Lately, I have been reflecting on what commitment means to me. Commitment to people, to jobs, to choices made, and commitment to myself. In my initial reflection, I found resistance, anger, pain, sadness, and restriction. Everything about the word commitment made me cringe. It felt like a trap. That I would be limiting my options and closing myself off to opportunity. I didn’t want to miss anything. I understand now this was only the surface layer of beginning to understanding what all this was really about.
I realized I was playing a story of what commitment meant to me, based on my past experience and perspective. The experiences of hurt, pain, sadness, and grief were all connected to the story. Whenever commitment would arise in my life, whether it be a job, a 1 year lease on an apartment or commitment to a romantic partner (that I so deeply love), I would unconsciously sabotage it. Even though, it was what I wanted to commit to. But in those moments, with my relationship to commitment being fear, pain and heartache, it appeared as the 'wrong’ choice. I was seeing what I wanted to commit to, through a lens that tainted my vision.
When I woke up from this unconscious story I was living, I wrote my own story of what I wanted commitment to be for me. Commitment to be based in love, joy, creation, and community. To relate to commitment as endless possibilities, magic, and the unthinkable. That in my commitments, I surround myself with those I deeply love, that I show up fully in every moment wide awake, and that I create a life which reflects my values and that is of service. In this I started to be committed in a way that brought freedom. Freedom to choose other than though the lens of fear and the clouded vision, and to instead choose a life that is deeply and fully, awake and alive.
xx