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Spiritual Icon & Best-Selling Author

By 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.

January 25, 2023

Yoga is so radical, it overturns everything you and I have accepted since we were children. We’ve been chugging along year after year based on completely hollow beliefs and assumptions. Some beliefs matter more than others. These are known as “core beliefs,” and when your core beliefs are wrong and misguided, trouble is always brewing—if not today, then in some worrisome future. To bring them closer to home, I’ll list the core beliefs we all take personally.

• I don’t really matter. I am small, ordinary, and insignificant.
• I deserve only so much love. At heart, I am probably unlovable. Life hasn’t been fair to me. That’s because life is unfair.
• If I don’t look out for number one, no one else will.
• There is much to fear in this world. Self-protection is very important.
• If I show anyone that I am vulnerable, they will take advantage. I need to seem strong and independent.
• The forces of nature are all-powerful. I will be fortunate if some natural disaster doesn’t befall me.
• The universe is a vast, cold, empty void. The Earth and everyone on it are less than a speck of dust, a product of random events going back to the Big Bang.

These beliefs undermine everyone’s life. They are ingrained in us early on, and they have sunk so deep into our sense of self that they hardly deserve a second glance. If you accept the unreality that Yoga rejects, your core beliefs will seem completely logical. Look around you or listen to the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Isn’t life unfair? Don’t each of us deserve only a limited amount of love? Isn’t the Earth a speck of dust floating in a cold, empty void?

Royal Yoga holds out an ideal life based on a new set of core beliefs. These are literally the opposite of the false core beliefs we have all been mistakenly living by.

• Your existence is based on an infinite field of consciousness. It is your source.
• Your true self has access to infinite possibilities.
• At your source, you are connected to infinite love and bliss. your true self is immune to fear, depression, aging, and death. You are always completely safe. There is nothing to worry about.
• You have no need to project an image of strength and independence. You have no need to project any image at all.
• The Earth and everything on it have a unique place in the tapestry of reality, woven by cosmic consciousness.

When people read these statements about an ideal life, they immediately assume they are merely someone else’s beliefs, like the beliefs that underlie organized religion. Many would say that the entire issue of spirituality rests upon belief alone.

It is impossible to accept Christianity unless you affirm the divinity of the resurrected Jesus, or so St. Paul declared in his letters to the early churches. It is impossible to accept Buddhism unless you affirm the Buddha’s enlightenment and the existence of Nirvana. In the same way, to accept Yoga, you must affirm your own infinite standing in creation. From the perspective of everyday life, this seems like too much to swallow.

But nothing about the ideal life is a belief akin to religious beliefs. What’s at stake is reality. Beliefs pertain to how you feel about reality. Yoga declares as a fact that every human being is embedded in a field of infinite potential. By squeezing our infinite potential down into small, manageable compartments, we are guilty only of being part of the mainstream of human beings.

But Yoga doesn’t care about the mainstream or about how you have lived in the past. In the worldview of Yoga, the infinite is always with us; in fact, it is our source. Nothing we do to squeeze our lives down to a manageable size has the slightest effect on reality, and the highest reality is what Royal Yoga is ultimately all about.

Adapted from LIVING IN THE LIGHT copyright © 2023 by Deepak Chopra. Used by permission of Harmony Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.