Which Commitment Are You Going to Follow –
Your Commitment to Yourself or to Others?

I’m one of those people who when they make a commitment, it’s written in stone that I will complete the job. I have kept commitments with people long after they were useful or fun. I also have had the habit in the past of judging people who haven’t kept their commitments to me, taking time to release them to their new choices.

I made a commitment to be on the Steering Committee for a group I worked with last year. I was excited about the possibilities last year, but now that I know my schedule and the situation a bit better, not so much this year. Too, I ended up with even more responsibilities, and I don’t really know exactly how that happened. But, what I do know is that I dread the Monday hangouts, feel awful when I think about the situation, and end up in bed some nights, totally missing the hangout. Today, I decided to stop ignoring the situation, hoping my body would line up with my lack of decision-making,  and instead asked my Inner Wise Self, as SARK calls her, for guidance. This is what she said:

You are beginning to see how having rules about commitment keeping does not serve you. Any opinions you hold become a rule book for the Universe to create your reality from.  For example, if you have a rule for truth in advertising, then you will begin to see situations where advertisers tell the truth, lie, and everything in between. This is how the Universe lets you know you have other choices, by letting you experience how the rule operates in your life.

When someone breaks your rules, you remember painful situations from the past. You see the current situation through that lens of upset, and your body acts on the memories by adjusting your body chemistry to that of the old situation. So, you have very little chance to develop a relevant strategy to deal with the current situation, to feel  good when you are dealing with it, or to develop a new rule. So, our first guidance is to slow down and breathe. Allow your soul room to connect, communicate, and adjust before you respond. This may take some practice and discipline, since you process information so rapidly. But, slowing down truly is worth the effort, as being still will allow new choices to bubble up.

The second issue we see relates to this question, “How much time do you want to spend on activities that are not joyful, that don’t generate life force energy for you?” Ultimately, choices you make either bring you more life force or dissipate the life force you already have. As you clearly have identified, at the moment dissipating life force unconsciously does not serve your well-being. In fact, dissipating life force doesn’t serve anyone’s well-being in any situation. So, you might ask yourself the following questions:

• Can this circumstance generate life force?
• Can this situation be dealt with in a joyful way that generates life force?
• Do I enjoy any part of this situation? Can I build life force on that in this circumstance?
• Do these relationships build life force? Or, can the way I  deal with myself in this relationship change so that it builds energy?

Any questions along these lines will open up the space for more choices to come in.

Ultimately, the commitments I most want to keep at the moment are joyful, energy-building, life-affirming, and supportive. I want to feel good. This is the vibe I want to experience, so I am choosing to create a new rule about commitment, “If it feels good, do it.” So, I’m off to communicate with the Steering Committee that my time with them is best spent volunteering where I enjoy working.