Tara Brach - The Liberating Power of Conscious Intention 2

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

While we can't change our past, we have the capacity in this moment to remember our deepest intention and seed the future. Intention can become the compass of our heart, guiding and creating our life experience.   In these two talks we explore how we awaken mindfulness of intention and how, when we are caught in habits that create suffering, we can find our way home to the deep intention that heals and frees us. The two talks include reflections and practices that can bring the power of intention alive in your life.   Our introduction music is from "Opening" by Adrienne Torf, © 2025 ABT Music

Welcome, friends, to the Tara Brock podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week, I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting tarabrock.com, where you can also join our email list. Now, let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste. Namaste. Welcome, friends.

Some years ago, I was planning a talk on presence, and I was in the shower thinking of different illustrative stories that might be part of the talk. When I realized that I was slathering my head with shaving cream and so much for presents, right? Jonathan said it was a good thing I didn't start shaving. The real challenge we face is remembering to remember. And this is where intention becomes so crucial on the spiritual path,

the more we set our intention consciously, whether it's for presence or kindness or whatever really matters to us. When we do it at, let's say the beginning of a day or before a stressful engagement, or at the beginning of a meditation, there's more natural calling back home. It has kind of a gravitational pull to bring us back home. Perhaps the most powerful inquiry in our daily life is, and you can ask yourself this very moment, what most matters to my heart? What most matters?

And there's an art to asking. We often have to ask several times to get quieter and really be listening. But the gift is this, that as we remember what matters, as we remember, oh, what I most care about is presence, what I most care about is love, our connection, our creativity, there's a waking up, there's a sense of sacred homecoming. So this is the power of intention. This is the power of remembering what matters to us. It brings us home.

One of my favorite lines from the poet have faced is, ask the friend for love, ask again, for I have found that every heart will get what it prays foremost. So today's talk, which is part two on the power of intention, it offers guidance on how to connect with what most matters, how to align our lives with our hearts. Okay, my friends, blessings. Before I give a talk and in this weekly podcast and in many settings, I take some moments of quiet and I reflect on my intention

for what's coming. And I thought I'd say it out loud, which is that this reflection serve our hearts, our awakening, and the intention for presence, for open-hearted presence. So I find when I take the time to get in touch with that, with a kind of sincerity, that this is really what matters, it actually helps me stay aligned. It helps me stay connected. And I thought I'd begin in this way letting you know because this is the second part of a series on intention and the power of intention. And last week's talk is available for those that haven't listened. And just as a bit of a recap, It's really central in Buddhist psychology, the notion of intention.

And it starts with karma, which means that everything has an effect. So, your habitual kind of thinking, you know, what you've eaten so far today, what you listen to, what news you listen to, how you're speaking with people, the kind of work you do, you know, if you pause and meditate, what music you're listening to, everything impacts your experience and ripples out. So where intention comes in is behind every action, no matter what it is, a mental action, a physical action, there's an intention. And it's usually unconscious. And yet it creates our universe. The Buddha put it, that, our whole life comes out of the tip of intention, everything, all of our experience.

So, if I am here and I have the intention to impress you or look good or raise money up the donation level, it'll be a really different kind of talk than if the... intention is that our hearts wake up, that this serve our awakening, our healing, our freedom. Okay, so intentions, create actions, create our life experience. And as we know, there are different kinds of intentions. And I'm kind of grouping them for simplicity into two domains. And one is the intentions that cause suffering, such as if we have an intention to hurt ourselves or someone else. And the other grouping is the intentions that actually serve healing and awakening, such as the intention to express love. So the ones that come from suffering really are coming from

and habitual fear and clinging. In other words, when we don't have our basic needs met, you know, our needs for safety, for love, for understanding, we live with a kind of ongoing fear and clinging that gives rise to intentions that actually don't serve us. For example, if someone doesn't feel safe because they've been abused as a... young child and their intention of course is to protect themselves, to defend themselves, and then that leads to lying and to avoiding contact or to lashing out. They're suffering because that fear-driven intention to protect becomes habituated and the behaviors become habituated. So even when there's no impending threat,

that same intention to protect and those same actions unfold. Okay, so it becomes our life experience when intentions that cause suffering get habituated. It is very much amplified by the society we live in. So the same fears they get instilled in a child through their, let's say, their immediate family, get reinforced, in fact the family gets the messages from society, gets enforced by the kind of society they're living in. And if it's a society like ours that is full with violence and addictive craving and messaging about what's right and what's wrong, who's superior, who's inferior, it can leave us in the grip of fear.

So Butch Hancock, he writes this. He says, life in my hometown, rural hometown, taught me two things. One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love. So we know it. We have actually often mixed conflicting intentions. In other words, we might be having a conversation and our deep intention is to listen well and to understand and connect. And yet the fear part of ourselves wants to prove our point and to be right and to inflate ourselves to feel superior. We might want to be facing and healing our insecurity, our relational insecurity. And there's another part of us that wants to drink alcohol to feel more comfortable in a social situation.

So we get pulled by the fear intentions and then the deeper intentions for healing. a cartoon, two bears in a cave, it's hibernation time, and so one's fast asleep, the other's wide-eyed, completely tense, and the caption says, darn it, I know better than to have a cup of coffee after October. So, you know, we can see them competing, this kind of immediate gratification or comfort or protection, you know, from fear, from clinging, and the parts of ourselves, the deep part of us that's intending in the long term just knowing we want to heal, we want to wake up. So I want to slow down here and kind of ground it in your experience because if you examine the day, you can start shining a light on unconscious intentions that were fueling your

behaviors, your mood, your whole experience. We don't do it that. often, but it becomes a very powerful tool of mindfulness to begin to investigate our intentions. So I'd like to invite you to, if you're not already doing so, just to come into stillness, let your attention go inside, take a few full breaths. We're just going to scan a bit through the day, see where you are being guided by deep intention, let's say for love or connection or learning, and where more from the intentions that are rooted in fear or craving. And sometimes it's subtle and sometimes it's very clear. So I invite you to be curious, to not judge,

and to begin by sensing in the last day or maybe two days. the times you've been relating with others. You might pick a few people that you were in conversation with, interacting with, and review what happened a bit and see if you, as you do, you can sense whether your intention in that interaction was towards presence, towards love, towards understanding. or whether there was a fear-based intention or craving to get what you want, to fix them, to change someone, to impress or get approval, to get their attention, or maybe avoid their judgment, or maybe to get the interaction over.

So just to scan and notice what kind of intention was operative. and you might do the same thing in work activity, just sensing yourself at work, and just notice if your intention was towards presence, you know, wholeheartedly engaging towards serving, towards creating, learning, or whether the intention was more towards relieving your anxiety by getting more done, impressing others, avoiding mistakes, being enough. And you might scan how you've been relating to yourself, whether in relating to yourself your intention's been towards presence, towards care, towards understanding, towards waking up, or whether it's been towards changing yourself by judging yourself, but pushing yourself, by aggressing against yourself,

or whether you've been trying to avoid being with yourself, or maybe ignoring yourself. Again, not to add judgment to it, but just notice what kind of unconscious intention was behind the way you were relating to yourself. and take a few breaths and feel the intention as you move on now, continue to listen, to let this tool of noticing serve you. There's a real power to bringing intention into the light of awareness. It actually gives us choice. It gives us the opportunity to sense, is this really the intention?

intention that is an expression of who I am. And awareness itself is the healer, just noticing, will help you come more and more into having intention be a real compass of the heart. Now, there are a number of pathways for recognizing and living from our deepest intention. And last week we explored how in a meditation and coming into presence we can begin to just ask herself what really matters and come into contact with what's really sincere, what really expresses us. And we also began exploring how we can set our intention for the day. And I described me bookending the day, like setting the intention at the beginning and doing this in company with Jonathan, my partner, and then at the end checking in and saying, how to go, without judgment.

So you can do that kind of a broad setting in the intention for the day. You know, what do you want to keep remembering through the day? It's a beautiful way to, you know, have a meditation at the beginning of the day and just set that intention, and it's powerful. One of my friends and teaching colleagues, Franco Sussesky, frames intention in a lovely way. His question is, love, what would you have me do today? What would you have me do today? So that's one thing, is broadly setting your intention.

But it's also really powerful to set it for particular situations. We tend to forget when we set it broadly more easily, but if you know there's an event that's going to be intimidating or a conversation that could be challenging or a conversation that's really special that you imagine you really, really want to show up for, really helpful to set your intention and move through that situation. and imagine it, neuroscience actually shows us and helps us understand the power of this. Because in order to really set an intention for a particular situation, you have to live it through in your mind.

And there was a study at Harvard Medical School where they divided participants into two groups, And one group was practicing a simple piano exercise every day, and the other group was instructed just to think about practicing that exercise. And what they found is that both groups showed beneficial structural changes in the same area of the brain in similar degrees. In other words, it created and strengthened neuropathways whether you were actually practicing the piano are imagining practicing the piano. So our brains can be altered just by thinking about something, which just starts to shine a light on how powerful it is when you set

an intention for what's coming, how much that can impact. So, for example, maybe you are going to have a meeting later on in the day a work meeting where there's a really good chance that there's going to be some conflict, some tension. And so you walk through it in your mind and you have the intention yourself to be open-minded, respectful, appreciative, to pause before you say things, and you run through it. It has a very big impact. I know for myself, when I do that, I end up before I speak really asking myself, well, what's my intention in speaking? You know, am I really wanting to serve where we're moving forward? Or am I trying to get my way in some way or just assert that I'm here?

It's really powerful. Or you may have something coming up where you really want to show up for someone. I remember doing this, kind of setting an intention when I was going to be having a conversation later in the day with a friend who had just lost both of her parents in the span of a couple of months. And she was in really deep grief, they had a very, very close family. And so I asked that kind of question, you know, really what matters in this? and just felt how much I wanted to offer a real deep presence, a listening presence, wholehearted presence.

And when I rehearsed in a sense, when I imagined into it, I could tell, oh, this is so painful, this is, there's no good response, there's just being with. And so then the actual time came and we spoke and she shared a lot and, you know, I asked a few, questions to make sure she was saying all she wanted. And then there was a silence. And we were on Zoom and we were just there in silence and it went on and it got uncomfortable. So I was about to say something and I have no idea what I had thought I was going to say. But there was this reminder then, okay, this is speaking from discomfort.

I'm wanting to ease the discomfort. Just be quiet. Be the quietness, you know. So I just stayed and the quietness went on. And we were both in tears. And then she really wept. And as a quieted, she said, oh, I just so needed that. She said, I just so needed to be with someone who would just keep me company.

I, last week I mentioned that walking in the desert and seeing the spire and that kind of reminded me of the way back to the retreat center. I was so grateful to have that spire, that reminder just to stay, stay, be quiet. You know, I found for some situations it really helps to hitch intention to certain flags. In other words, the flag of when you're about to press, send on a charged email to let your intention be to stop and to review and say, does this really resonate with my heart and my wisdom? Or for me, when I'm about to go for a walk, when I walk outside, it's a flag to let the walk be a meditation. I walk regularly and to really come into my senses. So I right away start listening and I start feeling as I'm moving my feet on the earth.

Or the flag might be a certain person that you know there's a kind of conflict that keeps on replaying when it replays, that's your flag to pause and reconnect. Well, what really matters here? Or it might be internal like when you find yourself obsessing or specifically caught in judging, resenting, blaming, okay, pause, what's under this? What's my deep intention? It's so powerful to ask those questions, to slow it down. It's a way of interrupting old patterns so that we have a choice to live more from our heart. I remember some years ago, I was working with a man who was struggling with his anger, and he was very domineering. He was very domineering with others.

He had to have his way, he had to prove you his right, and it was at work, but in his marriage they were near dissolution. It was really problematic. And we did a lot of inner work, tending to the young vulnerable part of himself that was underneath that need to keep proving and dominating and a lot of work with self-compassion bringing himself a lot of kindness which helped him get in touch with his deepest intention was to feel he wanted to feel seen and loved so he could connect with others so he could be part so he could belong but he needed to be a did a way back when he was engaging, a way of interrupting the old behaviors. So he set his intention, you know, whenever he noticed that he was arguing or controlling things. And just to say,

the limbic system is so much faster than our frontal cortex, we need a way of interrupting and slowing ourselves down. So that was his practice, especially with his wife, whenever he felt that tension and that he was trying to push her around in some way, he would pause and he had a mantra. It was not my will, my heart's well. That was what he would say to himself. And it helped him. It helped him realign his moments and his behavior with what mattered to him. Okay, so we're talking about getting in touch with our deepest intention, setting our intention and targeting the times of the day that we know it'll make a real difference to remember. And the truth is, whatever we practice gets stronger.

So the more we practice that, the more we find that what really matters to our heart, seems to be guiding us through our moments, through our day. But I want to now go to what I think of as the primary challenge in accessing our deep intention. And you've probably realized that whenever you're caught in the grip of what we'll call a fear-based intention, you know, the anger that wants to hurt or can get back or the craving that wants to have what you want to have, in those moments, there's very little access to remembering what really matters. Or you might have it as a mental understanding, like, I know this is wrong, I know that this is going to hurt me, I know there's a better way, but it doesn't matter right now,

you know, whatever. We're cut off though. from that integrated brain, that awake heart, that really allows us to connect with the purity and power of deep intention. Maybe you remember from last week I talked a quote from D.H. Lawrence that I really love. He says it's not what the self wants. It's what the deepest self wants. And it takes some diving. So how do we dive when what the self wants is really charged. And here I'd like to say what I found, there's two related understandings that can help you dive when you're stuck, that can help you reconnect with an away cart.

And the first one is that no matter what you're doing, whether you're hurting yourself, whether you're hurting others, the intention behind it is in some way to serve your survival, you're thriving. whenever you're emotionally stuck, the emotion is trying to help and it's misguided. You know, it's based on some delusional belief formed early in life, you know, and that we then just builds on itself so we land up, you know, if only I can get more money or more approval, are the right partner, then I'll be happy. or if I judge myself, then I'll change.

Or if I can get rid of this person from my life, or put them down or diminish them, it'll all be better. Or, if only I can get rid of these feelings right now, then I'll be okay. And then that leads us to more food or more drugs or drinking or whatever. So the intentions are misguided, but deep down, they're trying to serve your life. I think of them as they're a life that's loving life, just confused. And, you know, some we can see, and some are just immature. Some of our intentions are, it's like there's just this young person playing out, and it would have been okay at a younger age, but it feels not.

okay now. I think of a story of a mom who is preparing pancakes for her two sons, a five-year-old and a three-year-old. And the boys began to argue over who gets the first pancake. And the mother saw an opportunity for a moral lesson and said, well, if Jesus was sitting here, he'd say, let my brother have the first pancake. I can wait. And so the older one turns to his younger brother and says, Ryan, you can have the first chance at being Jesus. Of course, when children act from wants and fears, we're more tolerant, you know, and even if it becomes extreme, we have the perspective of, okay, they're having a hard time. There's something in them that needs attention. There's that unmet need going on.

And it's still life-loving life, but they need something. But we don't have that with ourselves. You know, when we behave in ways we don't like, we forget that underneath that it's being driven by an intention that's trying to serve us. It's just misguided. That's the first understanding. The second understanding is that if we then respond by blaming ourselves and shaming ourselves for getting caught, it only deepens the grooves of being stuck. Shame distances you even more from the healing power of your heart's intention. It makes it harder to come home. Recovery starts with love.

It starts with forgiveness. You know, if you want to shift from the domination, of a fear-based intention, if you want to live from deep intention, we need to relate wisely and kindly with the misguided intent. I was working with one man in his 40s, a meditation student who was doing drugs and hating himself for it, and he went to narcotics anonymous, and that was really helpful because for the first time he could really see that the same pain and unmet needs that were driving him, were driving everyone. And it really helped.

It really helped to see, you know, how much it, you know, we sometimes say it's not my fear, the fear. And yet he kept breaking his abstinence and hating himself for it. And, you know, he was a meditator. and felt like, you know, this is just utterly toxic for my spiritual path, and he just was very blaming and shaming. So we practiced rain together, and many of you are familiar with, rain. Rain is a blend of mindfulness and self-compassion that you can bring to any stuck place, and the acronym is recognized, allow, investigate, and nurture. And during investigating,

He really got in touch with just the vulnerability of the unmet needs, how much as a young child he feared really abandonment, rejection and abandonment, how much that was deep in his nervous system and that he couldn't help feeling that as a young child. And he was finally able then in the nurture part to get it and said, it's not my fault. That feeling, that fear of abandonment's still there and I'm trying to feel better in the midst of it and it might not be, it isn't a wise way but it's not my fault that it's happening. And far from being a way to let him off the hook it actually was the beginning of real healing where he could bring the kind of compassion to that young child and

to that fear of abandonment, to that fear of never belonging, the kind of compassion that really could nurture in a way that transformed. Shaming and blaming was keeping him from that. Once it wasn't there, once he said it's not my fault, he could feel how deep his soul yearned for just living in love and living in presence. His soul yearned for it. He knew he was home when he got in touch with that intention. So I want to pause again here and invite you to reflect. We'll do a little reflection together on bringing rain to a place within us where we are still judging ourselves if there's a place of shaming and blaming. Maybe a behavior you know isn't good for you or maybe it's hurting others. It's always both really and you can't stop.

It might be a way of consuming, a way of lashing out, a way of neglecting yourself or others, judging. I'll take a moment and give you a chance to come up with something where the judgment is strong. And when you do, you sense the situation and recognize the judgment, recognize that you're turned on yourself, just allow all that to be there for now. And then begin to investigate and bring to mind what you're judging, the behavior that you're condemning and see if you can feel behind that behavior, what's the intention? What's it trying to do for you? What's it trying to protect you from? Or what is it trying to get for you? Maybe it's trying to protect you from rejection or abandonment or failure. Maybe it's trying to get others to love you.

Just sense what it's trying to do. See if you can feel in. to the deep intention behind it in some way trying to help you. And as you do, sense the vulnerability that's there. You wouldn't be behaving in a way that felt harmful or off unless there was some suffering place inside. Just to get in touch with the vulnerability, the unmet need. And you might put your hand on your heart and sense what happens when you say, it's not my fault, it's not my fault.

Even try with a more kind tone, it's not my fault. And as you continue, might offer yourself some message of compassion right to the place that's most vulnerable. What are you wishing for that place? just to send your blessing, your wish, what's your deepest intention? What's the healing that you intend? Just to let yourself rest in the presence that's here and continue to feel into within that presence, the care, the awake heart that's here. And sense what you want to remember. You'll be in a few moments, we'll be continuing on, but what is it you want to remember?

what's the deep intention that you want to remember as you move on? Taking a few full breaths. And if it helps you to write things down, please do. I want to again say the two understandings, if we want to dive from a fear-based intention to our deepest intention, is to remember that when you're caught, the intention that's there is in the most fundamental sense trying to help you. It's life-loving life.

It's just distorted. And that blaming and shaming deepens the distortion. There's no diving. There's no coming home until we release by releasing with, it's not my fault. it actually opens us to the possibility of real change, real transformation. And of course, this extends to when we've been talking about when we're blaming ourselves for behaviors that are harmful, it extends to blaming others when they're behaving in ways that we don't like.

There's a misguided intention underneath. It's life-loving life, but distorted, confused. And if we can see that, it helps us let go of blame, come back home to our deepest intention and respond in a way that frees us up and possibly them towards healing. The sign of a true intention is sincerity. When you get in touch with something you deeply long for, something that really matters to your heart, you'll know it because you can feel it in your body. It feels sincere. You can feel it in your heart. Our true intention has to do with manifesting our full potential for love and awareness.

And then the sign that we're in an ego intention or fear-based intention is it always feels off. We always feel like we're still striving, separate, distanced. We don't feel at home. So we need to keep pausing and diving. to find what's really, really mattering to us. You know, I've just seen for so many the despair that people have is often because they've spent decades obeying the misguided intentions. You know, chasing the approval, the affection, the attention, acquiring, are following the misguided fears of, you know, that keep leading to pushing others away, numbing ourselves, rather than living aligned with presence, with love.

There's a phrase you might be familiar with, how I live today is how I live my life. It's a compelling thing to consider. How I live today is how I live my life. And as we know, there's a quality in our daily trance that's very time-based in the sense that we're very habituated, to life going on and on, and we forget the truth of impermanence. And what that does is it keeps us from inhabiting our deep intention

because it leads us to postponing. Well, maybe down the road I'll more fully live from love, you know. And we don't register that this may be our last season. For me, this might be my last walk, you know. Maybe it's our last hug with a certain person. We don't know. We don't register that all that we love passes. I mean, you might consider someone who's very dear.

And if you knew you were spending your last five minutes together, what would your intention be? Is it to be fully present, fully loving? I'm imagining so. are you might imagine someone you love who's already gone, someone you love who's passed away, and if you could have them back for, let's say, five minutes, just five minutes to have them back, what would your intention be? We postpone. We forget impermanence. We forget and we don't let people know how much we care, we act as if we have forever, we'll see them again and again. I mean, that's why so many truly appreciate the scares

that make mortality and what matters more clear, how precious this life is. You know, I read a story I wanted to share. Some of the particulars have been challenged by scopes, but there's truth in the message, as I think you'll see. And it's about the violinist, Ishtuck Pearlman, who is, most of you know, crippled by polio when he was a young child. So at every performance, he makes a slow entrance on crutches and he sits down and he unclasped the braces on his knees and then prepares to play. And he did this as usual at a 1995 performance at the Lincoln Center in New York.

On this occasion, he had only played the first few bars when one of the strings on his violin broke. And so the whole audience could hear the crack when it snapped. And we're wondering, you know, what's going to happen next? You know, would he put on his braces and make his way across the stage and get another violin? Would he wait till someone brought him the violin, a new one? So he sat still, close his eyes, he paused, and then he signaled for the conductor to begin again. And he re-entered the concerto playing with unimaginable power. passion, purity. Some of those watching maybe could see him modulating, changing, reconfiguring

the piece in his head so deep his immersion wasn't creating. And when he finished, there was an odd silence. And then came the outburst of applause as people rose and cheered from every corner of the hall. And he smiled. He wiped the sweat from his brow to quiet the crowd. And then he spoke, and it wasn't boastful, it was in a quiet, pensive, and kind of reverent tone. He said, you know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left. Sometimes it's the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left. So for all of us, we're all playing with broken strings. It's an imperfect life, imperfect hurting world. And remembering our true intention, our deep intention,

allows us to bring our full heart to our life. And again, what we practice grow stronger. The more we practice looking towards our deep intention, the more available it is. The poet Havas guides us by saying, ask the divine for love and ask again, then he writes, for I have learned that every heart will get what it prays foremost. Every heart will get what it prays foremost. You know, I think about I've been teaching for almost 50 years. And as I've met many people on the path, and when I, consider those who've really continued to unfold deepening wisdom and love and a deepening inner

freedom over the years. And I realized it has nothing to do really with what particular spiritual path or religious path, you know, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, indigenous, doesn't matter which one. It doesn't matter which meditation practice. The sign that most is in common from all of them is that each in some way is very much with that deep, sincere intention to wake up, to love, to wake up to truth, to wake up to full presence There's one teacher and friend was a couple of years ago about to have major heart surgery and just knew the wrist so she had that awareness of impermanence and the power of intention and she was reflecting on what she wanted to share with dear ones.

You know, she had that sense of if this was the last thing I communicated. And for her it was simply this. She said, be kind, be kind to yourselves, to one another. to all living things and to our dear Mother Earth, and let that kindness blossom into action. So as a way to close together, you might let your attention go inward and just sense what would be your last message

to dear ones about what matters. You might sense if you're at the end of your life, what would be your message to yourself right now about what's most important? What would you want yourself to remember? And as you sense the deep intention of your heart, just bow to it, honor it. No, you want to come back again and again because this is home. And to remember that every heart will get what it prays foremost. Namaste, blessings, friends.

Thank you for your presence and for your attention. Thank you.