Living With Intention

Last week at yoga, Gina, my favorite yoga teacher at Kansas Siddhi Yoga, talked to us about living our lives with intention. While living a yogic lifestyle encourages you to experience each moment without worrying about rushing to the conclusion (a principle I have written about before), we also shouldn’t just float through life without making purposeful decisions.

In yoga, this means purposefully choosing our next pose, and fully committing to it. As Gina said, if you’re just going to do something half-assed, you might as well not do it at all (sage advice from her mother on laundry folding as a child). As we worked, Gina asked us to keep in mind our purpose for coming to class that evening, and to focus on that purpose as our intention for practicing yoga for the hour.

I think I do a lot of things without a clear intention in mind. Probably most things, in fact. It is much harder to move through your day with intention, even if you do less things in the day, than it is to move through your day without really thinking about what your purpose is for each step. I go shopping without a clear purpose of what I’m looking for. I walk to the cafeteria at work feeling hungry, but without any idea what I’d like to eat. I wake up in the morning and move through the motions without giving myself a specified time for leaving the house. I sit down at my computer without a list of tasks that need to be completed for the day.

It is clear to me that doing each of these things with some sort of intention or purpose would make me more productive and less wasteful. But I think Gina was talking more about a higher purpose, and a deeper intention, spanning across the whole of our lives. A friend of mine told me this week that I seem to do a lot of thinking about my past decisions, and who I am now and how I got here, but I don't spend much time looking forward. That’s definitely true, and it made me think—I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about where I am going, and who I want to become, and what things I’d like to accomplish.

It can be easy to get bogged down in the past, and I especially like to rehash things in my head and try to determine the root cause of my issues, and of other people’s issues. My challenge for myself in the near future is to turn my thoughts the other direction, and look forward with a goal in mind, or a set of goals.

What do I want to do with my life? Who do I want to be? I feel like it’s almost a physical task to grip the sides of the tub of my thoughts and rotate it around 180 degrees. It feels like it will be sloshy and messy. I can tell it will be physically exhausting to redirect my thinking. I’m still unsure of how to begin…maybe it is with small steps.

My friend G is an excellent blogger, and she keeps a running list of her goals. I admire her stamina, and how she speaks plainly about her progress. I am also jealous of her lists, so I think I may start a list of goals, and try to develop some idea of how to head in a forwardly direction. My life goals...it sounds so broad and so...I don't know...self-helpy. I don't know if I'll be brave enough to publish them here (what if I don't succeed???), but there is at least a place to start. Wish me luck.