You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself.

A way of living is not a route you walk along while remaining unchanged by it. Practices only work when they stop being things you do and start being what you are, which is why advice followed at arm’s length so rarely produces the promised result. The distance between knowing the steps and being someone who takes them is the whole of the difficulty.

Pick one principle you believe in and stop treating it as a rule to obey. Ask instead what a person who simply lived that way would do at the next small decision, and do that.