In the best-selling book “The Four Agreements” Don Miguel Ruiz, based on ancient Toltec wisdom, gives four principles to practice in order to create love and happiness in your life. Adopting and committing to these agreements is simple. Upon reading Don Miguel’s wisdom many people have their eyes opened to a new possibility for living life.
As you practice living these four agreements your life will dramatically change. In the beginning these new habits will be challenging and you will lapse countless times. With practice these agreements become integrated into your being and every area of your life and become easy habits to keep.
During our early life we began making agreements. We also learned behaviors and habits in school, church, and from other adults and children on the playground. The impact of other people’s opinions and reactions to us became a very strong force in the habits we created. In this process we created agreements in our mind of who we should be, what we shouldn’t be, who we were, and who we were not.
The Four Agreements are:
- Be Impeccable with your Word:
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the Word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your Word in the direction of truth and love.
- Don’t Take Anything Personally:
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering. - Don’t Make Assumptions:
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life. - Always Do Your Best:
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.
The decision
When you decide to change your life and adopt the “Four Agreements” you are challenging the beliefs you learned and the habits you practiced since your childhood domestication.
Adopting the Four Agreements creates a conflict in the mind between expressing yourself impeccably with love and your existing fear based beliefs. At the same time living the Four Agreements has taken you on the most rewarding and profound journey of happiness and fulfillment beyond anything you could have imagined. The hard work in the beginning is rewarded to you in every interaction every day of your life. This is a very big return for a small investment of time and effort.
Spiritual Warriors
Don Miguel refers to people who decide to adopt the Four Agreements and create love and happiness in their life as Spiritual Warriors. It is Spiritual because it is about living your Life. It is also referred to as a war because you are challenging the old fear based beliefs in your mind. It will take more than a week and a half to break free of fear, the tyranny of the inner judge, and old emotional habits. There will be some battles lost along the way, but that is of minor concern in the longer term strategy of creating happiness in your life.
The Quest for Personal Freedom
The quest of a Spiritual Warrior is for Personal Freedom. Personal Freedom means freedom from fear, illusions, and the fear-based beliefs in the mind. In essence it means to win the war over the beliefs in the mind. It is with Personal Freedom that we are free of the human condition of emotional suffering. Spiritual traditions around the world have their own names for this state of awareness including nirvana and heaven. It is a state that is simply described as living your life with unconditional love, gratitude, and respect, for yourself, and for others.
This article was originally written by Gary van Warmerdam in and was published on Toltec Spirit