Setting intention at the beginning of the week.

I’ve been put on the spot now, what with a little sibling rivalry and mis-communications. The incredible thing about parenting is that there is no time for milling around, pondering what you really think and feel about a given subject. Sure, sometimes you can skirt an issue for a bit, saying “I have to give it some thought.” But when a 5 year old boy is feeling left out, mis-understood and bossed around, so he lashes out and older siblings come running, there’s no time to hum or haw. Which brings me around to the idea of intentions and how it affects all of us in a home.

As I sat with a boy on my lap as he cried saying he was sorry but I could tell the situation was beyond his comprehension or at least beyond his ability to deal with it solo, I asked him how he wanted it to be with his sisters. What was his intention? I painted the picture of the usual brother/sister dichotomy; a painful slurry of annoying actions leading to that ear piercing “MOM!!!!” that leads to me being put on the spot to deal with something that was a co-creation between siblings and I’ve been an innocent bystander, or a picture of 3 siblings, having fun, listening together, supporting each other and understanding each other. Now luckily there has been some of these moments lately, so he had a reference point when he said he wanted the latter. Intention set. I reminded him that it meant some things had to change. He had to start telling them things when he was frustrated. He had to come to me when he wanted to use his hands to tell them something, before people got hurt. He had to decide he didn’t want to hurt people. That he wanted sisters who were more than friends, but the kind of team that lasts forever. I told his sisters what the intention was and how some things needed to change, mostly perspectives on each other, meaning stop seeing your brother as the typical annoying little brother and give him a chance to change so that there was room for things to get better.

Our perspectives on things matter, in fact our perspectives is what makes matter! How we see the world, how we see each other, how we see ourselves, is what we get. If we expect to come downstairs in the morning to a gaggle of fighting children, 9 out of 10 chances is that’s what we’ll find. When we expect the weather to be difficult, it will be, merely for the fact that maybe the little bit of rain made a puddle just outside our car door. It wouldn’t affect anyone else, but our perspective creates the circumstance. It sounds like I’m suggesting that the world is creating circumstances just for us, and in a way it is, without calculation, without mass organization, the universe will always provide us with a mirror image of what we put out there. If we send out the perspective of being hard done by, the universe offers opportunity for us to feel like victims. If we have the perspective that money is hard to come by, we will always be broke. It’s a simple situation of offering an intention and the reflection of it coming back to us. It’s a simply fact of the Law of Attraction.... not unlike the law of gravity... it affects us all, we just need to decide whether we want to use it to our advantage or not.

Therefore, what’s our dominant intentions? They are often hard to word and might need to be found in images or feeling spaces. Sometimes, it’s just the idea of a happy home, an image of everyone laughing around the kitchen table, a happy bunch strolling out to the car, as everyone helps each other with their loads. The more we spend time in an image intention like that, the more the moments will arise when we can see them actually manifesting before us. We will notice them the more energy we’ve backed them up with.

Why do we fall into the trap of seeing the worst around us? By banging on the negative experience drum, by thinking how our dreams will fall to the wayside, by believing our house doesn’t ring out the way we wish it would, by doubting our financial situation will ever improve, we are crippling ourselves before we get started. All it takes is shifting that thought around a little, stretching the intention muscle slightly. Every stretch makes the intention stronger, so we can feel it and in feeling it, notice it coming into being. If a thought process is making you feel bad, replace it, it’s not productive. It is simply hammering home the reality you think is, rather than paving the way with a clearer vision of what you want.

I’m off to spend some time setting my intentions for the week. 

BE well, Happy and thrive.