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By Hanne Armstrong

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Speak Up

"To me, our mission is to expand the awareness that we're all one, that you are your neighbour and he is you," says festival founder Anne Thibeault-Berubé.

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Deepak Chopra will speak in Moncton on Nov. 9

Anne, a Nova Scotia resident, is a native of Baie Comeau QC and holds a PhD in Comparative French Literature from Bordeaux University in France. While a graduate student she presented papers at several conferences and also managed to attend sessions on spiritual wellness. These inspired her to create opportunities for people to experience and participate in exchanging ideas and gaining wisdom, not just to sit back and be lectured about them. The Autopoetic Ideas Festival was born.

This past April, Anne brought world-renowned physician, speaker, author and philosopher Deepak Chopra to Halifax, where some 1,500 people turned out to hear what he had to say. And on November 9 he comes to Moncton. 2,200 tickets are available for his evening at the Coliseum, and if advance sales are anything to go by, there may be a sell-out crowd on hand to take in his words and thoughts.

"He'll be talking about his newest book, 'Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul'," says Anne. "He'll show how our highest vision of ourselves can be turned into physical reality."

Deepak himself declares that, "You can't change the body without changing the self, and you can't change the self without bringing in the soul. It's all one process, and it begins with knowing that your body exists to mirror who you are and who you want to be."

Deepak, son of a cardiologist in New Dehli, India, took his medical training in India before moving to the US in 1968 where he did his residency in New Jersey, Massachusetts and Virginia, and passed board exams to become a doctor of internal medicine and endocrinology. In the 1980s he began his exploration of other areas, including meditation and the study of Ayurveda, a system of traditional Indian medicine. He is now one of the world's most respected authorities in the area of mind-body medicine.

"Compared with all the self-help gurus out there," says Anne, "Deepak's entry point is medical. He starts with physiology, biology, then gets to the soul which is indispensable to creating a healthy body."

Deepak's approach to life makes him a natural speaker for Anne's Autopoetic Ideas Festival. The Festival sets out to bring international speakers to the Maritimes, as well as offering local speakers a platform to bring inspiration and awareness and people together. The third annual Festival Weekend takes place this weekend in Indian Harbour, NS, and Anne is looking ahead to events for next year already.

You may be wondering about the word Autopoetic. It's drawn from the term coined in biology in the 1970s, autopoiseis, meaning a system which can create and define itself. Anne touched on this topic in her PhD thesis and transferred the term to refer to creation through inspiration when she founded the Autopoetic Ideas Festival. We are, she maintains, creators of our own reality, the way we come together and interact determines the communities we create and the world we live in.

The main event on Monday, November 9, begins at 7:30 p.m. in Exhibition Hall A at the Coliseum. From 6 to 7 p.m. VIP ticket-holders will attend a reception with Chopra. This is your chance for a quick chat and a handshake with one of the world's foremost speakers. There's also a book-signing, so if you have one of his books which you'd like to have autographed, bring it along. Tickets are available at tickets.moncton.ca or at 506-857-4100. They range in price from $129 for the best seats in the house plus the VIP reception, to $39, both prices before taxes and handling fees.

In addition to an inspirational evening, a portion of each ticket sold will be donated to the Moncton Public Library for the purchase of books. Library board member Jane Wood attended Chopra's event in Halifax earlier in the year and was so taken with his words that she urged Anne to invite him to Moncton as well. For her part, Anne sees supporting literacy through this event as being well in keeping with Festival philosophy.

"It's very exciting that Deepak is coming to Moncton," says Anne. "This is another event which shows that Moncton is becoming bigger and more cosmopolitan."