I’ve been eager to continue our conversation from last week on the third of The Four Agreements from the book by Don Miguel Ruiz: Don’t Take Anything Personally. When we left off, we had been talking about how freeing ourselves from other’s inaccurate opinions of us, from their emotional garbage, can ease our need to have to defend our beliefs and thus create drama and conflict. There is a better way.
Remember, whatever you do and feel is just a projection of your own personal dream – it’s just a reflection of your personal agreements. You have a choice. You get to decide whose opinion and what opinion has to do with you, or not.
The reason some opinions don’t have a strong effect on you is because you know the truth. You know who you are. You already know you’re loved. You already know you’re speaking with integrity. You don’t have the need to be accepted by someone else because you’ve already accepted yourself and you see yourself through the lens that God sees you.
When you feel good, everything around you is good. When everything around you is great, everything makes you happy. The reason you’re able to love everything around you is because you are able to love yourself.
At Weddings or Holy Unions, I often quote the Love Chapter (I Corinthians 13). “Love is patient. Love is kind.” And then there’s the line, “Love keeps no record of wrongs.”
That works both ways – not just towards someone else, but towards yourself as well. Sometimes we hear a voice in our mind, and we wonder where it came from. That voice or that tape may have come from an opinion or a comment we heard a long time ago – and we agreed to it. Even though it’s not true, it keeps on coming back to haunt us.
All of those voices in our mind can drive us crazy. They’re conflicting agreements we’ve made along the way. They don’t agree with themselves because there are parts of the mind that want one thing, and other parts that want exactly the opposite. (Now, that never happens to you, right?) Only by making an inventory of our agreements will we uncover all of the conflicts in the mind and eventually make order out of the chaos.
When we take things personally we set ourselves up to suffer needlessly. And, oh, sometimes we like to suffer! “Let me tell you about my sufferings” – and we try to top each other’s story!
Some of us are addicted to suffering! We love to tell our stories of how someone hurt us. That’s OK if we’ve moved beyond that hurt and pain and let healing happen. It’s when we tell those stories over and over again, and we stay stuck in the hurt and pain – continuously being a victim – then it is unhealthy.
There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally. The 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 won’t drink it.
Don Miguel Ruiz says, “When you don’t take the emotional poison, it becomes even worse in the sender, but not in you.”
When you make it a strong habit not to take anything personally, you can avoid many upsets in your life – negative emotions like anger, jealousy and envy will become less and less prevalent.
There is a letter written a long time ago from a preacher to a bunch of Romans. In this letter, Paul is exhorting the people who went to this particular church in Rome. “Let love be genuine, hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good, love one another with mutual affection, outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit. Serve God. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints, extend hospitality to strangers.”
Then it goes on to say, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.”
Wow!
Last week I mentioned how Carla Warnock, our sign language interpreter at The Met, has been rewriting The Four Agreements in positive “I” forms. I especially like how she has rephrased this second agreement: “I accept others where they are on their paths. Nothing others do is because of me. What others say is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When I am immune to the opinions and actions of others, I am free to live my full potential.”
Let’s make an agreement to let our hearts be completely open. Where we can say, “I love you,” without fear of being ridiculed or rejected. Where we can ask for what we need. Where we can say yes, or we can say no – whatever we choose – without guilt or self-judgment. Where we can follow our heart.
Rev. Dan Koeshall is the Senior Pastor at The Metropolitan Community Church (The Met) in San Diego, California, themetchurch.org
