What is your inner work? You may know in advance. You may not. Your work may relate to what is happening in this world, your personal experience of it or a larger perspective, including protection of friends, your community or the resolution of a war.
How to begin? Enter the attention space previously described. If you are followed by wishes or concerns that do not mire you in thinking or personal reactions, this may be the subject of your work at that time. Or you may enter free of content and feel your way to the work you are asked to do.
Each of us has particular proclivities or resonances. In a state suitable for inner work, the correct orientation is likely to arise.
I can always begin with an apology for having forgotten to do this work, for which I have accepted an obligation. I acknowledge my obligation. I submit to it. My heart responds. A pressure enters me, pushing me to surrender and accept what comes. I may have an idea of what the work is for but it has its own intending. Often I do not know what that is. Sometimes my wish for some action is allowed, even encouraged.
Inner work proceeds in love. It’s love that takes me outside myself and into this engagement, perhaps with the sorrow and suffering of sentient beings, their strivings, fears and aspirations. Or perhaps love expresses itself as glorification of the Absolute. There is no room for self-concern. Love is the center of a constellation of feelings which further inner work. There is compassion, intimacy, gratitude, praise and humility. Inner work will move you among these and more.
For every crisis, every tragedy, every possible joy, there is a good which has the possibility of entering and completing it.
Suppose that I feel the wish to pray for the end of a war. The resolution exists. I do not need to create it or know what it is. My task is to give the resolution room to enter. Holding a connection to the war in my attention, in my heart, without judgment, without expectation, with love, this is the nature of this work. God has an answer for every problem. Can I faithfully submit to this understanding, that He is the answer and I can assist Him to enter this world through loving attention.
Submission. Faith. The power of Intending. What am I intending? His will. I do not need to do. I only need to allow.
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October 14, 2025
Tags: inner work, intending, what work
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April 15, 2025
I breathe in and out. Breathing brings the outside in and the inside out. Attending to this, outer merges with inner, one space, making the two, one.
There is no division in this one space, an attention-space. No boundaries. The phenomena in the attention-space are not limited.
I ask: where does attention come from? From my brain? Is it mine? This is a difficult but rewarding inquiry. I discover that there is attention mediated by my thinking. And there is attention that rests directly on sensation and feeling. Can attention attend to itself? I find that it can. This is a wordless state. It requires only that I allow it.
The more I study attention, the more it seems to exist apart from me. I live within a field of attention. I can sense/feel the attention of others, animals, connected to me in this field. I am a participant in attention which moves me, informs me. It is a bridge to my experience, uniting me to my world. The medium of my being.
In the one space, the attention-space, prayer is engagement.
There is something else…the power of intending. The power to wish. Intention is thought. Intending is will. In the attention-space, intending is an act with consequence. In the attention-space, what I wish for exists as me. I am united with the action and the consequence.Tags: attention, attention-space, breathing, intending, space
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August 18, 2022
What does it mean to have an intention? It’s a thought about doing something in the future. It has very little reality, doesn’t it? Perhaps our intention will translate into action, perhaps not. Every intention brings opposition, resistance. It’s a measure of my maturity that I have many fewer intentions as I get older and I tend to keep more of them as I become aware of my tendencies and the consequences of not doing what I intended.
There is another path less travelled, the path of intending. What is intending? Intending is an unpremeditated action of the will in the present. Intending does not need an object to accomplish. It connects inside to outside in a wide open gesture of submission to the moment, an action in and of itself. Things happen whether or not you have thought them.
I watch the small birds while having coffee at an outside café. They unfailingly land precisely on the arm of the chair next to mine. Never a miss. No food here. And off they fly, seeming randomness. Do they think where they are going? No time for that. Do they have an intention? Or are they imbedded in intending, their instantaneous maneuvers guided by an invisible matrix of energy and shared attention.
Can I bathe in this medium so excruciatingly exact and perfect in which plans do not exist, just responsiveness? This mind is quiet, open. Not the closed mind of one who has things to do and thinks the steps, who faces a world of cares and sets a course into an uncertain future. Animals have this other way. Their only fear a present danger, otherwise on the wings of the invisible they are moved, the wind beneath their wings the force of universal intending.
Can I invoke intending and see what happens? Sorcerers say intending can be beckoned with the eyes. Is this true? Strangely, it may be so. Looking into open space seems to connect me to intending. -
July 27, 2017
Our intentions rarely have the force to proceed. Why is that? If they do have force, it’s because they serve our vanity.
Intentions are just thoughts, are they not? To have effect, they need to be connected to the unconscious forces that actually motivate me.
My doctor shocked me yesterday, telling me I should lose some weight or my health will suffer. He seemed very stern with me so I was worried when I left his office. Of course, I could not have known that he was in a bad mood after his wife had run up the credit cards. His demands seemed rational at the time. I formed a vague intention to exercise more and eat less, but not much changed until that hot new girl joined accounting.
I see my reflection in the window, how unpleasingly rotund I have become. She will never pay any attention to me. So now I resolve to take the doctor’s orders seriously. My intentions are reinforced every time I see myself in a mirror. I have a motive, although I tell everyone “I’m just following doctor’s orders” when I grandly turn down a second piece of cake at dinner. And I believe it too.
Since I am a member of a work group, I recognize that my infatuation and resulting motive have given me an opportunity to observe self. I observe that I am quite ridiculous. I have a self-image that is 29 years out of date. I pull in my stomach when I go to accounting. I remember how I did not like to be seen in public with my aunt who was very fat. I see that I have many little programs that revolve around my judgments of fat people…pulling back from physical contact…my aunt used to sweat a lot and I recoiled when she hugged me.
Ok, this prejudice is something I was not conscious of before. I can work with that, first by simply noticing the physical sensations when they arise. But why am I overweight?
I observe that I have an addiction to certain types of food at certain times. I have rationalized these addictions as habits designed to maintain blood sugar and energy levels. Perhaps, but let’s see. Over time, I observe that these presumed motives do not explain anything. It seems that at certain times of the day, I am uncomfortable if I do not have a particular sensation of fullness, even if I have eaten a good meal. Why is this? I don’t know and don’t need to know. I observe the craving for that sensation when it arises and I let it go.
Meanwhile, the girl in accounting has been fired. My doctor is surprisingly friendly and supportive at my next check-up as he unconsciously tries to undo the effects of our last visit together. I have begun to lose a little weight.
But more usefully, I have also begun to notice how suspect my motives are. They are a soup of unexamined impressions and unconscious desires. I dress them up as rational intentions but the motive power is almost always elsewhere, in habitualized sensations and self-images that are often completely irrational. My intentions are mostly a confusing thicket of vain ideas about myself. This realization, as it grows, has unintended consequences. I am not moved to do what I used to do; my once-avid participation in certain activities is now uninteresting and my friends don’t seem to know what to do or say around me anymore.
Perhaps at this point I will begin to encounter intent. This is a verb, not a noun. Intending is not a word-formula holding onto some desire or benefit of personal interest to me. To tend is to care for something. One of the early meanings of tending is to move in a particular direction. Perhaps intending is to choose to face in a particular direction. To have intent is to hold and care for a point on the compass without wavering. Why? Because it is fulfilling in itself.
Intentions are in the realm of the mind, under the influence of our vanity and our habits. Intent is in the field of the will, under the magnetic influence of something larger than me. I wish for intent.
Tags: habits, intending, intent, intention, motive, observation, sensation, will
