Amy Elliott had two dreams about Deepak Chopra in a week. Then she found out he was holding an event at OSU.

“Some people might say it was coincidence, I say it was spirit,” Elliott said.

Elliott made the decision to spend the scarce amount of funds that her and husband have left on a ticket. Due to Elliot’s pregnancy, she has been unable to work. When going through the hardest times of her life, Elliott used Chopra’s teachings to help her heal.

“I want to share that level of power with parents. That you really can tune into yourself and tune into what he [Deepak] would probably call ‘cosmic intelligence’ or ‘consciousness’ and have a direct affect on your reality and children.”

Elliott has a degree in a psychology and her own private practice where she does intuitive and energy work for trauma patients, in addition to one-on-one coaching for parents.

“I took the opportunity to hand him some of my work because it is applying all of this- all of the wonderful messages that he has had to share,” Elliot said. “I have been able to basically articulate his work into parenting language.”

Chopra’s lecture, “The Future of Well-being” on Feb. 23 aimed to expand the awareness of the audience by presenting recent findings that show a correlation between spirituality and physical health.

Chopra presented the results of the SOS, Seduction of Spirit study, done by the Chopra Foundation in collaboration with Harvard Medical School, UC San Francisco, the UC San Diego School of Medicine and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

This study intensively monitored individuals during meditation. According to Chopra, meditation decreases the chances of developing illnesses related to aging.

“At the genetic level people were reversing their biological age in 5-6 days,” Chopra said.

This happens because people are much more than their physical forms, according to Chopra. Since the body is always regenerating, then the answer of where to approach disease prevention could be through practices such as mindfulness, Chopra said.

“You are not a physical body,” Chopra said. “If you were a physical body you would have to decide which one.”

Every year 98 percent of the atoms in the body are replaced. The molecules of skin restore themselves every month and the liver restores itself every six weeks. Since the physical form is always changing, Chopra seeks a different answer for how people define the way they experience the world.

“We are not the bodies, we are not the minds, we are the consciousness,” Chopra said.

The development of this consciousness will enhance overall well-being and reduce susceptibility to disease, according to Chopra. In order to gain optimum health, Chopra presented, “The Five Pillars of Physical Well-being” — sleep, meditation and stress management, movement, emotions and nutrition.

Chopra says that sleep is important because it is the state in which people return to their “being” or “soul” when there is awareness, without thought.

Chopra also recommend having feelings of love, compassion, joy and empathy to influence the body and promote healing. It is the limbic brain, that evolved about 100 million years ago, which controls our emotions.

“Abused individuals have limbic dissonance and this causes hormones to go out of balance,” Chopra said. “Emotional, physical distress manifest in adulthood as disease.”

According to Chopra, emotions such as fear, hostility and anger has evolutionarily helped us to survive but can lead to inappropriate amounts of stress and cause unbalance in body.

The night ended with a meditation that asked four questions:

“Who am I?” “What do I want?” “What is my purpose?” and “What am I grateful for?”

“The answers change with time,” Deepak said. “The answers evolve.”

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