When I first read The Four Agreements and got to “Always Do Your Best”, I wasn’t convinced that was possible. It sounds like a tall order to some and to others it sounds like a copout.

 

In the book, Don Miguel Ruiz describes doing your best this way: “Under any circumstances, always do your best, no more and no less. But keep in mind that your best is not going to be the same from one moment to the next. When you wake up refreshed and energized in the morning, your best will be better than when you are tired at night. Your best will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick or sober as opposed to drunk.”

 

We are a culture that has been groomed to believe we need to work 12 hours a day (or more), skip our vacations, and worry that that isn’t enough. And yet we aren’t doing our best if we are missing out on our families, our friends, our life. As Arnold Zack wrote to Paul Tsongas in a letter, “No one on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time on my business.’”

 

When we overdo, we are expending too much energy and if we expend too much energy, we are certainly not doing our best. I remember interviewing for a management job with AT&T on the 70th Floor of the World Trade Center. I was a fish out of water. I’d been living on the East Coast for a year and although I had certainly visited Manhattan, the financial district is its own beast. The man interviewing me told me he expected me to work until 7pm every night. I knew that wasn’t going to work for me, so I mustered the courage to ask him why. I then proceeded to tell him that if and when it was necessary I would work late, however, I was good at managing my time and was quite sure I could complete everything required of me by 5pm. To my surprise and probably his, he hired me.

 

I think doing our best is about having Grace. Ernest Holmes describes Grace as, “Grace is the givingness of Spirit to Its Creation and is not a special law, but a specialized one. In other words, Grace is, but we need to recognize it. It is not something God imposed upon us but is the logical result of the correct acceptance of life and of a correct relationship to the Spirit. We are saved by Grace to the extent that we believe in, accept, and seek to embody, the Law of Good; for the Law of Good is ever a Law of Liberty and never one of limitation. Limitation is not a thing, not an entity, but a belief. Freedom is a Divine Reality.”

 

When we Always Do (Y)Our Best, we are allowing ourselves to experience Grace. Not everything needs to be done now. Not everything is your responsibility. Not everything gets tied up pretty with a bow. Life can be messy and when you do your best during the messiest parts; well, that is true Grace.

Blessings on your journey,
Rev. Gayle

I remember the first time someone asked me if I knew what the word assume

meant. I knew it was a trick question, so I responded no. They advised me that

assume has a tendency to make an ASS out of U and ME. It made me laugh and it

also rang true.

We see what we want to see, we hear what we want to hear, and then our brain

for whatever reason fills in the blanks based on our history and stories we have

chosen to make up.

Have you ever been in a relationship with someone and just assumed they should

do something for you because they love you and they should know what you

want? STOP IT! To the best of my knowledge none of us are truly mind readers, no

matter how much we love a person. The issue isn't that they don't love you, the

issue is you are afraid to ask for what you really want. Trust me on this. I spent

most of my life in relationships where most of the conversations were going on in

my head. And then one day, I'd be done and no one was more surprised than the

person I'd been living with.

Have you ever had a disagreement with a friend, spending days ruminating the

conversation in your head, losing sleep, feeling upset and angry? STOP IT! Yes,

you had a disagreement. It takes courage to reach out and ask an open-ended

question — without using the word you. It's safer to have conversations in your

head. The problem with conversations in our head is that your friend doesn't get to

be an active participant. Many friendships have been lost because we make

assumptions about what the other person is thinking and feeling. I don't know

about you; me, my psychic skills are really lacking in this department.

You may have noticed that The Four Agreements aren't really separate; they

intertwine with each other. When our word is impeccable, we don't leave room for

assumptions to fill the silence. We recognize the world isn't revolving around us,

so, we stop taking things personally. And instead of guessing, we ask.

Life becomes easier. Our relationships become deeper. And we stop making an ASS

out of U and ME.

Blessings on your journey,

Rev. Gayle

"Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering." — Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements

I used to think I had a personal relationship with everyone's bad mood. Someone snapped at me in the grocery line, and I carried it home like it was mine to fix. A friend went quiet for a few days, and I ran through a mental list of everything I might have done wrong. I was exhausted before I even got to the real problems of my day, because I'd spent all my energy absorbing everyone else's weather.

Here's what took me embarrassingly long to learn: most of what lands on us was never actually about us.

That coworker who's short with you in the meeting? She might be up half the night with a sick kid. The friend who didn't call back? He might be drowning in something he hasn't told anyone yet. Even the person who says something cruel and pointed, aimed right at your chest — that arrow was forged somewhere else, in some old wound of theirs, long before it ever reached you. You just happened to be standing there.

This doesn't mean people's words don't matter, or that we should shrug off real harm. It means we stop making ourselves the main character in everyone else's story. Each of us is walking around inside our own reality— our own fears, our own history, our own tired, half-healed places — and most of what we say and do comes straight out of those experiences, not out of some careful assessment of who you are.

I think about this every time I catch myself in the act of projecting, too. When I'm irritable, it's rarely about the person in front of me. It's about the meeting that ran long, the bill I'm worried about, the thing I said to someone I love and can't take back. If I'm honest, my stuff leaks out onto other people all the time. So why would I assume theirs doesn't leak out onto me?

There's a strange kind of freedom in this. Not indifference — freedom. When you stop scanning every interaction for evidence of your own worth, you get your energy back. You stop rehearsing conversations at 2 a.m. You stop editing yourself into a smaller, safer version just to avoid someone else's bad day.

So here's what I want you to sit with this week: the next time someone's words sting, pause before you let them in all the way. Ask yourself — is this actually about me, or am I just standing in the path of someone else's storm? You don't have to solve their storm. You don't even have to understand it. You just have to remember it isn't proof of anything about you.

You are not required to carry what belongs to someone else. Set it down. Walk on light. That lightness isn't callousness — it's clarity. And clarity, friends, is a kind of grace.

And here is the video to go with the BLOG: https://youtu.be/-TXpnZC29vE; if closed captions come on please un-click the CC button on the YouTube screen-bottom right.

Blessings on your journey,
Rev. Gayle

 

In Love and Law, Ernest Holmes writes, "Since our word creates always, it stands to reason that we have got to be very careful in sowing the seed. You cannot contradict nature and get an affirmative result. You cannot mix up thought, negative and positive and get a steady stream of affirmative consciousness and results. Your consciousness, your creative power, is limited to the amount of belief you have, the word you accept. If you believe you are living in an imperfect universe, it is imperfect to you. God has not erred. God has not made a mistake. There is nothing wrong."

In Don Miguel Ruiz's book, The Four Agreements, he writes, "The first agreement is the most important one and also the most difficult to honor: Be impeccable with your word. It sounds very simple, but it is very, very powerful."

Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

Impeccable means "without sin," and a sin is something you do or believe that goes against yourself. It means not speaking against yourself, to yourself or to others. It means not rejecting yourself. To be impeccable means to take responsibility for yourself, to not participate in "the blame game." Regarding the word, the rules of "action-reaction" apply. What you put out energetically will return to you. Proper use of the word creates proper use of energy — putting out love and gratitude perpetuates the same in the universe. The converse is also true. Impeccability starts at home. Be impeccable with yourself, and that will reflect in your life and your relationships with others. This agreement can help change thousands of other agreements, especially ones that create fear instead of love.

It is interesting reflecting on gossip. It is so easy to share someone else's story, or to gather support by sharing something out of context. I look back at times when I was having a disagreement with someone, and how I would share "my side" of the situation with my friends to gather support for me and against them. Sometimes we gossip simply by sharing someone else's story — when someone asks, "How is Billy doing?" instead of saying, "You should call Billy, I know he'd love to hear from you," we share what we know.

Remember the old TV show — some of you won't, you're not old enough — where the host would whisper something in one person's ear, and they'd turn and whisper what they heard to the person beside them? By the end of the row, the last person was asked to repeat what they'd heard, and it was never even close to what was originally said. Speaking with integrity is about speaking from your experience, not someone else's.

Before you speak, ask: is this my word to give? Your word is yours to keep impeccable — what will you do with it today?

Blessings on your journey,
Rev. Gayle

 

How often do we allow ourselves to judge someone — even ourselves — without considering that we are consciousness ever expanding? We form an opinion of someone in a hard season, a bad moment, an old story, and then we keep carrying that opinion long after they've moved past it. An awakened heart is willing to look again. And again. As many times as it takes. It is willing to see the person standing in front of us today, not the version we filed away years ago.

 

So, what does it actually take to awaken the heart? I've come to believe it happens in two movements: first inward, then outward

 

Before love can move through us toward others, it must find room inside us. We cannot pour from a heart that is clenched, guarded, or full of old static. That happens through four practices:

 

We calm down. Most of us are running so fast and carrying so much noise that we've forgotten what our own center even feels like. Calming down isn't about doing nothing — it's about slowing ourselves enough to empty out the chatter and reconnect to that quiet place inside that never actually left, it just got buried. You cannot hear your own heart over the noise of a life lived at full volume.

 

We let the past go. This is not the same as pretending the past didn't happen, or rushing past pain that deserves to be felt. It's something more specific: we keep the lessons, but we release the old stories about how we got them. Carrying yesterday's wound into today's relationship isn't loyalty to your healing — it's just exhaustion wearing a familiar coat.

 

We enlighten ourselves. This is the work of raising our consciousness — and it looks different for every single one of us. For some it's study, for some it's prayer, for some it's simply paying closer attention to the patterns we keep repeating. Whatever the path, the purpose is the same: to respond to life from a place of love rather than reaction, while still powerfully co-creating in alignment with our highest path. It's a daily choice to see a little more clearly than you did yesterday.

 

We create abundance. We are each Creators at our core — not someday, not once we've earned it, but right now, at this moment. We can build the life we dream of on every level: emotional, spiritual, relational, material. This isn't about denying hardship or papering over real limitations. It's about remembering that abundance is built not despite our circumstances, but through how we choose to meet them.

 

Once the heart has room, love doesn't stay private. It moves outward into how we treat one another — into the texture of our actual, daily relationships. I have found the following eight qualities show us what a truly awakened heart looks like in relationship:

 

Attention: Neglect born of inattention damages relationships far more often than outright malice ever does. Most heartbreak doesn't come from cruelty — it comes from being looked past, day after day, until you start to wonder if you were ever really seen at all. Showing up, fully, with your phone down and your mind present, is itself an act of love. It costs nothing and it is everything.

 

Trust: The entire fabric of our life together — working, living, breathing alongside one another — rests on a subtle, inherent trust in each other's basic goodness. Without it, every interaction becomes a negotiation. With it, we can rest into one another. Trust is rarely lost in one dramatic moment; more often it erodes in small ones, and it is rebuilt the same slow way.

 

Honesty: Still, after everything, the best policy. Not the brutal kind that uses truth as a weapon, but the kind that simply refuses to build a relationship on a foundation that isn't real. Every small dishonesty we allow ourselves — the "it's fine" that isn't, the omission we tell ourselves doesn't count — quietly withdraws from a trust account we'll eventually need.

 

Loyalty: We stand by the people we love in their darkest moments — not because we want to stand in the dark with them, but because we don't want them standing there alone. Loyalty isn't agreement, and it isn't blind defense. It's presence that doesn't disappear when things get hard, which is exactly when presence matters most.

 

Acceptance: We appreciate our similarities and respect our differences — both, not just one. It is easy to love what mirrors us back to ourselves. It is harder, and far more important, to extend that same regard to what doesn't. Acceptance doesn't mean we abandon discernment; it means we stop requiring someone to become like us before we'll consider them worthy of love.

 

Forgiveness: Imagine if everyone you knew were equally willing to apologize and to receive an apology. Most of our relational pain lives in that gap — the apology withheld, or the one offered and refused. Forgiveness is your remedy — yours to offer, yours to receive — and it is one of the few medicines that heals the giver as much as the receiver.

 

Empathy: It is our shared pain, more than our shared joy, that connects us at the deepest level. We are all walking through something, even when it doesn't show. Treating each other with that knowledge — gently, without assumption, with room for what we cannot see — changes everything about how we move through the world together.

 

Self-Love: Relationships don't create joy — they reflect it. The joy was always meant to come from within first. We cannot offer attention, trust, honesty, loyalty, acceptance, forgiveness, and empathy from an empty well. Self-love fills the well so there is something real to give.

 

Right now, wherever you are, bring your attention into your heart. Place your hand there and feel it — not just as an organ, but as the seat of something larger. Notice the subtle shift in your awareness, the quiet ground beneath fear, sorrow, anger, doubt.

 

This is the place we should pray from. This is the place we should speak from. This is the place we should live from.

 

Blessings on your journey,

Rev. Gayle