Setting Intentions
This morning I sat down - well, knelt, actually - to begin my morning YouTube yoga practice. As instructed, I closed my eyes, focussed inwards, began concentrating on my breath. I was then invited to set an intention for my practice: how did I want to engage with the practice this morning? How did I want to feel? What did I seek to gain from yoga today? I realised that this idea of intention-setting is something that happens at the beginning of almost every class. And I almost always think the same thing, a suggested prompt from many sessions ago: my intention, more often than not, is to be playful. And by playful, on a deeper level, I mean being kind to myself, trying my hardest, trying new poses but not getting frustrated if I can’t achieve those poses; it is more about a willingness to explore, and to try, and if needs be, to fail - but fail playfully.
This intention is not something which manifests itself again during my practice. Generally speaking, I don’t think to myself “I must be playful here”. But I *do *find that when accepting and setting this intention I get a sense that I am happier to explore the poses and transitions, and while this doesn’t stop me getting frustrated when I can’t achieve a particular goal in yoga, the frustration is a playful frustration - not so much “goddammit Dan” as “ah! I’ll have to try again next time”. Perhaps, then, there is something in the idea of setting an intention. But what is an intention?
“The most important feature of intentions”, write Kvavilashvili and Ellis (1996), “is their intrinsic relation to the actions and activities that we perform in our everyday lives” - a person’s “readiness to act in a certain way in the future”. According to Searle (1983), there are two type of intentions: prior intentions (where the intention happens prior to an action) and *intentions-in-action *(e.g. spontaneous actions). Gauld & Shotter (1977) establish two types of prior intention - immediate intentions and *delayed intentions; *but one important aspect of any prior intention is “that it always occurs as a result of a conscious decision to act in a certain way” (Kvavilashvili and Ellis 1996, p26).
So, perhaps then there is an opportunity to set the prior intention to be playful. In many ways, this relates to some of the ideas I have already written about: the setting of rules, laying the foundations of playful engagement through culture and value-setting. These activities could facilitate the intention of approaching a project or situation playfully, if the ruleset actively broke down an individual’s barriers for play - if it encouraged a disposition “to approach activities with the goal of having fun, and with an enthusiastic and in-the-moment attitude (i.e. a disposition to engage in play)” (Van Vleet and Feeny, 2015 p637).
In yoga, the notion of intention is linked with the notion of sankalpa, “from the Sanskrit roots san, meaning "a connection with the highest truth," and kalpa, meaning "vow." (Yogapedia 2018). This is intention in extremis, a spiritual and philosophical affirmation rather than connected to ego-driven desire. According to yoga teacher Anne Douglas (no date given), when searching for a sankalpa her students often start from a place of want, rather than intention - “I want to lose weight”, etc. But as they practice intention-setting, their intentions become more rooted in disposition:
“If someone starts with, ‘I want to quit smoking,’ as they work with it, they’ll start to feel a deeper desire, such as, ‘I want to take care of my body.’ Even further down the road, the sankalpa might become, ‘I love my body,’ or even ‘I am love itself.’ It’s an evolution, but it still has that feeling of the initial intention to quit smoking.” (Douglas quoted in McGonigal, no date).
This is, admittedly, heavily unscientific and a bit, as my mum would say, ‘hippy-dippy’, and I’m aware of getting sucked too far down a rabbit hole of un-academically researched spirituality. However, the evolution of the sankalpa from a specific desire (“I want”) to a more personal, dispositional affirmation (“I am”) sets an interesting conceptual precedent for nurturing a playful intention. If one wants to set off on a playful path - for, after all, not everyone is playful and not everyone will want to play - perhaps you begin with a playful intention - “I will be open and explorative in this project” - and work towards the ultimate goal of sustaining play through all projects - “I am playful”. We already know that playfulness encourages further playfulness. This provides a pathway for the person themselves to ‘become playful’.
Stoic philosopher Epictetus believed that, to an extent, the way we feel is in our control. In fact, he believed that we are in control of little else than our feelings:
“Of things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion, movement toward a thing, desire, aversion (turning from a thing); and in a word, whatever are our own acts”
As such, we can choose to relinquish some of the control in our way and move toward playfulness, fun, pleasure. Perhaps one way of doing this is by actively setting an intention to explore, to search for fun and pleasure - to choose to be playful*.
*This assumes, as usual, that the conditions for play are met: that our base needs are catered for, that we are safe etc. In essence, that we are in a situation where play is possible.
References
- *Yogapedia - Sankalpa *[Online]. Available: https://www.yogapedia.com/definition/5751/sankalpa [Accessed 26/05/2023 2023].
AIKIN, S., EPICTETUS. MANUAL, E., AIKIN, S. F. H. I. O. I. & STEPHENS, W. O. H. I. O. I. X. 2023. *Epictetus's 'Encheiridion' : a new translation and guide to stoic ethics, *London, Bloomsbury Academic.
GAULD, A. & SHOTTER, J. 1977. *Human action and its psychological investigation, *London, England, Routledge.
KVAVILASHVILI, L. & ELLIS, J. 1996. Varieties of Intention: Some Distinctions and Classifications. In: BRANDIMONTE, M., EINSTEIN, G. O. & MCDANIEL, M. A. (eds.) Prospective Memory, Theory and Applications. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
MCGONIGAL, K. How to Create a Sankalpa. *Yoga International *[Online]. Available from: https://yogainternational.com/article/view/how-to-create-a-sankalpa/ [Accessed 26/05/2023 2023].
SEARLE, J. R. 1983. *Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind, *Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press.
VAN VLEET, M. & FEENEY, B. C. 2015. Play Behavior and Playfulness in Adulthood. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 9**,** 630-643.