The Power of Intention Page 17
Step 8: Meditate to stay on purpose. Use the technique of Japa, which I mentioned earlier, and focus your inner attention on asking your Source to guide you in fulfilling your destiny. This letter from Matthew McQuaid describes the exciting results of meditating to stay on purpose:
Dear Dr. Dyer,
My wife, Michelle, is pregnant by a miracle—a miracle manifest from Spirit using all of your suggestions. For five years, Michelle and I were challenged by infertility. You name it, we tried it. None of the expensive and sophisticated treatments worked. The doctors had given up. Our own faith was tested over and over with each failed treatment cycle. Our doctor managed to freeze embryos from earlier cycles of treatment. Throughout the years, over 50 embryos had been transferred to Michelle’s uterus. The odds of a frozen embryo successfully initiating pregnancy in our case were close to zero. As you know, zero is a word not found in the spiritual vocabulary. One precious frozen embryo, surviving minus 250 degrees for six months, has taken up a new home in Michelle’s womb. She is now in her second trimester.
Okay, “So what,” you might say. “I get letters like this every day.” However, this letter contains proof of God. A tiny drop of protoplasm, as you have so eloquently written on many occasions, a physical mass of cells alive with the future pull of a human being, turned on in a laboratory, then turned off in a freezer. All molecular motion and biochemical processes halted, suspended. Yet, the essence of being was there prior to freezing. Where did the spiritual essence go while frozen? The cells were turned on, then turned off, but the spiritual essence had to prevail despite the physical state of the cells. The frequency of vibration of the frozen cells was low, but the vibrational frequency of its spirit must be beyond measure. The essence of the being had to reside outside of the physical plane or mass of cells. It couldn’t go anywhere except to the realm of spirit, where it waited. It waited to thaw and manifest into a being it always has been. I hope you find this story as compelling as I do, as nothing less than a miracle. An example of spirit in body, rather then a body with a spirit.
And now for the million-dollar question. Could this one embryo survive such hostile frozen conditions and still manifestbecause I practiced the Japa mediation? Just because I opened my mouth and said, “Aaaahhh”? I had a knowing, no question about it. Japa meditation and surrendering to infinite patience are daily practices. During my quiet moments, I can smell this baby. Michelle will thank me for my conviction and faith during the dark times. I praise your work for guiding me. Thank you. Now, nothing is impossible for me. When I compare what I have manifested now in Michelle’s womb to anything else I might desire, the process is without effort. After you truly surrender, everything you could ever want just seems to show up, right on schedule. The next amazing manifestation will be to help other infertile couples realize their dreams. Somehow, I will help those who feel there is no hope.
Sincerely,
Matthew McQuaid
Many people have written to me about their success with staying on purpose through the practice of Japa meditation. I’m deeply touched by the power of intention when I read about people who use Japa to help achieve a pregnancy, which they felt was their divine mission. I particularly like Matthew’s decision to use this experience to help other infertile couples.
Step 9: Keep your thoughts and feelings in harmony with your actions. The surest way to realize your purpose is to eliminate any conflict or dissonance that exists between what you’re thinking and feeling and how you’re living your days. If you’re in disharmony, you activate ego-dominated attitudes of fear of failure, or disappointing others, which distance you from your purpose. Your actions need to be in harmony with your thoughts. Trust in those thoughts that harmonize, and be willing to act upon them. Refuse to see yourself as inauthentic or cowardly, because those thoughts will keep you from acting on what you know you were meant to be. Take daily steps to bring your thoughts and feeling of your grand heroic mission into harmony with both your daily activities and of course, with that ever-present field of intention. Being in harmony with God’s will is the highest state of purpose you can attain.
Step 10: Stay in a state of gratitude. Be thankful for even being able to contemplate your purpose. Be thankful for the wonderful gift of being able to serve humanity, your planet, and your God. Be thankful for the seeming roadblocks to your purpose. Remember, as Gandhi reminded us: “Divine guidance often comes when the horizon is the blackest.” Look at the entire kaleidoscope of your life, including all of the people who have crossed your path. See all of the jobs, successes, apparent failures, possessions, losses, wins—everything—from a perspective of gratitude. You’re here for a reason; this is the key to feeling purposeful. Be grateful for the opportunity to live your life purposefully in tune with the will of the Source of all. That’s a lot to be grateful for.
It seems to me that searching for our purpose is like searching for happiness. There’s no way to happiness; happiness is the way. And so it is with living your life on purpose. It’s not something you find; it’s how you live your life serving others, and bringing purpose to everything you do. That’s precisely how you fulfill the intention that is the title of this chapter. When you’re living your life from purpose, you’re dwelling in love. When you’re not dwelling in love, you’re off purpose. This is true for individuals, institutions, business, and our governments as well. When a government gouges its citizens with excessive fees for any service, they’re off purpose. When a government pursues violence as a means for resolving disputes, it’s off purpose regardless of how it justifies its actions. When businesses overcharge, cheat, or manipulate in the name of profit-making, they’re off purpose. When religions permit prejudice and hatred or mistreat their parishioners, they’re off purpose. And it’s true for you as well.
Your goal in accessing the power of intention is to return to your Source and live from that awareness, replicating the very actions of intention itself. That Source is love. Therefore, the quickest method for understanding and living your purpose is to ask yourself if you’re thinking in loving ways. Do your thoughts flow from a Source of love within you? Are you acting on those loving thoughts? If the answers are yes and yes, then you’re on purpose. I can say no more!
IT IS
MY INTENTION TO:
BE AUTHENTIC AND
PEACEFUL WITH ALL
OF MY RELATIVES
“Your friends are God’s way of apologizing for your relatives!”
— Wayne W. Dyer
Somehow we allow the expectations and demands of our family members to be the source of so much unhappiness and stress, when what we want is to be authentically ourselves and at peace with our relatives. The conflict seems too often to be a choice between being authentic, which means no peace with certain relatives, or having peace at the price of being inauthentic. Making the connection to the power of intention in regard to being around your relatives may sound like an oxymoron to you, but it isn’t. Being peaceful and authentic can define your relationship with your relatives. First, though, you may have to assess your relationship with the closest relative of all—you. How others treat you, you’ll discover, has a lot to do with how you treat yourself and thereby teach others to treat you.
You Get Treated the Way You Teach
Others to Treat You
In an earlier chapter, I urged you to notice your inner dialogue. One of the greatest obstacles to connecting to intention are your thoughts of what others want or expect from you. The more you focus on how upsetting it is that your family doesn’t understand or appreciate you, the more you’ll attract their misunderstanding or lack of appreciation. Why? Because what you think about expands, even when you think about what you find unnerving, and even when you think about what you don’t want in your life.
If you’re attracted to this intention, then you most likely already know which family members push your buttons. If you feel as though you’re unduly influenced by their expectations, or you’re a victim of th
eir way of being, you’ll need to begin by shifting from thoughts of what they’re doing to what you’re thinking. Say to yourself, I’ve taught all these people how to treat me as a result of my willingness to make their opinions of me more important than my own. You might want to follow this up by emphatically stating, And it’s my intention to teach them how I desire to be treated from now on! Taking responsibility for how your family members treat you helps you create the kind of relationship with all of your relatives that matches up with the universal mind of intention.
You may be asking yourself how you can possibly be responsible for teaching people how to treat you. The answer is, in large part, your willingness to not only put up with listening to those familial pressures—some of which are long-term traditions running back countless generations—but also with allowing yourself to disconnect from your divine Source and indulge in low-energy emotions as humiliation, blame, despair, regret, anxiety, and even hatred. You and only you taught your kin how to treat you through your willingness to accept critical comments from that well-meaning, but often interfering and bothersome, tribe.
Your family relationships are in your mind. When you close your eyes, your family disappears. Where did they go? Nowhere, but doing this exercise helps you recognize that your relatives exist as thoughts in your mind. And recall that God is the mind with which you’re thinking. Are you using your mind to process your relatives in harmony with intention? Or have you abandoned or separated yourself in your mind by viewing your family in ways contrary to the universal Source of intention? These people who are related to you are all ideas in your mind. Whatever power they have, you’ve given to them. What you feel is wrong or missing in these relationships is an indication that something is amiss within you, because broadly speaking, anything you see in anyone else is a reflection of some aspect of you—otherwise you wouldn’t be bothered by it, because you wouldn’t notice it in the first place.
In order to change the nature of family relationships, you’ll have to change your mind about them and do a somersault into the inconceivable. And what is the inconceivable? It’s the idea that you are the source of the anguish in your relationships, rather than the individual whom you’ve pegged as the most outrageous, the most despicable, or the most infuriating. Over the years, all of these individuals have been treating you exactly as you’ve allowed them to with your reactions and behaviors. All of them exist as ideas in your mind that have separated you from your source of intention. This can miraculously change when you choose to be at peace with everyone in your life—most particularly, your relatives.
If the focus of your inner dialogue about your family members is on what they’re doing that’s wrong, then that’s precisely how your relationship with them will be experienced. If your inner speech centers on what’s annoying about them, that’s what you’ll notice. As much as you’re inclined to blame them for your annoyance, it’s yours, and it’s coming from your thoughts. If you make a decision to put your inner attention, your life energy, on something quite different, your relationship will change. In your thoughts, where your family relationships exist, you’ll no longer be annoyed, angry, hurt, or depressed. If in your mind you’re thinking, My intention is to be authentic and peaceful with this relative, then that’s what you’ll experience—even if that relative continues to be exactly the way he or she has always been.
Changing your mind is changing your relationships. Being authentic and peaceful with your relatives is only a thought away. You can learn to change your thoughts by intending to create authentic and peaceful feelings within yourself. No one is capable of making you upset without your consent, and you’ve given your consent too frequently in the past. When you begin practicing the intention to be authentic and peaceful, you withdraw your consent to be in the lower energy. You connect to peace itself, and decide to bring peace to your relatives, thereby immediately gaining the power to change the energy of family gatherings.
Think of the relatives whom you’ve blamed for your feelings of anxiety, annoyance, or depression. You’ve focused on what you disliked about them or how they treated you, and your relationship has always had an uncomfortable edge to it. Now imagine yourself doing this from a new point of view: Rather than reacting to their low energy of hostility or bragging with a hostile or bragging reaction of your own—lowering the energy field for everyone involved—you instead bring your intention of peace to the interaction. Remember, it’s the higher energy of love that can dissolve all the lower energies. When you react to low energy with more of the same, you’re not being peacefully authentic or connected to the power of intention. In the low energy, you say or think sentences like, I disrespect you for being so disrespectful. I’m angry at you for being so angry at the world. I dislike you because you’re such a braggart.
By putting your attention on what you intend to manifest rather than on the same low energy that you encounter, you make a decision to connect to intention and bring the attributes of your universal Source to the presence of that low energy. Try to imagine Jesus of Nazareth saying to his followers, “I despise those people who despise me, and I want nothing to do with them.” Or, “It makes me so angry when people judge me. How can I have peace when there are so many hostile people around me?” This is absurd, because Jesus represents the highest loving energy in the universe. That’s precisely what he brought to the presence of doubting, hostile people, and his presence alone would raise the energy of those around him. Now I know you’re not the Christ, but you do have some great spiritual lessons to learn from our greatest teachers. If you have the intention to bring peace to a situation and you’re living at the level of intention, you’ll leave that situation feeling peaceful. I learned this lesson years ago with my in-laws.
Prior to my waking up to the power of intention, family visits were events that caused me consternation because of the attitudes and behavior of some of my wife’s relatives. I’d prepare for a Sunday-afternoon family visit by getting anxious and upset over what I anticipated to be a fretful, lousy experience. And I seldom disappointed myself! I’d focus my thoughts on what I didn’t like, and I defined my relationship with my in-laws in this manner. Gradually, as I began to understand the power of intention and left my ego behind, I substituted kindness, receptivity, love, and even beauty for my former annoyed and angry assessments.
Before family get-togethers, I’d remind myself that I am what I choose to be in any and all circumstances, and I chose to be authentically peaceful and have a good time. In response to something that used to annoy me, I’d now say to my mother-in-law in a loving way, “I never thought of it that way; tell me more.” In response to what I previously considered to be an ignorant comment, I’d respond, “That’s an interesting point of view; when did you first learn about this?” In other words, I was bringing my own intention to be in a state of peace to this encounter, and was refusing to judge them.
The most amazing thing began to happen: I started looking forward to having these family members at our home. I began to see them as much more enlightened than I’d previously thought. I actually enjoyed our times together, and every time something came up that I’d found annoying in the past, I’d overlook it and respond with love and kindness instead. At an earlier stage of my life, expressions of racial or religious prejudice were a stimulus for my anger and resentment. Now I’d quietly respond with a kind and gentle reminder of my own opinions, and simply let the matter drop.
Over the years, I found that not only did the racial and religious slurs diminish to zero, but I noticed that my in-laws were expressing tolerance—and even love—toward minorities, as well as those who practiced religions different from their own.
Although my primary intention was to stay in a state of peace, I discovered that by not joining in the low energies of my in-laws, not only was the entire family more peaceful, but many enjoyable and even enlightening conversations developed. I had as much to learn from my in-laws as I had to teach. Even when I disagreed vehemen
tly with a judgment directed at me, if I remembered my intention to have a peaceful relationship with them, I was able to do just that. No longer did I think about what I disliked, what was missing, or what always had been. I stayed focused on making these gatherings fun, loving, and most important to me, peaceful.
Let’s take a look at the steps you need to take in order to make the stated intention of this chapter and all succeeding ones a reality.
Step 1: Identify your intention verbally and in writing, and develop a deep yearning for it. When you create a great longing for the experience of a peaceful family, everything will begin to happen to fulfill this yearning spontaneously and naturally. Rather than praying to a saint or God for a miracle, pray for the miracle of the inner awakening, which will never leave you. The awakening of this inner light, once experienced, will become your constant companion, regardless of who you are with or where you are. The dynamic force is within you. This force is felt as great joy running through your body. Ultimately, your thinking will become sublime, and your inner and outer world will become one. Yearn for this awakening to the inner light, and long for your intention to manifest.
Step 2: Intend for all of your relatives what you intend for yourself. When anyone criticizes, judges, acts angry, expresses hatred, or finds fault with you, they’re not at peace with themselves. Want this peace for them even more than you desire it for yourself. By having this kind of intention for them, you take the focus off of you. This doesn’t require words or actions on your part. Simply picture the people in your family with whom you’re not at peace, and feel the peace you crave for them. Your inner speech will change, and you’ll begin to experience the peaceful authenticity of both your beings.