The Mastery of Love Part 9 of 10: Sex, The Biggest Demon in Hell
March 26, 2009 by dr. lam · 11 Comments
Ruiz’s treatment of the need for sex is nothing short of brilliant. We have bodily needs that must be fulfilled that include food, water, shelter, sleep, and sex. However, we grow up with a tremendous amount of puritanical ambivalence toward sexuality and related guilt. What Ruiz tries to do is to separate the mind from the body. He argues that sometimes when we eat, we still need more food even though our body is fully sated. Sometimes we need more clothing to purchase not because our body demands it but because our mind pushes us toward further acquisitions for the simple sake of it. Our mind and body are joined but separate. When we confuse the two, that is when we get into trouble. Our body may require sex but our mind doesn’t. Our mind needs love.
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.
The Mastery of Love Part 2 of 10: Emotional Ping-Pong
March 17, 2009 by dr. lam · 4 Comments
We return again to our early childhood when we only knew love and happiness before our period of domestication by society began. When we were children we would run and play and only see running and playing as natural. However, in our household, the ideas of justice and injustice began to develop from our parents and we had to act in certain conforming ways. When we were in the presence of someone who was angry, we tried to flee. When we were attacked, we shriveled up. We tried to escape these negative emotions. However, the more we developed in society, the more that we began to have sores show up on our emotional body that at the slightest provocation would be painful to the touch. We allowed those wounds to develop and we returned the favor. When we started to build up pain from someone touching our wounds, we started to want to dish it out and release our emotional pain. When someone else would react to our emotional pain, they would then give it back to us.
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.
The Mastery of Love Part 1 of 10: The Wounded Mind
March 16, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
Once again we return to my old favorite, Don Miguel Ruiz, who authored The 4 Agreements and The Voice of Knowledge, which we explored a couple of months ago. I have found Ruiz’s Toltec message to be one of the clearest voices for sanity and ordered living that is out there. He need not have a 1000 page tome to get his message across. Instead, using ancient Toltec wisdom, he expresses truth in a profoundly simple but not simplistic way. Here we explore his book, The Mastery of Love, in detail. This blog series will cover some of his basic ideas discussed but also my own thoughts and feelings about the subject.
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.