I don’t exactly remember when Don Miguel Ruiz came to my awareness. I do remember his words hit me like a ton of bricks. His perspective on what I call “essential rules” were key elements in helping me change the downward trajectory in my life. Ruiz’s pivotal book helped me take personal responsibility for a lot more of my life than I previously had. His “agreements” provided me with basic tools that we can all use to create and sustain our own happiness.
The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz was first published in 1997. Born into a family of healers and shamans, Ruiz dedicated his life to creating a philosophy that blends ancient Toltec wisdom with modern sensibilities.
Ruiz begins this book by introducing the dream of the planet, which he dreams as the collective dream of all of humanity. This includes family, school systems, religion, and culture. Children learn their particular versions of “the dream of the planet” or the “truth” from their parents, teachers, and religious leaders through a process Ruiz calls the “domestication of humans.”
Ruiz explains how humanity is driven by an internal call “to pursue happiness.” Depending on your culture or belief system or religion, happiness can be achieved via many different routes. And what is happiness? Lack of pain. Lack of want. An abundance of love and joy. Meaningful work. Belonging to and identifying with a group.
In Chapter 1, Ruiz notes that everyone makes agreements in their lives from early on about what to believe, how to feel, and how to behave. However, these self-limiting agreements can actually cause people to continue living in hell in their personal lives.
Think about Catholics who refuse to release one another through divorce for fear of going to hell for doing so. Homosexuality was deemed a crime not so long ago. Geniuses like Alan Turing and Oscar Wilde paid a high personal price for their pursuit of happiness. To escape it and form a new dream, Ruiz outlines four new agreements people can make to fundamentally change their lives and lead them to personal freedom.
I can so relate. In my life, I grew up listening to well-worn narratives about our culture, community, and our family story. I wouldn’t go so far as to call what I heard “the truth.” In fact, my mother would frequently and flippantly say: “Never let the truth interfere with a good story.”
Every experience we had as a family was dissected and compared to how it “matched up” to the family’s pre-conceived beliefs. People were judged and granted inclusion into the family’s circle of friends only if they “fit in” and accepted our family’s values. As our family’s values were a little outside the norm, most of our friends were that way, too.
Some of the narratives I was inculcated in were about so-called immutable characteristics that had never been questioned. Mom couldn’t do math so, to her mind, her daughters couldn’t do math. Mom’s side of the family were all good people. Dad’s side of the family was all bad. Or worse, average. That nothing set them apart or made them special was anathema to my mother and her narrative about our superior values of inclusivity and above-average intellect.
I remember drawn-out conversations in our family circle about the deficiencies of other people in our community. Their stature in conversations rose in tandem with their accomplishments, their success in business, or their adventurousness. But if they were “ordinary” or “house proud” or “unambitious,” the implied message there was something “lesser than” about them. As I grew older and my circle widened with education and travel, I got a sense that our family might have been the subject of such discussions in other families’ conversations.
I marveled at how these rules and “agreements” we made in the family or even those that we make in society develop without any explicit discussion or agreement. They evolve. And the tighter the belief systems, the more rigid the rules. It is a form of survival, to be sure, but can create a life filled with fear and constraints.
Ruiz’s words invite us to question those belief systems into which we were born and see to what extent they are true for us personally. The potential to change our lives lies in our own hands. Doing so may be another matter.
The four agreements are elegant in their simplicity but – as elegant as simplicity is – it is challenging to implement and live by. But doing so is so worth it, as I experienced. I plan to explore each of them.
Expressive Compulsive 