Practice the Four Agreements: Be impeccable with my word/ Don't take anything personally/ Don't make assumptions/ Always do my best

This has been a meaningful and helpful goal to me, but it is now so much a part of my being that I no longer rely on the reminder of seeing it on my list day in and day out.

Anyway, when the occasion arises, I can always come back and wax philosophical about the Four Agreements some more. :)

She’s lost it. My mother. She has no sense at all.

My eye has been twitching since before Christmas. It was doing it the other night while I was talking to her on the phone and I made the huge mistake of mentioning it to her.

She has a medical job and for some reason decided that my completely benign eye twitching, otherwise known as Blepharospasm, must be some dread disease! She started spouting off about Bell’s Palsy and any number of other neurological disorders and how my FACE might fall and I would be hideously ugly for months on end.

Can you imagine?! Who does that? To their own kid?!

Not to worry, though. I did NOT take it personally. I certainly did NOT agree with her invented story. (I don’t like to call it a lie since it’s my mom, but OK, it was a lie.)

I know the eyelid spasms are caused from lack of sleep and being in front of the computer too much. My mother hasn’t turned her computer on in over a year, so she has no frame of reference for that obvious diagnosis. No- she had to jump to the conclusion that my face could be melting away.

Sheesh!

My mom made the mistake of labeling her children. I was “the smart one.” The older of my younger brothers was “the musical one” and the youngest one was “the scientist.” I realized the other day that it was HER mistake and really had nothing to do with me or with reality.

What her labels meant were that my one brother would get to be in band, the other could get away with blowing stuff up, and I could find out anything I wanted to learn for myself.

The musical brother played trumpet, and then he got to take piano lessons. He refused to practice and I told my mom that if I had piano lessons, I would practice every day because playing the piano was something I really wanted to learn. Instead of just telling me that she couldn’t afford for both of us to take piano, she told me HE would get to because HE was the musical one. She said I was the smart one and would do better in lots of things and that I should let him have music.

But…. but…..

^{i LOVE music.}

:(

My assumption was that my mother didn’t want me to learn any music. Not only that, but that I would somehow ruin our family if I learned how to play a musical instrument, so I deferred that to my brother. In seventh grade, I joined choir. It didn’t cost my mom anything. She didn’t even have to take me back and forth to lessons.

Actually, I’m not sure if it was really an assumption that kept me away from music as a child … It may have been a little girl’s mind agreeing (or at least submitting) to the misplaced opinion of a guiding adult. My mom made a lot of mistakes. Oh well. Life goes on. Time to get over it.

I know she never wanted to warp me for life. In fact, her strong objections to me ever doing anything that might cost her money made me virtually self-sufficient by the age of 15. I had a job, bought my own food, and even loaned her a substantial amount of money for the down payment on the house she still lives in. I paid my own lab, choir, and cheerleading fees, bought my own books, and got myself into a world-class university. I did get scholarships and a grant, but what that didn’t cover, I paid myself. Plus, I worked 20 hours a week and did over 4,000 hours of volunteer work at the hospital WHILE going to school.

Looking back on this period, I can see now that my mom’s labels were her way of categorizing her own fragmented life. In the conversation above, and many others like it, she was trying to reason with me, not destroy me. She has always thought I was smarter than her, even when I was 7, and told her that it was time to stop spanking me when she was mad. She complied. I am sure now that she never really cared if I learned to play musical instruments. She just couldn’t pay for it and tried to appeal to my sisterly sympathies in allowing my brother to live the dream.

Meanwhile, he doesn’t regularly play any music and I am still trying to find the money to learn.

hmmm.

It was a question brought up in Sunday School today.

I thought immediately of Eve. Yes, the Eve: the one all of Humanity has to thank for life itself. Now, don Miguel Ruiz discussed her in The Voice of Knowledge, but when I heard his comments, the thought took on a life of its own for me.

OK, so Adam and Eve had already been told to multiply, so The Original Sin had nothing to do with sex. I think the original sin was when Eve believed Satan after God had already told her the truth. She was in possession of all truth, but chose to believe a LIE. And it was a really OBVIOUS lie, too. This sin gave Satan the little power he needed to enter our minds and feed us as many lies as he can. He can’t read our minds, but he can try to fill them with garbage so we lose our good thoughts. If we believe him, we are thinking bad thoughts. We are sinning. This breaks all the Agreements, really, but primarily the First one—to be impeccable with the Word.

Well, I have noticed for awhile now that when a thought of anger or worthlessness begins to enter my mind, I think about Eve. I picture the thought as nothing but a pitiful attempt to fool me, whether it is about myself, or an effort to anger me toward someone else.

Looking at it like this, I can see how feeble it is. How petty. How ridiculous. It is like a snaggly weed growing in my beautiful garden and I notice how easy it is to pull it out.

All the bad thoughts in the world are just lies.

After I shared this with a few people, they said it helped them quite a lot, so I thought I’d put it up here. Maybe my thoughts on thoughts can be of service or comfort to someone else.

:)

My brother decided that I wasnt’ doing enough for our mom, who is houseboud, caring for our waning grandma, who is almost 93.

I call my mom nearly every day and go over to help her as often as I can get into Phoenix, but she rarely leaves the house while I am there because she wants me to help her go through my grandma’s old junk so she can get rid of the bulk of it.

What this amounts to is that I am already doing the very best I am able to in the service of my mom and grandma. My brother is also doing what he can do, which is to go over there occasionally and sit in the house while my mom runs errands. This is good. It gets her out of the house for a while and gives him the satisfaction of being a useful son.

So what is his problem?! Well, he only sees things from his own perspective (since he considers his to be the only correct perspective) and this distorts his reality gigantically from the true reality.

In other words, he considers himself to be the only one helping her. Our other brother has some forgiveness issues concerning our grandma, so he rarely goes over there at all. So finally tonight, the brother who blew up at me made some brutally harsh and unfair comments. He was making irrational assumptions and jumping to false conclusions. He was belittling everyone else’s best to try to make himself feel better. He was being reprehensible with his Word.

What did I do? Well, at first I yelled at him. I didn’t expect his tirade and wasn’t in the mood for his crap. I got defensive, but pulled back short of saying anything really stupid. Then I asked him what this argument was about—that I was pretty sure we were on the same team here. We both calmed down and finished our conversation on civil terms.

Afterwards, however, I completely fell apart. Emotional poison is BITTER! Blecch! Intellectually, I know that whatever service I give my mother in her time of need is really none of his business, and his opinion of it is none of my business. This I do understand, BUT IT’S MY BROTHER! His opinion matters to me, so I was crushed that he thought my best wasn’t good enough.

Crushed until I realized that he has no idea what my daily life is like. He was only making those critical assumptions from his own limited point of view. At this point the antidote for emotional poison rushed through me: Forgiveness. I sat down and wrote him a short letter, which I will send off tomorrow, after my husband reads over it. I want to make sure it doesn’t sound sarcastic or martyrish.

The 4 Agreements in action. It rocks! =)

I am always telling my people not to assume that just because someone did something that it meant this or that.

I am constantly thinking to myself and sharing with others that whatever it was that happened is only about the person who said or did whatever it was and that they (or I) cannot take it personally.

I don’t know of a time when I haven’t done my best, so perhaps this is it. I need to be better at letting other people know that as long as they are doing their best, they can only be proud of themselves. It doesn’t really matter if something turns out to be a dud if the best effort possible was put into it.

Impeccability. Can’t that only be taught by example? I mean, we can all ask the people around us to be honest with themselves and others, but what does it mean unless we stand up for everything we say? I hope that the way I use The Word is an example others will have the courage to (and want to) follow.

Today I had an interesting experience.

I went to my school district’s substitute teaching orientation and afterward stopped by the school where I will be working to let them know that my process was complete. Everyone was so excited for me!

Well, all but one, “M”, an interventionist who started working there just last year, right after I left to pursue subbing. She has only met me a couple of times and we have never had a conversation, so I know very well that she has no way by which to form an opinion of me one way or the other.

One teacher who has been particularly supportive in my quest to become a sub hugged me and called me “The Bomb!” She then turned to “M”, and asked enthusiastically if she knew me. “M” barely raised her head from the paper she had become intent on examining and muttered, “uh huh.”

Now if I were to make an assumption, I could take that personally and assume that she didn’t like me because she did her very best to ‘dis’ me. I could also assume, because of her hunched over body language, that my successes are somehow threatening to her.

Whether that is true or not is none of my business. I don’t know her well enough to decide her motives in acting like that. However, I do know myself and I do realize that my ability to change the mood in a room just by entering it can intimidate some people.

So “M” will have to get to know me. It won’t be long before she realizes that my being there takes nothing from her. Eventually, she’ll find herself unable to resist my friendly smile. =D

1: I have found that I need very little change in my life to accomplish being absolutely impeccable with my word.

2: I’m done taking things personally. I think of other people’s actions and words as their “belongings” now, so their stuff can’t hurt me anymore.

4: I have always done my best … in every situation I have ever been in ~ ever.

But making assumptions? . . . ?!

I don’t even know if I make assumptions. I will have to pay attention to this aspect of myself. I’ve never given any thought at all as to what, if anything, I assume in life. Hmmm.

Well, I USED TO assume that when I asked for something to get done around the house, like the dishwasher being emptied or a picture being hung on the wall, that it would get done. I stopped assuming stuff like that after learning the hard way that Just Because MOM Wants Something Done, Doesn’t Mean It Actually Gets Done!

Perhaps I need to listen again to what the tapes say about this. One of my little mottos is “Take nothing for granted,” but do I really know what that means? I DON’T KNOW.

I think I AM impeccable with my word, meaning that I speak without sin, but then today I told an outright lie to my little neighbor lady. She doesn’t need to know her brownies are ghastly, right? She gave me a beautiful plate of brownies for toting her and her little dog to the vet this morning and when she asked how I liked them, I told her they were great.

In reality, they were about 5% chocolate cake and 95% walnuts.
I can’t stand walnuts and my husband won’t eat chocolate, so I unceremoniously binned the whole lot. When I take her the plate back, it will be laden with some other baked yumminess, like snickerdoodles or apple crumb cake, and I will thank her again for the wonderful brownies!

I seriously do not think this makes me a liar. If she had walnut brownies in her TEETH, I would totally tell her. I truly do appreciate her kindness and I know she appreciates my willingness to help her. Being impeccable with The Word does not mean hurting other people and expecting them not to take it personally.

...when people around me have temper tantrums over things that have nothing to do with me.