You Become What You Believe

The slave catchers were closing in. Dogs barked in the distance. Harriet Tubman crouched with her band of escaping souls in the Maryland woods, fear thick as swamp water.

In that moment of terror, Tubman closed her eyes and saw herself differently. Not as property fleeing its owners. Not as a desperate woman hunted by men with guns. She saw herself as she truly was. A free woman guiding her people home.

She was born into slavery. She had every external reason to see herself as powerless. Chains defined her reality. Laws declared her property. Society reinforced her bondage at every turn.

And despite all this, she cultivated an unshakeable inner conviction of freedom that no one could touch. She understood intuitively what Yogi Ramacharaka expressed:

Tubman planted seeds of freedom so deeply that no external force could uproot them.

Time and again she returned to slave territory. Again and again she led others to safety. Her remarkable record speaks to something beyond luck or chance. Her secret was that she refused to be limited by how others saw her.

"The student may make herself over, and change her entire nature, if she but will it," Yogi Ramacharaka wrote. "She may build up qualities that she finds lacking in her make-up."

Tubman built courage where society demanded submission. She built leadership where law forbade it. She built freedom where chains insisted otherwise.

You face the same choice. Today and everyday.

There’s always a voice that whispers you're not smart enough, not worthy enough, not strong enough. That's the accumulated weight of every external limitation you've absorbed. But you have something more powerful than any chain.

Your mind. Disciplined. Directed. Unshakeable in its vision of who you truly are. Choose one quality you wish to embody completely. See yourself already possessing it. Feel what it would be like to express this naturally. Then act from that inner image until outer reality catches up.

As Harriet Tubman proved in those dark Southern woods, you become what you consistently believe yourself to be.