Intention
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Glances. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
I don’t know where the custom originates, but Western yoga students, at least, are often asked to “set an intention“ for their practice at the beginning of a class. An intention to cultivate kindness, maybe, or to leave behind an obsessive thought. For me the prompt always chafed. It’s so abrupt, for one thing. How do you figure out your intention right there on the spot? It’s an awfully consequential thing to improvise. And how do you boil it down to an anything? Isn’t intention a state of being? Isn’t it actually just the sum of your consciousness as it pertains to the world that encloses you in a given moment? The article, an, feels like a handcuff.
An intention might not even be something we set. I’ve argued here that our creative choices relate in some foundational way to the fact of our existence; that what we create is among the keenest artifacts of embodied conscious being. If we have even some measure of power over this, as I believe we do and must, then it only follows that we’d have it over what we intend.
But power is not the same as absolute, original, undiluted say, and here intention becomes more interestingly problematic, more acute: It’s not something we conjure from nothing in the instant of someone’s asking us. Our intention—that is, the short- and long-term development of choice—is atmospheric and structural. It flows into us and emits back outward in short or long bursts, in fine and gross motion. Intention runs freely or stops at barriers within us. It animates our relationships and is enlivened and instructed by them.
One day last summer at the end of a yoga class in Soho I found myself with my eyes closed envisioning the people out on Prince Street, which is one of the places in New York that looks like the movie: bustling, varied, scenic. But in my mind as they walked they pulled behind them ropes woven of strands in various colors which extended away, behind, dispersing in every direction. Strings of causes, all the accidents and involvements, all the influences, interpersonal or inanimate, they had exercised or undergone—these causal lineages emerged from everywhere on earth and all through time to concentrate finally in each of these many people crossing the cobblestones with their sunglasses and their shopping bags, who were by this mechanism connected to everything that had ever happened anywhere, and it all mingled again in the crossing of their paths.
When I start teaching yoga soon—the last class in my training was a few days before Christmas—I might make a habit of flipping things around. So not: Set your intention for the class. But: Use the movements of your body to sort and trace those strands, to find how they converge in you now—to discern where, with your assent and creative participation, they might lead you. Discernment is born of questioning, and the question on my mind is so warm and so possible, so full of being, so inevitably different from one moment to the next that it can never dull or expire: What do I intend?
Coming Friday: Cold.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.