'The Mastery Of Love' By Don Miguel Ruiz
'The mastery of love - A practical guide to the art of relationship' is a holistic book: it integrates mind, soul, body and emotions through the thread of love.
This book gives you a profound insight on human relationships and specifically on romantic relationships - how we conduct them and what we want from them.
After reading 'The mastery of love' you may look at the way you conduct your romantic relationships with new eyes and renewed 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."
The Toltecs
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 content of the book develops around the message from the Toltecs. I found this book very pleasant to read thanks to its warm and soft tone - while the different metaphors, parables and stories helped me to better understand 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 half.
However, it gets complicated because 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. We then become selfish in the relationship.
This frequent behaviour need not exist, if we give 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."
Regarding 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
'The mastery of love' sheds light on a number of topics related to self-development and relationships. Some of the topics include:
- 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' helps you to improve your relationships by showing you how to first love yourself. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to live a joyful life with a partner.
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"You have to focus on the most wonderful relationship you can have: the relationship with yourself. It is not about being selfish; it is about self-love."
Don Miguel Ruiz
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