4

Setting Your Intention

Your Life’s Purpose

There is a brilliant talk by Eckhart Tolle that I often share at the retreats I lead, called “Finding Your Life’s Purpose.” In this talk he essentially outlines the whole point of meditation practice: to become aware of the moments when we are distracted by thinking and to return to an experience of being present.

This is your life’s purpose: to be present and awake for what’s happening now.

Why is this simple instruction so hard?

It’s only hard because we learn to avoid pain. In attempting to avoid pain, we create all sorts of distractions that then have secondary effects, causing further suffering.

Eastern spiritual traditions speak of samsara, the endless cycle of conditioned existence that all beings go through until we see through the delusion. This is what hurls us humans through lifetime after lifetime of suffering until we work through our negative karma and stop causing harm. Samsara is the result of ignorance—the simple fact of not understanding how we perpetuate our own dramas.

Pilgrimage is about discovering how you create your own drama. The lessons you learn help change your thinking so you can stop creating more drama. Eventually, you don’t have to do that anymore.

Out of the Cocoon

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche talked about the cocoon we build around our experience to protect ourselves from the pain of life:

“The way of cowardice is to embed ourselves in this cocoon, in which we perpetuate our habitual patterns.”

You may notice this in your own life as rigid routines, lazy habits, and staying with familiar experiences that allow you to avoid growth. A cocoon is characterized by a walling off from the world, in order to transform into a new incarnation. But if you refuse to take flight with your new wings, you stagnate, and the cocoon becomes a dead end.

It’s possible to be so terrorized about the feelings you want to avoid that you build thick concrete walls around you so as not to feel those painful emotions. When an attitude of self-protection becomes your habitual stance in the world, then it becomes your prison. You not only keep the scary demon feelings away, but you keep all feelings away (because you either feel or you don’t) and this can block you from hearing what your heart wants you to know. Your heart may be yearning to write music. But if you were shamed by your third-grade music teacher for singing off-key, you might deny you want to write music (or paint, or write, or create a nonprofit, or design feather-and-sequin hooker heels) just to avoid the pain of confronting that old shame.

“When we are afraid of waking up and afraid of experiencing our own fear,” Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche says, “ we create a cocoon to shield ourselves…”

There is a point where the comfort of the cocoon becomes more painful than the prospect of fear at what awaits out in the great unknown world.

This is the birth of a pilgrim.

Setting Your Intention

What distinguishes a pilgrimage from a holiday adventure?

Intention. The pilgrim sets out to seek change. Even if the destination is a secular one, if the intention is to set the stage for a transformation to take place, then the psychological shift has already started to occur.

A tourist is satisfied to return with some happy memories, some nice photos, and a feeling of relaxation. A pilgrim, on the other hand, is guided by something more mysterious and perhaps a bit darker. A pilgrim sets out in search of her demons.

Setting intentions is a subtle art. When you intend to do something, it gets slotted into your mental machinery as part of the program. That does not mean it will happen. Life may intervene and obstacles may get in the way. But the intention to do something lays the blueprint for it to happen in a more organic way than a decision. This brings up a question.

What is the difference between a decision and an intention?

An intention is an attitude that aims for a general direction. It is a mental state, and can adapt as circumstances change.

Decisions tend to be based on reacting to an external stimulus, and often grasp at a particular outcome. They are reactions to outer circumstances. They are often fixed and inflexible.

Intentions aim. Decisions grasp.

Decisions are flimsy. They can be made off the cuff, and dropped just as easily. Decisions proclaim: Right (fist pounding on table). That’s it! It’s decided. You make a demand on your experience to produce a certain result. You set a goal and commit to the long haul, whether or not your environment supports it as you move forward. When there are clear signs that it’s the wrong road, some of us even feel better about forging ahead, as if extra suffering somehow makes our progress worthier. We think we are being good and disciplined as we struggle through the muck.

Intention has an open-ended quality; it’s a general direction or theme you aim for. There is room to accommodate fluctuations and new information as your life unfolds. It is flexible. Rather than deciding on a course of action, you set an intention and simply learn to be present in full as that intention manifests.

Decisions are conceptual; intentions come from the heart.

How do you formulate your intention to go on a pilgrimage? At the end of this chapter, I’ll invite you to set an intention for your journey that feels genuine.

Intention or Goal?

I make a distinction between intentions and goals. For me, intention is a larger view to work toward something. Once you have a clearly identified intention—for example, to be kind to people, or at least not to harm them—then you can break it down into smaller steps or goals. These you can think of as your daily practices.

A daily practice might be to say something kind to people when you first see them, or to offer a word of encouragement, rather than to immediately share your own experience. See what is up with them first. (If you don’t already do this, you’ll be amazed by the shift this small detail can make in your life.)

Intention is wide-angle vision, like when you turn the wheel slightly to steer in the right direction. It’s more like an approach. If I intend to travel to Mount Kailash, then it’s a possibility in the future even though I may have no idea how to do that yet. Then I might set a goal of learning how to get there.

So with goals, you identify a plan of action. Goals are like concrete steps to get from point A to point B. Identify which airlines fly to Lhasa by next Tuesday; an itinerary by October. Goals are hugely beneficial and important to create structure for larger projects. Once you get to point B, then you reevaluate the goals and current circumstances. Maybe you get to Lhasa and the roads to Kailash have been washed out. Then you may need to come up with other plans, all the while keeping your intention—the larger view of a journey to Mount Kailash—in the field of vision.

Goals are measurable. So if you fail to accomplish a goal, then you may be hard on yourself, or angry at others. This is why goals can so easily become ego’s weapons—because you compare your vision to reality. Setting intentions allows for things to evolve.

When you hold your intention in mind, you can then identify the steps that will support your intention. These are called practices.

Then take action and do your practices. If you start practicing meditation—or anything!—five hours a day, I guarantee things will happen. If you don’t have that kind of time, then start with five minutes a day. Regular, short sessions add up to change over time. Better to practice even a little bit every day, rather than a big chunk once in a while. Consistency over quantity.

So if you want to set out on pilgrimage, set that intention. Hold it in your awareness and listen to the ideas that arise. Make time to do your yoga practice and let that be your priority.

Energy flows toward your focus.

Begin or Recommit to a Practice

Practices are available everywhere these days—in studios and meditation centers, at conferences, in magazines and books and retreat centers. Your workplace might offer free classes at the lunch hour. You can Google esoteric Eastern practices and find teachings online.

But if you get spoon-fed by popular culture and rely on this as the source of your spiritual diet, then you might miss the depth or true purpose of these practices. Or you might get so excited by each new approach to meditation or form of yoga that you end up as a spiritual window-shopper.

Because of the plethora of approaches in the spiritual marketplace, it’s possible to spend a lot of time (and money) creating the illusion of a spiritual path, without ever developing a personal relationship to these practices. Your personal experience is where the transformation happens. This is why pilgrimage is so important right now—it’s how you develop your own relationship to practice.

What do you practice? Reconnecting with your inner wisdom, accessed by sitting still and observing the mind. This practice is simple—but not necessarily easy. Develop a regular practice of learning to ally with something other than the thinking mind. Practice allows you to cut through the onslaught of thoughts that regularly occupies the mind and check in with yourself so that you can hear that wisdom.

Awareness is only accessible in the present moment. The easiest way to access it is through coming back to the breath. A mindfulness practice like sitting meditation is essentially a tool to train the mind to be present. Concepts disconnect you from the present, so the practice is to learn to disidentify with concept and ally with the present.

Let Go and Allow for the Unexpected

The next step is perhaps the most important: to get out of your own way. This is where your intention gets plugged in to something larger than you. You are not the driver. You can set the course by visualizing your intention, but you have to eventually let go and give up the illusion of being in control.

Notice what moves you. When you have strong and unexplainable emotional yearnings, pay attention. They are your life force manifesting for you to experience. If you can’t yet admit to yourself the life that calls to you, you may get messages to remind you.

This is perhaps the most important skill to have as a pilgrim—learning to let your intuition guide you. The more you practice it, the stronger intuition becomes. There is a certain skill in learning to ride that edge between holding a focus and allowing for fluctuations to arise. The same way you might hold a challenging yoga posture is how to approach the path of pilgrimage: not too tight, not too loose.

Too tight is being bound by earth, not allowing for the unknown to arise. Too loose is getting lost in space, fantasizing instead of waking up to the current reality. Learn to walk that razor’s edge between the known and unknown worlds.

Open yourself to magic.

Write: Setting Your Intention

If an intention is the practice of training the mind to rest in the present moment, how do you set goals and make life plans?

Set aside at least an hour for this. You might want to go for a long walk first, holding each of these questions in mind as you walk.

Go back to “Your Story” that you wrote in chapter 1 and circle or highlight anything that feels charged, either positively or negatively.

Do a fifteen minute free write for each of the following questions:

Where does your heart call you to go? (This could be a geographical place or a state of mind or a situation.)

What would you like to grow out of?

What would you like to grow into?

How do you envision yourself in your ideal future?

Now write down your intention in one sentence. Memorize it.

What is the intention of your journey?