The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

by Miguel Ruiz

When you overdo, you deplete your body and go against yourself, and it will take you longer to accomplish your goal.

You are here to live, to be happy, and to love.

You are going to be productive, you are going to be good to yourself, because you will be giving yourself to your family, to your community, to everything.

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.

learn from your mistakes.

Action is about living fully.

Say no when you want to say no, and yes when you want to say yes.

Don’t expect that you will always be able to be impeccable with your word. Your routine habits are too strong and firmly rooted in your mind. But you can do your best. Don’t expect that you will never take anything personally; just do your best. Don’t expect that you will never make another assumption, but you can certainly do your best.

Exercise and do what makes your body feel good.

if you honor your body everything will change for you.

you are going to have a beautiful life.

keep your attention on today, and stay in the present moment.

Our normal human tendency is to enjoy life, to play, to explore, to be happy, and to love.

It is time to be free from the role of the Victim.

happiest moments of your life — when the real you comes out, when you don’t care about the past and you don’t worry about the future. You are childlike.

The freedom we are looking for is the freedom to be ourselves, to express ourselves.

The first step toward personal freedom is awareness.

Your life is the manifestation of your dream; it is an art.

One function of the brain is to transform material energy into emotional energy.

The warrior is one who rebels against the invasion of the parasite.

It is a place of joy, a place where we are happy, where we are free to love and to be who we really are.

The parasite can be compared to a monster with a thousand heads. Every head of the parasite is one of the fears that we have.

we face each of our fears, one by one.

stop feeding the parasite.

gain control of our emotions,

initiation of the dead.

When we “die” symbolically the parasite has to die.

The process of domestication can be called the dream of the first attention

One way to change your beliefs is to focus your attention on all those agreements and beliefs, and change the agreements with yourself.

choose what to believe and what not to believe.

the whole drama of your life is the result of what you believe, and what you believe is not real,

develop awareness of all the self-limiting, fear-based beliefs that make you unhappy.

the Art of Transformation,

for every agreement you break that makes you suffer, you will need to replace it with a new agreement that makes you happy.

our agreements are actually like a strong addiction.

put repetition in action. Practicing the new agreements in your life is how your best becomes better.

Every day we awake with a certain amount of mental, emotional, and physical energy that we spend throughout the day.

First we need the truth to open the emotional wounds, take the poison out, and heal the wounds completely.

forgive

We can choose to forgive because we feel compassion for ourselves.

Once you forgive yourself, the self-rejection in your mind is over.

accept yourself just the way you are.

You will know you have forgiven someone when you see them and you no longer have an emotional reaction.

the denial system.

It is the emotions that control the behavior of the human, not the human who controls the emotions. When we lose control we say things that we don’t want to say, and do things that we don’t want to do.

learn to control the emotions so we have enough personal power to change our fear-based agreements,

the discipline to be ourselves, no matter what.

warrior has control.

Not control over another human, but control over one’s own emotions, control over one’s own self. It is when we lose control that we repress t...