Don Miguel Ruiz

Don Miguel Ruiz gives you four agreements to live by

We'd start with the second of the four agreements, don't take anything personally. It matches a thinking pattern you can catch on paper.

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Don Miguel Ruiz gives you four agreements to live by, on Astera

Ruiz grew up in Mexico and trained as a surgeon. He later turned to the Toltec teaching his family had passed down. The Four Agreements came out in 1997 from Amber-Allen Publishing.

He calls the rules you took in as a child from family and school your domestication. The four agreements are the ones he suggests making in their place.

The four agreements as Ruiz wrote them

  1. Be impeccable with your word.Ruiz counts gossip as breaking this one.
  2. Don’t take anything personally.
  3. Don’t make assumptions.Ask the question you were about to guess the answer to.
  4. Always do your best.Your best changes from hour to hour, and Ruiz means the best you have today.
  5. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality.

When a friend cancels

A friend cancels plans and you decide they're angry with you. The cognitive distortions exercise in the free Astera workspace calls that personalisation. You match a thought like that to its pattern, then get a question to ask yourself.

The question for personalisation is: what else could explain this that is not about you?

Try Cognitive Distortions

We built Cognitive Distortions into the free Astera workspace to go with this book. Your answers save as you go.

Try it

The book itself is The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.

Questions

Is there a fifth agreement?

Yes. Ruiz and his son, Don Jose Ruiz, wrote The Fifth Agreement in 2010. It adds be skeptical, but learn to listen.

What does Toltec mean in the book?

Ruiz uses it for a line of teaching from ancient Mexico. He describes the Toltecs as people of knowledge.

What does impeccable mean here?

Ruiz goes back to the Latin, without sin. For him it means never using your word against yourself.

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