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Book Review of Perfect Health : The Complete Mind/Body Guide

Perfect Health : The Complete Mind/Body Guide
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From the front cover: "Deepak Chopra's groundbreaking best-seller, Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine, showed how health and sickness in the human body are controlled by awareness at the level of quantum physics, where matter and energy are interchangeable, where mind and body are one. Now Dr. Chopra has written the first practical guide to harnessing that healing power of the mind, a book based on the principles of Ayurveda ("the knowledge of life span" in Sanskrit), a 5,000 year old system of mind/body medicine that has recently been restored as Maharishi Ayurveda.

Although we perceive our bodies as solid, in fact they are more like rivers, constantly changing. We acquire new stomach linings every five days. Our skin is new every five weeks. Every year, fully 98% of the total number of atoms in our bodies is replaced. We appear the same, yet we are like a building whose bricks are continually being replaced, one by one.

Ayurvedic medicine gives us the tools to intervene at the level where we are being created new each day. The guiding principle of Ayurveda is that the mind exerts the deepest influence on the body, and that freedom from sickness depends upon contacting our own awareness, bringing it into balance, and then extending that balance to the body. This state of being, more than any kind of physical immunity, creates a higher state of health.

Perfect Health provides a complete step-by-step program of mind/body medicine tailored to the individual's needs. A quiz identifies the reader's body type: thin, restless Vata; enterprising, efficient Pitta; tranquil, steady Kapha; or any combination of these three. This body type becomes the basis for a specific Ayurvedic program of diet (which varies from season to season), stress reduction, neuromuscular integration, exercises, and daily routines. The result is a total plan for reestablishing the body's essential balance with nature, for strengthening the mind/body connection, for using the power of quantum healing to transcend the ordinary limitations of disease and aging -- in short, for achieving Perfect Health.