Intention + Surrender = Dedication

These concepts have been leitmotifs in my life for a while now:

1. Intention
2. Surrender
3. Sacredness

I was at the gym listening to a podcast from Gil Fronsdal on intention. (At one time, these podcasts were my usual soundtrack at the gym, and I remember a co-worker of mine finding it really amusing that my idea of a rocking workout was forty-five minutes on an elliptical machine listening to dharma talks.) I downloaded this one months ago, but just got around to it, and of course it was at just the right time.

The talk was about intention as an active, creative part of living, but also about bringing balance to the activity of intention. The passive balance to intention, Gil says, is surrender – that while we have enormous, almost unlimited  power to shape our experience with our intention, ultimately, there are still some things more powerful, and we do not have control over all of the details. A light bulb went on when I heard this. After TEDxMidAtlantic, which was about intention, action, and creation, I was inspired, but couldn’t really dig into the whole intention thing. Even though I got it, in the weeks following, everything in my life became about surrender. I know that this is my energy, this is my thing, my dharma on an energetic level is to bring the opposing energy into a situation – calm into crazy, female into male, order into entropy, darkness into light, yin and yang. But, it just occurred to me now that my mysterious dive into surrender in the last two months of the year was me just rolling how I roll, it was my natural response to intention, intention, intention.

For two months, I let myself get thrown around by all of the beauty in the world, by love, by heartbreak. It was an ecstatic and deeply useful experience. Then a lull. Then I started thinking about intention again. Lately, intention has been more retrospective for me, but I think of it constantly; when I am surprised or confused by my own actions -which seems to be happening a lot- I question my intention. What was it really – to manipulate? To soothe? Harmful? Non-harmful? It keeps me (sort of) sane during a major transition.

In the talk, Gil went on to discuss what to call this balance of intention and surrender, and he decided on “dedication,” because dedication brings with it an infusion of, YES, sacredness. So there it is, this idea of putting sacredness into the every day that keeps showing up over and over and OVER again.

It turns out that after all these years of trying to give everything my attention at once, these three ideas that I have worked hard to juggle – intention, surrender, and sacredness – are all really the same thing, the yin, the yang and the whole.

I guess really isn’t much more to say about it, other than that*.

(Except for this: no act is inherently sacred or profane, but some of the most fun ones are both.)