What is Missing is Commitment

The Union Path Podcast - What is Missing is Commitment
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Often when we're trying to create something, we can end up being tortured by its absence.

When there's something we really want, something we feel like we've been striving after for a long time, something we feel like we've done all the things,

we've done everything we can to put ourselves in a position to achieve this outcome, yet where is it? What's happening? What's gone awry? We've worked and we've worked and we tried and we tried. We've even given up. We've ignored it, and yet it hasn't happened. We just sit with this unrequited attraction to this particular outcome. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and it doesn't seem to happen.

That's the thing about manifestation or change or evolution or growth or whatever you want to call it. It's a complicated process to think about.

In practice, it's actually fairly natural especially when we view it in hindsight, we can see all the steps so clearly, we can see the progression so naturally, that it seems largely effortless, but that's looking backwards.

When we look forward and try to put ourself in a place where this thing is already happening, doesn't feel quite so effortless. Quite the opposite often. But what's missing, what's the missing piece?

There are no easy answers, of course. If there were, there'd be no challenge to this in the first place. If there was one thing we could do that would reliably deliver us the results we seek, well then there wouldn't be any seeking would there? It would just be something we didn't know yet that once we rectified that, everything we wanted would just come to us automatically, our life would run automatically.

But that's not really how things work, is it? That's also not really what keeps us coming back either. As much as we may lament it at times, it's the challenge, it's the disappointment even, that ultimately drives us, that ultimately keeps us engaging with life. Keeps us trying to be more, to have more, to do more.

It's this give and take of satisfaction and disappointment that keeps things interesting, that keeps things compelling.

If it were too easy, it would get too boring. If things came to us automatically, they wouldn't really mean that much.

So when there's something we really want, when there's something we've been striving after, of course the missing piece can obviously be more than one thing. It can be lots of things, but often when it is one thing. Usually that one thing has something to do with consciousness. That one thing has something to do with our concepts of who we really are, what we really deserve, where we really belong, what's really for us and what isn't.

So the thing I want to focus on is the idea of commitment. The idea of if there is something that we really want, that we're really trying to create in our life, are we really committed to it?

It's an interesting question to ask ourselves. Are we really trying to create this ourselves, or are we waiting for someone to give it to us? Are we really being active or are we just being passive?

Are we actually trying to create this reality, or are we just waiting for this reality to happen on its own, thinking our wishing for it, our visualization of it, our knowing it is enough?

These are interesting questions because on one hand, yeah it's true, that if we're just making frantic effort day after day,

if we've gotten neurotic and intense and aggressive about making a particular thing happen, that can often hold us back from it. Because all of that striving, all of that frantic effort is really little more than resistance.

It's fear. It's trying to overwhelm our uncomfortable feelings around the attainment of whatever we're seeking, through enough effort, through enough force, through enough movement to try to overwhelm those fears. We're trying to swamp our fear with activity.

We're trying to drown out our insecurity through our own tunnel vision. And obviously, that's not a good thing, but the opposite isn't so great either. The idea that if we just put all of the right precursors in place, then things will automatically happen, doesn't really seem very valid either.

But if we just sit and visualize, if we run our mantras, if we meditate on things long enough, if we do all the internal work to make something happen, but then it doesn't, what then?

How do we look at our experience? How do we look at our own behavior, our own role in this creation, whatever it is, and know what we're doing wrong, or at least know what we're not doing?

But again, that's the sticky trap of polarities, of getting caught in one extreme or the other, in either our activity or our passivity, and our action or our letting go.

What we're actually looking for is balance. We're actually looking for something in between. We don't want to be completely passive, but we don't wanna be neurotic either.

The answer is both. The answer is somewhere in the middle. And sometimes, the thing that can help us find our way to the middle is this idea of commitment. Because when we really commit to something, when we really decide to do something, no matter what, a couple things often happen. The first, we lose a lot of our fear of it. That a lot of times when we're trying to do something, we're actually scared of, we sort of sit on the margins of it.

We may make a lot of effort to make something happen, but part of us is kind of holding back at the same time. Part of us is waiting to take whatever hit we're gonna take, for the other shoe to drop, for the bad thing to happen after this good thing that we're trying to create. We're not really all in.

And again, we may be using our overthinking, overacting, overdoing to try to overwhelm this conflict we have inside of us. And so when we're really committed to something, when we've really decided in our bones,

to do something, to see something happen, just by the nature of that state, that conflict is resolved. Because we can only fully commit with our full selves.

It's funny with a lot of the spiritual work, I think one of the first things a lot of people learn is there really are no half steps. There really is no pretty much, there's no most of the way.

It really seems to work through fullness. It really seems to exist in wholeness. That yes, making progress towards something, doing things more fully, doing things from a more whole place, is progress, is good, but we need to keep going.

When we want to do the right thing. When we want to do the thing that's right for us, we have to do it fully. We have to do it completely. We have to do it with our whole selves and not have part of ourselves undermining it or slowing it down.

So when we commit to something, we make the decision to be fully involved with whatever we're trying to do. We make the decision to jettison our fear, to decide, whatever this is, it's really important to us, it's vital, and we're going to put our whole selves into the achievement of it.

Because a lot of times when we're passive, when we're only visualizing, when we're only meditating, when we're only holding something in our minds,

when we're only feeling something based on our imagination, we're not really with it, are we? We're really still much more of a spectator than a participant. And if we're scared, that feels safe. We find safety by being able to run these desires as a simulation, if we're scared of actually experiencing them in real life.

But if we do truly want to experience these things, we do have to deal with our own fear, with our own reluctance and concern of being hurt. With our own worry that some unforeseen side effect is gonna take us down, it's going to surprise us and turn this dream into a nightmare.

Or maybe it's not quite as dramatic as that. Maybe we feel like we just don't have the capability, and for whatever reason, this thing we want, even though we want it so deeply, isn't really for us. It's made for someone else, some other type of person.

When we commit to something, we have to resolve all of that as well. We have to decide that this desire, being so strong, so persistent, must mean that it is us.

That we are bonded to it in some way. In some way, it is a reflection of who we really are, and our separateness from it, our conflict with it is keeping it from us. Is keeping us from achieving a state of greater wholeness. Because when we finally experience the things that are really us, we become more us. We add on to who we are and we grow.

And it has such a delicious, sublime feeling to it, much the same way that when we are denied these things that we really want, it feels so awful.

Really, those feelings are opposites. The achievement or the living of what we really want is so fulfilling, it's so enriching, it's so satisfying,

versus the denial of these things we really want, it's really quite the opposite. We feel diminished, we feel a little bit poisoned. We feel like maybe we shrunk a little bit. But it's these feelings as uncomfortable as they are, that beckon us on.

Because these strong desires in our life are there for a reason. They're not there just to torture us. When they are that strong, when they are that persistent, when we've spent enough time with them to really know these things are real,

these things I want really are born out of who I am, that if we wanna live a happy life, we wanna live a full life, we have no choice but to go with them.

This is life calling us forward. This is a richer life guiding us home. These things are important for us. It's one of the reasons why it feels so bad to be separate from them.

But if we feel like we've pursued these ideas, these desires, these dreams for a long time, if we've really not only done the work on ourselves, but we've actually done the things in the physical world to bring us there as well. When we've really done all the things we can think of, and yet these dreams, these desires, are still elusive, those are the times when I come back to ideas like commitment.

Because it's kind of a funny thing, Sometimes the missing piece isn't so much something to do, it's really more something to be. Because when we commit to something, we've really decided we are this thing and this thing is us.

And that when we lack that commitment, we're not really fully in, on this pursuit, on this attainment, on this growth. That gap manifests itself in our own separateness with our dreams.

This idea of commitment can be really helpful, especially in times where we find recurring patterns. When we've pursued something over and over and over again and find ourselves back in the same place over and over again. Like we're just stuck in some infinite loop that no matter what we do, what angle we try, we always seem to end up in the same place.

We always seem to revert back to the same reality. And how can that be? How can it be that we can try different things that seem like opposite of each other, yet they all lead the same result? Because you would think with a wide variety of actions, of changes, then the result would've a fairly wide variety to it as well.

But that's the thing about life, a lot of it, if not most of it, is a reflection of who we are. Life gives us the incredible gift every day of reflecting to us who we're being really.

We may have concepts of ourselves one way or another, but life reflects back the kind of person we're actually being. And when life reflects back stagnation, or life reflects back these frustrated dream attainments, that's a good opportunity to really look internally, really ask ourselves is this thing I'm pursuing really what I want?

Because sometimes not participating fully with our full selves in the attainment of this thing we're pursuing is an indication that we don't really, really want it. That it's not really really for us.

And so how do we know? How do we know if something isn't happening because we don't actually want it or because of something like fear? We go inside, we feel what we're feeling.

We internally process, not only our experience, but our attitudes and beliefs around what we're trying to create, and we really feel them.

We experience our own feedback around what we're trying to do and let that inform us. We let our insides tell us the truth.

But when we know something really is for us, when we know that even if we tried and failed over and over again, that this thing still matters. That even though the disappointment of not having achieved it yet hurts, the thing that's really painful, the thing that's really diminishing is losing hope.

And so we make a bargain. We say to ourselves, you know, this, going after something and not getting it over and over again is pretty rotten, but I'd rather do that than fall into the despair that this is impossible.

Choose to believe that not only is this possible, but this will be a reality. That the only reason it hasn't shown up yet, is that there's still something to learn. There's still some growth here that needs to happen.

That in one way of looking at it, we're not actually ready for this thing that we want. That doesn't mean it's not right for us. It means it's not right, right now.

It means that perhaps we have the ability to bring this into our life, but because we're not currently the person that matches the situation, we may not be able to hold it. And that would be worse. That would be worse to bring something in and then lose it.

And I know it's said it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved it all, and that's true, but it doesn't make it not hurt. But that's part of it as well. That's part of the growth. Sometimes we need to hurt in order to learn. Sometimes we need to fail to realize we need to grow.

Sometimes we need to have something elude us to find out we weren't really pursuing it fully in the first place. We weren't really pursuing it with our full selves. We were using only our thinking, only our behavior instead of our being.

Because when we commit to something truly commit, that's an indication that our consciousness is aligned with what we're trying to achieve. We've decided to believe that this circumstance, this achievement, this experience is for us because it is us.

And so what do we do? What do we do once we've committed to something fully? And how do we know we've committed fully?

Well, it's like a lot of things surrounding a feeling, we know and we know. If we're not sure, then we're not. Again, that's one of those things that is either expressed fully or it's not expressed much at all. These ideas gain their power, gain their ability to alter our lives, through their completeness.

There is no partial credit, there are no half steps. If we go, we need to go all the way. If we start, we need to see it through. If we invest ourselves, we need to invest our full selves.

And once we do that, once we have that knowing, that we are fully committed, that we are fully in to what we're trying to create, what then?

Then that's where these ideas of non-resistance, of not feeling like we have to have manic behavior or activity to create things,

where we don't have to overwhelm life through our own effort and force come in. Because if we really committed to something, we've really absorbed these ideas into our sense of who we are,

we'll find ourselves acting naturally in doing the things that we need to do that lead us in the direction that we're trying to go,

by absorbing this idea into our sense of our own being we naturally radiate that energy. We naturally broadcast this being who and what we really are to everyone and everything we interact with.

And so what do we do? We put one foot in front of the other. We keep going. When opportunities present themselves in the direction of where we want to go, and they feel aligned on a deep level with where we're trying to go, we take them, because of course we do. Why wouldn't we? When we've jettisoned our fear, when we've given up our doubt, why wouldn't we do the things that feel like our dreams? Why wouldn't we pursue the things that feel like our desires?

It's natural, if we're not resisting moving toward what we want, we'll move toward naturally anyway.

And once we've really committed to something, once we've really decided and absorbed this into our being, there's no more conflict to reconcile.

There are no more hurdles that we need to jump over. Our path is a pleasant one. All of that strain and effort is really replaced by a far more pleasant and easy flow.

That we've done the thing we need to really do. We shifted our consciousness to actually be the thing we're trying to create.

And so now it's really only a matter of time that we find ourself united with it. Doesn't mean it happens instantaneously, it also doesn't mean it's helped much by staring at our watch or the clock or the calendar, and asking where is it? But all those behaviors are based in fear anyway, and so we probably won't find ourselves doing that if we've really committed to something.

But that's the work. That's how these things work. That when we're frustrated, when a presence that we seek is absent, it's always an indication there's something missing.

There is a flow to life, it's happening all the time. We're doing it all the time. And it's not that when we're not getting something we want, we're not in the flow. No, life is always flowing, it just may not be flowing towards and past the things we would like it to. That's really on us.

We change the direction of our lives by changing our consciousness around who and what we are. By going out into life with our full selves. By using these desires and dreams as way, finding tools back to union with our fuller, truer selves.

So when we've committed, we keep going. We don't do it from a place of lack, we don't do it from a place of worry, we do it from a place of knowing.

We do it from a place of real confidence because life cannot help but reflect back to us our own ideas and beliefs about ourselves. And when we truly committed, when we truly absorbed something into our sense of ourselves, then life cannot help but reflect it back to us eventually.

And we know it too. So in this time of eventually, we're not walking in longing, we're walking in knowing.

And we can let it go. We don't have to be focused on it. We don't have to be constantly trying to manage, it because we know.

And one day we'll find ourselves coming around a corner, trying something new, we're just out of the blue, there it is.

And it comes to us, ultimately, because it is us, and we are it.