A few years before Stephanie read Pema Chodron’s “When Things Fall Apart, Heart Advice for Difficult Times,” she was just starting her journey as an adult student in community college. Through the course of her divorce she had lost her house to foreclosure and had been laid off from her factory job. The year was 2008 and the country was in the throes of the Great Recession. Finding another job in the rural area where she was living was essentially impossible unless she wanted to work the night shift- which she couldn’t do as a now single parent of a young child. So she moved them into a tiny two bedroom apartment; in a tiny midwestern town with a population of 1600 people, relying on student loans and unemployment to stay afloat. It was a very stressful time and Stephanie dove into her schoolwork to distract herself from the lonely life she was living, otherwise. It was during this time that she found a book called “The Four Agreements, A Toltec Wisdom Book.”

I review the books that Stephanie has read. She has read a ton, some of them have been life changing and this book was one of them. Don Miguel Ruiz is a nagual from the Eagle Knight lineage. Thousands of years ago, the Toltec were known throughout southern Mexico as “women and men of knowledge.”

“Anthropologists have spoken of the Totlec as a nation or a race, but, in fact, the Toltec were scientists and artists who formed a society to explore and conserve the spiritual knowledge and practices of the ancient ones. They came together as masters (naguals) and students of Teotihuacan, the ancient city of pyramids outside Mexico City known as the place where “Man Becomes God.”

The knowledge of the Totlec eventually had to be concealed by the naguals in order to prevent it from being misused by people who were not prepared to use it wisely as well as people who would misuse it for their own personal gain. But it was passed down secretly through the generations waiting for the right time for it to be revealed again. Fortunately for us, Don Miguel Ruiz was guided to share the Toltec teachings with humanity during our lifetimes and that is what he has done in “The Four Agreements.”

Stephanie had to reread the book because it’s been over a decade since the last time she read it. She marked some pages that had messages she really wanted to touch on in this review.

She found a few.
The first time Stephanie read this book, she hadn’t yet become a hypnotist so what she got out of it was really focused on living her life according to the four agreements outlined in the book. But after reading this book from the perspective of someone who has learned how the neuroscience behind hypnosis works, she found this book to have even more compelling ideas to share besides just the four agreements. There are three main takeaways from this book that we discuss in this review and how they can result in a successful life of peace and happiness.

First, Don Miguel introduces the idea that the main function of our minds is to dream. He suggests that we are always dreaming, twenty-four, seven. Sometimes we are awake in the dream and sometimes we are asleep in the dream. When we are awake, we process the information we receive through our senses, framing it so that we perceive the dream as a linear passage of time. When we are asleep in the dream, it tends to change constantly because that frame is no longer present. While we are awake, we develop our view of the world by accepting “the dream of the planet.”

“The dream of the planet is the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams which together create a dream of a family, a dream of a community, a dream of a city, a dream of a country, and finally a dream of the whole [sic] humanity.”

Stephanie had to take a second to really think about the idea that everything experienced in the waking hours was a dream… the more she thought about it the more it seemed to be true. After all, some people experience the world visually, some auditorily, and some kinesthetically. When we are asleep and we are dreaming we tend to experience the dream the same way we experience reality, while awake. Some people see their dreams, some people feel their dreams, and some people hear their dreams. Incidentally, teachers are trained that students have a tendency to learn via those same mechanisms: visually, auditorily, and kinesthetically. Everything we think, every belief we have, every rule that we make up, is all a product of our imagination. As Stephanie considered this, she began to realize that existence seems to be experienced the same way, from a 30,000-foot view, whether one is awake or asleep. And then, later on in the same chapter, Nagual Miguel introduced the second concept that really caught Stephanie’s attention from the perspective of a hypnotist.

“But nobody abuses us more than we abuse ourselves, and it is the Judge, The Victim, and the belief system that makes us do this.”

Now, there are many people in the world for whom that statement would go way over their head because they have not experienced abuse or they may not have yet realized the abuse they are experiencing. But, and there is such a huge but, here, if this resonates with you the way it resonated with Stephanie, then perhaps this blog post is for you, too. He goes on to discuss that we will only accept just as much abuse from someone else as we give to ourselves. If someone is abusive towards us less than we are to ourself, then we will tolerate the abuse. And maybe this isn’t true for everyone, but Stephanie certainly could relate to this and maybe you can, too.

When we are born we are blank slates and we have to be taught the dream of the planet. As we learn the dream that we are taught, we build a belief system that turns into “the Book of Law” that our internal judge uses as a guide for right and wrong. When we are children we are taught the dream of the adults central in our lives and because the adults know best, we agree with their beliefs and we write them in the book. Then as we grow through childhood and are punished by the adults for not following the “rules,” we eventually learn to avoid punishment, and be “good.” We domesticate ourselves. Then as we go along, each time we find ourselves breaking the agreement our internal judge punishes us and our internal victim feels pain, shame, and guilt. And we don’t just punish ourselves once, do we? No, we punish ourselves over and over every time there is a new infraction of a rule that we agreed to, before we were old enough to understand what it was that we were actually agreeing to.

And lastly, of course we have to talk about the four agreements that can lead to amazing life changes even if you just do your best every day to follow them and succeed less than you intend to.

Reading “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Luis from the perspective of a hypnotist really validated everything Stephanie has learned from hypnosis training and working with clients. Changing the script written in childhood and rewriting belief systems are the central to the training a professional hypnotist receives in hypnosis school. There are many techniques and modalities an experienced hypnotist has in their toolbox to help their clients to get rid of that internal judgment and heal the victim. You might find it interesting to know that when a person goes into hypnosis, they are not asleep but they experience REM, (Rapid Eye Movement) as though dreaming. That is one way a professional hypnotist can tell when a client is in a hypnotic state.

If you want to experience a dreamy, hypnotic state and explore successfully implementing new agreements based on the book, “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Luis, here is a free download from Stephanie for you.

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