The Power of Intention
Where other-help = self-help
By Alison Canavan
“We can heal ourselves. We can heal each other. We can heal our world.”
The above is something we may have heard, hoped for or glimpsed throughout our lives. The work of Lynne Mc Taggart however, pins down how this healing can come about and that’s what makes her work, and her words, so compelling.
Lynne has investigated, written and taught about the “miraculous power of intention” for the past number of decades. Her book ‘The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe’ is a seminal book in the field of New Science and Spirituality and has been translated into thirty languages.
She is true pioneer in the field of spirituality and science and her unswerving determination has acted as magnet for scientists all over the world who have worked with her in creating a host of “intention experiments”. To date, Lynne has run forty-two intention experiments, the outcomes of which have proven to herself, the scientists and participants involved that “it works” – intention works.
Groups of people, sharing and sending an intention, have worked to affect the growth of seeds, to lower crime and violence rates and to heal individuals of painful illness and circumstance. All these experiments are documented and many are showcased in ‘The Power of Intention’ documentary which Lynne created in tandem with the global conscious community ‘Gaia’.
THE ‘POWERING UP’ PROGRAM
Lynne started by studying Intention masters such as Buddhist monks and Qi Gong masters. She drew from these intention masters in order to create a fast-track for people to harness the power of intention;
“I saw they had different modalities in some ways but also a lot of commonalities. So I distilled the commonalities into a specific practice. I also added on to that things that had been discovered about the use of intention during scientific studies. So I put together the science and the ancient wisdom into a program I called ‘Powering Up’.”
The practice of intention Lynne drew together consists of a number of elements. Some of the core elements are; the group effect, concentrated focus, love & altruism and oneness & connection.
#1 THE GROUP EFFECT
After having seen the outcomes of forty-two intention experiments, around 2008 Lynne decided to distil all she had learned into a workshop setting and bring this information into the lives of ordinary people in need of healing.
“I was kicking ideas around with my husband and I said, ‘maybe I’ll just put people in groups of 8 or so and have them send healing to a member of the group with a health challenge…and my husband said, ‘I love it, the power of 8.’”
In that moment Lynne’s next big project was born. Later, in her book entitled ‘The Power of 8’, Lynne shares her findings having worked with Power of 8 intention groups large and small over the course of decades.
Ultimately, the size of the group is not important however Lynne found that 8 is the “goldilocks number. It’s not too big, it’s not too small, it’s just right…but if you’ve got 6, if you’ve got 12 there, it’ll work.”
When people are grouped together, there is a “supersizing” effect on the intention, Lynne notes;
“Psychologists call it collective effervescence. We are ramped up when in a group.”
#2 CONCENTRATED FOCUS
When we use our mind’s energy and focus to intend, it is not the same as using the mind’s energy to meditate Lynne has found;
“Meditation is like a letting go. This [intention] is a very, very concentrated type of focus. This is what I teach people.”
In meditation we go inwards and slow down the thoughts in order to enter the space between them. With intention, we are utilizing a specific capacity of our thoughts to go out into the world and affect people and situations. We often don’t realize we have this capacity, that we are, as Lynne says “leaky buckets. Our thoughts are trespassers and they can go out and affect other people and things.”
“We have 70,000 to 80,000 thoughts per day. Most of which are pretty negative…we are broadcasting negativity most of our day and all of those thoughts we have…that is also an intention and it becomes our life’s intention. So one of the things I like to help people with is becoming much more conscious of what we’re broadcasting to the world.”
#1 LOVE & ALTRUISM
The basis of all type of healing work, including Lynne’s work, is love. It is love for ourselves, life and others that allows us to entertain thoughts of helping and healing the world around us. Love is the fuel;
“What I teach is other-help. Love is the foundation of all of this.”
In the group structure which Lynne teaches, people are not only receiving healing but giving it much of the time, and this experience and energy of giving generates an internal healing experience for the giver;
“I see this over and over again, people intending for other people and getting physically healed, getting parts of their lives healed…Altruism is like a bullet-proof vest; when people do things for other people, no matter how small, they live longer, healthier lives – the science is there… ‘I want for you’ is the key to a long and healthy life. The group experience enables you to live altruism in action.”
This “mirror effect” of what we send out also reflecting back on ourselves is something we intuitively know about. I became aware many decades ago, and have since heard it said many times, that where others have trespassed on our lives in seemingly unforgivable ways we must find a way to let the anger and resentment go and to forgive – and we do so for ourselves. We are the ones generating the anger and resentment. Our bodies and minds become factories for it unless we decide we are going to generate/be a factory for something else and thus experience something more healing and helpful inside of us. The Power of 8 groups guide participants into the experience of generating love, healing and unity which is both sent outwards and reflected inwards.
Lynne thus believes that “the act of selfless intending for someone else…doesn’t just heal the target but clearly gets mirrored in the intender.”
When, in the initial workshops Lynne ran, where people were put into groups of 8 to send healing to a member of the group in need, it was reported that he givers were also receiving miraculous results, Lynne decided to put this phenomenon under the microscope. In doing so, Lynne uncovered another aspect to how the Power of 8 groups were working…Oneness.
#4 ONENESS & CONNECTION
Lynne set to work, alongside scientists at Life University, Georgia, US, to study what was happening in the intender’s brain during the Power of 8 sessions. They found that the participants were experiencing brain-wave activity which were almost identical to that of Sufi Masters and Buddhist monks during ecstatic prayer. They were having “a mystical experience…a state of ecstatic oneness.”
These people were not meditators and did not have the benefit of years of practice. They were in fact “total novices”. For this reason Lynne describes the Power of 8 groups as “ a fast-track to the miraculous.”
“We experience life in separation, like lonely people on a lonely planet in a lonely universe, but suddenly we come together in groups and we are not alone and we are in a brain state where we experience ‘the field’ – we experience a mystical state of oneness and that, I believe, is where the real miracles start.”
REMEMBERING OUR POWERING
Humans have been coming together in groups for eons, and for good reason. For a society where so much has changed in the last 100 years, for better and for worse, we need reminding of the power within and the power we can generate when we gather together.
As a mother, I see daily the effect of my gaze, my thoughts and my intentions on my son. Children blossom or wither under the gaze of either a loving or an overly-critical parent. Children left in orphanages can die from lack of a loving human intention and gaze. We hold the power of life, death and everything in between in our minds and our intentions.
Where people have grown up without the group intention of a loving family to hold them through their life challenges, these groups are life changing and a life blood towards health and healing. Strangers coming together to ignite and unite the creative powers of their mind is leading to miraculous results and we are all worthy of miracles, great and small.
Participants in Lynne’s groups have been healed of sight-loss, liver disease, career failure and chronic pain and, as Lynne notes, while “it doesn’t happen every time, it happens enough to say that something extra-ordinary is happening.”
DUBLIN POWER GROUP
If you wish to learn more, Lynne’s books and the free online documentary are a great place to start. We will be hosting Lynne in October 2025 for a ‘Power of Intention’ full day workshop – see you there!