Being clear about motives and intentions

Hey to all and thanks for bein’ here and diving in to that exploring our thought by thought journey…

Just to review the past week, we’ve been explorin’ how to love ourselves more consciously.

And we’ve touched on how to:

• have compassion with our thoughts
• be gentle with our steps
• find simple ways to evolve order, create manageable routines.

So today, continuing this theme, I wanna briefly take a peek at how to create intention and establish motives so that our day to day actions stay focused and don’t wander off on their own meandering trail. 😉

Being clear with both is vitally important and allows for being gentle with ourselves.

I kinda look metaphorically at intention as the overall tone for life purpose ..and this can be a huge life long objective or a more specific yearly one. But all of us have to at some point or another answer this question: what am I intending with my life?

Example of my overall intention: to live spirituality day in and day out and to practice healing for myself and others to make the world a better place.

Okay. Simple. Global in thought and scope. Huge.

Sounds lovely. But how does that intention translate into day to day practicals?

Simple. By creating more manageable intentions….and by defining each and every motive before taking action.

And I mean this. Before taking action…any action.

Whether I am walking my dog, helping a friend, engaged in a consultation with a client, or simply saying hello to a neighbor, I’m as aware as I can be about my motive. And I know and I feel and I tense up when my motive is self interested.

We all do.

Sitting in traffic. Standing in line. Waiting. Thought can wander off into the land of the frustration zone.

But if we’ve established intentions and made ourselves very aware of our motives for that errand, that meeting, that interaction with anyone, we can pause, regroup mentally (no one has to see this) and simply reaffirm: “This is why I’m doing this. This is why I’m here.”

Golly I do this so so much.

As recent as yesterday I bounded off to meet a client with the best of intentions. My motive was to bring a sense of comfort and peace and help this client with her situation. 2 seconds en route, hello traffic! So I thought I’d get clever and take short cuts. Hello every city street renewal project going on this side o-town. Eww. I felt it. I felt myself squirm up, glance at the clock, feel trapped, stuck and certain I’d inconvenience this client by being late.

So I do what I do when my thoughts wandered into that land of frustration and irksomeness :)..I paused, regrouped remembered my overall intention: to live my spirituality and heal — and then looked at my motive: to help this client feel a sense of her freedom and spirituality too.

Right at that moment I had a choice: either get sucked into the externals (the traffic, the time, the slow moving pace) and react to stuff I can’t change or put my thoughts elsewhere and focus on something else, which is exactly what I chose. In the next half hour as I worked my way through that traffic, I began thinking about something I need to write a bit later and began outlining it in my thoughts.

Pretty simple mental shift.

But the point: had I not been clear about my overall intention or my specific motive, it would have been the easiest thing to consent to the pull of frustration. And had I done that, I guarantee you I would have shown up to the session with the client a very ornery, bothered, irked woman. And I would have vented. And then I’m dumping all my dirty laundry into the thoughts of this client. How’s that gonna help her? Any link to my overall life intention or goal? Nope. No well. Self absorbed, self focused and not a bit necessary to vent.

Whoof! That’s a lot of thinkin’, huh?

And you well may be thinin’ “Who has time for all that blah dee blah when  just doing my best to survive and get through the day?”

I know. I hear you.

But, without those rudders to steer us it’s so very very simple to mentally consent to so many other pulls. And sometimes they’re not negative pulls. Sometimes they’re pulls of distraction to go off and do anything else but what we’ve intended for ourselves and our life’s work for that day.

Without a global life intention and day to day ones, without clearly discerning our motives for the hour by hour to the longer term choices we make, life can meander, wander, just kinda ‘happen’ …and we wake up one day and wonder “how did I get here?” (Talking Heads, anybody?) 🙂

Being clear about our overall intention and motives keeps us focused, aware, always about that greater purpose.

So how bout it? Agree? Disagree? Askin’ somethin more, like ‘how can I figure out what my overall intentions are?”

Great! Leave comments below and let’s talk this up a bit…or email me at tre@thoughtbythought.net if you wanna keep it on the downlow.

Thanks for bein here and eager to hear from ya!