Deepak Chopra’s Self-Care Checklist

(What I learned from week one of Chopra’s “Healing the Whole Self” program)

January’s happiness binge is underway: Deepak Chopra’s free workshop started this week! (I’m also taking UC Berkeley’s Science of Happiness course, which also just started. Plus Oprah is doing a 10-week interview series with Eckhart Tolle. Holy happiness overload!)

Deepak (may I call him Deepak?) opened “Healing the Whole Self” workshop by talking about the inextricable connection between the mind and body and how disruptions in either can cause disease. He says all of our systems are in constant movement, cells are endlessly shedding and renewing, and most of what goes on inside our bodies and in our lives is determined not by genetics, but by our own individual actions.

Disease, he says, is a lack of ease or harmony in the body, which he calls the “bodymind.”

“Through our daily lifestyle choices, we have the power to prevent and heal many of the imbalances that lead to disease,” he says.

Deepak’s self-care checklist is all about generating the body’s natural healing by making nurturing daily choices that support our physical and emotional health.

His checklist is pretty sweeping (he’s got meditate, I wrote “moisturize”). Here it is:

Meditate: Slow down and breathe.

Sleep: Seven to nine hours nightly.

Exercise: Get a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate exercise (like walking) or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise (like jogging) a week.

Eat a colorful, plant-based diet: Yep. No-brainer.

Eat mindfully: Only eat when hungry, stop when you’re about 80 percent full.

The workshop also included a guided mediation, which my restless ass managed to sit all the way through to the end.

Deepak gave us a mantra — Om Supra Niti Swaha (Sanskrit?) — which I kept messing up but loved the meaning of: “The light of my own being guides my life forward.”