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Intent: How Do We Create a New Reality?
Intent can focus on anything from a daily way of being in the world to a major life change. It's important to engage our three centers-power in our belly, love in our heart, and wisdom in our third eye as we form our intent.
Forming intent is a spiraling path, not a linear process. Each insightful step leads to the next. We may need to be receptive,silent, open, patient, and trusting. We must be willing to remove obstacles of belief and find other ways of perceiving. We always have choices.
It is useful to think of creating a map of consciousness, a route we can follow along the path our intent takes us. Think of the map as a guide to changing the message for your energetic, spiritual, and physical selves, your whole field. Think of the map as the steps you can take to release what no longer serves, and find practices to feed your intent day by day. Think of the map as a guide for experiencing your shifts.
It helps to ask questions, listening to belly, heart, and mind as we answer ourselves and frame our intent:
What is my vision? How can I experience that vision with all my senses?
How does my heart's wisdom feed this intent?
What energetic stance do I want to take? What attitudes can I bring to this process?
How can I experience my path as a spiral, rather than as a straight line?
Who are my allies (friends, skills, beliefs, habits, personal strengths)? Who of my family and friends will not support me very well in this intent? What kind of response from others would help me?
How will I act on and demonstrate my commitment to my intent? What daily practices will help me?
How do I want to talk about my intent (or not)?
Are any of my old issues, stories, or habits going to get in the way? Am I willing to move some boulders, or let go of something, to follow though? What changes in lifestyle am I willing to make (or not)?
Expectations, Stories, and Shifting Energy
Our expectations, beliefs, and ideas of what is possible play a major role in outcome. We create the reality we expect to see.
Studies on both the placebo and nocebo effects, for example, repeatedly show that our expectations about whether we will stay sick or get well determine outcome. These expectations are so strong that they override treatments. As Deepak Chopra writes in HEALTH, SCIENCE (8/20/12),"...the body can turn any mental intent into its chemical correlation."
As we have mentioned before, our stories, memories, cultural assumptions, and embedded emotions can get in the way of the best intent. Our intent can push up against our habits, both personal and cultural. For example, a habit of overcommitment may make following through with a new project a challenge. A habit of avoidance can get in the way of doing something we say we intend to do. If we do not believe we are good enough, our intent to get a better job or find a mate will be sabotaged by underlying emotions.
This is why shifting energy practices are so essential: they teach our bodies new ways of being. They help us replace the stories, emotions, and assumptions that no longer serve us. They make space for shifting into "lighter" feelings that connect us to the world in different ways.
Making space for the new always involves releasing the old, transforming, and transmuting.
Love Talk
Tom Cowan's teaching about the Celtic tradition of Geancannach, or "love talking," helps me remember the whole in setting intent. This ancient Irish practice gives us a way to incorporate expectation, possibility, and complementarity as we express our perception.
Beautiful the steep mountain pass,
Beautiful too these sore muscles walking.
Beautiful these barren branches,
Beautiful too the spring they portend.
Beautiful life's joys and sorrows.
Beautiful too this moment of peace.
Beautiful the foggy morning,
Beautiful too the sun burning through.
Whenever you find yourself focusing on the difficult and negative aspects of a situation, try this practice to bring your perceptions back into balance!
Our Sacred Journey
It is with intent that we create meaning and make change. Working with our intent has all the potential of a sacred journey: seizing an opening, entering, choosing the way to move, finding meaning along the path, overcoming obstacles, and changing as result of the journey.
The earliest story ever written, around 2000 B.C. in Sumer, tells of such a sacred journey. Inanna, the Sumerian Queen of Heaven and Earth, must shed all her garments-symbols of power-as she passes through seven gates to reach the underworld. She arrives only with her naked intent, the clear sense of heart purpose that guides and sustains her actions and emotions. When she returns from the underworld, she uses the power of her intent to continue on her path, despite the cost and changes incurred. (Her consort, Dumuzi, has lived it up and ignored her absence; he pays dearly!)
So with us, possibilities and hope abound. Sensations and perceptions arise and fall away moment by moment. In a state of "interbeing"-the emptiness, or boundarylessness, that allows us to feel connected with all living creatures-breath, light, and energy move through us so strongly that cosmic connection is all that is important, and ego dwindles away. In this state, intent becomes a vast open expanse. Awe takes over, and the portal opens into wondrous, amazing mystery.
As we engage with the living energy fields around us-the energy of plants, animals, places, and human gatherings-we can discover endless resources. "Community" can extend far beyond our old ideas. Shared fields of intent can support us, and we can draw on the collective energy of many.
Whatever dream we have, for ourselves and the world, will become reality. This is the nature of the holographic universe! To dream brave, light-filled dreams means we must release our limiting beliefs, push past our fears, and set our intent. "In this place of pure potentiality, where Spirit dwells, all things are possible."
Meg Beeler/Earth Caretakers
Copyright � 2012
 | | Connection Despacho, Mt. Tamalpais |
"Intent includes the energetic attention, passion, spirit, and direction we choose to focus on as we move through the world. Intent comes from our essence rather than our thoughts: our third eye gives us the vision to see the whole. Our heart helps us feel our way into action with love, compassion, and intuition. Our power center in our belly helps us live with integrity. True intent includes the whole: our body, mind, heart, and spirit, the light and the heavy, the sunlight and the shadow. True intent takes into account our weaknesses as well as our strengths, so it doesn't set us up to fail.Our galaxy is ending a 26,000-year cycle, and the seasons turn. At the equinox, night and day reach a point of balance; for us humans, it can be a time of finding our own balance between the light and the shadow in our lives." [9/12 Shifting Consciousness News]
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