So well said! Thank you, Alison Rose Levy!
Many years ago when I was newer to trying on and exploring different spiritual beliefs, I considered “the Secret” but very quickly found it to be incredibly lacking, misleading, shaming, and, yes, rooted in privilege.
And it was painful to witness the pain of friends who believed in their power to manifest their reality only to have their intentions for a beautiful sunny dream come true vacation turn into a week of rain. That is just one among countless examples.
Intentions are powerful. And dangerous when misused.
Years ago I began cultivating deep intentions — to get and sustain my sobriety, to heal my heart, to live my life as a prayer, to grow my capacity to love, to alleviate the suffering in our world, to become more and more who I truly am.
And those intentions have taken hard, hard work. Nothing magical. But there has been a lot of mystery and grace and humility and compassion and gifts that I couldn’t have imagined.
It’s sad and disturbing when we humans act out of our privilege, out of being empathically impaired, out of ignorance and not being able or willing to see larger pictures. I say this with the humility of knowing that I have certainly done this myself.
And if I’m alive and breathing, there’s more work to be done to dismantle the obstacles within myself and our world that harms rather than helps us to be more just, caring, humane, truthful, and loving. ― Molly
At one time I was given a spot as a featured blogger on a website focused on positive intentions. It was the website and brand of a famous celebrity’s daughter. It was considered a great honor to participate and of course they did not pay me.
Every time one posted or commented, one was expected to express an “intention,” because A. that was their brand, and B. They strongly believed that intentions created reality.
I found it impossible to do this and it all seemed very contrived. It was as if the overt message was: "We're sharing with you the secret of our success!"
But the hidden message was, "America provides equal opportunity to all. All you have to do is ask for it, and you too can be as admired and successful as my father. And if you don't attain that, the problem lies in how you formulate your intention."
What a crock!
Eventually it came to pass that a medical doctor who had long partnered with the celebrity — suddenly got a terminal illness and died. This was very sad but what surprised me was that this death hit the celeb’s daughter so hard—because as she wrote at the time, she could not believe someone so loved and so well intended and so connected to the magical perfection of her famous family—could actually die.
At the time, this was a revelation. What many people have to face up to in their lives from the youngest ages, from the lives of their ancestors, or the history of their community, or country, from their forced recruitment into destructive activities like war-- was not any kind of reality to this spiritual celebrity's daughter.
For this website on intention, so many resources had been spent on a fiction. The magical intentions she was peddling were wishful thinking based on privilege.
Just today I reposted a meme that said that the name ‘Canadian’ means “they sit in our village,” that is to say “squatters.”
This is just one example of what rides along when we appropriate language without a complete grasp of its meaning. The use of phrases like “well intended, or “best intentions,” is all too often NOT to help manifest what is best. No, it’s often to appropriate language, and use it to hide or deny what occurred or what one is actually up to.
In the case of that vanity website — or of the US military’s genocide in Vietnam — or of the documentary filmmaker who white washed that aspect of US history by showing clips of those responsible falsely claiming that it all was done based on “the best information we had at the time,” the real goals were quite different.
Instead of "declaring my intention," people would do better to really examine their intentions and what lurks behind them.
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