October 2009 - What Vows Have You Made?

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How are your vows affecting your life? Vows are very powerful. What vows have you made? One of the biggest vows that some of us will ever make is the vow we take when we marry. There are many vows we take besides marriage vows. Vows can be positive, as in the commitment we make when we marry, or they can limit us. Whether you realize it or not, you may have made a vow a long time ago, for a reason that was appropriate at the time, but it no longer serves you, or is no longer relevant to your life, yet it is still affecting you. It’s important to also make the distinction between a vow and an intention.

You may have heard about the power and benefit of setting intentions for creating your goals and attracting your dreams, but intentions and vows are very different. Let me share more.

When you put forth an intention, it is like a prayer which means “this” or “something better”. A vow does something else. It shuts down any other possibility. A vow has a clarity of decisiveness. It’s as though a door slams to your old way of being and you walk through a different one. It feels different than a prayer or an intention which by its nature feels expansive. With a prayer or an intention, you put out the intention that it will be “this” or “something better”. It has a spaciousness of all possibilities so that grace, the universe, or source can teach you through this intention manifesting in your life. This is very different than making a vow. When you make a vow it’s a certitude that it is done. A door closes and it’s over with.

You may wonder why you feel such exhaustion; there’s a reason. In order for a vow to be held in place in consciousness it takes life force, and it doesn’t appear in just one cell. It has a consciousness of its own which permeates every cell in your being. So, every cell in your being reverberates with this vow.

Perhaps you made the vow: “Love isn’t safe, so I’ll just shut down”. This is a hard vow to keep; it takes energy to stay shut down. It is exhausting and debilitating to keep that one running. It eats away at your life force and you wonder why there’s a tiredness. When a vow like that is finished, and a new vow is given instead “to remain open to love”, you will experience so much energy. Because that old vow permeates every cell, when a new positive vow is made, every cell receptor can open up. Real health can start pulsating in your consciousness.

Let me give you an example of a powerful vow that happened for a young man. We’ll call this young man Ben. When Ben was 8 years old, he was sliding down a snowy hill near his home, all excited, full of so much juice for life and the sled went suddenly crashing into a tree and hit his mother. He went over and saw his mother and thought she was dead. Now eventually she was fine, but at the moment when he thought she wasn’t breathing and he thought she was dead he thought: “My exhilaration and my excitement killed my mother”. From now on, “I’m not allowed to have that”, and he shut himself down and that became a very crystallizing experience that didn’t allow him to ever feel that excitement again. From that moment forward he decided he needed to keep his emotions under control. His life became disciplined and controlled, for if he ever let his emotions carry him away again, he might kill someone with it.

Vows are very strong and most of us are not aware that we have made them, and at some point something in us doesn’t feel right any more, because in freedom that old vow doesn’t resonate any more. That vow no longer feels appropriate any more and it becomes so inappropriate that it makes a disintegration of the vow happen. We try to hold on to who we think we are because the vow is trying to shake loose. Then what happens is that grace, or source says: “It’s time for you to finish with that vow and to open up and receive love”. And at that moment there is tremendous energy that is released within you.

You may come across someone who has made a vow, perhaps even yourself. For example: “I will shut down my energy”. “I will shut down people”. “I will close out life”. “I will close out love”, etc. There are many ways people shut down. There are words that are attached to these vows. It’s not just a mechanism where shut down happens. Perhaps you said: “I’m never going to let you in again!” or “I’m never going to love again; it hurts too much!” or “I’m never going to let you touch me!” When you read or hear these examples, can you recognize the word patterns here? Maybe as a child you said, “I’m never letting you in again!” We’ve all said things like this, but as children, or even as adults, we don’t know the power of that vow. A vow has a consciousness of its own. It’s powerful! A vow has a life force of its own, in spite of your getting on with the rest of your life.

That’s why divorce is so painful and messy, because the consciousness of having made a vow is in every cell, and even though the divorce may be appropriate and the karma has finished between the couple, and it really is past its “sell by date”, the vow itself has a life of its own.

When we make a vow, we are saying we will be true to the vow, not that we’re necessarily being true to truth. You probably have made a variety of vows in the past which have outlived their usefulness, or the ramifications of making them were not fully understood when you made them, yet you are still honoring them, and being controlled by them.

A vow is a powerful decision and the moment you make the vow it is as though the whole universe rushes in to support that. In your own exploration of your life, when you come across an old vow that no longer supports you, it is important that you sever the vow and make a whole new one that supports your freedom.

Holding on to old vows which are no longer relevant can be toxic, to the point of actually creating illness. I remember working with a young woman who had a debilitating disease that was eating her away. When we regressed back to the original memory behind this disease, she recalled the night that her entire family died in an auto accident. She was 6 years old and she was the only survivor. She remembered saying to herself: “It isn’t right that they died and I survived”. This was a decision she made that became a self-fulfilling vow that was literally eating away at her cells. The good news is, we released the old vow and she made a whole new vow that supported her in living.

So ask yourself today, what vows have you made that no longer serve you? Imagine living your life having made vows which truly support your freedom! You deserve it.

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