Tara Brach - The Liberating Power of Conscious Intention – Part 1

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

The Liberating Power of Conscious Intention – Part 1 - 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. These two talks include reflections and practices that can bring the power of intention alive in your life.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. A story I heard had an elderly man in the woods and he was walking along and he heard a small voice and he looked down and there was a frog and the frog said, Kiss me and I'll turn into a beautiful young woman and the man kept walking. and the frog hops along and says again, please, please kiss me, I'll become the most beautiful woman you can imagine. And the guy slowly stoops down, he picks up the frog and he puts him in his pocket.

And the frog says, hey, aren't you going to kiss me? And the man says, well, at this point in my life, I'd rather have a talking frog. We know we changeover. time and what we want shifts. You know, we might be early in our life, you know, want to belong to a certain set of friends that meets in the cafeteria and another time we want to get that degree. You know, we change over time. What we want shifts, what drives us. Maybe it's not talking frogs but might be getting that degree or finding a partner. or maybe that our teen gets into a certain college, promotion, winning something. But under all the changing wants, there's a deep current of what most matters to us.

There's a deep heart's intention and how conscious and connected we are with that intention determines our level of happiness and freedom. So our talk and reflections this week and next will be on the power of conscious intention to create our life experience, to really align our life with our heart. Some might be celebrating that Jewish high holidays now. Rosh Hashanah celebrates the creation of the world,

and it's a beautiful time to start. start the new year with self-awareness, with meaningful intentions, and for all listening. This pertains to starting the day, starting every fresh moment. Reflecting on our deepest intention is what allows us to live from the depth and the goodness and the creativity of who we are. So I'll start on this mode by sharing that I was teaching a retreat at Yucca Valley, California some probably a decade ago or so, and I'd go for walks in the desert. And I remember on one, hiking through these eros, these dried creek beds, and realizing

I was completely lost. I had no idea of direction because the landscape looks kind of the same, at least to these Easterer's eyes. And so I had to climb a bit until I could see a steeple on the top of a building that was part of the retreat facility. And that became my landmark. And anytime, I'd just go wandering, but any time I feel like I was lost, I'd climb up a little and see that steeple and then be able to set my course back. So I was reflecting how on the spirit, spiritual path, how seeing that spire, that steeple, it's like remembering our deepest intention. It carries us home.

And it's so necessary when we're lost that in some way we can come back and remember, okay, here's what really matters. At any moment that we're stuck in difficult emotions, reactive, lost, any moment that we can get in touch with what really truly feels important in our life, we'll sense that we're coming home again, coming home to who we are. In Buddhist psychology, intention is considered the seed that creates our entire future. Intentions, what determines our actions.

Every action is moved by an intention. and it creates our life experience. It's sometimes described in terms of karma, which means cause and effect, and that our intention is what causes or leads to actions that then have their rippling effect on our life. Many know the classic example that you can put a knife in a person, and if it's that you're doing it in the middle of a fight intending to injure, that's one karmic repercussion that'll happen, or if you put a knife and a person and you're a surgeon

intending to heal, it's quite a different kind of karmic rippling. The Chinese Buddhist text put it this way, that from intention springs the deed, from the deed springs the habit, from the habits grow the character, from the character develops destiny. The Buddha said that we live our entire life on the tip of intention. In other words, intention drives everything and either create suffering or it leads to freedom. So there are different layers or domains of intention that we'll be looking at. We're going to focus on the two that most impact are evolving, awakening consciousness. And one of them is what we might call our deepest intention.

It's what that spire was for me. It's what most matters to us, what our life is dedicated to. You might think of it as our liberating aspiration. And for example, let's say our deep aspiration, our intention is love to inhabit and express love. Within that there's going to be intentions that are support of that, in service of that. For instance, for the sake of living and expressing love, you might commit yourself to listening more deeply or to meditating or to helping others.

So there are intentions in support of that deep heart intention or aspiration. That's one domain. And then another are the intentions to cause suffering. And that's when our actions and our behaviors are coming from the intention to get approval, or the intention to get affection from others, or the intention to be right, or to get back and have some vengeance and to beat others in a certain way. And these ego-level intentions are delusions really because they're kind of the fake spy that we think are going to move us towards happiness, but they don't deliver. They actually entrap us. So the key teaching in Buddhist psychology then in this domain is be mindful

of your intention. And most are unconscious, so it actually takes a purposefulness. You know, mostly we move through the day doing activities and we're not usually aware of the motivations and intentions behind them. And yet every activity is driven by an intention and it creates a certain kind of experience. And here's the thing. If you're mindful, then there's a possibility of being aware of whatever intention is operating and opening into the deeper intention that really expresses your heart. to ground this for a moment, you might reflect and look back at what's happened already today

or maybe yesterday. And consider someone you had an interaction with. Can you sense the intention that you held as you're having that interaction? I mean, was it a heart's intent to deepen connection, understanding, or was it more of that egoic level of, or was it more of wanting that person to approve of you or to like you, was it that you wanted to feel like you were being a helpful person? Were you wanting to get the interaction over with to get onto something else? Were you trying to avoid being judged? Just to sense that. What happens as you become mindful of that intention? Or maybe it was a mix of intention. And if you were repeating that situation, what might have been different?

If you had the spire that was really what most mattered to you, maybe you might have listened differently, more deeply, been more present, real, really there. So we're going to circle back to this because being aware of our intention changes the quality of our relationships with ourselves, with others, with our world. And our regrets come from the parts of our life where we were caught in intentions that cause suffering, that we weren't conscious of our deepest intention, we didn't live aligned. I mean, think of it. For some, it's somebody we love dies and then there's that regret that, oh, I wish I'd remembered how much I cherish this person and spent more quality time.

It might be the same when our child graduates and leaves home, having that regret. Or maybe it's regret for the years lost in addictive behavior, wishing we'd been more connected with a sense of what mattered, what was possible. Intention is a seed that determines our behaviors and creates our experience. And we can't change the past. The power of intention, and this is what really motivates me to explore it in my own life and with you, is that you can set your intention in the present. You can align your life right here and now, planning the seeds for the future.

It's as the Zen master say it, the most important thing is remembering the most important thing? What is our life dedicated to? Now, here's the question, which is really a challenge, which is, do you know? I mean, do you know what's most important to you? What most matters? And I ask because I often lead reflections where I invite us all to get in touch with our deepest intention, our true aspiration. And many people talk to me because they find, find, well, that either it's a mechanical reflection. They just say, oh, my deepest intention is caring for loved ones or being of service or are growing or knowing what's true. Or else they find they're just kind of blank. There's nothing there. Their mind's kind

of just spinning around. So, in order to have sincere and real contact with our deep and intention, it requires a kind of stillness and inner listening, a real presence, to sense what matters to our heart. In other words, our ego self in its thinking about the future in the past, isn't going to remember or connect. It's our awake heart that knows our deep intention. So we have to attend and be present. our wake heart. And it can seem like a catch-22 that we have to be present to remember

what we want to remember. And usually what we want to remember has to do with something to do with presence. And I'm jumping ahead here, but it's not a true catch-22. And here's why. Because who you really are, your awareness, wants to wake up. There's always been something in us, always something calling us home to love, to more presence, to truth. And, and here's what we're going to be exploring more fully, we can train in becoming mindful, becoming aware of intention, both our deep intention and also whatever intentions might be dominating the airwaves. So we'll start with how do we train in contacting our deep intention. And I find it helpful to consider three elements of our kind of core spiritual

intention or aspiration. And again, for many, the deepest intention is there and then a lot of the intentions we pay attention to are in service of that. So, the three domains. And the first, The first one, the first domain, is that your deepest intention always has to do with manifesting your innate potential. Like an acorn is not going to be trying to become a beach tree. We're trying to manifest what we really are. There's different language for that. It might be that your intention is towards love or towards presence or creativity or fearlessness

or joy or wisdom, they're all expressions of our potential. So your deepest intention, what you long for is what you are. Again, the flower seeks to blossom, the acorn seeks to become an oak. I remember back in the days of where we had answering machines, somebody had what they call a questioning machine, you'd call them. And what you'd hear is, what I want to know is, who are you and what do you want? I loved it. I called them regularly to keep inviting myself into a deeper space. But it's a beautiful way to connect with your heart's aspiration, because what we find out is that what we long for is an expression of who we are. And so,

So in contrast to that, if we're longing to hike the Appalachian Trail or to meet Beyoncé or the Dalai Lama or some externally hitched experience, that's apart from what we are. But if we're longing and our aspirations to be loving, to be truthful, to be courageous, that's an expression of our potential. I remember a beautiful story, an indigenous elder offering blessings to sleeping youth and his blessing was the same for each. He said, be who you are. So that's the first expression of a true aspiration. It has to do with manifesting what we are. The second is that for an aspiration or intention to be awake and conscious and full, it needs to be embodied. In other words, we need to feel it. It's a heartfelt experience.

experience. Oprah Winfrey puts it this way. She says, ask yourself, what is my truest intention? Give yourself time to let a yes resound within you. When it's right, I guarantee that your entire body will feel it. Intentions, the aspirations that we arrive at through reasoning, have very little influence in altering the course of our lives. So, if we do a reflection and it's very mental, like, you know, okay, what really matters to me, well, it matters to me to be a good person, that's not going to end up impacting our behaviors. The intentions that move us are emotional, they are embodied, they arise from real longing,

they engage us. So when someone's embodying an intention, I think the The best way to describe the way it transmits is sincerity. There's a quality of innocence, purity, sincerity. Okay, so these are two kind of markers of our deepest intention. One is that it's a manifesting of our potential and the second is that it's embodied, it's felt. The third flag or sign of true.

aspiration is that it always relates to this moment that what we're aspiring to is experienced in the here and now. It's not in five years I want to be patient and kind. It's not like you remember St. Augustine who said, Lord, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet. So we're really asking what our spirit or heart longs to experience right here and now. And And think about it, only if we're open to the possibility of here and now manifesting, are we truly open and available? If we think it's down the road, something in us is not present for it. So those are the three dimensions of our true aspiration or intention.

And what I'd like to do is pause again and do a reflection on this. This is kind of the ground level of training ourselves to take that power of intention and bring it alive in our lives. Wherever you are, you might see if you can find a posture that serves you so you can be alert and at ease. Take a few full breaths and let the breath invite you right here into the moment. moment, perhaps a long deep in-breath and a slow-out breath, releasing, letting go. Again, nice full deep in-breath.

And a slow-out breath, letting go, letting go. And again, breathing in, filling the chest and the lungs. And a very slow, smooth out breath, releasing, letting go. a breath resumes in its natural rhythm. Just sensing the awareness that's here, the presence that's here, that which is aware of the breath, letting all the senses be awake, listening to the sounds, feel the aliveness in the body, and feel your heart. You might gently bring a slight smile to the mouth and let that spread through the face, visualize and sense. the curve of a smile spreading through the heart.

So there can be a widening out or rippling out and let the mood or atmosphere of a smile spread through the body, further relaxing and opening you. And gently bring the attention to the breath. You might feel the breath at the heart and notice your heart, the state of your heart. And then just as if you're dropping a little pettling a little pett. pebble into pond, just drop in that inquiry. What is my deepest intention, my truest intention, my heart's aspiration? Ask your awakening heart. What do you most long for? And then listen, what really matters? For some, it helps to imagine from the vantage of the end of your life

looking back, what would most matter? And for some it helps to imagine your future self, the most wise, caring expression of your being, letting you know what matters. What is it you long to experience that is your potential manifested? And how does it feel that intention or longing it right now. Feel it as a prayer or something that really matters. For instance, if your intention is to be fully loving, it's really that prayerfulness, please may I be fully loving. Let it matter to your heart. Sense how it matters. And sense it as a intention for right here now, may in this moment I experience or live from the that love, from that presence, from that awareness.

If for you it serves to journal, to write down your true aspiration or intention, as I continue to talk, please feel free. The poet John O'Donoh Donahue says that prayer is a bridge between longing and belonging. So when our intention, when our aspiration is conscious and embodied and present, it actually is that spire guiding us home to belonging. It guides us home to live from what we most long for. Now here's the challenge. And I'm going to invite you to reflect again in a moment.

The challenge is, as we know, we humans are very habituated. and our habit is every day to go to sleep, go into a kind of trance, and forget. Forget what really matters, forget what we most care about, and we get caught in a kind of autopilot, and often we're run by other wants, other fears. So I just want you to, again, checking in, just reflect. and this is with real curiosity, without judgment, how alive is your aspiration in daily life? You might again, scan today, yesterday, and the ways you're living your days, how much of it is aligned with or supportive of what most matters to you? For many, you'll find that, yes,

sometimes there's remembering, but you're frequently also lost and not in touch. They say that all of spiritual life is forgetting and remembering. So I like this quote from D.H. Lawrence because I think it sums it up. He says this. He says that humans are not free when they're doing just what they like. We're only free when we're doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self. It takes some diving.

So, our training in being mindful of intention, there are a few different elements. The first step as we've been exploring is to connect with our deepest intention. Practice a reflection that brings us in touch by getting present and really inquiring. And then the second piece is we need to learn to dive, to reconnect when we're lost, to become mindful of whatever current intentions running the show and then learn how to open into the deepest intention. So let's look more closely what all of this means. We can start by saying that if we're not mindful and awake, it's natural that we're going

to move through the day on automatic as I mentioned. And the intentions that will be driving our behaviors come from a sense of a separate itself that has the conditioning to perceive something's missing or something's wrong. In other words, most of our daily intentions, we'll call them our egoic intentions and I want to say right here that doesn't mean they're bad. It just means that they sometimes get, they sometimes dominate and take over in a way that can cause suffering. Our intentions that drive much of our day is that this is a self that needs to

protection that needs control, that is looking for self-worth, for security, status, safety, you know, which leads us to checking things off a list, trying to accomplish, trying to feel good about ourselves. Again, these aren't bad things. They're natural. And yet, they're not going to lead us to the happiness and freedom that's possible if we're more mindful of our deepest intention. And as we know, even what seems like good behavior, you know, say visiting a hospital or helping someone at work, it's often driven by the need

to feel like a good person to appease our guilt or prove our worth. And much that we do is for our own comfort or convenience. I think of one story of a good group of children in a school bus and they're being driven. It's kind of a bit of a drive and so the children have time to be talking and they're sharing some peanuts with each other. And one little girl brings up a handful and gives it to the bus driver. And he says, thank you. That's so very kind and generous. And, you know, she goes back, plays, you know, she's talking with her friends or eating, comes back with another handful. And he says, oh, no, no, no, no. You keep this, this is for you? And she said, oh, that's okay, we're just first sucking off the chocolate.

We've got mixed intentions when we are whatever behavior is coming up. And it's interesting to ask ourselves, you know, are we really being generous? Are we doing something to make ourselves feel better about ourselves? Again, intentions are marbled. The point is, be aware. If we're aware, then we can do that diving. The suffering of ego-level intentions is that

what we think is going to make us happy doesn't deliver. So we get addicted to going after success or money or approval or attention or affection from others and we have some notion that if we get just enough

then finally we'll be happy but it's never enough. and check it out. I know for myself, I remember actual meditation where I was watching that, you know, process of always trying to go for approval or for success. And I asked myself, well, what would be enough? You know, what would have to happen for me really to go, okay, I'm good enough? And I realized none of that would ever, make a difference, that the only moments that there's a sense of enough are moments that come out of presence, moments that come out of really truly being here and resting in a kind

of open-hearted awareness. That's the only time it really feels like enough. So, the sign of being driven by an ego intention is is never enough, something's missing, something's wrong. And the way it shows up is a feeling of being separated from the truth of who we are, our wholeness, and being separate from others. And that's really one of the impacts of having an intention that's coming from wants and fears. And it's so interesting that in our brains we have a social networking and a neuronal networking in our brains and part of what that networking can do is pick up each other's intentions. Dogs have that network.

My dog knows my intentions. She knows when I'm impatient and want her to stop pestering me for food and she knows when I'm wanting to play and when I'm wanting to connect. We put a cartoon up on Facebook. Thank you, Christy, my assistant. She has a real knack for picking fun ones. This one has a dog sitting in a meditative pose at the center of the front lawn. Eyes are closed.

This is just emanating benign energy. And the sign there says, aware dog. You have to see it, I think. Maybe, but it's just absolutely perfect, aware dog. So we're talking about being aware of our intention and noticing how when our intention is in that mode of wants and fears with each other, it distances. It's also useful to remember that our ego-level intentions can masquerade as spiritual intention And there's a classic Zen story of a new to-be monk who goes to the monastery and wants

to enter in and be part of the community and he asked the abbot, well, how long will it take me to be enlightened? And the abbot says, 10 years. And then the novice says, well, how about if I try really hard? And the abbot says, 20 years. And the novice says, hey, you just said 10. For you, 30. If we turn the spiritual path into something the ego is trying to feel good about itself for, get somewhere fast, raised towards the finish line, it's been co-opted.

There's always intention behind our actions. So what kind of intention is there? And again, I just want to keep grounding this and invite you to pause and just consider today thus far. Remind yourself of what you've been up to, what you've been doing, and see if you can look behind your actions to notice the kind of intentions that have been moving you through the day. Again, not to judge when you're trying to get things done to feel more secure or feel better

about yourself? Was your intention to express love, express creativity without evaluating, simply notice and along with noticing, sense the experience that your intentions and actions created? What's been your mood? What is your sense of your own being? Has it been a small self anxiously on its way to something? Or has it been a kind of spacious sense of a field of presence, aware of different experiences, kind, compassionate?

What we notice is when ego intention dominates, when we have that, you know, that, you know, alternative spire, it keeps us small. The seeds create an experience of being preoccupied, tense usually, reactive. Often there's this undercurrent, as I've mentioned, of something's missing, something's wrong, personal deficiency. There's a quote that we keep going fishing, not realizing, it's not fish we were after. So, the more we're dominated by the ego intentions that we're on automatic, we lose sight of the deeper intentions and we create a life experience that's not aligned with our heart. We are not having intention be the compass for our heart. So we've explored now how we can connect with deepest intention. And this is a

reflection I invite you to do regularly, the question is how do we remember through the day? How do we become more mindful of intention? And there are really two primary trainings and one is to set our intention, which we'll explore a little more for the last part of this talk. And the other, as I've mentioned before, is learning how to shift, how to dive. So we go from ego intention to our true intention. And that we will explore next week. To step back a bit, I wanted to share with you that as I was reflecting on this theme over the last month, I joined with Jonathan, my partner, and we both decided to do talks on it. And by the way, if you listen to both of us, you'll hear some similar themes, I hope. And our motivation was that we were

spending our final weeks on Cape Cod, both working, doing our work, and soaking in the wonder of sand and sea and sky, and aware of impermanence, how it's all changing so fast, and who knows when next will have, you know, that kind of a stretch of time. And so we really wanted to dedicate ourselves to living our moments and to remembering what most mattered. And so it was our shared intention, you know, to explore, how do we remember, how do we remember presence? How do we use that spire and keep waking up from the trance of automatic? So, we thought we'd do our own experiment to deepen attention to intention. And we structured it so that after our morning meditation, we shared with each other

our intention for the day. And we had reflected on, well, what's my deepest intention and how do I want to express it today? And we had different language. Mine generally had the words like open-hearted presence. His had to do with flow and opening to flow. And then at the end of each day, we checked in and we reflected together on how much did we see the spire? Remember really what mattered to us? How often do we come back to that? And just to say, it's not new for me to bookend my day like this, but it added a real power to have our shared attention to it.

It made me more accountable and alert. And even if I hadn't been with him, doing it very specifically on intention, what's my intention for today? the end looking back and sensing, well, where was I aligned and when did I forget? Very, very powerful. So I can report to you that there was an increase in presence, more of this gravitational field of remembering. And then at the end of the day, there always are spaces of real forgetting, not judging,

really being curious, okay. So, when I forget, when I get caught in ego level intentions and even get small, tight, go into whatever reactivity is there, what's going on? You know, is it screen time? Because that's usually for me a time of, you know, drifting. It takes more consciousness to keep aware. it's feeling of deadlines and it shows up this urgency to do more or sometimes there's a sense of falling short and I get kind of caught in that trance or often when I'm tired or not feeling

well, these are different things I started tagging as, okay, those are forgetting times. But noticing without judgment, just having those times flagged inclined me to be more alert and to notice when I drifted and, you know, just be more able to come back. We also explored targeting intention and by that I mean not only would I be saying, okay, my intention's open-hearted presence, but during this particular Zoom call or during this conversation or whatever, I would in my mind target it so that I'd be more aware when I most felt like I would need that spire. And what I found is for many of us where we most need that spire remembrance, where

we most regret forgetting intention is in our daily interactions with each other. We seem to kind of zone out and go into habitual behaviors so quickly, it takes training to remember. And it's valuable to preset in a targeted way as I'm describing. So if you decide to do this bookending of the day and I hope you will, know that if you're having time with someone that might be tense or conflictual, set your intention ahead of time. the outcome you want, how you want to feel, how you want them to feel. An example of targeting

a few months ago with a family member, reached out to me, wanted a talk, was struggling with a decision. And so we were on the phone and he shared his dilemma and I weighed in, given what I knew about him, I weighed in and offered some perspectives I thought might be useful. and got off and afterwards, when I was reflecting on the day, I realized, wow, I was in total fixing mode. I was time conscious. I was trying to make it quick and I just really had not showed up with much presence, definitely not open-hearted presence the way I really would like to. We talked again the following weekend and this time I preset my intention. It was very targeted. and it was really to offer that kind of heart presence and to invite him forward, to have

him trust his wisdom. And so we talked and I did a lot more listening. I think mostly I was saying, well tell me more, asking questions or mirroring back and what I'm hearing is. And he left more trusting himself, his wise heart. So it wasn't like he left him. thinking, oh boy, Tara really knows the answers, it was that he was more in touch with himself, which is where the awakening comes. And of course, we were more connected because

of that. So I do want to suggest for this coming week that you explore bookending your day, getting in touch with your intention, your truest intention at the beginning of the day, particulars that you feel where you really want to be awake, and at the end of your day, reviewing without any judgment for the sake of just being more alert. And if it helps you to journal, use journaling. Okay, friends, as a closing practice, I'd like to invite you to just take a moment to again pause and breathe and come right home into your body and your heart and bring to mind an ongoing relationship where there's some tension, some conflict. And as you do remember a recent encounter, you just review it for a moment. And as we've been doing, review it with

the filter of being mindful of your intention. What was your intention? Was it to prove a point? To convince them of something or change them? To defend yourself? And you know, and to defend yourself? Notice the outcome. We talked about karma. Every intention creates actions which create outcomes. What was the outcome? How did you feel about yourself and about the other person? I'll sense what intention you'd most like to set for a next encounter. Is it compassion? Compassion for yourself? Compassion for the other person? understanding, connection, listening. Just notice if your intention feels wise, if it feels from your heart.

Setting your intention, sensing it as your potential, feeling your real longing to be able to manifest in your body, in your heart. And just imagine staying true. repeat in your mind and that you might repeat the encounter sensing how it might be if you stay true. We can't change the past. Our power is to plant seeds right now for the future by sensing our deepest intention. You know, our habits are human nature. The given is you'll forget. That's why no judgment, be forgiving. But what you practice gets stronger and the habit of remembering your true intention, your heart's intention, opens us to great possibility.

Letting intention be the compass of your heart that spire, that plant seeds for the life that most expresses the depth of who we are, the seeds that that bring love and wisdom, joy, and wonder. So we'll close with a bit of Mary Oliver, she writes, I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I've been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die? at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Thank you, friends, for your attention and for giving yourselves in such an earnest way to waking up.

Blessings.