It’s a fact… 92% of all new year’s resolutions fail! Yet how many times have we created an intention to lose weight, go to the gym, meditate daily, learn Spanish, never to get off the starting block? So often an opposing force seems to materialise, doubt creeps in and we convince ourselves that our intention was fanciful and was never going to come to fruition anyway. In my experience, and working with others, this is extremely common, however, intention is probably the most under-rated and misunderstood phenomena in terms of fulfilling potential and creating the life you want.
Intention
Nothing exists in the universe without intention. The house you live in, the car you drive, the clothes you wear, the relationships in your life and your favourite music cannot exist without intention. Even you do not exist without intention. It may seem obvious, but, why do so few of us allocate any time to this incredibly important tool for getting clarity on what we really want and creating a pathway to happiness?
Most of us are familiar with goal setting in either a work or personal scenario, or both, but intention is very different from setting goals. Discovering an intention integrates left and right brain and is more holistic. It’s a powerfully authentic vow that you make with yourself, which comes from your core and resonates deeply within you at soul level.
The life you are living right now is the way that it is because of intention. Whether you recognise it or not, you are creating the life you are living through the power of intention. As individuals, we spend our lives rearranging the furniture of the outer world, constantly surprised that the overall outcome never changes that much. We leave one job and get another one. We leave one relationship and start another one with someone who seems completely different. Rather than taking responsibility for the life we are creating; we have become conditioned to blaming other people and circumstances for the life we are living. What we really need to do is to take responsibility for our experiences and learn how to create a different reality. To do this, we need to set an intention.
A necessary condition for discovering our intention is to create a sense of space and stillness and allow ideas and thoughts to bubble up inside and capture them as they arise. It is often helpful to start with an open-ended question such as: ‘What do I want my life to look like five years from now?’ Or ‘What are my priorities in the year ahead?’ Or ‘What do I most want to change about my life?’ This whole process, which has no time limit, is about discovering your unique seed of intention. You can create two separate intentions, one for work, one for your personal life, or one intention to embrace both aspects.
Essential to this process is not to copy other examples, to disregard other people’s opinions, whether they are experts or not, and to be fully committed to discovering the inner mind-body seed that is particular to each of us, just like each one of us has unique DNA.
Once you discover your intention, it is essential that it becomes the guiding principle for every decision and the only person or thing that can stop our intention from becoming reality is our self. If we understand this simple truth, we are indeed masters of our own destiny and capable of creating the life we choose. It is not the quick fix that those new year’s resolutions promise, but a lifelong practice of developing awareness commitment and discipline and a superpower for anyone who wishes to align their life with their innermost wishes and create the life they want.