Co- Founder, CEO and Medical Director of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing and author of The Ten Commitments

WTB – How did you come up with the idea about commitment as a book subject?

SIMON –There were three threads that got woven together. The first came from family experience. I have two girls ages four and eight. Like every parent, we are constantly trying to figure out ways to get them to do what we believe is good for them - for example, getting to bed early to get enough rest. And the dynamics go something like this… “Sarah, get ready for bed.” And when she doesn’t get ready for bed it progresses to “Sarah, can you please get ready for bed now.” And it keeps escalating until you start to go into commandment mode which is basically something like, “If you don’t get ready for bed right now…” where there’s always an implied threat. And I realized that the more we escalated in terms of demand or commandment, the less likely they were to succumb.

Because what happens when you get into that commandment mindset, is that it naturally generates resistance because it lowers our self-esteem. So as I was watching this process play out, I began looking for creative ways to encourage them to take more responsibility for their own choices and do what was good for them. So I changed the dynamics to something like “Remember last night you didn’t get to bed early, and how tired you were in the morning? And remember you’ve got things I want to do…” you know, appealing to the higher self rather than treating children as secondary or second-class beings.

And then I also realized that in a lot of ways, the way that I learned about God was sort of as a projection of my parents. And that if your parents say, “If you don’t clean your room, you don’t get to go play outside” it really translates into a model for “If you don’t do this, God is going to punish you.” And I realized that model is part of the reason I, and so many of my colleagues didn’t find deep nourishment in our Western spiritual tradition. It was all about command under threat of punishment.

And, of course, this was why so many of them, and certainly I, spent the last three plus decades exploring Eastern philosophy.

Another element came from my practice at the Chopra Center. I see patients every day, who come to me with a sense of, “I want to change something in my life.” It could be something on a health level, it could be something on an emotional level, it could be a relationship. It could be that they want to change their point of view so they are not harboring resentment, dread, or whatever. So then the question arose, how am I going to translate that intention or desire into a way of living my life?  Next > 1 2 3 4 5