Like so many others, every new year I begin with resolutions to make changes in my life, but by the end of the year (or much sooner) I find myself enmeshed in the same old patterns of habits and choices. How do I break the cycle of useless resolutions, and actually begin to learn something higher about myself?

If you’ll persist with your sincere wish for higher learning, you can’t help but succeed. Persistence always prevails because part of its power is to hold you in place until either the world lines up with your wish or you see that your wish is out of line. But, for whichever way it turns in that moment, you’ve won something that only persistence can pay. See the following: if you get what you think you have to have to be happy and you’re still not satisfied, then you’ve learned what you don’t want. Now you can go on to higher things. And should you learn you’ve been wearing yourself out with useless wishes, then this discovery allows you to turn your energies in a new direction: self liberation.