This week I listened to "Don Miguel Ruiz" on Maria Shriver's podcast "Meaningful Conversations".
What I loved about the podcast is, it is the author speaking about the book, "The Mastery of Love" and he is doing so with someone who is more or less skeptical and disbelieving.
I had the book "The Mastery of Love" and I read it years ago. This time however, it makes so much more sense to me, especially after listening to their conversation.
Here is a part of the book.
"So many humans are suffering because of all the false images we try to protect. Humans pretend to be something very important, but at the same time we believe we are nothing. We work so hard to be someone in that society Dream, to be recognized and approved by others. We try so hard to be important, to be a winner, to be powerful, to be rich, to be famous, to express our personal dream, and to impose our dream onto other people around us. Why? Because humans believe the Dream is real, and we take it very seriously."
It is interesting to see life with this perspective, especially when we pretend to be something, while feeling we are nothing. The contrast itself is enough to spin your world into madness.
And, I love this part too.
"The emotional body perceives emotions, but not through the eyes. We perceive emotions through our emotional body. Children just feel emotions and their reasoning mind doesn't interpret or question them. This is why children accept certain people and reject other people. When they don't feel confident around someone, they reject that person because they can feel the emotions that person is projecting. Children can easily perceive when someone is angry and their alarm system generates a little fear that says, "Stay away". And they follow their instincts - they stay away."
"We learn to be emotional according to the emotional energy in our home, and our personal reaction to that energy. That is why every brother and sister will react differently according to how they learn to defend themselves and adapt to different circumstances. When parents are constantly fighting, when there is disharmony, and disrespect, and lies, we learn the emotional way of being like them. Even if they tell us not to be that way and not to lie, the emotional energy of our parents, of our entire family, will make us receive the world in a similar way."
"The emotional energy that lives in our home is going to tune our emotional body to that frequency. The emotional body starts to change its tune, and it is no longer the normal tune of the human being. We play the game of the adults, we play the game of the outside dream, and we lose. We lose our innocent, we lose our freedom, we lose our happiness, and we lose our tendency to love. We are forced to change and we start receiving another world, another reality; the reality of injustice, the reality of emotional pain, the reality of emotional poison. Welcome to hell - the hell that humans create, which is the Dream of the Planet. We are welcomed into that hell, but we don't invent it personally. It was here before we were born."
"You can see how real love and freedom are destroyed by looking at children. Imagine a child two and three years old running and having fun in the park. Mom is there watching the little guy, and she's afraid he might fall and hurt himself. At a certain point she wants to stop him, so he tries to run faster from her. Cars are passing in the street nearby, which makes Mom even more afraid, and finally she catches him. The child is expecting her to play and she spanks him. Boom! It's a shock. The child's happiness was the expression of love coming out of him and he does not understand why she is acting this way. This is a shock that stops love little by little over time. The child does not understand words, but even so he can question, "Why?"
"Running and playing is an expression of love, but it's no longer safe because your parents punish you when you express your love. They send you to our room and you cannot do what you want to do. They tell you that you are being a bad boy, or a bad girl, and that puts you down, that means punishment."
"In that system of reward and punishment there is a sense of justice and injustice, what is fair and what is not fair. The sense of injustice is like a knife that opens an emotional wound in the mind. Then, according to our reaction to the injustice, the wound may get infected with emotional poison. Why do some wounds get infected? Let's look at another example."
"Imagine that you are two or three years old. You are happy, you are playing and exploring. You aren't conscious of what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong, what you should be doing and what you shouldn't be doing, because you are not domesticated. You are playing in the living room with whatever is around you. You don't have any bad intention, you don't try to hurt anything, but you are playing with your Daddy's guitar. For you, its' just a toy; you don't try and hurt your Daddy at all. But your father is having on of those days when he doesn't feel right. He has problems in his business, and he goes into the living room and finds you playing with his things. He gets mad right away, and grabs you and spanks you."
"This is injustice from your point of view. Your father just comes, and with anger hurts you. This is someone you trusted completely because he is your daddy, someone who usually protects you and allows you to be you. That sense of injustice is like a pain in your heart. You feel sensitive, it hurts and makes you cry. But you cry not just because he spanks you. Its not the physical aggression that hurts you; it's the emotional aggression you feel is not fair. You didn't do anything."
"That sense of injustice opens a wound in your mind. Your emotional body is wounded, and in that moment you lose a little part of your innocence. You learn that you cannot trust your father. Even if your mind doesn't know it yet, because your mind doesn't analyze, it still understands, "I cannot trust." Your emotional body tells you there is something that you cannot trust, and that something can be repeated."
"You reaction might be fear; your reaction might be anger or being shy or just crying. But that reaction is already emotional poison, because the normal reaction before domestication is that your daddy spanks you and you want to hit him back. You hit him back or just intend to put your hand up, and that makes your father even madder at you. The reaction of your father for just putting your hand up against him creates a worse punishment. Now you know he will destroy you. Now you are afraid of him, and you no longer defend yourself because you know it will only make things worse."
"You still don't understand why, but you know your father can even kill you. This opens a fierce wound in your mind. Before this, your mind was completely healthy; you were completely innocent. After this, the reasoning mind tries to do something with the experience. You learn to react a certain way, your personal way. You keep that emotion with you, and it changes your way of life. This experience will repeat itself more often now. The injustice will come from Mom and Dad, from brothers and sisters, from aunts and uncles, from school, from society, from everyone. With each fear, you learn to defend yourself, but not the way you did before domestication, where you would defend yourself and just keep playing."
"Now there is something inside the wound that at first is not a big problem; emotional poison. The emotional poison accumulates, and the mind begins to play with that poison. Now we start to worry a little about the future because we have memory of the poison and we don't want that to happen again. We also have memories of being accepted; we remember mom and dad being good to us and living in harmony. We want harmony, but we don't know how to create it. And because we are inside the bubble of our own perception, whatever happens around us now seems as if it is because of us. We believe Mom and Dad fight because of us, even if it doesn't have anything to do with us."
"Little by little we lose our innocence; we start to feel resentment, then we no longer forgive. Over time these incidents and interactions let us know its not safe to be who we really are. Of course this will vary in intensity with each human according to his intelligence and his education. It will depend on many things. If you are lucky, the domestication is not that strong. But if you are not so lucky, the domestication can be strong and the wounds so deep, that you can eve be afraid to speak. This results is "Oh I am shy," 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 expression of the normal human instinct to express love." Miguel
This is how we learn to not love who we are, not trust who we are, not have a voice or a choice.
I find this wildly enthralling how we are who we are by how we were nurtured or domesticated in his words.
Knowing your past and how it has worked to shape you, you cannot blame yourself if you are having a hard time being you.
However, if we were taught this, we can unlearn what we were taught.
The untangling of my love of self, literally happened each time I used my voice or made an action for myself, instead of for the other. I was willing to do what I needed to do, regardless of the punishment that would come.
What is so odd, is that I also felt I had 'unreasonable' fear of my father and my mother as well. Yet, this writing shows how we suffer emotional wounding and how it infects our emotions. As well as how we hide our real emotions in order to make peace
I used to say, I was a whore for love and peace. I can see this more clearly in how I thought I had to be.
When we are raised in a dysfunctional toxic environment, we are unlucky in our domestication, and lose touch with our inner child. Lose connection with our healthy emotional responses.
We can peel back our fears and learn to love ourselves, but we may piss off a few folks in order to do so. We have to learn it is okay if others are upset. It isn't our responsibility to make them happy.
Being a master of our own emotions, is the mastery of love.
