Living Intentionally

Living intentionally is all about living a life that is aligned to your own authentic self, your own values, your desires, your needs, rather than living up to others’ expectations. Our Unique Five I Spiral of Living Intentionally is a simple and super effective framework that can help you to start living an intentional life packed with joy and magic right now.

Living intentionally is at the heart of our values and everything we do at The Sisters Enchanted™ . But what does it actually mean to live intentionally and how can it be achieved in the modern busy and chaotic world?

 The internet is full of ideas and tips on living a more intentional life. You can read self-help guides, follow apps and programs. But we believe living intentionally can be achieved in five steps that are easy to adopt and incorporate into your life right now, today, especially when you have a community of cheerleaders on hand to help you.

 Welcome to our unique 5i Spiral™ of Expansion for living an intentional life that is packed full of everyday magic.

 What is ‘Living Intentionally’

 Living intentionally is all about living a life that is aligned to your own authentic self, your own values, your desires, your needs, rather than living up to others’ expectations. This includes the expectations of your family, friends, society, expectations you feel the media place on you, expectations of what a good mother should look like, a good wife, a good friend.  Living intentionally is letting go of all the things you have become conditioned to think you need to do to prove that you are good enough and are living a good life worth living.

   How to Live Intentionally

 It sounds easy doesn’t it, just be you! Live the life that you want, be authentic! But, in the modern world expectations are fired at us all constantly, all day long, through media, social media and the words of others. Throughout our lifetime, all these expectations lead us to tell stories about ourselves, who we are, what we deserve, what we are entitled to, what we can achieve, limitations… and so much more. These stories can really clip our wings and cause us to throw barriers in the way of ourselves and living our fullest, most magical life.

 There are many ideas, books of ideas, on how you can work to get to the heart of who you are, your values, your authenticity and strip away the barriers that prevent you living an intentional life in alignment with your true self.

 Many of these are great, but the trouble is you can get so bogged down in reading all these things and following all these tips that you can feel lost and stuck.

The Five I Spiral

 Sara Walka, Founder and Director of The Sisters Enchanted, created our unique 5i Spiral. 

This simplifies intentional living into five repeating steps:

Intention

Integrating intentions into your life and body

Insight through shadow-work

Ideating the life that is in alignment with your values and the life you deserve

Intuition to guide healthy decision making

Intention

 Everything starts with an intention. A good intention should focus on how you want to feel and a specific step you need to do to feel that way. Your intention is the filter through which you see and process the world around you. Healthy intentions, aligned with your values help you to interact with the word in accordance with these values – to live intentionally. Unhealthy intentions steer you away from that person you want to be and away from the life you truly desire. Intentions help you to be more present in your day to day, while creating the future vision that you hold for yourself.

 Integration

 We all make intentions that don’t come to be. This is often because we make intentions that are just too difficult to integrate into our life at the present time. Perhaps they are too big, like ‘I want to be a good mom’. That is not an intention. It is not specific enough. Where would you even start there? This is a goal, and a big goal too, which needs to be broken into smaller intentions. You could reflect and journal on what being a good mom is and make a series of intentions to live as this person. Suppose your idea of being a good mom is to take the children away on a nature trip each weekend so that you feel connected to your kids. That would be a good intention but only if it was something that you could easily integrate into your current life. If you had the capacity, time and finances to do this then great. Intend away. But maybe the recession, rising cost of fuel and gas and cost of living crisis meant you only had the resources to take a hiking trip once a month. If you made the intention to feel connected with the solar goal of hiking weekend, you would be setting yourself up to fail so better make the intention to feel connected with the solar goal for a really great, exciting and special trip once a month.  Maybe you would all love the trips so much you would want to make some time or financial sacrifices to do them weekly, then you can integrate this intention into your life in that way.

Insight

 We love shadow work at The Sisters Enchanted. Very often, the reason we don’t realize our intentions, or carry on thinking and acting in ways we do not intend, are down to the blocks we put in the way of ourselves based on all those shadows in our unconscious.

Insight is a critical part of living intentionally because it is through insight that you learn about yourself and understand where and why you may not be fully integrating your intentions into your inner being and changing your life or creating the future you’ve been dreaming of. Shadow work is the act of considering the parts of you that are not too pretty. It’s understanding that they are actually what makes you whole and by ignoring them or pretending that they aren’t there, you are only holding yourself back from growing and manifesting.

Ideate

 ‘Ideate’ is a term often used in architecture and design and is all about creating a plan or a model of something you want to create. We can ideate about our lives too. This is where you can get creative and imagine and manifest the very best, most healthy, joyous and magical life you want for yourself and your loved ones around you.  This is where you imagine that life you really want, exactly what it looks like, what it feels like and do so with the belief that you deserve it, and you can get this life through living intentionally. Being able to ideate is all about feeling confident in your abilities to stand in your truth, your knowing, and connection to self and knowing YOU are your most powerful tool for creation and manifestation. 

Intuition

Intuition is central to intentional living and central to the whole of our ‘5i Spiral’. Every one of us has intuition, you have it in spades! You just need to recognise it, practise it and trust it. Being intuitive helps you make healthy intentions then recognise and grab the opportunities to realize them. 

 And that leads you back to intention. Perhaps your intuition will tell you the intention you made was not the right one, perhaps at least not for now and lead you to a new one, or that it is the right one but needs to be explored in a new way.

 This is a dynamic cycle; the steps interact with each other as it spins and grows and you grow with it. It really is as simple and as exciting as it sounds to live intentionally with the 5i Spiral.