Promises are an integral part of many people’s lives in this reality, but they may not create the outcome you’ve been counting on. In fact, best selling author and founder of Access Consciousness™, Gary Douglas, has found that they are most often a source of limitation.

One of the difficulties is that we make promises, for example, “’til death do us part.” This creates a limitation because, as infinite beings, do we actually die? Your body does, but you as an infinite being live on forever.

So what happens to those promises we’ve made? Douglas and his business partner and co-author, Dr. Dain Heer, have found that those promises hang out in the ethers, in effect, just waiting to snag us into the tentacles of limitation the next time we embody…or the next….or the next.

What would that look like? Have you ever seen someone across a crowded room and felt that “chemical attraction” in the form of “I have to have him (or her)!?” That’s a sure fire indication that the object of your current desire is someone you made a promise to in a former lifetime.

They don’t necessarily have to be the never-ending soul mate you’ve been dreaming of. In fact, “We’ve all been it all, and done it all,” says Douglas. We’ve even been rapists, murders, and pillagers of all sorts in one lifetime or another—which is one reason that none of us is in a position to judge anyone for their choices. Whatever the person we’d like to judge has done, we’ve done it, too, no matter how lily white and spiritual we believe we are in this lifetime.

So back to that person that’s hypnotizing you from across the room—the energetic attraction you feel doesn’t have to be romantic at all. They may have, for instance, been a marauding king that you promised to follow forever. This lifetime that might look like following them into an abyss of drug addiction, or anything else. Is following them really a promise you still wish to keep?

Even if they were your soul mate, returned to re-ignite the love of all lifetimes, is it in your best interest to renew your relationship complete with all the old baggage of past lifetimes? It is possible to destroy all those old promises, which actually allows you more freedom to create the relationship you would really like to have here and now.

It has often been observed that the frequency of copulation among married couples declines with the length of their relationship. One of the reasons for this is that judgments tend to pile up in the corners until there’s no room left in the relationship for joy or affection. The tools that clear up the gunk from old lifetimes work equally well for clearing up the debris from this one.

One easy way to clear up all that old baggage—from former lifetimes or this one—is simply to destroy and uncreate your relationship every day.

One happily married couple who are clients of Douglas and Heer’s did this on their 27^th anniversary. The husband asked his wife what she would like for their anniversary. She said she would like to destroy and uncreate their relationship every day.

“Does that mean you want a divorce?” asked her husband.

“No, no,” the wife assured him. “I just want to destroy and uncreate our relationship every day.” She knew that doing so would bring a freshness to their relationship. They now work and travel together, and are even more successful in their relationship and their finances than they were before she made her request.

Promises can take many forms. Some of the words Douglas and Heer have discovered that describe the energetic ties that bind include “oaths, vows, swearings, fealties, comealties, promises, and commitments.” Each of these has a slightly different energy, like the different facets of a diamond. Asking to clear every single one of them can create a more thorough erasure of those moldy old promises.

Some of these terms are self-explanatory, but what’s a fealty or comealty? A fealty is a promise from feudal times, such as when a serf swore his loyalty to a king in return for his protection. A comealty is a fealty that has actually melded into your physical structure, like a blood oath on steroids.

All of these promises in disguise are commitments you made, which means they continue to exist ad infinitum until you choose to destroy them. Are you ready to get rid of that old garbage? All you have to do is ask, “All the oaths, vows, swearings, fealties, comealties, promises, and commitments I have to (put the name of anyone in your life here), I rescind, revoke, recant, renounce, denounce, destroy, and uncreate all those.”

For added potency, you can add the Access Consciousness™ clearing statement to it, “right, wrong, good, bad, all 9, POD, POC, shorts, boys and beyonds.” (You don’t have to understand this; it still works as the magical vacuum cleaner that sweeps up all the old garbage you can name.)

We can swear not only to love somebody forever (whether that’s in our best interest or not), but also to do all kinds of other things with them—like get even, dominate them forever, or even kill again and again.

One woman found her life impossible to create because she was so traumatized by sexual abuse she believed she had suffered by her 16-year-old male cousin when she was 9. Years of therapy did nothing to move her out of her paralysis apparently caused by this childhood incident.

When Douglas finally asked the relevant question, “Was this incident caused by a desire for revenge?” she blurted out, “Yes, I swore to get even with that a**shole and I did!” Her abuser had been her father’s favorite relative, but the family disowned him after discovering this abuse. To this day, he remains a drunk living on the street.

Recognizing the swearings of that past lifetime allowed her to move out of being an eternal victim of abuse into creating a life that actually functioned.

Of course, Douglas did ask her to “rescind, revoke, recant, renounce, denounce, destroy and uncreate all her oaths, vows, swearings, fealties and comealties” to the cousin, so at least she could have some freedom.

Another kind of promise that can stick us was recently discovered at the “Beyond the 7-Day class” in Australia. That promise is allegiance. We’ve all been pledging allegiance endlessly, it seems, and not just in Boy Scouts or grade school.

We pledge allegiance not only to entities like our country, but also to concepts like our own poverty, lack of potency, or limitation. We pledge allegiance to our limitations every day, Douglas informs us. Is it any wonder Douglas likes to call participants in his seminars (as well as their co-habitants on planet earth) “cute but not bright?”

These self-destructive pledges can take many forms. Whenever we define anything as right, or our point of view of it as right, we pledge allegiance to it. Anything that stays in your life, that you can’t get rid of or let go of, is something you have allegiance to.

Every time you try to fit in, every time you try to do things the way other people do them, every time you do anything according to the rules of any aspect of this reality, you are pledging allegiance to this reality and eliminating what is possible with the laws of consciousness. When you pledge allegiance to anything, you make that thing more valuable than you.

One way to discover some of the things you have allegiance to is to look at what you are determined NOT to be. That very characteristic you avoid like the plague is actually something you have pledged allegiance to. If you avoid irritating people, for example, you have an allegiance to irritation. Whenever you have either a resistance to or an intensity towards anything, that’s your allegiance towards that subject. Whenever you react to anyone or anything, they have the power, and you don’t.

Are you stuck with these promises forever? Only if you’re not willing to ask to become aware of them and destroy them. Some of them may be deeply hidden, but as Douglas says, one of the truths in the Bible is “ask and you shall receive.” Even if you don’t know what these promises are, you can ask them to become energetically present and destroy and uncreate them—even if they’re so secret you’ve kept them hidden from yourself at all costs.

It could create a freedom from stuckness you’ve been struggling all your life to get out of. What if it could be that easy? Would you be willing to give it a try? Promise?