Be the Master Gardener of your Soul!

Here is an excerpt from a letter that grand-master Lee wrote to one of his Black belts in 1992. It is one of my favorites! Hopefully it will give you a little added motivation for the workout tonight! Enjoy…


“Belief is the knowledge that we can do something. It is the inner feeling that what we undertake, we can accomplish. For the most part, all of us have the ability to look at something and to know whether or not we can do it. So in belief there is power. Our eyes are open; our opportunities become plain; our visions become realities. Everything is possible for he who believes. He can, who thinks he can; and he cannot who thinks he cannot.

What a thing is, is to an unknowable extent, determined by or influenced by what we think it is. The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try and the faith to believe that it is possible. Your chances of success in any undertaking can always be measured by your belief in yourself. The strongest single factor in prosperity consciousness is self esteem, believing you can do it, believing you deserve it, believing you will get it. Let me give you a poem. “What the mind of man can conceive and believe, the mind of man can achieve.” I like that saying. The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100%. The feeling must come first. If you actually feel rich, if you have a deep inner conviction that you will always have all that you need, it will soon be.

Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success. What we sincerely believe regarding ourselves is true for us. What you believe regarding yourself to be, you are. A man literally is what he thinks. Man is what he believes. If you see yourself as prosperous, your will be. If you see yourself as continually hard up, that is exactly what you will be. We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make our world. The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. The barrier between success is not something which exists in the real world. It is composed purely and simply of doubts about ability. Our greatest power is the power to choose. We can decide where we are, what we do, and what we choose. No one can take the power to choose away from us. It is ours alone. We can do what we want to do. We can be what we want to be.

A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master gardener of his soul, the director of his life. We can know what people are thinking by looking at what they do. Actions mirror thoughts. And by taking a good look at where we are and what we are doing, we can understand what we are thinking. The thoughts that we have chosen have brought us where we are today.”

Happy Training!