Intention is Mind Magic

“A lot of sage advice centers around the idea of becoming unattached - to outcomes, desires, hopes, dreams & situations we have no control over. & while I do not dispute that un-attachment can & does support us in certain ways, I have also seen from the most ancient & varied sources - from the Mahabharata, to the works of Plato, to the Bible, to the Buddhist sutras - that we are not & cannot be bigger than our desires. The only way to come into right relationship with yearning, desire & wanting is to first acknowledge what it is we yearn for, desire & want. & believe it or not, this is usually the hardest step.”
-Briana Saussy, Making Magic

THE OLD WAYS HAD JUICE
Our most ancient ways of being in the world - what I like to call the “old ways” - consistently elevated & made sacred our experience of asking for what we want. Because many of the trappings of asking fell under magical (evocation, spells, incantations) & religious (prayer, supplication & intercession) modes of being, the concept of asking has become so demystified as to have lost its power. & if the act of asking is disempowered, it truly becomes ineffective, useless.

The situation we find ourselves in as (post) modern people is that the old ways don’t carry the juice to get us what we want. However, we have been hardwired for millions (yes, millions) of years to run on that very specific kind of juice.

& if we can’t access this juice, how can we ever expect to get what we want?

I frame this in this way to get your attention: If you are paying attention, you already possess the power to truly transform your life by effectively & consistently creating the space to ask for what it is you want. If you are not paying attention or are not interested in fully coming into your own power, then just stop here & move on. I’ll catch back up with you next week.

FOUNDATIONAL MIND
Okay, if you are still with me, hang on for a few minutes as I lay a very basic foundation.

The primary operating system we use to interface with the world is our mind. The mind is a deep complex of sense apparati designed to first keep us safe & secure, & then to optimize our survival in a wide variety of ways. We use our senses (the 5 primary ones - taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smell), thinking (the Buddhist 6th sense), intuition (the conventional Western 6th sense) & emotions (the conventional Western 7th sense), to help us make sense of all that arises.

Behind the scenes a whole host of things are going on to help us make decisions. A complex network, with key centers of information processing in the brain, the heart & the gut - interconnected & mediated by the nervous system - are all acting agents in the dance of millisecond to millisecond, minute to minute, hour by hour, day by day decision making.

Of course, as humans - with our vaunted agency, autonomy & sovereignty - we don’t want to simply respond & relate purely from a survival mode. We want to act upon the world. We want; we desire: & it is in this space that we create our world. In fact, increasing research in neuroscience tells us we might actually be creating the actual world through the ways we frame our mind & upon what we place our attention. What we focus on is what we perceive & what we perceive may in fact create reality.  But that is a whole other kettle of fish.

It is true that unexpected & unwanted things also occur in life, but for the most part, what we want is what we get. I know, I know...you are calling bullshit right now. “This is not my experience in my day to day life”, you say. Perhaps your lived experience is filled with deep feelings of frustration & disappointment of not getting what you want.  

FLOATING BULLSHIT
I argue that you are not getting what you want because you are not asking or not asking correctly. You are either just letting life happen & not extending intention on the world - I’ll call this floating - or you do not recognize that what you are intending is actually contrary to what you truly, deeply want - I’ll call this bullshitting.

Sound harsh? Sorry, but it's true.  You are either floating along in life just letting it happen or you are lying to yourself about what you really want.

Before you get butthurt, let’s flip the perspective so it is clear that I am in the same position as you. It’s a “we” here - including me - & I argue we are all guilty of floating & bullshiting, in even the most important areas of our lives.

A good bit of my argument hinges on the fact that most of what we want in life is for things to be easy.  It is a curious experience when one realizes that our greatest desires tend to be framed as negatives - it's not what we want; it’s what we don’t want.  We don’t want conflict, we don’t want to suffer, we don’t want to fail, we don’t want to struggle, we don’t want to reach. This is especially true of the things we want most deeply. Sure, if we want a different car or a new jacket, we don’t typically go around talking about not wanting our current car & we much more rarely talk about not wanting to be without the jacket. But when it comes to health, happiness & habits, we tend to internally frame the situation as a negative.

This is a deeply ingrained, modern mindfuckery, one deeply dependent on our need to protect our identity. Because we have taken such pains - however unconsciously - to protect our identity, we can’t risk really reaching for our greatest desires. When we can’t extend; we must defend.  

RUNNING AS LABORATORY
This is where running can be really, really helpful. Running is only one aspect of our life & so we can more effectively use it as a test scenario. We learn that if we approach what we want from an intentional space, we are significantly more likely to achieve our desired outcome. Because running is limited to a specific time & day, it is relatively short in duration &, in our case, it is already imbued with a very obvious, typically high, level of intent. We have to choose to get out the door & run & it is not guaranteed that this would happen without intending to do so.

When we dial in even more to a specific session, like an interval workout, a tempo run or a long run, the intention becomes even more concrete, assuming we are following a specific, preplanned training plan. We want to run a specific distance in a specific time or effort.  There is an understood form & function to the way we approach our experience of running on those days which lays bare the specific intention more clearly than is typical in our easy or recovery runs.

Even so, there are numerous aspects that can come into play that are undetermined & can blow us off our desired course for the workout: the snooze button, the weather, a selected route, our training partners, how we are feeling, etc. We reach many inflection points, even on an easy run, where we are required to reinforce the initial intention we set the night before when we decided to run the next day. It goes without saying that intention is even more critical for workouts & long runs.

If we just bring our coach’s intention for the workout & expect somehow that that intention will miraculously “do all the work” then we are unlikely to have success. When I I lay this out for you, you get it, don't you? Yet how many of us are going into our specific sessions with true intent?

BRING YOUR OWN
As athletes, we must bring our own intention to what we desire to accomplish. If you abdicate this opportunity, you are making a very serious error. By making a simple commitment to executing a workout as you intend, you create the pathways to making this same decision when it really matters - during a race or a crucial training session. Also, recognize that if you are actively making an intention, then you must understand thoroughly what you are about to do. It requires you get under the hood of both the workout & your motivation for completing it in a specific way. This understanding now has you actively participating in your training.

Let me lay it out for you in another way:

• You desire an outcome.
• You strive to understand what will be required to achieve that outcome.
• With this understanding, you set an intention for the workout that you hope will bring you closer to your desired outcome.
• The intention is an investment in your ability to consistently achieve the outcome when desired.
• The desired outcome is significantly more likely to occur.

Everyone wants the first & final bullet points, but the real power - the juice as I called it earlier - comes from those middle points. The quality of intention is absolutely critical to its effectiveness & you enhance the quality by deepening your investment. Are you fully conscious of your responsibility to create an intention?

Asking for what you want requires the clarity of well formulated questions. If you are unsure of where to start to bring full intention to your running  then perhaps the following questions can help you clarify:

• Are you expecting to have a positive outcome? If so, what have you brought to the table? What have you done to bring a greater likelihood of success? Note your consistency, your sacrifice, your suffering. These are the raw materials the juice is made from.
• Are you prepared for the outcome you would like? Have you done the work? If you have, are you expecting this outcome to occur of its own volition? What will you bring to bear on the outcome? Are you willing to get out of your comfort zone? Are you willing to trust yourself? Your coach’s intention?
• If you are not prepared for the desired outcome, why do you desire what you are unprepared to accomplish? This creates distrust: distrust in your ability, distrust in your coach or training plan, but most devastatingly distrust in yourself. Trust me when I say your greatest resource is trust. & it is earned, not given.
• If you do not achieve your desired outcome, what will be your response?

Hopefully, working through these questions brings a greater realization that getting what we want is work. It costs us something. That is what makes it valuable. The greatest asset you have is freely given to you: attention.

What will you do with it?

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A few additional comments:

• Goals & intentions are not the same thing. A goal is a thought process that results in a statement. An intention is the energy, the juice, invested in the moment for what you want. The goal is outside of you hoping to be achieved; the intention is inside of you working to be achieved. These are very different & very important to understand.
• While running provides a great opportunity & lens for considering intention, iit is just one more facet of your whole life. If you can get really clear on intention & actively engage in its transformative power, you’ll naturally enhance your reality. Now that’s magic.
• Please note that this discussion of intention as magic did not once mention manifesting. Don’t even get me started on that topic…