Choose Your Life Monday is an invitation to name what pattern you will lovingly notice this week and to do so in community. Of course, you can do it any day you want- you don’t have to start on Monday. Join in when and whenever suits you.

I can get over-the-top excited about things.

I know, if you saw the Happy Dance Video, this is not news to you.

I really really love my enthusiasm (I also love the root of the word, from the Greek enthous ‘possessed by a god, inspired’) and…

my enthous can become myopic. I can get lost in the enthous.

Case in point: setting intentions. Choosing a focus and working with it to bring more of what you want into your life. I advocate this in The Life Organizer and it’s part of what we do at the Comfort Cafe and Life Spa.

It’s good stuff and I notice that in paying attention to what I want to create more of this month – lightness – I forgot to pay attention to my pattern of making things more difficult and complicated than they perhaps need to be (but only by a tad, a smidgen, a wafer thin tidbit).

In getting all excited about intention, I forgot about the power of focusing my awareness on what I am already doing.

See, I began these Choose Your Life Mondays because one way we change our lives is by becoming aware of our patterns and then changing our habitual reactions when those patterns are triggered.

But we cannot change our reactions until we lovingly become aware of our patterns and we cannot lovingly become aware of anything until we are paying attention and one way of paying attention is to name in community what we will pay attention to.

When I was simply paying attention, I actually felt lighter

When I was paying attention to an already existing pattern, I actually felt lighter than I have these last two weeks when I was focusing on lightness!

Also, more change happened with less effort when I focused on an existing pattern and choose to react differently to it.

Yet I believe in setting intentions, in focusing, gently, on what you want more of…

Argh! Double Argh! Throws hands up in air and stomps around. Pouts.

Is there a right way? Do I have to revise my book? Am I leading women astray at the Cafe?

Then I said to myself, while giving myself a big hug, “Self, maybe it’s an and rather than but?”

(and makes everybody’s but look better)

As in what if I paid attention to how lightness is – or is not – showing up?

And

used the pattern of making things difficult to invite my intention in to play! To ask “Could I be lighter here?” or “What would help me treat this more lightly?”or remembering a moment of lightness and opening my heart to it.

Pattern Noticing  + Intention Setting =  More of What I Want – Straining

So this week I will

Lovingly notice when I’m feeling heavy or snarled in difficulty or when things feel too hard

and when I notice, I will ask msyelf one of my intention questions

Um, this may be really really obvious for all of you but don’t tell me because it feels huge to me.

Stay tuned for the results of my experiment next Monday.

In the meantime, hey, maybe you want to join me?

You could:

Name an intention – one word,  or a phrase, or a question that names what you want to experience more of or how you want to feel (if you’re over at at the Cafe, ideas on intention setting are in the monthly workshop available on This Month’s Goodies page or just check out some of the other women’s intention in the forums)

and name the related pattern you’ll lovingly notice.

Yin and yang, what is and what will be, how life is showing up now and using that as an invite to engage your intention, your desire, your beautiful heart.