Continue Topics :what is your intention?

Intent is the essence of what drives you to your goals

“Intent is a powerful force; it isn’t your will, it is more like a focused current of magnetic energy, drawing you towards what you wish to create. You cannot command it but you can initiate it, invite it and prepare yourself for its actions in your life.”
— Heather Ash

We are exploring in this column going beyond the four primary strategies previously outlined and stepping into the realm of intent. Claiming your intent is a powerful journey that opens internal possibilities and new insights into how to be more authentic and effective in all aspects of life.

What is intent? Intent is not your will nor is it your mind.

It isn’t a new discipline. Instead, intent is the mysterious force that activates your capacity to create what you desire — to draw you towards your goal by accessing the support and resources to achieve extraordinary results. Intent is a force opening unseen possibilities in order to help you manifest what you most desire.

Intent is where you focus your attention, helping you manifest what you seek.

Carlos Castenada wrote of intent, and it has been a force recognized and identified by many groups of people including the Toltecs of South America, the Hindus of India and the Sufis of Persia. Intent is set in motion, invited to help you manifest your dream, when you take the time to really focus on what you want to create. You then boil that desired outcome down to it most primal core desire — taking out all unnecessary words and images and peripheral elements.

Intent is the convergence of conscious and unconscious realms of your mind, heart and spirit that is captured in a word or phrase that acts like a focused laser beam, cutting through all resistances, barriers and doubts to the realization or your desired outcome.

In prior columns I shared the four primary strategies of our society for minimizing pain, creating success and dealing with others. They were: “pleaser,” “controller,” “isolator” and “distracter,” and they work as ways of manipulating self and others. They really suboptimize our lives and what we can create.

The strategies don’t build in an authentic accountability when supervising or working with others. The strategies are means of manipulating and staying protected versus fully engaging and risking full commitment, connection and mutual responsibility.

They are less than authentic and become knee-jerk, automatic ways of responding, relating and managing versus alive, responsive and enlivening ways of leading and connecting. They deaden creativity, exhaust the spirit and lead to a sense of alienation.

A powerful means of breaking the pattern of suboptimal strategies in life is through mastering intent. You master intent by consciously identifying what you want to create or bring to life, express that desire in a focused, coherent word or phrase and then commit to it by consciously focusing on it at least several times a day in terms of what you do and think.

You state your intent to yourself and ask your psyche, your heart and the grace of God to help it become manifest in your life.

As a recovering “please-a-holic,” I have been using intent to create a more potent and authentic way of working and relating to self and others. I have focused my intent into the concept and phrase of “compassion.” I chose compassion because it cannot be manipulated and does not manipulate.

It is real, immediate, whole and indivisible. Compassion cannot be tricked, distracted or faked since it is real, powerful and engaging. I know when I have been compassionate versus a pleaser. The two are dramatically different.

Compassion leads to respectful confrontation and truth-telling because to do less would be to cheat self and others. The pleaser can let something go, overlook it, avoid what is real and it always leads to a feeling of regret, of not having been honest or true to myself.
Compassion is patient and open and yet very direct — relentlessly respectfully honest. I remind myself several times every day that my intent is “compassion” — not to please others. It is to be real, present and of service to what is highest and best, not what is “safe” or will make other people “like” me.

Are you being your best self? What is your intent?