Discover Your True Potential

In his new book, You Are the Universe, best-selling author and integrative-medicine expert Deepak Chopra, MD, explains that the universe is participatory and that all of us are creators of our reality. Here, Chopra explores how yoga can help us understand our role as co-creators—and how liberating that knowledge can be.

- Deepak Chopra, MD

ALTHOUGH I GREW UP knowing about yoga, as every child in India did, and I later practiced a set of asanas as part of my meditation practice, the real revelation that the physical practice of yoga can serve as the doorway to expanded consciousness didn’t occur to me until fairly recently. The change of heart that turned me from primarily a meditator into a dedicated student of hatha yoga [the practice of coordinating physical yoga postures with breath] was different, perhaps, from what others feel when they make yoga class part of their weekly routine. It happened when I became convinced that body, mind, and cosmos were the same unified activity, thus deserving to be treated that way instead of referring to them as separate entities. I could see that practicing asana could help me access the universal life force that unites us all.

We tend to treat the body as different from the mind, or the mind as different from the cosmos, but we rarely stop to ask why. I believe these separations are symptoms of a larger separation, one that has had the disastrous effect of disguising our cosmic self. Anything that can put us on the path to rediscovering that lost cosmic self is of utmost value—and yoga is first on the list—because there is a hidden dimension of reality that would deeply benefit us with a greater sense of peace, joy, and serenity once we reach it.