Miguel Ruiz - The Mastery Of Love - A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship

Just look at the way you treat your cat or your dog. If you can treat your body the same way you treat your pet, you will you see that it's about love. Your body is willing to receive all the love from the mind, but the mind says, "No, I don't like this part of my body. Look at my nose; I don't like my nose. My ears – they are too large. My body is too fat. My legs are too short." The mind can imagine all kinds of things about the body.

Your body is perfect the way it is, but we have all those concepts about right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. These are just concepts, but we believe them, and that's the problem. With the image of perfection we have in our mind, we expect our body to look a certain way, to act a certain way. We reject our own body when the body is completely loyal to us. Even when our body can't do something because of its limitations, we push our body and our body at least tries.

Look at what you do with your own body. If you reject your own body, what can other people expect from you? If you accept your own body, you can accept almost everyone, almost everything. This is a very important point when it comes to the art of relationship. The relationship you have with yourself is reflected in your relationships with others. If you reject your own body, when you are sharing your love with your partner, you become shy. You think, "Look at my body. How can he love me when I have a body like this?" Then you reject yourself and make the assumption that the other person will reject you for the same thing you reject in yourself. And when you reject someone else, you reject him for the same things you reject in yourself.

To create a relationship that takes you all the way to heaven, you have to accept your body completely. You have to love your body and allow your body to be free to just be, to be free to give, free to receive, without being shy, because "shy" is nothing but fear.

Imagine how you see your pet dog. You see the dog with eyes of love and you enjoy the beauty of that dog. It doesn't make any difference whether that dog is beautiful or ugly. You can go into ecstasy just seeing the beauty of that dog, because it's not about possessing beauty. Beauty is just a concept we learned.

Do you think a turtle or a frog is ugly? You can see a frog, and the frog is beautiful; it's gorgeous. You can see a turtle, and it's beautiful. Everything that exists is beautiful -everything. But you think, "Oh, that is ugly," because someone made you believe what is ugly and what is beautiful, just as someone made you believe what is good and what is bad.

There's no problem at all with being beautiful or ugly, short or tall, thin or heavy. There's no problem with being gorgeous. If you walk through a crowd of people, and they tell you, "Oh, you are beautiful," you can say, "Thank you, I know," and keep going. It doesn't make any difference to you. But it will make a difference to you if you don't believe you are beautiful and someone tells you that. Then you are going to say, "Am I really?" This opinion can impress you, and, of course, that makes you easy prey.

This opinion is what you think you need, because you believe you are not beautiful. Remember the story of the Magical Kitchen? If you have all the food you need, and someone asks you to let him control you for food, you say, "No, thank you." If you wish to be beautiful, but you don't believe you are, and someone says, "I will always tell you how beautiful you are if you just let me control you," you will say, "Oh yes, please tell me I'm beautiful." You are going to allow that to happen because you think you need that opinion.

What is important are not all those opinions from others, but your own opinions. You are beautiful no matter what your mind tells you. That is a fact. You don't have to do anything because you already have all the beauty you need. To be beautiful you don't have any obligation to anyone. Others are free to see whatever they want to see. If others see you and judge you beautiful or not, if you are aware of your own beauty and accept your own beauty, their opinion doesn't affect you at all.

Perhaps you grew up believing that you are unattractive and you envy beauty in others. Then to justify the envy, you tell yourself, "I don't want to be beautiful." You may even have a fear of being beautiful. This fear can come from many directions, and it's not the same for everyone, but often it is the fear of your own power. Women who are beautiful have power over men, and not just over men, but over women. Other women who are not as beautiful as you are, may envy you because you attract the attention of men. If you dress a certain way and all the men are crazy about you, what are the women going to say about you? "Oh, she's a loose woman." You become afraid of all those judgments people have about you. This is nothing but concepts again, nothing but false beliefs that open wounds in the emotional body. Then, of course we have to cover these wounds with lies and denial systems.

Envy is also a belief that can easily be broken with awareness. You can learn to deal with the envy of other women or other men because the truth is that each of you is beautiful. The only difference between the beauty of one person and the beauty of another is the concept of beauty that people have.

Beauty is nothing but a concept, nothing but a belief, but you can believe in that concept of beauty, and base all your power on that beauty. Time passes, and you see you are getting old. Perhaps you are not as beautiful as you were from your point of view, and a younger woman comes along who is now the one who is beautiful. Time for plastic surgery, to try to keep the power because we believe that our beauty is our power. Our own aging starts to hurt us. "Oh my god, my beauty is going away. Will my man still love me if I am not as attractive? Now he can see other women who are more attractive than me."

We resist aging; we believe that because someone is old, it means she is not beautiful. This belief is completely wrong. If you see a newborn baby, it is beautiful. Well, an old person is also beautiful. The problem is the emotion we have in our eyes to perceive what is and what is not beautiful. We have all these judgments, all these programs that put limits on our own happiness, that push us to self-rejection and to reject other people also. Can you see how we play the drama, how we set ourselves up to fail with all these beliefs?

Aging is something beautiful, just as growing up is beautiful. We grow from a child, to a teenager, to a young woman or a young man. It is beautiful. To become an old woman or an old man is also beautiful. In the life of humans, there are certain years when we actively reproduce. During those years, we may want to be sexually attractive, because nature makes us that way. After that, we don't have to be sexually attractive from that point of view, but it does not mean we are not beautiful.

You are what you believe you are. There is nothing to do except to be just what you are. You have the right to feel beautiful and enjoy it. You can honor your body and accept it as it is. You don't need anyone to love you. Love comes from the inside. It lives inside us and is always there, but with that wall of fog, we don't feel it. 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.

You can begin by doing a puja for your body every day. In India, people perform pujas, or rituals, for the different Gods and Goddesses. In the puja, they bow to the idol, they put flowers near the idol, and they feed the idol with all their love, because these statues represent God. Every day, you can offer a devotional love to your own body. When you take a shower, when you take a bath, treat your body with all your love, treat your body with honor, with gratitude, with respect. When you eat, take a bite, close your eyes, and enjoy the food. That food is an offering to your own body, to the temple where God lives. Do this every day, and you will feel your love for your body growing stronger each day, and you will never again reject yourself.