Do You Agree?

Unique Perspectives: Do You Agree?

By Kim Stevens

Do You Agree? Before you say yes, read this.

Ok, I just love this.

As you probably know by now, I’ve shared quite a bit—through both writing and video—about The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. Honestly, it’s one of those books I think everyone should read. It offers such a clear, compassionate path to freeing ourselves from so much of the unnecessary suffering we carry around in our minds.

But today, I want to back up a bit. Before we even get into the agreements themselves, let's talk about why these agreements exist in the first place. Why do we even need them?

Ruiz explains that each of us lives by what he calls a Book of Law. And this Book of Law? It’s mostly written for us, starting in childhood. From the moment we arrive, we’re absorbing lessons from the people around us—our parents, teachers, culture—and somewhere along the way, we quietly “agree” to these lessons. Often without even realizing it.

For example, if a parent told you, “Good girls are meant to be seen and not heard,” or “Big boys don’t cry” well... guess what? That becomes a kind of “truth” you might carry for the rest of your life. A rule. A law. A belief that drives how you show up—or don’t show up—in the world.

Ruiz calls this process domestication. Little by little, all these agreements get locked into place. They become the laws we live by. And after a while, they stop feeling like someone else’s beliefs. They just feel like the truth.

But here’s the wild part, they’re not. Instead, what we’re really living in is our own personal dream—a fog of beliefs and judgments and fears that might not even belong to us. Ruiz says, “It’s your personal dream of life… what you believe, all the concepts you have about what you are, all the agreements you have made with others, with yourself, and even with God.”

And this is where the real trouble begins. Inside that dream, there’s a Judge. Oh yes... the Judge. And the Judge is constantly flipping through our Book of Law, deciding what’s right, what’s wrong, who’s good, who’s bad, and exactly how much punishment is required.

We judge other people. We judge ourselves. We punish others over and over again for the same mistakes.  And then we turn around and do the same to ourselves.

Sound familiar?

Ruiz calls this injustice—paying multiple times for the same so-called “mistake.” We judge ourselves endlessly. We drag around guilt and shame and this low-level sense of needing to be punished. This then brings out the victim in us, who says: I’m not good enough. I’m not lovable. Poor me.

What happens next is the worst part of it all in my mind… Is that we then start resisting life itself. We hold back from fully expressing who we really are. We tiptoe through our days. And, as Ruiz says, our biggest fear becomes the very thing we secretly crave: To be alive.

Like, really alive.

So... how do we break free from all this? Ruiz says it takes courage.

Changing these old agreements is like resetting our internal thermostat. We’re used to running at a certain temperature, and it takes some serious awareness to dial it up. But here’s the cool thing: Every time we lean into a new agreement—something that actually supports who we want to be—we gain energy. I just love that! And little by little, these new agreements give us the power to rewrite the whole system. Yeah, the WHOLE SYSTEM!

That’s when the magic happens. That’s when we watch the drama of hell dissolve and realize we’ve started building something entirely new. A dream of our own. A dream that feels like heaven.

I can tell you, I’ve experienced this over and over again in my own life. And I try to stay conscious of it now. Because anytime I notice I’m suffering, it’s usually a sign that some relic of a law is running the show again.

That’s my cue to pull out the pen and rewrite a few pages. Maybe to something like this:

I am meant to be happy. What’s good for me is what’s true for me. And there's a miracle baked into everything.

Yes, I agree.