Sometimes children come up with little gems of wisdom that make you think “that’s really cool”. My son, David, aged around 6 or 7, looked up at me and said “You know, Dad, before you can make a deal, you have to agree with yourself” and I thought… that’s something to think about!
And this one seems to be true on so many levels.
I think the first thing is that before we can make any sort of agreement with someone else, we have to have true peace in our heart first. Those things we decide despite the fact that we’re not happy about them, whether out of compromise or desperation – those things turn out to be the big mistakes that take us into places we didn’t need to go.
Secondly, we need to have thought it through ourselves. Decisions made that are poorly thought through usually end up going badly wrong. I’m not saying that we need to become paralysed by thinking too much… but those knee jerk reactions are usually going to let us down. The exception to this, I would say, is when there is a tug in our heart that says ‘do this’. Those tugs can be trusted. They come from a deeper place, a place of wisdom and connection. Trust them.
Thirdly, I think that we need to have the peace that this is the right thing for the other person too. The universe works on a win win basis… the universe will not ultimately honour anything that takes away from the other person because it’s unfair or because it doesn’t respect them.
And ultimately, in agreements with others as in life itself, we have to come from a place of wholeness in our lives. We have to find a way of integrating body, mind and soul. I’m not one of these people who advise you not to trust your body or your mind – the ones that protest that they have ‘evolved above into a world where they are guided by their souls alone’.
It seems to me that we were ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ and that what we are works best together. Sometimes we will get a ‘gut reaction’ – and we can trust it. Sometimes things ‘don’t seem to add up’, or they make sense’ – and we follow that. Other times, it seems that we are guided by an energy, a wisdom that comes from a place outside of ourselves – and we can place our trust in that.
We are wiser than we know, when we learn to listen to our whole being.. and then we can make decisions, and agreements, and commitments, that benefit us, our friends, our colleagues, our families, and, ultimately, the world. When we act from a place of total inner integrity then we become… unstoppable.