Living from Vow
a powerful tool for a more intentional life
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Full Moon / June 11, 2025
Prelude
Lately I’ve written a lot about current events in my life and in the world. Today’s piece was actually written back in 2012 (I’ve revised it ever so slightly to bring it current), but this feels like a good time to remember this enduring spiritual truth: everything begins with intention. How we enter our day; how we make important decisions about life, work, and relationships; how we engage with the abuse of power and the targeting of immigrants that we’re currently witnessing in Los Angeles and many other places in the U.S., all of it is rooted in the vows we have made to ourselves or, as is more often the case, the lack of vows.
I hope this piece opens your heart and mind to the possibilities held in understanding and keeping your promises to yourself, based on your deepest values.
Living From Vow
Most of my life, I have cringed at the idea of discipline.
I’ve thought of it as something that infringes on my freedom, specifically my creative freedom. Just hearing someone suggest that I make it a habit to go to bed the same time each night makes me cringe as I imagine lost opportunities of night owl creative energy spurts.
But in the past few years, I’m learning that discipline — in the right spirit — can be truly liberating.
One way that discipline manifests is as a vow. The dictionary defines “vow” as a solemn promise, often made to God. For many of us it’s an old-fashioned word that has little relevance outside of marriage (and how many couples stay true to those vows?) or a courtroom.
In some religious and spiritual traditions, we are invited to take a set of vows that are intended to support us on our path. In Zen Buddhism, the Bodhisattva vows are foundational. Here’s the version recited at San Francisco Zen Center:
Beings are numberless, I vow to save them.
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.
Buddha's Way is unsurpassable, I vow to become it.
Buddhism has other vows as well, including the Three Refuges, the Three Pure Precepts, and the Ten Grave Precepts — all of which make up the Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts.1 It’s a tradition that’s full of lists!
But there are also personal vows that come from the ferment of our own life experience. Some years ago, during an emotionally painful period of my life, I had a strange experience that involved vows. Out of the blue, a series of sentences kept repeating in my head. The words didn’t come from my own cognition or will but rather it felt like I was channeling them from some unknown source. They were at once familiar and yet completely foreign to me. I had no idea what to do with them. Perhaps this is what Moses felt like when God dropped the Ten Commandments on him with a thud!
The message was so strong and insistent that I picked up a pen and wrote it down:
As one who walks the path of the Buddha, I vow to nourish myself so that I can nourish others, to cultivate loving kindness and alleviate suffering for all beings, including myself.
As one who walks the path of the Buddha, I honor and respect the rhythms of my body and the earth. I vow to make time to stop, reflect, and renew myself in attunement with every breath, every hour, every day, every week, each month, and each season. I take shelter in the rainy season to sit in deep retreat with my sangha [community].
As one who walks the path of the Buddha, I vow to tread gently on the earth and carry nothing extra.
After getting the words down on paper, I took some time to reflect on what meaning they might hold for me.
The phrase that started out all three sections, “As one who walks the path of the Buddha,” made some sense since at that point I’d been a meditator and student of Buddhism for a number of years. It had an almost biblical feel to it, like an invocation that reminded me of the power my particular spiritual path held for me, if I would commit to it over the long term.
The focus of the first vow on nourishment and loving kindness was a reminder that I needed to include myself in the field of compassion that I aspire to send out to the world.
The second vow called on me to create regular times of rest and reflection in my life, to not get so carried away by the needs of others that I become burned out in the process.
And the third seemed to point to a way to live mindfully on the earth. On further reflection, I realized it worked on a metaphorical level as well. I was being invited to lighten my psychic load along with my physical load.
The more I sat with each of these vows, the more they resonated with deep needs inside of me that I wasn’t even aware I had.
For a number of years, I said these vows to myself at the start of every day, following my morning meditation period. It’s a practice I now realize I’ve fallen out of the habit of as I write this. And I realize it’s time to return to it.
This practice of creating, reciting, and remembering these vows changed my life in subtle but powerful ways. They continually help me to realign my compass toward my inner truth, to stay in my center rather than reacting to what’s coming at me.
I’ve learned that vows aren’t about someone else telling us what to do. They are discipline that comes from the inside out. This is the kind of discipline that can free us to be true to our deepest values.
Vows are really promises or agreements that we make with ourselves. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech can be seen as an expression of his intention. The “four agreements” from Toltec teacher Don Miguel Ruiz are another inspiring example of this kind of personal vow.
How to Create Your Own Personal Vows
My vows came to me in the form of an intuitive gift and were framed in the context of my spiritual practice. But you certainly don’t need to have some wild kind of channeling experience or be a Buddhist in order to create your own set of personal vows and make it a daily practice to commit yourself to them.
Your vows may not necessarily even be in verbal form. If you practice yoga, for example, it might be that your deepest intention – meeting whatever comes to you during your day with openness and love – is embodied in the Sun Salutation pose.
What matters is that whatever you discern to be your vows, you hold these with a conscious intention every day. They will help to guide your choices, and your life, in ways that you might not be able to imagine.
Here are some questions to help guide your process of creating your personal vows:
What is most important to me right now?
What is missing from my life that would truly nourish me?
What energy would I like to call into my life?
What promises do I need to make to myself in order to live life to the fullest?
What is my unique contribution and commitment to making the world a better place?
How about you — have you made any vows to yourself? How have they made a difference in your life? Join the conversation… always one of the best parts of Substack!
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See https://www.sfzc.org/offerings/establishing-practice/sixteen-bodhisattva-precepts
As long as discipline comes from a place of love and not scarcity, it works with us rather than against us!
This is interesting. Like you, I chafe at anything that feels like restriction or discipline. Plus, I really don't believe that anything can last forever. For these reasons, I don't make vows. I worry that I'll just break them (and that would harm my sense of integrity)
But as I reflect on your vows, I feel like they come from a deeper place--almost more like sign-posts pointing the way than rules imposed from above. In that way, I have internal vows that have pointed my way for my whole life. I would never break them.
So this makes me wonder: are vows meant to push us outside our comfort zone? To urge us forward and hold us accountable, even in discomfort? Or are they meant to codify and name what we already know to be true?
I know this is just a rephrasing of what you wrote in your article. But somehow, the ideas that you wrote about are showing up in a new way for me. Thank you.