Don't Take Anything Personally

For the past 6 months now, I’ve probably taken my life more seriously than any other time in my life. Last December, I started doing yoga. It was always something that I had wanted to do from a fitness perspective, but I was completely unaware of how it would completely change my life, my beliefs, and my worldview.

Yoga gave me the ability to really look at myself and the ability to deal with all of the emotional traumas I’ve carried with me for my now, 24 years of life. I took to yoga extremely fast, and by February I had made the decision to start yoga teacher training.

Looking back on my path, I’m still amazed at the changes I’ve made in my life and in taking responsibility for my own actions, which is something that I had struggled with for a very long time.

As part of my teacher training, I had a required reading list that included the book, The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz.

If there’s one book that I can whole-heartedly say changed my life, it is this one.

Now, I don’t want this post to be some half-assed high-school/college book review/summary. I gave up on that kind of writing half-way through my junior year at college. So, what I will talk about it what this book did for me, and how it played a role in my life at the perfect time. Looking at it now, I would honestly say that it was divine timing.

However, for the sake of explaining what the book is about and slightly sounding like a half-assed college paper I will say:

The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz is a book that contains Four Agreements that we can make with the world to unlock our own happiness and joy. Ruiz explains that these agreements come from his own Toltec culture. An ancient Central/South American culture that has passed down esoteric, spiritual knowledge through oral tradition among its spiritual leaders. This knowledge has been passed down through many generations of different lineages, and Ruiz explains, that he is part of one of these lineages.

Regardless of your own spiritual or religious beliefs, Ruiz explains that we all make agreements with our world that shape our mental condition. We believe certain things over others. We value the opinion of certain people over others. We have both negative and positive agreements with our world, and we have been making these agreements since we were born. Agreements passed down to us from our parents, our education, our society. We make agreements both consciously and unconsciously.

Now, I don’t want to get into each of the agreements, mainly because that would be a lot of work. However, I will discuss the agreement that changed my life when I saw it in action:

Don’t Take Anything Personally.

On its face, many of you may be thinking, "Yea! That makes sense, don’t take anything personally", but this agreement is so much more.

It’s about standing in your truth regardless of the world says about you. As humans, we spend so much time caught up in our heads, whether thinking about errors of the past, the future, or what other people will think of us.

Many of us limit ourselves because we are afraid of what the world might say. Now if your anything like me, you’ve been working on letting go of that agreement. Of not caring what other people think. Of not caring what the world has to say about you. In living your truth.

Ruiz explains,

“When you take things personally, then you feel offended, and your reaction is to defend your beliefs and create conflicts. You make something big out of something so little, because you have the need to be right and make everything else wrong. You also try hard to be right by giving them our own opinions. In the same way, whatever you feel and do is just a reflection of your own personal dream, a reflection of your own agreements. What you say, what you do, and the opinions you have are according to the opinions you have made – and these opinions have nothing to do with me.”

As I was reading this going through yoga teacher training, I was also thinking about my future as a yoga teacher and everything that I wanted to accomplish. Many of my friends and siblings were supportive of my new life path. As I had graduated from college just a year ago, I was struggling in finding my place and figuring out what it was that I actually wanted to do with my life.

My parents, at the time I was reading this book, were not 100% on board. I hadn’t told them how serious I was about being a yoga teacher because I knew it would result in a heated conversation.

I had graduated with a degree in Political Science and had been telling them for years that I wanted to be a Foreign Service Officer for the State Department. An answer I had come up with to answer the age-old question every college student gets: What are you going to do after you graduate?

Every time I would talk about yoga, they would ask if I was still studying for the test for the State Department. I would tell them that it wasn’t my focus at the moment, to which I would get the response from my mum,

“Don’t forget what’s actually important.”

It was crushing. And for weeks, I would dread going to my parent’s house, because I would always take it so personally. So much so, that I would spend nights crying to my boyfriend.

It wasn’t until a few days after I had read the second agreement of “Don’t Take Things Personally” that I found myself back at my parents, having the heated discussion that I had been dreading for weeks. They wanted to know the truth. And I was tired of not being honest.

It was during that conversation that I truly understood what it meant to not take things personally. My parents still had a perception that wasn’t truly me. I was battling how they perceived my career and my success. I dreaded this conversation because I knew my parents would be disappointed in me for not using my degree. I didn’t want to hear the words:

“I’m disappointed in you.”

Those words came out from both my parents that day. They doubted that I could be successful as a yoga teacher. My mother tried hard to make me promise her that I would still go work for the State Department. They tried to tear down my dreams right in front of me.

In those moments, I could feel the emotions running through. I could feel the want to defend myself from their attacks. These were my parents; it wasn’t just a stranger on the street. I actually cared about what they thought.

However, I stood there resiliently taking their attacks, their poison as Ruiz would say, and I didn’t take it personally.

All I said was,

“I understand how you must feel. But how you perceive me and what I choose to do with my life is none of my concern.”

Before that moment, I had questioned whether I really wanted to be a yoga teacher. But as I stood there facing their onslaught of disappointment, I had never been firmer in anything in my life. I had never been so sure that this was the path for me. That this was what I wanted to do.

It didn’t matter what anyone had to say because I knew that it had nothing to with me.

I didn’t take anything personally.

Now, my relationship with my parents is much better. My dad called me before I taught my first class to wish me luck, and my mum asks me to show her stretches whenever I stop by the house.

Whether people say I doing great or horrible, I know that standing firm in my truth is all that matters.

And for that, I thank this book.

“You eat all their emotional garbage, and now it becomes your garbage. But if you do not take it personally, you are immune in the middle of hell. Immunity to poison in the middle of hell is the gift of this agreement.” - don Miguel Ruiz

For anyone looking to step into their personal power, I deeply recommend The Four Agreements. The universe provided me the knowledge I needed at the right time to face what was in front of me. I hope that through writing this, you are given the knowledge you need at the right time. I could be tomorrow, a week from now, or maybe a year. Whatever the time, I hope this message and this book reaches you when you most need it as it did for me.

And remember, you are always at the right place, at the right time.

Namaste.

- Ju