Making Intention Actionable
So you made a New Year’s Resolution—now what?
This piece is an edited version of a posting I first made in 2014. It suits the new year, as many struggle to make sense of how to make manifest their new year resolutions. If you’re not a yogi, but find joy in other movement practices, the same principles apply: The mental muscles we choose to practice are the ones that will dominate when life gets heavy.
Before I had any familiarity with the philosophy or science behind the practice, yoga “worked.” I started regularly practicing yoga some 25 years ago. I didn’t know much about it save that I loved it. Every class left me feeling ease and spaciousness in my body and in my mind. I felt more connected to everyone. I’d glide home through Los Angeles traffic undisturbed and un-rushed; I was less reactive, and simply, beautifully, more present. Yoga cracked me wide open in the best way.
Though I loved yoga class, I thought many things yoga teachers said were silly. I was in it for the challenging physicality. I bore the talk on chakras and rising serpents to get to the good stuff—sweaty movement that made me feel alive, and eased both physical and subtle body tensions. I couldn’t fathom why teachers would muddy the class with intangible babble like the common directive to “set an intention.”
Though instructors would often offer a moment for intention setting, they’d never outline methods for achievement. What does that even mean, I’d think…How about I intend to not fall on my face during crow pose? I’d spend class wondering how a bunch of forward folding and chair squatting was going to help me realize said intention. What did a shape you made with your body have to do with an act of the mind? It felt like filler, something yoga teachers thought they were supposed to say. It was both an imposition, and a distraction from what I was there to do—fold and squat and somehow, after all that sweating and moving, feel better.
When I first became a teacher, I vowed to never become distracted by concepts that had no somatic grounding, no matter how poetic or attractive. Even after I began to understand and value the philosophical foundations for many yogic concepts, the notion of intention setting still felt vague and impractical. Teachers would proclaim now is the time to set your intention and then lead a sequence devoid of mention of this great thing we were there to intend. It felt fraudulent, or worse—like being sold something meaningless in sacred space.
Back then, I also had little interest in the mechanisms behind why I felt better. The being-ness, whole-ness, spaciousness and ease I felt were enough. But, yoga is like rainwater. Initially, the practice only permeates the first few layers. The body and mind, though, are thirsty earth, and yoga abides. Like a good, cleansing rain guided by a gentle yet relentless inward pull, yoga steadily seeps deeper, through denser sediment, until it rejoins itself in the infinite current running deep below. When we embody knowledge through yoga, we become profoundly, irrevocably quenched. Though you may thirst again, you have learned the way to an everlasting spring. Thirst, you understand, is purposeful; it is nature’s way of helping you seek, and thereby find.
And so, somewhere along the twists and bumps of my early years of teaching, the concept of intention started to make sense, real sense—meaning I could feel it in my body. Intention — sankalpa, as it’s called in yogic parlance — began to feel more tangible, like a muscle I could strengthen. The shift came as I began to understand the relationship between mind and body. If mental muscles can be used to direct the strengthening of physical ones, and if the mind and body are connected — moreover, made of the same stuff — why can’t physical muscles help strengthen the mental body muscles we seek to shape and tone? Arguably, it’s our mental muscles that support us most during moments of life’s heaviest lifting!
During my graduate studies in clinical psychology, I was introduced to a kind of therapy called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT. The premise is roughly this: Thoughts follow well-trodden paths of least resistance. Because thought processes are unconsciously conditioned, particularly by early life experiences, they can thereby be re-conditioned later in life in ways that better serve us.
But the mind can be a dark and crowded place, and it’s often hard to see how or where new paths can be laid. In my younger life, I often felt a kind of mental claustrophobia; my thoughts were so big and jumbled, they’d butt up against the very edges of my mind. In order to change a cognitive pattern, you must be able to conceptualize an alternative. In my crowded mind, there was no room to turn around, let alone begin the construction of an alternate perception of self.
This is where the body comes in. The body is like a second space, like an adjacent room. You can step out of the poorly lit, jam-packed mind in which thoughts clang and bang, and into the open space of the body. The body, then, becomes a container in which we can practice constructing an alternate conception of our own capacity to both purposefully feel, and to withstand reactive feelings.
As Aristotle suggested, “we are what we repeatedly do.” I offer: We are what we repeatedly think. How we practice perceiving ourselves is the foundation for our self-perception. As my relationship to yoga matured, I understood yoga’s physical practice could be a way to seek and find a more positive self concept. That is, we could set an intention and then choose to embody it. Every shape we can take can be an opportunity to pratice the thing we intend. I now teach yoga with intention front and center. Intention isn’t a prologue unrelated to what follows—it’s the substance of practice, should students choose to make it so.
I offer my students tangible moments in which the intention they set can be practiced:
If your intention is to find more ease and peace in your life…can you seek the lightness within a pose? Can you practice noticing what lightness feels like? In a moment of challenge, like a long-held chair pose, can you find the ease, the softness? Can that experience teach the mind that seeking ease in a moment of strong, challenging sensation is possible?
If you intend to act with more determination and resilience in your daily affairs…how can you use a moment like a long-held plank to experience those qualities? Can you choose to perceive shaking muscles as a sign of strengthening? If you’ve backed off, can you choose to perceive yourself as wise and capable for having dropped knees to the mat?
If you struggle with self-acceptance…can you use a difficult balancing moment to choose to not judge yourself when you fall? Can you practice resilience, coming back into the pose? Can the experience become an opportunity to practice strengthening the muscle of compassion for self, and empathy with anyone who has ever fallen?
If you habitually perceive yourself as residing in a state of lack, of not enough-ness…can you utilize any moment on the mat as an opportunity to choose to perceive your wholeness? Can you practice noticing yourself, from the crown of your head, through your fingertips to your toes, and let each inch of awareness become an affirmation of your inherent completeness?
The act of seeking strengthens the muscles of seeking! When we choose to strengthen our capacity to see ourselves positively, we simultaneosly become more capable of doing just that. The capacity to seek — and to find — becomes the pathway most well-trodden, and therefore the new path of least resistance. While the goal of yoga is ultimately patternless presence, developing positive thought, positive speech, and positive action is part of the process of becoming more present.
And so, the next time you find your way to the mat, or to any form of physical exercise, really—choose to practice thought patterns, and therefore ways of thinking and thereby being that answer the call of your intention. Because the thing is, if we are what we repeatedly think, then the thoughts we think, whether or not we consciously intend them, become the stuff of ourselves.
This is the point: If you set your intention to let go of a thought pattern or a relationship, and then repeatedly spend 75 minutes on the yoga mat thinking in a way that affirms holding and attachment, then hold and attach you will. If you acknowledge that your life would be served by more self-acceptance and love for yourself, and then spend every posture comparing yourself with others, then you will walk out of that class having strengthened the muscle of self-judgment, and all of the tension and strain it implies.
We are what we repeatedly think! But—this does not mean that intention alone is enough. It is the intersection of intention and action at which rests the real power of mind-body movement like yoga. Like every great revolution—it is the collaboration between pen, and sword — between contemplation, and action — that heralds great change.
In this next year, make intention actionable. Make the thing that you seek be the thing that you intend to find—and then find it, on the mat, every time you practice.