Intenders History / Tony’s Journey

Those of us who started The Intenders of the Highest Good are as in awe by what happened as anyone. From four good friends meeting once a week outside the little Hawaiian town of Pahoa, people are now gathering in Intenders Circles all across the globe to say their intentions and to share their gratitudes for the intentions that have manifested for them. Believe me, it wasn’t something we originally set out to do. We just wanted to help each other and get the most out of our lives.

It began with Tina, Mark, Betsy, and myself, and, for the first 6 months, there were just the four of us. Then Connie came aboard, and, soon after that, our friends, Aaron, Karen, Lois, and Alice joined our little circle. We were nine for the next several months, and then, one night, to our utter surprise, 35 people showed up and the Intenders began to take on a life of its own. Next, our friend Pomaika’i heard what we were doing and started a circle on the other side of the island in Kona. Not long after that, Conrad, another friend who had been a visitor to our circle near Hilo, took it back to Petaluma, California. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, a true grassroots movement was in the making.

In the winter of 1998, I took a trip to the mainland and ended up staying in the San Francisco Bay area for about a year. I began giving mini-workshops, and, in the process, I met so many people who told me they’d used the Intention Process to manifest their dreams that I started writing down some of the things I’d heard. In short, I became the scribe for the Intenders, and the books I’ve written are filled with stories I’ve collected over the last many years.

I’ve always known that in order for my teachings to be credible I have to have lived them. Indeed, I took this on as a challenge from the time I left my comfy Hawaiian home at the turn of the twenty-first century and came to the “mainland” with only $37 in my pocket and the dream of sharing our Intenders Circles with as many people as possible. Since then, I have manifested my way through life, trusting every step of the way that whatever I needed next would be there for me. As a result, I am a living example of Intending, envisioning and manifesting my needs, dreams and desires, moment by moment by moment. I never took a 9 to 5 job or regular employment; instead, I just intended for whatever I needed and it manifested for me.

When I arrived in California to meet with Conrad’s new Intenders Circle, I had the aforementioned $37 in my pocket and no return ticket. All I had with me was an old guitar, a backpack, and my intentions. In less than a year, I’d lived for free in everything from a gorgeous home atop Mount Tamalpais to a comfortable trailer out in the desert of Oakley. The details of my adventures are woven within the pages ahead, but, suffice it to say, by the time my friend, Jennifer Olson, and I drove to New Mexico to present a workshop, there were 17 Intenders Circles in the Bay Area, and, along the way, everything I needed had manifested for me.

New Mexico was a turning point for me after having lived a simple, minimalistic lifestyle in Hawaii for the previous twenty-five years. Within two weeks of settling into life in Corrales on the outskirts of Albuquerque, I was living in such abundance that my biggest decision from then until I left New Mexico was whether to drive the Classic Mercedes Convertible or take the shiny new Ford F250 truck. I was in a relationship with one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen; we were raising Arabian horses, traveling to Tahiti, cruising the Caribbean together, and the Intention Process was working like a charm. In Corrales, I also found the time to write a very inspiring book (The Highest Light Teachings) and establish one of the most powerful Intenders Circles in the country. Eventually, however, I had to leave New Mexico. Other lessons needed learning.

Over the next dozen years I crisscrossed the country countless times showing people all across America how to hold an Intenders Circle. In my travels, people were always asking me for a manifestation story. They wanted to know if I’ve lived in accordance with the principles in my Intenders books – and the answer is, “Yes, I have!” They also wanted to know if this thing we call the Intention Process or the Law of Attraction (as some call it) really works – and the answer again is, “Yes, It does!” My adult life has been a testimonial to the amazing results I’ve experienced by using these principles – and the stories in my books present example after example of the Intention Process in action.

Of course, it hasn’t always been a bed of roses, but it has been fun and adventurous. I’ve slept in in my van in countless WalMart parking lots and neighborhood side streets, but I have also been graced to live for extended periods of time on several magnificent estates, forested mountaintops, red rock hideaways and more, much more. Likewise, along the way I started the Intenders Community, the Vision Alignment Project, Highest Light House, learned HTML and built four major web sites, wrote The Code, penned a dozen books, 3 movies, 130 YouTubes – and am now putting the finishing touches on our Intenders Cybercircles for those who are unable to attend one of our real-life Intenders Circles. Throughout all of this, I have kept true to my path which was to manifest whatever I needed by intending it – and the stories in my books are an account of my travels and the people I met who also shared their manifestation stories with me. It is my intention that by reading these Intenders stories you become better able to consciously create whatever is needed so that you can take your next step in life.

In fact, just for fun, here’s a story that first got me interested in intending and manifesting. It’s about the 25 years I lived secluded in the rainforest on the Big Island that some folks have a hard time believing. Nevertheless, it happened to me, and it’s all true.

When I purchased my property on the slopes of Mauna Loa in upcountry Kona in 1973, the nearest town was several miles away and, except for one old funky country store, goods and services were not readily available. I was spending my days working on the farm with my mentor, B.J. and one of the first things he told me was that everything I needed (and most of the things I wanted) would come to me. He said that I didn’t need to go anywhere if I didn’t want to. All I had to do was believe it. I could stay at home as much as I liked, but there was one hitch: I’d have to learn to be patient.

I remember him saying, “You don’t have to know how or from whom the things you need will come. In fact, expecting that things will arrive from a specific source tends to work against you because that’s what closes the door for things to come to you from unexpected sources. All you have to know is that they will come to you when you need them.”

At first, I scoffed at the idea. I’d always been taught that I had to work hard, earn a lot of money, apply a lot of effort, then I would get what I wanted. I didn’t know anything about intentionality back then, and, because everything was going so well for me at the time, I had no inclination to test anything new. It turned out, however, that during my second year there, I lost my job, and my car broke down at the same time. I was resigned to hitchhiking or staying at home in my small coffee shack for months on end. Most people would have started to panic, but, since I was single and a little reclusive anyway, it gave me the opportunity to put B.J.’s idea to the test.

So I got up one morning and told myself that everything I needed would be there for me when I needed it. I didn’t have to worry or stress. On the contrary, I’d be nonchalant, and trust that, in some way, unbeknownst to me, I was being helped. I decided, then and there, to really believe it without waffling or wavering, and otherwise enjoy my day, doing the things I liked to do. It started working right away! My makeshift coffee shack was 600 feet up a steep, rocky, densely forested hill, but that didn’t keep anybody away. When I needed car parts, a friend surprised me one day with a trunkload of them. When I needed food, it was left mysteriously at the bottom of the trail to my place. When I needed company, all sorts of people came to visit. I even remember one full moon evening when a pretty lady showed up unexpectedly with a large pizza and a bottle of wine.

As more and more of these things happened, my belief got stronger. And so did my patience. Over the years, I realized that my needs were always met. I gained confidence in the knowledge that I was always provided for. And I also saw that when I was stressing out about something, my problems were most often in my mind, and not in my immediate environment. Sometimes I think back to the time when B.J. told me about all this, and how crazy I thought he was. But, as it turned out, he wasn’t crazy at all. He was wise.

Now, years later, after a quarter century of practicing these principles, you might ask if the Intention Process is still working for me? Indeed, it is! In fact, I’d always had a dream of living on a houseboat, but it had never been in my Highest Good to have enough money to swing it. As I write this, however, I’m living for free just outside Hot Springs, Arkansas on my 43 ft restored fifty year old houseboat on a gorgeous lake that sits atop the clearest crystal vein in the country. How it all came about is a story for another day, but suffice to say, life is good and just keeps getting better. “How did I manifest a boat of my own at this point in my life without taking a job?” you might ask.
Because I intended it.

Lee Ching has been the guide for the Intenders since early on. He is mentioned many times on this website and his beautiful, inspiring messages are the subject of our book, What You Need To Know Now: The Lee Ching Messages. It all came about as follows. We’d been meeting in our small original Intenders Circle for about a month when, one night, Mark mentioned that Tina had a unique gift. Right away, my ears perked up because I’d been living by myself in a small coffee shack way back in the hills of the Big Island for the past 25 years, and anything that didn’t look like a guava tree would have caught my interest. I immediately asked Tina what Mark was talking about, and, in the conversation that followed, I found out that she had a talent which she‘d never mentioned in the three years I’d known her. She acknowledged, humbly, that she’d been a “messenger” during the 1980s in Encinitas and Del Mar, California, as part of a group of people who were known back then as Love in Action. She went on to explain that they held gatherings on a regular basis, and that it was not uncommon for her to have large numbers of people come to hear her “channel” an entity whom she called Lee Ching. When she said that, Mark interrupted her and said that one night while she was in a trance and Lee Ching was speaking through her to a large group of people, a man in the audience began to heckle her. Mark explained that it frightened her so much that she gave up appearing in public from then on.

To make a long story short, I blurted out, “Well, Tina, let’s get Lee Ching out of the box!”—and, after a few moments hesitation, she agreed. What happened next, I could never have imagined in a million years. She closed her eyes, said a prayer, and out came the most beautiful, caring, loving Being I’d ever met.

To my utter surprise, my gentle, unassuming friend, Tina Stober, turned out to be a world-class channel. From the very beginning, I asked Lee Ching every question I could think of. I questioned him about the economy, our government’s agendas, the volcano (we could see the glow from Kilauea in the sky at night), my health, my gardens, my love life. You name it, I asked him about it. Looking back on it all now, I can say, unequivocally, that he answered every question accurately and with a feeling of such love and compassion that I never wanted our sessions together to end. Clearly, if it wasn’t for Tina and Lee Ching, the Intenders would not be what it is today.

Tony Burroughs is one of the more prolific visionaries of our time. He is an inspired storyteller, the author of 13 self-empowerment books, and is the cofounder of the Intenders of the Highest Good, a grassroots community movement with Intenders Circles in countries all over the world. His widely acclaimed Vision Alignment Project recently surpassed 3 million alignments. He has produced 3 full-length videos, over 140 YouTubes for the Intenders Channel, and has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows, including Coast to Coast AM. His last handbook, The Highest Good Handbook: Love, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is filled with powerful stories that influenced Tony and other Intenders along the way. His latest project is making the Merlin and Arthur YouTubes based on his newest ebook, Stay Above It All which is a free download on this website.

Nowadays, Tony lives on the Big Island of Hawaii about two miles from Hawaiian Beaches where the first Intenders Circles was held. He’s come “full circle” back to where his journey first began. And what an amazing journey it’s been! In his own words, “After having left my island home over 25 years ago, and traveled in almost every state, and trusted every step of the way that I would be guided, guarded and cared for in every moment, I’ve returned home to such an abundance of comfort, fresh fruit and good friends that it has crystalized my belief in the Intention Process. I set out over a quarter century ago to learn that as long as I make my intentions everyday, and I line my life up with the Highest Good, then all good things would come to me. And that’s exactly what happened!”

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