Have Intention, Will Succeed
For me, intention is a very strong part of yoga. Every time I step on the mat, it is with a particular intention. For a while now, it’s been to unify mind, body and spirit, and I feel, very much, as if I’m making progress. But that’s just practice in preparation for the real world. I’m practicing being clear about my intention by doing that in yoga. The goal is to be clear about my intention on or off the mat.
Because I do believe that the intention that I carry with me every day shapes that day, creates that day, if you will. And this leads me to talking about manifesting or creating your reality.
I saw the DVD The Secret as I am sure many of you have. And it’s a good movie with lots of positive messages. And I’ll talk more about those in other posts, but today I just want to vent a little about what a terrible analogy the Law of Attraction really is.
The Law of Attraction states that we attract to us what we think about. The movie goes on to contradict itself by saying we manifest into our lives what we think about. I feel that it can’t be both. I know I’m nitpicking here and that the analogy exists to help people internalize the creation process described in The Secret but, jeez, it’s got to make sense too.
We don’t attract things to us. This implies that things we want already exist and are pulled to us when we ask for them. It just doesn’t make sense that the creation process is attraction in action. We create, and what we create manifests in our lives, not elsewhere and is then attracted to us.
Another book that talks about creating or manifesting your reality is The Seven Spiritual Secrets of Success by Deepak Chopra (yes, I am a Chopra fan). This is a much better book (and much smaller too) that describes how to manifest what you want into your life. In this book, meditation is described as the key to accessing the field of infinite potentiality in which your thoughts can be manifested and made real. This paradigm makes a lot more sense to me (and just me, if the Law of Attaraction works for you, hooray!). I equate the field of infinite potentiality with dark matter, which physicists are starting to described as unformed matter (not dark because it’s black, but dark because it’s unformed). My thoughts impress or imprint themselves in the field and manifest into my life.
One thing common to both paradigms is that it is your intent that helps start the creation process. And I find this true of life in general. Acting with intention, speaking with intention, thinking with intention gives you direction and a sense of purpose as you act, think or speak. Purposeless action is chaos. Intentful action is creation.
Here is an excercise: Start every action or every project or every task with the intention that you will succeed. This does not mean to have the thought that you will succeed. Have the intention. See how it turns out. Let me know in the comments.
