Simple Stillness Meditation

This is one of the meditation tips offered on my Stress Busting E-Course .

It is very simple yet effective and a bit like playing Musical Statues - only without the music.

The object of the exercise is to sit comfortably, close your eyes and to try and keep your body perfectly still.

You don't have to empty your mind. In fact, you can think about whatever you want and let your thoughts go where they like. However you may find that the simple act of sitting motionless may be enough to still your thoughts.

As you concentrate on not moving your body or fidgeting - which some people may find difficult - you may discover that your mind is no longer racing along thinking fast thoughts because your attention is focused on keeping your body still. And often where your body leads, your mind will follow (and the other way round, of course too).

If you find it difficult to keep still, you can practise this exercise for five minutes initially and then gradually lengthen the period that you keep still over the next few days.

If you find the exercise really easy, you can sit completely still for anything from fifteen minutes to half an hour and beyond.

You will find that the act of sitting still will also still your thoughts and centre your being.

You can find similar exercises on the Free 7 Day Stress Busting E-Course.

Thought for the Day

When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs at what it has found.
Sufi Aphorism

Inspirational Bookstore

Over the next few weeks, I'll be compiling a list of inspirational books and music that have empowered individuals, awakened the imagination and fed the soul.

Check out the list so far in the Creative Mentors Bookstore.

Selling the Impossible

In the late 90s, Dr Evoy, a Canadian physician developed a specialised investment software product which he knew would be "virtually impossible to sell" and that cost 1000 dollars.

He set himself the challenge to create a website that would be effective at encouraging people to buy the little known product.

In two years, he sold all 1000 copies of his software at $1000 each by developing the ultimate internet marketing techniques.

Now he teaches other people to create something out of nothing through his webhosting service, Sitesell.com

Over the past two weeks, I have been looking at the ingredients of success. So far I've observed that successful people never give up and don't know the meaning of the word impossible.

They also diversify, expand and never stop progressing once they reach a certain platform of success. For example, Dr Evoy teaches emergency medicine at McGill University, created a successful toy design business, taught golf, and coached baseball before eventually becoming one of the top internet gurus who has led many webmasters to success.

For me, I think the true meaning of success is defined by people who enjoy and celebrate their achievements, no matter how small and insignificant they may seem to others.

After all, what is the point of having a billion dollars if you're not enjoying it?

Impossible Dreams

I read this story a couple months ago on the blog Eric's Tips.

At 20 years old, Ladan Lashkari is a top internet marketing expert with over 20 websites which include newsletter publishing tips and self-improvement. She makes a profitable living from her online businesses in spite of many challenges and obstacles she faces such as not being able to have a credit card or merchant account or travel outside her country.

The ingredients of success in her case appear to be persistence, perseverance and immense positivity in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

In the book, Think and Grow Rich, the author Napoleon Hill said that he once removed the word 'impossible' from a dictionary. According to the article in Eric's Tips, Ladan Lashkari seems to share this philosophy. And in the past few weeks, when studying stories of success, I've discovered that many of the people who've realised great ambitions did not seem to know the meaning of the word 'impossible'.

But there are many people who dream big dreams but are not able to manifest them. So what is the ingredient that separates the fanciful Don Quixote style dreamers from those who actually realise their big ambitions?

I shall endeavour to find out.

Read the inspiring article about Ladan Lashkari.

The 7 Rules of Success

When striving to turn a big ambition into a reality, it can be helpful and inspiring to read about other people who have already achieved success (and who - most importantly - are HAPPY with what they have achieved).

It can be particularly inspiring to read about all the odds they had to overcome, all the setbacks, obstacles and difficulties they experienced before they attained success - especially if you may be on the verges of giving up.

In the book, The Seven Rules of Success, top Life Coach, Fiona Harrold, explores and interviews people who have achieved great success in diverse areas of life.

She identifies 7 factors which helped these people on their journey to success:

1) Passion about what they are doing
2) Great self-belief
3) Doing more & more
4) Being prepared to take risks
5) Being able to inspire others
6) Perserverance
7) Generosity

The 7 Rules of Success features about 28 success stories and is an inspiring and insightful read.

The Dark Side of Success

"So, Charlie, do you know what happened to the boy who suddenly got everything he ever wanted?" asked Mr Wonka, ominously in the movie Mr Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Gene Wilder version).
"What?" asked Charlie, a little anxiously.
"He lived happily after," said Mr Wonka.

But what really does happen to people who suddenly get everything they ever wanted?

It is rare in life to hear of people who live "happily ever after" once they have achieved great success. On the contrary, great success is sometimes accompanied by a spectacular downfall.

People tend to equate success with fame and wealth. But so many talented people who have achieved fame and wealth both in the past and in today's society have been depressed or have developed addictions because fame and wealth have not lived up to their expectations or met their needs.

A lot of young people these days say, "I want to be famous" without having any idea what they want to be famous for. And it's quite easy to get famous today in the world of Reality TV. It is even easier to become infamous.

Keira Knightley is considering quitting acting because she finds fame too intrusive.

Britney Spears is recovering from a very public meltdown.

It begs the question: why would anyone want to be successful?

It doesn't only happen to celebrities. You may land the dream job you always thought you wanted. And things go well at first. But after the initial celebration when you settle down into your new life, you think - "What now?" or "There's got to be something more to life than this".

That is why important to know WHY you want to achieve what you want to achieve so that when you get it, you don't think, "Is this it? Why did I want this?"

Once you achieve and manifest a goal, toast your achievement, celebrate, maybe have a rest - and then create another goal. It could be a completely different kind of goal, in another sphere of interest entirely. If you have achieved a financial goal, you may want to create a goal which enables you to help others or your new goal may be to downshift or create a better quality of life.

"Be careful what you wish for" has always been a scary phrase for me. Looking at the purpose of our wishes is a helpful way to avoid meeting the dark side of success.

This month's theme: SUCCESS

Over the past couple of months I have been exploring the themes of perseverance, setting and achieving goals.

This month I will be exploring the theme of SUCCESS and ambition.

What happens after people have manifested their goals? How do they deal with their success?
I also hope to include inspiring stories about people who have achieved great success in spite of emormous obstacles, difficulties and setbacks.

Visit this blog again for more about living with, coping with or embracing success.

Thought for the Day: Success

Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.
~Author Unknown

Achieving Goals - Personal Success

Yesterday on Deal or no Deal, a contestant, Rita, won £18,444. Everyone in the studio was sad for her because she could have gone away with £100,000.

Rita was happy with her eighteen grand because it meant that she could fulfil a long held ambition to travel and visit the grave of the father she had never met because he had been killed during the war when she was a child.

To Rita, the amount of money she got was a success and she was delighted. But everybody else looked upset for her.

This made me realise that success is very personal. One man's hill is another man's mountain. One woman's failure is another woman's victory. It is all relative and individual.

When defining and manifesting our goals, we shouldn't think about what people around us expect of us or whatever everybody else thinks is a good goal to reach.

We should think about what success means to us. In this sense, success can be defined as what would make ME happy.

Achieving Goals - Part Four

OK, so you’ve listed and clarified your goals, you’ve chosen the main priority for your first focus and you've visualised your ambition coming true. What's next?

Draw up an action plan.
It isn't enough just to send your wishes out into the ether.
You need to plan your vision outlining the steps you need to take to achieve that goal.
This is the logical practical part of journey. Be very detailed, realistic and specific.
And remember that realism doesn't mean pessimism.

Divide your action plan into small manageable steps.
Some goals don't require a great deal of action and some require a lot of implementation.
Each day take at least one step towards achieving your goal.

Create milestones or signposts along your journey to keep you on the right track. Don't be too rigid about keeping to the finer details of your plan. Allow the Universe to do its part and to meet you halfway with synchronicities, coincidental meetings etc.

Have a strong focus but try to go with the flow at the same time. It's a fine balancing act to remain focused but not rigid and to see the big picture as well as the minute details of your future plans.

It is important to know exactly what you want but it is just as vital to know WHY you want it. So while you are creating a plan of action, it's a good time to review the purpose of your goal. Why do you want to achieve this particular ambition? Is it for financial security, happiness, creative fulfilment?

It is always good to keep the Big Picture in mind so that you are open to discovering several routes towards achieving the underlying purpose of your goal.


Read Achieving Goals - Part One

Read Achieving Goals - Part Two

Read Achieving Goals - Part Three

Achieving Goals - Part Three

You may have heard of Cosmic Ordering, the system created by Barbel Mohr for manifesting your goals.

One of Barbel Mohr's guided meditations instructs the listener to imagine that the cosmos is like the internet and to connect to the cosmos, we should imagine that we are going online.

I have created the following visualisation exercise based on the concept of cosmic ordering and the internet. It is a form of proactive prayer.

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Observe your breathing for a couple of minutes and instruct your body and mind to relax.

When you are relaxed:

Imagine that you are at your PC and you are shopping online. But you are not ordering from Amazon. You are ordering from the Universe.

There are different categories in the Universe's Online Store: Career, Property, Relationships, Health and so on.

In each category, you select what you want to order. For example, in the Career section, you may order a new job. In the Property section, you may order a new house. In the Health section, you may order Peace of Mind.

When you click on each item that you want, it goes into your shopping cart.
Finally you go to your Shopping Cart and review your list.
When you are satisfied with your list, see yourself clicking the SUBMIT YOUR ORDER button.

Et voilà.

Read Achieving Goals - Part Two

Read Achieving Goals - Part One

Read Achieving Goals - Part Four

Achieving Goals - Part Two

The first step to achieving your ambitions is knowing exactly what they are.

The best way of clarifying your goals is to write them all down.

Your main goal may be to get a new job or to travel the world or to write a novel.

However for a truly holistic approach, it is a good idea to create goals for yourself in each of the following categories:

Financial - This covers your job, career aspirations, bills, debts, possessions, property etc.

Health - This covers physical and emotional healing or personal development, leisure and fitness.

Spirituality - (If you are spiritually minded) - For example, you may wish to discover a spiritual path or create your own.

Relationships - This covers your relationships with your family of origin, your partner, your children, your friends etc. including people you want to improve your relationship with, opportunities for creating new relationships and those you wish to eliminate from your life.

Visualisation
Once you have made your lists, you can pick the goal which is the most important to you at this particular moment and imagine in detail how you would feel to have this specific goal fulfilled.

What impact would achieving this goal have on your life?

Which emotions would you experience in the first few moments that your new goal is attained?

The Achieving Goals Series will continue over the next fortnight.

Read Achieving Goals - Part One

New FREE Online Stress Relief Course

A new 7 day Stress Busting course is now available from my main website.

The course is absolutely free. You need do nothing more than sign up for it on the link below.
You will then receive each day's lesson by e-mail.

The course provides practical relaxation techniques and carefully designed exercises for reducing the symptoms of stress.

Discover creative and healing methods of combatting stress by enroling on the 7 Day Stress Busting E-Course.

To enrol, click on the link, scroll to the bottom of the page and complete and submit the short form:

FREE 7 Day Stress Busting E-Course

Achieving Goals - Part One

If you are stuck in a rut and need to change an aspect of your life, one way of getting out of the rut is to change your mindset and train your mind to accept a new way of thinking.

Thoughts are made of energy and energy creates events. So it follows that creating positive thoughts and images will in turn manifest positive events.

However positive thinking or visualising your goals are sometimes not enough.

The path to realising your goals must rest on a foundation of self-love and gratitude.

Self-Nurturance

If you have low self-esteem, you may feel undeserving or that the path to your goal is too difficult or that you are not good enough to attain your dream.

You have to believe deep down that you deserve to achieve your ambitions and manifest your goals otherwise your visualisation techniques may take longer to become a reality.

This can be achieved by adopting habits of self-nurturance through simple acts such as taking time out for yourself to do things you enjoy without needing to be perfect at them, meditation, reiki and self-healing techniques.


Gratitude

You have to be grateful for what you've got before you can progress. Sometimes you need to see the lesson or the "gift", or the silver lining of every situation so that you can move on from negative incidents in your life.

The more you say thank you to the Universe, the more you receive in return.

Once the twin tools of self care and gratitude are in place, visualisation techniques can work in a powerful and effective way.

Read Achieving Goals - Part Two

Easter Inspiration

Easter is the celebration of resurrection and new life.

Spring is the season of rebirth.

This is a great time of year to create new plans and new projects for the next twelve months. It is the perfect time to set new goals and to start putting your plans into action.

The energy at this time of year is much better for creating new resolutions for yourself than in January, when we should really be winding down and resting. In fact, it would be great, if we could celebrate the start of the New Year in Spring instead of in Winter.

But as we can't really alter the calendar, we can alter our mindset. If you have been stuck in a rut, now is a good time to get inspired.

This month I will be looking at the connection between the imagination and achieving your goals. So continue to revisit this blog for tips and techniques on using your imagination to achieve your goals over the next few weeks.

Happy Easter

Window Meditation

On a day like today with the sun shining brightly through the windows, I thought that this would be a relaxing meditation.

***

• Sit in front of a window.
  


• Take a few deep breaths.
  
  
• As you breathe in, imagine that you are taking the sunlight into your body and that it is a healing light which is entering and rejuvenating all your body's cells.
  
  
• When any thoughts enter your mind, as you breathe out, imagine that the thoughts are flying out of your head, out of the window and into the light outside.
  

Repeat this exercise: breathing in the light and breathing out your thoughts (especially any negative ones) for at least five minutes and then as long as you feel comfortable.

Adapting the Window Meditation

It may not always be a beautiful day. But you can still do the exercise with or without the sun. You could also try it at night with the moon.

If it's raining, when you do the breathing out part of the meditation, you can imagine that your negative thoughts are flying out of the window and are being purified by the rain.

Or if it is cloudy, as you breathe out, you can imagine that your stressful thoughts are being carried away on one of the clouds.

Simple Abundance

One of my favourite teachers came ten years ago in the form of a book by Sarah Ban Breathnach. I was intending to buy it as a Mother's Day present but ended up buying it for myself.

The book was called Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy. It is an inspirational book for women. It is all about finding your authentic self. The book is packed with information about creative mentors and teachers. It is full of quotations and meditations, amusing anecdotes and poignant stories. Each two month period is devoted to a particular theme such as gratitude, order, simplicity or joy.

This book can be a great companion to you both throughout the year as you read each day's passage and on any stage of your spiritual journey.

It is a particularly helpful book to have by your side if you are going through a transitional stage in life.

Memoirs and Meditation

Writing can be a great method of meditation whether it is free, unfocused, stream-of-consciousness writing or it is a reflective piece of writing that is focused on one particular concept such as 'peace' or 'hope'.

Writing about significant episodes in your life can be a meaningful act of reflection.

When you review your life through the written word, it is often surprising to discover how much you have gone through, how much you've achieved and survived, how far you've come and how far you've got to go.

Taking pivotal moments from your life and freezing them like written snapshots just for yourself can open you up to important insights about yourself, your relationship with yourself and your relationships with other people.

Some of us spend so much of our time on a treadmill in an endless repetitive cycle of of work, home, TV, hobbies etc. lost in the everyday details of our lives that we don't get to see the big picture.

Writing about aspects of your past life can highlight where you are on your current journey giving you a new perspective and vision of your future.

Sometimes it is is good to stop, notice and reflect, to pause and evaluate without judgement or criticism, just to observe with an impartial eye what has happened, what is going on and what sort of future you are creating for tomorrow.

Read more about Free Writing or Reflective Writing.

The So-Called "Secrets" of Success

The main "secret" of success is perseverance.

So continuing with this month's theme, here are nine secrets of success whose origins range from traditional sayings to anonymous authors.

When all put together, they read like an inspirational poem:

If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking. ~Buddhist Saying
Be not afraid of going slowly; be afraid only of standing still. ~Chinese Proverb
Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines. ~Robert Schuller

Some people dream of success... while others wake up and work hard at it. ~Author Unknown
All the so-called "secrets of success" will not work unless you do. ~Author Unknown
The only thing that ever sat its way to success was a hen. ~Sarah Brown
Success is a ladder you cannot climb with your hands in your pockets. ~American Proverb

The difference between try and triumph is a little umph. ~Author Unknown
Nobody ever drowned in his own sweat. ~Ann Landers