The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
“Action is about living fully. Inaction is sitting in front of the television every day for years because you are afraid to be alive and take the risk of expressing what you are. Expressing what you are is taking action. You can have many great ideas in your head but what makes the difference is action. Without action upon an idea, there will be no manifestation, no results, and reward. ”
My Notes
This is why humans resist life. To be alive is the biggest fear humans have. Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express what we really are. Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans. We have learned to live our lives trying to satisfy other people’s demands. We have learned to live by other people’s points of view because of the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else. (page 17)
We have the need to be accepted and to be loved by others, but we cannot accept and love ourselves. The more self-love we have, the less we will experience self-abuse. Self-abuse comes from self-rejection, and self-rejection comes from having an image of what it means to be perfect and never measuring up to that ideal. Our image of perfection is the reason we reject ourselves; it is why we don’t accept ourselves the way we are, and why we don’t accept others the way they are. (page 21)
The 1st Agreement: Be Impeccable with Your Word
Your word is the power that you have to create. Your word is the gift that comes directly from God.
It is through the word that you manifest everything. Regardless of what language you speak, your intent manifests through the word. What you dream, what you feel, and what you really are, will all be manifest through the word. (page 26)
Impeccability means “without sin.” A sin is anything that you do which goes against yourself. When you are impeccable, you take responsibility for your action but you do not judge or blame yourself.
Being impeccable with your word is the correct use of your energy; it means to use your energy in the direction of truth and love for yourself. If you make an argument with yourself to be impeccable with your word, just with that intention the truth will manifest through you and clean all the emotional poison that exists within you.
Whenever we hear an opinion and believe it, we make an agreement, and it becomes part of our belief system.
Imagine that every single time others gossip to you, they insert a computer virus into your mind, causing you to think a little less clearly every time. Then imagine that in an effort to clean up your own confusion and get some relief from the poison, you gossip and spread these viruses to someone else. (page 40)
Your opinion is nothing but your point of view. It is not necessarily true. Your opinion comes from your beliefs, your own ego, and your own dream. We create all this poison and spread it to others just so we can feel right about our own point of view. When you become impeccable with your word, your mind is no longer fertile ground for words that come from black magic. Instead it is fertile for the words that come from love. You can measure the impeccability of your word by your level of self-love. How much you love yourself and how you feel about yourself are directly proportional to the quality and integrity of your word.
The 2nd agreement; Don’t Take Anything Personally
You take it personally because you agree with whatever was said.
Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.
If someone gives you an opinion and says “hey you look so fat,” don’t take this personally because the truth is that this person is dealing with his or her own feelings and beliefs and opinions. That person tried to send poison to you and if you take it personally, then you take that poison and it becomes yours. (page 49)
But it is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I touch by what I have said. You are hurting yourself.
Don’t take anything personally because by taking things personally you set yourself up to suffer for nothing.
As you make a habit of not taking anything personally, you won’t need to place your trust in what others do or say. You will only need to trust yourself to make responsible choices. You are never responsible for the actions of others; you are only responsible for you.
The 3rd Agreement: Don’t Make Assumptions
Because we are afraid to ask for clarification, we make assumptions, and believe we are right about the assumption; then we defend our assumptions and try to make someone else wrong. It is always better to ask questions than to make an assumption, because assumptions set us for suffering. (page 65)
In any kind of relationship we can make the assumption that others know what we think, and we don’t have to say what we want. They are going to do what we want because they know us so well. If they don’t do what we want, what we assume they should do, we feel hurt and think, “how could they do that? you should know.”Again, we make the assumption that the other person knows what we want.
It is very interesting how the human mind works. We have the need to justify everything, to explain and understand everything, in order to feel safe. We have millions of questions that need answers because there are so many things that the reasoning mind cannot explain. It is not important if the answer is correct; just the answer itself makes us feel safe. This is why we make assumptions.
We make all sorts of assumptions because we don’t have the courage to ask questions.
Real love is accepting other people the way they are without trying to change them. If we try to change them, this means we don’t really like them.
The way to keep yourself from making assumptions is to ask questions. Make sure the communication is clear. If you don’t understand, ask. Have the courage to ask questions until you are as clear as you can be, and even then do not assume you know all there is to know about a given situation. Once you hear the answer you will not have to make assumptions because you will know the truth.
Find your voice to ask for what you want.
The day you stop making assumptions you will communicate cleanly and clearly, free of emotional poison. Without making assumptions your word becomes impeccable.
The 4th Agreement: Always Do Your Best
Keep doing your best – no more and no less than your best. If you try too hard do more than your best, you will spend more energy than is needed and in the end your best will not be enough. When you overdo, you deplete your body and go against yourself and it will take longer to accomplish your goal.
If you always do your best there is no way you can judge yourself.
You are not here to sacrifice your joy or your life. You are here to live, to be happy, and to love. If you can do your best in two hours of meditation, but you spend eight hours instead, you will only grow tired, miss the point, and you won’t enjoy your life. Do your best, and perhaps you will learn that no matter how long you meditate, you can live, love and be happy.
Doing your best, you are going to live your life intensely.
Doing your best is taking the action because you love it, not because you’re expecting a reward.
There are many ways that we hurt ourselves when we don’t like who we are. If you take action just for the sake of doing it, without expecting a reward, you will find that you enjoy every action you do. Rewards will come but you are not attached. You can eve get more than you would have imagined for yourself without expecting a reward. If we like what we do, if we always do our best, then we are really enjoying life.
When you do your best, you learn to accept yourself. But you have to be aware and learn from your mistakes. Learning from your mistakes means you practice, look honestly at the results, and keep practicing. This increases your awareness.
You do your best because doing your best all the time makes you happy. When you are doing your best just for the pleasure of doing it, you are taking action because you enjoy the action.
Action is about living fully. Inaction is sitting in front of the television every day for years because you are afraid to be alive and take the risk of expressing what you are. Expressing what you are is taking action. You can have many great ideas in your head but what makes the difference is action. Without action upon an idea, there will be no manifestation, no results, and reward.
You were born with the right to be happy. You were born with the right to love, to enjoy and to share your love. You are alive, so take your life and enjoy it. Don’t resist life passing through you, because that is God passing through you. Just to be, to take a risk and enjoy your life is all that matters. Say no when you want to say no and yes when you want to say yes. You have the right to be you. You can only be you when you do your best. When you don’t do your best you are denying yourself the right to be you. (page 85).