intention

How You Get What You Want

How You Get What You Want

What happens in your body when you think of wanting something very badly?

Give yourself a moment to really envision something you desire, and notice any changes through your breath and muscles.

Did you observe any kind of tightening, a sense of restriction, or shortening of your breath? 

Wanting begins with needing, food and sleep, and connection with other human beings for example. As babies and toddlers, on an embodied level, needing and wanting may be expressed through crying and reaching out to grasp. The baby reaches for the mother’s breast, the bottle, as a plea to be picked up and held; later on we may cling tightly to our favorite toy.

However, the ways in which we express and aim to fulfill our desires may develop inefficiently. We may learn to reach out and attempt to grasp what we want both literally and figuratively in restrictive ways, or to try and deny our desires in full. This diminishes our connection to living in the flow that leads us toward more embodied freedom and the fulfillment of our desires in the first place.

Control & Surrender

Control & Surrender

Instead of tying up our cognitive resources consciously deciding how to tie our shoes, eat our meals, and get to work every day etc., we create habits to ensure these activities are reliably completed in order to free up space for other, potentially more fertile, thought processes. Habits satiate our desire for predictability. That which remains static is much easier to control. In a life dominated by unconscious habit, we can maintain our status quo, for better or worse, in attempts to minimize having to manage our relationships to change and unpredictability.

In the other direction, we may long to lose control as a means of disrupting this stasis, perhaps helping us to remember that we’re alive.

The Organization of Movement in Crisis

The Organization of Movement in Crisis

Why does it take a crisis for us to wake up? We slumber in the false security of habit and stasis, content to close our eyes to the injustices of our world as long as they do not directly affect I, Me, or Mine. But when a crisis is what we’ve got, it’s all we can do to act quickly to put out the fire, no matter the cost to our wellbeing. The thing is, adrenaline burns up just as fast as the fire is extinguished. So if we’re dealing with long-term systemic crises, it’s absolutely crucial to know how to establish a well-organized framework for sustainable (M)ovement that supports us as individuals and in turn, each other.