Many instructors offer this as a tool at the beginning of the class, often along with a poem, a quote, a story, or a suggestion for what your intention could be. But no one ever really talks about what an intention actually is.

The Purpose of Intention

Considering we’re still in January, it is a good time to revisit the purpose of setting intentions. Back in 2015, I ran a 21-day healthy habit building challenge that talked about the importance of setting intentions. It’s a great introductory post to setting intentions, but here I’m going to dive deeper.

An intention can guide you back to the present moment. Intentions are not goals. You can achieve a goal but intentions are embodied and integrated in all the layers of your Self. Intentions can be adapted because it’s not about the outcome but how you show up in your action.

How to Set an Intention

The first step towards setting an intention is to get quiet and still. Take a deep breath, do some simple movements to release stored energy in the body and take a few moments to listen deeply to what your body, mind, and senses are trying to tell you.

Ask yourself what you most need. Watch to see if an answer seems to appear spontaneously without you having to analyze too much.

If nothing comes, ask yourself why you showed up on your yoga mat in the first place. Is there something you’ve been searching for?

Try to boil your intention down to one word or one short phrase that is easy to remember. Peace, Love, Quiet, Truth, Breath, Strength, etc. are all great examples. Feeling words tend to be easier for the mind to comprehend.

How to use your intentions throughout class

When you set an intention at the beginning of an asana class, you are choosing to focus on a particular way of being. If you find yourself feeling other than how you wish to be, then your intention can help you customize a yoga posture to fit your needs.

It’s common to set an intention at the beginning of class and then not even remember what it was by the end. If this is the case, the intention you chose is probably not that meaningful to you.

Throughout class, during every posture, every breath, every transition, you can ask yourself if you are embodying your word or phrase.

This is the part that tricked up one of my students. He was trying to reconcile setting an intention for say, peace, and then trying to push himself into and through difficult postures. My suggestion to him was to customize the posture so to help him achieve more peace, but that way of thinking was almost foreign to him. That’s because, it’s more common to hear suggestions such as “push to your edge,” “take one more breath,” or “do XYZ so that you don’t tear your muscles, ligaments, tendons,” etc. While that language does have it’s place in certain circumstances, the beauty of a group yoga class is that everyone can be doing the same physical posture but with a different intention. If one person’s intention is strength, their individual expression will be quite different from the person who’s intention is peace. And that is okay! This is how intention guides your personal practice. This is how you know when it’s okay to go a little further and when it’s time to back off.

A Word on Sankalpa

There is a Sanskrit word called sankalpa that often gets translated as intention. If you set an intention at the beginning of every class, that intention naturally adapts to your changing needs. Sankalpa, on the other hand, is a larger intention you wish to live your life by. Values such as peace, love and strength are good intentions but, on any given day, you might not feel strong, for example. Sometimes, we need to feel supported too.

That is why setting a Sankalpa is important. It is an exercise in understanding our deepest values and desires. It is a vow that we are determined to keep not because we are trying to change something about ourselves but because we need to be reminded every once in a while about our deepest held beliefs and desires and the importance of aligning with them.

A Sankalpa is often more than one word or phrase, but a short sentence — a declaration. Our Sankalpa is beyond the ego and mind. It comes from the heart.

Sankalpas can change over time too. The lifespan of a Sankalpa is best measured on the scale of months and years unlike intention that are usually meant for a few days to a few weeks at the most.

As you practice setting intentions, notice if any patterns arise. Are there intentions that keep popping up over and over again? If so, consider spending some time reflecting on your beliefs and desires and crafting a Sankalpa that you can take with you into every practice. It is possible to have both a Sankalpa, a mantra of sorts, and an intention that changes day-to-day.

Good luck setting your intentions! Remember, it’s called yoga ‘practice’ not yoga perfect.

This blog has been adapted from the original, which appears on the author’s website.

The post How Intentions and Sankalpa Strengthen Your Yoga Practice appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

The good news is that the game is still on. There is still that chance, the last lap to victory still holds good. Why not brush the dust off those aspirations that you had, those ideas you wanted to put into action, the kilos you wanted to shed off, the hobby you wanted to take up, the strength you wanted to regain physically and emotionally, and more? Why not end this year with the resonating echoes of the word “done!”? That would be the best goodbye to the year that you had welcomed with the vision of a new world for yourself.

Here’s a plan to change things around

Go ahead and use the next six weeks to re-align your life to keep distractions at bay. Set a DND on your Whatsapp and other meaningless messengers and get cracking on the goals you had charted out for yourself. Attention creates realities. Distraction only leads to confusion. It’s not too late yet. Ask any sales team and they’ll tell you that the maximum deals are closed in the last two days of the month. Do you recall the difference the last minute study made to your grades? It’s the last minute pressure that sets off the “magic button” to performance.

Ask any sales team and they’ll tell you that the maximum deals are closed in the last two days of the month

This is the time to believe in the philosophy of “Ask and you shall receive”. Don’t hold back, go all out and ask: ask for business, ask for help, ask for ideas. Share your purpose and also share your urgency. People like to help, but don’t impose and disturb. Ask with grace, and with gratitude, whether that help is granted or not. Some people will join hands with you and support you, while others’ hands would be tied for reasons beyond their control. Be graceful and be grateful to both. What have you got to lose, when you have not won the race yet?

Make some time for yourself

The one thing most people postulate at the beginning of the year is to make time for themselves. In the busy world, the growing numbers and the towering expectations from others, whether at work or at home, we tend to forget ourselves and become a work machine. Make time for yourself, starting now. Considering the pressures are high at the last lap of your race, if you can make some time now, you will be able to sustain it out of habit in the year to come. If you can’t do it now, you certainly will fail at it the next year too. Things are not going to get easier. You have to adjust things according to your desires. Invest some of your time in yourself; read a book, take up yoga, join the gym, take daily walks, or just be.

Use the festive time to create and forge connections

It would be a great way to end the year with warmth and support. If there was one thing you can build on now, which will give you guaranteed rewards in the future, it would be good relations with people. Invest in relationships. Work is an opportunity to make a new friend, to build a mutually beneficial relationship. Even if the opportunity for business eludes you at the moment, build that relationship for a future possibility. If relationship building is the foundation of business success in today’s changing economy, build that now. You both stand to gain.

If there was one thing you can build on now, which will give you guaranteed rewards in the future, it would be good relations with people

2017 will be about synergies, gear up for it. Create your think tank, your professional and personal pool of intelligence. Use the festive season to make connections and collaborations. When the cheer is in the air, it’s easier to get people’s support. Invite and involve people in your purpose and your goals. When you share your dreams and aspirations with people, you inspire them to take charge of their own too. When people are inspired, and if they find you at the source of that inspiration, they will maintain the connect and continue the support.

2016 will end and 2017 will arrive, that’s a certainty. Whether you will have accomplished what you had set out to achieve is the doubt you want to dissuade from becoming your destiny.

Hope for a better future is always there. It is there now, as it will present itself on the 1^st of January yet again. What you can do tomorrow, you can certainly do today. Instead of putting all your stakes in hope, invest some time in action now and make it come true.

The goals and resolutions you made in the beginning of the year were your goals, your resolutions. No one asked you to make them; your heart urged you in that direction. Success and achievement is therefore not an option, it’s a must—for your sake! They call it the last lap to victory for a reason, because there is victory at the end of the race; finish it, get there and may 2016 be the year of fulfilment and glory, just as you had envisioned it.

A version of this was first published in the November 2015 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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