The purpose of this book is to raise everyday well-being to the level of radical well-being. Such a goal requires a journey of transformation through an understanding of our own genetics. This fascinating field of inquiry has led to a flood of exciting findings, and more appear every day. Human DNA has many more secrets to reveal. Yet a tipping point has already been reached. It has become blindingly clear that the human body is not what it seems to be.
Imagine you are standing in front of a mirror: what do you see? The obvious answer is a living object, a moving machine of flesh and blood. This object is your home base and protective shelter. It faithfully takes you where you want to go and does what you want to do. Without a physical body, life would have no foundation. But what if everything you assumed about your body were an illusion? What if that thing you see in the mirror isn’t a thing at all?
In reality, your body is like a river, constantly flowing and changing.
Your body is like a cloud, a swirl of energy that is 99 percent empty space.
Your body is like a brilliant idea in the cosmic mind, an idea that took billions of years of evolution to construct.
These comparisons aren’t just images—they are realities pointing to transformation. Right now, the body as a physical thing fits in with everyday experience. To paraphrase Shakespeare, if you cut yourself, do you not bleed? Yes, of course, because the physical side of life is totally necessary. But the physical side comes second. Without those other possibilities—the body as idea, energy cloud, and constant change—your body would fly away, vanishing into a random swirl of atoms.
Once you see past the facade of that image in the mirror, the big story begins. Behind the mirror, so to speak, genetics has been unfolding the story of life in stages, punctuated by the 1953 breakthrough that revealed DNA’s double helix, a twisted ladder with billions of chemical rungs. In the past ten years, however, the story has exploded, thanks to the discovery of how active our genes really are. Everywhere in the body, a cell puts the secret of life into practice:
It knows what’s good for it and seizes upon the good.
It knows what’s bad for it and avoids the bad.
It sustains its survival from moment to moment with total focus.
It monitors the well-being of every other cell.
It adapts to reality without resistance or judgment.
It draws upon the deepest resources of Nature’s intelligence.
Can we, the summation of all those cells, say the same for ourselves? Do we eat too much, overindulge in alcohol, put up with pummeling stress, and rob ourselves of sleep? No healthy cell would make such choices.
So why the disconnect? Nature designed us to be as healthy as our cells. There is no reason not to be. Cells naturally make the right choices at every moment. How can we do the same?
What’s so exciting about recent research is that gene activity can be greatly improved, and when this happens a state of radical well-being is possible. What makes it radical is that it goes far beyond conventional prevention. The very foundation of chronic disease is being exposed by the new genetics. We are seeing how lifestyle choices made years ago profoundly affect how the body operates today, for both good and ill. Your genes are eavesdropping on every choice you make.
We hold that radical well-being is an urgent need, and we believe wholeheartedly that we can convince you of this. Unknown to the vast majority of people, there’s a hole in conventional well-being, a hole big enough that accelerated aging, chronic disease, obesity, depression, and addiction have managed to slip through. All efforts to counter these threats have been only half successful at best. A new model is needed. Here’s how one woman experienced this need.
When Ruth Ann developed pain in both hips, she initially shrugged it off. At fifty-nine, she prided herself on how well she was managing her body. She had superb impulse control, eating the right foods without the snacking and guilty dashes to the fridge for ice cream at midnight that gradually put on pounds. She didn’t smoke and rarely drank. Her cupboard held a stock of vitamins and nutritional supplements. Her exercise routine went beyond the recommended minimum of four or five periods of vigorous activity per week—she spent two hours at the gym every day. As a result, on the eve of turning sixty, Ruth Ann could show off a perfect figure, which had been her main focus all along.
The arrival of pain in her hips two years earlier was annoying, but she didn’t let it affect her exercise routine. Gradually the pain became chronic; it spiked whenever she ran on the treadmill. Eventually she needed to lie down for an hour every afternoon to allow the pain to subside. Ruth Ann went to her doctor. X-rays were taken, and the news was bad: She had degenerative osteoarthritis. Sooner or later, the doctor informed her, she was facing a hip replacement.
The cause of arthritis, of which there are many types, is unknown, but Ruth Ann has her own explanation. “I shouldn’t have been such an exercise fanatic. I pushed myself too hard, and now I’m paying the price.” She felt defeated. In her mind, she had been doing all the right things to postpone “turning into an old lady.” This was her biggest fear. Now, as if tiny goblins were coming out of the closet, the symptoms of accelerated aging were upon her. Her figure is that of a thirty-year-old, but appearances deceive. She feels tired for no reason. Her sleep and appetite have turned irregular, with nights of severe insomnia that can go on for several weeks. Small stresses give rise to low-level anxiety. Ruth Ann has never felt helpless before. Whenever she has a mental image of herself as an “old lady,” she wishes she could run back to the gym and get on the treadmill again.
The bottom line is that Ruth Ann feels her body has betrayed her. Yet consider how the situation looks from a cell’s point of view. A cell doesn’t push itself beyond its limits. It heeds the slightest sign of damage and rushes to repair it. A cell obeys the natural cycle of rest and activity. It follows the deep understanding of life embedded in its DNA. By conventional standards, Ruth Ann did all the right things, yet at a deeper level she was disconnected from her body’s intelligence.
We have so much that’s positive to tell you that we will state the negative side just once: The two major threats to well-being—illness and aging—are constantly present. Out of sight, without your knowing it, your present good health is being silently undermined. Abnormal processes are taking place in everyone’s body at a microscopic level. Anomalies inside a cell that affect only a cluster of molecules or the shape of one enzyme are virtually undetectable. You can’t feel them as an ache or pain or even as vague discomfort. Such abnormalities can take years to develop into even minor symptoms. But the day will arrive when our body starts to tell us a story we don’t want to hear, just as Ruth Ann’s body did.
This book tells you how to avert that day for years, or even decades, to come. The possibility of radical well-being is very real, and the most exciting developments are merely a prelude to a revolution in self-care. Become a pioneer in that revolution. It’s the most significant step you can take in shaping the future you desire for body, mind, and spirit. Your genes play a part in all of these areas, as we’re about to show you.
The threats that undermine your well-being are persistent. Even if you consider yourself safe right now, how secure is your future? Genes can help answer that question. They can lead you to make life-supporting choices while correcting the wrong choices made in the past. The first step is to focus on the cell. Your body has approximately 50 trillion to 100 trillion cells (estimates vary widely). There is no process—from thinking a thought to having a baby, from fending off invading bacteria to digesting a ham sandwich—that isn’t tied to a specialized activity in your cells. A cell must look to its DNA to keep it perfectly functioning, because DNA, as the “brain” of the cell, is ultimately in charge of every process. In a healthy person, this activity occurs perfectly more than 99.9 percent of the time. It’s the tiny exceptions, amounting to the merest fraction of 0.1 percent, that can cause trouble.
The DNA that’s neatly tucked inside each cell is something magnificent, a complex combination of chemicals and proteins that holds the entire past, present, and future of all life on our planet. Bacteria are essential to the body, too, with trillions of them lining the gut and the surface of the skin. These form colonies known as the microbiome. It’s long been known that bacteria in the intestines make digestion possible. But recently the microbiome has assumed much greater importance. For one thing, there’s the sheer number of bacteria involved, which amount to something like 90 percent of the cells in the body. Even more crucial, bacterial DNA became part of human DNA over the course of billions of years. It is estimated that 90 percent of the genetic information inside us is bacterial—our ancestors were microbes, and they are, in many ways, still present in the structure of our cells.
In fact, your body may contain 100 trillion or more bacteria (a very rough estimate). In isolation, they would weigh somewhere between three and five pounds in dry weight. If we keep score by the number of different genes you possess, it would be about 23,000 genes inside your cells and 1 million genes for all these various microbes. In a sense we are sophisticated hosts for the micro-organisms that colonize us. The implications for medicine and health are potentially staggering and are just now being explored. One conclusion is inescapable: the human genome, having expanded tenfold, has become a super genome. Because of the microbes now being wrapped into the story, Earth’s 2.8-billion-year-old genetic legacy is present inside each of us, here and now. Much of the original stuff, genetically speaking, is still propagating inside the cells of your body.
The fact that DNA stores the entire history of life gives it tremendous responsibility. One slip, and an entire species can be wiped out. Realizing this fact, geneticists spent many decades thinking about DNA as a stable chemical, its biggest threat being the instability created when a mistake slips by the body’s defenses. But now we realize that DNA is responsive to everything that happens in our lives. This opens the door to many new possibilities that science is just now beginning to grasp.
Some people find themselves apparently victimized by their genes; others are rescued by them. One woman experienced both. Saskia is in her late forties with advanced breast cancer that has metastasized to other locations in her body, including her bones. In her most recent battle against the disease, Saskia bypassed chemotherapy in favor of immunotherapy, which aims at increasing the body’s own immune response. She also decided to spend a week learning how to take care of herself through meditation, yoga, massage, and other complementary therapies. (The program she attended was given at the Chopra Center. We mention this in the spirit of full disclosure, not to take credit for what occurred next.)
Saskia enjoyed the week and came away with a feeling that she could relate to her body in a better way. She appreciated how well she was treated, pointing in particular to the loving attitude of the massage therapists. At the end of the week she reported that her bone pain had gone away, and she went home feeling much better, emotionally and physically. She recently sent a follow-up e-mail describing what happened next.
The day after I got home, I had another PET/CT scan. This one was four months after the last. The following week I met with my oncologist. Though I was expecting the worst, I had decided that no matter how bad my scan looked, I felt a lot better, and that’s what counted. But instead of bad news, he told me that he had never seen such a response in such a short time, and especially without the use of chemo drugs….He was very surprised and is much more interested now in what I’m doing!
I told him about what I learned at the Chopra Center (especially meditation, yoga, and massages), the dietary changes I’d made, and how supportive my husband has been in these last few months. I believe that all these things were working together to make healing possible.
Basically all the many metastases to my lymph nodes are gone, as well as the metastases to my liver; more than half of the mets to my bones have disappeared. The remaining bone mets have all diminished greatly in size. There’s one new lymph node met on the left side of my neck, but the doctor believes it’s insignificant in light of the vast improvements everywhere else. He told me to just keep doing whatever I’m doing.
There are two attitudes to take to this story. One is the standard medical response, which amounts to dismissal.
Faced with Saskia’s experience, most oncologists would consider it merely another piece of anecdotal evidence that has little bearing on the overall statistics relating to cancer treatment and survival. Cancer is a numbers game. What happens to thousands of patients tells the tale, not what happens to one patient. The other attitude to Saskia’s experience is to explore how changes in her situation led to such a remarkable result. Let’s list all the changes she experienced that might influence gene expression:
Improved attitude toward her disorder
Increased optimism
Decreased bone pain
Emotional support from her husband
New knowledge about the mind-body connection
New lifestyle choices added to her daily routine: meditation, yoga, massage
Benefits from therapeutic massage and other treatments at the center
The list looks quite diverse, and only one or two items on it would be found under current standard cancer treatments. But there’s a common thread to every item. New messages were sent to and from her brain and her genes. If medicine could decode these messages, we’d get much closer to solving the mystery of healing. It can be hard for any physician who is in the business of curing his patients to admit that the only true healer is the body itself. And how the body pushes atoms and molecules around to achieve healing—or not—remains a deep mystery.
What will happen to Saskia in the coming months and years is unpredictable. We are not promoting miracle cures in any way, shape, or form. We know full well that miracle isn’t a useful term for understanding how the body operates.
If you could listen in on the stream of messages received at the genetic level over the course of a single day, in all likelihood you’d hear the following:
Keep doing what you’re doing.
Reject or ignore change.
Keep problems away from me. I don’t want to know about them.
Make my life pleasant.
Avoid difficulties and pain.
You take care of it. I don’t want to.
You aren’t aware that this is what you are telling your genes, over and over, because you don’t put these messages into words like a telegram. But your intention is clear, and cells respond to what you want and do, not what you say. Each of us is incredibly fortunate that our bodies can run automatically with almost total perfection for decades at a time. But unless we participate in our own well-being, sending conscious messages to our genes, running on automatic isn’t good enough. Radical well-being requires conscious choices. When you make the right choices, your genes will cooperate with whatever you want.
This is the new story we want you to follow, and to turn into your own story. When you use your genes for transformation, they become super genes. To guide you to the goal, the rest of the book is organized into three parts:
The Science of Transformation: Here we give you the latest knowledge about the new genetics and the revolution that is changing biology, evolution, inheritance, and the human body itself.
Lifestyle Choices for Radical Well-Being: Here we provide a path for change that’s both practical and, as much as possible, effortless.
Guiding Your Own Evolution: Here we go to the source of all growth and change, which is consciousness. You cannot change what you aren’t aware of, and when you are totally aware, the promise of self-directed transformation comes true.
There’s the map. Now we begin the journey. The map has marked out the territory to be covered, but until you enter the territory, it won’t become real for you. What makes this journey unique is that every step has the power to change your personal reality. Nothing could be more fascinating or more rewarding.
Almost a thousand years before DNA revealed its first secret, the mystic Persian poet Rumi took the same journey. He looked over his shoulder to tell us where the road leads:
Motes of dust dancing in the light
That’s our dance, too.
We don’t listen inside to hear the music—
No matter.
The dance of life goes on,
And in the joy of the sun
Is hiding a God.