"Hope and Intentionality" by New Guest Blogger, Patrice Naparstek !

A beneficial new blogger!

Given the power of hope to change the world and given that we have to ability to personally create hope…. we thought a series of guest blogs on the subject of hope and intentionality might be fun. To kick it off we asked Patrice Naparstek to gives us her thoughts on the subject.

Patrice taught Dance and PE for over twenty years at the University of Wisconsin. She also worked as a somatic therapist (Rolfing - Structural Integration and Cranial-Sacral Therapy) for over 15 years.

She is passionate about many things but her top priorities are truth in relationship, knowledge of self and learning to sit still long enough to recognize both. She is currently working on classes designed to support anatomy in embodied movement.

We hope you enjoy her blog and hope it is the start of a conversation that feeds the soul.

Hope and Intentionality, by Patrice Naparstek :

The feeling of hope is often like a loosely woven shawl draped around me with no beginning and no end often accompanied by teary eyes and goose bumps. It also sometimes feels that I have little power how hope manifests. If I want to find hope it often seems that I have to look outside of myself by talking about, thinking about or connecting to something other than myself.

On the other hand – have you ever made an intention – the fully committed without a doubt throwing of yourself into a direction? Maybe you decided to follow a passion of yours, quit a job and throw your hat into the ring of your passion. Your phone rings and an old friend you haven’t spoken to in a while asks, “Are you still interested in carousel horses”, or “Would you like to be in a new play I’ve written?” Suddenly the world around you supports your decision, gives you access, shows you the way.

When I’ve set an intention I’ve found that it often resides in my body as an energetic presence. Not always in the same place but actual, sensate and real. Knowing where it is helps me to find my back to it as life and the habits of mind distract me from my intention.

Try this. Sit up and either set an intention for yourself, “I’m going to call my mother”, or “I’m going to finish that sweater I started”, or remember a time when you felt the strength of your own intention. Now, where does your intention live in your body? It might be in one of the chakra regions or somewhere in an organ, like your heart or lungs, or even in the bottoms of your feet. Take a moment to really feel where it is, what is the tone of your intention, its weight, its color, its shape. Give your self time to really feel where and what it is. By doing this you create an internal road map to your intention which in turn allows you to recommit your energies, to find the source of your commitment. The practice of setting an intention has become commonplace in our Western lives. To deepen that practice we might realize that body and mind are really one – we can’t separate them and the more we recognize that link the more clear becomes our way to realization of our intentions.

Hope is beautiful, necessary but often springs from a well outside of our selves. But intention – the fully committed, wholly present focus of our wills is what moves us to action. When we recognize that it resides in us, literally can be found in our own bodies it is like the world lines up with us to make manifest that intention. Then Hope shines from within us giving the feeling of self-reliance that we can co-create a better world.