Resolutions Or Intentions – You Choose

Well, here we are now one and a half months into this new year, 2012. I’m wondering, did you make any New Year’s resolutions this year? And if so, how many are you still keeping?

I have not made New Year’s resolutions now for a number of years because I am very bad at keeping them. So the best way I have found to not break them was to just never make them.

But lately I have been thinking that I do need to make some changes in both my life and my self. And since resolutions are not working for me, I decided once again to try a method I have heard about before but which I have not been using.

I am once again going to try the spiritual practice of making intentions. (Just to let you know, the past few weeks I have been rereading some issues of a wonderful magazine, “Science of Mind,” and many of the articles I have read deal with intentions. So I took this as a sign, an indication that it was time to explore this subject again more fully and to see if I can put it into practice in my life.)

I thought I would share some of the ideas and information I found with you as we see how resolutions differ from intentions and then how to make an intention and watch as our lives are changed and miraculously transformed.

Many times we seem to interchange the words resolutions and intentions because they seem to involve the power and privilege of choice. But there are some differences that bear noting.

Resolutions usually involve the physical realm – we seek to change the circumstances of our lives – and they usually begin with a belief that something is “wrong” and needs to be fixed.

Intentions on the other hand rest in our soul consciousness or in our hearts. With an intention, we choose to align ourselves with our soul’s desire for expression. Intentions can be seen as the thoughts of God – divine ideas.

Here is an example of the differences between making resolutions and setting intentions. I will use a common one from life – loosing weight and exercising more.

We make resolutions to loose wight and exercise more because we decide that our body is in the wrong condition and we weigh too much. We decide though sheer determination to change our body. We join a gym or go to the YMCA. We seek to power ourselves by our will to make something happen. But we soon find that willpower is exhausting and we quickly loose our resolve to change. And our resolution is finished almost before it has even gotten started.

But how does this scene play out if we use intentions instead of resolutions?

It works from the inside out instead of the other way round.

It begins by seeing our self as the healthiest, most wholesome being NOW, not sometime in the future. Then we hold this image and truth in our awareness and consciousness and quite worrying about how it will manifest. If at sometime, we feel inspired or guided to make changes in our eating habits or exercise, we make these changes, not in order to make us the person we want to be, but we do it to allow the perfection and wholeness that we already are to manifest. It is as we change out thinking and our consciousness that we are then able to manifest in our physical life the perfection and wholeness that we already truly are!

We will talk more in the weeks ahead about intentions and I will share with you information about a book and a group that has helped me a lot in this area.

Feel free to share your thoughts, ideas and /or questions regarding the intention process. If you have an interesting experience with setting intentions, feel free to share these also.

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