Setting your consciousness at a healthy starting point before setting intentions is necessary. A mind in chaos from unaddressed psychological pain may pose obstacles to your intentions. Unwanted reactions and defenses can get in the way of keeping yourself on track. First, you must heal the wounds of your past. After healing is dealt with, you can dive into intention setting. 

In Marla Tabaka’s article “Setting Goals Isn’t Enough, Setting Daily Intentions Will Change Your Life,” she says that setting goals can lead to a sense of failure, but setting intentions “allows you to focus on who you are in the moment, to recognize and live your values, and to raise your emotional energy, which in turn raises your physical energy.” Intentions are “about who you want to be, what you wish to contribute to the world, and how you choose to touch the lives of others.” A great example of an intention that Tabaka gives is: “I intend to show acts of kindness today, opening myself to any possibility to bring joy into the life of another.”

Tabaka highlights the pros of setting intentions:

• Intentions have no limits. Intentions are expansive. 
• Setting intentions can make you more effective. 
• Setting intentions will help you to get out of your head. 
• Setting intentions opens your eyes to things you may have otherwise missed. 
• Intentions can include global contributions.

According to Jess Carlson’s article “Intention is Everything,” “having intention means simply being aware of why you’re doing what you’re doing.  Living with intention means having a specific aim and focus and making all your actions, everything you do, align with that intention so you can manifest what you most desire.” She suggests setting an intention for the next month to test out how it can change your life. Carlson says to think of something you want and imagine “what is the feeling or emotion having that thing would give you” and to “create your intention around that.” After you have a set intention, “write your intention as a positive affirmation and place it somewhere that you’ll see if before you even get out of bed in the morning.” This is a great way to start with intention setting and discover if it works for you. 

Instead of thinking about the goal, or the “what” in your life, focus on the intention, or the “why.” The “why” of life is what drives us. If you really want that expensive dress you saw a beautiful model wearing or the newest hot sports car, take some time to think about the motivation behind that desire. Maybe you just want to feel beautiful and confident, and you believe that that dress can help you achieve that. From there, you can set an intention to allow yourself to feel more self love and confidence. Maybe you want to be able to go on adventures and feel powerful in that new car. You can set an intention to go on more adventures or to allow yourself to feel more powerful over your own actions. In order to step into a healthier, more successful new year, you can set intentions that are meaningful to you to motivate you to achieve a better self every single day. 

From a Mind Map Perspective

While all of this advice about intentions is incredibly useful, it will not truly make a difference until our minds are healed first. If we don’t clean the wounds of childhood, then we can’t have clear intentions. Our unconscious pain will create unwanted reactions.  We may react abnormally to normal things that may trigger the pain of our wounds in a WTF (What The Freud) cycle. In the WTF cycle, our repressed psychological pain bubbles up to the surface through abnormally negative reactions to relatively normal or common things. These reactions lead to encoding of negative core beliefs such as “I am unlovable” or “I am unworthy.” Under the crippling weight of these beliefs, we eventually fall into chaos, defenses, and then breakdown. If we can hope to grasp our truest, purest intentions, we have to find the root cause of our pain, or the initial childhood wound, and start cleaning our consciousness of the poison it has caused.

Once we have fully cleared the psychological viruses from our minds, we can start to heal. In this healing process, we are setting our consciousness back to a healthy baseline upon which we can build new positive habits and relationships. If we are still experiencing the aftermath of childhood wounds, consciousness can be a slippery slope. We can start out with intentions to be more loving, but then escalate into jealousy or envy. When we are healed, we can set our intentions from a strong base and build upon them to truly make a difference for the better. Setting intentions is simply not enough to change our lives until we can get to the root cause of our pain. Through Mind Mapping, you can heal in 2020.