Two weeks short of the Paradise Valley Wellness Centre's one-year anniversary, a world-renowned visitor offered exclusive insight on the centre's unique treatment techniques.
Dr. Deepak Chopra, an authority in the field of mind-body healing, a bestselling author and the founder of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing, attended an intimate gathering at the local facility on Thursday (Feb. 17).
He came to congratulate centre founder and director Nirmala Raniga and offer his thoughts on alternative addictions treatment.
"Today is a very historic moment and we should all congratulate Nirmala for her persistence in making this happen," Chopra said. "I think of her as the ideal person to bring this centre here to this beautiful location and my hope is that this is the first of its kind.
"My hope is that this centre become a model for a new way of treating addiction and actually seeing addiction as a pathway to enlightenment."
The Chopra Center for Wellbeing has partnered with Paradise Valley Wellness Centre to create the Squamish addiction treatment centre. The residential centre is the first of its kind, offering a unique healing approach that combines timeless Eastern healing traditions with the most recent breakthroughs in Western medical science.
Raniga's centre is devoted to helping patients recover from all types of addictions - drug use, overeating, alcoholism, bulimia, smoking and many others.
The treatment program is based on the principles developed by the Chopra Center's co-founders Chopra and Dr. David Simon and described in their book Freedom from Addiction.
Chopra started by saying that he thought the road to addiction started as a search for something more.
"It's a search for joy, it's a search for spirit, it's a search for exaltation and somehow it goes the wrong way, but in my experience people who have problems with addiction are really the most spiritual people," he said.
"My hope is that people who have conquered this illness will become the role models for teaching us expanded states of consciousness."
Chopra said that 25 years ago when he started to speak about the connection between consicouness and biology, it was not really well accepted in the scientific circles.
"But we've come a long way since then," he said.
"Today we understand that the human body is a process, not a structure. That's one of the fatal flaws of our materialistic view that looks at the material body as a totally material structure, like a physical machine that basically you treat as a technician.
"All of us are trained to be superb technicians who know everything about this physical machine, but we are lousy healers because we neglect the human spirit."
The return to the human spirit and its desire to remain in the positive, un-addicted conscious state is what Raniga and Chopra strive to attain.
"The word healing, the word holy, the word whole - they all mean the same thing," said Chopra, adding that health is a return to the memory of holiness and the conscious state.
The centre's activities are designed to reach that state, he said.
"Here we will teach meditation, yoga, breathing exercises but also a mindful way of living," Chopra said. "To be mindful of your body, to be mindful of your breath, to be mindful of your relationships, to be mindful of your environment, to be mindful of your emotions, your mind, your spirit.
"It brings about a complete re-wiring of your nervous system."
That re-wiring is supposed to prevent relapses that are so common among addicts.
"One of the big problems in the addictions field is the whole problem of relapse," he said. "People relapse very frequently and because they have a memory of the initial joyous experience that they had when they first tried whatever it was - it's that memory that brings them back to that addictive habit."
He said the Chopra treatment method does not accept that relapse as inevitable.
"There's really a high state of relapse and traditional programs have kind of accepted that and said, 'We are helpless, we are powerless, and therefore we are addicts for the rest of our life,'" explained Chopra.
"The way this program differs is that it's not based on helplessness, it's based on the idea that we can be returned to our own spirit, to the memory of our wholeness, that we experience a quiet, peaceful, tranquil, joyous energy which is our essential state.
"When we become totally of this state inside us, then there's nothing that will influence us to go back."
Chopra also acknowledged the importance of human connections and the effect of those connections on health and spirit.
"We can connect the world very quickly through cyberspace, through social networks and you can create network of happiness," he said. "If you have a happy friend your happiness goes up by 15 per cent, but if your happy friend has a happy friend, it goes up by another 10 per cent, and it keeps going up."
He acknowledged the skepticism at this peculiar connection.
"You say, 'How can this be?' We're all connected by a single spirit coming through our nervous systems with a little different karmic software," he said, evoking laughter from the crowd.
" but it's the same spirit and when we experience that, there's a spontaneous feeling of being connected and being whole, being in love or feeling compassion, feeling kindness and wanting to help each other."
Chopra said that kind of feeling has actually had substantial healing powers.
"We're seeing now that that kind of feeling, even in social networks, actually doubles survival in patients with breast cancer, for example, or decreases the mortality from heart disease a significant amount, like 50 and 60 per cent," he said.
"No drug does that and if there was a drug that did that and you didn't use it, in the U.S. anyways, you would be sued for malpractice."
He said that in essence "love is a healing force and not a metaphor."
Chopra finished by responding to questions from the audience. He said everyone has an addiction, but it's only acknowledged when it reaches a point of crisis.
"Everybody's addicted to something - we call addicts those people who are totally not in control of the thing they so want to not get," he said.
"It's when you can't get enough of what you don't want in the first place - but to some extent we are all addicted to something or another.
He said slight addictions are the norm and change doesn't usually take place until the addiction becomes unbearable.
"When people change is when the addiction reaches a level of crisis and they feel that life has totally lost all its purpose, all its meaning and they feel that they couldn't go any further down."
The Paradise Valley centre is here to help people redefine that purpose, he said.
