Common Sense Wisdom Based in the Four Agreements
Believing is something that you do.
Faith is what you do it with.
Faith is a kind of personal power you have. You can put it in concepts and ideas in your head and make agreements with it. Or you can put your personal power of faith within your self.
A warrior refrains from the first, and does the latter.
The irony here is that those that seek power often do so because they are powerless over their fear.
As a spiritual warrior,,, you will not develop real personal power until you develop awareness and win over your mind from fear.
Words aren’t the truth. Words are symbolic meanings for something real or abstract. Words are not truth so there is no sense in investing any faith in them.
But if you listen carefully to honest people you might find kernels of truth within the packaging of their words.
Speak Up For Your Self
Speaking up for your self doesn’t mean that you have to speak down to anybody.
A question from a subscriber to my on line course in Self Mastery,,,
Hello Gary,
I started reading The Four Agreements Companion Book yesterday and noticed that it had exercises like your Self Mastery program. The first exercise in the book was dealing with image of perfection but I’m still about ten sessions away from your Image of Perfection session.
I am aware that the sessions in your program are in an order for a purpose, so I wasn’t sure if it would be okay to continue reading the book or not.
Should I… continue reading the book and do the book exercises with your program? or stop reading the book until I finish your program?
Thanks for your time,
Curious
Hi Curious,
The Four Agreements Companion book is great and I recommend that you read it. However most people I’ve talked to that have attempted the exercises have gotten overwhelmed. They see so much of their belief system so fast without first having control over their attention that they slip into a victim point of view. That induces a feeling of overwhelm, powerlessness, and then hopelessness. Then their inner judge kicks in and berates them for failing. They lose motivation and close the book,,, stop the exercises… defeated. They end up feeling worse than when they started.
So that’s one of the reasons why I don’t start with the Image of Perfection beliefs. It’s also why I have people develop some other skills over their attention and beliefs before trying to change their whole belief system. It’s like eating beef. It’s much easier to do one bite at a time so you don’t get crushed by the whole animal.
By all means read the Four Agreements Companion Book. But, I’d suggest doing the exercises in the Self Mastery before starting the exercises in the book. And if you want to challenge and dissolve your Image of Perfection beliefs, (which is a necessary step to eliminating self judgments) then I suggest the using the steps in the Advanced Series of the Self Mastery program instead of the Four Agreements Companion book approach. In the Advanced Series I not only walk you through changing the Image of Perfection beliefs, but also walk you through the different issues of resistance that come up to letting these go.
After that, you’ll be better prepared to do the exercises suggested in the Four Agreements Companion book.
Hope that helps,
Gary
Original post at ToltecSpirit.com a Four Agreements resource for Spiritual Warriors
https://www.toltecspirit.com/2009/12/four-agreements-companion-book/
There are associations that our mind makes, particularly where our self importance is concerned. We build a self image structure of beliefs. In that structure of beliefs we usually think of people in powerful positions, as being more important. The associated belief is that if we have less power, then we are less important. And to our belief system less importance means less worth.
The emotional math we do with our self image is to associate our self worth to our power. The more power we wield, the more important and valued we are. The less power we have, the the less we feel we are worth.
This is all to say that we use the subject of power to create beliefs about our self worth. While that may seem to make sense to some people,,,, what gets really weird is when you become aware of the kinds of power we usually use to base our self worth on.
Faith is a force you command. You have the power to put faith in something or someone. When you do we say that you believe in an idea or a person.
Confidence is the feeling you create for your self by investing your faith in something or someone. Oddly you can create this feeling of confidence even if the idea is a lie or the person you believe in is a fraud.
A spiritual warrior is aware of how his or her belief in something can create a false sense of safety.
Practices for spiritual warriors in Self Mastery
There is often an interest to acquire more personal power. This approach becomes a common trap in a spiritual warrior’s path. The desire to gather personal power is often a compensating strategy for that feeling of not being powerful enough.
When you gain personal power based in this motivation your “I’m not powerful enough” story is being fed. Gaining personal power becomes a remedy that doesn’t address the source of the problem, and can even makes it bigger.
Turn your attention to your desires, and the fears, beliefs, and self importance that spawn them and you will have a chance to become free.