The Four Agreements Part 5 of 5: Always Do Your Best
January 16, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
Today we conclude our five-part series on Don Miguel Ruiz’s book, The Four Agreements, celebrating ancient Toltec wisdom so that we can pursue our own personal freedom to create our dream of happiness. The first 3 agreements in summary are as follows: be impeccable with your word, don’t take anything personally, don’t make assumptions. Today’s is “always do your best.”
Doing our best is the embodiment of the first 3 agreements. It is the way that we can accomplish the first 3 agreements, and it will represent a constant struggle on a daily basis to attain. Doing our best does not mean doing more or less than our best but simply our best. There was a man who approached a religious Master asking him, “How do I attain transcendence?” The Master said, “Spend four hours a day in meditation.” The man asked, “How long then will it take for me to attain transcendence?” The Master replied, “Meditating for 4 hours a day will allow you to attain transcendence in ten years.” The man then said, “What if I meditate for 8 hours a day? How long then would it take?” The Master replied, “It would probably take about 20 years.” The man looked quizzically and probed further, “How is that?” The master explained, “We are here to live life and to enjoy our life. If you only need 2 hours a day to meditate, but you spend 8 hours a day, you will frustrate your ability to attain happiness. Do your best and perhaps you will learn that no matter how long you meditate, you can live, love, and be happy.”
Sometimes, we spend too much of our effort to be our best and we diminish our pleasure in so doing. Sometimes, we do not spend enough effort and we lose pleasure as well. Doing our best is the most important thing to do. For example, sometimes we go to work simply to work to get a paycheck and do not enjoy the action that we do. If we don’t enjoy our work and don’t take pleasure in the action, we can never do our best. Instead we work all week so that we can escape during the weekend, in which we punish ourselves through self-hating behavior of intoxication and self-disregard. Then we start over again.
Our best will vary. We will not always be at our best. But our contract is that we don’t give up simply because we fail at one time or that we don’t succeed in our effort to be our best. Our contract to be our best, which entails following the first 3 agreements (be impeccable with your word, don’t take anything personally, don’t make assumptions) will need to be renewed all the time. The more that we submit to these 4 agreements, the fewer failures we will encounter and the easier we will find our path to accomplish them. The more we submit to our past dreams, i.e., past failures or past indiscretions, the more that we cannot live fully in today’s moment. We must live in the action of today and take pleasure in doing so. When we take a shower, feel the water hit your body in a cleansing way. When we eat, taste the beauty of the food that enters your mouth. Live today and for today. If you fail, never mind. Try again to succeed. If you live your life in this way, you have no option but to live in a blissful state so that your personal dream is a dream of heaven and no longer self torment. I am working on my own path to personal freedom, and the act of writing these blogs helps me every day try to be better than I was yesterday. It is helping me taste life a little sweeter and to unburden myself of my own human failings.
All my best,
Sam Lam
The Four Agreements Part 4 of 5: Don’t Make Assumptions
January 15, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
For those readers who don’t realize that this blog series CANNOT be read in isolation but should be read as a continuous whole, please read the last 3 days of blogs to get a clear grasp of today’s. It will be impossible to understand today’s blog without knowledge and digestion of the past 3 days’ blogs. Even if you have read the last 3 days’ blog, if you have time today, reread and reflect on them before you embark on reading today’s.
Today’s blog covers the 3rd of 4 agreements: “don’t make assumptions.” Too often we lack the courage to ask questions but instead we fall back on our outdated and biased belief systems that color our opinions. Simply asking the other person a clarifying question could be all that is needed to avoid a devastating assumption that can have lingering impact for both parties. We assume too much, and an assumption makes an Ass out of U and Me as the old joke goes. The other person has the right to say yes or no just as much as we have the right to ask the question. When in doubt, ask a question until there is no doubt that remains. Open dialogue between both parties so that assumptions fall away.
Taking things personally and making assumptions are the two things that have gotten mankind into unnecessary wars, escalated violence, created pandemonium, and torn relationships asunder. Starting with being impeccable with your word is a prerequisite. Being impeccable means being open, honest, direct, and unassuming. Assumptions tear relationships apart for no better reason than both parties fell back onto their old agreements, i.e., their own biases on how they see the world without confirming with the other person if that interpretation was an accurate one.
In a relationship, we hear too often, “I love him/her but I can change that person.” Such terms are not unconditional, and these words serve to undermine the very bedrock of that relationship. Acceptance of the other must be all encompassing and devoid of an impetus to change the other. We simply assume the other will change or we make assumptions as to their intents when those intents are not clearly outlined to us. We must clarify those intents through our being impeccable with our word and not taking something personally. We offer the other a light of pure love and generosity through which the other can accept our words. Through being impeccable with our word, not taking things personally, and not making assumptions we can enter our own dream of heaven and exit our own self-imposed hell. Tomorrow we conclude our journey, so that you can begin yours.
The Four Agreements Part 3 of 5: Don’t Take Anything Personally
January 14, 2009 by dr. lam · 13 Comments
The second agreement is based on the understanding of the first (be impeccable with your word); in fact, all subsequent agreements are predicated on committing to the first agreement. If you did not read yesterday’s blog, please take a moment to do so so that you can fully appreciate today’s message: “don’t take anything personally.”
As we discussed yesterday, when you take something another says personally, you have fallen under the black magic of the other person. The other person cannot hurt you if you don’t allow it. The only way that the other individual can create chaos in your heart is if there is already an emotional wound that is open and your belief system already subscribes to what the other person is inflicting. “You are so stupid.” You quietly assent, “Yes, I am.” What you don’t assent to consciously is the mantra that has been perpetrated against you in your youth that you were given this agreement by another individual and you chose to hold on to that belief system and carry it forward. However, if someone calls you a dirty name and your heart does not permit the injury, then it won’t happen. The emotional bruising that is inflicted is actually deepened in the sender when the receiver refuses to accept the insult.
As stated yesterday, the insult that the person levels against you reflects more about the person giving it than the receiver. When you say, “You are fat.” It mostly reflects the sender’s own issues with his or her self identity and associated insecurity. If you have been programmed all your life that you are overweight, your brain will accept the other’s emotional poison as veracity and you will be crippled by it. Just remember that when someone speaks ill of you, it most likely reflects an internally directed dialogue that exhibits that person’s weakness rather than yours.
Many times the reason that we accept an insult or personal sleight is that we have conflicting messages that circulate in our own dream by virtue of our mitote, or fog, that I discussed on Monday’s introductory blog. We don’t trust ourselves because we don’t have a single, clear message that we tell ourselves. We are living our own personal dream in a fog. So when someone else wants to level their claim against us, we accept it since the voice is louder than our very own. We as humans tend to create our own suffering and revel in it. Whether we choose to live in our own personally designated hell is a question of our own volition.
Tack up a message on your refrigerator that reads, “Don’t take anything personally” as a first step toward implementing the second agreement. Be impeccable with your word so that you don’t let anyone inflict injury on you and so that you don’t take anything personally. Tomorrow we continue onward with our journey.
The Four Agreements Part 2 of 5: Be Impeccable With Your Word
January 13, 2009 by dr. lam · 11 Comments
The first agreement is the most important agreement that you must have with yourself; it is at once the most powerful but also the most difficult to keep. We must struggle with it on a daily basis but we must not let a failure from yesterday influence our decision to continue with our fulfillment of this agreement. Many times we live either in the past or in the future, but we must live in the present moment so that we maintain each agreement as a daily renewable contract with ourselves.
Words are magical. The words that we use reflect more of ourselves than of those we speak. In the Gospel of John, it says, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word is God.” The words we choose to use can either be pure magic filled with love, compassion, and generosity or be black magic that casts a spell on all those who hear it. One man in Germany stirred up an intelligent nation to commit the most grievous atrocities and acts of violence 70 years ago simply through the use of his word.
To be impeccable with your word means to be without sin in your use of words. Impeccable comes from the Latin “im-” meaning without and “peccatus” meaning sin. We sin against ourselves first and foremost but we sin against others when we use words in a harmful way. When a child singing beautifully hears her mother say, “Stop singing! You have an ugly voice.” That child carries that agreement, or belief system, for the rest of her life. Even though the mother may have been irritated by any voice in her proximity no matter how angelic, the child will bear the burden of not wanting to sing forever until someone might break her spell with a new agreement, “Wow, you have the most amazing voice! Why don’t you sing for me?”
When we call someone “stupid”, we are not being impeccable with our word. If someone called you stupid in the past, and you are living with that legacy, you must make a new agreement with yourself to free yourself from the chains of another’s black magic. That person calling you stupid, uneducated, foolish, or whatever is pointing his or own finger at himself not at you.
The most emotionally poisonous black magic that we can throw is gossip. When we speak ill of someone else around us, we cast a terrible spell. If you are impeccable with your word, the spell cannot be cast on you no matter how black the magic the person uses. Being impeccable with your word creates an aura of love and acceptance that does not accept the black magic of the other person’s word. But you cannot be impeccable with your word if you cast that black magic. Using words to demean others reflects more on the person that speaks it than it does on the person against whom the words are used.
This first agreement must be made with yourself. It is an agreement to leave your own self-imposed hell. It allows you to only use words in an impeccable way. If you fail, do not abandon your quest. But begin anew. Be impeccable with your word.
The Four Agreements Part 1 of 5: The Fog & The Dream
January 12, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
Well, this week we move from the wisdom of the Far East to return to our hemisphere to learn from the ancient tribe of southern Mexico, the Toltecs, who practiced a not explicitly religious but nevertheless spiritual path to guide one’s life in a profound yet practical way. The wisdom from these blogs comes from Don Miguel Ruiz’s book, The Four Agreements. Today we will introduce the idea of what state we are in in our lives so that you can understand the necessity and the method of applying the Four Agreements over the next week.
The Toltecs looked at the way that we perceive ourselves as dirtied by a thick fog, which they called mitote (pronounced mih-toe’-tay). The belief systems that we have are instilled in us as a child, which we then carry forward for the remainder of our lives most oftentimes unwittingly. The Toltecs framed life as a 24/7 dream with an external dream and an internal dream. The external dream is what others have created in us as Ruiz argues through a process of “domestication” starting with our parents. If our parents say, “Son, you are no good.” We carry those limitations with us and we believe in those words even though it hurts us to do so.
Ruiz, a Toltec himself, posits that humans are the only beings that hurt themselves a thousand times for the same mistake. We also tend to hurt others for that one mistake that was made, whereas animals make a mistake and move forward. We allow others to abuse us, to judge us, and to permit ourselves to be victims because that is the domestication that was handed down to us. In fact, we can maintain relationships that are painful so long as that pain of abuse does not exceed our level of self abuse and self hatred. If you hate yourself to a certain degree, and someone else treats you worse than you treat yourself, you will divorce yourself from that person’s presence. However, if you are filled with self loathing, then even if the person treats you badly if it is less than your own self perception of abuse, you will tolerate that abuse and allow it to be perpetuated indefinitely.
In The Four Agreements, Ruiz uses ancient Toltec wisdom to help an individual break free from these draining belief systems, or old agreements, to create new agreements that emanate from one’s own personal dream to influence and shape the external dream. Why subscribe to the four internal agreements? Simply put, so that you can free yourself from your own personal hell and create your own dream of heaven. So that you can reduce your own internal pain and free yourself since no one else can do that for you. As you break these old agreements, you will see that you won’t be drained but you will be filled with a newfound sense of energy that will then feed itself to provide you even more energy, as you pursue your dream of happiness. What are these four agreements? Well, we will cover one each day over this next week. I hope you find this ancient wisdom as enlightening as I have in my personal quest for self improvement and self actualization.