The River Doesn't Care About Your Intentions

There's a river of energy moving through your life.

Not as a metaphor. As an actual description of how things work.

This river is your life force — your attention and emotional energy — flowing constantly, shaping everything it touches. Like any river, its course is determined by where it's directed. And like any river, it doesn't care about your intentions. It only responds to the actual landscape it's moving through.

You can intend to direct your energy toward growth. But if the actual channels — your habitual thoughts, your emotional reactions, your automatic behaviors — are carved toward worry, the river will flow toward worry.

You can set a goal to be more present. But if the riverbeds of distraction are deeper and more established than the riverbeds of presence, the water will flow toward distraction.

This is why willpower fails so often. Willpower is like standing in the middle of the river trying to push the water in a different direction. You can do it for a while, but eventually you get tired, and the water goes back to following the channels that are already carved.

The mystics knew this. They called this river by different names — prana, chi, life force — but they all understood that redirecting it requires more than intention. It requires reshaping the landscape it flows through.

This is the second pillar of working with devotion: Drinking from the River. It means understanding that your energy is always flowing somewhere. When the flow is clear and aligned with what you actually want, life has a quality of ease — not effort-free, but synchronized, like swimming with the current instead of against it.

But when the flow is clogged — by old emotions you never processed, by limiting beliefs you keep reinforcing, by the heavy boulders of stories you tell yourself about who you are and what's possible — the river grows turbid. The energy gets stuck. What should flow with grace becomes effortful and muddy.

The work, then, is not just to intend a different direction. It's to clear what's obstructing the flow. It's to consciously carve new channels through repeated attention and emotional investment. It's to let go of the boulders that have been damming the river.

This takes time. Rivers don't change course overnight. But every moment of conscious attention — every time you notice where your energy is flowing and gently redirect it — is carving a new channel.

Eventually, the new channel becomes deeper than the old one. And the water flows there naturally.

— Shanti