40 Days of Peace Day Fifteen
The Power of Words
The 1st Agreement
I discovered the Four Agreements many years ago and they changed my life. The 1st agreement, especially, shifted my perspective in profound ways about how powerful our words are.
The 1st agreement… Be Impeccable with your word.
“It is the most important one and also the difficult to honor. It is so important that with just this first agreement you will be able to transcend to the level of existence I call “heaven on earth.” ” -Don Miguel Ruiz
How we use our words with others and especially with ourselves, creates the “house we live in”. Words “cast spells”. You can throw daggers with them or use them for miracles and healing, compassion and love.
“I am the Smokey Mirror, because I am looking at myself in all of you, but we don’t recognize each other because of the smoke in-between-us.
That smoke is the Dream, and the mirror is you, the dreamer.” -Don Miguel Ruiz
“Your word is the power you have to create. Your word is a gift that comes directly from Creator, Yahweh.
“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.”
Through word, we express our creative power.
Through word, we manifest everything.
What you dream, what you feel, and who you truly are, will all be manifested through the word.
The word is a force.
Like a sword with two edges, your word can create the most beautiful dream, or your word can destroy everything around you.” (paraphrased from Ron Miguel Ruiz.. The Four Agreements.
If we sit in meditation with this TRUTH, “the true power of our words”, SO much becomes clear. How many times have we used our words as weapons? Gossip, lying, spiteful arguments, negative thoughts… How many of us have a running tape in our head that tells us “I’m not good enough”, “There’s no way I could ever reach that goal”, “I’m not pretty enough”, “My body is ugly”, “I don’t have enough money”… ?
How do we stop those negative thoughts every time they pop into our mind? How do we replace those negative thoughts with positive thoughts? Easier said than done, but through practice… all things are possible.
Of all the abuse I survived, I look back and see clearly, that the verbal abuse caused the longest lasting trauma on my being. In physical trauma, our spirits can dis·so·ci·ate with our vessels. This is also why we loose memories when we experience trauma. Even if I can’t recall specific details, my body holds those memories.
But words… I remembered ALL of the words and they replayed in my mind over and over and over and over. Combine this with shame and you have a recipe for depression, dis-ease, and self-loathing. I spent most of my adult life reprogramming my brain, and I’m still working with new teachers and advanced teachings on how to heal the neurological system that has been damaged in my brain and nervous system.
As a photographer, who had no reason to be nervous about creating… I would have so much anxiety before EVERY single photoshoot. No matter how much praise and compliments I received, that fear was planted in my system. And no matter how well my sessions would go, I would think I had done a terrible job and that maybe even my clients would hate all their images. THAT was NEVER the case. EVER. It was only the story I was telling myself.
My abuser manipulated my mind, wanting to control me and keep me in his cage, he would tell me daily how worthless I was, how fat, how ignorant… He wove a web of black magic and lies that twisted my mind into a dark nightmare, where I believed I wasn’t good enough. Somewhere in there, I was bound and locked away for a long time. Even after I got out of the abuse, the damage was done.
I was also, an amazing pianist. I wanted nothing more than to share my music with the world. I would play for hours a day and I even accompanied our church and all the choirs in my high school. I went to college to follow my dream!! But the damage had been done and I never made it onto the stage, not once. I threw up on the side of the stage, ran off and dropped out of the class. By my sophomore year, I had to switch my major from music to elementary education. I failed speech class 4 times and ended up having to take it in summer school with a class of less than 10 people and even that was terrifying, absolutely terrifying.
Today, when I photograph I have nothing but fun and creative freedom. I am free from that anxiety that once went hand in hand with every shoot. Today, I get excited and feel relaxed and at play when I create portraits. AND by my 44th birthday next June, I plan on sharing my music gift more in public. Loves, it is never to late for our dreams!
Words are powerful.
You can use them to destroy someones dreams
or help build their castles.
From birth, every one of us has been told stories that weren’t OUR TRUTH. “The human mind is like a fertile ground where seeds are continually being planted. These seeds are opinions, ideas, and concepts. You plant a seed, a thought, and it grows. The WORD is like a SEED, and the human mind is so fertile. The only problem is that too often it is fertile for the seeds of fear.” -Don Miguel Ruiz
Here’s the truth… we’re all magicians! Its up to us how we use our magic. The bad news is that “hurt people, hurt people”. BUT we can use our words to release people from the spells they are under!
I have a very loving family and I started finding my people who used their magic to replace the fear and hate tape playing in my mind, with one of love and hope and power! I started planting seeds of love and hope in my heart and now I plant seeds of love and hope in all the hearts that I meet.
I am intentional about spreading love to every single being I meet when I am in the world. I send them love. I make sure to share a compliment or cheer people on when they share their dreams. I love to share love to my brothers and sisters. My words are powerful. My love is powerful. My big heart is powerful.
The only way for me to shine my Light in the world at its fullest potential, it to do the work to heal myself.. and that work starts with my words.
Be IMPECCABLE with your words…
“The word impeccability means “without sin”. Impeccable comes from the Latin pecatus, which means “sin”. The im in impeccable means “without”… Religions talk about sin and sinners, but let’s understand what it really means to sin.
A sin is anything that you do which goes against yourself,” your TRUE NATURE, which we know is PURE LOVE… PURE DIVINE LOVE. Then sin is anything that separates us from our PURE LOVE BEING. We are not then, “born sinners” but anything that separates us from this pure state of LOVE then separates us from OUR TRUTH.
You go against yourself when you judge yourself. “Being impeccable is not going against yourself. When you are impeccable, you take responsibility for your actions, but you do not judge or blame yourself. From this point of view, the whole concept of “sin” changes from something moral or religious to something of common sense. Sin then begins with rejection of yourself” (YOUR TRUTH).
When we can see this pattern.. this inflicting fear and hate on ourselves and then in the world, it helps us understand why hurt people, hurt people.
It helps us see ourselves in everyone. It helps us learn to forgive, ourselves and others.
If I call someone stupid or worthless, I am actually using dark magic on myself because, of coarse, the person I spew this hate speech on will feel negatively towards me. If I spew my own hurt, my own negative emotions on you… I am ultimately spewing hate on myself. BUT if I truly love myself, I’m going to share that love with you and everyone whom I meet.
“Being impeccable with your word is the correct use of your energy; it means to use your energy in the direction of truth and love for yourself. If you make an agreement with yourself to be impeccable with your word, just with that intention, the truth will manifest through you and clean all the emotional poison that exists within you.
My dad helped me learn to forgive my abuser but it took a long time and a lot of growth. He would say, “You’re sitting in a chair and on either of the arms of the chair are buttons that control this persons destiny. One button will punish him, maybe even send him to live in a “hell”. The other button would give him healing and he would change in a good way and live a good life.” Oh, that chair was so damn hard. I hated my abuser so much. I blamed him for stealing my childhood, my innocence, my teen years, my dreams of being a brilliant pianist… Oh how I hated him.
And then one day, I sat in that chair and I prayed for him. I say there and went into a dream world where I met him as a little boy. I saw him, I watched him as his dad beat him and spoke cruelties at him. I watched as he witnessed his father beating his mom. I watched and I saw him through new eyes. And I not only forgave him, I spent a long time praying for his healing and for his life to change so that he would never hurt anyone again, including himself. I’ve never had contact with him, nor will I ever choose to have contact with. Because, it is also important to set up healthy boundaries. Loving me, means I don’t have to save him. But forgiving him, opened my heart to the healing I needed.
Forgiving him, I forgave myself. I was able to start a new journey to find my own child Sarah locked away in my subconscious.
This was a letter I wrote to myself a decade ago. This piece of paper saved my life on more than one occasion. I needed to read my own WORDS on the hard days to stop the old tape player from running. Write yourself a love letter. We’re all healing from some sort of trauma. Fear has been on the battlefield for a while and we are all casualties of this great war of FEAR vs LOVE.
Today is a really good day to pick up your sword of TRUTH and your shield of LOVE. Peace will rule all hearts again.
Use WHITE MAGIC, the magic of DIVINE LOVE. Use it on yourself and anyone who has ever hurt you, and we will raise the collective to the LIGHT.
THE ONLY WAY TO BREAK A SPELL IS TO MAKE A NEW AGREEMENT BASED ON TRUTH AND LOVE.
ONLY THE TRUTH WILL SET US FREE
Shams of Tabriz’s 40 Rules of Love
It’s easy to love a perfect God, unblemished and infallible that He is. What is far more difficult is to love fellow human being with all their imperfections and defects. Remember, one can only know what one is capable of loving. There is no wisdom without love. Unless we learn to love God’s creation, we can neither truly love nor truly know God.
Journal Time
