Gotham Chopra Tells Mommyish Why He Is Teaching His 5-Year-Old To Meditate

Gotham Chopra is teaching his 5-year-old to meditate in response to our fast-paced Internet-centric culture. It’s quite a feat in the age of rampant toddler iPad usage, but the father of one tells Mommyish how he keeps his TV off and the dinner conversation going. Such practices of stillness and witnessing are further advocated in the Chopra family’s newest endeavor, the Chopra Well Channel on YouTube with father Deepak Chopra, providing spiritual transformation programming from Monday to Sunday. Gotham himself hosts “Holy Facts,” a show about religion, every Wednesday.

Have you employed any of the Chopra Well Channel practices in your home as a father?

Yes. Parenting is kind of a never ending experiment and as soon as you think you’ve mastered any sort of technique, your child challenges it and changes it. I try giving my son structure but also at the same time empowering him and enabling him to dream and to be creative and to think and realize that there’s no right way necessarily. I know from my childhood that I learned how to meditate. I was taught how to meditate when I was five years old. And my son is just getting to that age right now, but at this point for a 5-year old boy it’s like “can you stay quiet, literally, and still for two minutes at a time?” We play games to time it. It’s almost like creating mindfulness for him more than any traditional sort of meditation. More than anything it’s teaching him to be quiet and to witness. And that not every waking moment you have to be doing something. My dad always used to tell us, we’re human beings not human doings, but we tend to forget that.

There’s so much out there now that keeps children perpetually “doing” for the sake of their parents. With endless iPad apps and things of that sort. What’s your opinion on that as a parent who is resisting “human doing” ?

The nice thing about having more than one child, especially on the weekends, is that they occupy each other and play together. But when you just have one, there’s this challenge because they constantly want to be or need to be engaged. So that’s where iPad apps and television and all of that becomes a crutch. We try our best to moderate that, because I do think that it’s just about over exposure to  information. And I’m not one of those parents who really worries about “Oh, what are the images he’s seeing?” My son is five years old so he hasn’t seen Star Wars or Spiderman. And yet he knows what they are. He’s never sat down and watched Star Wars, but it’s just the cultural immersion into those things. He knows more about Spiderman just by watching commercials and seeing it on his own pajamas. It’s amazing.

So how do you and your wife attempt to moderate that exposure? You mentioned meditation, but what else do you practice in the home?

There’s a little restriction on technology. But more than anything we talk to him a lot. There’s a lot of communication in my house whether it’s problem solving or if it’s just about what he does during the day and who his friends are and what are the activities being prioritized. My son speaks English and Spanish (because his nanny’s from Guatemala). His mother is Chinese so he also speaks Mandarin, and I’m trying to teach him some Hindi as well. We encourage him to be very articulate with what he’s thinking and feeling and we encourage that during meals.

You mentioned earlier that you’re not concerned with certain images affecting him. Does that include violent imagery?

When I was growing up there was always so much sensitivity to violence or rap music. I would say that I’m not overly concerned with things like that. On the other hand my son hasn’t been exposed to that and I think that’s in part due to my lack of interest. I’ve never been someone who’s been interested in the first-person shooter games, explosions, or that type of music. I’m just not into that stuff and I think ultimately that’s where kids follow your behavior in terms of what you tell them to do. I think that’s why in part he doesn’t do those things because we don’t do them. We’re sort of conscious about that. My wife and I never tell him to “be careful” which you hear from parents over and over. We remind him to try and “be mindful,” just to be conscious of what he’s doing. I don’t want to be a parent who nurtures fear in my child. I think like a lot of first-time parents, we’re feeling it out as we go along. My wife reads a lot of books and she researches a lot of different techniques, which I think is important to just know what’s out there.

Modern parenting is such a culture of fear now. I think it was even going back a decade but now it’s at a constant eleven volume. How do you navigate that as a father?

I want to raise my child to be fearless and to be the type who’s curious about the world. I think it comes more from our own behavior. We travel a lot, but we live in Los Angeles. We live in a really nice part of LA and it’s certainly pretty socioeconomically homogenous. But on the other hand it’s one of the most culturally diverse places on the planet so we’re the type who really try and put the effort forward so that he’s exposed to that.  We’re lucky to be able to travel too. We go to India at least twice a year with him because his great grandparents are from there and two of them are still alive. You have to see the world to be able to manage the world. That being said, we’re pretty traditional in the sense of like immunizations and everything. I immunized my son. We go to places like India and Mexico regularly and I believe it’s important to not over immunize, but we give him the basics.

In The Wall Street Journal recently, you said that you think the wellness lifestyle is going mainstream. I see that a lot even from the parenting perspective. There’s so much out there now to address the stress levels of parents and the emotional needs of parenting. Would you agree that the mainstream wellness lifestyle narrative is becoming more inclusive of the parenting experience?

Sure. My wife is a physician so you know it’s a dangerous thing to her trade. Every time I see my son has a runny nose I check online to see what he has. If you go deep enough everything leads to death, which is the big joke. Like, you start with a runny nose but if you poke far enough down the rabbit hole, it ends in a bad place. It’s the same thing with parenting. It’s like every time you have a question about “oh, how should I react to this phase my child is going through?” and without knowing it you end up in a place where there’s s0me study. As a parent, I try not to get too stressed about that. My dad always used to teach us that parenting is the number one most spiritual thing.

Watch Gotham Chopra’s first episode of “Holy Facts” on extreme devotion.

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(photo: Todd MacMillan)