Imagine my surprise when I discovered I wasn’t committed to success or personal growth but instead to escaping. Why would I be committed to escaping, and how is this even possible?
Many of us on a spiritual or healing journey probably have as our priority our own wellbeing, personal growth, and transformation. We also probably have desires to succeed in areas we love or are passionate about, and we may automatically believe we are committed to those areas. However, we also may have niggling doubts that tell us that we have created many blocks to success, many blocks to personal growth, many blocks to creating loving relationships, many blocks to great health and wellness, or many blocks to abundance or prosperity. And we may (or may not, depending on how deep we go down our own rabbit hole) work on releasing those blocks or self-sabotaging activities (self-protection), but how many of us can sit down and be deeply honest about what our own commitments are?
If you sit down right now and consider your passions and desires and then ask, ‘Am I committed to those passions or healing, or am I committed to something completely different?’
I asked myself this regarding my own passions and writing path over the past two weeks, and I was shocked to learn that my own commitment for most of my life has been to escape, to relax, to do the opposite of committing. Not because I am lazy and far from it, but because a big part of me felt that it was safer to commit to escape than truly commit to myself and my path. And some people have the opposite commitment; they find out when they ask this question that if they are committed to relaxing, to not doing a lot, but basically being mindful and simply enjoying life, that is okay, and that owning this commitment is part of their own healing journey.
When we have spent a long time trying to get things to work in our lives and they don’t appear to be flowing, we can look at the ways we are trying to protect ourselves from perceived harm, or we can also look to see if we are committed to something completely different.
For me, committing to too much escape and relaxation is actually detrimental to me. To another, it may be what they truly need to commit to after living a life where they have been heavily responsible for other people’s needs or working too hard.
We have to ask: Are our honest commitments actually serving or hindering us?
If we don’t ask the hard questions, we won’t get honest answers.
I know many on the spiritual path who will bypass the hard questions because if they did actually ask them, their instincts and inspiration may give them a completely different understanding of what they are doing than their conditioned and sometimes biased mind has them believe.
For example, many who are psychics may believe that their guides always give them honest answers, and yet if they are truly honest with themselves, they may discover that sometimes they get it wrong and sometimes they give the answers they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear. I know I have done this too, wanting a specific answer to a question and receiving what I wanted to hear, but it just wasn’t true.
An example is when Michael was sick with cancer. I asked how long he had to live. I used my pendulum (dowsing object) to ask this question. The pendulum gave me the month of May, but it gave me May 2023 and May 2024. What did I do? I decided not to listen to May 2023 and chose to take May 2024. Michael passed away on May 1st, 2023.
We can make big life decisions on the basis of missing information, and this is where, if we truly want to grow, we need to ask ourselves hard questions. Honesty, while it can sting a bit when we realise it, is the best policy. I know of some who never invite questions in or ask questions of others, especially if the others are generally outspoken and honest people. It is far safer not to ask questions, so the painful answers are not revealed.
Being committed to escape is probably more common than we think. While I may commit to escaping by not committing to my passions because doing so keeps me safe from what the changes would mean for me, others may commit to escaping by working hard to avoid relaxing and taking better care of themselves. A commitment to escape is often stronger in those with addictive personalities, but many of us do this regardless of whether our drug of choice is food, drugs, sex, spirituality, travel, alcohol, independence, or co-dependence.
What happens with the desire to escape is that it generally protects something within us. If, for example, we associate relationships with losing our sense of self (often due to enmeshment or engulfing in our childhood), we will reach for the escape of autonomy, avoiding relationships, pushing people away, and keeping people at arms length. If we associate independence and alone time as a threat because we associate relationships as places where we are safe and taken care of, we will flee from being alone and always look for the saviour in the arms of another. The key is finding the balance and recognising if the escape is detrimental to our growth. How do we stop escaping and keep our sense of self when relating to others, or if we generally seek relationships, find our sense of self by being alone?
For me right now, the idea of escaping to some far off shore is incredibly appealing, but I know it would just put off the inevitable commitment to myself, which probably doesn’t mean escaping from this current somewhat painful experience of life. I loved the freedom that travelling gave me in 2000. 24 years later, I would do it again in a heartbeat, but for now, what is it I truly need?
Finding Our True Core Commitments
Teal Swan has an honest way to find out our core commitments. While I understand that one of my commitments is to escape, I am going to use this process to discover if I have any unconscious core commitments. This is what you need to do to find this out:
Close your eyes and ask from your soul (like setting an intention to intuitively see something) to become your core commitment. Then surrender as if you were letting your identity be taken over completely by that commitment. What does it feel like in your body? What images do you see or words do you hear or feelings do you feel? See if you can you define what you are feeling.
Once we are able to discover this core commitment, we can then look at our lives and see if this commitment makes sense in how we have been in life. We may discover this commitment came from some early life trauma set up to protect us.
Have you found your core commitment yet?
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Kelly Martin, author of ‘When Everyone Shines But You’ is a dedicated writer and blogger who fearlessly explores life’s deepest questions. Faced with a decade of profound anxiety and grief following the loss of her father and her best friend Michael, Kelly embarked on a transformative journey guided by mindfulness, and she hasn’t looked back since. Through her insightful writing, engaging podcasts, and inspiring You Tube channel Kelly empowers others to unearth the hidden treasures within their pain, embracing the profound truth that they are ‘enough’ exactly as they are.
