The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz

The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz

I took this book because I loved another book from the same author. Most of the things I found very interesting. It gave me a very different perspective towards love and relationships. And gave me a very strong learning of why self-love is important to have great meaningful relationships with others.

This blog contains all of my highlighted learning from this book.

Click here to buy the book from Amazon

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The Wounded Mind

• All of our drama and suffering is by practice.

• The manifestation of the disease of fear is anger, hate, sadness, envy, and hypocrisy; the result of the disease is all the emotions that make humans suffer.

• They are living in the moment. They are not ashamed of the past; they are not worried about the future. Little children express what they feel, and they are not afraid to love.

• What we call education is nothing but domestication of the human being.

The Loss of Innocence

• Over time, the incidents and interactions let us know it's not safe to be who we really are.

• Shyness is the fear of expressing yourself. You may believe you don't know how to dance or how to sing, but this is just repression of the normal human instinct to express love.

• We are judging ourselves all the time, and we are judging everyone else all the time, based on what we believe and based on the sense of justice and injustice.

• The limit of your self-abuse is the limit you will tolerate from other people. If someone abuses you more than you abuse yourself, you walk away, you run, you escape. But if someone abuses you a little less than you abuse yourself, perhaps you stay longer, You still deserve that abuse.

The Man Who Didn't Believe in Love

• He was happy because of the love coming out of him; she was happy because of the love coming out of her. But as soon as he made her responsible for his happiness, she broke the star because she could not be responsible for his happiness.

• It doesn't matter how much you love someone, you are never going to be what that person wants you to be.

The Track of Love, The Track of Fear

• Love has no obligations. Fear is full of obligations.

• In the track of fear, whatever we do is because we have to do it, and we expect other people to do something because they have to do it. We have the obligation, and as soon we have to, we resist it. The more resistance we have, the more we suffer. Sooner or later, we try to escape our obligations. On the other hand, love has no resistance. Whatever we do is because we want to do it. It becomes a pleasure; it's like a game, and we have fun with it.

• Love has no expectations. Fear is full of expectations. That is why fear hurts and love doesn't hurt. That is why hardly anything hurts us when we are in love; we aren't expecting that our lover will do something, and we have no obligations.

• Love is based on respect. Fear doesn't respect anything, including itself.

• If I don't respect you, then I try to control you. Most of the time when we tell our children how to live their lives, it's because we don't respect them.

• Self-pity comes from disrespect.

• Love is ruthless; it doesn't feel sorry for anyone, but it does have compassion. Fear is full of pity; it feels sorry for everyone. You feel sorry for me when you don't respect me, when you don't think I am strong enough to make it.

• Compassion comes from respect and from love; feeling sorry comes from a lack of respect and from fear. Love is completely responsible. Fear avoids responsibility

• When others try to be responsible for you, it only creates a bigger drama.

• Love is always kind. Fear is always unkind.

• Anger is nothing but fear with a mask.

• Love is generous. Fear is selfish; it is only about me. Selfishness closes all the doors.

• Love is unconditional. Fear is full of conditions.

• In the track of love, there is no if; there are no conditions. I love you for no reason, with no justification. love you the way you are, and you are free to be the way you are.

• If we are in a war of control, it is because we have no respect. The truth is that we don't love. It is selfishness, not love; it is just to have the little doses that make us feel good.

• I have to control you because I don't respect you. I have to be responsible for you, because whatever happens to you is going to hurt me, and I want to avoid pain. Because there is no respect, I act as though you are not good enough or intelligent enough to see what is good or not good for you. I make the assumption that you are not strong enough to go into certain situations and take care of yourself.

• In a relationship, as in a game, it's not about winning or losing. You are playing because you want to have fun.

• It's not that I am better than you; it's because I love beauty. I love to laugh; I love to have fun; I love to love. It's not that I am selfish, I just don't need a big victim near me. It doesn't mean that I don't love you, but I cannot take responsibility for your dream. If you are in a relationship with me, it will be so hard for your Parasite, because I will not react to your garbage at all." This is not selfishness; this is self-love. Selfishness, control, and fear will break almost any relationship. Generosity, freedom, and love will create the most beautiful relationship: an ongoing romance.

• If you are aware that no one else can make you happy, and that happiness is the result of love coming out of you, this becomes the greatest mastery of the Toltecs, the Mastery of Love.

• Love is not about concepts; love is about action. Love in action can only produce happiness. Fear in action can only produce suffering.

• The only way to master love is to practice love. You don't need to justify your love, you don't need to explain your love; you just need to practice your love. Practice creates the master.

The Perfect Relationship

• You cannot change other people. You love them the way they are or you don't. You accept them the way they are or you don't.

The Magical Kitchen

• Imagine that you have a magical kitchen in your home. In that magical kitchen, you can have any food you want from any place in the world in any quantity. You never worry about what to eat; whatever you wish for, you can have at your table. You are very generous with your food; you give your food unconditionally to others, not because you want something in return from them. Whoever comes to your home, you feed just for the pleasure of sharing your food, and your house is always full of people who come to eat the food from your magical kitchen. Then one day someone knocks at your door, and It's a person with a pizza. You open the door, and the person looks at you and says, "Hey, do you see this pizza? I'll give you this pizza if you let me control your life, if you just do whatever I want you to do. You are never going to starve because I can bring pizza every day. You just have to be good to me. Can you imagine your reaction? In your kitchen you can have the same pizza even better. Yet this person comes to you and offers you food, if you just do whatever he wants you to do. You are going to laugh and say, "No, thank you! I don't need your food; I have plenty of food. You can come into my house and eat whatever you want, and you don't have to do anything. Don't believe I'm going to do whatever you want me to do, No one will manipulate me with food." Now imagine exactly the opposite. Several weeks have gone by, and you haven't eaten. You are starving, and you have no money in your pocket to buy food. The person comes with the pizza and says, "Hey, there's food here. You can have this food if you just do what I want you to do." You can smell the food, and you are starving. You decide to accept the food and do whatever that person asks of you. You eat some food, and he says, "If you want more, you can have more, but you have to keep doing what I want you to do." You have food today, but tomorrow you may not have food, so you agree to do whatever you can for food. You can become a slave because of food, because you need food, because you don't have It. Then after a certain time you have doubts. You say, "What am I going to do without my pizza? I cannot live without my pizza. What if my partner decides to give the pizza to someone else -- my pizza? Now imagine that instead of food, we are talking about love.
  

• We think we are searching for love, but we are searching for, "someone who needs me." someone we can control and manipulate.

• Not being perfect, you reject yourself, and the level of self-rejection depends upon how strong the adults were in breaking your integrity.

• It's better to be with someone who wants to be with you than to be with someone who has to be with you.

• And if you are generous with your love, everyone is going to love you. You are never going to be alone if you are generous.

• Your generosity will open all the doors, not your selfishness. Selfishness comes from poverty in the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant.

The Dream Master

• It's your reactions that make you so unhappy or make you so happy.

• Becoming aware is about being responsible for your own life.

• Be completely honest about your happiness.

• All that suffering occurs because we don't want to see, when it is so clear before our eyes.

• "There is no worse blind man than the one who doesn't want to see, There is no worse deaf man than the one who doesn't want to hear. And there is no worse madman than the one who doesn't want to understand."

Sex: The Biggest Demon in Hell

• If you put humans in that creation, but take away the ability to judge, you will find we are exactly like the rest of nature. We are not good or bad or, right or wrong; we are just the way we are.

Seeing with Eyes of Love

• Everything that exists is beautiful - everything. But you think, "Oh, that is ugly," because someone made you believe what is ugly and what is beautiful, just as someone made you believe what is good and what is bad.

• Envy is also a belief that can easily be broken with awareness.

• The only difference between the beauty of one person and the beauty of another is the concept of beauty that people have.

• You can only perceive the beauty that lives outside you when you feel the beauty that lives inside you.

• Can you see the perfection in a relationship like that? It's about honoring the God inside each other.

• Fear is a reflection of love

• Our emotions act like a filter through which we see the rest of the world.

Healing the Emotional Body

• Everyone around you, including yourself, is lying all the time. Don't believe yourself.

• Nothing but common sense will guide you to your own happiness, your own creation.

• Everything is what it is. You don't need to justify what is true; you don't need to explain it. What is true doesn't need anyone's support. Your lies need your support. You need to create a lie to support the first lie, another lie to support that lie, and more lies to support all of those lies. You create a big structure of lies, and when the truth comes out, everything falls apart. But that's just the way it is. You don't need to feel guilty because you are lying.

• Truth will always survive skepticism.

• There is no other way but forgiveness to clean the wounds of all the poison.

• Forgiveness is an act of self-love.

• The words and actions that hurt you are merely a reaction to the demons in that person's own mind.

• Nothing anyone does is because of you. Once you have this awareness, and you do not take it personally, compassion and understanding will lead you to forgiveness.

• There is no if. There is no justification. There is no explanation. It is just to love.

• This is simple, common sense, but we cannot love others until we love ourselves. That is why we must begin with self-love.

God Within You

• That is the reason you are here: to play and have fun. We are born with the right to be happy, with the right to enjoy life. We are not here to suffer. Whoever wants to suffer is welcome to suffer, but we don't have to suffer.

• Humans suffer because we know: We know what we believe, we know all those lies, and because we can't fulfill all those lies, we suffer. It's not true that you go to hell or to heaven after you die. You live in hell or you live in heaven, but now.

• In the end that is what we are looking for: to be ourselves, to live our own life, instead of the life of the Parasite the life we were programmed to live.

• You accept yourself the way you are, and the complete acceptance of yourself becomes the complete acceptance of everyone else. You no longer try to change other people or impose your point of view. You respect other people's beliefs. You accept your body and your own humanity with all the instincts of your body. There is nothing wrong with being an animal.

• When you become wise, you respect your body, you respect your mind, you respect your soul. When you become wise, your life is controlled by your heart, not your head. You no longer sabotage yourself, your own happiness, or your own love. You no longer carry all that guilt and blame; you no longer have all those judgments against yourself, and you no longer judge anyone else.

• The more you resist, the more you suffer. It is simple.

• The fear of love is one of the biggest fears that humans have.

• The whole world can love you, but that love will not make you happy. What will make you happy the love coming out of you. That is the love that will make a difference, not the love everyone has for you.

Prayers

• When we fulfill any need of the human body, it gives us pleasure. To breathe gives us pleasure. Just to breathe is enough for us to always be happy, to enjoy life. Just to be alive is enough. Feel the pleasure of being alive, the pleasure of the feeling of love.

• From now on, let every action, every reaction, every thought, every emotion, be based on love.

• Let our relationships with our family and friends be based on respect and joy so we no longer have the need to tell them how to think or how to be.

• Help us to accept others just the way they are, without judgment, because when we reject them, we reject ourselves. When we reject ourselves, we reject you.

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All Credit goes to the writer and the Book