Attention & Focus · “You Become What You Hold”
Heart-Focused Intention
Focus attention in the heart, generate compassion for the target of intention, and mentally merge with — ‘become’ — that target, so the intention is sent with felt connection rather than detached willing.
Settle, then drop attention into the heart. Generate genuine compassion for the one you’re sending to. Gently loosen the sense of “I” and imagine becoming one with them. Send the specific intention through the heart, rest in gratitude, then let go. The real return is your own compassion, connection and calm — not a verified action at a distance, and never a substitute for care.
What it is
Within Lynne McTaggart’s “Powering Up” framework (The Intention Experiment, 2007), one element is distinct enough to stand alone: the instruction to drop attention into the heart, deliberately generate compassion for whatever or whoever you are sending intention to, and then merge with — in her phrase, relax the sense of “I” and sense yourself becoming one with — the object of intention and “the Field.” Where the solo “Powering Up” entry covers the sequence (choose, focus, sense, rehearse, release), this entry isolates the quality of attention McTaggart treats as the amplifier: heart-centred, compassionate, and empathically fused with the target rather than coolly aimed at it.
It is essentially a focusing-of-attention practice built on empathy and loving-kindness.
The Method
Step 1 — Settle and centre in the heart.
Having relaxed into a calm, focused state, move your attention from the head down into the centre of the chest, around the heart, and let your awareness rest there. Step 2 — Generate compassion. Deliberately call up warmth, care and compassion — McTaggart names “being compassionate” as a core element of effective intention. Foster a felt connection with the one you intend to help (e.g. by recalling shared experience or simply wishing them well). Step 3 — Become the object — relax the sense of “I.” Loosen the boundary of the separate self and imagine merging with the target of your intention, sensing yourself as one with them (and, in her framing, with “the Field”). Rather than standing apart and willing at them, you “become” them. Step 4 — Send the intention through the heart. From inside that merged, compassionate state, let the specific intention flow — McTaggart’s image is of sending it “through the heart” toward the recipient. Step 5 — Rest in gratitude, then release. Close with a felt sense of gratitude (as if the good is already so), then let the whole thing go rather than monitoring for results.
Source & Lineage
The practice is drawn from the “Powering Up” material in McTaggart’s The Intention Experiment (2007), where compassion, merging/“becoming the object,” and heart-focus appear as named ingredients of an effective intention.
The compassion-and-merging core has obvious kinship with Buddhist loving-kindness (metta) and exchanging-self-and-other practices, and with HeartMath-style heart-focused techniques. Its distinctive wrapper — that empathic merging helps intention act non-locally — comes from McTaggart’s interconnection thesis and is not established by her contested experiments.
Common refinements
Forcing the merge. “Becoming the object” works as a gentle imaginative loosening of self, not a strained effort; if it feels destabilising, stay with simple compassion instead.
- Cold, head-level willing. Skipping the heart-and-compassion quality leaves only detached visualisation; the warmth is the practice here.
- Believing the warmth proves transmission. Feeling deeply connected does not mean you affected the other person’s body; keep those two things separate.
- Boundary loss. For people prone to over-identification or dissociation, keep the merge light and re-establish a clear sense of self before finishing.
- Refinement: if “the Field” framing distracts, run it purely as a loving-kindness / empathy focusing practice — the mechanics and benefits are the same.