Breathwork And Nervous System Reset

Week Recap Of The Four Agreements

Self-Care As Subtraction Not Addition

Agreement One: Be Impeccable With Your Word

Agreement Two: Don’t Take Things Personally

Agreement Three: Stop Making Assumptions

Agreement Four: Redefine Your Best With Rest

Undomestication, Ancient Wisdom, And Closing

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Blessings, greetings, and welcome. Welcome back to the Sweet Spot. This is Dr. Derek Sweet. I'm your host here on The Sweet Spot. This is episode six of seven episodes we've been doing on a book called The Four Agreements. It's a classic book, and we've been unpacking the four agreements all week long. And I really hope that you'll get an opportunity to go back and listen to some of the chapters we've talked about this week about the four agreements because it's really been quite illuminating. And I've been loving the feedback I've been getting from some of you about what unpacking the four agreements opened up for you. So today is self-care Saturday, sweet spotters. And if you've been with us all week, take a breath. In through the nose, and slowly out through the mouth, letting the exhale be longer than the inhale. You know, whenever we do that, we take a deep breath and we let the exhale be longer than the inhale. Here's what's happening. From a neurophysiological perspective, you are resetting your internal mechanisms. You are allowing a system inside your brain, a parasympathetic nervous system, the one that is responsible for rest and digest behaviors, to surface. And you're sending a message to your threat detectors in your brain that it's gonna be okay. So that deep breath, which might be the only one we take for the day, is a wonderful reset. And we are already into self-care Saturday. Wow. Right. Remember this week we covered a lot of ground on the four agreements, this book. We said on Monday that we have had agreements or scripts running in our lives and running in the background since we were kids. We didn't even choose them, we just had them handed to us and we took them on. Tuesday, we cleaned up our word. We said, hey, the words have power, and we have to be careful where we take them and what we say to ourselves and what we say to others. On Win It All Wednesday, we decided that we're just not going to collapse under criticism and we're not gonna languish under loss, right? We stopped collapsing and languishing under criticism and loss. And Thursday, trust yourself Thursday, we challenged every assumption and decided, you know what, rather than just assume and live under the weight of our assumptions and drain our energy, we'll write our own story. And then Friday, finish strong Friday, we committed. Oh yes, we did. We committed to a standard that was honest and sustainable, a standard that was our own. Yes, and we found strength in it. So, yeah, if you didn't hear those five days and those four agreements, I I ask you to go back and to try to listen to them. And today we're gonna do a calibration. We have had five days, four agreements, and now it's gonna be one calibration today. We're not gonna add anymore. Today we're gonna subtract, we're gonna do the math a little differently. You've been doing great all week. We've been adding in all week on these four agreements. But here's what nobody is telling us about self-care. Here's where we're gonna really look at self-care a little differently. Most people think of self-care as what you add in, like if you want to add in more sleep, maybe get better nutrition, add in a workout, a massage, more aromatherapy, go on, read a great book or go on vacation, and those things matter and they matter deeply. But Don Miguel Ruiz, the author of this book, argues something really profound, I think. That self-care is about what you stop doing to yourself, and that's a way of looking at these four agreements, not just as agreements, but as a self-care operating system, not just relationship tools, right? So that's the idea. It's self-care Saturday. Let's see if we can dive in and do a remix of the four agreements as self-care agreements. You want to go do that with me? Sure you do. Let's let's go in. Yeah, every single one of these can be thought of as removing something and subtracting something. Every one of these removes a specific form of self-abuse that we may not even realize or have recognized as abuse. Think about that. So agreement one, right? Your word. Remember agreement one? Honor your word? That's a big one. Be impeccable with your word. Look, from a self-care perspective, this is where it either begins or it breaks down. Because the author is clear in the book, self-rejection is the biggest sin that you commit against yourself. Every time you call yourself stupid or after a mistake, that's not accountability. That's self-abuse dressed up as honesty. Every time you rehearse why you're not ready, why you're not good enough, why you're not worthy, your nervous system creates a file. Your hippocampus, remember we talked about the hippocampus being like a little librarian, it files it away. And you we it you walk around with that. And your prefrontal cortex, remember the brain's CEO? Not only is it file, the prefrontal cortex is the CEO. This is your planning and self-regulation center. It takes those words to heart. It takes those words as instructions. And when you start, well, look, let me put it this way: you can't pour from a cup you've been verbally poisoning from the inside. You've got and I've got to watch the words we say to ourselves. Self-care starts with how we speak to ourselves when no one else is listening. And I don't know about you, but I'm always in a conversation with myself. My head is just going with thoughts, and the thoughts are words, and I have to be careful. So, agreement one, cleaning up the word, not just for it's not just for others, it's for it's for you first, it's for me first. And so that's how we care for ourselves. Be gentle, speak kind words. You know, there's a spiritual, the ancient wisdom. I'm not gonna quote, but you know, the ancient wisdom tells us to to to that that sweet words are healing, they're like a honeycomb, they're very powerful, and that's why the first agreement can be seen as self-care. The second agreement, don't take it personally. I speak to myself again, that's the second agreement, is perhaps the most directly therapeutic agreement on a Saturday, on self-care Saturday. Because think about it. Self-care Saturday, Saturday is where the week lands, right? You carry it home, you're carried into your rest, you're carried into your relationships, into your body, and if you spend the whole week absorbing all kinds of other people's energy, absorbing what you see on the news, everything, every bit of it, the feedback, the silence, the words, the verdict on your value, the advertisements that you've had to sit through, all of it. You arrive at Saturday sometimes a little fatigued, a little exhausted. And sometimes it's the weight of everybody else's projections, not all, not necessarily always the work, right? It's the work of everybody else's, it's the weight, right, of everybody else's projections just sort of, even from the TV, it's just sort of landing on you. So the author writes, if you keep this agreement, this don't take things personally, the second agreement, he writes literally, if you keep this agreement, you can travel around the world with your heart completely open and no one can hurt you. Don't take things personally. You see, the translation of that for me is that when we stop outsourcing our worth to other people's opinions, we stop hemorrhaging the energy we need to recover. We stop bleeding our own energy because we're so worried about what this person thinks. And their criticism becomes their own autobiography. It has nothing to do with us. Their criticism is not our biography, their criticism is their autobiography, not your biography. Remember the book I told you about yesterday. I think I said this book. What you think, I just like the title, I love saying it. What you think of me is none of my business. Great book, and it's a quick read. So, yeah, self-care and the second agreement makes sense. That's not just emotional intelligence, it's energy conservation at the highest level because you're not taking on other people's opinions, you're not taking things personally, you could just live by that agreement, and according to this author, you can walk around and be happy all day long because you're just not taking it. Easier said than done. It's gotta be practiced. Yeah, this is energy conservation, what I'm talking about here. This is big time self-care. A bubble bath is cool, massage, cool, body work, cool, hydration, excellent, but something about not taking things personally is also very caring for you. Now, what about the third agreement? Don't make assumptions. Could that be self-care? I think so. I'll tell you why. When we walk around making assumptions, we're exhausted. Every unverified story you tell yourself, every time you make this assumption about what somebody meant, what do they think of me? Why are they quiet? I wonder what's happening with them. You know what you're doing with that is that you're burning your own emotional fuel. You're using up your ATP or denocine triphosphates. So these are your energy packets. You are uh uh uh absorbing um all this work in your in your neural pathways. So, yeah, unverified stories. Uh, what do they mean? What do they think? Making assumptions. Listen, they're expensive. That burns a lot of fuel. And you know, the most expensive assumptions, right? You know which ones they are? The ones we make about ourselves, the ones you made about yourself. When you say you make an assumption that you're not ready for this, that you're not able, that you're not capable, that you may fall short, that they might laugh at you, that this doesn't look good on you, that you're not smart enough, anything. Those aren't facts. Those are fears. Yeah, they're fears, and they're fears, and they're wearing a costume of looking like you know, I'm gonna have to prepare, I'm gonna have to keep perfecting this, I'm gonna have to ask a million questions, I'm gonna have to be so prepared, so prepared, so prepared. That's fear wearing a costume of preparation. Okay, sometimes, yeah, in my work, we've got to do that, we've got to tell you things like this. Like, this is you, you're afraid, and you you're hiding behind preparation, you're hiding behind a million questions. Run the system, stop being so afraid. I speak to myself. So, yes, this third assumption, this third agreement, don't make assumptions, is very real for self-care Saturday. It means sitting down and asking yourself honestly, what story am I taking into this weekend that I never actually verified? What assumptions am I walking around with that are draining my energy? I want you to name it, I want you to question it, and I want you to put it down because you don't have to carry fiction into your rest. This is self-care Saturday. We don't need to carry a story into it. Let's just rest. Let's chill, let's chill together. You want to do agreement four with me? I'm sure you do. I want to do agreement four with you, okay? An agreement four. How look, does agreement four really tie into self-care? Agreement four is always do your best. That's what the author says. I think it does. I think it does. I really do because you see, I think what happens here is that you're redefining self-care from perfection to compassionate consistency. You see, the author is saying that your best is not a fixed thing. Your best is not a fixed standard. That's where we get hung up. We have some idea of what the best should be, and we keep and we're locked into a very rigid view. No, your best can change depending on what's going on. We said that the other day. It can change based on your sleep, based on your stress levels, based on whether you're grieving or not. Sometimes in a grief period, you your best is what you is all that you have. The little that you can do is what you can do, and that's okay. It could be a part of your recovery, um, whatever season you're in. So I want you to hear that clearly, sweet spotter. Today is self-care Saturday, and resting today is doing your best. Just getting the rest today. Consider that your best. We don't often think of rest that way. Then when I take a rest, when I take a break, this is me at my best. Have you ever thought of it that way? I know I don't. I have to consciously remind myself you're doing the right thing by taking this break. It's okay. Recovering today is doing your best. You know what else? Saying no to one more obligation is doing your best. I saw Michelle Obama say this on some show where she said saying no meant that she was saying yes to things that she really wanted. So sometimes saying no to one more obligation, so you can say yes to your own restoration, that's agreement number four. That's doing your best. Wow, that's great. So, what are you gonna say no to today? So that you can say yes to your body, yes to your mind, yes to your spirit, yes to relaxing, yes to resetting, yes to recalibrating, yes to refreshing, yes to recharging. Can I come up with another R? Yes to recalibrating, I think. I may have said it already. Anyway, you know what I was saying, right? The idea is resting today, recovering today, and saying no to one more obligation today is agreement number four. That's self-care. Yeah, you know, I love this agreement because it's protecting us from self-judgment on the days, like on the Saturdays, when our best looks a little bit quieter than the rest of the week. You don't always have to be the rock star every single time. Finishing strong like we did on Friday doesn't have to look like more. Sometimes it looks like stillness. We'll talk about that tomorrow on Slowdown Sunday. Sometimes it looks like just stopping. All four agreements converge on one act: breaking the agreements that you made in fear and replacing them with the agreements you're gonna make in self-care and love. You've been listening to The Sweet Spot. All week long, we've been dealing with a book called The Four Agreements. In this book, the author, Don Miguel Ruiz, says that we've been domesticated. That's the term he used. The years of childhood where we absorbed other people's judgments, we were domesticated. Where we took on the fears of other people, we were domesticated. When we started accepting limitations, we got domesticated. When we made these things our identity, we got domesticated. That's what he called it. He said domestication. We didn't choose those agreements, we inherited them. So, what's real self-care? Saturday self-care is the daily practice of undomesticating ourselves. It has to be. We've got to get undomesticated. We've got to reclaim our word today. We've got to reclaim your energy, reclaim your story, reclaim your standard. This is not about a spa day. Absolutely go to the spa, but this is about soul day, a soul work, because you've got to find new strength. You've got to not just be always fatigued and weary. A part of this is renewing yourself. The ancient wisdom in Isaiah 40 says that you've got to trust in God, find new strength, soar on a wing like an eagle, run, don't grow weary, walk, don't languish and faint. And you gotta notice the order in that word in the ancient wisdom. The ancient wisdom ain't nothing to play with. If you go back and read that verse in Isaiah 40, verse 31, you will see an order for those who have eyes, let them see. First, trust, then the strength comes, then the soaring happens. What does that tell us as we close? Rest is not the absence of effort, it's the source of effort. Let that land in your spirit this Saturday. You cannot sustain what you refuse to restore. Come on now. Yes, rest is no escape. You're this is how you arrive. You're not escaping. You're arriving, and you're allowed to stop moving, you're allowed to be still, and you're allowed to surrender. As Maya Angelo said, you may not control all the events that happened to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. Thank you for listening to me on Self Care Saturday. Every old agreement you inherited, every belief that fear installed before you had a choice, those are the events that happened to you. You didn't offer them, you absorbed them, but today on Self Care Saturday, you're letting go. That's the work, that's the door, that's the path. Love you, you're amazing, you're extraordinary. I'll see you tomorrow for Slow Down Sunday, and we will have completed the four agreements for science, for soul, and for success.