Frequently, particularly with people with more serious challenges, I’ll say to my patient, “you can either take steps, or you can take drugs.” Say there is someone who is feeling down, and they’re still harboring loss from a previous relationship, or they are feeling anxious and not sleeping at night. And they’ve seen their family doctor, and the doctor says, “I think you should go on antidepressant medication.” And yet there is something inside them, at least the ones that come to the Chopra Center, that says there’s got to be another way to do this.
Seeing so many people, I realized that so much of what causes human suffering is under our control. We have a choice. If we chose to express who we really are in the world without being restricted by all of these internal, self sabotaging voices, then people can make those changes. They can start exercising, they can start eating healthier, they can start getting to bed earlier, they can stop using alcohol to self-medicate, they can improve the quality of their relationships, they can start finding ways to express more creativity if their jobs aren’t allowing them that.
So what I’ve learned these past 20 plus years, is that the way you start to chart that course towards manifesting your desires really starts with commitment.
The third thread that inspired this book to be written is the essence of my practice for the last 35 years - namely yoga. I’ve been a yoga and meditation teacher since the early 70s. And yoga means union, integration. It means not rejecting any aspect of life. It’s really about eliminating the word “not” from our vocabulary - there is a beautiful poem by Hafiz that says, “I rarely let the word “no” escape from my lips, because I realized that God is shouting yes yes yes to every moment of existence.”
And so when I started thinking about it, I realized there’s got to be a way to integrate what I’ve been studying, researching, writing and lecturing on for the past 30 years, with what I learned my first 18 years. And so I went back and started reading about Western philosophy and Judeo-Christian tradition. And I realized that if you had to summarize, or do the Cliff Notes version of everything that presumably Judaism and Christianity has taught us, that it’s all in the 10 Commandments. But again, those commandments have such a punitive focus to them that when I saw it I realized, “No wonder we are all resisting them.”
So, what I wanted to find out was, coming from a more holistic perspective, was there a deeper truth to the 10 Commandments? Could I be consistent with what I think are the core principles while reframing them in language that is much more empowering to people - particularly those of us who were raised in the Western tradition? So for me this book has been a type of yoga, kind of a reunion of different parts of myself. And I’m finding it incredibly liberating. And I wanted to share that with others who might be in the same situation I was - at a certain point, it felt like I wasn’t writing this book anymore. It was more like the book was trying to write itself. And if I kept my ego out of the way, it worked pretty well!
WTB – I’m really captivated by your talk about Commandments. Next > 1 2 3 4 5
