Walking Meditation and the Power of Intention

We want to live at extra ordinary levels of consciousness, experiencing each moment, finding the wonder and joy in every instant.

Unfortunately, most of us spend a great deal of our lives acting and behaving automatically, with no conscious thought at all, like driving a car and suddenly realizing you weren’t aware of the last five minutes. We’ve all experienced that kind of auto pilot behavior. What about when you drive past a familiar landmark and notice something you’ve never seen before? All those times you’d looked at the item, yet your brain never registered it. You moved past it without being aware of its existence. It begs the question, what else are we missing?

An intention can be as simple as, “I intend to be more aware of my surroundings.” That is the goal behind setting an intention, to wake up your awareness. There is a well-known experiment in psychology where a subject is shown a picture of a group of people. The subject is asked to find all the people in the picture wearing green sweaters. They find about 30. The picture is then taken away and they are asked if they saw anyone wearing a blue sweater. Most subjects said they saw none, some saw one or two. In fact the number of people wearing blue and green sweaters is equal.

When our minds are asked to focus or look for something, it does so with great single mindedness! When we set an intention, our mind and body and environment harmonize to see it fulfilled. It’s like a mental homing beacon you set that leads you to your destination.

Your intention helps you in taking control of your life and your path. Here are some examples:

A Bit of Science

Positive and negative ions surround us. They are like bits of conductive static electricity. Research in California and Israel have shown that low concentrations of either will produce fewer alpha brain wave frequencies, the level of consciousness we seek in meditation. Sudden increased levels of negative ions assist in producing these distinctive brain waves.

Changes to the atmosphere causes changes in the production of negative ions which in turn affects our ability to tune in and transmit our intentions. When intentions are expressed in a group, the collective energy acts as a kind of amplifier, strengthening the signal and therefore the message. In addition, it’s been found that the energy fields involved in setting intentions are enhanced during stormy weather or by water and high levels of negative ions. Walking in the forest, with the rain falling, creating an abundance of negative ions and then gathering Qi by the ocean will be a highly charged and effective time and place to set an intention and send it out into the ether to our Source.