The Agreements You Made Before Age Five Are Still Running Your Life
Most of us carry a handful of beliefs about ourselves, the world, and our place in it that quietly shape everything we do. We rarely notice them, because they were installed so early and have been repeating for so long that they feel simply like reality. In this work I call them agreements, and understanding how they form 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 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 themselves than about you.
I had a very supportive upbringing, and I still misinterpreted many of the well-meaning actions of my parents and came to see life through a 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, 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. For some people this inheritance is minor. For others it is a substantial weight of ancestral pattern that can only be resolved by going back through the generations.
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.
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 journeywork 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." But I want to be clear: that replacement is my thinking mind's example. What you receive in an actual journey will be different, and it should be, because it comes from the spirit mind, not the logic mind. That is precisely what allows it to overwrite the imprint already sitting in the limbic brain.
This is why the change tends to hold rather than fade. 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, when you finally see them clearly, often almost absurd, a mix of misinterpreted guidance from well-meaning adults, behavior that was enforced to make us follow the rules, and dysfunction we simply copied. Once we can uproot and change them, the kind of change that self-help promises but rarely delivers becomes not just possible but ordinary.
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.