A Universe of Possibilities in One Book

(Originally published 1 July 2012) 

I just finished Deepak Chopra's Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul. * It may be the best self-help book I have ever read; it is certainly one of the most profound, powerful, and practical.

It is so good that as soon as I finished the final page, I turned back to the first in order to begin again. This time I plan to spend more time delving into the exercises, recording and journaling on the various tools and activities he suggests.

The book opens on a very personal note. At the beginning of the Introduction: The Forgotten Miracle, he recounts his first encounter with a cadaver in medical school: "I took my scalpel and cut a fine line down the skin over the breastbone. The mystery of the human body was about to reveal itself. At that moment I also stripped the body of its sacred nature. I crossed a line that is nearly impossible to recross ever again."

The first section of the book is Reinventing Your Body. Here Chopra leads the reader through 5 Breakthroughs: your physical body is a fiction, your real body is energy, awareness has magic, you can improve your genes, time isn't your enemy. He candidly points out the shortcomings of the scientific model and its widely accepted assumptions, and explains how the quantum view greatly expands our notion of what may be possible in terms of healing and reversing entropy in our bodies.

The second section is Resurrecting Your Soul; this is where I was sometimes moved to tears. I appreciated his respectful attitude toward various religions, quoting sacred texts, while not shying away from pointing out the shortcomings or limitations of certain religious models, just as he did with scientific ones. In this section he presents 5 more Breakthroughs: there's an easier way to live, love awakens the soul, be as boundless as your soul, the fruit of surrender is grace, the universe evolves through you.

The short final section, 10 Steps to Wholeness, is prefaced briefly under the subtitle Promises You Can Keep. The 10 steps are: nourish you "light body," turn entropy into evolution, commit yourself to deeper awareness, be generous of spirit, focus on relationships instead of consumption, relate to your body consciously, embrace every day as a new world, let the timeless be in charge of time, feel the world instead of trying to understand it, seek after your own mystery.

On the heels of that final step comes the Conclusion: "Who Made Me?" As he began it, so does Chopra end the book on a personal note. "I hope the arguments I've made for reinventing the body in terms of energy and awareness come through to you as credible. I believe them fervently, as I believe in bringing the soul back into everyday life."

And truly, what higher calling can there be for us as individuals, friends, family members and planetary citizens than to heal and strengthen body and spirit and the connection between them?

* I read the Random House Large Print version, ISBN 978-0-7393-2838-5, 2009