Self Guided Journey: Chapter 1 — Intent

Welcome! Kia ora koutou. Piki mai kake mai. This month is the first chapter in our consciousness journey together. Over the course of the year we will play with a range of topics, but let’s start by exploring intent.

Many of us begin our year with a period of reflection — seeking to renew and reorient ourselves for the year ahead. We examine where we have been living with incongruence — and puzzle over the gap between the life we live versus the life we feel we could truly thrive in.

It is a time of intention setting — a chance to a focus, a chance to find a little more alignment with our wholeness, purpose, gifts, and blisses.

When we set an intention, we make an inner commitment to growth.

As discussed in the introduction email, our monthly explorations will all follow an Inquiry, Action, Practice model — which you can read more about here. This framework helps us break things down into small steps — how might we open, how might we move forward, how might we embody our learning.

Inquiry — Your current state

One tool we will return to many times throughout the year is journaling. Journaling is a great way to inquire within our self, and to capture our Action and Practice discoveries.

This month, your inquiry is into your current state.

Your task is to spend time, even just ten minutes, exploring in your journal how you are, right now. Below is a list of questions to get you underway — pick the ones that resonate and go from there.

• How are you entering your year?
• How is your energy? Is high or low, positive or negative, open or closed, expansive or contracted?
• What does your inner landscape look like, currently? How do you feel about this?
• Where are you being called to expand?
• Does the life you are leading feel like one that helps you learn and thrive? And, if not, how big is the gap between your current life and a life that would allow this?
• Does what you do — how you are spending your time — give you joy? If not, what does give you joy?
• What are your barriers to self-compassion?
• What would it feel like to explore and adventure within your own life?

Action — Forming your intent

I like to think of intent as a guiding star. It helps to orient us in times of overwhelm, and find the courage to expand. It allows us to look beyond the day-to-day, and to find meaning in the difficult things that arise for us.

We often set goals for our career, our physical health or appearance, our financial security — but what are your plans this year for your fullness, your own aliveness? What would you like your intent for your own growth to be, this year?

Take a look over your journaling inquiry into your current state. Where would you like to place your intent? What resonates? What work is pulling you?

Below are examples from my clients.

• A life coming from love not fear.
• Turning from self-punishment to self-love.
• Living an updated version of myself.
• Living my most expansive self.
• Living my full potential.
• Being fully authentic.
• To fall radically in love with myself.
• Experience intimacy with life.
• A fearless heart.

For me, for many years, my intention was to replace fear with love in every one of the cells in my body.

Play around. Explore. See what resonates. Remember this is a prototype — it doesn’t have to be perfect, the wording doesn’t have exact.

We are simply making a small but significant step.

We will return to your intention many times throughout the year.

Practice — Connecting to your intent

Each morning, pause and connect to your intent — even briefly. And then, during your day, start to observe what is happening, try and pause as often as you can. When do you feel aligned with your intent? When do you feel you are contributing towards it? When do you feel disconnected from it?

Our emotions can provide powerful clues into our connectedness — clues we often miss! So instead of judging your emotions, start to think of them as information — as sources of wisdom. What might they then be able to tell you about your intent throughout your day?

Intent requires us to build a healthy relationship with yes and no. When you hear yourself using these words — agreeing or declining — how do you feel? Is there resistance? Are you saying yes/no because you feel you should?

Practice connecting to your intent, and then observe how it guides your answers. This process can feel so liberating!