You make hundreds of choices every day. You choose what to eat for breakfast, what to wear, whether to have coffee or tea and what needs your attention this day. Your choice-making muscles– your head and your heart– have been working since birth offering advice on how to manage life. But, more than likely your head does most of the work, and your heart sits in the background with dancing shoes on, ready, waiting, hoping to be invited for a spin around the room. Now it is time to consciously engage both parts of you in choosing how you desire to experience your own world, the world around you and those other folks who share the floor.

Your power to choose is the most powerful exercise of human will available to you. In understanding what is true about life around you in general and your life in particular, you make the best choice of what to believe based on what you have experienced and learned, what you think about the past, and your guess about the future. The Talmud expresses this so beautifully, “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.” So, in your brain you mix these particular bits of information together to form your own personal worldview, your beliefs about yourself and the world around you.

Imagine you could deliberately create a new worldview by choosing to believe something different than what you have been told, been taught or have surmised from your life experiences. You can. By setting this intention and tapping into your heart you become the conscious creator of your own life; you decide your life is to be something more fulfilling than what it is at present.

This decision marks your starting point; a chance at a more joy-filled life. You cannot know exactly where this will lead, but to make this choice, you step onto the path that leads to a heart-centered life. Your next move is to set your intention and gently escort it into reality.

Few cross over the river.
Most are stranded on this side.
On the riverbank they run up and down.

But the wise man, following the way,
Crosses over, beyond the reach of death.

He leaves the dark way
For the way of light.
He leaves his home, seeking
Happiness on the hard road.

Dhammapada 6