Don Miguel Ruiz - The Mastery of Love

are needy. It's all about me. We are so selfish that we want the person with whom we are sharing our life to be as needy as we are. We want "someone who needs me" in order to justify our existence, in order to feel that we have a reason to be alive. We think we are searching for love, but we are searching for someone who needs me, someone we can control and manipulate.

There is a war of control in human relationships because we were domesticated to compete for the control of the attention.

What we call love - someone who needs me, someone who cares about me - isn't love; it is selfishness. How can that work?

Selfishness doesn't work because there is no love there. Both people are starving for love. In the sex they have, they taste a little love and it becomes addictive because they are starving for love. But then all the judgments are there. All the fear. All the blame. All the drama.

Then we search for advice on love and sex. So many books are written about it, and just about all these books could be called "How to Be Sexually Selfish." The intent is good, but where is love?

They are not about learning to love; there is nothing to learn about love. Everything is already there in our genes, in our nature. We don't have to learn anything, except what we invent in this world of illusion. We search for love outside ourselves when love is all around us. Love is everywhere, but we don't have the eyes to see.

Our emotional body is no longer tuned to love.

We are so afraid to love because it isn't safe to love. The fear of rejection frightens us. We have to pretend to be what we are not; we try to be accepted by our partner when we don't accept ourselves. But the problem is not that our partner rejects us. The problem is that we reject ourselves, because we are not good enough, because that is what we believe.

Self-rejection is the main problem. You are never going to be good enough for yourself when the idea of perfection is completely wrong. It's a false concept; it's not even real. But you believe it.

Not being perfect, you reject yourself, and the level of selfrejection depends upon how strong the adults were in breaking your integrity.

After domestication, it is no longer about being good enough for anyone else. You are no longer good enough for yourself, because the big judge is always there, reminding you that you are not perfect. As I said before, you can never forgive yourself for not