides to that so baby is aware there's no question a baby is fully aware when you look at the baby it's also fully joyful fully embedded in the world of wonder and curiosity and love if you look at the baby its eyes are joyful it's trying to lock its eyes with your eyes to see if you look into the baby's eyes and then if you do it smiles okay the only time a baby is in distress is when it's wet or it's hung and that's because it needs to return to homeostasis so it says and the mother immediately responds and how does the mother respond through attention she listens through affection she loves the baby through appreciation she noticed how unique the baby is totally even though it's joyful like all the other babies there's something very unique about this baby so she appreciates that and in the beginning at least before the baby is sent to school she totally accepts the baby as is as is so the relationship between a mother and a baby is actually very pure he's very innocent full of wonder curiosity love and we would say empathy compassion joy kindness it's a it's the ideal relationship in fact there are studies now where i have seen the babies in the room fast asleep the mother is in another room fast asleep the baby feels hungry the mother's breast leaks with milk at the same time so even in deep sleep they're in communion this is called non-local communion non-local communication these days and people are developing models to explain that in science so you're right a baby is enlightened but doesn't know it okay it's in pure innocence then it gets bamboozled by our constructs which are necessary because we can't live in the world without these constructs money is a construct but we made it up right we made up money there was a time when i said you know give me a haircut and i fix your shoes and then you say oh let's do that then i said you know give me your eggs i'll make you an omelette and then that extended till we said this is too inconvenient why don't i just write on a piece of paper i owe you this that became money then it became colonial empires it became slavery it became wall street it became all these constructs latitude longitude nation states colonial empire greenwich mean time who says it has to be greenish mean time why is it not calcutta meantime or botswana meantime or burundi mean time well this is our colonial history which has bamboozled us into a construct which is very useful for creating science and technology but it's useless when you find want to know who am i that's trying to wake up when you say who am i am i this changing body mind am i changing personality am i changing what when you start to ask this question you begin your journey so a lot of people are asking this question uh and i'm interested as to whether you think this is increasing um i what i've seen over the last few years and i appreciate with my experience and you know my where i'm up to in my clinical journey the fact that i am you know in my sort of early 40s compared to you at a different stage of life we we potentially are going to have a different perspective on this but i see a lot of people at my age maybe in their 30s actually having all the so-called you know signs of success like the job the car um you know the two holidays a year whatever it is that they feel is society's definition of success they've got it yet they're feeling that something deep is missing inside them uh this is covered in lots of documentaries at the moment but this whole idea that you know we're materialistically more well off than ever before you know cars as you said iphones whatever it is but at the same time anxiety stress depression these things are just going up and up they're going through the roof and i think that really speaks to what you're talking about that many of us are we're asleep we're just sort of sleepwalking through life without really understanding who we are or why we're here and i've got to say that i was very very surprised but very flattered that halfway through the book you'd mention me my book the stress solution and the idea of which i write about in the book about microstress doses and macro stress doses so you're a good writer you're a very good writer oh thank you i appreciate that you know as i say i'm super flattered you mentioned me in my book in in your book i'd really like to understand what what is going on is that what you're essentially talking about i'm just i'm trying to make sure that it's relevant for every single person listening they get it they're like oh yeah you know i've got that i've got the job i'm married i've got the car but i'm just feeling as though there's something missing is that what you're speaking to when we talk about waking up and gaining awareness is that often the trigger that some people need yes but you know it's very interesting that's the trigger that modern society needed to address what has been called in spiritual traditions an existential crisis or even a dark plant of the soul this is a well-known factor in its spiritual traditions so what did the pandemic do it instilled a feeling of collective grief and what when do we have grief we get grief when we lose something that we took for granted you lose a parent you lose your marriage you lose your job you lose you know your health you go through grief everybody at some point goes through grief okay now you and i are physicians i remember as an emergency room physician i used to work in the emergency room to make a little extra money in my residency as an emergency room sometimes i so saw a person go through the stages of grief within an hour they had a massive heart attack everybody was hovering around them you know the alarms were going on that people were looking for a pacemaker incubator they were resuscitating the patient you could see the patient in panic and you could see that there was a process going on which today i call grief and when grief happens first thing that happens is you feel victimized you say oh you know why me well right now it's the whole world but never mind that's the first stage of grief the second stage of grief is actually anger sometimes even hostility and then the third stage is frustration it doesn't work and then people start to go into the fourth stage which is resignation and then something terrible happens is called despair and helplessness and i've seen people die in that stage of despair and helplessness because they were so aware of their mortality in that moment only in a few people once in a while you see the next stage and that next stage is acceptance and as soon as they accept that moment for what it is you also see something else peace now once you see that there's an opportunity for meaning so what i'm asking right now is we are going through collective grief and why are we going through collective grief because we took our existence for granted we also took our awareness of existence for granted okay let's we take it for granted now you're one of your fellow bengalis a great sage by the name of rabindranath he said that i exist is a perpetual surprise now what a phrase to come from this great human being was not only a great poet but a sage a rishi a philosopher he said that i exist is a perpetual surprise and he also said and i'm now you know not directly translating him but you know the sentiment exactly he said if you're not perpetually surprised by your existence then your humanity is incomplete okay so this is what has happened if this pandemic is pointing out to us that our humanity is incomplete because we're not even surprised or grateful that we exist and we have no idea why we exist or why there is awareness of existence because if there was no awareness of existence then for all practical purposes there's no existence this is the great mystery now in our indian tradition the tradition of you know dharam or you know the the schools of thought that come from the great sages or tagore or shanti niketa they say that human suffering occurs only because of five things only because of ethics in sanskrit they are called declarations number one we are asleep to our true identity we are asleep we have no idea of our own creativity we're just recycling everybody's else's ego reactive responses so number one second we are clinging to a dream because every experience is a dream if i said what happened to you five minutes ago that's a dream right now so you're clinging to an evanescent ephemeral transient ungraspable dream the third cause of human suffering is you're recoiling from the nightmare which the dream frequently becomes as when there's a pandemic there's a war there's terrorism there's eco-destruction there's climate change now we're recoiling from this dream is becoming a nightmare the fourth is you're identifying with the provisional identity which is your current body mind not your body mind from 10 years ago not your body by in ten years from now so you're identifying you have a screwed up identity it's called the ego and the last cause of human suffering is the fear of death so these are the five cliches and the only solution is to wake up to your true identity which is unlimited immeasurable potential for creativity for maximum diversity of expression for higher consciousness for your capacity to create a better world all those which we call dharma is part of waking up how does one go about waking up i used to do this as a practice but i no longer do it because i think i'm i'm awake at the moment so i used to stop every once in a while during the day and ask myself am i aware and then i would ask myself what am i aware of and then i would realize that at the end of this question all i was aware of sensations perceptions images feelings and thoughts that's it that's the totality of all experience sensations in your body the five perceptions sound touch side taste and smell that color and shape images in the mind imagination feelings emotions and thoughts now if you want an acronym for this it is s-i-f-t shift that's the totality of all experience the rest is a story you know it could be a religious story a theology a philosophy a doctrine a dogma or scientific story but it's still a story if all if you want to wake up recognize what's my story right now are there other versions of this story and you realize there are infinite versions of every story every thought every feeling every emotion every perception you know if i asked you what's that you might say it's a rainbow and another person said that's love that's wonder that's exhilaration or somebody might say it's just water vapor yeah it's it's about you know it's about curiosity isn't it open-mindedness attention and curiosity yes yeah and there's there's a lovely there's i can't remember which chapter it sounds a lovely lovely bit in the book where you talk about a ripe mango yeah and i actually read it to my daughter last night because you know kids get this stuff she got it you know this idea that a mango yet to me or to the person look at it it might be this beautiful ripe yellow orangey mango that's going to be sweet and succulent but someone else may look at that completely differently an animal may not see that as yellow and orange they may say that as just a dull blob and it's this kind of this this awareness this perception this understanding that things you know that the word identity is something that's coming up a lot now on the podcast because you actually talk about it really very beautifully in the book you you talk about the divide itself and i i've never heard it um i've never seen it written like that i thought it was such a beautiful way of explaining the conflict that so many authors have um i i wonder if you could explain the divide itself and and and why people listening and watching to this need to know about it and then i guess we'll move on to what people can do but but i really love that as a concept the divide itself okay so the divide itself another word for it is the separate self i am a separate entity as a human body mind from everything else so i'm here and then everything else is out there there are people there are situations that are others there are animals there are plants but i am separate i am the perceiver and that is the perceived i'm the observer and that is the observed this is our common experience because as soon as you're born you're given a name this is your name this is your ancestry this is your culture this is your family this is your economic status and that becomes your identity never mind that your body and mind are changing but that's now your identity and it's a provisional identity as a separate self and what do we call it me and what do we call the the outside whatever is outside of me we call the other so right now this is me you are the other but this me can only exist in relationship to the other if there is no other actually there is no me in there in the what there's an african greeting called ubuntu right so i the other makes me possible so me and other are entangled you can't have me without the other the other can not have me uh cannot be the other or cannot have a sense of me without calling me the other okay so this is our common fragmented mind existence divided mind existence my mind is separate from your mind and it is by the way your personality is separate your body is separate your emotions are separate so we are the divided self but who is having the experience right now of this conversation now we're going a little deep okay i is having the experience because i is both me and the other because i is the awareness in which we are sharing this experience right now we are sharing this experience in what the old traditions of india would call chittakash is the infinite space of awareness today what do we call it we call it cyberspace but it's the same space because cyberspace has squeezed us into a bandwidth of experience you both have to be on the same zoom zoom coordinates right and everybody who's listening to us has to also be in the same coordinates and we made them up just the way we made up latitude longitude greenwich meantime wall street etc so what we're doing right now is we are sharing the space of consciousness within a certain bandwidth of experience whatever the coordinates are for the zoom call or whatever this podcast is okay is that reality is that narrow bandwidth of experience reality what's outside this range you your visual experience of the world is less than one percent of the electromagnetic spectrum your auditory experience of the world is less than one percent of possible sonar vibrations and on and on you never experience anything more than one percent of fundamental reality and you call it the reality it's not it's the dream scale okay when you break these boundaries then you're no longer in the dream you're you work up and you realize something which is very difficult for people to realize that your essential being is formless formless has no form now this is actually wonderful because if it has no form it is infinite if it has infinite it's not in space-time if it's not in a time then it's immortal it's timeless it's not subject to birth and death the bhagavad gita talks about it says water cannot wet it wind cannot dry it weapons cannot shatter it fire cannot burn it it's ancient it's unborn it's not subject to birth and death what is subject to birth and death are constructs in the human mind okay now once we know that all those five cliches disappear they disappear because you realize that everything you are fearing is part of a dreamscape including your body mind i i i just love hearing about this and as as i as i listen i have this sort of i'm holding two things in my head and you know again maybe that's a construct an artificial concept that i'm making up that doesn't exist but i'm feeling that our ability to understand that depends on where we are on our spiritual journey correct so you know i've i've said on many occasions before my sort of journey started when i lost when my father died seven years ago um that and actually as you were talking about going through life asleep i actually thought of my dad and i thought you know dad you know medical school in kolkata came to the uk works hard to bring up his family you know does three night shifts uh four night shifts a week as well as his job so he only sleeps three nights a week for 30 years gets ill at 59 with lupus kidney failure dialysis as a family my whole adult life until seven years ago revolved around looking at the dad but the journey i have been on since dad died has been transformative both professionally but also personally and for me it was about taking a pause stopping asking questions which i know is a big part of the themes you write about in the book this this idea of self-inquiry i i actually feel that and this is sort of plays into the micro stress doses i've written about before is this idea that we're so busy with this little hits of stress you know email instagram facebook twitter work uh responsibility uh child care responsibility maritals and whatever it is it just adds up adds up so we have very little time to sit with ourselves think and look inwards but as part of that journey as part of understanding how my life experiences affected who i am today the penny dropped for me maybe two years ago so i feel that i'm able to follow that conversation and what you've just been speaking about in a way that five years ago i don't think i would have got that i think i would have i think i think it would have been too much for me but i think i'm now able to resonate with it and really connect with it how would you as someone who's very experienced with this like if someone is struggling to follow that line of thought how would you potentially explain it to them in a slightly different way or is that even possible no it's possible but let me actually respond to your story because um i was seven years of age um living in mumbai with my grandparents my brother was four years of age our father was a cardiologist and he was trained in britain and we were living with my grandparents and one day we got a telegraph from my father that he had passed his exams and he was now the fellow of the royal college of physicians which was a big deal in india those days okay post-colonialism so my grandfather who was a sergeant army sergeant took us to the rooftop he had an old rifle and he blew some rounds into the air to celebrate then he took me and my little brother to a movie i remember the movie it was alibaba and the party peeps and then he took us to a carnival actually which was close to the house took us to a nice restaurant came home we went to sleep in the middle of the night he died and i remember waking up to the sound of willing women in the house and the servants taking me and my brother to a neighbor's house the next day he was cremated and his ashes were brought in a little jar back home and one of my uncles said what is a human being yesterday he was with the kids taking them to carnivals and movies and restaurants and firing rifle rounds in the air and today's a bunch of ashes and i had my existential crisis right then at the age of seven so what happened to my grandma father right okay and then my little brother his skin started to peel and they took him to every doctor and they couldn't make a diagnosis and then some local healer said he is feeling vulnerable he's exposed because he's missing his parents if they come back he'll be fine sure enough when my parents came back he was fine so you know somewhere in the background there was mind and body going on an existential crisis i end up going to medical school residency training i think because of that crisis okay that crisis where i lost something somebody that i dearly loved and i had no idea what happened to them now it takes a long time so you say you know what does it how can you help somebody who's not even thinking about this okay well if they're not thinking about this you can ask them to ask themselves four questions every day only four questions sit quietly close your eyes put your attention in your heart ask for questions don't worry about the answers first question is who am i okay am i at the body am i the mind or am i the awareness in which this is a changing experience second question is what do i want do i just want lots of money will it make me happy okay what do i want do i want a good relationship do i want if you don't ask the question you're not going to get what you want but then ask yourself also what is the limit to what i want what is the limit where will i be contented don't worry about the answer the third question you ask is what is my purpose why do i exist just to go you know at the end of my life if somebody asked me what was your life about i'll say i went to work 24 7 i made a lot of money i worked the heck out and you know is that my legacy what is your purpose and the last question which is the most important what are you grateful for and you know i ask this question every day what am i grateful for if you don't have time for four questions ask this one question what am i grateful for and your body will go into a different mode just by thinking of the things you're grateful for and we know now inflammatory markers go down gene expression changes there's homeostasis just by keeping a gratitude journal we did a study with chronic heart failure patients on digoxin and many drugs and then people who were just doing a gratitude journal guess who did better the ones who were keeping gratitude journals yeah i love that that's really tangible that is very actionable and i guess it just speaks to this idea of taking a pause and turning your attention inward and asking yourself you know this it's such a simple idea but it's so effective and it it is remarkable how many of us these days don't feel we've even got time for five minutes of self-reflection each day but we do have time for an hour on instagram and an hour on youtube and a few hours on netflix and and i get it right i'm not i'm not here to judge anyone i'm just i'm just saying that's a very practical take home for people that i think would automatically start to just change their perspective on things and and allow you to start going deeper there's one other thing which is very practical it just says stop notice and choose that's it stop notice notice how you're feeling notice the sensations and feelings and perceptions and they choose what you would like to experience i mean doesn't matter it's a piece of chocolate ice cream stop notice feel your body then choose how you would like to feel and actually that would feel very good that little chocolate ice cream would feel very good if i took the right amount and ate it mindfully it would actually be exhilarating yeah rather than inhale the entire tub without even being aware of it right which is something i have done on on many occasions in the past um but look there there's so many threads there i want to explore but i'm conscious we only have 10 minutes left although i have been informed you're going to be in london next year so i'm very much going to try and book something i would love to meet you yes thank you and actually go deeper but but for the last 10 minutes i really want to get on to meditation i think because that's essentially what the book is about on on well on on one level that is what the book is about um you know how does somebody there's so many different meditation techniques out there and i think meditation is very confusing for people i wonder if you could sort of give some of your top tips how can someone who's never tried before or they've tried and fallen off the wagon how would you recommend that they get going with a meditation practice you can start with just sitting quietly with your eyes closed uh and do nothing for five minutes do nothing and if you can handle that then start observing your breath for five minutes uh again not manipulating if you can handle that then start observing sensations in your body for five minutes just with non-judgmental awareness of first nothing then breath then maybe sensations then you could pick a perceptual object whatever it is or you can pick an image in your mind a candle or a flame or a sunset so there are many techniques of meditation which i outlined in the book which are natural by the way concentration reflection inquiry contemplation transcendence awareness of body awareness of breath something called intraoception where you can actually become aware of the what's happening in the visceral part of your body in in yoga traditions that's called intraoception so as in the west we are concerned with perception we're never concerned with interoception but you can train yourself to be a yogi that you're fully aware of what's happening in the body and you can even regulate it you know right now because of our interest in biology i'm looking at the vegas nerve which is in in the indian traditions in the yogic traditions the vegas is part of a whole system autonomic nervous system that's called brahma nadi now we have these very interesting reports many years ago i saw a report that um fda in the u.s had approved vagal stimulation for intractable epilepsy okay so what they were doing is putting electrical implants in the vagus nerve stimulating it with the handheld device and then you know seeing if it relieved epilepsy and sure enough it does okay but what they found was that people who had other problems like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus or bronchial asthma or any inflammatory disorder they were getting better so you know i met with the rnd chief of one of the biggest companies in the world and they said we are now going into electroceuticals because this is the next revolution in medicine how to stimulate the vagus nerve electrically i said well you don't first of all have to do it electrically you can do it through magnetically because electromagnetism is the same activity so you don't have to be invasive you can put a magnet and do it but why don't you try deep breathing and yoga they all stimulate the vegas love and he said oh you know and meditation all stimulate the vegas now and he said but how do we make money out of that i said well fund some research on vegas stimulation but now this company has 2 000 engineers working on electroceuticals in somewhere in new jersey in our country but what i'm saying is if you understand how meditation works it doesn't matter which meditation it's quietening the mind getting to the source of thought which is the fundamental reason why we meditate along the way you do many things including vagal stimulation and self-regulation and actually it's the best way to return to what we might call home base and you can try any one of these things try stopping try noticing just be more conscious of the choices you're making if i was asked one definition of enlightenment it would be consciously choosing freedom from the conditioned mind period and i i i love that i'm going to be i'm going to be thinking about that for the rest of the day and this evening it's it is something that is so powerful yet so many people i think have they want to it's like what you said right at the start of this conversation they want it now it's like um it's going to help you in my stress hours i meditated once i don't feel any different it's not for me i'm not going to do it i'm looking for the next thing you know keep searching until you find that thing and i i've had an interesting journey journey with meditation myself and i i know you write in the book that it is a journey i've tried all kinds of things you know actually you know when i was 16 15 or 16 it was one of the summers when we were in kolkata with my mom and my fam and my cousins and mom took me and my brother to learn uh meditation i think it was transcendental meditation at the time yeah beautiful i was yeah it could have been but i wasn't ready i was some sort of i thought what is all this crazy stuff you know meditation what's that going to do for me oh man i wish i had taken it more seriously then because all i'm trying to do now is learn what actually mum was trying to teach me back then but but but i've tried using apps and sometimes it's helped sometimes you know i go through different phases at the moment i prefer to meditate with nothing just literally sit there and stillness and just observe and i find that's the most that's the best one for me at this moment in time and of course that could change but i do have a question i have this um these beads that i just got from my mum's house because my kids have both got these and i've grown up watching my mum use these beads to meditate and i know that one of the mantras so you write about the at the back of the book is something that my kids also were taught by their grandma to do whilst going uh you know whilst whilst feeling each and every single one of these beads now i've got to say i tried this a few days ago i found it really difficult right so i found it much easier to sit in silence and meditate for 10 minutes the way i'm used to doing it i found this quite distracting i wonder if you could uh sort of shed some thoughts on why that might be and whether i should actually spend a bit more time practicing well you wouldn't have found it distracting if you had found if you had done it as a child that will you take it for granted now it's something unfamiliar so you're trying to break a habitual mode of experience that this does you know your habitual modes are being broken by doing this process but this process using a mantra or in the christian tradition hail mary or thy will be done these are very powerful centering techniques because they take you away from your story so again in the wisdom traditions of the world but particularly from india from the great sages we say that these practices take you away from your karmic story and what your body is is a reflection of your karmic story it's the interpretation of past stories whether they're cultural stories or personal stories but this is the separate conditioned mind and that process takes you in the reverse direction so it's a very powerful technique i would say try it for a few more days your mom knows what she's telling you yeah fantastic i'll be sure to send her the youtube link to this when it's done i'm sure should be delighted to hear that but i i but i totally agree it is i just thought it was interesting and also there's a bit of i've heard you i think speaking of podcast with oprah before and i think you mentioned about these um mantras and um sometimes you should say them but other times you just sort of say them silently in your mind what's the difference between whether you actually say it or think it anything that is subtle is more powerful you know in the physical level also you know when you get to the atomic level and subatomic level that's much more powerful you can you know an atomic bomb is based on um basically very subtle levels of existence right at the level of particles and force fields and molecules and atoms and beyond that so anything that's subtle is powerful so our emotions and thoughts are much more powerful than our everyday perceptions which are influenced by our emotions and thoughts if i asked you what are you thinking at 9 57 last tuesday you have no idea but if somebody asked me what were you doing on 9 11 i would be able to tell them because that was a very very powerful emotional experience so we only remember selectively certain emotions and experiences so if i just if your audience just stopped right now and instead of listening to you and me they just became aware we can ask them to do that right now instead of listening to you and me they become aware of that which is listening so as you're listening to me become aware of that which is listening there's a presence there that presence is the real you and it is at peace already so don't look for peace it's already there it's just being overshadowed by distraction that's it and what you can do right this moment is be aware of your own presence and ask yourself one question is anything wrong right now is there anything wrong right now and now it's not a moment in time it's the presence of being awareness nothing wrong so so powerful um in in that silence i suddenly had an awareness i could feel and i could hear my heart um which was happening all along i just was putting my attention on the screen and what am i going to ask you next and how am i going to close the conversation off because we're almost out of time and you know i guess you could say that's presence to the conversation but it's taken me away from what was actually going on inside look i want to be respectful of your time thank you for the for the time you've given today it was a privilege to talk to you honestly i mean that yeah privilege to talk to you yeah well thank you i wonder if we could just leave the listener it was a very powerful way to stop but the podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we're going to get more out of life you've actually left so many tips throughout this episode you've already discussed them but are there any sort of final thoughts any final tips that you would encourage the listeners the viewers to go and start applying right now in their lives to improve yes when i earlier i said four questions who am i what do i want you know what's my purpose what am i there are four intentions that you could also start your day with which i do close your eyes i'll take you through this okay close your eyes feel your body feel the sensations from the inside out and mentally just say joyful energetic body joyful energetic body few times and feel what happens to your body now put your attention on your heart and mentally say to yourself loving compassionate heart and feel it in the heart loving compassionate heart now bring your awareness to your third eye between the eyebrows and mentally say reflective alert mind and see the clarity of an alert mind but reflective and quiet and now expand your awareness outside the boundaries of your skin let it pervade all of space and time and mentally introduce the intention lightness of being lightness of being now you can open your eyes if you had those four qualities every day in your body and your mind you're free a wonderful way to finish thank you again thank you for encouraging us to step outside the norm and challenge what we regard as normal think about things differently thanks so much and i'm looking forward to the next time already namaste thank you namaste thank you very much big honor thank you if you enjoyed that conversation i think you are really going to enjoy the one i had with the former monk j shetty on the simple things that you can do to train your mind it's right there give it a listen and let me know what you think the monk mindset is about pursuing your truest goals your truest self and your most authentic aligned goals

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 329,851

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview, deepak chopra, deepak chopra interview, deepak chopra jay shetty, how to be more present deepak chopra

Id: 5AIL31TjAy0

Length: 57min 48sec (3468 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 18 2022