Four very simple agreements to make with yourself:
1) Be impeccable with your word
2) Don't take anything personally
3) Don't make assumptions
4) Always do your best
"We make the assumption that everyone sees life the way we do. We assume that others think the way we think, feel the way we feel, judge the way we judge, and abuse the way we abuse. This is the biggest assumption that humans make. And this is why we have a fear of being ourselves around others. Because we think everyone else will judge us, victimize us, abuse us, and blame us as we do ourselves. So even before others have a chance to reject us, we have already rejected ourselves." (75)
(San Rafael: Amber-Allen Publishing, 1997)
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3 comments:
Hey, did you hear of this book on exmo? There was a poster advocating it on there that peaked my interest a couple months ago. You should amend this with a link to that if you can find it...I can't. I remember the poster's explanation of the "take nothing personally" part being especially intriguing to me. I'm assuming from your short post that it wasn't so eye-opening or life-changing for you...
Yeah, I was also really intrigued by that exmo post -- which is what got me reading this. It was a sliiightly eye-opening book. I say slightly because it only reinforced things I feel I already knew. The overly-simplistic examples Ruiz gives were pretty irritating... at times I sort of felt like I was reading a self-help book for 4 year olds... but at the same time I gleaned some comfort from that simplicity.
The whole "dont take anything personally" part is probably the most important piece of advice. Especially for me. I like how he says that every comment and every action that another person plays on you is not really about YOU but is about them and about how they view their world, their dream at that moment (he calls our personal world a "dream"). This dream is in our minds. It is made up of all the rules and ideas that society, religion, and our upbringing have ingrained in us. Ruiz calls this process of taking on these rules and boundaries our "domestication". When we become teenagers and adults, this domestication becomes self-enforced as we essentially build the walls of our own prisons. The only way to escape our own personal hell is to break all the harmful agreements that we made unwittingly as children with the adults and world around us, and to reforge our own agreements now that we are consciously free to do so. I like how he says to take neither compliments nor criticism personally. Someone telling you you're a fantastic person truly has very little to do with you, and has more to do with the way that person who said so is feeling at the moment. It really levels the field. By accepting ourselves as we are and accepting others as they are, we can find freedom. Makes me think of the whole idea behind namaste, how the god in me greets the god in you.
Anyway, is it life-changing? I hope practicing these four agreements will have that eventual result. At the very least it definitely got me thinking about how to behave better, to think more clearly, to live more peaceably with the people I interact with on a daily basis. It's definitely worth reading.
(I couldn't find that thread on exmo just now either.. it was written back in early november I think. Has probably already been deleted)
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