The Path of Intention
Sometimes, you just can’t meditate. Or maybe, for one reason or another,
you won’t meditate. Maybe you don’t have the time, or it just doesn’t
seem like your kind of thing. Maybe it’s more complicated than that.
I hear you. Even people who love meditation struggle with it now and
then, but if you’re not meditating — and also if you are — here’s
another great thing you can do to work with your mind. It’s simple, and
can really change everything. It’s paying attention to your intentions.
Paying attention, of course, is a key part of Buddhist practice. It’s
called right mindfulness, and it’s one of the eight aspects of the path
that the Buddha embodied and championed. Also among these is right
intention, or right resolve: The aspiration to act with correct
intention, doing no harm.
Thanks to his own practice-borne insights, the Buddha came to understand
firsthand the power of thoughts: that they can so easily control us,
and that we can, with practice, take back some of that control. We do
this not by wrestling it away, but by letting go of what leads us to do
harm and consciously fostering positive traits like friendliness,
steadiness, and compassion.
This jibes with something we all sort of know but don’t necessarily keep
in the front of our minds: that our interactions and experiences seem
to go better when we’ve spent some time looking at our minds,
intentionally cultivating them so that they’re more attuned to
connection with others and a true appreciation for life — including even
its difficulties. Working with intention makes room in the front of our
minds for what we really value.
There’s a meaningful satisfaction that comes with knowing that, whatever
life hands you, you’re making room in your mind and heart to accept it.
And then to let it go. Try it. You’ll likely find it harder to be
grouchy or hard on yourself or impatient or self-important when you’re
regularly dedicating time and mind-space to being anything but.
With the new year right around the corner, I invite you to explore the
intention-setting practices featured below, for the benefit of yourself
and all beings everywhere.
- Rod Meade Sperry, Editor, Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Guide
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Regularly remind yourself of your intentions, advises Sylvia Boorstein. It’s the key to keeping your life on target.
Wise intention is the cornerstone of wise effort, that is, effort that
is wholesome and positive. The instructions for wise effort call for us
to continually evaluate our actions and choose those that lead to less
suffering and eschew those that lead to more suffering. This is easily
determined by checking if the action is being fueled by wholesome or
unwholesome intentions. So clarity about our intentions needs to be
present to inform wise effort. There are ways to practice wise intention
for ourselves, our loved ones, and all beings.
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On
the Buddhist path, says Zen teacher Norman Fischer, our intention
deepens into commitment and then into vow. At that point, our intentions
and our life become one.
When
you meditate, you soon forget about whether things go as you hope they
will. You are happy to be surprised by what happens, knowing you can
make use of anything for your practice. In that way, your meditation is
always successful, no matter what arises. All you have to do is do it.
But
here’s the problem: it is difficult to sustain a meditation practice.
We are so easily sidetracked, distracted, and discouraged. Events of our
lives throw us off almost every day. Our intention to practice wobbles
and wavers.
Intention
is everything. If your mind is always aligned with your intention to
practice, you are always practicing. Practice is the spirit of practice,
more than any specific activity. The mind of practice is practice. And that’s intention.
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Thupten Jinpa teaches us two great practices to start and end every day.
Our motivation to do something is the reason or reasons behind that
behavior, the source of our desire and the drive to do it. We may be
more or less aware of our motivations.
Intention, on the other hand, is always deliberate, an articulation of a
conscious goal. We set and reaffirm our best intentions to keep us
inclining in the directions we truly mean to go. But, we need
motivations to keep us going over the long haul. If our intention is to
run a marathon, there will be times when we’ll ask ourselves, quite
reasonably, “Why am I doing this?” We need good, inspired answers to get
us over such humps. Conscious or unconscious, motivation is the “why,”
and the spark, behind intention.
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