The Compass

Hello! It is HOT! I have been putting ice-cubes on my face to stay cool but unfortunately the ice cubes have been in my freezer beneath a pile of frozen bananas, so now I smell of bananas.

This week, I had a wonderful conversation with a yoga student of mine. We were talking about intentions, which I quite often suggest that students set at the beginning of a class. This student told me that her intention is usually to leave the class in one piece, which I thought was a truly excellent intention. I’m not in the habit of teaching extravagantly inaccessible poses, but still, the ego can take over and it’s still always possible to injure yourself.

I often wonder whether anybody in my classes actually sets intentions. Teaching yoga, because nobody is talking back to you, and all you have is an expression to go by, can be a peculiarly one-sided. It is an interior practice, and this is sort of the point: for the student to develop their awareness of their interior world, so there is inevitably an opacity to the experience of teaching. You do simply have to trust that the practice is doing its work. However, it is very nice, whenever a student tells me how they are feeling or how something is landing, and that, in fact, they are also setting their intentions.

I really like intentions, which are quite separate from goals. Intentions are not really about achieving one thing or another, although often this will be a side-effect of intention setting. Rather, they are an orientation. Working with as an intention is like walking with a compass. You will wander, and likely to very exciting and unexpected places, and you will need to put your compass in your pocket if you want to enjoy the view — (and if putting something in your pocket makes you think of your phone, then think of intentions instead as a North Star, and look up at the sky instead). Every time you pull out your compass, (or look up at the sky!) it, you’ll reorient yourself.

So, during the course of a yoga class or in meditation, or, indeed, if you practice intentions enough for them to begin to seep out into your life, inevitably your mind and your direction of travel will drift. But then, when you remember your intention, or are prompted to do so, you will come back to it, whatever it was: presence, compassion, doing less. This is the point — you will move away from your intention as many times as you return to it, in fact, you need to forget it, take a few or many steps, in order to remember it again. But every time you do come back to it, it’s a little easier to do so: the pathway and the direction of travel is a little more familiar, a little more well-worn.

Intentions are very powerful, but that doesn’t mean they are forced or that they will dominate you. Intentions are not about becoming a different person, but about repeatedly re-orienting yourself, repeatedly checking your compass or your star. I think orientation is very important in the 21st century, when we don’t necessarily have a set of externally prescribed values to which to adhere. Compassion, I have found, is a very powerful intention, towards myself and to other people. Compassion does not mean that I lose my capacity for discernment, but it does mean that I try, where I can, to lead with the view that people (not least myself) are generally doing their best. Judgement often overrides compassion, so I have to check my direction of travel quite regularly.

Generally, when I am remembering to do so, intention-setting is something quite different from adding a task on my to-do list. In fact, they generally simplify things, and they make me feel less worried about the long list of things I feel the need to accomplish, because I feel a bit more able to discard (within reason) those that are not aligned with my intentions. I have some kind of a container, and an anchor — like the magnet on the compass, that pulls me towards North. After I had my conversation with my student, I imagined her with her compass, orienting herself in her practice, and it made me feel happy, and it made me feel that sharing these practices, we’re finding our shared points of orientation, travelling the path in step.

With love, and ice-cubes,

Rosie xxx