Awareness as Medicine: Letting Healing Intelligence Do Its Work
By Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, FRCP
Asleep: The mind-body connection is wounded.
Awake: Awareness leads the healing process.
Healing has become a holistic term over the past few decades, reflecting a shift toward accepting the mind-body connection. But the full implication of “holistic” has yet to sink in. When you get over a cold or a cut finger heals itself, the process looks physical. In the case of a cold, your immune system kicks in; in the case of a cut finger, it is the inflammation response that is triggered.
What we don’t see is that something deeper is involved. A decision was made about what kind of healing was needed. Only after this decision has been made does any kind of healing begin. To expand on how holistic healing affects you, this is the place to begin.
Healing decisions are made in awareness. The fact that the immune system operates physically, as does the inflammation response, distracts us from what awareness is doing. If awareness didn’t govern and oversee healing, it wouldn’t occur.
Modern medicine already acknowledges the mind-body connection, but this goes further. Wholeness isn’t about mind and body getting together, which they do, but about transcending them to reach a level where knowing what to do is part of your deeper awareness. A crucial aspect of awakening is to allow the law of healing intelligence to benefit you, which happens when the lines of communication are open between mind, body, and their common source in pure awareness.
Why Some People Get Sick More Than Others
Let me bring this down to earth. What are the key differences between people who don’t get sick and those who get sick more than the average person? What are the differences between people who enjoy a more fulfilling life psychologically and those who don’t? These aren’t metaphysical questions but practical ones, and medicine has found some telltale clues, even though the whole story is far from understood.
Getting sick more often has been traced to at least a dozen possible factors. Notice how broadly they cross physical, mental, and social lines.
· Chronic stress exposure
· Sleep duration and regularity
· Socioeconomic status.
· Social isolation or weak social bonds
· Early childhood adversity (neglect, abuse, instability)
· Baseline physical fitness and muscle mass
· Smoking history and air-quality exposure
· Perceived lack of control or chronic helplessness
· Nutritional adequacy, especially protein and micronutrients like zinc and vitamin D
· Work conditions — particularly shift work, high demand with low autonomy, and exposure-heavy jobs
· Personality traits linked to emotional suppression (e.g., chronic inhibition of anger or sadness)
· Health literacy and preventive behavior (vaccination, early care-seeking, hygiene practices)
When the Mind-Body Connection Is Wounded
What these different-looking factors have in common is that the mind-body connection has been wounded. A physiologist would say that the body’s dynamic balance, or homeostasis, has been thrown off. But a more holistic view would tell us that the body’s sense of self-awareness has been thrown off. Awareness applies to immune cells rushing to combat an invading microbe just as certainly as you being aware of what day this is.
That immune cell must know its job, recognize the difference between an invader and a harmless arrival, keep the distinction clear between a bewildering host of microbes and potential allergens, and be willing to die in order to serve the greater good of the body’s survival. The fact that the immune system has been referred to as our “floating brain” captures its complexity.
But “brain” is a misplaced term, because the flow of healing intelligence uses the immune system, just as it uses the body. On its own, as a physical object, no cell or organ is intelligent or aware. Even the most basic healing that we take for granted, like a cut finger, depends upon the setup of the inflammation response (and several associated processes like blood clotting and cellular renewal) happening at the source of healing.
At the source, thousands of processes divided among trillions of cells are silently, effortlessly, and efficiently coordinated, an achievement so far ahead of modern medicine that our best understanding isn’t enough to comprehend the full working of a single cell. Our role is to exercise the full potential of mind and body without gumming up the works that fundamentally support life.
How We “Gum Up The Works”
If you look back at the list of factors that determine who gets sick and who doesn’t, it is easy to see how each one gums up the works. We can take different positions about who has the responsibility for one factor over another. Quite often people say, “This is what happened to me” instead of “This is what I want to take responsibility for.”
But those discussions miss the holistic healing available through deeper awareness. The active mind is constantly making choices, and the ego is quick to approve or disapprove of each choice as it rolls off the assembly line. But in reality, everything on the list (which could be expanded to include even more susceptible factors like being depressed, being fired, getting a divorce, or being forced into early retirement) impedes the flow of healing intelligence.
Once you know this, you are on the way to waking up. Instead of struggling with stress one day, a cold the next, and side effects from a drug the day after, your focus can be aligned with opening the channels through which healing intelligence is meant to flow. Then you are achieving truly holistic health.
A Step Forward
It would be good this week to reinforce some of the key points in this post by rereading it — a lot of information was covered. Looking back at the dozen factors that keep people from being well, apply them to yourself, not as an individual project like deciding to quit smoking (although that’s always a good idea).
How We “Gum Up the Works” of Healing
Instead, connect the dots in your own awareness, which means taking a look at how you run into imbalance and why you haven’t addressed it yet. Stressed people don’t need a Post-it on the fridge to tell them that they are stressed. They need to look at how much awareness is being devoted to finding an answer and how much is devoted instead to denial, distraction, resignation, or simply putting up with the status quo.
Once you have honestly and candidly considered the list, don’t use it as a map to getting better. Attacking one issue at a time is the opposite of taking a holistic approach. There is a much simpler measure of things as they are in your life. Look at any aspect, good or bad, and ask the basic questions:
· Does this make me feel more expanded or more closed off?
· Does this make me feel balanced or thrown off balance?
· Am I finding life more effortless or the opposite?
A Holistic Check-In for Your Own Life
The more you investigate the basic nature of healing intelligence, which is effortless, natural, balanced, carefree, unstressed, efficient, and life-enhancing, the more you will discover the profile of the life you are meant to be living.
Namaste,
Deepak
