Commitment and Freedom

For many years, in spite of many joys and achievements, and being surrounded by wonderful people, most of my life had a very miserable tone. That’s a strong word, but I consider it appropriate. I found it difficult to commit; and it ruined me, because there was in me a strong desire to succeed and give my best to others, to life, to God. But I just could not get over that barrier by will power; and I was being pushed by myself, back and forth – with some advance, as always happens, but predominantly in a constant coming and going.

My quest for self-knowledge, based on the Pathwork teachings, made me understand that we need to see our self-created inner misery, because only then will we manage to get out of this state. After many steps in this quest, I began to notice certain patterns in my life. The most striking pattern was to fear going to the end in any activity; or, to put it another way, to fear committing myself. Commitment always led me to a strong sense of loss, and that got me stuck.

I realized that this sense of loss stemmed from what in the Pathwork is called an “image”: a fixed, generalized and immature conclusion that is therefore erroneous. I began to strive to identify this image so I could then dissolve it. In my Pathwork I had some important insights. One was: “only those who are free can commit.” I needed to free myself from the belief that commitments implied in loss. Over the past few years, and with the help of my Helper, Gustavo, I got several concise expressions for that image. The latest, and perhaps the one that best expresses it, is: “it is in passivity that I get what I need”.

On that occasion – about a year ago – I had identified my difficulty to commit myself, and had already advanced much in identifying my central image, but I had not yet made a clear connection between them. Also, my denial of that connection was still very active. (It still exists, but has lost much of its power.) So, although I understood that only those who are free can commit, and that not being able to commit is being imprisoned, I still could not commit myself, because the feeling that I would lose something in a state of activity was still very strong. You cannot beat that with the mind only. The feeling was still that I needed to be in a passive state to avoid losses.

Doing meditations and visualizations I sought to revive memories of childhood and peek into the unconscious, in the search for possible sources for the identified image. I recalled that when I was four years old I had a serious kidney disease. The doctor said I needed complete rest, and that salt should be removed from my diet. So my mother, who worked in three shifts to give us a decent life, took a leave and stood beside me for about four months.

I have great memories of that time. Unusually, for a child of that age, I almost always followed to the letter the doctor’s recommendation. Even to go to the bathroom I had to be carried in the arms, but I did not care, because I had my mother with me.

But as I said, it was almost always that I followed the doctor’s recommendation. Once I went to the bathroom alone, and my mother surprised me with a reprimand in the form of a scream. Of course she was only concerned about my recovery, but it was remarkable, and I think it made me follow more closely the bed rest recommendation.

I also remember that my mother bought an atlas, and it had a drawing of the planets, with their names. I memorized the names of the planets in the correct order, and she showed to be very proud of that. And so time passed, with similar experiences, until I recovered completely, and my mother went back to her routine work.

In my mind, as a four-year-old, my recovery was, in a way, a loss: I lost the companionship of my mother. Of course, there was no injustice in that, nor did my mother commit any error by going back to work. It was an experience that I had to have. But at the time, my childish mind generated an immature, fixed, generalized conclusion, and therefore erroneous.

This memory has favored then a moment of culmination in my journey, when the movement of the upward conical spiral referred to by the Guide finally took me to its end, closing a cycle of my journey. In a torturous state of coming and going, I created plans and gave up on them. After some progress, I could see how the plans were rigid, and thus imprisoning me. But I still could not see the solution, and I quit making plans, under the pretext of surrendering myself to God’s will, but I still felt trapped. There seemed to be no way out, until, continuing the work, I had a deep inner experience, which I expressed for myself, in the following words:

“I have a general plan, but what I will actually do, I want to decide day-by-day, at every hour, always seeking the truth in a spirit of service to God, to others. There is no greater commitment than that. There is no freedom greater than this. And the plan can always be revised. The truth I am referring to relates especially the inner truth, which includes recognizing when I do not want to be in truth. But I struggle not to fall into the trap of self-indulgence, the trap of running away, of escaping. Only so can I live fully, and fulfill my destiny. ”

Paulo Peixoto
PWOL Collaborator
September 2016

English translation by

Gustavo Monteiro