The Mechanics of Intention

May 14

The interruption of daily routines during this time of COVID-19 provides a rare perspective that may encourage you to examine and rearrange your life. Intention is an essential part of any change process. Clear intention helps you make decisions and direct your attention effectively and with integrity. Beginning a day without setting your intentions means inviting distraction, unhelpful habits, and reactivity. When your mind doesn’t have a clear intention to follow, it defaults to looking for problems and following the momentum of habit. While setting intentions may have far reaching metaphysical effects, it also is simply an important and concrete step for managing your resources to help you create the life you want.

First let’s explore the territory of setting intentions. Then let’s look at some basic practices. Setting intentions can cover a wide range of experiences. They could relate to work tasks, health, relationships, spiritual values, or forms of contribution. They could be set in a given moment or for a whole period of life. They could focus on feelings, thoughts, actions, beliefs, attitudes, behavior, or energy. The line between intentions and goals can get blurry. For example, you might say something like, “My intention is to spend a half hour on the family budget today.” This is more of a task-oriented goal. One way to distinguish between an intention and a goal is to examine the origin of each.

Intentions, as we are defining them here, arise from what is authentic and alive for you. Authenticity is marked by a sense of intimacy with life and with yourself. When something is authentic for you, you have a sense of being at home in yourself. You experience a sense of alignment. If, however, authenticity is a tender need for you, connecting with what is true for you might come with feelings of vulnerability and the impulse to move attention away from your experience.

When something is alive for you, there is a sense of expansion, ease, and flow when you think about moving toward it. This is distinct from moving toward something out of craving, which is characterized by compulsion, narrow focus, and contraction. A sense of aliveness arises from groundedness in experience, especially body awareness. Following aliveness naturally contributes to life. Skillfully following aliveness depends not only on being able to distinguish it from craving, but also on being able to remain flexible and creative about how you follow it.

Let’s come back to our example of the family budget. If you are grounded in your desire to contribute to the family by doing the budget, you will naturally set your intention to dedicate your time and energy. If on the other hand, you are entangled in reactivity—imagining you “have to do it”—you might begrudgingly set it up as a goal or task on your list of things you should do. In addition, goals sometimes turn your attention to success or failure in a binary way. Your life becomes a test that you either pass or fail. Setting a goal is most helpful when it is a specific and doable action that arises from an intention.

Now let’s look at some basic practices for finding and setting intentions. Determining the span of time you will focus on is a useful place to start. Are you setting an intention for your life, for your day, or for a particular moment or event? The process for any of these types of intention contains the same elements: inner quiet, deep listening, contemplative questions, grounding in authenticity, following aliveness. To reveal a basic process, let’s take each of these in turn.

Practices for finding and setting intentions

Inner quiet – Engage a strategy that interrupts your mind’s usual chatter and the associated emotions. There’s no right way to do this. It’s about what is effective for you. It might be self-guided meditation, a recorded guided meditation, yoga, rock climbing, chanting, anchoring, singing, qigong, etc.
1. If you are setting intentions for your life as a whole, it’s helpful to build up this quiet throughout a whole day or even a week-long retreat.
2. If you are setting intentions for your day, you might take ten minutes or two hours to engage a quieting practice first.
3. If you are setting intentions for a given moment, interaction, or event, you might just follow your breath in and out and engage an anchor briefly first.
Grounding in authenticity – This step is especially important if authenticity is a tender need for you.
1. Sit or stand squarely over your center.
2. Take one to three full breaths while focusing in the center of your abdomen.
3. Reassure and remind yourself that there is not some certain thing you are supposed to be, feel, know, do, or think. You are a constant unfolding of dynamic aliveness and do not fit into boxes or under labels.
4. Remind yourself that you want to and can be present for whatever arises, and that you want the truth.
Contemplative questions
1. If you are setting intentions for your life as a whole, one or more of the following contemplation questions might be helpful:
  1. How do I want to serve or contribute to life?
  2. What do I want my life to be about?
  3. What really matters most to me?
  4. Around what center do I want to organize my energy and time?
  5. What is my north star?
  6. If I have ever faced imminent death, what became most important?
  7. What do I want to be able to feel, know, be, or say at the end of this life?
2. If you are setting intentions for your day, one or more of the following contemplation questions might be helpful:
  1. How do I want to contribute today?
  2. Who do I want to be today? What quality do I want to embody or bring to interactions with others?
  3. What mindfulness practice would I enjoy engaging with today? Is there a habit I want to interrupt or a new habit I want to practice?
  4. Is there something I have energy and enthusiasm for doing today?
  5. What would be satisfying to do today?
  6. Is there something I want to remember throughout the day?
  7. How could today be a manifestation of my intention for my life?
3. If you are setting intentions for a particular moment or event, one or more of the following contemplation questions might be helpful:
  1. What can I contribute in this situation?
  2. What do I care most about here?
  3. What attitude do I want to bring?
  4. What’s really most relevant or important in this context?
  5. What would living from the intention for my life look like in this context?
4. You can find more on contemplation practice here
Deep listening
1. Once you choose a contemplative question, become still, ask it, and then become still again. Let the answer bubble up by itself.
2. Freewriting after posing a question can also facilitate deep listening.

When a specific intention becomes clear to you, take time to imagine possible specific ways you could carry out that intention. Do you want to make a specific plan or simply watch for opportunities? You might be inspired to create a specific and doable goal from your intention. You might create ways to remind yourself of your intention throughout the day.

If you don’t have the practice of identifying your intention for the day, this might seem like too many details. If so, start small. For example, if you value loving-kindness, you could set your intention to offer a friendly greeting to at least one person in your neighborhood today. If you have aliveness about supporting your health, you could set your intention to sit outside and stretch for at least ten minutes today.

One of the most important human needs is purpose. When your sense of purpose is unclear, it is easy to become disconnected from life. Intention helps clarify a sense of purpose in little and big ways. Purpose helps you maintain groundedness and resilience.