What If Intention Is Not Something You Do – But Something You Connect To?
I have a daily intention practice. It lives in my journal, every morning, in eight categories: career, finances, personal growth, health, family, social life, physical appearance, environment.
I write in the present tense. I close my eyes and feel what I am describing. I have been doing this for months, and I believe in it – not as magic, but as direction. A way of telling myself, every day, what I am building towards and what kind of person I am becoming in the process.
For a while, I thought of intention as something I was generating. An act of personal will. I intend, therefore it exists as a direction.
Wayne Dyer’s The Power of Intention turned that around completely.
Table of Contents
Who Is Wayne Dyer?
Wayne Dyer was an American author and speaker who spent over four decades writing and teaching about self-development, spirituality, and the relationship between inner life and outer reality. He wrote more than forty books. He died in 2015, and his work continues to circulate widely – in part because his thinking has aged unusually well.
The Power of Intention was published in 2004. It is not a self-help book in the conventional sense. It sits somewhere between psychology, philosophy, and spirituality – and it does not apologise for that.
Intention as a Field, Not a Personal Trait
The central idea in this book is one of those ideas that initially sounds like word games and then gradually reveals itself to be something more serious.
Wayne Dyer argues that intention is not a personal quality – not something you either have a lot of or a little of, not willpower, not determination. It is an energy field that underlies all of creation. The field of pure intention that produces everything that exists.
The book’s proposition is that human beings are connected to this field. We emerged from it. Our natural state is one of alignment with it. And when we are aligned – when our thoughts, beliefs, and energy match the frequency of the intention field – things move. Not magically. But with a kind of ease and momentum that is noticeably different from trying to force outcomes through personal effort alone.
This is not entirely unlike what Tara Swart describes in The Source – the brain reflecting back what it is consistently directed toward. Wayne Dyer’s framework is more philosophical and less clinical, but both are pointing at the same underlying dynamic: what you direct your inner life toward has a measurable effect on what shows up in your outer life.
The Seven Faces of Intention
Wayne Dyer describes the field of intention through seven qualities – seven “faces” that represent how intention expresses itself:
Creativity. The source field is endlessly creative. To align with it is to access that creativity in yourself – not to manufacture it through effort, but to allow it.
Kindness. Intention, in its natural state, is benevolent. It is oriented toward flourishing, not fear. Cruelty and competition are departures from the field, not expressions of it.
Love. Perhaps the most loaded word in the language. Wayne Dyer uses it to mean something closer to unconditional positive regard – for yourself and for others.
Beauty. The capacity to perceive and create beauty is part of what it means to be connected to the source.
Expansion. The universe is expanding. Life is always moving toward more, not less. Contraction – staying small, staying safe, staying stuck – is a departure from the field’s natural direction.
Unlimited abundance. Not in the materialistic sense. In the sense that the source is not scarce. There is no finite amount of creativity, love, or possibility to go around.
Receptivity. This one I find the most practically useful. The field is always offering. The question is whether you are in a state to receive it.
Reading through these seven qualities is useful not as a definition but as a diagnostic. Where am I in alignment with these? Where am I not?
The Ego as the Obstacle
Wayne Dyer is very specific about what breaks the connection to the field of intention. It is not failure or difficulty or circumstance. It is the ego – the constructed self that has decided what you are, what you deserve, and what is possible for you.
The ego operates from fear and scarcity. It keeps score. It protects its territory. It is profoundly concerned with how you appear to others. And it constantly narrates a story about why you cannot have what you want – or why you should not want it at all.
This maps directly onto what David Bayer calls the primitive mind in his discipline episode and what Carol Dweck calls the fixed mindset. Different vocabulary, same architecture. The part of you that is oriented toward survival rather than growth, toward safety rather than possibility.
Intention work is, in significant part, the practice of noticing when the ego is speaking and learning not to act from it automatically.
How to Reconnect
Wayne Dyer’s practical suggestions for reconnecting to the field of intention are not complicated. They are, in fact, almost embarrassingly simple. Gratitude. Meditation. Kindness toward others. Conscious choice of what you allow into your environment – the people, the media, the conversations.
And this: behave as if you are already connected to the field. Act from the qualities of intention – creativity, love, abundance, receptivity – even when you do not feel it. The feelings follow the actions, not the other way around.
This is the same logic that underpins my morning practice. I do not write my intentions in the present tense because I have already achieved them. I write them in the present tense to train the quality of my inner state – to operate, moment by moment, from the assumption that they are possible, that I am moving toward them, that the field is available to me.
Practical Takeaways
- Reframe what intention means. Not personal will. Connection. The question shifts from “how hard am I trying?” to “how aligned am I right now?”
- Use the seven faces as a daily check. Creativity, kindness, love, beauty, expansion, abundance, receptivity. Which ones feel open? Which feel contracted? That tells you something.
- Notice the ego’s voice. It sounds like reasonable caution but often smells like fear. “That’s not realistic.” “People like me don’t get to…” “What if it doesn’t work?” Name it, and do not let it make the decisions.
- Behave as if you are already connected. Act from kindness, generosity, and creativity regardless of what you receive back. The state creates the results, not the other way around.
- Protect your environment. What are you watching, listening to, surrounding yourself with? It is not woo-woo to care about this. It is alignment.
Why This Belongs in Soul
Soul, on this blog, is the section for inner life – for the questions underneath the to-do list, the dimension of experience that makes the rest of it meaningful.
The Power of Intention is a Soul book because it is asking the biggest of the underlying questions: what is the relationship between your inner world and the life that unfolds around you? And what would change if you took that relationship seriously?
My morning practice with my journal and my eight categories is, in Wayne Dyer’s terms, an intention practice. My visualisations, my crystals, my gratitudes – all of it is, in one way or another, about learning to stay connected to a field that is bigger than my immediate fears and doubts. This book gave me the philosophical framework for something I was already doing. And that kind of retroactive understanding is very useful – it tells you to keep going.
I do not know whether the field of intention is real in any objective, measurable sense. I know that my inner life – the quality of my beliefs, the direction of my attention, the nature of what I am building toward – has a significant effect on what I notice, what I attract, and what I am able to do. Whether that is neuroscience or metaphysics or both, the practical implications are the same.
Tend your inner life as carefully as your outer one. What grows inside eventually grows outside.
Et toi? Do you have any kind of intention practice – formal or informal? Is there an area of your life where you would like to feel more connected to something larger than effort and willpower? Leave a comment below or come and find me in the Notes from Soph community on Skool.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Book Details:
The Power of Intention: Learning to Co-create Your World Your Way – Dr Wayne W. Dyer
Published 2004 | Hay House
📚 Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1401902235/?tag=websitenote0f-21
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