How to embody your commitments

Commitments are an act of self-love – a series of actions that cumulatively bring us into alignment with our wild dreams.

When you think about the idea of commitment, what happens in your body?

You can imagine a commitment as a series of possibilities, a way to send a message to your body that the dream you have is within reach. Having a dream within reach can make your body feel excited or deeply uncomfortable.

It is important to give yourself grace, compassion and curiosity when actualizing your dreams into action. Reaching for each step as you approach the goals of any commitment means giving yourself the fertile ground to cultivate each plant that makes up our garden of potential.?

With your garden of commitments, you can look at sowing each goal as the right livelihood within you. “Right livelihood offers a view of work as a vehicle for self-actualization.” - Cultivating Right Livelihood By Della Duncan and Mark Phillips. Right livelihood is an act of prioritizing your mindfulness, acting in unison with your highest purpose, and contributing in community towards a shared transformation.

Being in an active practice and embodiment of your wild dream, helps disrupt colonized ways of engaging in the concepts of work that are often unsustainable and exploitative. When we center our work and share profits in ways that are sustainable to all and aligned to the planet, we transform the concept of work from an all consumptive place, to one of utility, abundance and wellbeing for communities and for the planet.

What if you let your purpose exist outside of the mainstream idea of progress and success? In its most authentic form, your purpose and the commitments do not stem from productivity or income. In fact, income alone as a sole driver of purpose, is likely to strangle your wild dream and cause systemic harm to others. Many conscious creatives and intentional small business owners, see their vision as a commitment to show up for themselves and to honor the commitments they have to their communities.

This kind of community connection invites you to honestly assess if you are overcommitted in ways that prevent you from actualizing your purpose.

Imagine for a moment about what your dream space would be for your personal commitments to take root. Have you given yourself permission to be in that space? Maybe you’ve overextended yourself in your other engagements. Maybe you’re ready to take action towards a commitment, but start feeling overwhelmed when you think about what it will take. Maybe you even wonder if you deserve to have a dream become reality.

The truth is, you will never know, until you try and you won't know what you are capable of until you imagine your vision into action. By embodying your dream into action, you begin to experience what it might be like to grow that metaphorical garden into your living, embodied purpose.

So, what are some small actions you can take to activate your wildest dreams?

Consistent embodiment of your commitment: Repeatedly embodying your commitments will send your physical & energetic body the signals to know that the possibility is attainable. Allow yourself to imagine the details of your wild dreams, and notice how it makes your body feel.?

Notice the gap between your commitment and where you are currently: Take a moment to identify and feel the gap between imagining and manifesting your wild dream. Do this without any judgment, and let any thoughts of inadequacy fall away. Just observe and take note.

Work on closing the gap until that dream is fulfilled: Closing these gaps is an opportunity to practice self-love, exercise boundaries and care for your nervous system, and to see yourself as a creator. Each small action that you take towards your dreams also allows others to see that theirs are possible too, regardless of imperfect conditions.

Developing this practice and returning to it frequently may surprise you. It becomes more and more clear just how much space is available to you for reimagination, and how much of it is obscured by societal expectations that work should be the center of your lived experience.