Identifying Intentions

The differences between Intention Week (9) and Aligning with Intention Week (11) seem minor until you truly break them down and pay attention to how they serve our lives. In the recent past, my own ‘unmet’ intentions have included writing a weekly blog, solving a tangled insurance issue, competing well in disc golf tournaments, and doing the Five Tibetan Rites daily. Even though I am ‘capable’ of having done each of these things, my thoughts, feelings and values have led me away from bringing them all the way home. It’s easy for me to see that as a failure to meet my goals and stop there, but a closer look at my true intentions makes the reality a lot more interesting than simply setting goals and meeting them (or not).

For starters, there is a long list of completed intentions in their wake. Some are things I’ve put real effort toward, while others are in-the-moment choices that lined up to my values in a way that gave them precedence over things like weekly publishing or tackling the ongoing insurance mess. I’ve barely done The Rites and I’ve struggled to put a decent round of disc golf together, but I’ve been dealing with an injury that has made both efforts difficult. In response, I’ve realigned with a practice of spinning 33 times each morning as part of my ‘morning meditation time’, and at the same time, I’ve been able to put more intentional energy into relaxing my muscles and strengthening my ‘mental game’. Mostly, this applies to my life, not my golf game – although I’m inviting it to bleed through!

Physical stuff is always a challenge for me. Astrologically, I’m a libra, so ‘everything in moderation’ is a hard-wired mantra, keeping me frequently balanced, but rarely practiced. In addition, I deal with a connective tissue disorder that makes my whole body overly flexible. This seemed cool when I was younger, but as I age it is a more obvious and pressing concern. It inhibits my physical healing in a way that has encouraged my study of ‘alternative modalities’ for many years. This Our Raw Material work keeps my mind active and my values front and center, even when my physical body struggles to keep up with the challenges my life gives it. Disc golf has become a surprisingly reliable partner in keeping my body moving over the last 20 years, and the residual benefits of community and friendship provide increasing value – things I couldn’t have imagined or idealized when I first began playing for fun.

My writing, while not as prolific as intended, feels solidly rooted in my belief system and the body of ORM tangibles continues to grow–just not on the timetable I had given myself on a purely ego-based level. Our current audience is small and undemanding, but I can see how the groundwork is being laid for future growth, and I welcome the opportunity to ‘be in the moment’ with these thoughts and ideas as they bring me closer to my soul’s efforts. My own understanding of the practice and its many benefits continues to expand and I feel more deeply connected to humanity with each passing season. The fact that It Works! is no longer a question in my mind. I trust this process implicitly because I have watched not only my life, but the lives of the people who have given it a chance, become more meaningful to each of us. Things that didn’t make sense now have form, and even if I don’t like them, I can sit next to them without the ‘triggers’ they used to present. My feelings, once hidden, are now useful and welcome in my environment because I am prepared to receive them.

Our Intentions are born from our emotions, so ‘what we decide we want’ can and does form from many different places. We might want something because we admire someone else who has it. We might become inspired by a story, movie or the like to try something we’ve never tried before. We might be reacting to conditions that we don’t know how to handle. We might become angry and form harmful intentions that dissipate and move away from us as soon as the anger has cleared. If those emotions become restrained, we might bury that anger deep in our psyches, harboring intentions that we hope will resolve the negative feelings, but often serve to stoke the anger further, clouding true passion and purpose and leading us away from our resources. Feelings of loss create their own set of emotionally-charged intentions and it becomes hard to see what we truly want when we are ‘temporarily blinded’ by the gravity of grief. Our desires and our feelings become entangled to the point that it’s hard to decipher which intentions we plan to follow through with, and which are fleeting thoughts without much energy behind them. Many humans live their lives in this condition, with the fight or flight response ready to engage at the first signs of conflict.

Aligning with Intention moves us out of the emotional space and into the mental space where we actually attempt to make them happen. Resource Week falls beautifully between them because only in lining up our resources do we actually bring our intentions to fruition. When we stop to think about the vastness of our intentions – that is, everything we have ever thought or stated that we wanted – we begin to see that it would be practically impossible to make each of them happen. There is simply not enough time available for our physical bodies to manifest each of our thoughts and desires. Our minds operate on a much more rapid frequency than our bodies, but we fail to remember that while we are ‘wanting things’. This can lead to feelings of disappointment and/or failure when we aren’t taking ‘the whole’ into consideration. Our egos rarely stop to consider this perspective, instead sounding alarms and insisting on ‘our safety’, as it sees it.

Ego/Soul Balance helps maintain that equilibrium as we learn to pay attention to the spaces under our triggers, naturally ensuring that our passions and purposes remain attached to our intentions. I’ve always loved the saying, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”. It implies that if you want something badly enough, you will find a way to make it happen. I used to believe that was true, but now I know that in order for that to happen, it must be connected in some way to your value system, your passion and your purpose. For example, if your will is to control/possess another person, this will rarely work out in your favor. It does not fit anyone’s universal purpose, so even if you find yourself in that position temporarily, the universe itself will find a way to ‘undo’ the effects. 2020, as a year, was an energetic step in the direction of ‘seeing more clearly’, even though it’s a little tough to see it that way.

Our egos are in place to regulate our environments by keeping us ‘safe’ and ‘protecting’ us from the things they don't know or understand. As humanity has evolved, our collective ignorance has grown to unforeseeable heights. The amount of substance that exists in our world is simply too great to be known by any one person, individually. The advent of the internet only proves that fact: with every single answer available at our fingertips, our limited minds aren’t wired to hold space for all of the questions… So just as our bodies can’t keep up with the speed of our minds, our minds can’t maintain the pace of ‘everything under the sun’ that continues to grow exponentially as we each have different experiences and discoveries every single day.

The key to unlocking it all resides in the melding of our ego energies with those of our souls. Our philosophers, doctors, metaphysicians and clergy members have all tried to form words and plans around ‘healing what ails us’ and how to reach some state of ‘better than what we’ve got’, but so far, we have been largely unable to breach that divide. For the most part, our egos have led the charge. We have had to develop a group of ‘soul-aware’ people to even imagine the possibilities that exist apart from ‘what we know to be true’ and to challenge those ‘truths’ with what has ironically been presented as ‘alternative facts’. Stay with me, I’m not supporting what Kelly-Anne was pushing, but it does demonstrate the vigor and defense each of us is willing to put behind what we believe to be true. Most of us consider ourselves ‘smart enough to know the difference’, but do we stop and consider where that belief really comes from? What has us so ready to reject things we’ve never considered as immediately untrue? We all know that we don’t know everything, so what makes us so secure about the merits of our own opinions above anyone else’s? It’s a rhetorical question, but I hope it resonates from deep within our souls.

We have arrived at a place in time where feelings of loss, abandonment, and fear drive a lot of our thoughts, impeding our ability to ‘realize’ our true passion and purpose. As bleak as things may seem, however, the ‘human spirit’ continues to shock and amaze us as we watch things like what happened in the Tulsa Little League World Series earlier this year. A twelve year old’s natural instinct to provide comfort to an opposing team member superseded his more obvious intentions for the day, prompting a surge in melting hearts. That spark of recognition between Ego and Soul is everywhere if you are looking for it.

Our many intentions may derive from our emotions, but our ability to connect to the meaning behind them lends a richness that can’t help but spur gratitude. When we combine our intentions and our resources, aligning the endeavors of our soul and our ego in concert, we see a larger benefit than the one that serves us alone, and that perspective is the goal of Our Raw Material: Aligning the intentions of our Souls and our Egos to provide loose structure as we navigate the many conflicts before us, free of fear and eager for freedom. Since many of us remain unaware of the organic energetic structure that supports our entire existence and connects us all, those who do are ‘called on’ to know better and do better in the face of emotional unrest. Our triggers are real and being able to ‘reason through them’ is impossible without an effort toward preparing our bodies to absorb and release our conflicting emotions. The key that we are all searching for, that aligns our intentions and manifests our desires, begins with how we breathe. As resources go, it is arguably our most under-rated (and I’m happy to continue that argument with anyone who wants to!). Place some intentions around your breathing and see how quickly you can feel the difference between emotionally producing intentions and aligning with making them happen… Happy intending!