Here\u2019s a gem from the The Four Agreements<\/i>, a bestselling self-help book by Don Miguel Ruiz based on Toltec wisdom: The second of the \u201cAgreements\u201d advises us not to take things personally. This simple idea is based on the realization that how another person interacts with us in truth is not personal, because the interaction is dictated by his or her level of consciousness\u2014which is entirely about the other person and not at all about us. Most of us are quick to take offense at what others say or do because we take it personally, which exports our individual freedom and authority, constricts or even momentarily shuts down our awareness, and creates suffering. Such transactions typically turns reactive, with each person convinced the other is to blame. We can interrupt this vicious loop by practicing the second Agreement, stepping back, and remembering that how another person shows up is not personal, not about us, and that indeed, the quality of our interactions with others is always determined by the degree of our own awareness. Our work, therefore, is ever on ourselves\u2014but how liberating it is to realize that, as long we are seeing things as they are, others have no power to offend us. This life-changing clarity also carries us into the circle of compassion, for in those things that we may have taken personally and judged harshly in others, we see reflected the face of their self-inflicted suffering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here\u2019s a gem from the The Four Agreements, a bestselling self-help book by Don Miguel Ruiz based on Toltec wisdom: The second of the \u201cAgreements\u201d advises us not to take things personally. This simple idea is based on the realization that how another person interacts with us in truth is not personal, because the interaction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philosophycenter.net\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3397"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philosophycenter.net\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philosophycenter.net\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philosophycenter.net\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philosophycenter.net\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3397"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.philosophycenter.net\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3401,"href":"https:\/\/www.philosophycenter.net\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3397\/revisions\/3401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philosophycenter.net\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philosophycenter.net\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philosophycenter.net\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}