Showing Up: The Radical Journey of Commitment

It's easy to see the implicit wisdom in this approach. First of all, it keeps you from being swayed by every moment of enthusiasm or doubt. That provisional commitment gives you time to investigate the effect that the practice, the project or the teacher has on your life. A year is enough time to learn how to break through in some aspects of the practice. It's also enough time to ask the questions you need answers to, and to figure out whether the emotional style of the scene fits your own temperament.

Once you've 'tested' your commitment, you enter the phase called Submission, or surrender. This is when you give yourself to the path you've chosen, on its own terms. If it's a relationship, you make the health of the relationship your priority—which usually means that you're willing to give it time and attention that you might otherwise spend on other things. If it's a practice, this is the time when you follow instructions. If it's a creative project, you take it step by step, finding the thread of inspiration and sweating it out. If it's a job, you play by the rules.

The Submission stage is the period of the learning curve, the stage of persevering effort. When you're in the Submission stage, periods of boredom or dryness or resistance become signals to pay more attention to the way you're showing up, to look into yourself, or simply to offer more love into the situation. In a sense, it's the time of faith, the willing suspension of disbelief, rather like the period after you've tilled the earth and planted a seed. You're holding your commitment, having the faith that it will grow.

In meditation and yoga practice, this period of Submission is a time when you surrender to developing yogic habits, especially the habit of regularity. The essence of commitment at this phase is simply getting yourself to the mat, staying there for the allotted time, then doing your best to bring the lessons of the practice into your life. You're creating the neural circuitry that you need to establish the practice in your brain and nervous system, and you're doing it through repetition.

At some point in the Submission stage, you begin to experience Intimacy. In the stage of Intimacy, something shifts. Instead of being outside the practice, outside the group, a suitor being tested, you begin to be invited into the inner chamber, the inside track, however that manifests. You've proved that you're trustworthy by showing up fully.

So now, your lover confides more freely in you. The two of you begin to spend long hours simply being present with each other. He introduces you to his family. If your commitment has been to a project, you find that insights about how to do it are coming thick and fast. You're getting more done with less effort. People are showing up to help you. When it's your spiritual practice you've been showing up for, it may feel as if your practice is opening up for you. Insights arise, little gifts, hints from inside. Sometimes they come from your teacher, but just as often from the 'inner teacher. The inner guidance of the heart is activated, and you start to find your practice being guided by insight.

One of my early breakthroughs during this stage of my practice occurred about a year after I first began a mantra practice. I'd been doing mantra assiduously but without much sense of the mind moving inward. Then one day, I 'realized' that the mantra had an energetic signature, which I could actually experience as a felt sense inside my inner body. From that moment on, my meditation with the mantra began to take me deeper and deeper into my self.

At some point in the Intimacy stage, however, you may begin to experience something that sports trainers call the Plateau Experience. Nothing seems to move. And often, that stage means that on the bell curve of growth, you've peaked.

Here, of course, we have the second big test of commitment. Every relationship, every project, and especially every person's practice follows the pattern of the bell curve. There's a rising phase. The relationship is growing toward intimacy; the practice is getting deeper. You're attracted, interested, engaged. At a certain point, you hit the top of the curve. Maximum presence, maximum excitement, often maximum success. From here, the curve goes down. Inevitably.

This is the point when the energy of any situation will tend to wind down, to fall into a trough. Your relationship is okay, but there's no excitement, no discovery. Your practice has stalled—either you're not going deeper, or you've achieved a kind of mastery that leaves you wondering "Now what?" The job doesn't challenge you much any more. The novel is done.

This is a critical point in the journey of commitment. A lot of us get to this point and decide its time to try something new—sometimes radically new, as in a new partner or job or teacher. Sometimes, that is exactly what we need to do.