Living Intentionally - November's Theme
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Back in September I wrote about the five themes that I was focusing on for my 40th year - Growing, Re-Connecting, Letting Go, Non-dependence, and Intentionality. Some of these -Growing and Reconnecting - I’d already used as monthly themes for this site. For October, I focused on the theme of Letting Go. And so, as we move into the month of November, I’ve decided to focus on Intentionality. (I’m undecided if I’m going to spend a month focus on non-dependence, as that’s more a personal goal of mine, and not one I particularly relate to my yoga work, but I might change my mind on that).
If the word Intention makes you think of something you set at the beginning of yoga class, well, you’re right. But intention and intentionality are much more than a word or a mantra that you use while on the mat in class. Intentionality, at least as I’m using it here and in my theme for the year, is about the purpose. It involves being present with and focused on specifically whatever you’re doing in that moment. It involves knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing.
We live in a world where the ability to do twenty things at once is coveted. And being able to multitask, at least to some extent, does have its place. If you’re in a job where you have to answer the phone, but it’s not your sole task, you can’t be completely thrown for a loop every time the phone rings - you need to be able to answer the phone, have a conversation, and then go back to whatever it is you were working on, all with relative ease. Similarly, if any time a passenger in the car started talking we gave them our undivided attention, we’d probably have totaled multiple cars by now.
But there are many times where our attention is so divided that we find ourselves in the middle of a conversation and have no idea what the other person is saying - either because we’re paying attention to everything around us, or we’re stuck in our own worries, or we’re thinking about what we want for dinner, or something else. Or we complain about how we have no free time, but in fact we’ve spent every evening in front of the TV or on social media zoning out, without even giving it a second thought. And let me note here - I have no issue with TV or social media, but we often turn to almost on autopilot, regardless of what else is going on, not because we really want to watch TV or check social media, but because we aren’t acting with intentionality. These are simply a couple of obvious examples. I could easily find at least ten activities I do every day that I barely recall doing, or why. I simply go through the motions. Which means that honestly, I miss a lot of life by being on autopilot - aka not living intentionally.
In yoga, there are numerous ways we can find ourselves being unintentional. We can be going through the poses as if they were a game of Simon Says, instead of focusing on connecting movement with breath, being mindful of how our body is aligned in the pose, or understanding why we’re doing the pose at all. Or maybe it’s that we always go for what we consider the most “advanced” variation of a pose without giving thought to whether or not it serves us best. Or the opposite - we automatically always go into the same modified version without thinking, because we’re just used to the idea that this is the only variation we can do. Or maybe we become so entrenched in our yoga routine that it feels… well… routine. Maybe it starts to lose meaning, or we notice we don’t feel the same after a class as we used to. We go because it’s what we do, but when we think about the why (why we take that style at that class at that studio from that teacher) we can’t really say.
Of the mat, it could be just about anything. The way we go through our morning routine, our communication with others, the drive to work, the way we spend our downtime, how we approach household chores and tasks. It could even (and in my case certainly often is) our thoughts. The number of times each day that I catch myself lost in thought, or my brain becoming a runaway train, without even being aware of how I got on the train in the first place, is too many to count. And while I value a good day dream or visualization (or, let’s be honest, rabbit hole of thought/imagination) as much as the next person, I waste a lot of valuable time chasing my own brain and trying to get it back on track.
So throughout November, I’m going to focus on intentionality as it applies to various aspects on and off the mat. And if you’re thinking “but November is the month of Thanksgiving (at least for those of us in the U.S), shouldn’t you be focusing on gratitude/being thankful?”, here’s the thing - to me, gratitude is intentionality. While certainly there are some people who may naturally just feel grateful without much effort, generally speaking, gratitude is something we practice intentionally - especially at first. Every morning I write down at least three things I’m grateful for. People keep gratitude journals. They use apps. (I personally do both). They tweet or post a daily gratitude. However we do it, we do so intentionally. It might, after a while, because something that’s more second nature - you might eventually get out of bed and begin the day feeling grateful that you’re alive and it’s a new day, instead of grumbling over your alarm. But for many of us, this is a practice, and it’s something that we have to do intentionally on a regular basis if we hope to get to that second nature point. So I’ve got you, gratitude, thankfulness. I’m not leaving you out. It’s all part of intentionality. Happy November!