The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book)

by Miguel Ruiz

Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus only on that which we want to perceive.

With that fear of being punished and that fear of not getting the reward, we start pretending to be what we are not, just to please others, just to be good enough for someone else.

That 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.

In your whole life nobody has ever abused you more than you have abused yourself. And the limit of your self-abuse is exactly the limit that you will tolerate from someone else.

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.

If you want to live a life of joy and fulfillment, you have to find the courage to break those agreements that are fear-based and claim your personal power. The agreements that come from fear require us to expend a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love help us to conserve energy and even gain extra energy.

The first agreement is to be impeccable with your word. It sounds very simple, but it is very, very powerful.

When you are impeccable, you take responsibility for your actions, 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.

Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about “me.”