Mastery of Love

Sharing my learnings from the book, Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz

Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz

In The Mastery of Love, don Miguel Ruiz illuminates the fear-based beliefs and assumptions that undermine love and lead to suffering and drama in our relationships. Using insightful stories to bring his message to life, Ruiz shows us how to heal our emotional wounds, recover the freedom and joy that are our birthright, and restore the spirit of playfulness that is vital to loving relationships

• Each of us, they believed, has our own personal dream. And most people are living in what the Toltecs call the dream of hell, characterized by fear, suffering, violence, and injustice. This dream teaches us to become masters of negative emotions. As children, we might learn that anger helps us get what we want. Then, we practice anger over and over until we become masters of it. In the same way, we become masters of jealousy, sadness, and so on –⁠ and these feelings come to control our lives and relationships. But this is not the best dream. Instead, we must become masters of love.
• the human mind, which Don Miguel refers to as the emotional body, is full of wounds. And those wounds are infected by an emotional poison we call fear. All other negative emotions –⁠ anger, sadness, envy, and so on –⁠ stem from fear. 
• When children are born, they’re free of emotional poison, but it doesn’t take long to start accumulating.
  • Our emotional wounds start to appear when we’re around three or four years old.
  • as children grow older, they begin to learn from adults who have long been infected by emotional poison. They learn to fear punishment and seek reward. They fear not being accepted, or they fear that who they are isn’t good enough. These fears are all emotional poison.
  • As a result of these feelings, children begin to create images of themselves that fit what they think other people want.
• As we get older, we continue to accumulate emotional poison in response to things we consider injustices. Then, once we’re full of that emotional poison, we feel the need to release it. And how do we do that? Usually, by trying to pass along our poison to someone else.
• Sometimes, this desire to transfer emotional poison results in abusive relationships. Perhaps a person has received his emotional poison from someone much more powerful than he is, so he can’t easily transfer it back. He then searches for someone he can transfer it to –⁠ someone weaker or more defenseless. 
• Abusive people’s emotional bodies are sick – infected with emotional poison – which causes them to lash out. We can’t rid other people of their emotional poison, but we can start to overcome our own by being aware of the problem.
• In life, we exchange wedding rings. In doing so, we signify our expectation that our partner will make us happy, and vice versa. But this is an impossible dream because we can never completely know our partner’s mind, expectations, or dreams. And this means that, sooner or later, our partner will disappoint us and break our happiness. In reality, only you can be responsible for your happiness.
• Every relationship you have is between you and one other person. And each of you is responsible for one half of the relationship. However, all too often, people act as if they’re responsible for the other person’s half in addition to their own.
• In fact, we can think about our relationships as traveling down one of two tracks: the track of love or the track of fear. Most people’s relationships exist on the track of fear; instead, we need to choose the track of love consciously. 
  • Track of fear: obligations and expectations. 
  • track of love: We only do the things we want to do – and the same goes for other people.
• In order to master a relationship, you must be aware of these two tracks. With that awareness, you’ll be able to catch yourself when you’re on the track of fear –⁠ and shift onto the track of love. 
• some people may not be perfect for you –⁠ and that’s OK. It’s not always easy to find someone you don’t feel the need to change. But it’s very important to do so.
• Finding the right person begins with knowing exactly what you want. You need to have a high awareness of all the needs of your body and mind – and you need to be perfectly honest with yourself about those needs.
• Staying in a dysfunctional relationship is ultimately selfish because you’re preventing your partner from finding what he really wants. Someone else will be able to love him exactly as he is –⁠ even if you can’t. 
• Just because one person doesn’t love you doesn’t mean another person won’t. And you shouldn’t base your sense of self-worth on how much others feel about you, anyway! Instead, focus on the most wonderful and important relationship you can have: your relationship with yourself.
  • Our beliefs often get in the way of self-love. Take beauty, for instance. Beauty is a belief about the quality of something. But it doesn’t describe that thing’s intrinsic nature – it’s just a concept someone gave you to make you think certain things are good and others are bad. In reality, everything that exists is already beautiful and perfect.
  • A great way to foster self-love is with a daily puja, or ritual. When you eat, for instance, chew very slowly. Take a bite, close your eyes, and imagine the food as an offering to the temple of your body. With daily practice, your love for your body will grow stronger and stronger.
• Self-love and self-acceptance are so important because once you have them, you’ll begin to live your life in a different way. You’ll no longer accept abuse from others or from yourself. And you’ll attract others who accept themselves in the same way you do.
• we need to acknowledge and accept the difference between our bodily needs and our mental needs – when these don’t match, internal conflicts arise.
  • Stop confusing the needs of your body with the needs of your mind. Recognize, for instance, that your body wants sex, and that that desire isn’t evil –⁠ it’s completely normal. Eventually, you’ll start to understand that you’re neither your body nor your mind. Instead, you’re life itself –⁠ a force you share with everything else in the universe.
• When it comes to healing our emotional wounds, the process isn’t much different with treating an infected wound. In this case, the scalpel is truth, and we can use it to open our wounds and reveal lies. Then, we clean out the poison with forgiveness. And, finally, we keep the wound clean until it’s fully healed – using love. 
  • injustice currently causing you to suffer is no longer true. open up your emotional wounds and see them from a different perspective.
  • Forgiveness isn’t easy, but it’s necessary. You need to extend it to everyone who has ever hurt you –⁠ not because such a person deserves to be forgiven, but because you don’t deserve to continue suffering from the memory of the things that person did. 
  • keep your emotional wounds clean using love. Practice looking at everything in the world through eyes of love, seeing the beauty in everything. This will make you a master of love. That, in turn, will inspire others to become masters of love – until the whole world is free of emotional poison.