Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session we're going to talk about the journey of achieving your goals. I'd like to share a quote by Henry David Thoreau that I recently came across and I really like. He says, "What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become." What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become. I think one of the reasons I really like this is because when we think of goals or I won't put this on you, I'll just say for myself personally, when I think of goals, there's this feeling of, you know, the accomplishment or the goodness of it comes at some point in the future.

I'm working towards something and once I finally get there, then there will be release, then there'll be the fulfillment I was looking for, sense of satisfaction, or I could finally relax. And so it's, it's some moment in the future that I'm working toward and I sort of just have to get through everything in the meantime to get there. But, uh, you know, as important as I think goals have been in my life, I I've always struggled with this future orientation with them. And this quote really invites us all to re-imagine the journey toward achieving those goals. And who do we have to become to get to this goal? What within us needs to get activated? In what ways do we need to grow? And that's a different orientation toward the goal setting and goal achieving process.

Yes. Getting the goal, accomplishing it, getting to that future moment can be extremely satisfying and we should allow ourselves to appreciate it once we get there. But most of our life is happening in between. It's happening in the journey. And so what would it be like to, to set goals that really inspire us to become a certain person, set goals that make us think, you know, who would I have to become to be able to achieve that goal? Or just to look at the goals that we're currently working toward and think, you know, in what ways am I changing right now? Who am I becoming, trying to get to this goal? And appreciate that as much, if not more, than the actual attainment of the goal itself.

Just something to think about. Maybe it will resonate in the same way. It resonated for me. Thanks so much for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.