Now we are coming up to the time of New Year's Resolutions, which almost everyone seems to regard as matters of will power. And most are happy to make them as conversation pieces, while being sure they won't be able to keep them.

Making New Year's Resolutions that work is not a matter of will power. It's a matter of technique, the results of which look like magick. Here's an overview to help those who want to do it again, but this time without failing miserably after a week or so.

First of all realize the paradox that if you want to change something in your life then that something is already there for some reason. But that you only ever want something that you don’t have, is the other side of the coin. Both factors work, sometimes simultaneously in the lives of the confused.

On more than one occasion I have been talking with medical people about common problems like colds and influenza. I give them my view that their researchers always seem to look in the wrong place for the answers. They are always looking for ways to give colds to someone who doesn’t have one, or they research the blood and vital fluids of people with colds. My opinion, usually not welcomed I must admit, is that they should study people who don’t get colds or influenza to see what variable makes them different.

My mother never, ever had a cold, even under the stress of years of poverty, of incessant working day and night under air raid conditions and living in damaged houses without functioning roofs. I haven't had a cold since 1947 and have never had flu. I always refuse medical offers to damage my immune system with shots.

Maybe people like us hold the clue for conquering the cold and flu problem. As Dr. Williams said, "For every disease in the world there is some place where it never occurs. These are the places to go to find the cure."

Using a similar logic when thinking of changing unwanted habits, I look at the widely used tool of affirmations. Now many ordinary folks have changed their lives by using affirmations. But I am particularly concerned with the affirmations that don't work, when by all the standard rules of self-programming, they should.

Those metaphysically unchallenged people who read my stuff are much clearer than mundane folk about how their world is created by their thought processes. They can see very clearly in others how they are programming themselves negatively and getting what they are continually creating, while complaining about their bad luck.

You may have seen it happen yourself. How many people do you know who have something remarkable happen to them and immediately say, “I don’t believe it.” That is a particularly vicious piece of California slang that the subconscious takes literally. Good things then tend to be pushed away without even being noticed.

Remember my story about the woman who won $500, then went around telling everyone and always started by saying, “I don’t believe it, I won $500.” Next day she had an accident and her medical bill was exactly $500. She non-ised her winnings. Good thing she hadn’t won $500,000, she would have needed a much worse accident.

If the major problem is negative thinking, why then does counter-thinking positively not work in all cases? There must be some deeper lock that doesn’t let the positive thought counter the negative. And there is. There is a barrier that prevents the healing or transformative energies of affirmations from getting through. Let’s examine this matter. It may help you change some factor that currently seems so entrenched that you tend to think, "Well, it can’t be helped. That’s just the way I am."

You know very well that the only thing you have absolute control over at any time is your mind. You can think whatever you choose. Unfortunately, by the time most of us discover this we have already thought ourselves into several tight corners by using formulae that worked well once, and are now instantly applied whenever any situation arises that mirrors an old one. The defensive patterns in our consciousness are energized as quickly as the eye closes when dust particles hit the eye lashes.

And the old remedy, often invented by the desperate two year-old, isn’t very comfortable, or effective, for the forty two year-old. Since the subconscious storehouse of these treasured instant remedies is in a place where time as duration does not exist, we have lots of apparently intractable problems as adults; most of them caused by what seemed at the time to be solutions to past problems.

So we look at what must have been true about the original and probably forgotten problem. Whatever the condition that you wish to change, you must have NEEDED it or RESENTED it at one time, for some reason. Let’s look first at the NEEDED.

Whenever some affirmation contradicts the need originally implanted, it is just brushed away as a non-optimum and dangerous piece of verbiage, not a thought to be considered.

Let’s use a totally mundane, but prevalent situation: the person who wants to stop smoking. Sometimes such people go on affirmation trips and repeat hundreds of times such sentences as, "I don’t like smoking any more." or "Every day I smoke less and less." and so on.

Such affirmations often bring about miraculous changes in other circumstances, but not where smoking is concerned. The resulting failure is always interpreted by the worker as weakness of will and contributes to feelings of guilt that further smoke-screen the true situation. Getting clearly in mind why this is so opens the way to be able to reframe any circumstance in our lives.

What was resisting the affirmation was the protective aspect of the original need. Until that original need is addressed there can be no change, because until that time happens, change is labeled as dangerous and the subconscious protests by not allowing the change. You can change any mental building very swiftly, but you have to know where the foundation stone is. And the foundation stone is always a need or a resentment. These are usually totally lost in past and forgotten stuff.

So bring in the magic(k) sentence, "I am willing to release the need for (x)." Insert the thing to be transformed. Smoking, excess weight, lack of money, whatever it is.

This is an affirmation that gets round the armor and to the roots of the ghost of the past. Once upon a time it was absolutely necessary for survival, as far as your ego was concerned, that you didn’t have more money than your father (salesmen), or you were accepted by some peer group (teenage smoking), or you were only noticed when you did this (loud mouthed aggression), or many thousands of scenarios.

If what you did then seemed successful, in the judgment you could bring to bear at that time, then your ready-made and unchallengeable solution became a fiercely protected program in your arsenal of subconscious survival tactics. No logic could reach it. No alteration brought about by future circumstances had any effect because the program was not time-sensitive. Duration did not change it in any way, whatever the apparent change in circumstances.

I know personally of a man who has had open heart surgery and was warned to drop smoking. His wife obediently cut down to four packs a day to do her part in reducing second hand smoke; he carried on regardless. His condition did not improve, and it won’t unless he changes tactics. His bodily survival is of no interest to the fiercely-held defense program that is still defending him night and day against an enemy that certainly no longer exists, or at least is a great deal less dangerous in present time than the one he now faces.

Once it was very pro-survival for him to smoke. Nobody is born a smoker. The non-smokers have no particular reason to preen themselves. Everybody was once a non-smoker. The smokers started for many reasons, and those reasons were the need at the time. Nothing that leaves the need untouched will alter the wonderful survival-oriented machinery put in place by the person who invested emotional and probably financial capital to achieve it.

It was starting smoking that required the act of will. Nobody enjoys it at first. The healthy body rebels strongly against being poisoned. But when the need for the poison is a paramount survival need then the body goes along with the scenario and gets the message, "This is a matter of survival. I must do it to survive." The constantly exerted will together with an emotional need for acceptance overrules the throwing-up behind the tool-shed and the delicate green tinge to the skin. The habit becomes established as a survival factor and what is called addiction occurs. It isn’t really addiction, it’s a fierce, no-surrender attitude of the program of the need.

To get a good grasp on how obvious it is that circumstances don’t happen to you, life doesn’t come from outside, you could check out the first major work that affected the metaphysical public. It is still available and still totally relevant. I have the 41st printing of the 38th edition bought years ago. It’s definitely a best seller in its field. The Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes.

Here now is an actual history from the affirmation genius Louise Hay, of how a student of metaphysics used the “I am willing “ sentence to start unwinding the tangled ball of string that is what our web of programs looks like. This is a hint to be gentle with yourself. Tugging at a tangled ball of string doesn’t do much to untangle it.

The smoker read or was told something like this posting and realized that his habit was built on a need of some sort. It made no difference that he didn’t know what the need was. This isn’t psychoanalysis. The Universal Mind knows what to do to bring about the goal of your properly-worded thought patterns. All you have to do is provide your totally obedient subconscious with the correct Law. The only proviso is that it musn’t directly contradict one already in place.

He began to use a simple relaxation process and repeated a couple of hundred times a day, "I am willing to release the need to smoke cigarettes."

He didn’t freak out next time he lit one up. He knew that what was going on took time and that it was in progress. He was prepared for what usually happens when you are affirming a pattern release. The situation gets worse for a while. Most people give up right then, even though it is actually a sign that progress is being made. The same law works when fasting. The third day is the crux. Get past it and everything is wonderful. It’s the analogy of the second wind phenomenon in running.

However, in his case what happened was a little different. He began to find his personal relationships were getting really uncomfortable. He was sharp enough to see that this may have been a clue, so he thought, "Maybe I have been using smoking as a smokescreen for uncomfortable relationships. How about giving up the need for uncomfortable relationships first?"

He did that as an affirmation and began to realize that the relationships were uncomfortable because people were always criticizing him. By this time he was alert to the fact that he had created all of his experiences, so he worked on being willing to release the need to be criticized.

After a very short time he got back to the reason that he only felt comfortable when being criticized: because that was how he lived his home life. The kid in him was only comfortable around criticism. You may have noticed that many smokers find it difficult to accept praise or a compliment. It makes them very uncomfortable, and the reason quite often goes back along the same tortuous route as was followed by the man in the story.

As soon as he got there he began working on being willing to forgive, because there weren’t any more needs coming up. After dealing with forgiving, he found that cigarettes had no attraction for him at all and the people around him weren’t criticizing him. The survival factor had been stripped away from all the needs that covered the original one.

I chose this example to show how the needs can be overlaid so that ordinary rational thinking is just not able to cope with them. A psychiatrist who hides behind his pipe might not have been much help either. Being willing to change is the key that unlocks all the doors. And this kind of changing is reframing; it is not healing. Look at the principles, not the details. The technique is universally applicable. Smoking was just one example, not the whole story.

One person I taught had bad arthritis. The simple affirmation, “I am willing to change.” without any stated goal or direction was followed by the almost total eradication of the crippling effect of the arthritis. Somewhere in that psyche there had been a need to stand firm, for the benefit of others. The lady was a Virgo, as astrology loving readers will have surmised already. This ‘stand firm’ thing was translated by the subconscious quite literally, as it usually does. She became less and less able to move, all because of a decision made when very young, as it turned out.

That wasn’t known at the time and came out of an investigation. The release from the old suggestion was triggered by the willingness to change. That could be a good one to start with, whatever the problem.

As an aside about this matter from my observations. The arthritis bit seems prevalent, in my experience among earth signs. The ones who deal with wanting not to change by becoming overweight and unable to exercise, or to make any exertion to bring about change, are most frequently the Taureans of the Earth signs. Those who pride themselves on their inflexible will and thus indirectly give their bodies the gift of inflexibility are usually Capricorns. Virgos collect all kinds of stuff to play with because they collect ideas instead of mass. That is an example of how three different games produce the same result with three different strategies.

Astrology fans could fill in the different sentences that would trigger the effect in different signs. You can’t just go by what people say. You have to know what their present persona means by the words.

This sentence and its variations are real magick, because they can reframe consciousness and bring about improvements in any condition that you don’t want.

Consider listing all the things you would like to change in your life this coming New Year: ill health, this condition or that condition, a constant feeling of unworthiness or an involuntary aggression that compensates for it, meager financial resources, fear of something, etc.

Accept that its presence depends on some need or resentment that you may well have totally forgotten or overlaid, or a suggestion that you accepted under stress that has now become an inner law of your life, and beyond the reach of normal thinking. You are not likely to be wealthy if you had a resentment against rich people embedded early on. How could you ever willingly become like someone you resent?

In people who are not already severely mentally disturbed, many of these conditions can be remedied without shrink fees, and usually without having to find out the historical details by simply contemplating how best to use the "willingness to..." system.

For example, there is some condition in your life that you don’t want to continue. First you have to acknowledge that you created it. It isn’t your fault, you were merely responsible for its creation. Accept no fault. Fault is another name for guilt. Inflicted guilt is a tool of organized religions to attain and keep power over their followers, their lives and their pocket books -- and it works if the programming begins in childhood.

As Garrison Keillor says, "Guilt: The gift that lasts a lifetime." And as the Jesuits say…“Give us a child until he is six. You can have him after that.”

Don’t accept guilt. If you’d known better you would have done better. But you must accept responsibility for creating the condition, because whatever it is, you did it or created it, or it wouldn’t be in your life now. Being responsible and being guilty are totally different things.

Many people taught by nuns who snapped, "Who is responsible for this?" may find it more difficult than others to see the distinction. In those circumstances it obviously meant the same as "Who is to blame for this? Whose fault is it?" “Who deserves punishment?” These are not equivalent sentences. Taking responsibility is not the same as pleading guilty.

The victim syndrome is deadly because it usually brings with it a total inability to change. The victim personality cannot concede responsibility for bringing about conditions it hates. The fact that it’s uncomfortable or even potentially fatal doesn’t mean you didn’t make it yourself.

Remember the guy who is now killing himself by continuing to smoke. The source of his problem was a decision made years before. Of course, that victim stuff is still only about bodies. The Self of the victim is as bright and shiny as the Self of anyone else. The body and emotions of the victim are productions of the Cosmic Game of making your own laws in life, which include the programming of your upbringing, and identifying with the life being led as if it was your essential being. So you could modify the magic sentence along these lines:

"I now realize that I created the condition of (x) and I am now willing to release those patterns in consciousness responsible for (x) appearing in my life."

Fill in the blanks with your own stuff. When you release the patterns in consciousness that hold the unwelcome condition in place, it just disappears. You can prepare for its disappearance by having an affirmation ready that:

"I am now willing to accept patterns in consciousness that bring about (y)”

Insert the name of some other condition that you want.

If you actually do what I suggested and list those matters that bother you, and deal with them one by one this year along the lines of the reframing work of the last few paragraphs you will find out a lot more about the magick of affirmations.

Now let’s look at circumstances produced by resentment. Louise Hay who I mentioned above is a very active 80+ years old, constantly giving seminars and writing Ask Louise columns published in dozens of papers and magazines. Her books have been translated into 29 languages.

When she was a young girl she was constantly physically abused and frequently raped. When she was in her teens her step-father continually had sex with her. She ran away from home, without education or any social skills at all. Later in her life she encountered the Church of Religious Science whose major teaching is that our thoughts create our world. She studied for the first time in her life and became a qualified practitioner after three years of work.

Then she was diagnosed with vaginal cancer. Her training had allowed her to realize that the physical problem was based on deep seated resentment about her sexual abuse when young. The problem was not the cancer, that was a symptom. It was the resentment that had unbalanced the healthy equilibrium of the body and caused it to turn against itself in the bodily area where the stresses had been inflicted.

She learned about the power of forgiveness when dealing with this life threatening test of her studies. By mental work with affirmations and changing her life style to be pro-life by exercise and dropping junk food from her diet, she regained equilibrium and the cancer disappeared.

Many people have used her ways of using affirmations to heal everything in their lives that is not beneficial. You could not do better than to read her book You Can Heal Your Life and look at her web site www.hayhouse.com.

This lady had nothing going for her except good looks as a youth. Her life was filled with violence, sexual abuse and fear. She had very severe programs to release, and has done so, and knows exactly how she did so.

She was the pioneer of categorizing specific physical problems with specific mental attitudes, and framing affirmations that addressed the mental cause of the problems rather than just the symptoms. Right now in her eighties she has recently learned to dance, and is looking forward to her best decade yet. Are you looking forward to the wonderful things due in the next decade? Maybe it’s an attitude worth checking out.

Your world is thought-based. Your thoughts are word-based. You can use words to fix any word-based problems in it, if you are flexible in your thinking and give suggestions, not orders. "It gets easier every day to ...." is a good arrow to have in your quiver.

This is about removing and repealing those laws of your life that either you didn’t pass yourself, or which you passed in a non-optimum state. Getting rid of them clears away barriers to perception that you did not know had been erected.

Look what happened when the English Parliament repealed the Witchcraft Act because they just knew that there were no such things as witches. Witches came out of the woodwork.

The same sort of blossoming of previously unused or hidden beauty and talent is available to those who repeal the ancient Acts they passed in a condition of poor judgment and then made into laws in their lives. That cutting remark from an adult that hit you as a child, who believed it and made it into a law of your life, may be the only barrier preventing your immense talent at something from being expressed.

The major English speaking players in the affirmation path to health, wealth and happiness are Dr. Joseph Murphy, Ernest Holmes and Louise Hays.

Check them out on Google and give yourself a very Happy New Year.