Straight Talk About Intentions

On the Temple grounds in Bloomington, Indiana

If someone comes into my house when it isn’t looking super shiny, I find myself making apologies – or at least a comment – about why it doesn’t look better. I’ve never had anyone respond with an expectation that it should, yet I continue to feel like that’s a valuable intention – while also understanding that it’s an unachievable ideal for me. Why is that?

There was a time in my life when someone's impression of my home really mattered to me, but once my kids hit middle school, I made a conscious effort to let that rigid need go. I figured all it took was a little mind over matter action. Upon review, I can see my mind-body misconnect clearly.

My focus on mindset left my body (physical reactions/matter) to fend for itself. I changed my habit, but I failed to be intentional about my feelings, so I couldn’t see where I’d embodied the debris of my old ideas. That tiny adjustment will keep me from needlessly begging pardon about something that no longer carries any actual weight.

I’m making a point of setting it down -- right here, right now -- and trusting it will settle into easy balance soon. Perhaps it's time to start explaining more about whatever I happen to be doing in my home, rather than what I haven’t done. This is me intentionally tuning my focus to more creative and inspiring thoughts.

Our beliefs exist as a perfect reflection of our minds' protections, and they are regularly forced to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time. Our deepest concerns about what keeps us safe are often created after the fact of a difficult event, or in response to our fears of bad things happening. We are designed to react in real time, but through our fear of authentic expression we've developed a habit of anticipating what might go wrong. This is creative thinking, but it’s not very helpful to our growth and development.

Our power to transform our mind and body, together, is easily forgotten as we tend to focus on whatever ‘needs attention now’. Enter personal beliefs, expectations, assumptions and judgements. When these debates take over, we run the risk of missing the entire point of human individuality: our beliefs about what matters to us will be different, situationally, from most of the people we know – at least some of the time. We all ‘know’ we don’t prioritize the same things every day, and we still hold others accountable when they reflect the same human behaviors we absolve in ourselves. I don’t know why it persists when we know what we know, but we simply see things differently for others.

Our individual algorithms are curated to complement and serve a single belief structure: our own. We share experiences with other people, but the whole expression of a human life is a strictly solo effort. This has created a lag in understanding the complex connections among our countless creative intentions – even though they have become the solid cornerstones of our brain’s impressions.

So why does one idea stick and another doesn’t? Especially the truly unhelpful ones that we drag along. And how do we close the gap so our most stubborn beliefs can also support who we are in real time? I believe it involves aligning with specific-to-us intentions that help us relax into the neglected emotional tones our bodies have been reverberating back to us in response to what we have created for them. Don’t panic – this is organic. You are perfect exactly as you are.

Our overall health is a part of the equation, but the imposed limitations of our belief systems play a much bigger role than we are willing/able to conceive. Once we reshape our need to remain protected, it transforms our world view of what universal protection can be. But first, we’re going to have to encourage some different intentions towards how we are trying to qualify the parameters of common sense.

Intention is among the once-revered concepts recently under fire. It joins truth, rational, and normal, feeding waves of confusion and division that hit each of us on several different notes. We’ve consciously stopped listening to anything that feels fake, disingenuous, or just plain wrong – making it easy to assume and misunderstand each other. Natural curiosity has been replaced with snap judgments. And judging by the way we disrespect the decisions of our judges (whatever side), it can seem like we’re heading for a cliff, no?

Maybe we are, maybe we aren’t. The jury is still out, and I’m grateful for the time to try to work towards broader perspectives all around. We aren’t settled around the ‘true’ meaning of words, ideas, or intentions, but that’s only because we all reason from different sets of raw material. The jury is holding out in hopes that we can get a few things straight across the board; but they also recognize how relative essential truth has become.

Currently, there’s a big push for the use of “common sense”, and a full disregard for the fact that right now it is all an illusion of innuendo, knowing glances, and projections. For each human, our notion of common sense is an amalgamation of what we know best. This is where our ego’s assumptions find form and we forget the whole truth. We are all incredibly ignorant of what is common to someone else. We hardly know what other people intend or desire, but we regularly decide a lot on their behalf. Starting with the definition of common sense.

Potentially divisive concept: Perhaps we’ve never had Common Sense to begin with? Honestly, I think Thomas Paine would agree. While this thought can be scary to entertain, let’s take a little moment with it. Does your mind work to accept or reject this notion? As you exhale, push your breath a little harder than you normally do, ramping up your ability to expel stagnant energies slightly. It is our human habit to become consumed by the many different intentions that our brains fire off in response to everything we encounter. Just by using our breath with intention, we can start creating something new.

Our intentions begin from emotion, and we spend much of our time creating them on multiple levels – conscious and unconscious. Between emotional freedom and mental architecture, we pull in emotional reactions. Seeing is believing, as they say, but how often are we “seeing” things that aren’t really there?

Example: My husband, Fred, wears readers at the front of his shirt. He often hugs me, forgetting they are in the way. At some point, it became a problem for me and I asked him to remove them first. He’s working on it, but since it’s not his priority, I must make my own internal shift for now. The other day, he approached me for a hug and I felt myself getting palpably annoyed about the glasses – until I looked down and noticed they weren’t there. My mind tried to fill in the blanks too early.

I had created a physical response that was unwarranted — and it was a big moment of awareness. I was shocked — I thought I had good control over what I believed and why. Human ego is consistently confounding, am I right? Which leads me back to remembering that my soul seeks to reconnect with my being however it can. That is the baseline vibration of human intention.

At stake for each of us lies the challenge: CONTROL. From our breakfast choices to what makes us feel satisfied, advertisers and influencers have made it their business to affect our intentions to serve theirs. (Come on, man – it’s business, not personal). Breathe and remember… Accepting that companies’ motivations lie in their own successes shouldn’t feel as icky as it can. Lean into your own preferences, values and intentions for inner insight.

Our minds are creative, imaginative tools that make us uniquely ourselves and they are capable of a lot more than we allow. As we lean into our raw material – not in comparison to anyone else’s – we start to identify how many things we entertain wanting for ourselves. The next step is noticing how many we reject. Pick your reason: deserve level, shame, blame, belief system blockages, etc. Identifying with the intentions that truly matter clears the path for recognizing what it’s going to take to move us where we want to be.

We challenge statistics and research from their very underpinnings, which seems healthy, until pointing out flaws becomes the objective. If the task is reaching an objective truth, we’ve got to move back toward something we can share in common. And it’s not common sense. At least not yet.

So is there a common remedy available? I believe The ORM Arena is the best shot we’ve got right now to reach

a starting point of any kind. This thought practice was designed with Common Sense in mind, so that even though we don’t share experience, we can represent ourselves within the context of our beliefs, while respecting the same in other people. Spark joy from within by cycling through the ORM Pillars. Give H2Om a try. Perhaps a common thought practice will have more of us seeking what we mean by the ‘sense’ in ‘common sense’.

The truth is, Marie Kondo’s got nothing on the creative intentions that spark joy from within our mind-body connection. Let’s go find our own keys! Our Raw Material, anyone?