The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship

by Miguel Ruiz

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.

Life brings to you exactly what you need. There is perfect justice in hell. There is nothing to blame. We can even say that our suffering is a gift. 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 to get out of hell.

Happiness never comes from outside of us. 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.

Anger is nothing but fear with a mask. Sadness is fear with a mask. Jealousy is fear with a mask.

We don’t have the right to change anyone else, and no one else has the right to change us. If we are going to change, it is because we want to change, because we don’t want to suffer any longer.

In the track of love, there is justice. If you make a mistake, you pay only once for that mistake, and if you truly love yourself, you learn from that mistake.

Selfishness, control, and fear will break almost any relationship. Generosity, freedom, and love will create the most beautiful relationship: an ongoing romance.

Finally, 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 Toltec, the Mastery of Love.

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.

It means you make a choice and say yes or no, because you love yourself also. You make a choice, and you are responsible for your choices. Then if the choices are not working well, you do not blame yourself. You simply make another choice.

If you see what you want, why not take a risk? But if you see it is not what you want, you know you are going to pay for it. Don’t go around crying, “My lover abuses me,” when it was so clear for you to see. Don’t lie to yourself. Don’t invent in people what is not there. This is the message. If you know what you want, you will find it is just like your relationship with your dog, but better.

You have to accept yourself and love yourself just the way you are. Only by loving and accepting yourself the way you are can you truly be and express what you are. You are what you are, and that is all you are. You don’t need to pretend to be something else. When you pretend to be what you are not, you are always going to fail.

It’s not worth whatever happened in the past to spoil the possibility that you can reach heaven in a relationship. Have the courage to go for it 100 percent or let it go. Let go of the past and begin every day at a higher level of love. This will keep the fire alive and make your love grow even more.

The dream that two create is more difficult to master than one. To keep the two of you happy, you have to keep your half perfect. You are responsible for your half, and your half has a certain amount of garbage. Your garbage is your garbage. The one who has to deal with that garbage is you, not your partner. If your partner tries to clean your garbage, she is going to end up with a broken nose. We have to learn not to put our nose where no one wants it.

What makes you happy is love coming out of 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. If you are selfish, you are always going to be alone, and there is no one to blame but you. Your generosity will open all the doors, not your selfishness.

Your reactions are the key to having a wonderful life. If you can learn to control your own reactions, then you can change your routines, and you can change your 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.

“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.”

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

You have a belief about what is beautiful and what is ugly, and if you don’t like yourself, you can change your belief and your life will change. It sounds simple, but it isn’t easy. Whoever controls the belief, controls the dream. When the dreamer finally controls the dream, the dream can become a masterpiece of art.

Everything is made by Love, by Life. Even fear is a reflection of love, but fear exists in the mind, and in humans, that fear controls the mind. Then we interpret everything according to what we have in our mind. If we have fear, what we perceive will be analyzed with fear. If we are mad, what we perceive will be perceived according to anger. Our emotions act like a filter through which we see the rest of the world.

Almost everything in this world of illusion is a lie. That is why I ask my apprentices to follow three rules for seeing what is true. The first rule is: Don’t believe me. You don’t have to believe me, but think, and make choices. Believe what you want to believe according to what I say, but only if it makes sense for you, if it makes you happy. If it guides you into your awakening, then make the choice to believe it. I am responsible for what I say, but I am not responsible for what you understand. We live in a completely different dream. What I say, even if it is absolutely true for me, is not necessarily true for you. The first rule is very easy: Don’t believe me.

Rule number two is more difficult: Don’t believe yourself. Don’t believe all the lies you tell yourself — all those lies that you never chose to believe, but were programmed to believe. Don’t believe yourself when you say you are not good enough, you are not strong enough, you are not intelligent enough. Don’t believe your own boundaries and limitations. Don’t believe you are unworthy of happiness or love. Don’t believe you are not beautiful. Don’t believe whatever makes you suffer. Don’t believe in your own drama. Don’t believe in your own Judge or your own Victim. Don’t believe the inner voice that tells you how stupid you are, that tells you to kill yourself. Don’t believe it, because it isn’t true. Open your ears, open your heart, and listen. When you hear your heart guiding you to your happiness, then make a choice and stick to it. But don’t believe yourself just because you say so, because more than 80 percent of what you believe is a lie — it isn’t true. The second rule is a difficult one: Don’t believe yourself.

Rule number three is: Don’t believe anyone else. Don’t believe other people because they are lying all the time anyway. When you no longer have emotional wounds, when you don’t have the need to believe other people just to be accepted, you see everything more clearly. You see if it is black or white, if it is or is not. What is right now, maybe in a few moments is not. What is not right now, maybe in a few moments will be. Everything is changing so fast, but if you are aware, you can see the change. Don’t believe others because they will use your own stupidity to manipulate your mind. Don’t believe anyone who says she comes from Pleiades and she wants to save the world. Bad news! We don’t need anyone to come and save the world. The world doesn’t need the aliens to come from the outside to save us. The world is alive; it’s a living being, and it’s more intelligent than all of us together. If we believe the world needs to be saved, soon someone will come and say, “Okay, a comet is coming, we need to escape from the planet. Kill yourself and boom! You will reach the comet and go to heaven.” D...

You must forgive those who hurt you, even if whatever they did to you is unforgivable in your mind. You will forgive them not because they deserve to be forgiven, but because you don’t want to suffer and hurt yourself every time you remember what they did to you. It doesn’t matter what others did to you, you are going to forgive them because you don’t want to feel sick all the time. Forgiveness is for your own mental healing. You will forgive because you feel compassion for yourself. Forgiveness is an act of self-love.

The truth is that you cannot forgive because you learned not to forgive, because you practiced not to forgive, because you mastered not to forgive.

Love coming out of you is the only way to be happy. Unconditional love for yourself. Complete surrender to that love for yourself. You no longer resist life. You no longer reject yourself. You no longer carry all that blame and guilt. You just accept who you are, and accept everyone else the way he or she is. You have the right to love, to smile, to be happy, to share your love, and to not be afraid to receive it also.

That is the healing. Three simple points: the truth, forgiveness, and self-love. With these three points, the whole world will heal and will no longer be a mental hospital.

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. Heaven and hell only exist in the level of the mind.

When you become wise, you don’t have to use all those images you created; you don’t have to pretend to be something else. 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. We are animals, and animals always follow their instinct.

Surrender all those ideas about being what you are not, and become what you really are. When you surrender to your nature, to what you really are, you no longer suffer. When you surrender to the real you, you surrender to Life, you surrender to God.

You are what you believe you are. Humans are powerful magicians. When you believe you are what you are, then that is what you are. And you can do that because you are Life, God, Intent.

You have already mastered fear and self-rejection; now you are returning to self-love. You can be so strong and so powerful that with your self-love you transform your personal dream from fear to love, from suffering to happiness. Then just like the sun, you are giving light and giving love all the time, with no conditions. When you love with no conditions, you the human, and you the God, align with the Spirit of Life moving through you. Your life becomes the expression of the beauty of the Spirit. Life is nothing but a dream, and if you create your life with Love, your dream becomes a masterpiece of art.