I am a commitment to…

Today I am celebrating my first-ever completed original a cappella composition in 3-part harmony! 🥳😮🥰

This is a melody that came to me as I began working over time with the commitment named in the first verse. Commitments and declarations are a practice used in the generative somatics & Strozzi Institute lineages. They are how we organize ourselves, what we center our bodyspirits around. They are what’s most compelling to us. What’s worth showing up for. Worth coming back to, even when we’ve strayed, even after we’ve fallen back into old patterns and avoided the new practices and habits we’re trying to develop.

Our commitments are what inspire us to put in the long-haul effort that’s required of us when we are working towards lasting transformation within ourselves. In politicized somatics work, we see these commitments to our own personal transformations as intrinsically connected and vital to the longevity and success of transformative social movement work.

Once we’ve landed on a commitment that feels right for our personal work, we usually work with it for a length of time that can span months or years. The first verse commitment here is one I’ve been working with for nearly 3 years now, and the second is more recent to the last few months. There are others I work with too. We contain multitudes, and it is very possible to work with multiple commitments at once if and as that’s right for you.

The first verse says: I am a commitment to loving myself in imperfection & process. In another version I have worked with over time, I add the word “eternal” before process, to remind myself not to get it twisted: loving myself in process will not eventually lead me to some end point of perfection, but rather that imperfection and process are my forever states of being. We will always be in process til our dying days, and we will never be perfect!

The second verse says: I am a commitment to honing my craft & taking next right action on my own best behalf. This commitment is about becoming willing to develop rigor where I have a conditioned tendency to slack, fall off, or abandon what I start, & learning to break my life, goals, & work down into manageable bite-sized pieces so I don’t get too overwhelmed to ever start or fool myself into thinking I don’t know how or where to begin.

In InterPlay we call the notions that things happen as a result of steps and that we need only take one baby step at a time “Incrementality.” Learning about and practicing InterPlay in my life has also helped me notice what my body wants more of, what feels good and lights me up, & encouraged me to find the choice points where I could actually have more of those things (The InterPlay tools of “Noticing,” “Body Data, Knowledge, & Wisdom,” & “Inner Authority”).

Blending my politicized somatics with my InterPlay lineages gradually helped me realize beauty is motivational in my practice. Singing for me is about devotion to both myself (soothing myself, healing myself, softening and showing care to myself) & to what’s larger than me (what I consider to be the Divine). And offering beauty to myself and the Divine helps me come back to my declarations practice when I’ve gotten avoidant with it for myriad reasons (feeling too busy or overwhelmed to make time for it, believing I have to do it one rigid or “right” way, getting lost in guilt trips over how much I haven’t been doing it as excuse to not start again, or telling myself if I don’t practice for a set length of time, anything short of that “doesn’t count”).

Over time, I have been growing a deep love for practicing, which is essential to my ability to show up for social justice work in a sustained yet sustainable way. This is a big deal for me as a recovering quitter, who would often get bogged down in despair and exasperation with why I would get cyclically overwhelmed and burnt out between my movement and paid work, & would struggle to find the motivation to keep showing up to the new practices I was trying to get into and the nascent commitments I was naming.

This didn’t mean my commitments weren’t compelling enough (though sometimes it can mean we haven’t found the right one or true wording yet). In my case, it meant I needed to get more attuned to my bodyspirit in order to find what I could tweak about my practice to make it work for me.

Over time, I started to have many moments that reminded me of my long-held love for singing, until one day I had a revelation about how this lifelong passion had inadvertently gotten slept on, buried, & de-prioritized as I grew up. Being able to come into choice around singing more often for pleasure, creative & spiritual practice eventually led me to weave song into and around my somatic centering practice, which this song is one example of today.

Unlocking the creative potential of my commitments practice has ultimately made practice more pleasurable, easeful, and nurturing for me (all of which make it more sustainable), rather than something I associate with dread, force, imposition, external authority, and harsh strictness.

I still struggle with dropping the ball on my practices, but my ability to soften judgments of myself when I do has helped me become willing to pick them back up much faster than I used to. Being a commitment to loving myself in imperfection and process helped me start to feel how hard I held my self-judgments as physical tension and constriction. And this is where I see the magic and medicinal quality of commitments.

In gs and Strozzi we intentionally say “I am a commitment to…” (as opposed to “I am committed to…”). You could argue it’s just a semantic difference, but I’ve found the “I am” sentence stem makes my commitments more like a spell, an invocation I cast over myself as invitation to feel the resonance of my commitment throughout my whole body, and to move beyond rote recitation of my commitment in my brain. “I am a commitment” invites my body to show me in what ways and places I already hold my commitments to be true, and what parts of my body may be protecting something that has become an obstacle to my more full embodiment of the commitment.

Being a commitment to honing my craft and taking next right action on my own best behalf has helped me to bring this 3-part recording to life and completion today! It has also been helping me stay clear about my focus and show up more consistently to the tough work of identifying my boundaries, communicating them, & acting in service to myself through standing behind them when communication isn’t enough.

Many things about transforming ourselves (as is also true of transforming our world) are not easy. In neo-liberal capitalist carceral culture, our society at large has become a commitment to instant gratification and disposability. I think of showing up to the challenges of my self-growth a little bit like strength training. It’s not always “no pain, no gain,” but it does require discipline. Discipline used to be something I despised and ran from, but learning that I can have discipline that is loving and in service to my highest self and purpose has helped me to partner with it, to see it as something that’s necessary to my evolution and that can help me when I’m ready to choose it. As ever, for it to be trauma-informed, having choice is crucial.

Blessings unto all the commitments you are, unto what you are choosing to practice, and to the fruits your practices are growing.

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Layers and layers

What of our growth is possible because of someone else’s/some other part’s/some past lifetime’s decay?

Who helps us feel for our edges, soften into our insides?

How is the flesh of our lives nourishment to others, the Divine, the whole?

How is our growth radial, non-linear, scalloped, in so many glorious gradients?

What music emanates from decomposing?

Who is witness to the layers of our lifetime, the ripples across lifetimes, the cycles of change and transformation across time?