Dr. Mehta is an Indian holistic health, well-being, wellness, and fitness guru. He is a TV and radio presenter and a columnist in various publications and websites. Mickey has written a number of books, including The Shoonyam Quotient, Lose Weight, Gain Shape, and Resurrect Your Being.

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DR. MICKEY MEHTA

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 In February 2020, MICKEY MEHTA shared his
 thoughts with MAMATA VENKAT at Kanha
 Shanti Vanam, the Heartfulness headquarters near Hyderabad, India, just before
 the pandemic hit. Mickey is known as India’s premier fitness guru, holistic
 health guru and corporate life coach. He has worked with the government, the
 army, the navy, the air force, and the Mumbai police. He has served many
 A-listers on their fitness journeys and is now associated with the Fit India
 Movement, partnering with the Government of India. He also does his regular
 rounds of workshops and consultations for the international corporate world.
 What keeps him motivated? Commitment to growth, introspection, and
 spirituality.
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 Q: Dr. Mehta, tell me a little bit more about your life and the steps that
 have brought you to where you are now.


 MM: I think the culmination of my entire
 fifty-eight years, sitting with you, giving this interview, has been like a
 flash – the entire thing. This is my journey from Harlem to Harvard. The
 journey, like a roller coaster, has been full of fun, joy, anxiety, pain –
 everything. It has been a mixed bag of ups and downs, upheavals, states of
 joy, moments of happiness, bliss, and, trust me, every bit of it has been fun
 in hindsight for the simple reason that we always grow out of it. For the
 simple reason that you get polished like a diamond. It is like what coal goes
 through. Steel has to be tempered, also, and goes through so much heat. And
 it’s not easy being coal, either. You need to be dug out. And there are
 processes before the coal becomes ready to use.


 Q: Everything worked out the way it was supposed to.


 MM:&nbsp;Yes. And who cares if it didn’t,
 as long as it happened.


 Q: My friends and I often talk about how things aren’t right or wrong, they
 just are.


 MM:&nbsp;They just are, because right and
 wrong becomes our perspective. Each perspective is so different. When the
 angle changes, the view changes completely. Like stupid people, we keep
 struggling to prove our point of view. And this struggle strains us, gives us
 pain, gives us stress. And the answer to that is Heartfulness.


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 Q: Was there an event in your life that, in the moment, felt “wrong,” but
 ended up being “right,” the best thing that could have possibly happened to
 you?


 MM:&nbsp;As we said, there are no right
 and wrong moments. Nevertheless, if I were to choose some moments in life: I
 was supposed to be a car mechanic, a steward, and a security guy. Instead, I
 chose to get into fitness, martial arts, nutrition, Yoga, body building,
 swimming, meditation – deep into meditation and spirituality – in the last few
 decades. Now I am championing the cause of age reversal, challenging ailments,
 and bringing about success stories with terminally-ill people, adding lots of
 life force into them with the laws of nature.


 This has been a thirty-eight-year journey. I’m all of fifty eight. I still
 believe that I started just yesterday. And it is fun. It is exciting every
 day.


 Q: What initially led you to fitness?


 MM:&nbsp;Emulating my cousins doing
 exercise. Going home and working out. Seeing them do martial arts. Emulating
 them quietly in a corner. Sweating it out; a pool of sweat in the room. And I
 used to carry a lot of water to drink, and my mom and sister used to think
 that I was taking that water and throwing it on the floor to show how much I
 had sweated. But that wasn’t the case. I literally sweated.


 I have seriously given my blood, bone marrow, and sweat to this. And I think
 it ain’t enough yet. There’s lots more to come. We haven’t yet started.


 Q: Do you think that getting into fitness early on in your life taught you
 a work ethic, diligence, and perseverance in every other arena in your
 life?


 MM:&nbsp;Perseverance. Diligence. Sense of
 commitment. Sense of responsibility. I think fitness, health, wellness, and
 well-being gives you perfect discipline. It puts you on the path of evolution.
 So we have all the Ashtangas of Yoga –
 Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana, Samadhi
 – as opposed to the forces of entropy, which kill you.


 So time, matter, space, life, motion, mass, causation and effect, gravity.
 Right from the point of time that you were a speck of life on the rim of a
 volcano, a few million years back, to the point of becoming a superconscious
 human being.


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When animals stood upright, as chimpanzees, the forces of life went upwards to
the brain, and the brain opened up.


 So humans became sensitive, humans became poets, humans became writers. Humans
 invented the wheel, invented fire. Humans knew what love is. And they settled
 from being nomads. They became sensitive. They refined. They evolved. And from
 cannibals, they became very refined persons. So they grew spiritually. A human
 became a Krishna. A human became a Buddha. A human became a Mohammad. A human
 became a Christ. Humans on the ladder of evolution have the potential to rise
 above gods and fall below animals. Humans can choose to go upward or downward,
 but the ladder is the same.


 And of course, humans became so many Devis: Saraswati Devi, Durga Devi,
 Lakshmi Devi, countless Devis. And I certainly endorse the importance of the
 feminine within spirituality. The valley who knows how to receive. The valley
 who knows how to surrender. The valley who can seduce with absolute subtlety,
 no aggression and no violence. The valley which is biologically stronger,
 emotionally, mentally stronger, psychically stronger – who knows how to give,
 knows how to forgive, knows how to bless, knows how to create, and certainly
 knows how to destroy.


 Q: It sounds like spirituality is a large part of who you are.


 MM:&nbsp;Yes. Philosophy and spirituality
 have been the main state of my being, having understood Patanjali’s Yoga
 Sutras, having understood Vairagaya, having understood
 Santara, which are about the laws of attachment and letting go in
 life, surrendering to life – icchamrityu, iccha jivan, iccha siddhi –
 and now learning more about the Seven Sins of pride, anger, lust, envy,
 gluttony, avarice and sloth. We succumb to them.


 How do we evolve out of that? After almost four decades of meditation, I
 understand that Heartfulness is a very good discipline of meditation, which
 makes a lot of sense.


 Q: How has the Heartfulness practice positively impacted your life?


 MM:&nbsp;It has brought me one good
 indicator in life: When we carry a lot of grudges, a lot of resentments in our
 heart, we can clean them and replace them with love and compassion. Remove the
 junk, empty the junk, and fill yourself up with love and compassion. Let go,
 let go, let go, breathe out, breathe out, breathe out. Settle, settle, settle.
 Get set like yogurt. Just settle, settle, settle. Yogurt karma.


 And you keep evolving. As you settle deep down inside, as you stay rooted, you
 start fruiting, as well.


 Q: If you could take a 30,000-foot view of your life, and you could take
 one lesson that you could share with any young adults who are trying to
 figure out what they want to do with the rest of their life, what would you
 tell them?


 MM:&nbsp;The only purpose of this life is
 to evolve, and once you evolve you realize the purpose of life. And try to
 understand that when nature reached its highest creativity, when God reached
 highest creativity, human beings were born. And when human beings reach their
 highest creativity, God is again born.


 So don’t be complacent with life. You are God in seed form. Start nurturing
 that seed. Wait for your blossoming. Wait for your fruiting. Become fragrant,
 Become sweet. Get rooted, get fruited.


 My message to people is this: The excellence of fitness, health, wellness and
 well-being is the ladder of evolution. Get energized. Get maximized. Get
 optimized. Get supersized. Get revolutionized. Get eternalized. Get
 internalized. Get hypnotized. Get mesmerized. Get regularized. Get
 revitalized. Get specialized. Get initialized.


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 Interviewed by MAMATA VENKAT Illustrations by GAYATRI PACHPANDE
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