So many of you have shared with me the powerful transformations that have begun to unfold in your lives from the New YOU for the New Year Manifestation Discovery Challenge. And because of your heart-opened expression, I have decided to keep the momentum moving forward. Each month, together we’ll continue to explore thought provoking weekly challenges.

Each week’s newsletter will be an infusion of my own awakenings along with the many teachings of masters that have influenced me personally – in essence, a weekly touchstone for us to continue our journey in finding the finest expression of ourselves in the world.

For the month of February, I thought I would introduce the powerful teachings of The Four Agreements written by don Miguel Ruiz. Each week, we’ll place our awareness on one of the four agreements and weave it gently into our daily living. This book has been a powerful tool for thousands of individuals – and for good reason…it holds the power of truth, wisdom, and practical application. These agreements work and I use them everyday.

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

Let’s get started with a greater understanding of how we’ve come to be exactly where we are…

The quest of a Spiritual Warrior is for Personal Freedom. Personal Freedom means freedom from fear, illusions, and the fear based beliefs that the spiritual warrior within battles – the beliefs of the mind that are limiting, conditioned, and self-imposed. It is with Personal Freedom that we are free of the human condition of emotional suffering. MOKSHA – emotional liberation – is essentially living your life with an undercurrent of unconditional love, grace, ease, and greater appreciation and gratitude for yourself, and others.

The Four Agreements shares four simple truths to commit to and practice to create more love and happiness in your life. The process is transformational – ultimately evolving the way you think!! Yes think, speak (your vocabulary will shift), and act.

It sounds pretty profound but these four simple agreements are powerful change agents and require diligence in the early days of the practice. Sometimes it’s really tough because you feel like you’re going against everything you’ve ever been taught…but the results happen quickly and powerful shifts begin in your life at a rapid pace.

BE SURE TO LOOK FOR THIS WEEK’S MEDITATION IN YOUR INBOX THIS FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8th!!!

Don Miguel speaks about domestication – our personal Domestication.

He says that from the time we emerge from the womb, we begin making agreements – domesticating ourselves. We become defined by our agreements even when they are first time reactions. And we pay such close attention to everyone’s opinion in our world that we ultimately become the compendium of what everyone we value in our life would like us to be – or at least the areas where we faced greater rewards. This isn’t just your parents. Think about it for a bit – think of your childhood – the first fifteen years of your life as you figured out or tried to figure out – the most appropriate responses to parents, teachers, siblings, friends, relatives, girlfriends, religious leaders, even total strangers you were meeting for the very first time. There was no guidebook or owner’s manual…it was the influential people around you from whom you built most of your opinions, perceptions, and ideas about life. And your approved-of behaviors elicited the emotional and physical rewards of attention, affection, appreciation, or acceptance while your dis-approved of behaviors generated some sort of punishment like the removal or denial of attention, affection, appreciation, or acceptance.

Whatever they were – it is from this fabric that we were woven. We actually domesticated ourselves and as we grew, we engrained those responses over and over again to people and things that happened around us or to us…and from there, we wove the fabric of our ever-flowing personal dream. From every direction – parents, teachers, friends, siblings, strangers… we responded to their actions or their presence or even their existence and we projected our previous responses with like-kind responses until we are conditioned bundles of behaviors.

Due to all these agreements, We have bent and sculpted and massaged our very being to conform to all those people’s opinions and their reactions to us and that has become a powerful trajectory in who we have crafted ourselves to be – our styles, our vocabulary, our priorities in life, our personal codes of behavior, how we express ourselves, even our self definition including – our basic codes of behavior — things we say and don’t say; things we do and don’t do; and ways we see the world. And from here, we further defined ourselves into who we should and shouldn’t be; and who is being projected outward and inward — who we were, and who we were not.

Then we began living our life according to all these agreements based on the opinions of others. Living our lives each day based on these conditioned agreements, we began to see them as laws of nature or basic principles of life when in fact they were just agreements we made in our head based on interpretations and projections of how others would respond.

At a certain point the agreement became a basic LAW in your life – the way things were going to be and the way YOU would be. And you began to fashion yourself to comply with that agreement – right down to the selection of your hair color and the way you projected yourself into the world. This is your domestication. Subliminally making choices based on the opinions we learned from others rather than pure ones we would make from our core to awaken instead a life filled with unconditioned ease of expression.

Through years of conditioning, we don’t see the nuances in the evolution of the ways we express ourselves. Our words…our speech…our emotions…our physical body…our voice…our tone… even our attitude is so often automatic, habitual, kneejerk – we are blind to being the thing that everyone else experiences; but as they react to that being, and we react to them, we refine our agreements a bit more tightly. Do you see that this can be a path to inner constriction and UN-conscious behaviors?

Over the years our mind has filled with beliefs that generate a running parade of thoughts. In all that thinking there are many assumptions that we are not aware of. We even make the assumption that what we think is true. We imagine and assume what others think of us and how they will react. We also assume that the judgments and self-criticisms we have are true. We have learned to make so many assumptions that we aren’t aware of. These assumptions are not the truth. These assumptions and the faith we express in them is just one way that we are not impeccable with our word.

Through our domestication we have also learned to take things personally. We assume that other people’s opinions about us are valid and when those opinions don’t agree with ours we either dislike that person or change OUR own opinion. Their opinion becomes our belief about our self. We end up having an emotional reaction to our own belief because we assumed their opinion is true. We can also take personally our own opinions. Our own self-judgments are also simply assumptions. Even though we have made them up and they are not necessarily true, we make assumptions and take them personally. This is another example of our domestication.

This month, through our exploration of The Four Agreements, we can take this time to change the fabric of our life and shift us – in stages – to a life of greater peace, freedom, authenticity, and happiness.

So join in me in creating an opening within us to allow these new agreements to flow into the spider web of the millions of agreements that we’ve made to get us to this point in life. We’ll create that opening through weekly inspiration in it’s many forms; articles, videos, meditations, and live radio streams.

Let’s stay connected this week by being impeccable with our word.

Keep rockin it Spiritual Warriors and stay tuned for more to come!

Peace,
davidji

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