Healing Self-Advocacy

Integrative medicine pioneer – and prolific bestseller – Deepak Chopra and Harvard neurology professor Rudolph E. Tanzi explain how you can take charge of your health. The authors detail how stress, diet, exercise and emotion – especially love – affect your inflammatory response and overall health.

To be alive is to join the river of evolution – the real river you cannot step into at the same place twice.Deepak Chopra and Rudolph E. Tanzi

They provide logical steps to supercharge your immune system and stay healthy. Though they discuss meditation and mindfulness, this isn’t a manual of spiritual guidance. It explores the links connecting mental, emotional, psychological and spiritual health and advocating for your own well-being.

Love

Love consciousness keeps you in a state of healing, alleviates stress, anxiety and depression and reduces chronic inflammation. The body internalizes every experience and sends a message to every cell.

Positive lifestyle changes can actually heal a heart. The authors assert that a “whole-system” lifestyle approach can reverse the plaques that line many coronary arteries and that meditation can be therapeutic for heart disease.

Stress

Chronic stress plagues almost everyone in modern society. Dealing with stress calls for clearing out the residue of old stressors and easing the impact of new stressors. Practicing meditation and mindfulness reduces stress. Other helpful, techniques include remaining physically active, seeking emotional support, practicing yoga and becoming centered.

Diets

Mind and body are one.

You haven’t had enough to eat when your stomach is full. You’ve had enough to eat when your brain says so, specifically the region known as the hypothalamus.Deepak Chopra and Rudolph E. Tanzi

The separation of mind and body lies at the core of why diets don’t work. The body naturally secretes two satiation-related hormones. When the stomach is empty, it secretes ghrelin, which spurs the brain to signal you are hungry. When you have eaten enough, your fat cells secrete leptin, which balances the hunger-satiation response. To eat healthily, listen to your body.

Mindfulness

Your primary goal is to become conscious. Amid the busyness of modern society, people tend to be reactive, not attentive. An unconscious day may include eating on the run; feeling rushed or pressured; listening to people without hearing them; not noticing the beauty around you; worrying about problems but not planning to resolve them; or feeling haunted by pains from your past. All this normalizes mindlessness. When you stop giving unconscious negative events power over you, you shift toward healing.

Your Own Advocate

Staying well-informed about your illness helps eliminate unpredictability. Hearing bad news can be so traumatic a patient can decline, even though his or her condition may be treatable. To make a medical experience less stressful, talk with other patients, join a support group, keep a journal and seek emotional support.

Belief

Your beliefs, childhood conditioning and inherited genes affect your health. A drug can affect your body, but only partly determines your reaction. In 35% to 60% of successful treatments, for example, a placebo effect is a factor because belief, expectation and perception play crucial roles. Presumably, the authors say, placebos work because they cross the artificial boundary between mind and body.

Activate the placebo effect for yourself by inspiring the positive belief that you are going to heal. A healing belief must inspire confidence, eliminate a negative belief, bring positive results and be replicable. 

Alzheimer’s Disease

Chopra and Tanzi describe the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease, which includes senile plaques – clumps of amyloid deposited around nerve cells; tangles – twisted filaments inside nerve cells that kill the nerve; and neuroinflammation – your brain’s immune system response to the plaques, tangles and dying nerve cells. To reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s, eat a Mediterranean diet, get seven to eight hours of sleep nightly, exercise daily, reduce stress, learn new things and engage socially.

“The Wise Healer”

To become a wise healer, understand that your body and mind are equals in the body-mind partnership. The body’s intelligence is older and deeper than the intelligence of the rational mind.

When you become an advocate for yourself, you are being conscious instead of unconscious; you are valuing self-care…you are being a healer.Deepak Chopra and Rudolph Tanzi

Suffering is an interpretation based on beliefs, habits, conditioning, and the struggle between acting mindfully and mindlessly. Help your healing self end your suffering by involving your higher consciousness and practicing mindfulness.

Seven-Day Healing

Chopra and Tanzi offer a weekly healing regimen that begins with eating an anti-inflammation diet of berries, tree nuts, whole grains, garlic and ginger on Monday. Reduce stress on Tuesday with yoga or mindful breathing. On Wednesday, meditate, join a social support group or take a multivitamin to slow the aging process. Stand up and move once at hour; walk five minutes for every minute you work on Thursday. On Friday, consider your core beliefs and your negative beliefs that trigger fear. Vest in positivity on Saturday; remove the obstacles from someone’s path. Evolve on Sunday by seeking meaningful coincidences. Be compassionate and generous; express love.

Spiritual and Practical

Deepak Chopra made formerly counter-cultural ideas about meditation, mindfulness and conscious living part of the mainstream. This treatise – aimed at helping readers improve their health through those methods – seems a logical outgrowth of Chopra’s spiritual and philosophical practices. Chopra’s collaboration with professor Tanzi brings research-based pragmatism that those not versed in Chopra’s writings may have assumed he lacked. In fact, Chopra has always grounded his spiritual advice in matters of day-to-day living. Together, Chopra and Tanzi offer an applicable system of consciousness and conscious health practices that is clear, straightforward, free of jargon and easy to absorb. Reading it may provide that first lift of positivity that Chopra and Tanzi regard as crucial to lifelong and long-lived health.

Deepak Chopra, M.D. also wrote Abundance; Meta Human; Perfect Health; Total Meditation; Quantum Healing; You Are the Universe; The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents; and The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire. Chopra and Tanzi also co-wrote Super Brain.