“Choose your intention carefully and then practice holding your consciousness to it, so it becomes the guiding light in your life.” – Roger Delano Hinkins
This seems like sound advice to me even though not that easy to sustain.
When we think about the intentions we choose, they are often quite grand and geared toward making our personal lives better – here I’m thinking the endless round of New Year resolutions made in good faith and often forgotten by the end of January.
What if we took a more fundamental approach to our intention setting by choosing intentions that actually are guiding lights or principles? For example, setting ourselves an intention to be in right relationship with all living beings. At one level we might say this is about being a good human so that’s not so hard is it. But if we really hold our consciousness to it and make it central to our lives as Hinkins suggests, then it takes us in many powerful directions.
Minute by minute we can practice improving the quality of our interactions with others, committing ourselves to show kindness and compassion – well that’s already set the bar pretty high – especially if we’re having a bad day ourselves.
And yet, these micro changes, day in, day out, are the fundamental key to building a more peaceful world. Not because there are never conflicts or disagreements, but if we set the intention to behave with kindness and compassion even in conflict, then we stand a better chance of resolving it wouldn’t you say? Even if that resolution is to accept our differences with respect for the other.
And then each micro step builds until we could actually say (and mean it) that our intention is world peace.
Holding our consciousness to the fundamentals of building a better society and world through our micro movements feels like a powerful intention.