Power of Intention

Intentions have a bit of a bad reputation.  They say “the path to hell is paved with good intentions.” In the tradition of yoga, however, intention is the starting point of practice. It makes the space for the positive and powerful transformations practitioners have experienced for thousands of years.  But often the understanding of goals and intentions get blurred. Both lose their power when we confuse them.

You see, goals are the things we have to put action and effort behind. Goals are the things resolutions are made of “I am going to work out every day.”  Goals might even have multiple steps to reach; starting a new business venture or traveling to a foreign land would require a financial base, doing research, creating a plan and then executing that plan.  Goals are achieved over time and they are set up so you either reach them or you miss them.  The most successful people continue to rewrite their goals turning even their failed goals eventually into successes.  S.M.A.R.T. goals refer to making sure the goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Some might create bronze, silver and gold options to have ranges of success. But there is no doubt, goals are about making things happen in this world through personal effort and action.

Intentions are not goals; they are not interchangeable with goals; ideally, they are not attached to actions in any way. People often use the word intention to soften a goal…“My intention is to get to the gym this week.”  A goal implies success or failure.  Intention assumes no fault if other things come up that week. Often after the fact, we say “I had the intention to go to the gym but something came up”. And while that may be grammatically and contextually okay, it does not touch on the power or influence a yogic intention can have on your life.

Intentions are all about who you are and how you see the world.  Intentions have nothing to do with what you do. Intentions are really a way of focusing your attention and energy in the direction you are most interested in understanding more about.  Intentions are about opening to a specific frequency of observations and being in inquiry or even meditation with them.  While intentions may be set with a desired outcome, committing fully to an intention really opens you up to the mysteries of life and its bigger and better plans for you.  Whereas goals are achieved over time, our chance to be in intention really only take place in the present.

The best way to let you experience intentions is this.  Pause for a moment and scan your room for everything red.  Notice every red item. Go ahead.  Do it.

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Now…If you don’t have a lot of red, you may have noticed that your eye caught things that were orange, or pink or maroon and other shades of red.  You didn’t need to research or think hard to notice, you knew what you were looking for. Without looking at the room again, how many things can you name that were blue?  Even if you have a photographic memory, you would have to pull the image up in your mind and rescan the room for blue things because when you first looked your attention was elsewhere.

That is the power of intentions.  We can see the world in totally different shades based on the lens we chose to look through. Our past and life circumstances automatically color our world and self-view so that we see the world a certain way. Let’s call this our original programming for now. Intentions give us the power to try on different lenses and to write the programming we want for our lives.  Without intentions, we might get very distracted along the path of life, end up in places we don’t want to be, or miss the things we most desire that may have been right in front of us all along.  We might run our “original programming”’our whole lives noticing and attracting more experiences we don’t want and that make our original programming even stronger!

Consider: If your dad left when you were a kid, you might already have an unconscious intention (original programming) to prevent yourself from ever feeling that pain again – so you’ve been noticing your whole life all the things that make relationships unstable so you can be prepared when they finally break down.  But you probably didn’t notice many of the healthy stable and loving encounters you’ve experienced or walked past in your life because your attention was elsewhere. You’ve been longing for “blue” but paying attention to “red” all your life.

Goals are awesome and empowering but often set from our original programming. Our desire to have certain things usually comes from what we’ve had or have not had in the past. Most goals will help us repeat certain patterns in our lives. All the predictions we can make about our future lives are based on the evidence we have collected from our original programming. What makes the act of setting intentions truly transformative is that we open ourselves to seeing new reference points. When we fully engage with our intentions moment by moment we begin to create a whole new story track. What we focus on expands. Therefore, while intentions can only be engaged with in the moment, their outcome is unknown, unpredictable, and potentially positively life-changing.

Intentions help us to rewrite our story going forward…. We still don’t get to know how it will end but we can turn a drama into a romantic comedy or epic adventure. By really committing to an intention in our lives we will have a whole new world of data to observe.  Observation will lead to engagement, Engagement leads to new experiences and new experiences lead to new beliefs!  Intention opens us to opportunities we would have missed if we were not paying attention.

So what do you most long for?  The best intentions are simple ideas either about yourself or the world. The practice of intentions is to simply notice everything that falls in that category: healthy relationships, love, peace, healing, freedom, purpose, joy. Choose one for your yoga practice, your day, your week, your year, and enjoy the path it takes you on. Choose to act in alignment with your intention (even when its challenging or scary to do so) and you won’t believe what opens up for you.  I promise…it will not lead you on a path to hell.