Right Intention

You set your intentions based on understanding what matters most to you and make a commitment to align your worldly actions with your inner values.

-Philip Moffitt

The second step on the Eightfold Path is Right Intention and is an important topic here at year’s end. Many of us review the year that has passed and tend to make resolutions and set goals for the next year. The teachings on Right Intention offers a special perspective to this process.

The teachings remind us that we must understand much more than just what we want, we must know why we want what we want.

This distinction is critical in terms of understanding the ways we cause our own suffering. We must be able to discern if our deepest core values are being served by intentions that are causing suffering or optimizing our ability to know freedom from suffering. Without this deep understanding we can so easily act unskillfully and unwisely..

Beyond our own suffering we know from the teachings that our intentions must include all beings. If our intentions are based on a belief that we are separate and autonomous as we go about living our lives, we are ignoring both the interdependent nature of all things as well as impermanent nature of existence where our actions, skillful or not, are what create the waves on the surface of the still and equanimous and already free sea of life.