Focus on a singe intention

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Do everything with the single intention that underlies your feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Focus your intention on benefiting others, being helpful, being gentle toward others, developing bodhicitta, and ignoring your ego. Cultivate an awakened mind. Look outward for discovery and inspiration.

This Mind Training or meditation practice is not something done for self-gratification. It is a way to wake up to the world and see compassion everywhere. When you look closely at “What do I want?” you find that the “I” includes the world and not just the egotistic self. Questioning like this is what it means to wake up. Focusing on a single intention is a keystone practice; the practice that supports all other training.

What holds all this activity together? Is there any thread that runs through all this business? Or are we just trying to make it through another day? What do you know about your underlying intention? Rather than making a few heroic or virtuous gestures or taking on some righteous cause, the idea is to have a quality of awareness, gentleness, and benefit to others color everything you do. [^@Leif:2010aa]

Everything you do is for the help and support of others. Why don’t you stop for just a moment and consider this and express silently or out loud your gratitude and wish for everyone to be happy and safe? We end up lost on autopilot so much of the time. Avoiding being lost gets exponentially more challenging as we get busy and distracted by social obligations. We lose track of why we are doing things and are in a hurry to meet some end-game where we can finally be done and relax. Wandering on autopilot keeps us from noticing the ever-present vast openness of life.

The technique of practicing this slogan sounds easy. When starting a new activity, be it answering the phone or getting in your car to go shopping, ask, “What do I want?” or “What are my intentions?” or “Will my intentions wake me up?” Stopping and questioning your intentions takes focus and practice. Eventually, you’ll see this single intention as the evidence of vast, spacious awareness and be of help to others.

When you focus on the present moment and do things mindfully, you begin to notice that no self is ‘doing’ anything. Everything arises in a kind of spacious openness that is always present.¹

Even small glimpses can have surprising results. “Just start, iterate to improve.”

Begin Tonglen with yourself ………………………………[[201903090508]] Cultivate a serious attitude ……………………………..[[201903160423]] Benefit others without the hope of thanks ………………….[[201904270500]] Remedy obstacles with one intention ……………………….[[201904080510]] Two activities: begin the day, end the day …………………[[201904090608]]

Alternate Titles

• Keep a single intention
• All activities should be done with one intention
• Accomplish all yogas through a single means
• All active meditation is done in one way
• Practice all yogas by means of one
• Practice all yogas (or activities) by one
• Do everything with one intention
• Practice all yogas in one way
• Have a single intention

04-07-2019 - 6:10 AM ›[[201904070610]] → #slogans