Don Miguel Ruiz tells us to Be Impeccable with Your Words, suggesting we make an agreement with ourselves to be impeccable with our words. He also warns that it is a most difficult agreement to honor.
Words are powerful. Words express feelings and truths. They can hurt someone, comfort those in pain, express powerful and creative ideas, and words can lie to us.
Powerful communication can lead a people to victory or destroy everything around us. We are experiencing the division in our Country through negative words manipulating and dividing people through fear-generating beliefs.
Many people who suffer from anxiety use words against themselves without knowing it or hearing it.
Using the absolute is often how we trick our brain into believing something that is not real or correct. For example: “I always” or “I never” are words that are not impeccable.
When we can get beyond the absolute to what is impeccable and accurate we will stop scaring ourselves into believing something that is not accurate.
For example: “It’s always raining when I go to visit you.” Other than the rain forest, it is difficult to find a location that is ALWAYS raining. Using the word “always” suggests something other than the truth.
When we are able to use our words correctly we will have more power over how we feel. If we use words to scare ourselves we create imagined anxiety.
If I almost hit the car in front of me my body will go into fight or flight mode using epinephrine hormones produced by the adrenal glands. I will feel symptoms of the fight or flight, such as racing heart, light-headed, or tingling fingers all brought on by the adrenaline rush. The symptoms lesson and go away once we realize that we did not hit the car in front of us. If we are not impeccable with our words and continue to say the “What If’s,” epinephrine will continue to produce and you can get yourself into a full blown anxiety attack by just using your words against yourself.
Suggested reading:
A Toltec: The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz
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