Deepak Chopra

Spiritual Icon & Best-Selling Author

Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing and Jiyo.com, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. He is board certified in internal medicine, endocrinology and metabolism, and is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, and a clinical professor in medicine at the University of California, San Diego. TIME magazine has described Chopra as "one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century."

With over 15 million in his social media community (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and his affiliate websites), he shares his insights to help to create a more peaceful, just, sustainable, happy, and healthy world. The World Post and The Huffington Post's global internet survey ranked him as the 17th most Influential Thinker in the World, and 1st in Medicine.

In conjunction with his medical achievements, Chopra is a prolific author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, with 25 New York Times Bestsellers including You Are the Universe. After collaborating on two major books featured as public broadcast television specials, Super Brain and Super Genes, he and Rudolph Tanzi took a quantum leap in their revolutionary approach to tackling the issue of lifelong health and heightened immunity in their book, The Healing Self.

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Q&A

What is your wellness philosophy?

I strongly believe in wellness that is consciousness-based. The mind-body connection has been acknowledged for more than 30 years in the medical profession, but we still live with a strong bias toward the body. What we need to realize is that the body goes where the mind leads it. To reach a state of lasting wellness for a lifetime, qualities like happiness, social support, curiosity, and inner fulfillment are essential.

What brought you into wellness?

It was a steady progression from my early career as an endocrinologist. I discovered meditation, then Ayurveda, and then developed a world view about how to guide people to higher states of consciousness as a key to inner fulfillment.

What does You. We. All. mean to you?

It begins with the healing self, a shift away from relying on doctors to self-care. The wellness movement must encourage this shift if we want to break out of the old model in which the body is a machine that needs repairing by a mechanic—the doctor—when it starts to break down. Expanding wellness to include We and All is a natural progression. Once we know how to care for ourselves, we want to care for others. But ultimately, from a consciousness-based perspective, wellness is about waking up. In the Indian tradition, someone who is fully awake sees pure consciousness in everyone and everything. This results in the famous axiom, "I am that, Thou art, that, and All this is that." The word "that" refers to our source in pure awareness, and the infinite play of consciousness that is universal.