We all have dreams. We all have desires for what we want to do and how we want to live our lives whether we are willing to admit them to ourselves or not. What do you want in your life? Take a moment to think about it. Are you imagining the kind of relationship or family you want to live in? Are you figuring out the kind of work you want to do? Are you perhaps visualizing the home you want to live in? Even people who either deny the value of dreams or seem to have given up on them are painting the picture of how they want to live with every preference they develop and every decision they make as they go through their lives. How do we get from a decision to a manifestation? How do we move from a dream to a realization? How do we get those pictures we have painted in our imaginations out into the world so we can live and experience them fully? This is the function of intention, and it is helpful to know what intention is when we want to live the intentional life.
Intention is almost as impossible to define as consciousness or who or what God is, but it is possible to describe it enough for us to be able to imagine it, to get a mental picture of it. Dictionary definitions of intention describe it as an aim, a plan, or a resolve. It is also described as something you want to do or are going to do. While the dictionary definitions point in the correct direction, they are certainly insufficient and verge on leading us in the wrong direction. The dictionary definition seems to point to intention as an act of will. And while I am a firm believer in free will and its power, it is not the same as intention. Our free will can be thought of as the ability to decide or make choices among a range of possible objects or actions, and these choices help to direct intention, but they are not intention itself. Free will can also be at odds with intention as we can choose to resist what we want. Intention is not the choice or even the plan, really, but it is the power to move us from our choices, including our hopes, our dreams, and our visions, to their fulfilment in our experience. Intention is also the path or the course from where we are at any moment to the fulfilment of our desires.
Intention is like a GPS (Global Positioning System) navigator. It can locate you, wherever you are, and the realization of each of your desires in space/time and shows you the best path from where you are to where you want to go as it also modifies the course to include every new desire you come up with on your journey. Imagine a very simple example. You get into a car to go to a store at the other side of town because they are having an insane sale on your favorite brand of clothes. Your GPS system is very smart and not only thinks of the length of the route, but it also takes into account the traffic flow, so you can have the best route relative to time and distance. As you head out, you remember that you need to pick up some things from the grocery store. Your GPS system has immediately added a stop at the best supermarket and corrected the course to accommodate a new stop along the way. Then, you realize you are getting hungry, so the system again calculates a new course to move you past your favorite restaurant. Then, there is a traffic accident that has frozen traffic on the course set out by the GPS system, so there is a new modification to avoid that problem. A few minutes later, as you are going along listening to music, you space out for a moment and miss a turn. The system recalculates the route anew and now you are off on a seemingly new direction that is still leading you to the places you desire to go. Intention, like this amazing GPS navigation system, is there for you follow to get you where you have decided to go.
Intention is also the power that helps to move us along the path. It is the power that directs our energy and the energy of the universe to move us in the direction we want to be going. Just having the path laid out is not enough; we also need to be able to move along it. Have you ever felt like you had to work yourself up to get something accomplished? We’ve all found ourselves needing to engage our will power to force our way through a task we didn’t really want to do or one we felt tentative about or even afraid to begin. Will power is what we often turn to in the face of our own resistance. It can certainly get us up and moving, but it requires much more effort, much more force of will, than is necessary. Intention is much more natural and requires much less exertion on our own part. If we release resistance to movement, the power of intention can carry us along to what we want in our lives. Have you ever had the feeling that everything was lining up for you? Without rushing or hurrying, you were moving from point A to point B to point C smoothly and effortlessly as if you were effortlessly gliding through the steps of a dance. The things you were doing seemed to be doing themselves in a way, and you accomplished more in less time. You were feeling the power of intention. When I’m moving with the power of intention, I sometimes describe it as being in my groove or in my flow. At those times, I am taking advantage of the power of intention without the hindrance of resistance in the forms of stress, worry, doubt, or fear, to name a few.
Intention being both the direction and the power to move us on our desired course is amazingly and beautifully powerful. And we all know times when we were flowing with it and when we were not. Does that mean that intention is capricious? Is it an on-again, off-again companion? Intention is available to all of us at all times. Intention is so much a part of each of us that it can never be unwoven or cut off from us. If it seems unavailable to us or out of reach it is because we have closed ourselves off from its immense power. We all have the free will to choose to flow with our intentions or not, and we very often choose to work against the power of intention for many reasons. Intention may be leading us into new territories and we get skittish. Logic and observation may tell us that we are going in the wrong direction. We may have come up with a plan and are rigidly sticking to it rather than following our intention. On the other hand, we may have decided that struggle and hard work are what makes an outcome noble. We may believe that if we don’t have any scars to show for our effort, we will not have anything to brag about, and people will not applaud as loudly. These are just some of the ways that we resist the power of intention. The good news is, that no matter how much we resist, intention is always ready and available to us when we open ourselves to it.
I have an image in my mind, a symbol if you will, that helps me wrap my mind around this incredible power. Have you already anticipated what it is? I see intention as a river that is constantly flowing in the direction of my preferences and desires. It is a river that is constantly shifting to accommodate my newly discovered or more specifically refined desires. It is a river that I cannot leave as it is intrinsic to all of creation, generally, and the course of my own creation, specifically. It is an ultimately irresistible current, but one that I can choose to fight against or flow with. Every moment, I have the choice of going in the direction that I want or struggling against it. Going with the flow of the river of intention is, of course the easiest way, but there are two common traps that we fall prey to. One is the belief that we need to be working hard and suffering for our rewards rather than enjoying what we are doing, and this belief gets us turned against the current so that we can feel the burn of our effort. The second is that we have been taught to overcome our resistance with willpower which almost always makes the task at hand even more difficult if not agonizing to accomplish. If we are expending energy on resisting any task at hand and at the same time pouring even more energy into using willpower to circumvent that same resistance, imagine how quickly fatigue will set in. On the other hand, if we could let go of our resistance and enjoy riding the current, we will find ourselves moving toward what we want with so little effort in the common sense of the word. We’ll be doing work. That is for certain. But it won’t be work in the sense of labor or toil, but rather actions that we delight in doing and find fulfilling, be they creating art, doing business, or cleaning the bathroom. In the flow of intention each and every action can be joyful, and therein lies the energy of the power of intention.
Intention is the power and the current that moves you in the direction of the life you have created in the realm of mind. It has immense energy if we allow it. It is always moving at exactly the right speed: never faster than we can handle and sometimes slowly and gently so we can enjoy and explore where we are a bit more. If we allow ourselves to go with the flow of intention we will have the lives of Joy, Love, Wellbeing, and Awareness that we intended when we entered into these bodies as babies.
