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What are your beliefs and values?
Of don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements most people will say that the hardest one to keep is Don’t Take Anything Personally. I don’t agree.
The most challenging agreement is actually Being Impeccable with Your Word. In taking something personal you take what someone said and express an interpretation that makes it personal. We invest our faith in the belief that what someone says about us is accurate. Your interpretation is the expression of your own word and it is a distortion of the truth. Expressing your faith in your false interpretation is off the mark of impeccability. Our interpretation also often has a component from the inner judge and victim voices’ in our head.
Basically, if you are taking something personally you are not being impeccable as well. It also means we are making false assumptions about our self image. It appears that not taking things personally is the agreement we most often break because it is the one we notice because of the emotions. We don’t usually have emotional reactions when we make assumptions, but we set ourselves up for them.
The interpretation we make has the assumption that what someone says really applies to us. We don’t usually see this assumption because we are often busy in an emotional reaction by then. The assumption might seem to be hidden but it is not. It is out there plain as day but we aren’t use to noticing them. In the same way we aren’t use to noticing the windshield of our car as we drive. We train ourselves not to notice by looking right past what is filtering our vision.
How often do we make false assumptions even with our different beliefs and values?
If you are taking something personally you can be sure that you have some false assumptions in your perception and interpretation.
How do you stop making assumptions that are the set up to emotional reactions? The first step is always awareness. You can’t change a behavior pattern until you realize and accept responsibility for doing it. That includes patterns in the mind.
In this episode, I cover some places that assumptions hide. I do a little poking around to show you what they look like. I also show how they lead us down dark alleys chasing illusions in our minds. Becoming aware of those dark alleys of mental illusions will make it easier to get out.
Some of the beliefs and values stories I cover in this episode are:
- What kind of parent am I?
- Am I a bad mother?
- Am I a good dad?
- Ever wonder if you are a good lover?
- What is my life purpose?
- Do you want to know what God knows?
- Do you want to be like God?