2018 And An Intention of Mindfulness

The word intention has a lot of baggage.

The first time I heard the phrase setting an intention was years ago, after one of my first yoga classes. The teacher asked us to set an intention for the day ahead. She suggested something like keeping an inner calm, which promptly caused me to roll my eyes deep into the back of my head.

A couple more yoga classes and over a year of mindfulness training has warmed me up to the idea of setting intentions.

I’ve learned that to intend is to aim. And when we aim, we don’t always hit our targets…

Setting intentions gives us permission to fail and try again.

When we set a goal, we oftentimes find it easy to give up on it as soon as we begin to divert from the desired outcome — or even fail.

This is why I stopped setting New Years Resolutions years ago. And why so many people rag on the idea of them.

This year, my intention is simple. It’s one I think about every day when I wake up, and reflect on before I go to sleep.

In 2018, I’m making mindfulness my intention for every single day.

This may sound ridiculous, I know. But I’ll explain.

I’ve chosen mindfulness not just because I’ve been meditating and went on a retreat over New Year’s. More broadly than that, it hits on many, if not all of the things I am trying to improve about myself: become more present, a better listener, a healthier eater, more compassionate toward myself and others, and a little more clear-headed (I’ve joked before that I have not felt as sharp as I did prior to getting an iPhone nearly a decade ago — and there’s likely some truth to it).

Setting mindfulness as my intention does not entail spending every day in a trance-like, blissed out state. Or meditating for hours on end.

It simply means bringing a tiny bit more awareness to everything happening internal and external to me in a given day. This includes everything from the thoughts in my head, to eating the food in front of me, to having conversations with co-workers or friends.

It means paying attention. Not getting lost on autopilot during one of the aforementioned activities.

It doesn’t mean NOT thinking. Thinking is fine as long as I’m aware that I’m thinking about something I’ve chosen to think about. It means not getting lost in thought — or more realisitically, catching myself when I am lost in thought, and returning my attention to the task at hand.

And though it can be a huge distractor, it doesn’t mean eliminating technology from my life. Using my iPhone is fine as long as it’s done for a specific purpose when I’ve chosen to use it — not getting sucked into the depths of the internet because I haphazardly wanted to see if the URL jared.com is available (it’s not — thanks Jared’s Jewelers).

This is easier said than done. Though I’ve gotten better at not getting sucked into the phone, my mind is constantly bombarded with thoughts about random things to Google, people to text, or reminders to set for myself. I’ve started to let a lot of these impulses go. I’ve realized, right after I’m triggered to reach for the phone, that 90% of these thoughts are not urgent. Important, perhaps. But if they’re important enough, they will come back at a better time. And they do.

Setting the intention to be mindful every morning involves simply writing it down:

(The irony that I’m using the “goal” section of this journal for intention setting, despite just ragging on goals, is not lost one me)

At night, I reflect on what I’m calling “awareness lapses.” These are moments when my mind wandered at an inconvenient time. Times when I failed to be aware.

It’s January 15. I’m only two weeks in. This whole thing could become a disaster.

But the beauty of it is, by setting intention, I’ve already given myself permission to fail (and I have — dozens of times a day).

Hopefully that freedom makes it stick.