The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz-‘Domestication of Humans’-
Are you a Perfectionist?
Are you a perfectionist, never able to fully accept things as they are, wound up and uptight, always judging yourself unfairly, never able to fully relax and let go?
In The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz he says ‘We surrender to the beliefs of our parents, and the world, with our agreement. When we agree to something, we say YES to it. .Ruiz calls this process the Domestication of Humans.
Ruiz says that ‘ At an early age, we learn punishment and reward and form an image of perfection in order to try to be good enough to get the reward. We live by an image of how we should be in order to be accepted by everybody else and our fear of being rejected becomes the fear of not being good enough. In the end, we are not good enough for ourselves because we don’t fit with our image of perfection-so we punish ourselves with our own judgement!’
If who you are were these hands, and what everyone else wanted you to be and believe was dough, and you were to ball the dough up in your hands- the dough completely covers up and sticks to your hands! In the same way, We take others beliefs, they stick to us, and COVER UP who we truly are, and our lives feel like a mess! We start pretending to be what we are not, just to please others,and start feeling DOMESTICATED or DOUGH-MESS-STICKY!
We feel like we need to GET OUT of our cages. But we’ve grown so used to being in our cages that we are FEARFUL of leaving them behind! Ruiz says, ‘Just being yourself is the biggest fear of humans.’ Instead of getting out of our cages, We use a distracting behaviors, like perfectionism to GET OUT of being our wild,free self!
A wild man or woman knows who they are and is too busy being their true self to pay attention to the limiting beliefs of the world around them.Our true selves long to get into the WILD! Ask yourself-‘WHY HOLD?’ Why hold onto the beliefs, thoughts, and feelings of others when they have me feeling trapped?” When your feeling fear, anxiety, or any other negative emotion, ask yourself ‘WHY HOLD? Learn to let them go of the thoughts and beliefs that cause these emotions, drop the perfectionism, and be YOURSELF -free, happy, alive, and WILD.
If you find yourself feeling caged in, anxious, trapped and domesticated, try ending this sentence ten times with a different thought.
“If I allowed myself to express my free, wild self, I would_____________________.”
For example , If I allowed myself to express my free wild self, I would go for a run in nature OR smile all day long. Do it ten times, select your favorite answer and GO DO IT!
Read the The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz-it has some killer ideas on how to really start BEING YOURSELF, , wildness and all!. And if you want your OWN ideas to be more fun and engaging, with a video like this w rite me at nick@nicknavatta.com, and we’ll explore whats possible.
Nick Navatta