The Agreements You Made Before Age Five Are Still Running Your Life
Most of us carry unconscious agreements about ourselves, the world, and our place within it that silently shape everything we do. We rarely notice them, because we accepted them early as truth and have been repeating for so long that they feel simply like reality. Understanding how these agreements are formed is the key to understanding why so much self-improvement produces only marginal results, and why real change requires reaching a different level entirely.
How an Agreement Forms
We make these agreements when we are very young, often before the age of five, and we make them based on an extremely limited set of data points. A small child's entire evidence about how people behave might be their experience with one or two caregivers. From that tiny sample, the child concludes something like "I am a certain way, the world is a certain way, and this is my place in it."
The problem is not that the conclusion was unreasonable at the time. The problem is that it becomes ingrained. We extrapolate that early conclusion to apply to all people and all circumstances, and then we spend the rest of our lives seeing the world through that self-limiting filter, gathering evidence that confirms it and overlooking everything that doesn't.
These agreements are like mantras. We have repeated them to ourselves, unconsciously, thousands of times, until they seed themselves in the limbic brain, the emotional, deeply-wired part of us that runs the show from behing the scenes. That is where they live, and that is why they run our lives from a place we usually cannot see.
It Is Not Only Trauma
I often use trauma as an example, because it is dramatic and easy to see. But the same dynamic applies to what most people would call a healthy, supportive upbringing. If your parents were good to you but couldn't quite tune into your authentic needs, you could easily have interpreted that to mean that people who are supposed to love and care about you actually care more about external factors than about your true inner needs.
I had a very supportive upbringing, and as a child, I still misinterpreted many of the well-meaning actions of my parents. As a result, when I was a younger person, I saw life through an extremely self-limiting lens. It is remarkably easy to do. And it goes deeper than our own interpretations, because we also absorb and replicate the agreements of our caregivers much in the same way we carry forward their patterns of speech and posture. We inherit some of their filters, based on how they interpreted their own lives. And those patterns run further back still, through family lines and cultures across generations. These ancestral patterns can also be resolved by going back through the generations, often with dramatic healing for the whole family line.
Why Affirmations and Most Self-Help Fall Short
Here is the crux. Affirmations and most self-help programs speak to the conscious, thinking mind. But the agreement isn't stored in the thinking mind. It is encoded in the limbic system, beneath language, wired in through thousands of unconscious repetitions and often through emotionally charged experience. Repeating a positive statement on the surface does not reach the agreement underneath. We are, in effect, wired one way and trying to talk ourselves into another, which is why the results are usually marginal at best. I've written more about this here.
In ordinary modern life, these deep agreements do get overwritten, but almost always in a negative direction, through trauma, through a strong and painful experience that carves a new imprint. What most people never learn is that the same channel can be used deliberately in a positive direction. That is exactly what Shamanic Spirit Medicine does.
How the Work Reaches the Root
In a journey, we track an agreement back like a thread to the moment it formed. We ask for more definition about what the agreement actually is, and then we ask to find its origin, the life experience, or set of experiences, that led us to internalize it. From there we remove the old agreement and ask to be given a new one, for present time, that allows us to live our full potential.
To make this concrete, imagine someone uncovers the agreement "people care more about themselves than about me, so I always have to watch my back." In a journey, that might be removed and replaced with something like "every person has the right and responsibility to meet their own needs, and when we collaborate with others who honor that, everyone can thrive." That replacement is my thinking mind's example, what you receive in an actual journey will be different, and unique to you and your situation. The agreements we retrieve in journeys come from the Spirit Mind, they are not given created by human thought, this is precisely what allows it to overwrite the imprint already sitting in the limbic brain.
This is why the changes made in this way hold rather. We are not papering a new belief over an old one on the surface. We are reaching the level where the original agreement lives and rewriting it there. The agreements we made in childhood are usually outdated. When we finally see them clearly, we often find a mix of misinterpreted guidance from well-meaning adults, behavior that was enforced to make us follow rules, dysfunction we simply copied, and survival mechanisms formed from the trauma of outright abuse. Once we learn to uproot and change our core agreements, the kind of change that self-help promises but rarely delivers becomes not just possible but ordinary. I know it works because I have seen the enduring positive results in hundreds of students and clients persist over decades - that's no coincidence.
Learning to find and change your own agreements is the core of the method I teach. Level 1 - The Fundamentals of Shamanism introduces you to your agreements and the foundations of journeying; the deeper work of changing them in full comes in Level 2.