This session is on natural wonders and the bigger conference is on the pursuit of happiness. I want to try to combine them all, because to me, healing is really the ultimate natural wonder. Your body has a remarkable capacity to begin healing itself, and much more quickly than people had once realized, if you simply stop doing what's causing the problem. And so, really, so much of what we do in medicine and life in general is focused on mopping up the floor without also turning off the faucet.

I love doing this work, because it really gives many people new hope and new choices that they didn't have before, and it allows us to talk about things that - not just diet, but that happiness is not - we're talking about the pursuit of happiness, but when you really look at all the spiritual traditions, what Aldous Huxley called the "perennial wisdom," when you get past the named and forms and rituals that really divide people, it's really about - our nature is to be happy; our nature is to be peaceful, our nature is to be healthy. And so it's not something - happiness is not something you get, health is generally not something that you get. But rather all of these different practices - you know, the ancient swamis and rabbis and priests and monks and nuns didn't develop these techniques to just manage stress or lower your blood pressure, unclog your arteries, even though it can do all those things. They're powerful tools for transformation, for quieting down our mind and bodies to allow us to experience what it feels like to be happy, to be peaceful, to be joyful and to realize that it's not something that you pursue and get, but rather it's something that you have already until you disturb it.

I studied yoga for many years with a teacher named Swami Satchidananda and people would say, what are you, a Hindu? He'd say, no, I'm an undo. And it's really about identifying what's causing us to disturb our innate health and happiness, and then to allow that natural healing to occur. To me, that's the real natural wonder.

So, within that context, that larger context, we can talk about diet, stress management, which are really these spiritual practices, moderate exercise, smoking cessation, support groups and community - which I'll talk more about - and some vitamins and supplements. And it's not a diet. You know, when most people think about the diet I recommend, they think it's a really strict diet. For reversing disease, that's what it takes, but if you're just trying to be healthy, you have a spectrum of choices. And to the degree that you can move in a healthy direction, you're going to live longer, you're going to feel better, you're going to lose weight and so on. And in our studies, what we've been able to do is to use very expensive, high-tech, state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost, and - in many ways - ancient interventions, can be.

We first began by looking at heart disease, and when I began doing this work 26 or 27 years ago, it was thought that once you have heart disease it can only get worse. And what we found was that instead of getting worse and worse, in many cases it could get better and better, and much more quickly than people had once realized.

This is a representative patient who at the time was 73 - totally needed to have a bypass, decided to do this instead; we used quantitative arterioography showing the narrowing, This is one of the arteries that feeds the heart, one of the main arteries, and you can see the narrowing here. A year later, it's not as clogged