By Bex van Koot
When was the last time you did something with pure intention in your heart and mind?
For many of us, “pure intention” is an ideal to which we aspire but not really something we have the opportunity to practice in the everyday. We worry about every possible mistake, about not doing enough to change the world, about pushing others too far to do the same. So often, we think and act out of fear of what we don’t want.
So those moments when we are finally able to make a choice based on pure love and trust? Those moments are precious.
Pure intention is one of the fourteen Hridaya Yoga attitudes, guidelines for cultivating a moral spiritual practice. I wanted to write here a little bit about all fourteen of the attitudes, but I worry it would go on forever. And so there I go, acting from worry, even as I act from my intention of sharing this blissful experience.
The ideal of living a life of pure intention is, for me, about harnessing the power of motivation. As a perpetual procrastinator and time-challenged freelancer, this is a daily challenge and a deeply personal struggle. The scariest and most difficult times in my life are those when I have no aim, when I feel lost without direction.
Keeping a pure intention comes through when I find myself lost in these spaces and am able to remember and to trust. During one very powerful meditation in the Module One retreat in Mazunte, an instructor shared this beautiful thought: trust life as empty lungs trust the air.
We don’t empty our lungs in panic. Often we don’t even notice the breath as it happens. When we do focus our attention there, we deliberately empty ourselves knowing that we will be filled again. Sometimes life treats us the same way.
On the wheel of time that spins us all around, sometimes we must be emptied of all that we are, left open and waiting to be filled with something new. And what moves into that space while we wait, what comes to make a home in our heart as the world changes around us, that all depends on our purest intentions.
So are you preoccupied with everything wrong in your life? The next time that the universe turns you upside down and shakes every last penny from your pockets, will that void be filled with thoughts of anger and pity?
Or will hope and love and gratitude come to stay where fear once lived?
