If you look closely you will see that life is full of new beginnings. Every breath–each inhale and each exhale is an opportunity to start again. The sunrise. A sunset. The change of seasons. New beginning can be a powerful homage to the inevitable cycle of life and death as well as an opportunity to reorient ourselves with focused energy on how we would like to move forward.
In this way a new beginning is a great time to determine where you’d like to focus your attention and energy. It’s a great time to set an intention. (How to Set an Intention in 2 Easy Steps) An intention can help guide your focus. Over the course of a cycle (whatever duration that may be), an intention can help you engage with your environment in a more meaningful way.
An intention is the focal point of your actions. It is the new beginning freshly painted. The outcome, however, requires surrender.
Let go of the outcome
When you set an intention, you are at the start of something. You cannot know the specific outcome, but you have an idea of what you want that outcome to be. You can feel it in your body, the expansiveness of a deeper why. An intention as a commitment to yourself. Your heart contains an outcome that is ephemeral. It lacks the details.
You have to trust the process.
I am not advocating for you to set an intention and just see what happens. Instead, I am advocating for you to set an intention and act on that intention in response to and connection with what is showing up in your life. I am asking you to surrender to what life is offering to show you.
The balance between what you give in tangible action and what you receive in opportunities will bring about the desired outcome.
Look for the opportunity
Moving from beginning to end is a matter of seeing as much as it is a matter of acting. Life gives us numerous opportunities to show up in line with our intention. If you are so fixated on what you think you will need to do in order to elicit your desired outcome, you are missing out on numerous opportunities to grow more fully in the direction you want to go. Surrendering the outcome is about trusting that you can both notice and take the opportunities given to you and use them to develop deeper understanding. Your intention can help you focus your actions and your perspective during these moments, helping you to grow.
Here is a personal example. My most recent intention was to be more accepting of myself. Trusting I could focus my actions towards this intention no matter what life threw at me, I surrendered the outcome. Life handed me a pretty aggressive bout of anxiety. The anxiety spiral helped me to understand that above all else what I needed to accept was that I have an anxiety disorder and that it not only sometimes drastically affects my life but the lives of those I love.
This realization–a growth spurt towards my intention–came after being very unaccepting to myself and being challenged to get myself out of an anxiety spiral with compassion. My intention focused me forward–it helped me towards my outcome, but it did so in tandem with the uncontrollable aspects of life.
Listen to your heart
Your intention and the fulfillment of that intention is formed at the intersection of your heart, your actions and your experience. In that, let go of the idea you can predict the outcome and instead tune into the moment and the whispering of your heart. Listen. So much information is being shown to you at any given time, so much is experienced at any given time. When you show up present to how these experiences and information affect you that is the time to remember your intention. At this intersection you can make choices aligned with what you deeply want.
John O’Donahue says it well in his book Aman Cara
“It is far more creative to work with the idea of mindfulness rather than the idea of will. Too often people try to change their lives by using will as a kind of hammer to beat their lives to the proper shape…If you work with a different rhythm, you will come easily and naturally home to yourself. Your soul knows the geography of your destiny.” (O’Donahue, 57)
Part of any mindfulness practice is the tuning in to the present moment by moment experience. Such an act of noticing is predicated on acknowledging the inevitability of change, the incessant ebb and flow of life’s rhythms within and around you. An intention directs you to these rhythms, helping you to see and then act in ways you otherwise might not have chosen–or even noticed.
In this way your intention, as O’Donahue says is created, evolving and unfolding. Just like an artist painting a canvas, the final product, the fulfillment of an intention, is a collaboration between what you have control over and the rising and falling presence of inspiration and experience.
Open up to new beginnings
The intention you set today is the beginning of a dance between yourself and the world around you. It is about deep listening and looking, understanding the pieces of yourself and how they interrelate with what you do not have control over.
The outcome is predicated on your surrender to what you cannot change, to the inherent beating of your heart, to the rhythm within you, to the process–
To intentional action and the way it will all come together.
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