Happy Holidays & New Year! 

One of the questions I most often hear is how to set intentions and how to manifest what you want in your life. Setting intentions is different than setting goals.

Intentions are focused on feelings and are not goal oriented.

1. How do you want to feel inside?

What we’re really seeking is not an external achievement or acquisition – it’s the feeling that we think will arrive alongside our wish. Danielle LaPorte, one of my favorite inspirators and soul sisters, calls this our “Core Desired Feelings” and helps you get uber clear on what you’re really seeking in her digital program THE DESIRE MAP. 

If you want to be in a relationship or draw in your soul partner, what do you actually want to feel once you have your mate? Understanding the internal feeling will help you dial in what kind of partner you want. Consider possible feelings: safe, loved, excited, sense of companionship, playfulness, sexy, nurtured, seen or understood.

2. Cultivate These Qualities Now

Become what you seek. Don’t wait until the person, thing or achievement you are manifesting arrives. Start working with the feelings you want now. If you wait to cultivate the qualities you want to feel, you may miss what you’re manifesting completely. This is the science of manifesting – The Law of Attraction.

Like attracts like.

You naturally draw towards you the essence of what you are. What you radiate is what you magnetize. Practice makes perfect. Practice feeling and being playful, sexy, nurturing, loving and excited about your Self and your life now.

3. Feel How It Feels

Bring the feeling into your body. If you want to feel loved and understood notice how that feels in your body. Maybe it’s a warm, tingly sensation. Maybe you feel relaxed and open or at ease, relaxed and peaceful. Where do you feel it? What do you feel? When you bring your desired feelings in to a bodily sensation they begin to take root in your present life.

Added bonus: You’re laying down new neural pathways and teaching your body and nervous system how to feel and be. Often, we have to rewire and uplevel our happiness or joy quotient. Practice feeling content and at ease.

Intentionally put yourself in to situations where you feel your desired feeling. Set your intentions by bringing them into your state of feeling and then into your body as physical sensations that are attached to that feeling.

4. Question Your Motivation

Once you’ve set your intention get really clear on why you want what you want. What are you really seeking? Our desires and needs are always changing and evolving. Make sure you are actually manifesting from what you want now – not an old, outdated story.

I recently re-evaluated what motivates me in my career and questioned what lies underneath my desire to travel around the world teaching. What am I trying to manifest by teaching more workshops globally? For years, I loved the sense of adventure, newness, change and freedom. Still do. I’m motivated by financial goals, networking, meeting new people and positively contributing to their lives.

However, in the last year or two, my priorities have shifted. I want to slow down. Settle down. Simplify and ground. I realized I don’t have to travel across the country, except when I’m highly motivated. It’s taken awhile to shift the direction of my career and forge new pathways in my business. But, the new incarnation is beginning to form. It’s time to reinvent the wheel according to what is most aligned with my deepest desires and needs.

Ask yourself:

• What am I seeking internally?
• Is there something that is even more aligned with my higher purpose?
• Am I following someone else’s model?
• Who am I trying to please?
• Which voice in my head is driving the “Desire Bus”?

Questioning your motivation allows you to become even more refined and subtle with your intention setting. Often we are unconsciously motivated by internalized voices – maybe a parent, inner diva, or your competitive teenage self that is still trying to “win” against or over others. Get clear on your motivation. When you know it is rooted in your most authentic and altruistic Self – forge ahead.

5. Let Go + Let God

Trust that all is happening for a reason and that when you are super clear and on the razor’s edge of what your intention is, the Universe conspires to support you in every way. God/Goddess/Your Higher Self/Nature immediately activates to bring your intention to reality. Let God take care of the details. What you think you want will most likely end up looking like something else. All is coming – in its own time and way.

Looking back over my last year – one of my BIGGEST life lessons is letting go of control. I’ve been made humbly aware of how often I manipulate, control, conspire and try anything to try to get things to turn out the way I think they should.

It’s so much more fun to let go and let God. TRUST. When we are attached, we constrict and resist anything that doesn’t look like what we thought. This blocks the flow of our energy – and everyone else’s. (More on this in an upcoming vlog.)

• Take a deep breath.
• Say a prayer. (“Not my will, but Thy will be done.”)
• Let go.
• Await magic.
• Gratefully + graciously receive.
• Feel the contentment, joy, happiness and peace.

May you celebrate all your successes today!

Comment below or on Facebook to let us know how you set intentions. Do you write them down? How do you want to feel in 2018? What changes do you want to see in your next year?

Happy new year… Thank you all for your continued support, inspiration and LOVE!

xoxo,

Ashley