Finding Joy In Life Through Intention Setting - by Lucy Draper-Clarke PhD

COURSE

Finding Joy In Life Through Intention Setting

With Lucy Draper-Clarke PhD

This 10 day course offers instruction and contemplations to cultivate receptivity, through intention and attention. It explores core feelings, to create an ideal future, while allowing changes of course. It covers finding balance, staying motivated and transforming obstacles. Finally, pure intentions and daily practices are explored, to live with joy and meaning.

ManifestationVisualizationHappinessHealth & HappinessSecularSecular MindfulnessMindfulness

Meet your Teacher

Lucy Draper-Clarke PhD
Saltash, UK

Lucy Draper-Clarke PhD is an educator, writer and researcher-practitioner in the field of mindfulness and compassion. After obtaining a doctorate in mindfulness and teacher education, she now offers public courses and lectures at the University of the Witwatersrand. With a focus on Joyful Activism, she works with those engaged in social transformation and healing, to alleviate stress and increase resilience through compassion and presence. She leads popular retreats around Southern Africa, including a much-loved Intention Setting process. As a practitioner with the Karma Kagyu School of Buddhism, she attends regular meditation retreats to deepen her own practice.

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10 Days

2.9k students

4.6 stars

15 min / day

Happiness

English

Lesson 1

Creating an Intention Space

In this introductory session, we will learn to relax and settle our mind, in order to drop beneath the continuous chattering commentary and hear our authentic voice. By becoming receptive, we bring intention and attention together in the present moment. We will identify ways to measure success, and access the sources of our own happiness. Rather than setting specific future goals, we explore how heartfelt aspirations serve to guide us, moment-by-moment.

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Lesson 2

Excavating our Experience

In this session, we will gaze back in time to connect with experiences that allowed our experiences of joy and happiness to arise. We will build on the settling practice in order to explore pleasant, neutral and unpleasant events. These provide insight into our deeply held values. We will then learn to tune in to our unique set of core feelings. These provide us with inner guidance for the remainder of the intention setting course.

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Lesson 3

Time Travel

In this session, we will learn to look forward and imagine an ideal future, where our core feelings are constant companions. We will open the gateway to our unconscious mind, and unearth the things we’d like to have and do, or who we would like to become. By contemplating the end of our life, we learn to choose our legacy, and to live more fully in the present moment. This process prepares us for living our life purpose.

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Lesson 4

Listening for our Sankalpa

In this session, we will find a way to describe our overriding life purpose, bringing together the intentions we unearthed in the previous session. A sankalpa is our unique intention statement, or vow, which helps keep us committed to utilising our skills and talents for our own benefit, and the benefit of others. The sankalpa becomes a focal point to return to whenever we get taken off course by life’s inevitable distractions.

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Lesson 5

Balancing our Intentions

In this session, we will take the time to group our list of intentions, in order to bring balance to our life. By using a model of the brain, we understand our different hard-wired needs, and attend to them skilfully. These include safety, connection and self-actualization. When we learn to bring balance to our life, we can ensure we care for ourselves, while also caring for others.

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Lesson 6

Staying Motivated

In this session, we will learn to manage our energy. In order to cultivate new habits and keep true to our intentions, we must find ways to stay motivated and energized. This is the opportunity to differentiate our social self from our authentic self, and see which intentions are motivated from within. We categorize them into different timescales so that our intention setting course is effective in both the short and long term.

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Lesson 7

Reverse Engineering

In this session, we will learn to focus our mind, and channel that energy and commitment into action. After imagining an ideal future, we work backwards to plan the necessary journey steps. We will focus on our longer-term intentions, which require harnessing our strengths. Then we identify the first journey step, and take action immediately. This provides the motivation for further steps and gives us the chance to prepare for potential obstacles and set realistic timelines.

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Lesson 8

Transforming Obstacles

In this session, we will learn to look openly at the obstacles that we identified in the previous session. These are usually ones that we unintentionally put in our own way. We will learn to change our relationship with them through self-compassion. When we acknowledge that we are flawed and human like everyone else, we can find the way inwards to our indestructible essence. This sets us up for conscious engagement with all aspects of our life.

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Lesson 9

Pure Intention

In this session, we will learn to explore how intentions offered unconditionally, without expectation of reward, circle back to bring us the greatest happiness. These originate from our wise and compassionate heart, rather than from our ego-centric sense of self. These intentions offer us a fulfilling and meaningful life, even if we never actually reach the final destination. We will explore self-interested, mutually beneficial and altruistic intentions to understand the importance of each.

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Lesson 10

Daily Intention Setting

In this final session, we will learn to break down our vast aspirations into the daily life practices of connecting with our heart’s desire, and rejoicing in the fruits of our growth. These regular practices give us on-going motivation, and help us co-create a joyful life, by staying receptive to the wonder and guidance that reveals itself through the present moment. Our ordinary life can be extraordinary when compassionate intentions guide all that we do.

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Ask your teacher

This course includes 53 community questions and 28 audio replies from Lucy Draper-Clarke PhD. The community classroom and teacher audio replies are only available via the app.

53

4.6 (135)

Recent Reviews

Olivia

June 1, 2025

This was a beautiful course. Thank you! 🙏

Tracy-Michelle

July 21, 2023

This course was very beautifully presented. I am inspired. 🙏🥰

Traci

December 23, 2021

A great reminder on setting intentions and other helpful practises to include in your meditations.

Kathleen

May 26, 2021

Very practical course provided with kindness. Very helpful.

Sarah

April 26, 2021

Thank you Lucy. I have learned new things and remembered some old things. This is a lovely, well thought out and presented, course that has inspired me to keep moving along my path with intention. Om Shanti 🙏

Petra

November 29, 2020

Loved it ! Very helpful hand on tools. Thanks a lot 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

Ty

September 17, 2020

Well done and informative. I love the intention setting. Like you said, without an intention we will drift. Namaste!

Katt

July 3, 2020

Gentle and thoughtful - lovely course.

Kerri

April 22, 2020

Very good information, nicely paced. Instructor has a lovely voice and encouraging demeanor.

Dania

April 19, 2020

This was an awesome course that really put me in a much better headspace during this scary time.

Julie

April 13, 2020

Wonderful course to align one’s direction through committing to our own I AM affirmations. May all beings be free 🙏

Dani

April 1, 2020

I really enjoyed this course! Thank you thank you 🙏

Shannon

March 31, 2020

A lovely course

Shauna

March 10, 2020

This was lovely and really helpful. Thank you so much and may you be well and happy.

uk

February 2, 2020

There is alot in this course. Helpful, soothing, and challenging. Thank you!

Helen

January 10, 2020

I followed this course over a long period with gaps between each day. I tried to develop curiosity in the gaps rather than writing. I feel I have more clarity about intention setting and my resolve to engage in daily meditation is strengthened. Sharing the blessing to close each session is uplifting. Thank you Lucy.

G

December 30, 2019

Lovely, loving, methodic guidance in one of the proven most challenging tasks for someone who developed a deep sense of guilt, unworthines and lack of faith by growing up in a violent household with scarcity ideology: formulating her wishes, balancing action with being receptive, and no less important, trusting Life. Combines perspectives and frameworks to formulate intentions that lead to happines instead of possibly self imposed goals that lead to frustration.

Sue

November 28, 2019

Enjoyed so much! Thank you

KatieG

November 13, 2019

A wonderful course with practical guidance for daily practices. Thank you!

Lauren

November 1, 2019

So good!!!!! Super inspiring and so much wisdom.

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