The Power of Intention

The second step on the Eightfold Path, is Right Intention. The power of intention is discussed in the Dhammapada, a collection of sayings by the Buddha,

The thought manifests as the word;

The word manifests as the deed;

The deed develops into habit,

And habit hardens into character;

So watch the thought and its ways with care,

And let it spring from love

Born out of concern for all beings…

As the shadow follows the body,

As we think, so we become.

So what is this thingl called intention? Of course, we’ve all heard the saying that the Road to Hell is paved with good intentions, implying that our intentions are irrelevant and that our actions are the most important demonstration of our lives. Actions are important, but this common saying doesn’t take into consideration where actions come from in the first place. Imagine that you are standing over a person with a knife in your hand. Your intention is to harm them, you stab the knife into their heart and begin slicing into them, and they die. Now, imagine the very same action, but you are a surgeon and your intention is to heal them. Something goes wrong during the surgery, and they die anyway. The outcome is exactly the same, but the motivation for your action was extremely important to understanding the situation.

Jack Kornfield says that intentions are the seeds you plant in your heart that grow to become how you live your life. The stories you are telling yourself about your life are the foundation of how you experience life and how you react to any situation that you find yourself in. If you wake up in the morning, and something goes wrong, and you decide that it’s going to be a crappy day—then you’ve set your intention to find the crappiness in life. And we usually find what we’re looking for. Buddha recognized the power of intention. In the New Testament of the Bible, Paul said that we shall reap what we sow. And sowing actually begins with our thoughts and intentions.

In this moment, right now, ask yourself “What is my primary intention in life?” “Why do I get up in the morning?” When you think about getting older and reflecting back on your life, what do you want to see? In Buddhism, we are encouraged to start with a clear intention, not settling for just sleepwalking through life reacting in old conditioned ways.

“Breathing in, breathing out, feeling resentful, feeling happy, being able to drop it, not being able to drop it, eating our food, brushing our teeth, walking, sitting—whatever we’re doing could be done with one intention. That intention is that we want to wake up, we want to ripen our love and compassion, and we want to ripen our ability to let go, we want to realize our connection with all beings. Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or to put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us.”

-Pema Chodron, from Comfortable With Uncertainty (Shambhala Publications)

When we’re feeling stressed or depressed or anxious or happy or cheerful or silly or whatever state of mind might arise, in that moment we can recognize these states of mind, and we can ask ourselves: “What is my intention?” “What do I want out of life, and what do I want to put into life?” We can wake ourselves up. We can use the rising of any emotion or thought to better understand ourselves and to recognize the power of clarifying our intention. An emotion or thought is NOT who we are! We always have a choice about how to respond to anything and anyone in our life. Bring to mind a time in your life when you felt stuck in a bad situation, when you had that feeling of having no choices, feeling that there was no way to escape some particularly difficult situation. When you think about those times, even when things might seem at their worst, we still have the ability to set our intention towards waking up, to being curious about the situation, not judging ourselves for whatever we’ve done in the past, giving ourselves the gift of forgiveness and clear seeing. Waking up enables us to see the world with fresh eyes, to see new options that we might have missed before.

Naturally, there will be times when we have to admit we’ve fallen back asleep, that we didn’t act with good intentions, or even times when our intentions were kind and compassionate, but the outcome was still less than desired. Even in those situations, we have a fresh opportunity to set our intention to waking up and getting back on track.

Sometimes it might seem like too much effort. Our limited minds might tell us that it’s just easier to keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. Living a life without any specific intention can at times seem very alluring. Let’s just smoke that cigarette or have that drink. Let’s watch TV until our brains turn to mush. Who cares? In those moments, when mindfulness seems like too much trouble, that is the most important moment for practice. That is the moment to remind ourselves of the deep, long-lasting happiness that can be found in waking up and staying awake. We can remind ourselves how wonderful life can be.

“Action isn't a burden to be hoisted up and lugged around on our shoulders. It is something we are. The work we have to do can be seen as a kind of coming alive. More than some moral imperative, it's an awakening to our true nature, a releasing of our gifts. This flow-through of energy and ideas is at every moment directed by our choice. That's our role in it. We're like a lens that can focus, or a gate that can direct this flow-through by schooling our intention. In each moment our intention gives this energy direction.”

–Joanna Macy, from “Schooling Our Intention,” Tricycle, Winter 1993

So, First, in each moment, we can set our intention. And Second, in each moment, we can remind ourselves of why it’s worth making the effort. And third, we can identify the choices that we are making in our lives. It can often seem like there is just one answer, the old conditioned response, to whatever is happening in our lives. But that simply is not true. We live in arguably the free-est country on the planet—and yet we can fool ourselves into thinking that we don’t have choices. The Buddhist teachings encourage us to use our intention as a litmus test against which choices can be evaluated. Then, we can choose consciously. We can decide what we want our life to be about, and can then choose our thoughts and actions based on that intention.

Last year, a friend of mine was facing some very difficult challenges in her life. I asked her if it was okay for me to share some of her story—she said yes. She had always been a good saver and smart financial planner, but then she found herself in financial crisis: she and her husband were both out of work, having a mortgage that they were struggling to pay, savings having been depleted, no end seemed to be in sight. As she and I talked about the dire circumstances, I was struggling to find a way to help relieve her pain. But my friend had found her own inspiration. She said that she was ready to explore all the options, even ones that had once seemed inconceivable to accept. She said that she knew bankruptcy and foreclosure were options, that she could live in her dad's basement and start her own business. She talked enthusiastically about the joy of moving in with her dad and starting fresh. She had taken the blinders off of what was possible and found there to be possibilities that, not only could she consider, but that she could even see as positive.

Our intentions color the stories we tell ourselves. In the face of the worst financial situation of her life, she knew she had choices, and that it was up to her to decide what to do, that life was not happening to her. She was creating the life she was living, and no matter how dire things seemed, she could set her intention on making new choices, set her intention on seeing the world as a place of possibilities and those new choices could include joy and happiness. That is the power of intention.

So each of us gets to choose, not once in a lifetime or once a year, but we are choosing in each and every moment, how we are going to live our life. We are choosing whether we live with clear intention or whether we allow ourselves to get dragged down in the mire of old habits and old ways of seeing the world and old ways of seeing ourselves. It is a choice. And no matter how many times we might think that we fail, we always, every one of us, have a new moment to start fresh.

There’s a wonderful William Blake quote that says, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it actually is—infinite.

So, we can be encouraged that the work of waking up is an opportunity to see the world come alive. We can wake up to this truth, we can recognize our unique gifts and manifest those gifts in our everyday actions. We can recognize the flow-through of energy from intention to action. We can recognize that every moment is a moment to start fresh. In each moment, we can set our intention to living our true purpose.