The Power of Commitment
On Aligned Life Decisions, Wholehearted Steps, and the Trust That Grows When We Move With Life’s Flow
16 min read
There is a particular tension that appears when we stand in front of a big life decision.
A subtle pull in two directions at once.
Part of us leaning toward the new.
Another part holding tightly to what has been familiar.
The nervous system does not particularly enjoy this state of suspension. When we send two different signals at once, energy disperses into hesitation, overthinking, and quiet internal friction.
And yet many of us spend long stretches of our lives exactly there.
One foot testing the new ground. The other still anchored in the old.
Strangely, the moment we finally place both feet on the same side, things begin to shift dramatically. Energy gathers. Direction becomes clear. Life starts re-organising.
This article explores why wholehearted commitment creates this shift, and why moments of real decision unlock the same magic that rules all healthy living systems: coherence.
If we haven’t met yet, my name is Elena. I’m a Somatic Coach and writer exploring how our nervous system, our life decisions, and our deeper sense of direction intertwine in our personal life and in business. Through Bendyminds I share reflections on life transitions, resilience, and the quiet intelligence of the body, especially for sensitive humans learning to trust their own rhythm again.
If these themes resonate with you, you might enjoy my newsletter The Undercurrent, where I share weekly-ish essays and reflections like this one.
Life transitions, commitment, and the moment things start moving
This conversation came up yesterday during a dinner with friends when one of them shared how excited and relieved they felt after having sold their old apartment in their home country and fully untied the strings to their old life in favour of building a new one, in a new place, and a new chapter.
A big life decision, made with surprising clarity.
A little context: we live in a small coastal town filled with expats who left their old lives because something in them knew it was time for a change. They packed their belongings, cancelled contracts and apartments, and committed to building a new life in a place that somehow feels righter.
For most of us, this move means landing in a country where we don’t speak the language (Portuguese not being not the most mainstream, is it…), needing to find a new circle of friends, and in most cases having to completely re-invent the way we generate our incomes, without the sustainable presence of local jobs and professional networks like we are used to in bigger cities.
Suffice to say, the conditions for a major life transition like this are challenging.
And after the first summer spent at beaches, splurging on cheap coffee in local cafés and raving about how easy life becomes when you switch grey skies for sunshine, the truth of reality starts creeping in, and you notice little essential details of your ‘new life’ seeping through the layer of
Talk about ‘mild winters’ feeling harsher in houses that don’t have central heating. Long-term rentals being actually hard to find. And then, annoyingly, the bigger life questions still suddenly popping back into your mind:
‘What the heck do I actually really want to do with my life’ and ‘Is this where I want to be?’
Why big life decisions ask for more than just thinking it through
Ah thank you for your reliable concern, good old mind!
As always here to protect us from making dumb decisions, and trying to its very best capacity to accurately predict what will be happening in our near and far future.
Honestly, I love the mind for its ability to dream and plan, and creatively connect all possible dots in all imaginable scenarios. But in real life, the question of decision making goes deeper than just ‘thinking it through’, and the real power and wisdom is to be found when we include our whole set of intelligence, neck downwards.
Much of this deeper intelligence lives in the body itself, in the quiet signals of our nervous system that constantly orient us toward safety, alignment, and movement.
The power of the heart, our soma, and our energy.
(By the way, carving out access to these most essential decision-making instances is at the core of my Somatic Coaching work. If you’re curious about how to work with me, start here.)
Is your heart really in it?
This goes for the example of expatism but really also for most big life decisions like the commitment to a partnership, having children, or starting self-employment. All big steps in life, paired with a certain polarity and risk.
And here’s where I see two different kinds of people’s behaviour.
The ones who take a leap, putting both of their feet on where they’re stepping towards - or the ones who reach one foot out and let the other one linger somewhere mid-air.
Can you feel the difference between the two behaviours?
Life transitions almost always involve winning something on one side, and losing something on the other.
No matter how much we want to grow, and no matter how aligned the new place, the new relationship, the new career might be, it comes with the cost of giving something previous up.
Some people are not ready to pay that price.
Some of us think we can get away with dipping our toe into something new, something fresh, something exciting, without risking to lose the reassurance of what already feels familiar, safe, steady.
I could see myself doing this extensively during my years of being employed in a 9-5, but spending my evenings, off times, and basically every free minute with teaching Yoga, doing teacher trainings, and traveling to India.
Architect at day, free-spirited nomad at night.
I’d translate this one as ‘testing the waters’.
Another version is to take a half-hearted step forward that looks like you’re going to step over, but in reality, you still linger your back foot somewhere on the old ground to not lose the grip.
In our expat example, this could look like moving to a new country, making new friends, but still keeping an apartment in your old city. Staying registered in your home country. Flying back and forth to keep seeing your old friends, working with old clients, or just hanging out in your old life.
I’m saying ‘old’ because physically, you moved your life and your body into your new future, but secretly, you’re still vibing on your old frequency.
The twilight zone - your body has moved, but your heart somewhat stayed back.
From my perspective, this is the most dangerous of behaviours.
Because not only do you waste a lot of energy going back and forth (either physically, or by navigating different legal systems, or managing remote belongings) , you also deny yourself the immense momentum that comes with placing both of your feet on the same ground, and instead stay in a state of split identities.
Not fully here, and not fully there.
Big commitment unlocks big support.
The magic concept that my friends and I unpacked that evening was that although the idea of making a full-hearted, weighty step to the other side of life may seem risky, it is often rewarded with a momentum that makes things flow in the right direction.
‘Leap, and the net will appear.’
as eloquently quoted by Julia Cameron in her phenomenal book ‘The Artist’s Way’, as well as by numerous other authors chewing on the concept of Providence.
This is exactly how many big life decisions unfold during periods of change.
Imagine you want to board a small boat from the pier.
The boat’s floating in the water, and as long as you keep most of your weight on the standing foot on solid ground, you can’t get on board. You can stabilise it, yes, and you can use your probing foot to nudge the boat into the right angle, and to steady it enough so you can make your step over.
But that’s all there is. Preparing, steadying, aligning.
In order to really move over into your new life, the new boat, you have to take a good breath, tighten your core muscles, and make an assertive step onto the rail of the boat, put your weight on your foot, and cross the gap so you can jump inside.
And then?
The boat might shake. You might tumble around for a while, trying to regain your balance with the sway of the water. Learning to calibrate on the new ground.
But eventually, the boat will stabilise on the water surface. You will get the new sense of gravity. And together with your newly boarded vehicle, you’ll start to move with the water’s flow.
Many of the most meaningful life decisions work this way. The moment we shift our weight fully onto the new ground, life begins to reorganise around that commitment.
Life moves when you move with it.
And this is where we tap into one of life’s most essential, yet mostly invisible concepts.
An inherent principle that has been observed and described across various streams of thought - some ancient, some scientific, some spiritual - all circling around the same fundamental truth:
Life organises around coherence.
We see it in the old wisdom of Taoism, and its idea of the flow of the river, understanding that there’s no use in forcing it, yet also not to cling to the riverbank either. When you step into the current, it will carry you. When you hover between shore and stream, you’ll exhaust yourself.
The law of attraction speaks of the idea that life responds to the frequency we consistently emit.
From a more scientific standpoint, we are finding similar thoughts proven by Chaos theory. Complex systems don’t stabilise through micromanagement. They stabilise when enough variables align around a new attractor point.
A full-hearted decision acts like such an attractor. Energy that was previously scattered in back-and-forth loops gathers. And what looked like chaos begins to pattern itself.
And then, following this string of thought, applied to our human nervous system, the framework of Organic Intelligence and Somatics teaches us that we can trust even our own body in the self-organising capacity of living systems.
And that, when our present-moment lived experience comes into synchronisation with our inner awareness, when what we feel, what we notice, and how we respond are no longer at odds, our nervous system begins to reorganise itself.
Energy that was previously tied up in internal conflict becomes available for movement and restoration. Fragmented parts of our psychology start to integrate, all by themselves.
And stability starts to emerge from within, followed by a sense of wholeness and joy.
In other words, the system strengthens simply because it is no longer at split.
(If you’re in a phase in your life where you feel like you’re all over the place, feeling anxious, scattered, or constantly depleted, my Resiliency Coaching works exactly with this concept of bringing your system back into sync. You can book your first Intro session here:
Trusting life with the gap
Let’s recap what we’ve learned for today.
Two feet on different grounds is a divided signal.
Two feet on the same ground is coherence.The step in between takes a moment of trust.
Trust that needs to be trained, but can only really grow if we’re ready to take some risks.
Commitment creates the conditions for flow, without needing too much of your extra effort. Because when all systems work in the same direction, it allows life to organise around a new center of gravity.
In my own experience, I’ve seen this concept playing out in so many ways.
When I moved from my office job into my self-employment as Somatic Coach and Yoga teacher, it didn’t really kick off until I finally quit, although I didn’t have my new income figured out. When I dreamt of moving abroad, I only finally found my new home when I cancelled my apartment, gave up my German health insurance, and started to learn Portuguese.
And when I was striving for a different kind of partnership, that is more about growth than it is about complacency, and closer to real love than just the idea of attachment, it worked out when I boarded a plane in the middle of Covid, and dove all in into a romance that had no promise of a future.
The capacity of trust is measured in resilience
All those times, I made the step without being exactly sure if the other side will hold. Because in reality, we’ll never ever have that guarantee.
But I stepped with my full heart in it. I was committed.
And in the end, it all somehow worked out, and even better than I could have imagined.
Was it scary? Oh yeah. And I didn’t make all the steps in one clean go.
Was it a linear journey? No! It took me to many places, detours, and unexpected roundabouts. I had to back up, go around, pause. Sometimes I had to run, and sometimes I had to be patient and wait.
Sometimes I was certain and asssertive, and sometimes I was confused and hesitant.
The trust I was building was the effect on the continuous readiness to go by trial and error, and the increasing resiliency I was building in my nervous system.
And opposing to some more old-paradigm teachings circulating today, this kind of resiliency growth can not be put on a timeline, or a fix step-by-step method.
We need to go in our own capacity. We need to go in our own direction.
We’re allowed to test, to probe, to feel things out, and to go back and forth until we’re clear. It’s a process of calibration, between our inner sense of safety, and nature’s invitation of growth.
Slowly bridging the gap between what feels familiar, and what feels aligned, and preparing you for the moment you’ll have enough capacity, enough resilience in order to make your leap.
Fear might always be present.
But once you know what you want, and you tested the waters, you gotta take that fear by the hand and take it over as you cross the gap.
How I can support you with making your committed step
Maybe you recognise yourself somewhere in this.
Perhaps you are standing in one of those in-between spaces right now. One foot still rooted in what has been familiar, the other sensing the pull of something new.
And maybe the real question is not whether the next step is perfectly safe, but whether your system has enough support and clarity to take it.
If you see yourself wanting to commit to your new project, a relationship or simply a new version of yourself but stay lingering in the back-and-forth of overthinking, self-doubting, or downright anxiety around making a move, my Nervous System Mapping Session might be a good place to land.
We’ll shed light on where you’d really want to put your heart to right now, and gently take the edge off the spinning mind and anchor your energy in the Here and Now through your senses, so you can commit to a clear, assertive step.
You find the details here:
