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You Can Improve Your Life by Setting Your Intentions

Steam TrainIntentions have transformative power. Together you can create and set your intentions toward love and peace. You can set them to bring joyous satisfaction and accomplishment to your mutual lives. With these kinds of potential benefits in mind, it furthers you to find ways in your relationship to consciously set intentions and to remind each other of these goals.

We have a really busy time coming up, busy through our own making. We’re planning an interactive workshop in 11 weeks time, and September is full of trips. Maude is visiting friends in Europe for the first half, then we’re driving to Carson City for our wedding anniversary and to ride on a steam train. (Sound effects from Phil here.) We plan to keep writing blogs for that month, too, so it’s going to be a busy three months, and we talked about the mental attitude we’ll need to avoid it becoming a slog.

We agreed that we don’t want to come from a place of pressure, or start to feel overloaded and harried; we don’t want to feel stress and anxiety, rushing and busyness. All of these activities are planned with purposeful intention, yet we know that all too easily we can forget the why and lose track of the wherefore.

We’ve had some experiences that alerted us to this, and we have been able to draw on them when we veer from our course.

One was when Phil started feeling underjoyed (it’s the opposite of overjoyed) by the process of writing a blog, newsletter, reading corner and audio each week. We talked about it, Phil realized how antithetical that was to our vision and – just stopped. It was about deciding how to look at it. Because we always have a choice of how to view any situation. No description is all-encompassing; there is invariably another way of seeing things from a different angle.

Another time was last year when we organized our travels a little differently. We decided to pick a basic route and direction, but not book any places and just see how things manifested as we went along. In the beginning, this was so different that we were a bit out of sync, not knowing how to make decisions. The roles of navigator and driver started to clash and we were bickering and feeling irritated. Neither of us was having much fun or enjoying the trip. One of us stopped and pointed out the disharmony, and the other said, “Well, let’s just stop doing that!” And we did. We reiterated our intention for the journey and for how we like to be with each other and moved right back to that space. (We wrote about this event a year back.)

Does that sound unreal or too good to be true? That’s the thing with intention. You can give it your attention and make it your priority. You can choose to move in that direction. When you do, any other pulls on you will drop away. They can never have the power that a mutually set intention has.

So for the actions and plans that we have set for the next three months, we want to be joyful and present, sharing love and being of service together. If we slip out of conscious awareness of that, one of us will be there to remind the other.

The takeaway here is that how you handle life is a choice. The trick is to notice that you’re holding a poor attitude and switch to taking a better one. All you need for this is awareness and intention. What are your mutual goals? What chord and tone do you want to strike between you? Set your intentions together and watch how that changes everything!

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Successful Relationship Reading Corner


BookshelfThis week we wrote about improving your life and your relationship by setting your intentions. Here are some helpful articles on different aspects of this topic.

The Nature of Intentions in Relationships "How important is intention in the growth and development of healthy relationships? Does the good stuff just happen by itself? Can we make our goals, our dreams, our lives, our relationships happen out of sheer will? Is there always that chance for the development and healing that is required in healthy relationships? Are some people just lucky in relationships?"

Good Intentions? "I recently read an article about the effect of other people's good intentions on us. Others' good intentions have been shown to decrease our pain, increase our pleasure, and, yes, even make food taste better. It's a delight to see a study done that articulates what we know from our own experience. Most of us have witnessed or felt the power of others' good or unkind intentions on us and ours on them. But have we stopped to consider the power of our intentions, kind or unkind, on ourselves?"

Sample Intentions "Intentions are a critically important step in creating a dream life come true. But if you’ve never written them before, it can be daunting. Here are some sample intentions to inspire you to write your own:"

 

Spreading peace one relationship at a time
Phil and Maude
 
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