Guided Action

I’m sure you’ve read the words in my title before. It’s what all the teachers in The Secret talk about. Set your intention, keep focused on it, hold still and wait till you’re told what to do.

Who’s doing the telling? The Spirit of your Self.

It’s taken me a lot of years to be able to follow this advice. How about you? Oh I know how to set intention, focus and hold still. It’s the waiting that can trip me up. An old song from the movie Dr. Doolittle comes to mind. It’s called “I Think I Like You.” One of the lyrics is “Waiting . . . , waiting . . . , waiting . . . .”

Waiting for what? For guidance, for an impulse, for an idea, for a nudge, for a surge of energy.

In the long run, it’s easier to manage a life this way, but learning how to do it has a steep learning curve for most of us. I learned to listen for guidance on purpose. Here’s how:

First, I started using guidance with things that “didn’t matter.” I don’t mean they really didn’t matter to me, but they weren’t the humongous things that mattered a lot.

I’d have a bunch of errands to run. I knew I’d get them done one way or another, but I used my inner guidance system to ask how best to do them, in what order. Invariably, if I followed my guidance, I’d run into someone I needed to see on the path. If I didn’t listen for what to do first, I wouldn’t run into anyone.

Second, I used my internal guidance system with things that made a difference (everything does), bigger than an order of errands but not the biggest things in my life.

As time went one, I got to trusting my guidance a lot more and I moved easily into using it for everything. Now, I rarely make a move without an inner push.

Guided action is efficient action. You just have to hold still before you pass go.

A Lesson in Intention

Marcel Marceau died this week. He was a world-renowned mime who created a melancholy mime-clown named Bip.

Many years ago, when I was a student at National Theatre Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, I was privileged to take a class with this master of gesture.

Marcel Marceau’s artistry is where I first encountered the idea of intention.

His class was full of silence. Without ever speaking, he set us each a task, an exercise, to establish the fact of a wall in front of us. He put his expressive hands in the air and felt a wall, and then, through gesture, encouraged us fledglings, wannabes, to do the same.

We felt for the wall in front of us for about an hour. An hour!

Occasionally, the master would come to discover the wall we had created, and we would have a wall dialogue. Eventually, he visited every wall in the room. When he would work with a student, the wall became much more real, more solid, more . . . well, wall. He had been establishing walls in the air for decades by then.

After the silent work, he spoke in his rich French accent.

“There is only a wall if you intend a wall.”

I walked around for a full week with that sentence echoing in my head. I suppose it was a roundabout introduction to the philosophy that would eventually guide my life, metaphysics.

There is only a wall if you intend a wall.

There is only a connection if you intend a connection.

Intention is everything.

Merci beaucoup, M. Marceau. God-speed.