"The Mastery Of Love"
By Don Miguel Ruiz

"The mastery of love" is a holistic book, that through the thread of love integrates mind, soul, body and emotions. What love really is and what is not is clearly described in this book.

Background

Don Miguel Ruiz brings an important message from the Toltec tradition: "The Toltecs are the ones who can express with the heart, the ones who have unconditional love". The style of writing is then warm and soft, and it makes a quick and pleasant reading.

"The mastery of love" is also very easy to understand thanks to the metaphors, parables and stories to grasp human relationships. For instance, the story about the magical kitchen is a great comparison to a romantic relationship.

On relationships

As "The mastery of love" well explains, in any relationship there are two halves, but we are only responsible for our own half. We are not responsible for the other person's.

However, it gets complicated as, for a start, due to our childhood and our patterns of behaviour, we embark in most of our romantic relationships out of the need of the other person, and we become selfish in the relationship.

This frequent behaviour need not exist, if we dedicate a little love and respect to ourselves first. As Don Miguel puts it, "How much you love yourself - that is your price - and Life respects the price."

In the same way, authentic happiness comes from within us first, and the mistake we frequently make on our relationships is that "We base our happiness on our partner, and it doesn't work that way."

About the relationship between love and happiness, the author explains: "There are millions of ways to express your happiness, but there is only one way to really be happy, and that is to love. [...] If you don't love yourself, you don't have any opportunity to be happy. [...] Love coming out of you is the only way to be happy."

Other topics

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

• Freedom: "When you inhibit your partner's freedom, you inhibit your own because you have to be there to see what your partner is doing or not doing. And if you love yourself so much, you are never going to give up your personal freedom."

• Perfection: "Self-rejection is the main problem. You are never going to be good enough for yourself when the idea of perfection is completely wrong."

• Who am I?: "You start to notice that you are not the dream, that you are not the mind. [...] You find out that what you are is a force - a force that makes it possible for your body to live, a force that makes it possible for your whole mind to dream." "The real us is pure love".

In sum, "The mastery of love" gives a profound insight on human relationships and romantic relationships specially, and what we want from them.

After reading this book you may look at the way you conduct your romantic relationships with new eyes and renovated energy. As Don Miguel Ruiz puts it, "If you choose to keep going, you can still have a new beginning by accepting and loving your partner just as she is."

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