The Power of Intention for Living Fully
Clarifying and living in alignment with our intentions helps us feel more alive.
Intention is knowing who we want to be and where we want to go, as well as how we navigate getting there.
We can feel discomfort when we live out of alignment with our intentions.
Clarifying our intentions and recommitting ourselves to them regularly helps us feel confident and vibrant.
“Attention and intention are the most powerful tools of the spiritually adept. They are the triggers for attracting both a certain kind of energy and a certain kind of information.” -Deepak Chopra
How often is your behavior dictated by your habits and impulses, rather than your real intentions? Maybe you make plans to go to the gym but end up at happy hour. Or find yourself impatient and irritable with your child, only to feel guilty afterward. "Right Intention," the second fold on the Noble Eightfold Path, involves bringing conscious intention to the forefront of our minds so that we use our values and intelligence, rather than our fears or habits, to guide our behaviors.
Living With Right Intention
Right Intention is more than a goal; it's a way of being in the present moment (the ever-changing present) that is based on understanding what matters most to us. It’s knowing the kinds of human beings we wish to be and the impact we want to have on the world. This doesn’t mean making painful sacrifices or trying to be perfect. In fact, living in line with our intentions is liberating, as it means fewer uncertainties and regrets. Living off of autopilot and with a reverence for the choices we make each day makes life vibrant and meaningful, even more precious.
To live this way, we must clarify our intentions. Clear intentions help us make big and small decisions. They also help us make sense of the discomfort that arises when we have made the wrong decisions. For example, after speaking badly about someone, most of us experience physical, emotional, or cognitive unease. It may be subtle—a mild twinge in the gut or an intrusive memory of what was said. Why? Because most of us have an intention—consciously explored or not—to avoid causing harm to others.
In psychology, we sometimes refer to the disconnect between our values and our behaviors as cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance impacts all of us, from animal lovers who don’t like thinking about where their meat comes from, to chronically spending rather than saving, to drinking and eating too much when we intend to care for our bodies well. We have sophisticated cognitive strategies, like rationalization and blaming, that help us reduce the discomfort of dissonance. Unfortunately, these strategies often serve to take us further from the root of the difficulty: knowing and living in alignment with our intentions.
Intentions are at the heart of the concept of karma: the intentions behind our actions create energy that shapes our futures. Wholesome, compassionate intentions create a very different karmic future than selfish or vengeful intentions. Every act, and its accompanying intention, creates a ripple we contend with sooner or later. Indeed, how we feel today is a product of our actions, and the intentions behind those actions, in the past.
Clarify your intentions in writing. This might take some exploration.
