Hala Taha: [00:00:00] You're listening to YAP, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Hala Taha. And on Young and Profiting Podcast we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world. My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life, no matter your age, profession, or industry. 

There's no fluff on this podcast and that's on purpose. I'm here to uncover value from my guests by doing the proper research and asking the right questions. If you're new to the show, we've chatted with the likes of ex-FBI agents, real estate moguls, self-made billionaires, CEOs, and best selling authors.

Our subject matter ranges from enhancing productivity, how to gain influence, the art of entrepreneurship and more. If you're smart and like to continually improve yourself, hit the subscribe button because you'll [00:01:00] love it here at Young and Profiting Podcast.

This week on YAP. We're chatting with meditation guru and best selling author, Deepak Chopra. For the last 30 years, Deepak has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution, and he's a world renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. He's also the founder of the Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism and Chopra Global, a modern day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality.

Time Magazine has described Deepak as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century, and he's been featured in outlets like The New York Times, CNN, The Huffington Post, and many more. In today's episode, Deepak and I chat about how meditation changed his life. And we take a close look into the ideas in his new book, Abundance: The Inner Path to Wealth. We learn about the history of money and we hear why money is the coin of [00:02:00] consciousness.

We also yak about good money versus bad money karma and Deepak gives us an in depth overview of the seven chakras. Lastly, we hear his thoughts around the intersection of the law of attention and the law of intention.

If you're curious about the human experience and what it means to live a life of abundance, you're gonna wanna listen to this one a few times over. Now, without further ado, here's my conversation with the legendary Deepak Chopra. 

Hey Deepak, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. 

Deepak Chopra: Thank you Hala. Privileged to be here.

Hala Taha: It is such an honor to have you on this show today. For everybody who is tuning in on YouTube. You may notice that I'm not in my studio. That's because I am live here at Podcast Movement. Because when Deepak Chopra has time to come on your show, you make time for Deepak Chopra no matter what's going on.

So Deepak, you are a household name. I'm sure everybody listening has heard of your name, but just in case you're a prominent figure in the new age movement, you're a world renowned speaker, [00:03:00] you're a founder of the Chopra Foundation, you're a licensed physician and author of over 90 books. But today we're gonna primarily focus on your book Abundance: The Inner Past to Wealth, because that's the perfect topic for my Young and Profiteers. Does that sound good? 

Deepak Chopra: That's great. 

Hala Taha: At one point in your adult life, you were drinking black coffee by the hour. You were smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and you actually turned to meditation to stop those bad habits. Can you tell us that story in your own words and how meditation changed your life? 

Deepak Chopra: Yeah, actually I was a practicing physician and I was also studying neuroendocrinology, which is the study of brain chemicals and hormones.

I was teaching at Harvard Tufts in bu junior faculty medical students and doing some research, and in those days, we were looking at what we call the molecules of emotion, which everybody knows about right now. Serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, opiates, anandamide, and many others. These were in the brain, you know these [00:04:00] molecules.

And they were for the first time, we realized the interface between what happens in our consciousness and what happens in our brain, what happens in our biology turned out that these molecules were also immunomodulators. They modulated the effects of the immune system, fine tuned the immune system. So that was my interest actually in mind body medicine and meditation. 

Yes, I was stressed, I was smoking and cigarettes and drinking alcohol on weekends, sometimes to excess. And one day I had put a pacemaker and a patient put him on a ventilator in a hospital. Then I went outside and smoked a cigarette, and I felt disgusted, so I threw the cigarette and I changed my lifestyle.

Meditation came after. Meditation came as a result of a chance meeting with a friend who suggested that I should, and then I got involved in meditation as a way to not only look [00:05:00] at managing stress, but a deeper understanding of what we call consciousness or spirit or awareness. The same thing. And that was going beyond body mind medicine.

Hala Taha: So what was so innovative about what you were doing back then in terms of alternative medicine? 

Deepak Chopra: I was challenging mainstream medicine, which is based on, in science we call it reductionism, which looks at body parts, and then you try to understand how disease occurs. So you'll try to understand how bacteria multiply and then you interfere with that with antibiotics.

Or you try to understand how cancer cells replicate and you interfere with that with chemotherapy or radiation, and it works. It works. It's very effective in acute illness. So if you have pneumonia, you need an antibiotic, don't question about it. Meditation is not going to help you clear pneumonia or if you have a appendicitis, you need surgery, not [00:06:00] meditation.

But then there's chronic illness. And chronic illness means things like diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, chronic diseases of all kinds, autoimmune illnesses, many types of cancer, premature aging that we are not successful with drugs or pharmaceuticals. So for that, you need to look at more than the physical body and look at the mind social interactions for professional interactions.

You have to look at deeper level of reality called awareness of consciousness or spirit. You have to look at the environment. You have to look at personal relationships and much more. Sleep, stress management, mind body coordination, vagal stimulation, biological rhythms. So the word health comes from the word whole so holistic means including everything. 

And that was not passionable then but now it is. Every [00:07:00] medical student is exposed to it. I teach at three university hospitals and everybody now teaches what was then considered non-mainstream. But now it's not. It's pretty mainstream. 

Hala Taha: Yeah, totally. 100%. So one of your key philosophies that I think that is really important for this discussion is your philosophy on evolution.

And you say that consciousness, not necessarily Darwinism or survival of the fittest, really was responsible for the evolution of humans, or there's more to it. So I'd love to hear your perspective on that.

Deepak Chopra: I say it's very controversial. It's very few people who actually subscribe to what I'm saying. So classical Darwin theory holds that evolution is the result of what are called random mutations.

You have to be very precise when you describe this word random. Everyone knows what a mutation is. We're seeing mutations every day with covid. So a mutation is a genetic mistake. [00:08:00] Where the alphabet that spells the gene, something is missing or something is extra. Life has four letters and how they spell out words. We call them genes. 

And so we share the same alphabet from mosquitoes to trees, to everything rodents, chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans. The difference between a gorilla or a chimpanzee and a human is less than 2% in terms of genes. 65% of the genes that you have in your body are the same as a banana, 80%, the same as a mouse.

About 70% is a fruit fly, and yet you still have the same alphabet. It's just the spelling is different. So when we say random mutations, we should be saying unpredictable. Random means inherently random. Unpredictable means we don't know what's going on. It's like going to Grand Central Station and you have lots of people going everywhere.

It looks [00:09:00] random. But then when you look deeply, you Oh, so many people are going to Philadelphia. So many are going to New York. So each one is going somewhere with purpose. Not randomly, it appears random to us. So first of all, random is not a good word. It should be unpredictable. Natural selection is a good word.

It means that those genes that survive start to dominate. And that's current Darwinian theory, and it's called the evolution of species, not the evolution of life. Nobody knows how life evolves. Evolution of species means how did bacteria become plants become animals become rodents become, primates became humans.

And so current theories that somehow that happened and we are at the top of the food chain now, as a result of that, it, there's a school of thought that says that's probably could not be true. It's too precise. And also, There are [00:10:00] leaps in there are gaps. The difference between chimpanzee and a human is only less than 2%, but chimpanzees don't reach Shakespeare.

They don't send people to the moon. They don't design computers or talk on Zoom. They don't have existential issues like, who am I? What do I want? What happens after death? It's too different. So there's a school of thought that, and that actually even Dr. Francis Collins, who's the head of the NIH and was responsible for the genome project, he calls it Theistic Evolution.

That somehow our being has something to do with, I don't the word the theistic because again, scientists are allergic to God, so we don't use that word, but consciousness or awareness as an organizing principle. Some people are not allergic to that We say consciousness probably guides evolution.

Nobody's actually seen evolution happening. It's all from the fossil record. And so whatever we say [00:11:00] is based on circumstantial evidence. I believe that humans now physically are probably not evolving, but they are evolving in consciousness, in creativity, in imagination, in creating artificial or augmented intelligence, in creating meta versus in creating 3D reality.

So there is something going on. Humans are evolving and it's possible as they evolve in consciousness. Biology may follow but we are all guessing. 

Hala Taha: We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsor. 

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Something that stuck out to me in your book was when you said that animals don't really consider like [00:13:00] happiness, like they're happy on their own mostly. Whereas humans, it's like we have problems being happy. Can you talk about that? 

Deepak Chopra: Yeah. We even have on our constitution the pursuit of happiness, which implies we are miserable automatically. Happiness is the opposite of sadness. You can't have one without the other. There's something else called joy which is innate. You see it in a baby, in a child full of wonder, curiosity, love, compassion, empathy, the whole works.

But as we grow up, we are bamboozled or conditioned by social constructs, and that makes us happy. We also have existential dilemmas. Like at some point we start, no matter who you are, you could be intoxicated with the biology of youth, but one day you're gonna get old. One day you're going to have infirmity.

And one day you're gonna die. So that leads humans to ask existential dilemmas. Not that they know the answers, but they [00:14:00] ask. Also, humans are victimized by memory and also by imagination. So if you kick a dog, the dog will remember. And if you meet the dog five years later, it might attack you. But unlike a human being, it won't plan for five years. How to get even. We are a species full of contradiction, paradox, ambiguity and existential conundrums, including what is called the dark night of the soul. 

Hala Taha: The dark night of the soul. What's that? 

Deepak Chopra: That is when you realize that you don't have an identity. That we all think, I am Deepak Chopra. You think we, if you say I have a body, then you have a problem. Which body are you talking about? Fertilized over zygote, embryo, baby, toddler, teenager, young adult, old person, all the way to dusty death. So what we call a body is not announced. It's a verb. You can't grasp it. Similarly, your mind, you say, I'm a mind, which one?[00:15:00] 

Teenager's mind and emotionally undeveloped mind at eight years, which qualifies you to run for president, but nothing else. If you're emotionally undeveloped, the only.

Hala Taha: Oh, now I get it. 

Deepak Chopra: You run for president. That's the only thing that's you qualified for. But the point is that human beings, there's no such thing as an identity.

It's all a false construct. So documented the soul is your lies. You don't have an identity. There's nothing permanent about you, period. Not your mind, not your emotions, not your personality, not your body. So when you go through that period of spiritual experience as part of the spiritual experience. Then you get what I call the heebie-jeebies.

You realize you don't exist as a person. So what do you exist as? That's the big, spiritual quest. Dark Knight of the Soul, Jesus Christ went to through it. St. John of the cross crossword to [00:16:00] it. Anybody who pursues the dark a spiritual quest will go through the dark night of the soul and it's like torture.

But then if you cross over, then there's what is called ecstasy because you find that you're actually God pretending to be a human being. 

Hala Taha: Very fascinating. 

Deepak Chopra: As by as Ram does. Great spiritual teacher used to say, We are all God in drag. 

Hala Taha: I love that. I would love to talk about abundance and start to understand your perspective on the inner past to abundance. Starting with the history of money, because money you say is from consciousness as well, right? No other animals are using money for tools or resources or whatever it is. So talk to us about the history of money. 

Deepak Chopra: So up until 40,000 years ago, there were about eight different kinds of humans. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, which means the wise ones. So we were [00:17:00] humbled enough to call ourselves wise. Then we gave other species names like Neanderthals and Homo floresiensis , on and on. So species meets only within its own kind. Just like you are the lion species or the feline species. You include cats and panthers and tigers and cheetahs and lions, they're all the same family, but they're different species.

Like that. There were about eight or so human species, and they all had a language for what we call mating reproduction sex, and a language for danger. That's it. This is how we survive. This is the language that all other animals have, birds and every species has language. Then one species, us, we created a language for telling stories.

We are the only species that tells stories. With that, we created stories like money, like colonial [00:18:00] states, like empires, like latitude, like longitude, like Greenwich pen time. And so on. And we created money because before that, I'll give you a haircut and you fix my shoes, and that became too inconvenient.

So we said, Okay, I'll give you the shell, and this means so much, or this stone means so much. And then that too was inconvenient. So we made it. Coins and money on paper. But money is a human story for I believe, exchange of values. Whatever values you have, you exchange them, and that's what we call money, the exchange or currency.

Currency for exchanging values. So if your values of pornography or guns. Or whatever, alcohol, tobacco, you can make money. You could just go to Las Vegas and hang out with people like that, and you'll make money. If your values are movies, then you make money hanging out with people who make movies, et cetera.

If your values [00:19:00] are held and consciousness, which are mine, then you make money with people who have the same values. That's why the book, right in the beginning I have something called a soul profile. When you fill that in, what your soul is. Your deeper value, size, it's not your bio, which is on LinkedIn, and your bio is what other people think of you.

Your sole profile tells you what your values are, and then if you create a community of people who have the same values, you can make a lot of money with those values. That's exchange. That's why we call it exchange. And so that is only about money. Now, abundance is not just money. Abundance is fulfillment at many levels.

So I wrote the book actually after I heard a lyric from Bob Marley, which said, Some people are so poor, all they have is money. And then I did research on people who have lots of money and people who have no money. And I found they're the same because they think only about money. The [00:20:00] poor can't think of anything else. And the rich becomes their identity. They confuse self worth with net worth. Yeah, I like to say they confuse their selfie with their true self. So they sacrifice their self for their selfie. They think their selfie is what they are. Wealth and abundance is much more than money. Money adds about 12% of joy and happiness to your life.

So if you win the lottery, you'll be ecstatic for six months. Then you'll plateau, and then you'll be back to your baseline, which is what you were before you won the lottery. Five years later, you might be more miserable because you're trying to hide your money in the Bahamas or becoming an oligarch or something like that.

So it becomes a source of stress. You need abundance at many levels. So security. If you have money, you don't necessarily have security and safety. Because I know a lot of people who don't feel secure, they have billions of dollars. Sensual delight. [00:21:00] You can't buy sensual delight, which means enjoyment of the five senses by money.

You have to be mindful. You don't buy self-esteem by money. You don't buy true love by money you can simulate somebody can marry you for your money and they hope you die soon so they can inherit the money. You can't buy creative expression, insight, intuition, imagination, higher consciousness. You can't lose the fear of death by buying money by money.

So abundance means all of the above, including the loss of the fear of death, which only comes through identifying with your true self or your soul, which has nothing to do with the amount of money you have. You can't buy joy with money either.

Hala Taha: We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.

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So since you brought up the soul's purpose, I know that in your book you give a couple questions that we can ask ourselves. What's a way that we can find out what our soul's purpose is? 

Deepak Chopra: It's in the book, you have to identify your peak experiences, what your purpose in life is. If you add all the money in the world and all the [00:27:00] time in the world, what would you do?

How would you start? What is your contribution to your family, to the world, to society? Who are your heroes? Heroins in history, mythology, religion, business? What are your unique talents? How do you express them? Who benefits? What do you value in a relationship? What do you give? What do you receive on and on? When you fill that out, you know who you are. Otherwise, you can check out LinkedIn for your bio. 

Hala Taha: Yes, and I'll definitely stick the link to your book in the show notes so everybody can check that out. He's got lots of quizzes and stuff and it's very interactive. It's a great book. So let's talk about abundance life models. So India and Japan are two countries that have abundance life models that are popular, yoga and Ikigai.

So I'd love for you to break down what yoga is. A lot of people think yoga is just exercise. That's really not all it's about. And Ikigai is as well. 

Deepak Chopra: Ikigai is similar to yoga. Yoga is more [00:28:00] expansive. So yoga has eight limbs. Yoga means union with your true self, which is the divine in you. So yoga has eight limbs, and these eight limbs are rules.

First two are have to do with what we call social and emotional intelligence, that they're called Yama and niyama. The third is the yoga that you go. Yoga studios for , but even there, you, it's not an exercise. Each posture is a seat of awareness. So when you do happy baby, you should feel like a happy baby.

If you do it properly or you do a cat cow, you assume the, not only the posture of a cat cow, but you get the feeling, the consciousness of that, et cetera. The yoga postures are called yoga asanas asthma means seat of awareness. Then you have breathing techniques called pratyahara. There are hundreds of them, and you can modulate your breath to bring about any effect in your [00:29:00] body, including increased energy, decrease energy shift energy in all kinds of ways.

That's called pranayam. And then there's something called pratyahara which is withdrawal of the senses. Learning to regulate the internal organs of your body, heart rate, blood pressure, immune system, endocrine system, microbiome, et cetera. And then there are the last three steps at the on meditation, the hard focus, awareness, and soma transcendence.

So these are the eight limbs of yoga and most people only learn one and that to not adequately because they just think it's exercise or stretch. I'm writing a book down on what yoga really is. Yoga, it means union. It's derived from the word yuj, it's the same as the English word yoke. So when Jesus says, My yoke is easy and my burden is light, that's yoga because he feels connected to the source of all experience.[00:30:00] 

Hala Taha: I never realized how interesting yoga was and how much there was to it. And so you really opened my eyes and I'm super excited to learn more about chakras and how to do mantras and we'll get into that in a little bit, but it really is exciting stuff and I think my listeners, you guys should really go pick up that book cuz it's really good.

So Ikigai, I think this is super important in terms of finding a career that really aligns with our purpose and makes us fulfilled. So I'd love for you to explain that as well. 

Deepak Chopra: Ikigai, same as dharma, follow your bliss. When you express your unique talents, it's not work. It's like play. When you express your unique talents, you lose track of time as well, and you have a lot of joy. Ikigai's following your bliss the same way as dharma, and then you act from that level, not from your mind, but from the level of your sore spirit.

And that's why knowing your dharma is very important. We do [00:31:00] go through that in the book. All the ways you can figure out what your purpose is, how to follow your bliss, which is what Joseph Campbell also spoke about, but he didn't say, How do you do it? So it's here in the book. 

Hala Taha: Yes. Okay. So another term that I feel like a lot of people know is karma, but they get it wrong. So what are the misconceptions of karma that people have?

Deepak Chopra: So karma simply means past experience, and not only past experience, but interpretation of past experience. It's your personal story about life. So if you close your eyes and do nothing, you'll immediately becoming aware that you're having a conversation with yourself.

Who is it that's having the conversation with yourself? It's your condition mind. And that conversation is always about good and bad things. So if you are having a conversation about past experiences that you're happy. Then your body feels good. If you are remembering [00:32:00] past experiences that you thought were unhappy, then your body feels unpleasant.

That goes on and on. You can't have good without the bad. You have to have both. By contrast, just like you can't have up without down or hot without cold. Goal of life is not to get good karma. The goal of life is to be independent of karma. And that is you go beyond. So the physical body is called the carmic body or the conceptual body because there's no such thing as a physical fixed body, as we just said.

So the conceptual karmic body is what recycles as the soul or the condition mind. If you go beyond that, there's something called the bliss body. And that bliss body is independent of all your stories, positive or negative. And that comes through meditation, through mindfulness, through inquiry, through self reflection, through awareness of the body, awareness of the breath, awareness of internal organs, [00:33:00] awareness of relationships, awareness of your social and professional interactions, awareness of the ecosystem and awareness of your relationship to the universe. That's karma. 

Hala Taha: So since this is Young and Profiting Podcast, we've got a lot of young professionals that are trying to grow their wealth and their entrepreneurs and they care about money. So let's talk about good versus bad money karma. What does that look like? 

Deepak Chopra: Right now, Putin has bad karma. And they said Karma never loses an address, so he is gonna pay for it. Some or the other bad karma simply means the choices you made were harmful and destructive to both yourself and to others. That's not good money, but it's contaminated money and karma never loses an address.

You'll, you will. It'll come back to you. And then good car money as far as is coming. What we call love in [00:34:00] action. Love without action is irrelevant. Action without love is meaningless. But when you have love in action, we call it karma yoga. And karma yoga is the best way to make money. 

Hala Taha: I love that. So we can't just sit here and have a great mindset. We also have to do something. If we wanna get money, we have to have intention. So can you talk to us about the law of attention and the law of intention and how they. 

Deepak Chopra: So our spirit or our consciousness doesn't work through rational logic. It just works through attention. Attention means where you're putting your energy. So right now please put your energy on your toes. Did you do that? 

Hala Taha: I guess I thought about my toes.

Deepak Chopra: Okay. No, not tad put your attention there. Awareness there. 

Hala Taha: Okay. 

Deepak Chopra: Feel your choice. That's called attention. Now, wiggle your choice. That's intention. So attention is putting your awareness somewhere. Intention is action.

And when you [00:35:00] combine the two, and not just those, you can do that with space. You can do that with consciousness, you can do that with your own infinite being. Then intention organizes its own fulfillment. I also call it the law of least effort. Do less and accomplish. And ultimately do nothing and accomplish everything.

So your very presence creates wealth if you know how to do it. 

Hala Taha: So for me, one of my favorite parts of your book was you had a bell diagram and it was on the human condition. And basically yoga teaches that human consciousness is pulled in different directions by the same forces, order and chaos. So the left side of the bell curve is entropy.

So that's habit, inertia, unconscious behavior. The right side is creative intelligence. Creative intelligence was something I never heard of and I think very, very useful to everyone, and I feel like my listeners are gonna love this. So can you explain entropy and creative intelligence and the spectrum that [00:36:00] everyone is on?

Deepak Chopra: Entropy is something that follows the arrow of time. It's the dissipation of heat to the, what is called end point is the heat death of absolute. Everything disappears, and that's what's gonna happen to the universe. One day it'll disappear into a black hole, and that's called the singularity. That's the end of entropy, but aging is entropy also. The opposite of entropy is creative intelligence. And it is not linear. So you have to ask yourself, how does a human body think, thoughts, play a piano, kill germs, remove toxins, and make a baby all at the same time. There's no logical way, linear way that you can do all this. Your mind cannot multitask.

It can only do one thing at a time. In fact it never multitasks. That's a myth. When you do one thing, you think you're doing many things at the same time. You're switching from one to the other very rapidly. And actually you're doing neither [00:37:00] and you're messing up your brain networks. Creative intelligence is basically doing an almost infinite number of things all at the same time and correlating them with each other.

Your body functions like that. Your cells, your stomach cells, your heart cells, your kidney cells, your brain cells all work in coordination. Without even sending messages to each other. So creative intelligence is non-local. It doesn't employ space time. It is the inherent intelligence of the universe, and it is, you have to go beyond your rational mind.

That's where meditation comes in. The seven chakras are simply seven junction points between consciousness and biology. So the lower chakras have to do with survival and safety with sexuality and sensuality, with ambition and making money and transformation. But then those are important chakras, all of them, because we need that for our survival.[00:38:00] 

But then there's love and there's belongingness, and then there's creative expression, there's intuition, there is higher consciousness, and there is transcendence. The chakra methodology in the book is very ancient practice. It comes from what is called in the west, it's called tantra, which is misunderstood because most people think tantra is sexual practices.

And that is one aspect of tantra and it's not the right name even. It's called tantra in Sanskrit and there are three practices that go with tantra. They're called tantra, yantra, and mantra. So tantra is the ritual. And in the book you have these rituals. Seven, seven rituals, each of the chakras.

And then you have mantras. Mantra means instrument of the mind. Man means mind. It's the origin of the word, English word, human man, woman. So it's the same. And we are thinking beings. An instrument of the mind that takes you beyond the mind. [00:39:00] Yantra is a visual intention. You visualize what you want. When you combine mantra, yantra and tantra, then you manifest. It's not the law of attraction, which is all mental, in my view. Silly. 

Hala Taha: So chakras is super interesting to me. Talk to us about what chakras are exactly. And there's seven of them. So maybe you can kinda walk us through what they are.

Deepak Chopra: Yeah, I did. Yeah, Just while ago I did. Anyway, chakra across a junction points between the spirit and the body mind.

So that word chakra means wheel and the wheel of awareness. And so they are in your body along the spine, but metaphors and by putting your attention on these different places. And practicing the mantra, the yantra and tantra , you've been to manifest what is associated with the chakra first. So the first chakra is about survival and safety.[00:40:00] 

The second chakra is sexuality and sensuality. The third chakra is ambition and success. The fourth is love and belongingness. The fifth is creative expression. The sixth is intuition and knowingness, and the seventh is going beyond all of them. Loss of the fear of death, transcendence, and finding who you really are. So when all these chakras are aligned, then you basically are fulfilled, which means you have abundance at all levels, not just one. I love that. 

Hala Taha: Awesome. As we start to wrap up this interview Deepak, thank you so much for your time. We always ask our guests the same couple of questions at the end, and then we do some fun stuff at the end of the year.

So what is one actionable thing my Young and Profiteers can do today to be more profiting tomorrow? One actionable thing they can do. 

Deepak Chopra: Ask yourself, what would I do if I all the money and all the [00:41:00] time in the world? And then who would benefit and then go for it.

Hala Taha: I love that. And what is your secret to profiting in life?

Deepak Chopra: Don't worry about the profit, worry about how you can help other people. The fastest way to be successful is to make other people successful. 

Hala Taha: I love that. Amazing. And then my last question to you as my father was also an immigrant who became a doctor and was successful, not as successful as you, but you really lived the American dream, and I would love for you to give some advice to some of our immigrant listeners about how they can succeed as an immigrant being different than other people, and just some insight given all of your success as an immigrant. 

Deepak Chopra: Immigrant means you bring a unique culture to this country and actually the best way to be successful. Is to have maximum diversity. Work with people who bring maximum diversity to your team, especially if you're an entrepreneur.

[00:42:00] Maximum diversity of race, of gender, of nationality, of education, then shared vision. Have the same vision together and then support each other emotionally and and spiritually like a good soccer team. And then you'll be successful. If you're only thinking about yourself, you can't be successful. Hard work driving ambition, exacting plans will make you successful.

By the time you are, you probably have some kind of disease and stress and you know you'll be miserable. So do it the right way. 

Hala Taha: And where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do? 

Deepak Chopra: deepakchopra.com. And we have a very wonderful site called NeverAlone.love. It helps young teens who are contemplating suicide, which is the second most common cause of death in this country.

And so we are creating an ecosystem to help teens not only go beyond depression, [00:43:00] but experience joy. So deepakchopra.com and neveralone.love. 

Hala Taha: Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. 

Deepak Chopra: Thank you, Hala. 

Hala Taha: Wow, what an amazing episode. Whenever I listen to Deepak or read one of his books, I'm always reminded about the uniqueness of the human experience and how important it is for us as individuals and as a collective to gain deeper understanding and awareness of consciousness and spirit, especially if we wanna live fulfilling, purposeful, and abundant lives.

It was so incredible to have somebody like Deepak on this podcast. He's literally a living legend, and I'm so honored that I had the opportunity to sit down with him and catch up with him for an entire hour. So at the core of this episode, it's all about abundance and Deepak shared some great actionable advice, and I wanted to call out a couple takeaways before we call it a night.

The first is to create a community of people who share similar values. This reminds me of the saying, you're the [00:44:00] average of the five people you spend the most time with. We've all heard this saying, but I wanna remind you that as frequently as you can, put yourself in proximity with the people that you look up to, the people who are doing what you wanna be doing, or have the lifestyle that you wanna eventually achieve.

When you do this, you're not only building relationships and connections, you're also starting to focus your energy and gain traction with your. And this brings me right into the second takeaway, the law of attention and the law of intention. The law of attention is that energy flows to where we are focused.

And the law of intention is what puts this into motion. Intention is the trigger for action. So intention can look like a lot of different things from journaling and mantras to being actively involved in conversations with that community of people that you've surrounded yourself with. Focus your attention on what you want and set your intention to achieve it, and you can find abundance in any aspect of your life.

And lastly, remember that abundance doesn't only [00:45:00] refer to money. It includes relationships, experiences, family, friends, physical and mental health and beyond. So to achieve abundance, we've gotta find out what our souls purposes. Ask yourself, what would you do if you had all the money and time in the world? Who would you serve?

How would you contribute? And once you have that answer, get straight to work. And YAP fam when you do start achieving abundance in all aspects of your life, including financial, don't forget about that good money karma. Use your wealth for good and use it from a place of love. Remember, as Deepak said, Karma never forgets an address.

I loved that line. So let's keep the conversation. You guys can find me on LinkedIn by searching for me, or you can find me on Instagram and Twitter at YAP with Hala. And if you love this conversation with Deepak Chopra, please drop us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks so much to my YAP team, and thanks for listening to another incredible episode of Young and Profiting Podcast.

I'll see you next time. And this is your host, Hala [00:46:00] Taha, signing off.