January 1 – Start with intention

Dear Friends,

New Year’s Resolutions, Goals, Intentions… Likely your news feeds have had many suggestions about what to do to make things stick in the new year. So let’s start this month together by looking at intentions.

In an article titled “The Power Of Setting An Intention“, Jeena Cho writes:

As we come to the end of 2016, it’s a wonderful time to pause, reflect, and set an intention for 2017. An intention, unlike a goal, isn’t about achieving the next big thing, or moving up the ladder. It’s about how you’re being, in this moment.

In a similarly titled article, “The Power of Intention“, Rick Hanson, Ph.D. writes:

To make the most of your life, to nourish the causes of happiness for yourself and others, it takes strength, clear intentions, and persistent effort.

In the fuller article, he suggests a practice to help you frame your deepest intentions, something he calls “The View from the Porch”. Perhaps you would like to try this exercise (or the journalling variation, described below) today.

He says:

Relax, and take a few breaths. Settle as deeply as you can into a feeling of calm and well-being.

Imagine that you are sitting comfortably somewhere many years from now. Your health and your mind are intact. You are in your 90’s or older, toward the end of your lifespan, sitting on a porch in a comfortable chair, with a beautiful view down a long valley below. There may be other people around, or maybe not, however you like.

Sitting there in your chair, you feel really good, really contented. Then you start reflecting back upon the life you’ve had, from the vantage point of a comfortable old age.

Looking back from the porch, what are you happy about? Consider different parts of your life, such as friends and family, work and career, good times and bad, personal and spiritual development, creativity, health, self-expression, and service.

Keep restoring the perspective of looking back from the porch, from a comfortable old age.

What are some of the things you feel grateful for?
What has been really important in your life?
What are you glad that you stood for?
What do you wish you had done differently?
What have been the central guiding values and principles of your life?
What qualities or aspects of your life make you glad that you have lived, and at peace with your life ending some day?
Looking back, what would you say to a younger version of yourself? Such as the age you are today.

Take a few moments to let all this sink in. You might like to write down some of your reflections.

He then asks:

can you see any overarching purposes that sum up the things that are most important to you in this life?

And he goes on to describe further steps to distill this into priorities and commitments. Read the full article here:
https://media.rickhanson.net/home/files/PowerofIntention.pdf

When I took the “Search Inside Yourself” (SIY) training course, we did a similar exercise, but using journalling instead. In SIY, journalling is intended to let your thoughts flow onto paper. Given a prompt, you start writing for the designated amount of time. There is only one rule for the exercise: do not stop writing until your time is up. (If you get stuck, you can write, “I have run out of things to write. I still have nothing to write…” And sooner than later, more stuff will come up.) For this exercise, we had seven minutes to write in response to this prompt:

If everything in my life, starting today, meets or exceeds my most optimistic expectations, what will my life be like in 5 years?

Consider:

Who are you, and what are you doing?
How do you feel?
What do people say about you?

By connecting to our deepest values through envisioning exercises like these, we can come up with intentions that align with what’s truly important to us. And that alignment helps us find the motivation and energy and resilience to keep at it.

I must commend you on your motivation already: you read to the end of this very long email! Thank you! I will try to keep subsequent messages much shorter. 🙂

With best wishes,
​​​​​​​Andrea