In The Four Agreements, don Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, the Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love. The Four Agreements are: Be Impeccable With Your Word, Don't Take Anything Personally, Don't Make Assumptions, Always Do Your Best.
152 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
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The tools shared by don Miguel are based on common sense and shared with such simplicity, that the universal message underlying his teaching is recognized by many. don Miguel's message is simple, practical and when implemented, even incrementally, changes lives.
In the tradition of the Toltec, a Nagual guides an individual to personal freedom. Combining new insights with old wisdom, don Miguel has dedicated his life to sharing the ancient Toltec wisdom by translating it into practical concepts that promote transformation through truth and common sense.
Don Miguel Ruiz was born into a family of healers, and raised in rural Mexico by a curandera (healer) mother and a nagual (shaman) grandfather. The family anticipated that Miguel would embrace their centuries-old legacy of healing and teaching, and carry forward the esoteric Toltec knowledge. Instead, distracted by modern life, Miguel chose to attend medical school and become a surgeon. A near-death experience changed his life. Stunned by this experience, he began an intensive practice of self-inquiry. He devoted himself to the mastery of the ancient ancestral wisdom, studying earnestly with his mother, and completing an apprenticeship with a powerful shaman in the Mexican desert. In the tradition of the Toltecs, a nagual guides an individual to personal freedom. Don Miguel is a nagual from the Eagle Knight lineage, and is dedicated to sharing his knowledge of the teachings of the ancient Toltecs. He is the author of The Four Agreements, The Mastery of Love, The Four Agreements Companion Book, and THE TOLTEC ART OF LIFE AND DEATH (COMING OCTOBER 27TH, 2015, FROM HARPERELIXIR).
This is a small book of 129 pages which I have read it many times. I suspect I will pick it up and read it again for as long as I can read. I don't have it on my bookshelf though, as I want to honor its special nature to me. In my nightstand by my bed is its home for now.
This is a book that challenges one to live up to four simple truths, and offers transformational results if one could live a life completely engaged in the four agreements. They are so concise that I can state them here. 1) Be impeccable with your word. 2) Don't take anything personally. 3) Don't make assumptions. 4) Always do your best. Simple huh? Track a day and see how many times you break an agreement (in your actions or your mind). To my constant amazement, I find myself stumbling over one or another of these agreements with some regularity. So it helps to remind myself with a yellow sticky note on my fridge, mental food for when I reach for the physical food.
I am not committed to these four agreements with a hope that I will attain some mystical state. I find the author's explanation of how our mind, our society, and importantly, our relationships work to be insightful, even though it is based on a paradigm that is completely outside my heritage of growing up in a small New England town. Understanding the Toltec dream metaphor is an essential part of realizing the deeper meaning driving our relationships within the world around us. Ruiz does a good job of helping these concepts become clearer. Especially relevant to me is the understanding of the role of judging and the resulting self-victimization that society attempts to impress on all of us.
Ruiz has helped me drop many of my limited belief structures and has opened up insights into living that are valuable to young and old souls alike. Lately, I have started to sense that some of his intricate explanations of how the dream takes control of our lives are based on a complex analysis that once reasoned through, only makes the simplicity of the four agreements more relevant to me in my daily life.
It is 2024, twenty-one years after I wrote this first review. There are only four agreements, but they are a challenge to keep, and I certainly feel my life has improved by striving to keep them actively guiding my life. It is a good read.
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I was surprised. I thought I would really like this book. A friend of mine told me the basic ideas were to be impeccable with your word, don't take things personally, don't make assumptions,and always do your best. To me, these sounded great: be honest, be forgiving, give others a chance to say what they think and try your best. or so I thought!
The ideas were actually more along the lines of: don't send out poisonous words that put spells on people, don't let others poison you with their spells (pretty strange, right?), don't have expectations of others, and yes, try your best.
My husband and I were going to read this together, but by page 16 he couldn't take it anymore! I needed to read it for our book group so I continued on solo.
I found the explanations for these ideas unnecessarily described as being from black or white magic, unnecessarily loaded with examples and I felt the author was talking down to me.
Also, by far the book's biggest flaw, the information, if it hadn't been so swollen by overexplaining EVERY single concept, could have been presented in half OR LESS of the length. Really, an elementary student might need all the over-simplified explanations supported by numerous examples, but even a teenager would have felt that Ruiz is beating a dead horse! (As my husband and I did by page 16!)
Another friend told me that the ideas in this book reminded her of things she's heard before and gave as an example You Are Special, a great children's book by Max Lucado. I suggest reading that instead of this book.
The book's ideas felt religious and might be okay for someone who is without religion and looking for some principles to govern their life. But, for me, as a Christian, I felt that these concepts were not only familiar but succinctly summed up in "love one another" and "try to be like Jesus."
I really didn't like the book, but I suppose that I don't have to worry about the author taking it personally! :)
I'd like to propose this book as required reading for the course, Life. Make four simple agreements with yourself and living becomes so much easier, so much lighter:
1. Be impeccable with your word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.
2. 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.
3. Don’t make assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
4. Always do your best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.
What I love about this book
* It's a short, captivating read. I love the efficiency of receiving so much thought-provocation in so little time.
* The agreements are applicable to everyone, everywhere, regardless of religion, gender, age, etc.
* Stories, anecdotes and examples from various beliefs are intertwined throughout, spotlighting their common bottom lines: love, life and peace.
Possibly the most life-changing book I've ever read. No, really. See?
Trivial introduction to New Age ethics with a large side order of third-rate, rancid leftovers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all written for a third-grade reading comprehension.
Considering that the first agreement is "be impeccable with your word," it's ironic and even more horrifying that the words in this book are so lazy, careless, contradictory, infantile, incoherent, and devoid of integrity.
Miguel Ruiz thinks that the ideal human is--get this--a toddler:
If we see a child who is two or three, perhaps four years old, we find a free human. Why is this human free? Because this human does whatever he or she wants to do. The human is completely wild. Just like a flower, a tree, or an animal that has not been domesticated--wild!
Uh, yeah. That human also completely loses its shit if for some reason it can't keep doing what it wants, and if you were to leave it in the woods, like a flower, a tree, or an animal that has not been domesticated, it would die--like, really soon, unless it was, you know, adopted by wolves. In which case it would be useless as a human.
There's a reason people call the period of being 24 to 36 months old "the terrible twos." If you think about it, a toddler is basically "a living being who lives off of other living beings, sucking their energy without any useful contribution in return, and hurting their host little by little." Or at least, that's what toddlers would be if they didn't stop being toddlers. And that, by the way, is Don Miguel Ruiz's own definition of a parasite--but he's too dense to realize it. (And if you are inclined to protest that it's harsh to describe toddlers as as beings that suck the energy of their hosts without making a useful contribution in return, google reasons my kid is crying. )
At least the idealization of children explains the childish syntax and diction, the crudeness of the examples. This douche nozzle actually writes:
An example: I see a friend and give him an opinion that just popped into my mind. I say, "Hmmm! I see the kind of color in your face in people who are going to get cancer." If he listens to the word, and if he agrees, he will have cancer in less than one year.
How the hell does Ruiz know? Has he actually tried it? Is he such a horrible person that he would actually tell a friend that he looks like someone who's going to get cancer? I seriously hope not, because that most definitely does not constitute being impeccable with one's word; it's being wantonly careless, glibly harmful, and perniciously cruel with one's word. (Shame, shame on Miguel Ruiz. Bad, naughty Miguel Ruiz.)
I would like to hear from anyone who has evidence, however anecdotal, that supports Ruiz's claim about giving someone cancer with one's (utterly unimpeccable) word. In the meantime, I can offer this anecdotal evidence to the contrary: one of my relatives suffered for years with severe OCD related to medical issues. This person spent years convinced that they were developing cancer, but they just kept being wrong, because it turns out that mere belief is not necessarily enough to give someone cancer after all. More to the point, people are told all the time, "Don't smoke! Smoking gives you cancer!" And they say, "Meh. That will happen to someone else. It won't happen to me," and even though they don't believe the warnings, they still get cancer. Why? Well, it's obvious enough: the reason people started getting cancer from smoking in the first place isn't that they were told they would get cancer within a year; it's that smoking causes cancer. Freakin' DUH.
This book is so devoid of integrity that it even manages to make Hitler trivial and trite in ways not even the most egregious example of Godwin's Law on the internet could do. Seriously:
Take the example of Hitler. He sent out all those seeds of fear, and they grew very strong and beautifully (sic) achieved massive destruction. Seeing the awesome power of the word, we must understand what power comes out of our mouths.
The mind reels. Hitler didn't merely "send out all those seeds of fear," and his rhetoric alone isn't responsible for the "massive destruction" he so "beautifully" (?!) achieved. He invaded over twenty countries, including Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Britain, Yugoslavia, Greece, Soviet Union, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia. He established death camps and systematically murdered six million Jews and is also responsible for the murder of another ten million people, including Poles, Russians, Gypsies, people with disabilities, Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and Germans who opposed him for any reason.
Describing a genocide and that much deliberate savagery in trite terms like "seeds of fears" that "beautifully achieved massive destruction" is vile and something an intelligent reader should object to. The book manages to make evil banal in ways even Hannah Arendt could not have predicted.
But hey. Guess what will fix everything? TALKING MORE! TALKING BETTER!: "All human problems would be resolved if we could just have good, clear communication."
Except you know who excelled at clear communication? Hitler. And you know who's shitty at good, clear communication--besides, you know, Miguel Ruiz? "A child who is two or three, perhaps four years old." The "wild," "undomesticated" human that Ruiz posits as the ideal human totally sucks at the thing that Ruiz says will solve all our problems.
This would be a significant flaw if Ruiz were actually trying to formulate a sophisticated system that would offer human beings a coherent guide to ethics and behavior--if, that is, his work had any integrity. But it obviously doesn't. My guess is that Ruiz's one and only goal is to convince gullible people to buy the shit he's peddling, and he has clearly succeeded very well at that.
