Infertility & The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide for Personal Freedom

Cheers, dear readers,

It is fantastic to be writing to you here today! I have missed this wonderful creative and therapeutic outlet which also serves as a way to support and send love and hope to this courageous community. As a bonus tip to anyone reading this: If you are struggling emotionally, please consider taking pen to paper or your fingers to your keyboard. Getting your emotions and thoughts out on “paper” can truly be life changing, healthy, and an excellent way to get challenging and draining emotions OUT of your mind and your body! If you keep them bottled up inside it can lead to depression, my friends — and I can tell you first-hand, that is no picnic! All of our emotions are just that: simply normal, natural, human emotions. Yet there are productive ways to release them and share them, and not so productive ways that may also hurt those around us. A word of caution though: Our words have amazing POWER —> both to heal or to hurt.

That brings me to the first point of this blog post: Be Impeccable with Your Word as a way to personal freedom and joy. I have written here in the past about my de-cluttering mission that I spoke about after reading The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Well days ago, I was organizing, de-cluttering, and “KonMari”-ing my vast book collection. This whole process is cathartic and powerful as we take each item we own and ask “Does this spark joy”? As I diligently charged forward on this rather difficult task, I came across a book that sparks so much joy in my life that I own two copies. If you are wondering, yes I kept both! I already re-read one copy, and lent the other copy to a loved one before he went on vacation.

The book: The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom is a game-changer, my friends! I cherished and loved this book when I read it in my 20s as a hopeful youth, and I cherish it just as much reading it now in my 40s as an empowered, infertility survivor, mature women. I encourage you to get a copy for yourself and dive into the wisdom of this book. But I will share just some morsels of its incredibly wise words.

Brief Summary: “In The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love.”

• Be Impeccable with Your Word — This agreement sounds so simple, but it is very, very powerful. Regardless of what language or dialect you speak, your intent manifests through your word – what you dream, what you feel, and what you really are. The word is a force, and it is the power we all have to express and communicate, to think, and thereby to create the events in your life. But like a sword with two edges, your word can create the most beautiful dream, or your word can destroy everything around you! One edge is the misuse of the word, which creates a living hell. The other edge is the impeccability of the word, which will only create beauty, love, and heaven on earth. How can you use your words to inspire, hope, strength, and resilience in your life?
• Don’t Take Anything Personally — Whatever happens to you – including someone saying an insensitive or thoughtless comment – don’t take it personally. What other people say is about them, and what we hear is about us. Why do we take things personally? Because it may mean that we agree with whatever is being said. As soon as you agree, the poison someone else is trying to give you goes through you, and you are trapped in a living hell, due to “personal importance.” Personal importance, or taking things personally, is a maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about “me.” Yet nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you. What they say, what they do, and the opinions they give are according to the agreements they have in their own minds.
• Don’t Make Assumptions — We all tend to make assumptions about everything. The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are the truth when that may not be in fact the case at all! We make assumptions about what others are doing or thinking – we take it personally – then we blame them and react by sending emotional poison with our word. This is why whenever we make assumptions, we’re asking for problems and creating our own suffering. Because we are afraid to ask for clarification, we make assumptions; then we defend our assumptions and try to make someone else wrong. It is always better to ask questions than to make an assumption, because assumptions set us up for suffering. What if we all first assumed goodwill instead? What could be true in our lives then?
• Always Do Your Best — This agreement is all about action! Under any circumstance, always strive to do your best, no more and no less. Yet keep in mind that your best is never going to be the same from one moment to the next. Everything is alive and changing all the time, so your best will sometimes be high quality, and other times it will not be as good. Your best will depend on whether you are feeling wonderful and happy, or upset, angry, or jealous. As you build the habit of the four new agreements (replacing older limiting beliefs), your best will become better than it used to be.

I hope these words offered here help you on your infertility journey, and offer inspiration and maybe some guidelines to live an awesome life, whether things are going your way, or even when they are going horribly wrong. You can be resilient and strong through it all! We are here to support you on your journey.

Please join Julia next week to hear more about her own personal journey down the infertility path. I look forward to speaking with you soon. I wish you the best on your respective journey.

Warm regards,
Cathy