Who’s not familiar with “The Four Agreements“?  Don Miguel Ruiz did a fabulous job of popularizing these simple and profound guides to life.  I think about them often and find myself caught in the traps of not following them.

Sergio Magaña is a lovely man.  He’s funny, incisive, laughs a lot and tells it the way it is.  He also claims to be a very practical man.

I had an opportunity to attend two seminars by Sergio when he last visited New York.  Absolutely loved them.  Although have to say that the audience was a lot colder and subdued than my typical experience with seminars on spirituality in Latin America.  Maybe it’s just a reflection of New York.  Maybe I was colder myself.

The first seminar was on dreaming.  But not on recall or interpretation.  But rather dream work, manipulation.  The concept behind it is the idea that our life is a reflection of our dreams.  So instead of being a spectator letting our subconscious do whatever it wants with our dreams, why don’t we become active participants and guide our dreams more consciously?  Had never thought about it in those terms.  Always felt a “victim” of my dreams.  But don’t we feel victims of a lot in life?

Nothing Sergio suggests is an easy fix.  It requires perseverance and muscle.  But being very practical, he did give us a blueprint of exercises to follow daily to develop the appropriate psychological muscles.

Sergio and Don Miguel Ruiz are shamans of a very particular Mexican lineage that they would probably call “nahualism”.  It’s shamanism based on a perception of reality that very much resembles Erwin Laszlo’s Akashic Field.  We are simply a reflection of a broader all encompassing reality.

The obsidian mirror is a beautiful tool.  Obsidian seems to be a rock that our ancestors used extensively going back maybe millions of years.  It’s a shiny black volcanic rock that is not so difficult to work.  Shaped as a cylinder, it becomes a perfectly regular mirror that allows you to peer deep into infinity.  It’s a portal to the Akashic Field.

Sergio’s seminar on the obsidian mirror was a guide to 36 days of self improvement.  He swears by testimonials of his pupils who have cured the incurable and changed around their lives.  It’s not easy and takes a lot of perseverance.  I’m now on my sixth day and loving it.

The concept is actually very simple and powerful.  First, we need to get into a trance-like state by breathing deep repeatedly.  Hyperventilate let’s say throughout the whole process in increasing degrees of intensity.  Then, at each one of the 13 steps, the idea is to look deep in the mirror, see ourselves just as we are, in increasing degrees of themes and introspection (“my stories, my perceptions, my feelings, my sexuality, my habits”) with a particular focus on what’s wrong and problematic.  Seeing yourself every day simply to say “who’s the fairest of them all” doesn’t help at all.  But once you’ve peered long enough, then with muscle manipulation of the eyes, you can actually “dissolve” your image.  You don’t see it in the mirror any more even if you’re staring right at it.  All you see is “mist”.  Then at this point, close your eyes and breathing deeply, you return all those problems back to the mirror, to the vacuum from which they came.  It’s another take on getting back to the “zero point”, to Deepak’s “pure potentiality”.

I love this.  And I think it came at exactly at the right time in my life.  The first few days, I have smiled a lot at the mirror with a profound urge to laugh at myself saying “yep, that’s me, in my foolish glory”.

Will report back when the 36 days are done.  New muscles.  New habits.  Maybe new healing.  Maybe even me my psoriasis will be gone!!