Commitment and/or Freedom

The choice between commitment and freedom: most people believe it’s a decision we must make. We tend to think that committing to something or someone diminishes our sense of personal freedom.

There's also a common notion that free-spirited individuals are unable to commit unconditionally and probably should not be trusted too much. We live in a world where these two concepts are potentially mutually exclusive, but are they really?

What does the reality look like when commitment and freedom are experienced simultaneously?

What is commitment?

·         Willingness to give your time and energy to a job, activity, or something you believe in.

·         The state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity, etc.

·         A promise or firm decision to do something.

·         An obligation, responsibility, or promise that restricts freedom of action.

Interestingly, only the last definition refers to the concept of freedom. Apparently, this specific definition of commitment is present in the English language only very recently.

What is freedom?

·         The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.

·         The quality of being frank, open, or outspoken.

·         Liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another.

·         A right to act in the way you think you should.

Now that we are done with dictionary terminology, what does this dance between freedom and commitment means to me? How do I experience this in my reality and in the system? What is alive in me, and why is this important?

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Hm, it’s interesting. As soon as I connect with the concept of freedom, it makes me think about my childhood. I was born almost at the same time as the independence of Ukraine, and the concept of freedom was more than just a smell in the air. Everything and everywhere was infused with freedom. This was the collective vibe I grew up in. Personally too, I started to value my freedom before I was able to properly talk and walk.

When I think about freedom, two other concepts come to mind simultaneously: independence and sovereignty. Sometimes we tend to use them as almost synonyms, but they are quite different when we really connect with them and observe how they are lived through us.

Because I am too 'independent,' rebel, free, and I don’t want to obey authority that does not make sense to me, my commitment to people, projects, things, and sometimes even to my core values could be deeply questioned by my surroundings.

Strangely enough, when I truly engage myself in any kind of adventure, I am actually highly and fully committed. I could even say that commitment is a required element for me to undertake any kind of meaningful action. And I take it very seriously. I guess both freedom and commitment are very important to me.

I am not willing to give up my inner power to lose my freedom, and I am also not able to create anything truly without real commitment. So, yeah, already the paradoxes. How will I deal with that? Can I be free and committed? What is needed to make this reality possible?

It's quite a difficult topic to contemplate because it’s present literally everywhere. I feel like most of the human challenges are actually around those concepts. Freedom and commitment are a sacred duo playing at multiple scales at the same time, potentially in all the systems we know: families, work environments, with partners and friends, with health and education, with our country or planet. All the issues we face individually and collectively can be observed from only this one illusory choice between freedom and commitment.

No matter the context or environment, we all experience this daily. I am certain most of us have already said something like this at some point in their lives:

‘It does not matter what I want or think; I don’t have a choice to do X because I have committed to Y.’

When someone gives me this answer to something, a very interesting reaction happens inside of me.

A part of me wants to almost yell: ‘What do you mean you don’t have a choice?’ Nonsense, you always have a choice. This is potentially the only thing you will always have. This part of me feels almost angry but very determined to always remain sovereign.

Another part of me feels the depth of the confusion and pain of being forced to obey even if it makes no sense. I feel the suffering of doing things I deeply didn’t agree with, but I believed I had no choice because of my commitments. This pain makes me understand more deeply and actually helps me access the incredible quality of compassion. When I feel this pain-compassion duo, I don’t want to talk. I just want to hold and create space for it. So, I might choose silence. Because it’s safer.

In those moments, I commit to remain fully present in the now.

I understand that it makes no sense to make a person aware of the choices they have now if they are not willing to feel the pain of all the other choices they didn’t make before. If they are not able to handle their authentic truth and freedom, it makes no sense for them to question their established commitments.

A commitment is a safe zone. We commit mainly to decrease the amount of fear we feel in our system. This is why we seem to willingly give up our freedoms to remain a bit longer in a ‘safe’ zone.

We live in a world where the level of stress, instability, and the unknown are growing exponentially. This tendency wakes up tons of old fears and even generates new ones. Whether we like it or not, our individual systems receive more and more fear from the outside that needs to be processed and consciously integrated.

One of the strategies is to use fear as leverage to grow and evolve. It’s to learn how to feel it and how to transcend it. To sit with it. To listen to what it tells you. To give it love and compassion even.

We can learn how to use fear as a primary force for transformation. Fear can be the accelerator, and not the brakes. Fear is simply showing you the signals on your dashboard. It communicates and informs. It does not dictate your behavior unless you have already given up all of your inner power to an external authority with your prior commitments and engagements.

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Fear and love are the same. They actually dance together too. Somehow, your capacity to truly love is related to your capacity to consciously work with fear. Not against it. But with it.

If you embrace your fears and let yourself truly feel them, eventually, you might see how love is born and emerges from there too.

Another strategy to deal with fear is to try to avoid it. What kind of system, service, or product can we build  and use to avoid feeling more fear? What kind of social contracts, commitments, and laws must we put in place to feel less threatened by others? What kind of freedoms do we consider worthy of losing to preserve our security and lower our fears?

This is a very popular strategy worldwide for pretty much everything today. We create all kinds of things and strategies to avoid fear. From marriage or job contracts to carbon markets or travel restrictions and any other micro and macro system. We build or create something that makes us feel less fear. We don’t deal with the actual fear; we just create a blanket to cover it up. It’s a fair short-term remedy. But is it really efficient for the long run?

The fear is still there, under the blanket. You just don’t see it anymore because you believe that the price of your freedom you had to pay was enough to make it disappear. But it’s not.

The more freedoms you give up and the more fears you store under your carpet, the more stuck, depressed, and disempowered you will feel. And this is also how you could start the cycle of slavery on a larger scale.

You can find a fear or a pain that people are not willing to feel or deal with, and you create a way to avoid it for them. Once you have a product/service or strategy to numb the fear well enough, you can ask whatever you want from them in return: money, love, sex, freedom, soul, etc.

Once we start selling bits of who we are to protect us from our own fears, we are already in a very clever cycle of denial and inner corruption. The fewer of our fears we feel, the less resilient we become. The less resilient we are, the more manipulated we could be. Once you believe that it’s better to avoid the fear by external denial rather than to heal it with an internal process and resources, you are actually walking further away from your inner truth. The further you des-align yourself from your inner truth, the more challenging it will be for you to feel any form of freedom. Or any other elevating emotions, for that matter.

Remember, fear walks hand in hand with love. The more fears you have under the carpet, the more love is also stuck there. This is what we don’t realize as a society. Any artificial tools we create to prevent us from feeling fear, the same tools rip us off from love itself at the same time.

Fear is supposed to be transformed into love. This is why it exists. This is why it’s exponential today because we all ask for more love, but we are too blind to see that often it comes wrapped in the box we call fear. So, we reject it, and we protect ourselves from it.

Fear is not supposed to be protected, denied, or destroyed.

Same as love, fear can’t be vanished by anything else than yourself.

So, before being able to understand the freedom/commitment polarity, there is a need to learn how to work with fear and how to transform it into love. Not how to run from it, but how to compassionately welcome it and integrate it for what it is in our system.

Freedom is not the price to pay to heal ourselves of fears. Freedom is the remedy, the secret superpower to transform our fears into love and ultimately heal ourselves.

Okay, let's assume we have the courage to face our fears, then what? How does this help us grasp the complex interdependence between freedom and commitment?

Once you know how to transform internal fear into love, you don’t commit to the same things anymore. You don’t commit to things that decrease your freedom. You actually use your freedom to commit to things that generate even more love.

When you fear, you commit to dealing with fear. When you love, you commit to create love.

When you commit to dealing with fear, you need to be reassured by all kinds of laws, procedures, rules, and regulations. By all kinds of weapons, coping mechanisms, and defending strategies. Contracts, agreements, and papers. With fear comes security. Safety. Protection.

But, when you know how to create love from fear, there is no need for any of that. When you commit to love, you commit to creating a society that is more interested in a fear-free/peaceful world than in a WWIII world. You don’t invest your energy, time, and resources to put your stuff under the carpet and to keep it safely there; you are actually using your energy and commitment to unleash more of that love from under the carpet.

Once you have your freedom back, there is no way you will commit to fear. And your authentic sense of freedom will simply force you to commit to love.

With love comes joy. Compassion. Peace. Kindness. Respect.

Why is it this way and how can we comprehend it more easily?

To answer this question, you need to contemplate the concept of interdependence even deeper.

The true confusion between freedom and commitment comes from the fact that most of us are unable to hold multiple perspectives at the same time in our consciousness. This capacity is unlocked by love. The more we are in fear, the fewer perspectives we can hold in ourselves. When we are scared, we reduce our thinking to only us. We become ego-centric and over-protective of our own little self.

The more we are in love, the more of the world we can include as a part of ourselves. The more expanded our sense of self is, the more committed we become to something greater than us.

The more we learn how to do this, the more we can simultaneously hold individuality and collectivity as something deeply interconnected together. It’s not a choice anymore. It’s not me against the other or the world. It’s about me being truly WITH everything that is around.

Once we know that the world is part of us in the same way we are a part of the world, once we truly feel this interconnection and interdependence around us, we will naturally and truly commit to love.

Only then can you truly feel the frequency of deep commitment to Life itself while preserving the totality of your freedom and your own sovereignty.