Intention

I have been wondering for a long time if all of the things that I have been learning about are just for me, or are they "the right way" for everyone to live. I think that I am now beginning to understand that the things that I am learning right now have a lot to do with where I am right now and where I am trying to go. My intent or my direction.

This month, it would seem, that my practice is about forming a clear intent. In wednesday morning Yoga Nidri (meditation) the first thing that they ask us to do is form our intent. He suggests things like.. I want to awaken my spiritual potential, or I want to be healthy. Stuff like that. In every book I have read about meditation they also stress this as the first step. I'm not sure why, but it is something that I have resisted or struggled with. It is hard for me to decide what my intention should be, maybe because I am afraid to get it wrong. I should know better than that.

Anyways, this brings me to the question.. is what I am learning for just me. I understand now that your intention dictates your direction, which dictates what you need to learn. For instance, if your intention is to become a professional pianist, then you will probably learn about how to play the piano, how to practice dilligently, how to read music, etc. If your intention is to be an mad scientist and take over the world, you will probably learn a lot about physics and bombs and also a lot about hate. So, my learning is going to reflect where I am going from where I am. The path is mine alone.

Obviously the things that other people learn can be useful to me and the things that I may learn can be useful to others. That is because we are all humans so we work pretty much the same way, and because we will share a lot of common intentions, like to be happy or healthy. So the things that work to make one human truly happy or healthy might be extremely similar.

Also, I think that having a clear intention makes things simpler in your learning and growing. Just like when I used to ride horses (but this is probably similar for any soprt), they always told us to look in the direction that we wanted to go and then the horse would line up with that, but if we were looking all over the place our horse would be all over the place too. If we focus on the direction we want to go, then we don't have to worry about all of the tiny little details all the way along. Our wise subconscious self will already be lining things up in the background.