This week we will discuss the 2nd agreement:

Don’t Take Anything Personally.

Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.

 

Try saying - “They” are not doing it to me, it is just how “they” do life.

 

Taking things personally is also referred to as “personal importance” and it is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that “everything is about me”.

Nothing other people do is because of us, it is because of themselves.  All people live in their own dream, in their own mind, their own world and when we take things personally we assume they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.

When we take things personally, then we feel offended, and our reaction is to defend our beliefs and create conflicts.  We often make something big out of something small, because we have the need to be right and make everybody else wrong.

 

Here is another way of looking at this agreement - Don’t take anything personally - good as well!! If we can make these agreements with ourselves, then we won’t have the need for others to tell us how wonderful we are.  We can take in the compliments, the affirming comments but we won’t rely on them for our self worth.  We will have done the work, done the self study and found our true self - we will be “teflon” against people offending us or building us up.

 

Another way of looking at this agreement: Even the opinions we have about ourselves are not necessarily true; therefore, we don’t need to take whatever we hear in our own mind personally.  The mind can talk to itself - one part is talking and the other is listening.  It is a big problem when a thousand parts of your mind are all speaking at the same time - mitote!  We have different thoughts and opinions in our mind, different points of view.  The mitote is the reason humans hardly know what they want, how they want it, or when they want it.  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.  Only by self study and making an inventory of our agreements will we uncover all of the conflicts in the mind and eventually make order out of the chaos of the mitote.

 

Don’t take anything personally, because by taking things personally we set ourself up to suffer for nothing.

When we really see people as they are without taking it personally, we can never be hurt by what they say or do.

 

When we make it a strong habit not to take anything personally, we avoid many upsets in our life.  Our anger, jealousy, and envy will disappear, and even our sadness will simply disappear if we don’t take things personally.  There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to us when we take nothing personally.

 

As we make a habit of not taking anything personally, we won’t need to place our trust in what others do or say.  We will only need to trust ourself to make responsible choices.  We are never responsible for the actions of others; we are only responsible for ourselves.  When we truly understand this, and refuse to take things personally, we can hardly be hurt by the careless comments or actions of others.  We can choose to follow our heart always.  We can experience inner peace no matter what is going on around us.

 

Ok so now once again our intention is helpful as we learn and study: Today I Choose to Judge Nothing that Occurs!  No judgement about yourself, others or your mitote mind!!!

 

Here are a few questions I asked the students cleansing this week:

1.When are you most likely to take things personally?

2.What triggers you to do so?

3.What people “offend” you most often and cause you to fixate on yourself (and take things personally)?

4.Identify 1 person that most often causes you to take things personally and commit to NOT taking anything personally for the week.  Who is that person?