Let’s imagine one of the worst possible sins against us, rape.  What if you were raped 10 years ago?  If you continue to hold that anger against someone else, then it will lead to your continued suffering.  If you say, “I cannot forgive that person” then you will not be free.  You will continue to live in your own personal hell.  The past is gone.  If you forgive the other person, you are doing it for yourself.  You are freeing yourself.  Once you forgive yourself, you will forgive those around you.  Once you have offered unmitigated forgiveness, you will begin to love again and to be free from your own dream of hell.  Forgiveness will give you freedom from your own personal, emotional wounds that dwell so very deeply within you and me.  We will be able to offer a voice of healing and by doing so we can create our own freedom from that hell in which we reside.  Create your own dream today and create the dream for your life.  Begin with forgiveness, starting with your own.   Love yourself, and be free.  That is the beginning of the mastery of love…a journey that I am on myself.

He uses an example of a married woman who encounters a handsome gentleman in the street and who starts to feel physically attracted to him.  She then feels guilt about what she felt and then turns away.  She sees him again, and her hormones rise exponentially.  She then commits adultery with this man and feels a combination of exhilaration and self hatred.  Although we cannot deny when our bodies feel attraction, we act on those desires when we would lead to our own destruction because our mind is not satisfied.  We must separate bodily needs from the fragility of what our mind wants.

When we begin to realize that eating for the sake of eating only leads to obesity, and buying more and more clothing only leads to an insatiable desire for more clothing, then we realize the faults of the mind and not the body.  We must attribute the failures in our mind and not the body.  Our body wants what it wants but our mind is oftentimes the culprit for pushing us toward things that would lead to our own self destruction because we do not perceive it to be a problem in the mind.

To return to the last several days of blogs, when we begin to love ourselves unconditionally, we will be able to love those around us in a similar way and we will attract those individuals into our lives.  Too often when we are on a pattern of self destruction like excessive drinking and eating, our mind (and not our body) wants to be around others with a similar predisposition.  If we go to a bar, who are we going to find?  Of course, people that like to drink.  Then we start hanging out with those people who like to drink.  What happens when we leave that self-abusive behavior?  Our “friends” cannot understand us and we then feel alienated.  We must then find new friends that vibrate at our new energy level.  We must always be sensitive to what our body desires and what our mind tells us we desire.

When we love ourselves and are happy/content in our lives, we can radiate love to all those around us.  Our magical kitchen we talked about yesterday is full, and we can make any dish that we want.  However, when we live in a fearful state that we don’t have love, then we follow the track of fear.  By doing so, we only see scarcity and we act out of fear that we will lose that precious relationship because we are needy.  Alternatively, we may be just filled with emotional poison that we transmit to all of those around us like the emotional ping pong that we addressed last week.  When we are filled with self poison, self loathing, and self hatred, we look at the person next to us with that same dread and we push their emotional buttons to release our own poison.  We then have that other person release that poison back onto us, and matters escalate.

When you are accepting of yourself and when you reach a happy state even without reference to another person, you invite love in.  As I talked in my leadership series, you must first work on yourself.  You must lead yourself.  You must love yourself, then others can love you.  Or if you are a leader, then others will follow you.  All of you who read my daily blog are on the same journey with me toward life fulfillment, enrichment, happiness, and peace.  I am honored that you can work with me on our personal journey toward self love and away from selfishness.

Let’s now imagine that you are starving for a few weeks with no food around you anywhere, and a stranger comes up to you with the same proposition.  Perhaps you would respond with a more dire urgency to eat the pizza and be controlled since the choice at this point is rather obvious.  Well, the moral of this story is that the kitchen is love and we can either have an abundance of it or a scarcity depending on how we perceive it.  The love though is self-love.  Once we begin to see that we have all the love in the world without regard to another individual then we can feel comfortable that we do not need to be in a serious state of starvation but that we can be free of a perception of starvation.  Tomorrow we will talk more about what self love means.

Sometimes we just have to know what we want.  Too often we don’t accept the other individual the way he or she is but demand certain changes or conditions before we want to offer that love.  However, with our animals, we simply see that animal as a being in front of us that need not have certain conditions that we apply.  If we don’t know what we want in a mate, then we won’t know how to find it or how to recognize it when we find it.

The simple truth is that when we encounter a love in front of us without preconditions, i.e., when we find someone who we feel is right for us from a spiritual, mental, physical, and at all levels without the need to change the other person then we have found the right love.  When we start appending notions like, “Well, I really love this person BUT…” then perhaps we have not arrived there yet.  Do we want a dog or a cat?  If we know, then we can choose.  If we don’t, then we cannot.  If we want to change a dog into a cat, we can’t and we won’t.

What if you are with a cat and you want a dog?  Well, that is a hard one.  Only you will know the truth if you have made a mistake in your choice.  I’m not advocating just throwing in the towel, but we need to be honest with ourselves and what we want so that we can make our choices during this short life and be happy.

One day this man encountered a woman sitting on a park bench.  He saw that she was visibly distraught.  He asked her what was the matter.  She said, “I have been married for many years to a man who no longer loves or respects me.  I do not believe in love.”  The man who did not believe in love responded, “Yes, love does not exist.”  Then, the man and woman who did not believe in love became steadfast friends, and that friendship blossomed into a burgeoning romance.  They both could not believe in fact that this time what seemed to be love was founded on respect and mutual admiration.  There was no petty jealousy or negativity like from the past.  

One night a shooting star came from the heavens, and the man gave that star to the woman.  The woman became afraid of the overwhelming love and dropped the star, which then broke into a million pieces.  Whose fault was it that broke the star?  It was the man’s.  He thought he could give another person happiness.  However, in any relationship, we are only responsible for our own happiness not the other person’s.  We cannot make that person truly happy but we can simply exude our own happiness every day.  When we start to become responsible for another’s happiness, we can lose our own.  As my mentor always said, “Happiness comes from within.”  We cannot live in the shadow of another’s happiness.  We can only be responsible for living our own happiness.

When we have the responsibility to make someone else happy, we create internal anxiety within us for that responsibility, which ultimately leads to failure.  Our fear that we will lose that love and our anxiety to please our significant other can ultimately ruin that relationship.  Focusing on our own happiness, peace, and contentment will radiate to our partner without necessarily being explicit in our desire to make that other person intentionally happy.  Just be responsible for your half of the equation.

Ruiz divides relationships into two distinct categories:  fear and love.  Too often 95% of the relationship is based out of fear with only 5% given to love.  Fear is conditional:  I only love you if…; whereas love is unconditional.  Fear is selfish and controlling; whereas love is generous and filled with respect.  When we start to let go of fear and focus on our own half of the relationship and the success of that half, our relationship can flourish.  When we are gripped by fear of how to make the other person happy or we feel that we must be in charge of that person’s happiness, we allow fear to dominate that relationship and move it toward a lower state and possible disintegration.

As I have said in a past blog, I have tried to stop saying that “I am imperfect.”  It brings to light our own self abusive tendencies to play judge and jury so that we can become Victims again.  Ruiz calls the indoctrinated belief system that society (aka, the Dream) has imposed on us as the Parasite that sucks on our emotional wounds.  The language that the Parasite uses is fear.  Fear grips us and paralyzes us and distorts our relationships.

Many times we wonder when we see others, “How does she live with that abuse?”  The answer is simple:  she already is abusing herself (I’m not good enough or worthy.  I deserve this.) and therefore accepts as only natural abuse from another.  With the emotional poison that is there, she gives it back to them, and he accepts it because he is used to thinking of himself with that same level of self abuse.  Ruiz’s insight (that I have mentioned in a previous blog and is worth repeating here) is that we will only tolerate an abusive relationship as much as we tolerate our own abuse.  When that relationship exceeds our own level of self abuse, we will flee.  However, many individuals live in such a sustained level of self abuse that they can tolerate many levels of abuse and will remain in that relationship.

When we can begin to clear the storing house of false thoughts that the Parasite has made us believe, think, and really fear, we can then escape those abusive relationships because we will stop abusing ourselves.  When we begin to love ourselves without self condemnation and without judgment, we can then have the prospect of entering a healthy, loving relationship.

Picture this scenario, the wife returns home early to wait for her husband who is running late.  Inside she is angry at him so she releases a volley of fuming hatred.  The husband is attacked and feels the emotional sting that is present and must then angrily call out a weakness of his wife, usually unjustified.  Also, that attack could be leveled at a past grievance that lingers in his heart.  This interchange continues to mount until both individuals shut down in anger, frustration, fear, and hatred.  This emotional ping-pong is a typical scenario that plagues many households, relationships, friendships, and business colleagues.  When we ourselves are filled with emotional poison, we will invariably need to unload it on another.  That pain and suffering will be easily returned to us, which only continues to escalate.  We need to work on cleaning ourselves of our own emotional poison (hatred, fear and anxiety) so that we do not return the volley and so that we do not reach a point of no return.

Love is a universal sentiment that we all desire, but few find because of big barriers that we erect as humans between one another.  In his opening chapter, Ruiz explores the idea that we are like beings filled with open wounds on our bodies filled with a rancid infection known as emotional poison.  We are afraid to be touched and are afraid to touch others because it hurts.  We live by the dictum of hate, anxiety, fear, and hypocrisy.  In fact, our lives are ruled by fear:  fear of rejection, fear of betrayal, fear of failure, fear of loneliness, etc.  We are emotionally closed to one another so that we cannot see the person next to us except our own contrived perception of that individual that is filled by a dense fog.

The dense fog, mitote, we talked about before is the thousand voices that cry out in a collective human dream dictated by societal rules and regulations that constrict our every behavior.  When we were but 2 to 3 years of age, we laughed and played and did not hold an image of ourselves created by others.  However, as we grew up, our parents educated (or Ruiz calls domesticated) us, and society began to create certain expectations for the way that we should behave and act.  We were forced into seeing ourselves the way that others saw us and we began to create roles for ourselves that matched what expectations others had imposed on us.

Before we seek the love of another, we have already created two distinct images, one that is pure and that represents our true selves and one that is already a product of what society sees in us.  Then when we seek our mate, we conform to the perceptions that other person has created for us.  In so doing, we have created 6 images between two individuals that only leads to more and more confusion and psychological division.  We create our own living hell because we must act according to so many perceptions of ourselves and become frustrated and fearful when we do not match those external perceptions.  We dream our own dream of hell.  It is hell on earth that we have personally created and that we live out of fear.  This week we will explore how to love and how to let go of our own self-imposed punishment.