About Intention Setting
Welcome welcome friend!
Have you loved you today? Can we make a commitment to being good to ourselves and giving back the love to our own selves first? I realize that harnessing the power to practice deep self empathy and love is the key to surviving periods of challenge and change. I was digesting some journalling prompts from my new favourite online trainer (BBM and YES she schedules workouts as much as she does self-care sessions) and sorting out my self-care rituals on paper in response to these journaling questions when I realized that I had been faking my self-care a bit and staying on the surface. I wrote down the classics like meditating, gua sha, outdoor time, practicing yoga, journalling and yadaya and stopped myself to ask "does doing these things really take care of my needs?". Its not a black and white answer, of course these practices take care of my needs in many respects but what I am getting at here, is that I was lacking intention and meaning behind these practices. I was "doing to do" because once upon a time, I had decided that these things brought me peace and benefit. I and all of us in fact, deserve to take good care with sincerity and appropriateness.
Earlier this week I was investigating and exploring my personal definition of intention and looking closely at my relationship to intention setting. What do you feel and think about intention? I've lead and been lead by so many teachers to cultivate an intention at the beginning of a yoga class and never ever questioned it. Lately I've been saying in my classes, question everyone and everything and practice discernment : "is that true for me? does that resonate with me? does this serve me?". I think it is top priority for each of us to maintain our agency during our yoga practices and work on deep inner listening in order to provide attention and care to ourselves rather than be dictated by another thing outside of ourselves. Doing so allows us to foster a profound connection to our intuition, which I believe further develops our trust muscle and support us in becoming more authentic and grounded in life off the mat. But back to rituals tying into meaningful self-care and intention... I'll say this over and over again because its worth repeating, yoga is a lifestyle not just a practice of shaping the body in preparation for meditation.
As I like to believe, yoga is present in self-care and taking care of self boils down to listening to our deeper, internal needs and taking right action in support of becoming the highest, most compassionate, loving versions of ourselves. So yah, keep doing your self-care rituals but before you do, take some time to ponder the WHY behind these actions. Put your soul, your heart, your prayer and your presence into what you're doing. Otherwise, I fear we might slip into autopilot and truly miss out and the joy of being kind and loving to ourselves. Recent to this week, I've opened up a small window of opportunity in each of my morning classes to write down an intention for the day ahead and much of that was inspired by this American poet, word artist and singer that created an app called Eternal Sunshine. I intuitively clicked onto some tab that gave me the most well fitted advice around intention and it went a little something like this:
- The intention you set for the day creates magnetism around what you desire to attract into your life.
- It will be the force behind your actions, it will be shared and reflected through all actions and interactions.
- If you choose the intention of love, for example, you would act in love, experience love, spread love, share and receive love, . Love would be manifesting in the consummation of your every activity and action.
That was the golden advice I didn't know I was craving until I read it and let it permeate. If you register things more efficiently by writing them down as I do, then I invite you to get that big bad journal out and write out a list of things you do to currently love yourself. Revisit every bullet point in that list and percolate on how each ritual takes care of your needs. If it's not to your liking or surface level, performative shiznit, ditch it or fine tune it to better meet your uniquely important needs.
Breathe Well & Be Well
Marlies
