Text of the meditation
By thoughts a person binds themselves. It is true that a person is the instrument of mental forces, or, to be more accurate, that they are those forces, but they are not blind, and they can direct them into new channels. In a word, they can take themselves in hand and reconstruct their habits; for though it is also true that they are born with a given character, that character is the product of numberless lives during which it has been slowly built up by choice and effort, and in this life it will be considerably modified by new experiences.
No matter how helpless a person has apparently become under the tyranny of a bad habit or a bad characteristic, and they are essentially the same, they can, so long as sanity remains, break away from it and become free. A changed attitude of mind changes the character, the habits, the life.
James Allen (1864–1912), Book of Meditations for Every Day in the Year (1913) – public-domain text, gently modernised.
The original 1913 text is in the public domain.
