Tips for intentional living
Do a quick search on Youtube for ‘intentional living’ and you’ll find a host of videos about using Do a quick search on Youtube for ‘intentional living’ and you’ll find a host of videos about how to create the lifestyle you desire.
Intentional living is about using the knowledge of mindset and vibrational energy to consciously place your attention on experiences you would like to have.
Hang on a minute, isn’t this what self development books have been telling us for years?
Kind of.
Humanity has explored a lot over the last few decades about the power of a positive mindset, but intentional living explores more than that; it’s about utilising your energy, which is your emotional tone.
This means that rather than getting frustrated in traffic and trying to ‘think positively’, you actively align yourself by getting into a different energetic state. It’s about changing your emotional frequency so you not only have a better experience, you are happier too!
I’ve read and researched extensively on this subject for over ten years, but have only just begun to practice it. Here’s some tips from those who have seen it work in their lives:
1. Meditate
Eckhart Tolle talks about the value of meditation and how slowing down your mind can lead to more positive results in your life. I see the mind a bit like a treadmill. We can crank it up to a fast pace (and it’s pretty much at running speed for most of us), but we need to train ourselves to slow it down and give ourselves a breather.
Why? Well when you are caught up in mind, it’s harder to create. You slip back into fear because the mind is perceiving, judging, and thinking. It will tell you ‘you can’t do that!’ or ‘maybe you should try this’.
When your mind is calm, you are centered in awareness, which is peaceful and balanced. From here, decisions can be made with clarity, and above all, intuition.
2. Create through sensation
Intentional living is made up of thought and feeling. Say you’d like to visit a certain place. Not only is intentional living about preparing your mindset for this experience through positive affirmations and unconscious self belief, it’s also about conditioning the body.
Neville Goddard talks about the power of feeling when creating by using our senses energetically. What do I mean? Well, instead of just thinking of a beach for example, we utilise our minds and bodies to consistently sense the feeling of our toes in the sand, the sun on our backs, the salty sea smell in the air.
Neville himself made it his life’s work to practice this and he developed some astounding results once he had practised it with consistency. He found that when the mind and body are relaxed, so in meditation or just before sleep, is when this worked best.
We can only assume this is because the energetic impressions were seeping into the unconscious mind, which may have a part to play in creating our reality.
3. Let go
As humans it is natural to have desires, says Esther Hicks. However we can get so caught up in the ‘having’ of what we want that we create a dischord within ourselves and a disharmony.
Say for example you wanted a particular job. You were well qualified for it, and knew it was possible for you to have, but you really, really, really wanted the job. You got so over excited when thinking about it, that the fact that you didn’t have it produced a sort of craving feeling in your stomach and a restlessness that you’re ‘not there yet.’
If you think about our bodies as musical instruments, then we’d be tuning ourselves to the opposite of what we wanted. Osho, the indian spiritual teacher, says ‘if you relax, it comes. If you relax, it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it.’
This has been the hardest one for me to do, as I naturally start to get excited and clinging when things are moving in a positive direction.
To let go means to be calm and chilled about it. Like ‘I have that dream job, it’s cool’ feeling in your stomach. It comes from knowing you can be happy with or without that experience in your life.
Are we more powerful than we think? Can we use our thoughts and emotions to attract experiences into our lives? You can read all the books and watch all the videos in the world, but your experience will be your best teacher. Try it for yourself - I’d be interested to hear your results!