The Mastery of Love Summary
The Mastery of Love by don Miguel Ruiz is talking about that in order to receiving love, first you need to have self-love. When we really love ourselves, then the love will flow out of us and we can start to love anyone unconditionally and become the master of love.
I actually read the book twice. At first time, I feel like I didn’t absorb all the concepts from the book, since it was highly recommended by a YouTube Guru, I feel I have to read second time to grasp all the knowledge from the book. At the second time, I did pick up something I probably missed from the first time reading, but I feel the concepts of the book is really simple.
The book starts talking about humans use fear to domesticate humans, and our fear increases with each experience of injustice. We have to release the emotional poison, and sometimes we don’t want justice; we just want to release, we want peace. That is why humans are hunting power all the time, because the more powerful we are, the easier it is to release the poison to the ones who cannot defend themselves. That is the dream of hell.
There are three simple points in the book: the truth (Awareness), forgiveness, and self-love.
- First, we need to have awareness. We have to aware that we are fear of love, we have emotional poison, and we are not prefect. We need to aware we have problems. Once we have awareness, we have a choice. If we could have that awareness all the time, we could change our routines, change our reactions, and change our entire life. The real mission you have in life is to make yourself happy, and in order to be happy, you have to look at what you believe, the way you judge yourself, the way you victimize yourself. You have to know what you want, how you want it, when you want it. You have to know exactly what the needs of your body are, what the needs of your mind are, and what fits well with you. Everything is about awareness.
- Second, we need to learn to forgive. Not only the people we need to forgive, but also we need to forgive ourselves. Forgiving everything we did wrong, today is a new start and we need to live in present, not past.
- Third, It’s self-love. Just imagine how you will feel the day you adore your own body. When you accept yourself completely, you will feel so good about your own body, and you will going to be so happy. Then when you relate with someone else, you limit of self-abuse is almost zero. This is self-love. With self-love, we can reclaim our divinity and find god within you. Please having your heart completely open and becoming wise to receive love.
Below are the notes and quotes from the book, and I have jogged down for my own reference:
A Toltec is an artist of love, an artist of the spirit, someone who is creating every moment, every second, the most beautiful art — the art of dreaming.
Life is nothing but a dream, and if we are artists, then we can create our life with love, and our dream becomes a masterpiece of art
You have the power to create. You create yourself, whatever you believe you are. You are the way you are because that is what you believe about yourself. Your whole reality, everything you believe, is your creation.
The need to be “right” is the result of trying to protect image we want to project to the outside. we have to impose our way of thinking, not just onto other humans, but even upon ourselves. We have seen how we create that image of perfection to please other people, even though they create their own dream that has nothing to do with us. This is the biggest lie we believe about ourselves, because we are never going to be perfect.
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.
Life brings to you exactly what you need. If you just open your eyes and see what is around you, it’s exactly what you need to clean your poison, to heal your wounds, to accept yourself, and get out f hell.
That is the mistake most of us make right from the beginning. We base our happiness on our partner, and it doesn’t work that way. We make all those promises that we cannot keep, and we set ourselves up to fail.
Your heart is a magical kitchen. Open your heart. Open your magical kitchen, and refuse to walk around the world begging for love. In your heart is all the love you need. Your heart can create any amount of love, not just for yourself, but for the whole world. You can give your love with no conditions; you an be generous with your love because you have a magical kitchen in your heart. Then all those starving people who believe the heart is closed will always want to be near you for your love.
Your generosity will open all the doors, not your selfishness. Selfishness comes from poverty is the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant.
You cannot control what is going to happen around you, but you can control your own reactions. Those reactions are going to guide the dream of your life, your personal dream. It’s your reactions that make you so unhappy or make you so happy.
You are responsible for the consequences of what you do, think, say and feel. You control your personal dream by making choices. If it’s a consequence you enjoy, then keep doing what you are doing. Perfect. But if you aren’t enjoying your dream, then try to find out what is causing the consequences you don’t like. This is the way to transform your dream.
By completely honest about your happiness. Don’t project a false sense of happiness by telling everyone, “Look at me. I’m success in life, I have everything I want, I am so happy”, when you don’t like yourself.
To become masters of love, we have to practice love. The art of relationship is also a whole mastery, and the only way to reach mastery is with practice. To master a relationship is therefore about action. It is not about concepts or attaining knowledge. It is about action. Of course, to have action, we need to have some knowledge, or at least a little more awareness of the way human operate.
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