The Second Agreement

Until now, I have not had time to get back to my dis­cus­sion of “The Four Agree­ments” that I began in the post below enti­tled “Sticks and Stones.”

I emphat­i­cally rec­om­mend this book. It is a gem, filled with affirm­ing and uplift­ing guid­ance for liv­ing a bal­anced, healthy life.

The Four Agree­ments, again, are:

1. Be Impec­ca­ble with Your Word
2. Don’t Take Any­thing Personally
3. Don’t Make Assumptions
4. Always Do Your Best

I think that the sec­ond agree­ment is the most dif­fi­cult to live by.

Why?

Because every­thing is all about me, of course!

But it really isn’t. Author Don Miguel Ruiz calls that “per­sonal impor­tance.” He points out that we should not take any­thing that hap­pens around us per­son­ally. We take things per­son­ally because deep inside we agree with what is being said about us and we become trapped in our selfishness.

But he teaches that “[n]othing 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.”

And here is where it gets really dif­fi­cult: “Even when a sit­u­a­tion seems so per­sonal, even if oth­ers insult you directly, it has noth­ing to do with you. What they say, what they do, and the opin­ions they give are accord­ing to the agree­ments they have in their own minds. Their point of view comes from all the pro­gram­ming they received dur­ing domestication.”

For me, it is really easy to live by this prin­ci­ple where out­ra­geous or out­landish behav­ior is con­cerned. The tag line above is a per­fect exam­ple. It is easy to under­stand that some­one who calls another per­son a “neg­a­tive and dis­rup­tive spirit” has per­sonal issues that moti­vate him/her to make such an “over the top” statement.

In my esti­ma­tion, it is much harder, how­ever, to dis­re­gard the smaller, more triv­ial com­ments like, for instance, “Have you gained weight?” Such com­ments are more eas­ily believed and taken to heart because there is more likely to be a ker­nel of truth in them that does, in fact, have to do with me. The speaker is prob­a­bly observ­ing some­thing that I would rather he/she not see. But to achieve true hap­pi­ness, we have to resist the temp­ta­tion to believe and buy into oth­ers’ state­ments because, accord­ing to Ruiz, by accept­ing the speaker’s words, you “eat all their emo­tional garbage, and now it becomes your garbage.”

I find that to be a very accu­rate state­ment of how I some­times react. I inter­nal­ize crit­i­cism that I think might be grounded in fact and allow it to eat away at me, just as he describes.

The cycle con­tin­ues when we become offended, and then we expend energy try­ing to prove that we are right and the speaker is wrong. Instead, we need to remem­ber that what­ever some­one else thinks or feels is their prob­lem, not ours.

And here’s where it gets very tricky: No one else can hurt us. We can only hurt our­selves. So when some­one says some­thing to us that we find hurt­ful, we must bear in mind that it is not what they said that hurts us, but the old wounds their words touch. We hurt ourselves.

We all have our own unique truth, so “if you get mad at me, I know you are deal­ing with your­self. I am the excuse for you to get mad. And you get mad because you are afraid, because you are deal­ing with fear. If you are not afraid, there is no way you will get mad at me. If you are not afraid, there is no way you will hate me. If you are not afraid, there is no way you will be jeal­ous or sad.”

Con­versely, if we take noth­ing any­one else says or does per­son­ally, we can live in a state of per­pet­ual bliss, at peace, happy, and always enjoy­ing the beauty around us. Sounds Utopian.

To put his phi­los­o­phy to the test, think of an argu­ment you have had with another per­son. Think about the things the two of you have said to each other. Accord­ing to Ruiz, you were both really talk­ing to and about your­selves. So if you say some­thing hurt­ful to another per­son, for instance, “I can’t believe you did some­thing so dumb,” that per­son should hear your words as an indi­ca­tion of what is going on inside you and your words are not really an indi­ca­tion of his/her intel­li­gence. He/she should under­stand that you are speak­ing from a place of fear and anger and not take your words personally.

That part makes a great deal of sense to me because as I think about con­flicts I have had with another per­son, I can see where they said or did some­thing about or to me that was really moti­vated by their own fear. Usu­ally, it is a fear of los­ing some­thing — in most instances, power, either real or per­ceived. This isn’t earth-shattering, given that we are all power-hungry crea­tures, in vary­ing degrees and to var­i­ous extents, depend­ing upon the circumstances.

Add to this equa­tion what we hear in our own mind, some­times from an out­side source such as the Holy Spirit. We have a choice to believe “the voices we hear within our own minds,” just as we choose whether to believe what we hear externally.

Finally, if we take things per­son­ally, we set our­selves up to suf­fer. If oth­ers lie to us or about us, we must break our­selves of the habit of lying to our­selves about it. Rather, “[y]ou have to trust your­self and choose to believe or not to believe what some­one says to you.” And you must see it as a gift if some­one who fails to give you love and respect walks away from you. (Or, as in my case, you have the strength and courage to do the walk­ing yourself.)

Ruiz writes that putting this Sec­ond Agree­ment into prac­tice will spare us an enor­mous amount of emo­tional pain, adding “[t]he whole world can gos­sip about you, and if you don’t take it per­son­ally you are immune. Some­one can inten­tion­ally send emo­tional poi­son, and if you don’t take it per­son­ally, you will not eat it. When you don’t take the emo­tional poi­son, it becomes even worse in the sender, but not in you.”

This Agree­ment means that those folks in my for­mer con­gre­ga­tion who are gos­sip­ing about me, and spread­ing rumors or spec­u­lat­ing about why I left the church, are talk­ing to and about them­selves. None of it has any­thing to do with me at all because I am not there and I am not going to return. I am not affected by their con­duct — I am not tak­ing it personally.

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