Creating an intention tunes you into the uniqueness of the moment with a laser focus, gleaning from it the essence of what matters now. It’s a friend and guide, accompanying you and providing a road map to help you embody your values and actualize your purpose.

Yet a funny thing happens: you often don’t follow through. You forget your intention, space out, perhaps remember it later on, or not at all. Have you noticed your inner critic has a lot to say if you don’t follow through with your intention, occupying the space where intention was with self-judgment for not following through?

One of the ways to address this gap is to create ways to track what your direct experience is telling you as you move to embody the intention. Learning to track whether the intention is still valid or needs tweaking is a powerful practice that empowers and engages you, keeping the intention fresh and alive.

By creating a practice of your choosing that’s limited in scope, you can develop the muscles that directly support following through with intention. In meditation, for example, when you come back to the breath over and over, or any other object of concentration including ‘allowing everything to be’,  you are using that focus and will to stay aware of yourself through the breath. By consciously noting that this is an intention and it is intrinsic to the meditation process, you strengthen the muscle that says ‘I can follow through with my set intention’.

Let’s take a closer look at how this works. Take a pranayama practice where you create an intention to incorporate breath retention into your practice session. Moving towards doing this, you find that breath retention doesn’t’ seem to be what wants to happen; there’s a subtle pull away from it. If you stay aware and don’t force the intention – staying open and allowing that awareness to continue – if you don’t go against that perception and add the breath retention to your practice anyway, you will find that contrary to your intention disappearing, it’s becoming fine-tuned.

It could become clear to you, for example, that your truer intention in this moment is to notice how the breath is moving in a given part of the body, to follow it with your awareness as it ebbs and flows there. In the end the actual intention, the one you can follow through with, will have an easy yes to it, an obviousness so to speak; it will not be something external that you place on your self, something you need to fit your actual experience into. (Listening and responding fine-tunes intention. It’s the muscle that starts to develop and get stronger the more you use it. You also notice that the inner judge won’t have much to say about ‘abandoning your intention to practice breath retention’ since your direct knowing has acted as the guide for what is right in that moment. )

It is also highly effective to use props to support intention. Creating ways to pause and check in: where am I in regard to my intention? Is it still appropriate? Does it need a tweak to be more right, fit better? A timer is a great support and companion and they exist everywhere in our world these days: phones, Alexa, apps, watches. When you pause, try sensing your body, notice your breath, check in with your internal landscape, ground yourself in the here and now; then check in with your intention. All of these help reconnect you with yourself and invite the gifts that a life with intention brings.