09/16/2026
At the end of one of my classes a few weeks ago I had the most delightful conversation with Kelli Jo Kingsley McCarty who was in the same boat as me. She used to come with all these intentions to try to shut her brain off. To get it to stop thinking, but that is impossible. That isn't how the brain works. It was never and never will be about turning it off. It is about getting it to shift. Maybe it shifts from bright colors to muted oranges and pinks by imagining those colors. Or maybe we try to get it to just not be so damn loud all the time.
We don't shut the brain off. We try to get it to stop yelling frantically at us. Sometimes I feel like my brain is one of those people standing on the edge of the road trying to get you to pop in for an insurance quote- shouting, waving, spinning a sign, music blaring. It is overwhelming. So we shift away from stopping thoughts and we try to get them to not shout. To not be in all caps with lots of exclamation points. We imagine things slowing, the words becoming lower case. Double spaced. One word on each line. What is your word? What if your word was sunset and all you did was breathe in and out and picture the sunset? What would happen?
We can't stop the thoughts. We can welcome them. We can soothe them. We can take them from ALL CAPS kind of aggression to subtle acceptance that they are what they are that day.
An intention truly is whatever you want it to be, but I find it most helpful to imagine it is your word, sound, or way to shift into a softer version of you.