Personality

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• QHow do I counteract my idea of personal suffering?

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  A Deepak Chopra , Alternative & Complementary Medicine, answered

  To counteract this, we need to find the spirit. Spirit can do one thing that your ego craves very deeply and can't accomplish on its own. Spirit can help the ego escape that painful trap of I, me, and mine. It is strange but true that the very mechanism that builds the isolated self also wants to escape it. The ego wants the best for "me," yet there is another, subtler force that wants the best for all (which ends up being best for me, in the end). Allow this force to express itself, and you will discover that the walls of isolation are not as solid as your suffering makes them seem.
  
  Spirit gives us access to an emotion that cannot be felt in isolation -- compassion. Compassion comes from the root words "to suffer with," and for that reason many people actually fear it. An audience member in Boston on a gray drizzly evening asked me, "How can I feel compassion for the victims of this tragedy (the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001) without having it hurt me? I don't want to be injured, I want to offer love and peace." It was a very honest question, and I responded, I hope, on that level.
  
  "Let yourself feel their pain. Let it come into you, and don't be afraid that you'll be injured. Trying to keep out someone else's pain comes from fear for our own safety; in the name of safety we retreat behind our own private walls. Yet the truth is that your pain and the pain of the victims are shared. They make you human together."
  
  Compassion is one of the most honored and saintly feelings because it marches up to the front lines of suffering and says, "Take me." In this giving of oneself there is a direct experience of pain, yet in the giving there is love. Thus compassion has the power to dissolve pain by not avoiding it, but by trusting that love affords the greatest protection. By discovering that there is a reality -- love -- stronger than any pain, you mount your strongest defense.
• QAre my mind and ego allies on my spiritual journey?

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  A Deepak Chopra , Alternative & Complementary Medicine, answered

  People are surprised to encounter a great deal of chaos when they go inside. Not only is the mind restless and wayward, the egooffers its own agenda. Having touched on the ego's needs to assertits demands, one shouldn't have the impression that it is an enemy.The ego has its proper place. The same holds true for the mind with its confusing stream of jumbled ideas, beliefs, desires, fantasies,and emotions. Its chaos poses problems when you try to see yoursoul clearly, yet the mind has an enormous capacity to perceive reality in new ways.
  
  In their proper place, mind and ego are to be cherished as allies.Remind yourself of this in the long campaign to bring balance back to your inner world. Ego and mind will seem to fight against you, but in truth they harbor their own spiritual goals, not to ruleover the soul but to be absorbed in its domain of light. One of thebest ways to allow your ego to be absorbed in spirit is to witnessit silently. You do this by just observing your own reaction to situations, circumstances, people, and events. In the mere witnessing of these, you will begin to see a transformation, and a balancing of body, mind, and spirit.

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• QWhat does it mean to embrace all?

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  A Deepak Chopra , Alternative & Complementary Medicine, answered

  This affirmation is about uniting two realities. There is a path toGod that relies solely on the mind. It is the coldest, rockiestroad, offering nothing of comfort to the heart, yet the path of themind is also the simplest. It sets out to answer one question: Whoam I? The instant you ask the question, only two answers emerge,diverging like two roads in the woods.
  
  The first answer: "I am this mind and body, born in thephysical world and destined to die."
  
  The second answer: "I am being itself, which gives rise tothe cycle of birth and dying but lives eternally beyond them."
  
  No one ever takes the second road nor, I believe, are we meant to.If you could satisfy yourself mentally that you are the eternal"I," what would be the use of experience? This world was made to bethe most enticing, seductive, beautiful, intoxicating, erotic, andsensual part of creation. It begs to be experienced, and thereforewe all took the first road. We put on individuality and subjectedourselves to birth and death. The drama has been magnificent.Pleasure and pain have overwhelmed us. Yet if birth and dying werethe ultimate reality, the road would lead to hell, so by the graceof being, the first road simply dissolves. The second road remainseternal. The being that is unborn and never dies, appears. You knowthe truth of who you are, which is All. Birth and dying go on. Butyou can step outside the drama whenever you wish. You can reclaimyourself beyond pleasure and pain. With undying gratitude you lookback over your shoulder and realize that for you suffering has cometo an end.

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• QIs my pain really mine?

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  A Deepak Chopra , Alternative & Complementary Medicine, answered

  Even though your ego may cry out as if only you are in pain, you need to look further. Offering help to others, for example, ends your isolation, a primary source of your pain. A woman stood up at a lecture once and asked me, "How can I get rid of this terrible pain in my heart? It has been with me for twenty years, ever since I lost a child." I had given specific answers to similar questions, but this time I blurted out, "You have to stop thinking of it as your pain." I expected her to look shocked or offended. What crossed her face instead was a puzzled look, as if she knew that something true had been hinted at. My pain? Of course it's mine. Who else could it belong to?
  
  What if the pain that seems to be yours is really not yours? (And here I do not mean to belittle personal suffering, but only to offer a larger perspective that may help alleviate it.) The truth is that fear and anger exist outside ourselves. They are not yours or mine, unless we attract them. Negativity is an invisible parasite. It needs a host to feed off of, and the host is the ego. When you learned as a young child to cling to my toy, my candy, my pleasure, my happiness, at the same time your ego started clinging to the opposite: my scraped knee, my broken doll, my sadness, my pain. Absorbing an experience as "mine" was how you built yourself up, developed a sense of individual identity. As we grew, we learned to see this self in a larger perspective, in the context of humanity. But when tragedy strikes, we often regress to this early state.

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• QHow does trust relate to fear?

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  A Deepak Chopra , Alternative & Complementary Medicine, answered

  There is another crucial element to releasing fear. I have observed that we are all willing to release our most intimate and hidden fears when we feel trust. Trust means that you are offered the promise of safety and can accept it. Both parts are necessary -- there has to be the offer of emotional openness and also the ability to accept that a safe haven is truly present. The question is, where can any of us turn for trust?

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• QWhat are the traits of self-actualized people?

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  A Dr. Michael T. Murray, ND , Naturopathic Medicine, answered

  Dr. Kenneth Pelletier's work is reminiscent of Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist who in 1943 brought us the concept of self-actualization - a process of ongoing actualization of our potentials, capacities, and talents. Maslow was really the first psychologist to study healthy people. He strongly believed that the study of healthy people would create a firm foundation for the theories and values of a new psychotherapy. His work and theories were the result of intense research on psychologically healthy people during a period of more than 30 years. Maslow discovered that healthy individuals strive and are actually driven to be self-actualized. He found that self-actualized people had the following traits which are certainly worth striving for in our lives:

  They embrace the facts and realities of the world (including themselves) rather than denying or avoiding them. They are spontaneous in their ideas and actions. They are creative. They are interested in solving problems; these often include the problems of others. Solving these problems is often a key focus in their lives. They feel close to other people, and generally appreciate life. They have a system of morality that is fully internalized and independent of external authority. They have discernment and are able to view all things in an objective manner.

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• QHow do I escape the ego's insecurity?

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  A Deepak Chopra , Alternative & Complementary Medicine, answered

  Humility is the modesty that comes naturally when you see how vastcreation is in all its infinite abundance. In India it is said thathumility bows down before God like a tree laden with ripe fruit.The ego fears being made humble. The "I" is insecure and does notwelcome being taken down to a lower position.
  
  The way to escape this attitude is by appreciating the richness ofyourself. Within you the drama of life plays itself out as in noone else. You can access the full range of experience, includingexperiences of pain and suffering. Even as you move to healyourself, remain aware that the play of light and dark adds to therichness of life.
• QWhere do negative emotions get there power?

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  A Deepak Chopra , Alternative & Complementary Medicine, answered

  Negative emotions feed off certain aspects of the shadow -- a hidden place where we all repress things we feel guilty about or ashamed of.
  
  The shadow is dark. Everyone has a shadow because of the natural contrast between darkness and the light.
  
  The shadow is secret. We store impulses and feelings there that we wish to keep private.
  
  The shadow is dangerous. Repressed feelings have the power to convince us that they can kill us or make us go insane.
  
  The shadow is shrouded in myth. For generations, people have seenit as the lair of dragons and monsters.
  
  The shadow is irrational. Its impulses fight against reason; theyare explosive and totally willful.
  
  The shadow is primitive. It's beneath the dignity of a civilized person to explore this domain, which reeks of the smell of the charnel house, the prison, the lunatic asylum, and a public lavatory.
  
  Negativity assumes its overwhelming power from the fact that it feeds off all these qualities at once: A secret, dark, primitive, irrational, dangerous, mythical evil is much less convincing if you break it down into one quality at a time. But this process of bringing evil down to scale won't be convincing until you apply it to yourself.

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• QWhy should I renounce my self-image?

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  A Deepak Chopra , Alternative & Complementary Medicine, answered

  Over the years you have built an idealized self-image that you defend as "me." In this image are packed all the things you want to see as true about yourself; banished from it are all the shameful, guilty and fear-provoking aspects that threaten yourself-confidence. But the aspects you try to push away return as the most insistent voices in your head. The act of banishment creates the chaos of your internal dialogue; thus your ideal erodes even while you are doing everything to look good and feel good about yourself.
  
  To really feel good about yourself, renounce your self-image. Immediately you will find yourself being more open and relaxed. Much time is spent in self-help trying to turn a bad self-image into a good one. As reasonable as that sounds, all self-images have the same pitfall: They keep reminding you of who you were, not who you are. The whole idea of I, me and mine was erected on memories; these memories are not really you. If you release yourself from your self-image, you will be free to choose as if for the first time.
  
  Self-image keeps reality away, particularly at the emotional level. Many people don't want to admit what they are actually feeling. Their self-image dictates that being angry, for example, or showing anxiety is not permissible. Such feelings don't accord with the "kind of person I want to be." Certain emotions feel too dangerous to be part of your ideal image of yourself, so you adopt a disguise that excludes those feelings. Deep-seated rage and fear belong in this category, but sadly so does immense joy, ecstasy, or freewheeling spontaneity.
  
  You stop being ruled by self-image when:
  
  • You feel what you feel
  • You are no longer offended by things
  • You stop appraising how a situation makes you look
  • You don't exclude people you feel superior or inferior to
  • You quit worrying about what others think about you
  • You no longer obsess over money, status, and possessions
  • You no longer feel the urge to defend your opinions
• QWhat is a samskara and what does it do?

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  A Deepak Chopra , Alternative & Complementary Medicine, answered

  When they tried to understand how the mind traps itself, the ancient Indian sages devised the key concept of samskara (from two Sanskrit word roots that mean "to flow together"). A samskara is a groove in the mind that makes thoughts flow in the same direction. Buddhist psychology makes sophisticated use of the concept by speaking of samskaras as imprints in the mind that have a life of their own. Your personal samskaras, built up from memories of the past, force you to react in the same limited way over and over, robbing you of free choice (i.e., choosing as if for the first time).
  
  Most people build up an identity on the basis of samskara without knowing that they chose to do this, but the clues are inescapable. Rage, anxiety, depression, sexual addiction, substance abuse, obsessive compulsion; all will testify to how samskaras rob people of free choice. Unable to escape their toxic memories, people adapt to them, adding one layer after another of impressions. The bottom layers, laid down in childhood, keep sending out their messages, which is why adults often look in the mirror and feel like impulsive, frightened children. The past has not been worked through sufficiently; samskaras rule the psyche through a jumble of old, outworn experiences.
  
  Stored memories are like microchips programmed to keep sending out the same message over and over. When you find yourself having a fixed reaction, the message has already been sent: It does no good to try to change the message. Yet this is exactly how the vast majority of people try to tame the mind. They receive a message they don't like, and their reaction is one of three things: Manipulation, control or denial.
  
  All three of these behaviors come after the fact -- they deal with the mind's disorder as the cause of the distress rather than as a symptom. These supposed solutions have tremendous negative effects. Each tries to prove an impossibility: Manipulation tries to prove that anyone can be made to do what you want. Control tries to prove that no one can reject you unless you say so. Denial tries to prove that bad things will go away if you don't look at them. The truth is that other people can refuse to do what you want, can walk out on you for no good reason, and can cause trouble whether you face it or not. There is no predicting how long any of us will stubbornly try to prove the opposite, but only when we admit the truth does the behavior completely end.