LIVING INTENTIONALLY 

Beyond hopefulness

How often do you set an intention?  If you are like most people I’d imagine you do so relatively regularly particularly around New Years, birthdays or other significant events and time landmarks.  Setting intentions is a very common practice and even so most people do not live very intentionally.  There is a tremendous difference between setting intentions and living intentionally.  Typically when we set an intention it is for something that we want to show up in our physical reality.  Perhaps it’s setting the intention to purchase a house, find a relationship, read more books, eat healthy, exercise more, or start a new business.  If you are really ambitious you might intend things like world peace, the end of hunger or the awakening of humanity.  While there is nothing wrong with setting intentions, in fact I recommend that people do, it does not equate to living intentionally.  

See as humans we tend to be quite lazy.  Even if we “do a lot of stuff” we can still be incredibly lazy.  In fact I believe that some of the least lazy people might not do much at all.  Strange paradox right?  What I mean by lazy is that we tend to lack mental discipline, focus and the harnessing of our own will power.  We tend to just let life happen and hope for the best even if we keep ourselves busy with a lot of stuff.  Often all of that stuff is a distraction from living intentionally.  If we are more spiritually oriented, rather than just hope it all works out for the best we might say that we leave it all up to divine orchestration and intervention.  While that is not entirely inaccurate many people use it as a cop out to not show up or discipline themselves, and they fail to recognize that THEY ARE the divine orchestration and intervention.  The divine is not something other than them, it is them, and the use of their own personal will is their divine power.  

Being “hopeful” is pretty strong indicator that you are not aware of your divine power and you are expecting/waiting for something to save you or the other humans on this planet.  Its empty and lacks power (aka lacks you).  See true intentional living has less to do with what is happening in the manifest world and more to do with where you are coming from.  What I mean by that is knowing why you exist, what convictions you hold to be truth and allowing that to be the guiding light for all that you do.  Ask yourself are you just doing on automatic pilot and routine, or is each breath and action deliberate.  You might sense some heaviness or impossibility around making every action deliberate because it may feel like a lot, and you are right it is a lot, and it is what is required if you truly want to live in an awake and empowered physical manifest reality.  Living intentional means you take no action from a sleepy, unconscious, or automatic state.  Instead you are constantly attuning to where it is you are coming from.   

WHERE YOU ARE COMING FROM 

Why you exist

Do you know where you are coming from?  This is the first step.  Most people do not know what internally motivates them, what is actually important to them, what they are convicted in or why they even exist at all.  Where you are coming from and why you exist are synonymous.  You must decide this for yourself if you are to choose the path of intentional living.  No one will do this for you and it will not just magically reveal itself.  It must be a deliberate chosen knowing.  As tempting as it is to reduce ourselves to things, objects, roles, jobs, businesses, physical creations and the like, none of these things are why you exist.  Not to say that certain of these things won’t be ways that you choose to express the why of why you exist, none of them define the why.  We are so accustom to externalizing our power that it may be challenging for you to get what I am saying here, but its worth getting.

If you don’t know why you exist then you will follow the societal standards that have been laid out and think that a successful life means that you accomplished them all and an unsuccessful life means you didn’t.  This is akin to being a robot as it is void of any real life.  If you have enough awareness, at some point you realize that getting and doing (or not getting and doing) all the stuff, matters not at all.   Not at all.  All of the getting and doing will keep coming and going, its ceaseless, it will never stop.  If you arrive at a place where you think its all done, you will soon realize its not, it keeps going.  If you don’t ever realize that it is where you are coming that matters, then you will eventually find yourself stressed, exhausted, depleted, and waiting for a “vacation” or for physical life to end so you can have some peace.  Even death is not an escape.  

So how do decide why you exist? Well you just do.  We all know it for ourselves because it is who we are, its simply that most do not ever self-inquire.  People are so busy in the doing and thinking of life that their actual being is extremely neglected.  In fact most have never even made contact with their being, believe it or not.  One thing that often arises when we begin to self-inquire as to why we exist is that we often don’t feel worthy of what we are.  If for example we say we exist to “be love” and thus where we choose to come from is love, we may feel some shyness or inhibition in claiming this for ourselves.  We might also reject it by saying to ourselves that being love is not enough and fall back into our reliance on what we are doing rather than where we are coming from in order to feel a sense of worth.   

To live intentionally you must fully claim where you are coming from 100% of the time.  It must be in the forefront of everything that you think or do.  In this way you stop being lazy and filling your life with stuff that you think you’re supposed to be doing.  You become more aware, more actively participating even if you are not doing anything in particular.  You harness your power of will, which again is your divine power.  Life stops just happening.  You stop being hopeful.  You stop caring so much about what things look or feel like.  Your desire or need to control anything lessens and your vigilance to your own self, to your own state of where you are coming from increases.  You become the intention you set and therefore realize it matters not if it actually physically manifests.  The security and stability in your being dominates and you become unmovable and unshakable by any change of appearance.   

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado