Mallika Chopra: Just Breathe
Mallika Chopra is a mom, media entrepreneur, public speaker, and published author. Mallika was the founder of Intent and co-founder of The Chopra Well with her brother, Gotham Chopra, and father, Deepak Chopra. Her latest project is Living With Intent: My Somewhat Messy Journey to Purpose, Peace and Joy.
An Interview with Mallika Chopra: Just Breathe
Interview by Victor Fuhrman
To listen to the full interview of Mallika Chopra by Victor Fuhrman on the OMTimes Radio show Destination Unlimited, click the player below.
When my generation was growing up in the late ’50s and early ’60s, we seemed to live in simpler times. Without the distraction of social media, smartphones and video games, we spent much time engaging in physical activity, reading for school and pleasure and enjoying the neighborhoods and the world around us. Today’s kids face different challenges. Bombarded with digital communication, upsetting messages from media, social pressure, and even bullying, children are facing stress and feeling overwhelmed. What can parents do to help their children learn to de-stress, relax and turn their minds to positivity?
Mallika Chopra, says the answer is to meditate and breathe. A wellness expert and daughter of Deepak Chopra, Mallika learned to meditate when she was nine years old. Her two daughters, ages 15 and 12, also practice meditation, drawing on their experiences and her own she wrote Just Breathe – Meditation, Mindfulness, Movement and More, a fun and easy guide to meditation for kids. Mallika is the author of Living with Intent, 100 Promises to My Baby, and 100 Questions from My Child. She’s a busy Mom, a sought-after speaker and the founder of www.intent.com She lives in Santa Monica, California, and she joins me to discuss her beautifully illustrated and easy to follow book for children ages eight to 12, Just Breathe – Meditation, Mindfulness, Movement, and More.
VICTOR FUHRMAN: Mallika, please share what was it like growing up as the daughter of the world-renowned Physician and New Thought Leader?
MALLIKA CHOPRA: You know, that’s usually the first question I get, my brother as well. For us, our father was always our father. We never really intellectualized the thought too much about what was happening as we were kids. My memories of my father are really of my father as the stressed-out Doctor who was working 24/7, who drank to go to sleep, who smoked incessantly and was unhappy.
My parents had come here as young immigrants, and they arrived here with $8 in their pocket, had me soon after they got here and my dad was just you know ambitious and worked hard, moonlit as a Doctor almost every single night, so he wasn’t around. It was only around the time that I was nine, and his life changed that our family’s life changed. Then my dad’s popularity took decades to happen, so for us, as kids, I think we always feel that we were a very normal family. As my dad became more popular, his books became more popular, what we were able to see as many people who came to my father who was going through struggles in life – whether it was being diagnosed with disease, or relationships, changes or depression – so we really saw the power that he brought to some people’s lives for transformation.
VICTOR FUHRMAN: Now was it your father who taught you to meditate at age nine?
MALLIKA CHOPRA: My father was going through his mid-life crisis, I think, and was walking in Cambridge and saw a Transcendental Meditation Center, and he had always been intrigued by Philosophy and concepts, but not practiced in anything. So, he went into the TM Center and had a life-transforming experience where immediately he stopped smoking and drinking and came home that day and took my mom to the TM Center to learn. The next day my brother and I learned Transcendental Meditation from teachers there, and then he had his brother learn and my mom’s sister learned, and the entire Indian community learned because it was such a dramatic shift for him. So, I was nine.
VICTOR FUHRMAN: What was that experience like for you, the initial introduction to meditation?
MALLIKA CHOPRA: So, I think as kids we didn’t think about it that much again, but I think what happened as kids we saw the transformation that happened in my parents. My father suddenly changed a lot of the habits that kind of created stress and tension and in-fighting in our house. Transformed, my parents seemed happier. My dad was taking more of an interest in me and my brother, so I think the experience wasn’t so much about what I was experiencing in my meditation practices as a nine-year-old, but it was really about the transformation in our family. That’s why I feel so excited about the work that I get to do now because I’ve seen how it affected and changed my own family.
VICTOR FUHRMAN: How did starting your meditation practice at a young age shape your life?
MALLIKA CHOPRA: I credit meditation with the shift in my family’s happiness and family’s transformation. I learned when I was young, so I feel like I was gifted tools by my parents that helped me anchor myself, know myself, pause, shift from flight or fight reactions to more responsive reactions, and situations. I feel meditation gave me much security because I felt that I could control and moderate my reactions to things in better ways. The only thing I would say is that at the same time I’m almost 50 now, so I’ve been meditating for almost 40 years. I’m an irregular meditater, so I like to share that with people as well that each one of us finds our journey and that’s been my story as well.
VICTOR FUHRMAN: How did that life experience shape your own experience with your beloved daughters Tara and Leila?
MALLIKA CHOPRA: I talk about this in my book Living with Intent. I’ve had a messy journey, but the subtitle of that book is My Somewhat Messy Journey to Purpose, Peace, and Joy. What I’ve learned over several decades now that often we find our way, we feel that we’re healthy, we feel that we’re connected, we feel that our work is of purpose. Suddenly we do our thing and realize that “gosh, we are not happy”, I’m not healthy, I think, for me, actually I’ve had several of those moments, but a very powerful moment was in becoming a mother.
That was a day that it suddenly dawned on me that I was becoming a mother, bringing an innocent soul into a planet that had a lot of suffering and confusion and violence, and I had to think about my intentions, and that’s something that has been a thread throughout my life. Who am I, what do I want and how can I serve? So, for me, in becoming a mother, I think I found my unique voice of how I could continue on this journey as a mother, how I could conserve myself, my children, and then slowly share those ideas with other people as well.
VICTOR FUHRMAN: So, at that point, a point of re-evaluation, is that something that you would recommend to everyone?
MALLIKA CHOPRA: I do. When we were young kids, my brother and I were the guinea pigs for all of my father’s experiments, but he taught us also about the power of intention and recognizing that intentions represent our deepest desires. He would have us repeat a phrase that does like this: I am responsible for what I see, I choose the feelings I experience, and set the goals I will achieve. Everything that seems to happen to me, I ask for and receive as I have asked. He would ask us as kids “What did you ask for?” and we would say, “Oh, tickets to the Celtics, a trip to Hawaii, a new Atari game”, and he’d listen and say “OK, we can work on that, but what about asking for love, connection, inspiration, a sense of purpose?” We were taught at a young age to ask for those qualities in our lives. So that is something that has been this thread for me throughout, and this idea of real self-reflection. We may get into this later, but I know meditation and mindfulness are very trendy now. I’ve lived in this world, and you also have for decades now, and it’s fascinating to see how popularized it’s become, and that’s nice, but I like to remind people that this is not just about stress management. These are wisdom traditions that are about self-reflection, and I never want to lose that.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Mallika Chopra
