Your Body Wants to Be Your Strongest Ally — Let It

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Modern medicine has triumphed on many fronts in conquering diseases and extending life, but its greatest advance is almost totally unsung. Health and longevity have made it possible to see the body as our greatest ally. After centuries of inevitable sickness and early death for the vast majority of people, the human body is poised to become our greatest ally on a new front: consciousness.

If you can step outside the accepted image of your body as a machine, you will discover that it is actually not a separate physical object but united with your mind as one consciousness — call it the bodymind. This step alone rids you of many damaging attitudes. As a thing separate from ourselves, the body is an obsessive source of worry over sickness, aging, and death. Equally obsessive is whether someone’s body is beautiful enough, strong enough, appealing enough to the opposite sex.

To escape all of these damaging attitudes, realize a few basic principles about the bodymind:

· You are already whole, thanks to the union of mind and body.

· Every mental process has a corresponding bodily process.

· You are embodying your own state of consciousness.

· The same traits you attribute to your mind also belong to every cell in your body.

The fact that we are embodying our own consciousness is probably the biggest breakthrough of our time, but it is still hard for the average person to grasp. (For a detailed discussion of this concept, see the eye-opening video by Judith Blackstone, “Can We Embody Nonduality?” In religion and spirituality generally there has been strong judgment against the body, with a corresponding celebration of the soul. But in reality this separation was totally artificial. You cannot have any experience, however earthly or divine, without your brain registering it and passing the message to every cell in the body. You cannot hide your thoughts from your body. If you look in the mirror and feel bad about your body, you are simultaneously judging against yourself.

What’s so liberating about the bodymind is both short-term and long-term. In the short term, the elusive goal of living in the present moment is radically turned around, because your body, including your brain, has no choice but to live in the now. In fact, so confident are your cells about living in the present moment that they store only about 3 seconds…