The Four Agreements are Toltec wisdom guides as popularized by shamanic teacher and healer Don Miguel Ruiz. The first, “Be Impeccable with Your Word,” speaks to our capacity to have integrity with our words. Impeccable is a heavier word than it looks. It comes from the Latin peccare, to sin, so what is being asked for is speech without sin. That is a high bar, and every one of us trips over it sometimes.
To be impeccable with our word is no small thing. It requires a level of mindfulness in our day-to-day interactions and the capacity to withhold speech, even when we are charged, triggered, angry, misunderstood. It is usually our emotional states that prevent us from being irreproachable with our words.
Old patterns dictating how we perceive others and ourselves also limit our ability to use our words with integrity. When we speak poorly of others, when we are ungracious towards ourselves, when we erroneously see ourselves as victims, we lose the integrity of our speech.
When we are impeccable with our word, when we speak with integrity, we speak only for compassionate truth and love. When we do not speak with loving-kindness we hurt ourselves as well as others. It never feels good to our spirits when we are critiquing. This doesn’t mean that we can’t express anger or set firm boundaries, but to do so with integrity and loving-kindness means that we don’t verbally take others or parts of ourselves hostage.
Impeccable is not the same as nice. Nice is a performance for the room. Impeccable is a match between what is true and what leaves your mouth, and the true thing is often unwelcome. Someone who never says anything hard is keeping a different agreement, one made much earlier, which says do not risk the disapproval. Most of us made that agreement young, for good reasons, and it has kept us safe in its way.
You know the moment. Something lands wrong, and the sentence is usually out before you have caught up with yourself. A part of you got there first, and it is fast because it has had to be. It learned that the first word wins the room, and that a cut delivered early hurts less than a cut received. It is protecting something real. It is also why you spend the drive home rewriting what you said.
You cannot outlaw that one, and shaming it makes it louder. What it answers to is time. Three seconds of saying nothing is an eternity to a part built for speed, and three seconds is usually all this agreement requires.
The pressure to speak comes before the words do. Before there is a sentence, something gathers: heat in the face, a jaw that sets, breath that shortens, hands that want to move. Yours may run on other cues. See if you can find the half second where the thing is only energy and not yet language. That is the only place a pause can happen. Once it is a sentence it is already moving.
Almost all spiritual traditions prescribe integrity in speech. The Bible says “let your words be few” (Ecclesiastes 5:2), and Right Speech is part of Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path. So the first agreement, and the ones that follow, are not new, but rather a new package on an old truth, for as Ecclesiastes 1:9 states, “there is nothing new under the sun,” which is to say that there is no magic path, no guru, no ultimate truth, that hasn’t already presented itself to the world a thousand times over. Still, the fact that speaking with integrity is addressed in so many world religions tells us that this is an important teaching.
There is a simple teaching on the wisdom of silence, often called the three sieves, that can help us to put into practice impeccability with our word. We ask ourselves: 1) Is it kind? 2) Is it true? 3) Is it necessary?
Those three questions get handed to the Buddha, to Socrates and to the Quakers, and nobody has found a page where any of them said it. The oldest trace is a minister’s advice to the people around him, written down by his son in 1857. It has traveled from mouth to mouth ever since, and it is yours to use now.
The three sieves are for your own speech and nobody else’s. Handed to another person they become a gag. People have been talked out of naming abuse or reporting a harm with them, and out of saying the unbearable true thing at the family table, all under the banner of kindness. If a rule about speech is being used to keep you silent about something that is being done to you, that is not the first agreement. A sieve works in your own hands. Held by someone else, it manages you, and kindness is only what they call it. If these questions have ever been turned on you to keep you quiet, reject them. Your voice and your sovereignty are yours.
May you pause before speaking so that your words become more precious.
May your words be used wisely.
May they spread truth with loving-kindness.
May your words cause healing rather than harm.
The Toltecs were a people who lived in central Mexico, and people who carry that ancestry are alive today. Nearly everything said about the Toltecs of the past comes down to us through the Aztecs, who looked back on them as a vanished golden age. No Toltec text survives that anyone can hold these agreements up against. What travels under that name in modern spiritual writing runs through a twentieth-century line of teachers, Carlos Castaneda among them, whose account of his own apprenticeship did not hold up when it was examined. None of this makes the four agreements less useful to you. Their authority comes from what they do when you try them. If they work, they work because they work, whoever said them first in Tula, the old Toltec capital.
Where the agreements come from: The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz.
More in the Four Agreements series