Alternative medicine and wellness figure Deepak Chopra visited Midway on Friday afternoon to speak at the groundbreaking of Ameyalli, a resort with a focus on Chopra’s seven pillars of wellness — emotional regulation, sleep, mindfulness, movement, relationships, nutrition and laughter.
Chopra spoke outside the realm of traditional medicine with claims about gene editing, how he thinks wellness practices someday may prevent most diseases like cancer, how his organization used artificial intelligence in the COVID-19 pandemic to find that everyone who got sick had severe anxiety or depression and what his organization hopes to accomplish in healing and preventing chronic diseases.
“Right now, I think the major pandemic in the world is not COVID-19,” he said. “The major pandemic is depression and anxiety and inflammation, and they go together.”
He invited the audience to reflect on their physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being.
“Most people die of disease,” he said. “They don’t die a peaceful death in meditation, which is how it should be.”
Midway Mayor Celeste Johnson was excited to talk about the city’s agreement with resort developer Charles Heath and the benefits the facility can have for the community.
Heath has said the completed resort will employ hot springs in the area, including a pair designated for the public to use for free.
Friday afternoon was an emotional moment for him as he spoke to the crowd standing between two of the project’s completed two residencies. He said he’s worked on the project for four and a half years with his wife, and he referred to it as their legacy, a “labor of love.”
“I’ve been in real estate development for 47 years and really wanted to end this with a project that not only pleased people but helped people,” Heath said. “We hope you like it when it’s all said and done and built. … Ameyalli is a perfect union of sight, water and well-being. It really has it all. We have such a natural beauty here.”
When first getting approval to build Ameyalli on the site, Heath said he, the public and the city of Midway all benefited through his commitment to preserving open space while also pursuing a development he was passionate about.
He said uniformly beneficial agreements aren’t always the case when developers and cities try to work together.
“Usually I’m running out of town because someone’s not happy,” he said. “It’s a project where everybody won.”
Johnson also grew emotional about the project as she addressed the crowd.
“Developers are a unique breed, and we’ve had a couple of unique breeds in Midway who wanted to give back,” she said. “It became very obvious in my very first meeting with Chuck that he was one of those, so I was just honored really to be able to be a part of something that was going to benefit my community.”
She said she became mayor to help safeguard Midway’s rural character even after the small town grew popular, and so far she said the municipality has managed to save 400 acres in conservation easements, 50 of those on the Ameyalli site.
Poonacha Machaiah, the CEO of the Chopra Foundation, also spoke.
“It takes a village to bring up a child, and the child is in this community,” he said. “What you’re going to see over the next decades as we work together, it’s going to be the center of excellence.”