February 2022 week 5
Today I Choose To Judge Nothing That Occurs
For those of you who did not join the cleanse this month I would like to finish out the month with a few more thoughts from the Four Agreements.
When we are living the 4 agreements, the Toltec’s say we are honoring God in every thought, every emotion, every belief, even what is “right” or “wrong”. Every thought becomes a communion with God, and you will live a life without judgements, victimization, and free of the need to judge yourself so harshly. - Today I choose to judge nothing that occurs!
The Toltecs refer to the 4 agreements as the mastery of transformation. They believe with these 4 agreements, you will have a beautiful life. You will transcend the human experience of suffering, to become the embodiment of God.
Let’s make this agreement - I choose to honor the 4 agreements. or I am going to keep the 4 agreements just for today. If you break one, begin again.
Our days are full of obstacle to this, we keep trying and choosing again.
Let’s look at The Toltec’s path to freedom
True freedom has to do with the holy spirit - it is the freedom to be who we really are. The only thing stopping us from being free is ourselves. And this idea nicely bridges the gap between our February studies and our March studies.
Our true nature is pure like children - not afraid of the future, not ashamed of the past, we enjoy life, play, explore, our normal human tendency is to be happy and to love. But what happened since childhood? We are no longer free because the judge, the victim and the belief system do not allow us to be who we really are. Once our minds have been programmed with all that garbage we are no longer happy.
The first step toward personal freedom is awareness. We need to be aware that we are not free in order to be free. Most people live and never discover that the judge and the victim rule their mind, and therefore they don’t have a chance to be free.
We know because I often repeat it…all change - first step is awareness, then acceptance and action - forgiveness - There is no need to blame your parents or anyone who abused you in your life, including yourself. It is time to stop the abuse - free yourself from the tyranny of the judge by changing the foundation of your agreements. It’s time to be free from the role of the victim.
The Toltecs teach 3 masteries that lead people to personal freedom
1.Mastery of awareness - to be aware of who we are and whats blocking us
2.Mastery of transformation - how to change, how to be free of domestications or agreements we developed over the years.
3.Mastery of intent - that part of life that makes transformation of energy possible; it is God - it is bringing God into the shift and change.
Toltecs compare the Judge, the Victim, and the belief system to a parasite that invades the human mind and the food for the parasite are the negative emotions that come from fear and it thrives on drama and suffering.
If we want to be free we have to destroy the parasite and Ruiz outlines 3 ways:
1.Attack the parasite head on. Face each fear, one by one.
The 1st step is awareness - awareness of all the self limiting, fear-based beliefs that make us unhappy. We need to take an inventory of all we believe, all our agreements and we begin the transformation. Once we have the awareness and we want to transform - we make a choice, I choose again - we decide to adopt the 4 agreements which is a declaration of war to regain our freedom from the parasite.
The 4 agreements offer the possibility of ending the emotional pain, which can open the door for us to enjoy life!
For every agreement we break that makes us suffer, we will need to replace it with a new agreement that makes us happy.
2.Stop feeding the parasite - to do this we have to gain control of our emotions, we have to refrain from fueling the emotions that come from fear, we need to control our own behavior. It is true that the way we see the world will depend on the emotions we are feeling. When we are angry, everything around us is wrong. When we are sad, everything around us is sad and so on. We suffer when our mind is ruled by fear in the form of - anger, hate, sadness, envy and betrayal. To stop this we need the truth and again awareness to study whats going on and the answer is always some form of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the only way to heal..****We can CHOOSE to forgive because we feel compassion for ourselves. We can let go of the resentment and declare” thats enough!!!! I will no longer be the big Judge that goes up against myself. I will no longer beat myself up and abuse myself. I will no longer be the Victim. We need to forgive those closest to us, then we need to forgive God and once you forgive God, you can forgive yourself.
To be able to uncover the truth and get control of our own emotions we need to become a spiritual warrior and here are his warrior characteristics: 1.Awareness. 2.Discipline to be ourselves, no matter what. 3.Control over one’s own emotions, not anyone else.
3.Initiation of the dead- a symbolic death which kills the parasite. We need a great deal of courage to face the angel of death, letting the angel of death teach us how to live. For me, I am considering the angel of death to be myself at my darkest moments, my emotional and spiritual bottoms. I wrote of one last week and through this month and studying the 4 agreements so I could teach you (along with some outside help😊) I can see how this recent “bottom” has taught me how to live.
If we use this metaphorical angel of death as our teacher, we can begin each day with: I am awake, I see the sun. I am going to give my gratitude to the sun and to everything and everyone. One more day to be myself.
Whoever survives the “initiation of the dead” receives the most wonderful gift - the resurrection. To receive the resurrection is to arise from the dead, to be alive, to be ourselves again. We are able to break our old agreements, become free again and heal our mind.
We need to surrender to the angel of death- it takes away the past in order to make it possible to live happy, joyous and free.
OK now I promise this is the last bit about this book. I feel like it would be helpful at this point to share from the book why Living the Four Agreements Is such a challenge so we don’t get discouraged. We are going to move forward with a heightened state of awareness in regards to these agreements and I don’t want us to set ourselves up for failure!
We have out of years of habit not paid attention to how we express our self. The responses that come out of our mouth are often automatic. They were learned from years of habit living by the agreements we learned. We do not consciously choose our words, or the emotion, tone, and attitude that we express.
Over the years our mind has filled with beliefs that generate incessant thinking. In all that thinking we have 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.
Overtime we have also learned to take things personally. We assume that when someone has an opinion about us that their opinion is valid. 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. We take personally our own self judgments. These self judgments are nothing more than an assumption. Over years the mind has developed many habits of making assumptions and taking them personally.
Just because we adopt the Four Agreements doesn’t mean that all these habits in the mind will stop with that commitment.
When we decide to change our life and adopt the Four Agreements we are challenging the beliefs we learned and the habits we practiced since our childhood.
Adopting the Four Agreements creates a conflict in the mind between expressing our self Impeccably with love and our existing fear based beliefs.
One of the hidden assumptions that people often make when adopting the Four Agreements is about time. Without awareness the mind makes the assumption that they should immediately be able to keep the Four Agreements 100% of the time. The mind completely ignores that there are already existing agreements and habits of taking things personally that have been in place for years.
With the expectation of the new agreement that we will not break any of the Four Agreements we are set up for failure. We have an emotional reaction and take something personally which feels bad. (but is completely normal part of our old habits) But then the inner judge reprimands us for failing to not take something personally. Now we feel twice as bad. The inner judge tells us that we failed and the voice of the victim in the mind accepts this proposal.
The result is that we are not only upset, but we also feel like a failure. If we just look at our emotional state at this point it will seem like things are getting worse instead of better. It can seem like attempting to keep the Four Agreements is causing more problems and making us feel worse.
If we are aware that we are judging our self for taking something personally, we can feel even worse. Our inner judge might use that awareness to judge and reject our self for judging our self for taking something personally. In the beginning the myriad of voices in your head are likely to use your new found awareness as material for self judgment. This is when the fourth agreement, Always Do Your Best, is most important. It gives you immunity from self judgment. Our best isn’t perfect practice of these agreements on day one. Our best will include a lot of stumbling in the beginning and improve over time as we practice. Just like walking, learning a language, or playing a sport, we can’t play at top level on our first day learning.
In actuality the problem is not that we adopted the Four Agreements. Nor is the problem that we have “failed”. What is really happening is that we are having an awakening. We are waking up to how our mind makes assumptions, has emotional reactions, and is so quick to make self judgments. These realizations about the belief system in our mind are not usually pleasant but are part of an awakening. It is usually uncomfortable realization, but through it our awareness is growing.
With some more awareness and practice we can move beyond this uncomfortable awakening about the mind. We will come to see that it is not us that is judging our self for failing. It is the inner judge. With practice we will see the ridiculous expectations and assumptions for what they are and not feel like a failure when we lapse in our journey to impeccability. This comes as we gain more awareness and gain more personal power over our agreements.
The agreements may be simple, but he never says they are easy to keep.