I know it may seem a bit late to be talk­ing about New Year Res­o­lu­tions,
but this is per­haps the best time to start reflect­ing on them to see how
well you’re doing.

Here I am talk­ing about my Resolutions:

How are you get­ting along with yours?

Did you man­age to lose weight? Kick a bad habit? Pick up a new skill?
Get started on achiev­ing some­thing you’ve always dreamed of?

I’d love to hear from you.

All the best in 2009,

Burt

Of all the ques­tions I’m asked on a daily basis, this one has been an ever­green favourite for as long as I can remember:

“What exactly is a visu­al­iza­tion, and how do I do it right?”

My dear friend, if you’ve ever expe­ri­enced a day­dream, you already know how to visu­al­ize. Watch this video for a full explanation:

Most peo­ple know me as a pub­lished author, a spir­i­tual guru, and of course as The Amer­i­can Monk — but not many know I’m also a licensed minister!

About a month ago my lovely grand­daugh­ter Erin gave me the chance to dust off my tux when she asked me to help her tie the knot with her fiance Shaun in San Diego.

It was sim­ply beau­ti­ful. It’s not often that a grand­fa­ther gets to offi­ci­ate his own granddaughter’s wedding!

It’s times like these that I feel truly blessed.

Hi friends. I thought it would be nice to share with you some­thing I received in my email inbox not too long ago from Ger­ald O’Donnell.

These are three things you should start doing every sin­gle day to increase your level of hap­pi­ness NOW.

These three exer­cises are intended to be done at home on a daily and ongo­ing basis. They will open up a new level of aware­ness and pre­pare you for advanced per­sonal and spir­i­tual devel­op­ment.

Exer­cise 1: A New Way of Being

This first exer­cise is a plea­sur­able and pow­er­ful life-changing tool. The effects of daily stress asso­ci­ated with mate­ri­al­is­tic obses­sion (and its by-products: anx­i­ety, iso­la­tion, frus­tra­tion, fear, anger and depres­sion) can be dis­solved by this tech­nique. It is at the same time sim­ple and very pro­found. It increases greatly the vibra­tory rate of your non-physical Higher Self. Its premise is “smile at the world and the world will smile back at you.”

As you go about your daily activ­i­ties, from the moment you get up in the morn­ing up to the the time that you go back to sleep, con­stantly imag­ine that you are smil­ing inwardly at your outer real­ity as you go about your daily activ­i­ties. Imag­ine that you are smil­ing from the deeper recesses of your mind, orig­i­nat­ing from within your heart area, and that you are pro­ject­ing that hap­pi­ness and smile out­ward through your eyes and expres­sion. No mat­ter what the cir­cum­stances are. You will find increas­ingly that your eyes will be smil­ing and so will your mouth, that will often curl up to a slight smile.

At the same time imag­ine that your heart con­stantly expresses a great inward smile filled with pure joy of being alive, no mat­ter what.

After 2 weeks or so, you will notice an incred­i­ble amount of changes, not only in the way you inter­act with the ‘out­side’ world, but also in how the ‘world’ acts and projects real­ity toward you. Your fears will begin to abate and an inner feel­ing of peace and love will emerge. Notice how peo­ple seek your pres­ence and ‘Inner Love.’

Exer­cise 2: The Witness

Set aside 5 min­utes at first (keep increas­ing by 2–3 min­utes every other day until you reach 20 min­utes) and close your eyes. Turn your atten­tion inward and, from being a ‘think­ing’ human being, start view­ing your thoughts as an inde­pen­dent observer in a detached remote man­ner, as if your thoughts were ‘things’ or a spec­ta­cle to watch. Watch the train of your thoughts and images, the suc­ces­sion of often unre­lated thoughts that appear to you. Don’t ana­lyze any­thing.

Learn to switch from the per­cep­tion of being ‘in’ your thoughts to with­draw­ing from them and becom­ing the detached totally pas­sive observer of them. Get the feel­ing for the men­tal shift that occurs when doing so. Go within the thoughts and then with­draw to a more detached level. After a while of repeat­ing this exer­cise you will notice that your thoughts become more iso­lated and that your inner mind starts tak­ing a break.

Now, here is the next part of the exer­cise. As you watch your train of thought (images or just con­cepts), pick up one par­tic­u­lar thought that you find inter­est­ing and “plunge into it” with full con­cen­tra­tion. Remain focused on that thought to the exclu­sion of oth­ers for as long as pos­si­ble. If other thoughts inter­fere, do not push them away, but watch them pass by as if they were for­eign ‘things’ in your con­scious­ness. At first you might only be able to do this for maybe 1 minute or less. Slowly increase it up to 7 minutes.

The last part of the exer­cise con­sists of blank­ing your thoughts out. This is done by decid­ing to con­cen­trate on per­cep­tu­ally dark noth­ing­ness. If a thought comes in, imag­ine throw­ing white light on it. Imag­ine that the light dis­solves that thought and that the screen then goes back to noth­ing­ness. Try to main­tain that state up to 5 min­utes. Start with 1–2 minutes.

Exer­cise 3: The Movies

This exer­cise is the “going in and out of movies” exer­cise. All you need to do is to choose a good sus­pense­ful motion pic­ture and go watch it, prefer­ably on a big screen. Try it also with hilar­i­ous comedies.

First, allow your­self to get immersed in the cap­ti­vat­ing story. As you for­get about your iden­tity and start becom­ing ‘within’ the plot of the scene, sud­denly with­draw your aware­ness from the big screen (you may for the first time want to look a bit around you in the dark in order to remem­ber ‘who you are’) and become the observer of real­ity again. Slowly recon­nect to the plot, but this time, allow your­self to remain with the aware­ness of being your­self watch­ing, as a spec­ta­tor (observer), the real­ity pro­jected in the movie. Keep this dual aware­ness for a moment and then let go and plunge within the movie action, for­get­ting your real inner self again. And then repeat the exer­cise over and over.

Keep on doing this men­tal with­drawal and then plung­ing in again, until you get to know inti­mately the feel­ing of with­draw­ing from ‘real­ity’ (aware of inner self) and div­ing back in it (aware of outer real­ity). Easy isn’t it? This sim­ple exer­cise is very powerful.

As you get the knack of it try the same sys­tem as you go about your daily life. Use the same “men­tal trick” when engaged in your daily activ­i­ties, espe­cially the very ones that cap­ti­vate you and are often asso­ci­ated with fear and stress. Soon, you will become aware at all times of being the ‘observer’ (inner self) observ­ing the observed (real­ity and outer self) and become quite detached about it, enjoy­ing your ‘movie’ in a much more relaxed and calm atmosphere.

Hope you enjoyed these exer­cises. Try them out, and let me know your feedback.

Because of the nature of my work, I’ve spent my entire life meet­ing all sorts of peo­ple. Rich, poor, happy, sad, and every­thing in between.

But even so, there’s always one kind that never fails to amaze me — the per­son who dares to live his or her dreams.

You prob­a­bly know one or two peo­ple just like this. They’re not nec­es­sar­ily wealthy (although they often are) — they’re sim­ply liv­ing their life in the EXACT way they want to, and doing the kind of things other peo­ple only talk about. Maybe that means chang­ing the world. Or own­ing a suc­cess­ful busi­ness. Or being a musi­cian. Or even some­thing sim­ple like hav­ing more time for the kids.

Dreams vary from per­son to per­son, but the same mag­i­cal thing hap­pens to any­one who lives them — they find true hap­pi­ness and sat­is­fac­tion, and begin to glow from the inside out.

My friend, best sell­ing author and moti­va­tional coach Cyn­thia Kersey (you may remem­ber her from this post) calls them ‘Unstop­pable Peo­ple’, because noth­ing can stop them from liv­ing the lives they want to live. And after decades of inter­view­ing and study­ing the secrets of these peo­ple, she’s dis­cov­ered how the rest of us can become just like them.

She calls her dis­cov­ery the Unstop­pable Effect, and it’s one of the most sim­ple yet highly effec­tive suc­cess prin­ci­ples I’ve ever seen. Accord­ing to the Unstop­pable Effect, you will sig­nif­i­cantly increase your chances of achiev­ing your goals and liv­ing your dreams just by observ­ing the suc­cesses of Unstop­pable People.

I know how hard it is to stick to those New Year res­o­lu­tions we all wrote down as 2009 was on the cor­ner, so there’s no bet­ter time than now to show you this — a video inter­view with the late Dame Anita Rod­dick, founder of the Body Shop, phil­an­thropist and one of Britain’s most loved Unstop­pable People.