An important reminder to not take anything personally

Don’t take anything personally — the second agreement from the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz

I remember first buying this book about 15 years ago which now seems like a lifetime ago. Since then I’ve referred back to it or reread one or a few of the agreements when I’ve needed to. This evening was one of those times and it helped so much. I ran myself a bath with candles and just read, then felt gratitude.

I’d love to say that with all the yoga, meditation and work on myself etc. that I’m now a person who never takes anything personally and I’ve successfully got my ego well and truly under control. But, that’s not quite the case, and maybe it never will be. As a very natural first reaction, I still take things personally sometimes, but to give myself credit,  I’d like to think I deal with it a lot better now (at least I try to).

Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. — The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz

I’m not going to get caught up in the drama of the thing that I took personally this evening but I did catch my thought process almost in slow motion. I didn’t have too long to dwell, but my mind started to look automatically for related things in the past, making me feel more sorry for myself. It’s funny how deceiving memory is at times. What and how I recall certain things is so closely linked to how I’m currently feeling. I can sometimes recall exactly the same memory multiple times but perceive it in totally different ways depending on my current mood. So unreliable — memory doesn’t like to store things objectively!

Luckily I had a yoga class to teach, which allowed me to put my injured ego aside and focus on giving a really great class that everyone enjoyed. Sometimes teaching yoga is amazing for this because it allows me to focus purely on one or a group of people for an hour and create a space for them to focus on themselves, which in return helps me a lot. I then returned home and just voiced how I felt out loud and allowed myself to get emotional and just feel what I wanted to feel without beating myself up.

In the past I used to keep a diary daily from childhood, but I’m a lot more choosy about which thoughts I write down these days, hence the reason for not writing out the details because in reality it’s such a small thing. Instead, I’m choosing to share my solutions instead. I still write down my thoughts, but often I’ll throw the bit of paper away or burn it which feels a lot more therapeutic. Similarly, just voicing stuff out loud can really help.

The last thing I did was to then relax in the bath with the third chapter of the Four Agreements and feel like a massive weight had been lifted. I don’t even need to elaborate — it’s such simple advice, but it helped so much. Also hats off to the author for mastering this! I hope with time, I’m able to instantly not take so many things personally as a first reaction.  

This can be said for both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ things. I’ve noticed equally that if I receive too much praise, I start to rely on it rather than asking myself what I think. I’ve mentioned it a lot in a fair few of my posts on here and that’s the importance of equanimity which is the essence of Vipassana meditation. Follow the link to read my experience of 10 days meditating  in silence.

You discover that everything comes and goes — sensations, thoughts, feelings…and the idea is to just allow these things to appear without getting too caught up in them or trying too hard to change them. Easier said than done, but it was a beautiful, liberating and empowering life lesson for me when I spent 10 days immersed in silence with only this to focus on.

I’m going to finish it here and leave this post by sharing another quote from the book.

If you keep this agreement, you can travel around the world with your heart completely open and no one can hurt you. You can say, ‘I love you’, without fear of being ridiculed or rejected. You can ask for what you need. You can say yes or you can say no — whatever you choose — without guilt or self-judgement. You can choose to follow your heart always. — The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz

Finally, the links in this post are Amazon affiliate book links, which means that if you choose to buy the Four Agreements after clicking one of my book links, I will make a commission.