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Where do you get your energy? Until you know the answer, your sources of energy will be limited. Food can only supply so many calories, and quite often, if those calories come from fat or sugar, there is actually a falling off or dulling of energy. If your energy comes from being with people, you won't be energized when you are alone. If your energy comes from working, it will last much longer and be more renewable but eventually bring fatigue.
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Dear Readers and Friends,

In our quest to grow and evolve, we all run into obstacles. We meet resistance. Change proves stubborn and at times impossible. Anything that I can do to overcome these obstacles is a contribution I never wish to pass up.

In my new book I address the most difficult obstacle of all: the body.

The human body can be a source of the miraculous. The very minute I write this message to you, someone in a laboratory somewhere is breaking through old concepts about the body, discovering that what was once a machine made of flesh and bones is actually a living process, a river without boundaries. Yet you and I find ourselves with bodies that wear out, age, grow sick, and disappoint our highest aspirations for freedom and creativity.

Clearly, the body needs to be reinvented. That's the main theme of my new book, Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul. I throw out every fixed belief about what the body can and cannot do. In their place, I offer five breakthrough ideas that can completely alter how you see your body and what you do with it.

Breakthrough #1 -- Your Physical Body Is an Illusion
Breakthrough #2 -- Your Real Body Is Energy
Breakthrough #3 -- Awareness Has magic
Breakthrough #4 -- You Can Improve Your Genes
Breakthrough #5 -- Time Isn't Your enemy

Each of these breakthroughs overturns an outmoded belief that turns into a physical limitation. If you think of your body as a physical object, you will cooperate with aging, because what is aging but a physical object wearing out? If you believe that time is your enemy, aging has gained another ally. If you accept that your genes are fixed, they take away your freedom to change.

What these five breakthroughs have in common is this: you can change your body through consciousness, because despite its physical appearance, your body is the product of consciousness to begin with. There is no difference between a thought and a molecule in the brain. Each intention sends signals to every cell in the body, causing the cell to change. Therefore, the most natural way to achieve change is through the power of intention.

The second half of the book's title, Resurrecting the Soul, extends the power of consciousness far beyond the physical. The soul is your spiritual body. It brings nourishment to every cell as surely as nutrients are brought by the blood. Most people believe they have a soul, but they rarely if ever feel connected to it. When you reconnect, a kind of resurrection occurs: you discover that the closer you live to your soul, the better for your body.

Health, anti-aging, a strong sense of self, centeredness, spontaneous right action, the increase of love and compassion -- these are all united at the deepest level of consciousness. Every cell is aware of the state of your soul, and vice versa. One consciousness, constantly moving and evolving, is who you really are.

This conclusion is the most important one I've arrived at after thirty years of teaching people how to unite body, mind, and soul. Union cannot be achieved one piece at a time. Even though most people attack their problems one at a time and have mixed priorities in their lives, the truth is that wholeness is wholeness. People don't feel whole because they have excluded their bodies from the spiritual journey, judging the body to be inferior, defective, ugly, and devoid of intelligence. At the other end of the scale, they have sent the soul into a never-never region above and beyond this world.

So as you reinvent your body, which means accepting it as part of your whole consciousness, the soul must also be brought back into partnership with it. Five soul breakthroughs are needed:

Breakthrough #6 -- There's an Easier Way to Live
Breakthrough #7 -- Love Awakens the Soul
Breakthrough #8 -- Be as Boundless as Your Soul
Breakthrough #9 -- The Fruit of Surrender Is Grace
Breakthrough #10 -- The Universe Evolves through You

When you absorb these ten ideas, and follow the practical exercises attached to each, you will turn the process of life in a new direction. Instead of being blocked by obstacles, areas of freedom open up where you never imagined them. I speak personally, because the seed of this book dates back to my first days in medical school. When I used a scalpel to slice beyond the barrier of the skin, I gained scientific knowledge about the body, but at the same time I sacrificed the body's mystery and holiness.

We need to have both. The reason you can reinvent the body rests upon solid new evidence about the brain, genes, and lifestyle changes. Yet those are the windows through which a much greater truth can be seen, which is this. When the flow of life encompasses mind, body, and soul, a person has found the easiest way to live. We must put out of our heads that unity is an exotic, faraway goal reached only by the spiritually gifted.

When you delve into Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul, your allegiance will shift to wholeness. You won't be fixated on your body, your mind, or your spiritual path. The three will merge, as they must in order to be whole. The reunion is the most joyous experience anyone can have, and happily for all of us, it's also the most natural.

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A new field of sociology is studying "social contagion," a deeply mysterious phenomenon that could change everything we think about our behavior. We all experience how fads and trends work. Out of the blue, everybody seems to be doing something new, whether it's texting, fleeing My Space for Twitter, or playing a new video game. Fads are contagious behavior. You catch them from other people. Yet no one knows how behavior goes viral. What makes a group of people all decide to act the same way?

This becomes a crucial medical question if you want a group to stop doing something harmful -- getting young people not to smoke, for example, or persuading a whole population to stop getting obese. The most advanced work on this question has come from two researchers at Harvard, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, whose new book, Connected, was previewed in a recent New York Times Sunday magazine article. Christakis and Fowler analyzed data from the nation's biggest heart study, which has followed three generations of citizens in Framingham, Mass. They looked into the behavior of over 5,000 people who were mapped into 51,000 social connections with family, friends, and co-workers.

Their first discovery was that when someone gains weight, starts smoking, or gets sick, close family members and friends are around 50% more likely to behave the same way. This reinforces a social-science principle that is decades old: behavior runs in groups. We have all experienced it as peer pressure, or by knowing families where everyone seems to be overweight or a smoker. The reverse is also true. If you run with a healthy crowd, you are more likely to adopt healthy behavior yourself. Not just health is involved; almost any behavior can be contagious. In a dorm at college, if you happen to room with someone with good study habits and high grades, your grades are likely to improve by association.

But the second finding from Christakis and Fowler was far more mysterious. They found that social connections can skip a link. If person A is obese and knows person B who isn't, a friend of person B is still 20% more likely to be obese, and a friend of that friend is 10% more likely. This "three degrees of connection" holds good for all kinds of behavior. A friend of a friend can make you prone to smoking, unhappiness, or loneliness. The statistics are there to prove it, even though you have never met this friend of a friend.

The findings of Christakis and Fowler suggest invisible connectors that run through a whole society. If their research olds up, think about the implications. The notion of a collective unconscious was posed almost a century ago by the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung, who also claimed that we all have a shadow side that hides in the unconscious. Did Jung hit on invisible connectors long before data came along to support him? That's really a side question to the main once: What kind of connection can exist invisibly, without people talking to each other, watching how each other behaves, or even knowing about each other's existence?

While pondering this issue, I'd like to point out that the same questions apply to the brain. When your brain is engaged in a behavior, millions of neurons "catch" the same intention and behave in synch without visible connections. Different areas of the brain light up simultaneously. We don't see one neuron teaching another the new behavior, nor do we find a hidden telephone system that transmits the new intention -- such as deciding to get out of your chair and grab a glass of orange juice -- from a starting point in one part of the brain to other locations. Instead, every neuron gets on board at the same time to carry out your intention.

These are complex issues, and I'm giving only a hint of how mysterious they are. But the new research on social contagion is exciting, because it supports the notion that there is actually one mind that coordinates not just how people catch on to fads or decide to imitate each other, not just how distant brain cells know what other brain cells are doing, but far-flung phenomena like how a baby learns to speak and how twins separated by thousands of miles suddenly know what's happening to each other. These invisible connectors are showing up in many, many areas of life. Social contagion is making news because we all like to rely on data, but the possibility that we all participate in one mind challenges religion, philosophy, and the meaning of life itself.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

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Like most people, I was encouraged and energized by President Obama's stirring speech to Congress last week. With rare candor, he told the truth about the three C's of reform: costs, coverage, and character. The last C was the most emotionally charged. Staring lawmakers and citizens in the eye, the President essentially asked, "Is America a society that squanders $900 billion on a dishonest war but refuses to spend the same amount to give its citizens affordable health care?" Because of the massive counterefforts by lobbyists and the resistance of the right wing, we're holding our breaths on the answer to that question.

But let's say the light prevails and the Democrats deliver a bill that gives insurance access to millions of previously uninsured Americans. As great as that victory would be, health care won't be reformed. Isolated voices like Andrew Weil (writing at the Huffington Post and in his book, Why Our Health Matters), and Dean Ornish (writing as the medical editor at huffingtonpost.com and in his book, The Spectrum), and former Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano are telling us why.

Here are the basic points that aren't being addressed:

1. Prevention, the key to future health, isn't being followed enough. That's why Americans are getting more obese and sedentary every year. That's why sugary drinks are now the single largest source of calories in the average diet. Alcohol and tobacco still account for 35% of all medical expenditures. Leading causes of bad health — obesity, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes — could be rolled back by sensible prevention guidelines that people simply aren't following.

2. Supply and demand for doctor care is upside down. Patients aren't demanding the bulk of the $700 billion in unnecessary tests and procedures performed every year in this country. Doctors are creating the demand to cover their backs and increase their income. Even conscientious doctors who put the patient first are caught in lockstep habits, calling for unnecessary tests because that's what doctors do in this country.

3. Without a public option, there's no real incentive for insurance companies to lower their costs. The free market isn't free when the consumer is presented with noncompetitive insurance plans that basically aim at corporate profit and when Wall Street dictates how corporations must be run in order to survive.

4. To borrow a phrase from Secretary Califano, we've become a "sick-care system" that puts all its efforts in developing newer drugs and offering more surgery once a person is ill. Doctors are not trained to keep people healthy. They are also strongly tempted to perform needless procedures that do not extend life span, such as hysterectomies, lower back surgery, heart bypass, and balloon angioplasty.

5. We are addicted to the sick-care system, and no money is being allocated in any of the reform bills in Congress to breaking this addiction. Massive public education was successful, over a long period of time, in getting people to quit smoking. Now we need the same massive public education to get them to adopt prevention. Will doctors, insurance companies, and big pharma do the job for us? Well, did big tobacco do the job of ending smoking? Without government action, the private sector will push drugs and surgery because prevention doesn't show up as profit on their bottom line.

I regret having to walk in the shadow this way. President Obama brought a good deal of light to the whole muddled issue of health-care reform. He spoke truth and balanced it with political realism. He chastised the political reactionaries who want to kill reform by using lies, fear, and misinformation. We're better off for having heard the speech. But costs won't go down and Americans won't be healthier until the five points listed above are dealt with. Right now, health-care reform has been couched in terms of economics first and morality second, with little thought to what should really come first: turning sickness into wellness.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

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