Change Your Life in the New Year

Dec. 27, 2007— -- With our bellies full of holiday cheer, many of us are looking for salvation in the new year. Salvation from ourselves and from our destructive habits. And who do we look to for comfort? Baby New Year, of course.

Every year, January brings with it a time-honored tradition. The resolution. But while some say New Year's resolutions are a waste of time and impractical, Deepak Chopra is not one of them. Appearing on ABC News NOW's "All Together NOW," the prolific author and founder of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing said that the new year is a good time to make resolutions. He just thinks our ideas about happiness are backward.

While most of us believe that weight loss, money or career success will bring happiness, Chopra says, "It's the other way around. If you're happy, you're likely to achieve all of the things that you want."

We want to change, that much is obvious. Just witness the billions of dollars we spend each year on dieting programs and the inability to find a free treadmill at the gym in January. But few of us stick with the program and come February we're right back on the couch where we started.

Lets face it, the resolutions we make are often artifice. We pretend we're going to make a positive change in our lives but in the back of our minds we're resigned to our fate. If you're like me you even start making your excuses in December (the only project I ever seem to get a head start on).

So why is true happiness so elusive for many of us and what can we do to effect real change in our lives?

Chopra's latest book, due out in February, is "The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore." While he speaks about religion and spirituality, Chopra is quick to point out that scientists have studied the human condition in an effort to find out what truly makes us happy.

"It turns out that our conditions of life do not influence happiness that much. So if you win the lottery…you'll be happy for the next few months but in a year from now you'll be as happy or unhappy as you were before you won the lottery," says Chopra. It's an emotional elasticity that holds true for tragedy as well, according to Chopra.

Speaking about his book, Chopra says that he wrote about the third Jesus because the first was historical, the second theological being the Jesus of dogma, ideology and doctrine. "But the third Jesus is a state of consciousness." He says that when Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven is within, "He's talking about a very deep reality that we long for."

Whether you are Christian or not, it's easy to apply Chopra's interpretation of the spirit of Jesus to a broader spiritual ethos. "The ultimate truth at the heart of creation is love," says Chopra. "Love not as a sentiment or an emotion, but at the ultimate truth at the heart of creation there is one spirit that is manifesting in all of us and that divine spark exists in us."

According to Chopra, once we are in touch with that part of ourselves, "we see how we are not separate, we are all part of a wholeness."

Chopra compares the teachings of Jesus to Gandhi's Hindu teaching of Ahimsa. For those of us seeking peace in 2008, he points to the basic principle of Ahimsa. "I think first of all we must recognize that to expose our vulnerability and our defenselessness is not to be weak. When we are totally and utterly defenseless then all beings around us cease to feel hostility."

Whether it's peace we seek or good health or wealth, when we look to the future and contemplate the year ahead, we often have hope. But like the yin and the yang found in Chinese philosophy, Chopra dismisses hope as a sign of despair.

"We have to be anchored in sobriety and if you are anchored in sobriety then you are independent of both hope and despair," says Chopra.

Whether we make quiet promises to ourselves or bold declarations about the changes we're going to make in our lives, the desire to create personal change is usually genuine. It's the methods we employ that are suspect.

Chopra mixes religious themes with practical advice for creating change in the new year. "If you want to renew yourself this year, then ask yourself 'what needs to die inside me?' It is through death that we find resurrection. So you've got to ask yourself, 'what are those habits of thought and behavior and speech inside me that are not serving me anymore?' What do I need to let go so that that emptiness…can be filled in with something that will cause me to feel inspiration, to have insight, to have intuition, to have creativity, to have conscious choice making?'"

Ultimately, Chopra's simplest suggestions for renewal in the New Year come down to doing for others that which we want done for ourselves. "You want to be happy, make other people happy. You want to be successful, make other people successful. You want to experience love, give your love to someone…the only way to fulfill yourself is through fulfilling someone else."

Good advice for those of us who will spend the next two weeks at the health club fighting for the Stairmaster closest to the television.

Click here to read an excerpt of Dr. Chopra's upcoming book, "The Third Jesus."