you want a new life of abundance and joy, your first step is to prepare yourself for it. Give yourself the gift of preparation.
The First Wave: Intention
Begin this week standing still for a moment. Contemplate what you want to experience in this week of preparation and send that desire out into the universe on a wave of intention. At the end of the week, you will stop, look back at what happened, feel gratitude in your heart, and with a sense of celebration, send waves of gratitude and joy back into the universe.
I used to think of these two experiences, intention and gratitude, as two poles—a place to start and a place to end. But then I read about light. Light can be a particle, a specific point, like a pole, but at the same time it's a wave. In this soul adventure, we are becoming aware of our true nature as a spiritual being of light, so we need an image to symbolize how setting intention and expressing gratitude are both places at the opposite ends of a continuum and the waves of action that flow between these places.
The movement of a Slinky is a perfect image for the relationship between intention and gratitude. Like the two ends of the Slinky, intention and gratitude are connected and reciprocal. They flow one to the other and back again, and in the process, they move forward together, in the same way the coiling and recoiling of a Slinky moves it down steps. Intention begets gratitude, and gratitude flows from intention. And just as a Slinky won't move unless you give it an initial, intentional push, you have to set the waves of intention and gratitude into motion. Nothing happens until you give it that initial intentional push.
If you can get a real Slinky, play with it as you set your intention for this week. If not, hold out your two hands and imagine your virtual Soul Slinky. Lift your left hand gently to send your intention out in a coiled wave. Feel it flowing into your right hand, where it naturally produces an equal wave of gratitude.
What is your left-hand wave of intention for this opening week of preparation? Not sure? Good. This is a golden opportunity to begin practicing the true creative power of intention. It is not necessary, or even desirable, to have a sharp picture of exactly what you want to experience this week. And really, how could you possibly predict what will happen or what should happen? This week and all of the Lotus and the Lily is a creative experience. When you enter into a creative endeavor with a crystal-clear image of the outcome, you're not entering into a creative endeavor. You're controlling it or managing it or wrestling it to the ground, but you're not allowing it and all its gifts to come to you.
Artists of all kinds are intimate with the paradoxical tension of holding an intention to create while simultaneously releasing control over the result. I heard a rock star laugh when an interviewer asked him how he planned his newest album. The musician said if you know the songs you're going to write, don't bother going to the studio. Fiction writers understand the creative dynamic, too. They are constantly complaining that their characters won't do what they're told.
Now it's your turn. With a gentle wave of your left hand, declare your positive, beautiful, soul-expanding intention for this week of preparation. Then get out of the way. Heaven will take it from here. In seven days, you'll be amazed at all that happened. And you will celebrate by joyfully bouncing springs of gratitude in your right hand.
Day 1
begin with intention
Intentions shape Light. They set Light into motion.
—Gary Zukav, The Seat of the Soul
Everything begins with intention. Whether you are consciously aware of your intentions or not, every move you make is powered by a potent but invisible internal engine—your intentions, thoughts, feelings, and desires. Intention has power. This power doesn't require belief in any dogma, god, or religion. It doesn't require hard work to locate or effort to use. You already use this power every day. You can't help it; it's how you're wired. Teilhard de Chardin, the ground-breaking twentieth-century philosopher, priest, and paleontologist, explained this wiring when he said, “You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.”
You may have heard this famous quote and even repeated it yourself. But have you stopped to consider what he is saying? If you are a spiritual being, that means you are made of the stuff of spirit. What is that? In our simplest understanding, a being of spirit is made of light and energy—intangible substances that flow effortlessly and instantaneously to places we cannot physically reach.
We visualize angels and gods as spiritual forms. But set aside religious imagery for the moment and play with science. Consider what happens when sunlight bursts through a prism. You can't grasp the exploding rainbow; you can't put it in a box. Yet it is real. And it affects you. For a moment, you are lost in rainbow joy. After that experience with one dollop of light, spend some time with a few Hubble photographs of stars born billions of years ago. You will be stunned by the power and magnificence of light.
Ah, you say, that's the universe, and the universe is stunning. But you are, too. You have to be. You are a part of it. A less-famous quote from Teilhard de Chardin captures your creative power, “The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.”
Since de Chardin died in 1955, science has verified his words. In The Intention Experiment, Lynne McTaggart summarizes decades of research demonstrating that the outcome of an experiment is influenced by the attention and intention of the experimenters. In a chapter titled “The Human Antenna,” she describes evidence that “[d]irected intention appears to manifest itself as both electrical and magnetic energy and to produce an ordered stream of photons…[O]ne well-directed thought might be like a laser light….” Scientists can even measure the light coming off the top of your head. So that light in the rainbow and barreling through the universe for a few billion years—that's you, too. How lovely to know that the spiritual axiom that we are light is actually true.
McTaggart's conclusion is thrilling: “Intention appears to be something akin to a tuning fork, causing the tuning forks of other things in the universe to resonate at the same frequency.” If this is true in the big labs of science, it must also be true in the small lab of your life. So starting today, use your power as a spiritual being of light to influence your spot in the universe by setting your intention for this thirty-day experiment with the Lotus and the Lily.
You have nothing to fear. You are in good hands. Not mine so much, although I will share with you everything I experienced and learned. But you're in much wiser hands than mine. For the next thirty days you will walk with the masters the Buddha and Jesus, and you will hear the wisdom of Hafiz, Rumi, Meister Eckhart, Lao Tzu, and many other mystics. This process is a grand experiment, indeed, and now is the time to influence your experiment. This is the perfect moment to focus your light and get your tuning fork vibrating. What do you want? Why are you here? What do you hope to experience, learn, create? Spend some time today getting clear about your intention.
Then speak your intention aloud, sending the vibration of your desire out into the world on the waves of your voice. Speech has creative power. In the Bible, creation itself is recorded as a series of spoken commands beginning with “and God said.” But it isn't just the First Creator who has this creative voice. “Any word spoken with clear realization and deep concentration has a materializing value,” says Paramahansa Yogananda in Autobiography of a Yogi. Speak your intention for the Lotus and the Lily today and every day for the next thirty days.
Don't be surprised or concerned if your intention changes as you go. You are going to be dancing with profound teachings, and your soul will move in response. When you feel the urge to change your intention, change it.
But don't skip this important first step. Intention is not only what you do on the first day; it's also what you do on the last day when you create your Intention Mandala. And it won't stop then. As Lynne McTaggart reminds us, “[T]houghts