How this guru helped himself

Saturday feature on the most intriguing names in entertainment Chopra drank to excess while doubting purpose of his life

“I know now there is so much more to healing than taking pills or performing surgery.”

DEEPAK CHOPRA

For Deepak Chopra, the journey towards the light began in darkness.

It may seem hard to imagine, but the hyper-confident self-help guru and new age medical authority who’s coming to speak at Roy Thomson Hall on April 30 was once a deeply troubled man, drinking to excess, while doubting the meaning of his very existence.

“Yes, it’s true,” he says on the phone from a hotel room in Halifax, where he is preparing for another one of his 200-plus engagements he delivers every year.

“My life was on a path totally different from the one it is now and I live in gratitude that I was able to change it.”

He’s written over 70 books (21 of them New York Times Bestsellers) and counts many of the world’s superstars as his friends, but none of that would exist had he not survived a dark soul-searching night in Boston over 30 years ago.

It’s a common enough story. His father was a prominent cardiologist in New Dehli and, although he was first drawn to a life as an actor or writer, Chopra followed his father’s career path.

His younger brother was to follow the same path.

The 65-year-old Chopra graduated from medical school in India when he was only 22 and spent the first six months after graduation working in small rural villages.

“I do not know precisely why I was compelled to move to America, but I was and that was when everything changed, first for bad and then for good.

“I was only 23 when I moved to New Jersey in1970. I received $400-a-month salary as an intern. Even back then, I could not support my wife and two children on that sum.”

So he worked hard, very hard, to improve his lot and by the time he was 35, he was the chief-of-staff at what was then called New England Memorial Hospital, now known as the Boston Regional Medical Centre. “I was such a busy man,” he says with a self-mocking chuckle. “I would see nearly 100 patients daily, in my office, in the hospital and in intensive care. But I was finding no joy in being a doctor. I would sit at home at nights, drinking and smoking, wondering why my life had be- come so meaningless.” Chopra had always read various philosophical works to try and relax, but one night, “a night I was more depressed than usual,” he picked up a volume on transcendental meditation. “It resonated with me instantly and I began to practise it. Before long, I had stopped smoking and drinking and my attitude towards my life began to turn around.” For a while at least, meditation was a separate thing from Chopra’s medical practice, but that would soon change. In 1981, while on a visit home to India, a friend took him to meet Brihaspati Dev Triguna, a master of ayurvedic medicine, based on the Sanskrit word for “science of life,” which concentrates on balancing the flow of energies in the body. Chopra admits this encounter “opened my eyes further” but the final connection had yet to be made. That would come in 1985, when he met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, developer of the transcendental meditation technique. Because of the many difficulties that arose between the two after their partnership dissolved in 1993, Chopra declines to discuss him today, but in his 1991 book, Return of the Rishi, he vividly describes the meeting and how the Maharishi taught him that meditation and medicine were one. “He made the theme vividly clear. Health and disease are connected like variations on one melody. But disease is a wrong variation, a distortion of the theme.” Chopra recalls today how “I returned home to Boston and when I found a patient wasn’t responding to conventional medical treatment, I knew something was missing. So I started teaching meditation to my patients.”

Although most of them responded with great enthusiasm and Chopra’s results were astonishing, there was an expected backlash.

“We were attacked for it, violently, by the America medical establishment. People always attack what they can’t understand.” At this point, Chopra’s life took a decisive turn. He quit his position at New England Memorial and, in effect, severed all connections with conventional medicine. “If you find the old therapies work for you, that is your concern. I know now there is so much more to healing than taking pills or performing surgery.” Chopra joined up with the Maharishi, becoming one of his spokes- people and a major part of his corporation. Within two years, Chopra was a millionaire. By 1991, he had already published several books. In one instance, after a appearance on Oprah Winfrey, his works sold 130,000 copies the next day. Most revealingly, he was on the cover of People magazine.

And Chopra acquired almost as many detractors as adherents, medical colleagues who complained how he had “sold-out” to the Maharishi.

Chopra is philosophical about those accusations which have swirled around him for nearly 30 years.

“People do not question when conventional doctors earn annual salaries in the millions of dollars, but if you do it through alternative sources, you are immediately suspect.”

By 1993, Chopra had parted from the Maharishi and his work, over the intervening decades, has evolved into a complex examination of the chemistry of the human brain and what it is capable of. “When I speak at Roy Thomson Hall, my topic is ‘the future of well being’ and I feel that future is a very exciting one.

“It can be summed up by neoplasticity, resculpting your brain with your mind so that you can enjoy well-being in terms of homeostasis.”

Chopra talks about more of his future visions and they seem as much science fiction as inner spirituality.

“I am wearing four biosensors right now. They tell me how my heart, my brain, all my vital organs are working. With these tools, we can slow down the aging process. We can use cloning and stem cells, not from the outside, but from the inside, coaxing them to repair.

“But all of this must be combined with emotional and spiritual wellbeing. That is the root of everything.”

How does Chopra deal with the ultimate question: what happens when we die? “There will always be speculation,” he says evenly. “The key to everything, in death as in life, is flexibility.”