"The Four Agreement Companion Book" by Miguel Angel Ruiz, M.D. and Janet Mills.  In it they write:

"All the suffering and drama in your life is the result of what you have learned.  Whatever you learn is alive.  The image that you have of yourself is alive, and it lives in your mind.  That image is not you, but it will use everything it perceives to justify its own existence. It is not you, but it is eating you alive and destroying your happiness."

"The voice of knowledge inside your mind controls the dream of your life.  The Toltec's call it a Parasite; the Bible calls it evil.  It is a living being that exists in your belief system, and lives by eating your faith, your intent, and your happiness.  What is sad is that you believe the knowledge is you; you believe the image is what you are.  The program, or Parasite, is really the one who is living your life, not you.  But this program was not there when you were born."

"When you were born, your mind was completely innocent.  You had no concepts about good or bad, right or wrong, beauty or ugliness; you had no concepts at all.  You had no idea what it means to be a human, to be a man or to be woman, but you saw other people outside of you, and you recognized them as your own kind."

"When you are one, two, or three years old, you cannot see yourself.  The only way to see yourself is to look at your image in a mirror, and other people act as that mirror.  You don't know what you are, but your mother tells you what you are, and your father tells you what you are, and brothers and sisters do the same thing.  The other humans around you have the capacity to project an image onto you, which means they tell you what they believe you are."

"What your mother tells you is not exactly what your father tells you that you are, or what your siblings, or the television, or the church, or the whole society tells you that you are.  Every human in your life projects a completely different image onto you, and none of these images are accurate.  What you believe you are is a distorted image of yourself that came from other people — from mirrors that always distort images.  Because you cannot see yourself, you believe them as you agree with them.  As soon as you agree, the image is programmed in your memory, and now you believe this is what you are."

"What were the images others projected onto you?  When you say, "I am smart, I am stupid, I'm beautiful, I am ugly," it is really the program who says I AM.  These images are only knowledge or a lot of concepts, but they aren't you." 

"You perceive all the distorted images others create for you, and at a certain point you take all these images and try to make sense of them.  You create another whole image of yourself, and project it to the outside world:  I am good in school; I am bad in sports.  Then you practice that image until you master it.  And because people are projecting different images onto you, you are always asking them about yourself.  You are asking for the projections to support what you already believe, to support the distorted images you have about yourself."

"In the same way other people project their beliefs onto you, you agree, and they become yours.  They teach you to judge the way they judge, to gossip the way they gossip, to create dramas the way they create dramas.  You begin to play with all these concepts, all this knowledge, and that is how you learn to dream."

"The Toltec's call this the dream of the first attention because it is the first time you used your attention to create a whole reality.  And because your attention is hooked from the outside, your whole world is projected to the outside.  You begin to search for the yourself outside of you because you no longer trust who you are.  You search for what you believe you don't have:  justice, beauty, happiness, and love, when all of these were always inside of you."

"Can you see the beginning of all the suffering and drama in your life?  You need a mirror in the world to see yourself, but there isn't a clear mirror to tell you what you are.  So you agree with the image others create for you, but you are not that image.  Of course you modify the image and you change it all the time, but where is the real you?  It gets lost because there isn't a good mirror to reflect what you really are."

            Don Miguel Ruiz, Janet Mills

This book will be one of my pivotal books in explaining and affirming how I woke up one day and had no idea who I truly was, but had a great idea of who I wasn’t.

The world is pretty scary when you can’t trust yourself, and instead rely on others to define you, your sense of self changes many times a day depending upon who you are with.

Wayne Dyer’s quote, “Beyond the good opinion of others…” comes to mind, when their opinions can’t shake yours.

I have unlearned who I was to re-learn who I am.

The greatest gift I was ever given was to find out I didn’t know who I was, while it was the most terrified I have ever been, it also was the most exhilarating.

Parts of the old me come floating in from time to time, just to be recognized for what I am not, each bringing back to me a new space or an open spot for a new idea, a new awareness, a new discovery to be made.

Undoing the old beliefs and thoughts or mirror images others and my self thought of me, giving way to new me.

My outsides have changed little, but the redecorating that is going on inside my head and the way I feel about myself is quite stunning.

Knowing me from the inside out.