Freedom, part 1: Commitment

What does commitment mean? What does freedom mean? How do they show up in our lives? What is the opposite of each idea and the tangible ways each manifests?

Does commitment have to do with "tapas": with discipline, with practice, with the notions of purification and the clarity that comes from cleansing actions?

Committing to what? Possibilities:

• to doing a specific practice - running x 3/week, attending Kirtan, cooking a local, fresh, nutritious meal for dinner
• to a person - a friend, a family, a relationship
• to hold yourself up to your values or follow a certain way of being - kindness, honesty, compassion -in its many manifestations
• to focus your discipline specific towards observances - from a wide concept of non-violence in your actions to particular way of focusing on "right speech" by having a day of silence each week.

Some thoughts / questions as they relate to liberation and freedom as Independence day approaches

• When is the relationship between commitment and freedom? Do any of the above commitments promote or lessen one's ability to be free?
• What is the relationship between commitment and attachment? Consciously practicing or being disciplined such that one focuses or directs actions, speech or finds the manifestations of a commitment to interweave throughout the day --> can this occur while still practicing non-attachment?
• What attachments are binding and which are a letting go that is liberating?
• Can the confines or bondages requisite to holding oneself to a practice or an attachment actually be the key to freedom? 
• Or, are discipline , commitment and attachment antithetical to what it means to be free?
• What limits our potential and what opens us to it? Can commitments to living moderately or the result of commitments that are limiting be that which releases us? 

What opens us and expands the boundaries of our lives - our potential and our lived experience?

What does it mean to be free? How, literally, does one be free?

(Feel "free" to comment,  in fact I'd encourage you to commit to exploring one of these questions in some way..... if part of that is being disciplined and open enough to share your experience, that would be very much welcomed)