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So what is this tool called intention? Has anyone heard the saying that the Road to Hell is paved with good intentions? It implies 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. If someone takes a knife and stabs someone, is that action unskillful? What if the person wielding the knife is a surgeon? It could be a criminal who stabs the person and they die, or it could be a surgeon trying to save them, and they die anyway. The outcome is exactly the same, but the motivation for the action was extremely important to understanding the situation. I would offer that the intentions, the thinking, are more important than the actions
There is a discussion of this important tool 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.
Jack Kornfield says that the 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. In the eightfold path, 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.
So, in this very moment, ask yourself the question, what is your primary intention in life? Why do you 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 allowing ourselves to just sleepwalk through life reacting in old conditioned ways.
-Pema Chodron, from Comfortable With Uncertainty (Shambhala Publications)
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 can 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.
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 to put into life and what do I want to get out of life, and?” Allow that deeper level of honesty with yourself. We can leverage the rising of any emotion or thought to better understand ourselves and recognize the power of clarifying our intention. An emotion or thought is NOT who we are! We each 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, that feeling of having no choices, that there was no way to escape some particularly difficult situation. And when you think about those times, even when things seemed at their worst, even in those moments, we still have the ability to set our intention towards waking up, to be curious about the situation, to not judge ourselves for whatever we’ve done in the past, to give ourselves the gift of forgiveness, the gift of clear seeing, the gift of clear intention.
There will be times when we have to admit that we have fallen back asleep, that we didn’t act with wise intentions, or even times when our intentions were kind and compassionate, but the outcome was still not what we wanted. Even in those times, we have this incredible tool of mindfulness, to set our intention to waking up, get back on track and just gently bringing compassionate attention to each moment.
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 intention to wake up can at times seem very alluring. Let’s just smoke that cigarette or have that drink or eat that doughnut. 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 to ask what is our intention. That is the moment, to take a slow deep breath and try to remember why we might want to choose another way of living.
–Joanna Macy, from “Schooling Our Intention,” Tricycle, Winter 1993
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.
The process is: First, in each moment, we can set our intention. Second, in each moment, we can remind ourselves of why it’s worth making the effort. Third, we can identify the choices that we are making in our lives. Fourth we can choose differently. 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 this planet—and yet we can fool ourselves into thinking that we don’t have choices. Maybe the real issue is that we have too many choices. How on earth are we supposed to narrow down what to do with our lives with all these options!? The Buddha taught that setting our intention to wake up in each moment, that intention helps us focus our energy on what has value. We then have a litmus test against which choices can be evaluated. In fact, it’s helpful to recognize that we do have choices, and can choose consciously. Each of us here today can decide what we want our life to be about, and can then choose our thoughts and actions based on that intention.
A few years, 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 wholeheartdely yes! She had always been a good saver and smart financial planner, but then she found herself in financial crisis when she and her husband both lost their jobs, and found themselves having a mortgage that they were struggling to pay, savings that had been depleted, and no end to the struggle in sight. As she and I talked about the dire circumstances, I was struggling to find a way to help relieve her pain. But then, my friend made this very clear statement: 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 an option. That she could live in her dad's basement and start her own company a an option. She had taken off the blinders of what was possible and found there to be possibilities that she would not have previously seen as positive. She talked enthusiastically about the joy of moving in with her dad, and starting fresh. 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. 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. And this was a few years ago. And it actually has a Hollywood ending—she’s now very successful at a new job that she loves even more than the old one, and she has a strong sense of resiliency that she can handle whatever happens in life.
Each of us gets to choose--not once in a lifetime or once a year--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.”
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 into our everyday actions. We can recognize the flow-through of energy from intention to action. #1: 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, #2 we remind ourselves what our true intention is. #3 identify all the options we have, #4 we choose differently.
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