Intentions: what are they for?

Why "intend"? What is the purpose and to what extent is it worth doing?

We often hear this about setting intentions for the new year or for a new stage. Sometimes this is done in a superfluous way, or too demanding, losing sight of the true power it can have.

Intentions are frequently associated with something magical, which would generate effects just by being mentioned. 

The exercise of setting intentions is a process that actually connects us with our desires and allows us to take charge of them. If we do not know what we want, nor do we say it, it will be difficult for us to move in that direction.

Intentions help us enable ourselves so that this can be developed. It is a starting point, a base, which inaugurates a new cycle. Of course, it can happen that one establishes these intentions and then nothing happens, not only because we can unconsciously generate obstacles to that process, but also because many factors intervene, some of which do not depend on us.

However, the habit of inaugurating a stage with an intention creates the previous space so that it can take shape, it enables a possibility. It is interesting to be able to work on intentions in a creative way, elaborating them, experiencing them, keeping them present in different ways and through different modes of symbolization. So they go through a process in which we inhabit them, live with them, appropriate them and incorporate them into our lives.

Art therapy tools help us on this path of symbolization. The intentions then pass through our emotionality, they transform, evolve, adopt different forms and move through different spaces, products of our own imagination. 

That intention then takes on another dimension. It adopts greater consistency, it makes its way through a character, it speaks through phrases and dialogues, it is shown with its own colors and particular movements. It is a living intention, which has its own status.

 

If we write an intention and leave it there is something else. You can do your job anyway. There are very organized people, who tend to easily meet a list of annual goals. But this is not the meaning of intention as a symbol, which is what we are developing in this article.

Intention as a symbol has deeper effects, transforming what it encounters in its wake, and in the process also ourselves. In that change that is generated with the creative act, internal issues are mobilized that allow us to truly appropriate that desire, or rather, make it work. Reason for which, in this way, the intention can undergo modifications. And we may end up finding that our path is different from what we thought.

Raising intentions from this flexibility is what allows us to work on them, go through them, initiate a process that remains open and that accepts the possibility of change. The intention as a fixed and structured goal is complicated because it can limit and bias a lot. Even transmitting the idea of ​​demand when feeling that we must comply with it. It generates an effect contrary to the one initially sought.

 

Thank You