2024, but with Intent

headless chicken…

Do you really want to go around the sun one more time living a life of mediocrity and dullness? Do you really want to reach the end of 2024 and feel more or less like you do now - another year done and dusted; next? It’s life in the trenches, putting out fires everywhere. Constantly living, but not blossoming. Breathing, out of habit. Waiting for someone, something, to light that spark. The one that will drive you a hundred-miles-an-hour and create starlight in your eyes. The spark that will connect again to your heart, remind you that you were once young, that life held endless possibilities, that “hope” was not tinged with nostalgia.

This is where I was two years ago. I’m a hyper rationalist. Always making decisions based on what makes most sense. Never wanting to rock the boat. Seeking a life of middle-ness, of balance, of adequacy. Laced with patience and suppressed desires. Always wanting more, but never wanting to stand out. Always dreaming of different, but never taking the steps to make it happen. Behaving as if THAT LIFE, the one I dreamt of, WAS NEVER MEANT FOR ME.

But the long years of holding out meant that I was struggling to see who I was in the ashes of the “good decisions”, in the dim light of mediocrity that I had cultivated for myself. I wanted more, I wanted out, I was chafing at the shackles. I had to break free. I felt like I needed to scream.

So I plunged in head first when I saw an advertisement for a vision board workshop run by someone at my co-working space. I wasn’t familiar with vision boards, had never done anything quite so kooky in my life [because I would never give myself permission to be THIS silly], and had no idea what to expect. But I was grasping at straws so anything to help shatter these shackles, mental and emotional as they were, and self imposed as they were, was better than trying to gnaw my way out but with no idea where to run to.

intentful living…

Looking back, the desperation I felt was partly about feeling that nothing was adding up, partly about feeling lost and hopeless, partly seeking meaning, partly looking for direction. Perhaps a classic mid-life crisis, but definitely one infused with anger [at myself for having lived like a headless chicken for 40 something years] and suppressed desire [because of a misguided application of the philosophical idea of “detachment” handed to me from my Jain background].

This change I needed, it had to do with finding purpose. I have tended to look to the classic Hindu spiritual texts to ease my pain, but I knew that while I understood the ideas, the practical application of them was on me. How do I find in myself this purpose, this reason? How can I create a new me without really creating a new me? How could I, with gentleness and love and creativity, find a way to explode these shackles?

The answer, I found, was to stop digging deeper and deeper in my vortex and to plug into the idea of intention to carry me further and longer.

what’s a vision board?

Intent. Setting an intent. Showing up with intent. Make your intention clear. These phrases are rife in popular culture and parlance these days.

Intent is really a melange of desire and focus.

Intent is knowing what you want, keeping it in your focus, and leading your decisions with this combination of desire and focus. In creating intent, you start with “What do you want?” For me, the hardest question. What did I want? Desire? Emotions? Could we talk about rational decision making instead? What’s with the third degree about “wanting”? One question. Brought me to my knees. Indeed, what did I want?

The workshop facilitator said, don’t think too much, just reach for what is top of mind, easy to get to. Hardest part for me. I once had a friend dedicate Paul Simon’s “Think too Much” to me.

But I was there to explode my shackles. “If we want a different result, we need to try a different method,” said I to myself. And plunged in.

Three hours of exploring what was not my customary “deep” but rather my very surface, three hours of meditating and envisioning, not asking myself deep questions about what I really wanted out of life, but asking myself what I really wanted out of life with lightness and fearlessness. Don’t judge. Not even yourself. Especially not yourself.

And folks, let me tell you, it was the most freeing and exploding experience I have had. I gave myself the permission to desire. I gave myself the permission to want. I gave myself the permission to yearn. And I took this vision for my life in 2022 and found some pictures that echoed with it, and put it on a slide, which I turned into my desktop wallpaper. I had allowed myself to want things [not necessarily material things], I had given them some form in terms of the images I had found, and I was looking at these intentions of what I wanted for myself, every day.

And I do not recollect if all those desires came true, whether I was able to manifest them or not, but I learned so very much about myself, my desires, and about how I wanted to live my life.

I wanted to live a life that I had cultivated, nurtured, desired and focused on. I did NOT want another year to go by feeling like I was just surviving.

create your own vision board with me!

Since this initial explosion, I have indulged myself in journals that help me create this vision for myself each year. Together with these journals and my training and experience in conducting vision board workshops, I find that I am able to live more confidently and with greater synchronicity between my acting and being self on the one hand and my thinking and observing self on the other. I think the idea of these two selves is very similar to Nobel-prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman’s terms of the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self” - although, in my case, the “remembering self” is more like the “thinking and observing and judging self”!

As I created my vision board this year, I found that on my list of “living a cultivated and meaningful life” was: LIFT PEOPLE UP WITH YOU.

So, in that spirit, I want to share this experience with YOU. I want you too to live a more emboldened life, to live in a blossoming garden that you have cultivated for yourself, tasting the fruits of your own labour as your vision for your life is played out in 2024.

Create a vision board for yourself. Let me guide you through the process. Take a few hours for yourself, where you give yourself permission - permission to desire, to call forth your innermost dreams, to dare to want more.

Join me for this 2.5 to 3-hour workshop on Tuesday, January 16th 2024 at 9am Central European Time. Sign up here to book a spot. I am offering it at an alarmingly low price because for me, this workshop is about spreading joy and enlightenment with others. Please, come with me on in this journey…