don Miguel Ruiz - The Seven Secrets to Healthy, Happy Relationships

Also by don Miguel Ruiz Jr.

The Mastery of Self: A Toltec Guide to Personal Freedom

Living a Life of Awareness:
Daily Meditations on the Toltec Path

The Five Levels of Attachment:
Toltec Wisdom for the Modern World

Don Miguel Ruiz's Little Book of Wisdom:
The Essential Teachings

Also by HeatherAsh Amara

Warrior Goddess Training:
Become the Woman You Are Meant to Be

The Warrior Goddess Way:
Claiming the Woman You Are Destined to Be

Awaken Your Fire: Ignite Your Passion, Find
Your Purpose, and Create the Life That You Love

The Toltec Path of Transformation:
Embracing the Four Elements of Change

Copyright 2018 by don Miguel Ruiz Jr.
and HeatherAsh Amara

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work in any form whatsoever, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief passages in connection with a review.

Cover design by Emma Smith

Cover art by Nicholas Wilton

Interior design by Frame25 Productions

Hierophant Publishing

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www.hierophantpublishing.com

If you are unable to order this book from your local bookseller, you may order directly from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951171

ISBN 978-1-938289-82-8

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed on acid-free paper in the United States.

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To all whom we have loved and who have loved us.

Love is not about property, diamonds and gifts. It is
about sharing your very self with the world around you.

Pablo Neruda

And will I tell you that these three lived happily
ever after? I will not.... but there was happiness.
And they did live.

Stephen King

Happily ever after.

It is with these three little words that an entire universe of expectations about relationships is created. Through this fairy-tale concept and others like it, the idea is planted in our minds that once we have a committed relationship our lives will be grand, everything will be perfect, and we will have finally arrived at our destination.

But of course we all know relationships are a bit more complicated than that.

As human beings, most of us yearn for fulfilling relationships, as they are an integral part of our journey. They provide unlimited ways for us to learn, grow, thrive, and have fun, as well as serve as the foundation on which most of us build a family and community. Yet, as we know, relationships are not always a bed of roses.

Romantic relationships can take us from sublime ecstasy to the deepest despair with just a word or look from our beloved. They can lift us to great heights of clarity, passion, and openheartedness or drop us suddenly into a pit filled with the fear, grief, confusion, and judgment.

Romantic relationships can prove especially challenging in these changing times. The institution of marriage began as a financial and social arrangement and was not focused on love. Even in our modern times, it was not very long ago that we had distinct gender roles within a relationship. It was idealized that women would stay home and take care of the kids and household while men worked to provide for the family financially. It's easy to see where these roles can fall apart: not only are they inherently stereotypical and unfair, but they were also class discriminatory, since usually only upper-middle-class and upper-class families could afford to have only one parent providing a source of income. Even when both parents had to work, employment opportunities were, and can still be, highly gendered. While these rigid definitions of relationships did not bring happiness, they did bring a kind of familiar stability and continuity.

Today, we are entering a whole new world of relationshipsparticularly romantic relationships. While we can appreciate the beauty of a vast frontier with no rules, we must also face the challenge of very little guidance or support about how we might behave. For this reason, we usually end up unconsciously dragging the old rules and expectations of our parents, culture, and religion into our relationshipswhether or not we consciously agree with them! We choose partners in a flush of hormones and possibility, only to find that when the spark of new love dissipates we have no idea how to communicate or navigate the challenges that arise. And because we are not taught how to be creative, curious artists of relationships, we get bogged down in our expectations and play out the same patterns and conflicts even as the relationships themselves change.

This book arose partly to address this search for knowledge. In our work, we hear many of the same complaints repeated by people seeking guidance about how to find and maintain a healthy relationship. The common issues include everything from my partner isn't emotionally available to I no longer feel physically attracted to my partner to I feel like my partner is trying to control me.

Specific questions we have received go something like this:

• How do I communicate my true feelings to my partner about issues we don't agree on?
• How can I come back into trust and love with my partner after an affair or other breach of trust?
• How do I support my partner's path without compromising my own?
• How can I get my partner to grow with me mentally, emotionally, and spiritually?
• How can I feel emotionally close to my partner again?
• How can I help rekindle the sexual chemistry we once had?
• How do I know if it's time to leave the relationship?
• How do I attract a partner who doesn't follow the same patterns in my past?

As you will see in the pages that follow, the answers to these questions lie in healing your past, learning new skills for the present, and envisioning your future clearly. For this we need new guidelines. Our purpose in writing this book is that it can be just such a guide.

Because most of us have been beguiled by some version of the many old fairy tales or myths, such as the elusive happily-ever-after, one of our goals is to help you spot and let go of any personal mythologies that are no longer helpful, thereby opening yourself up to new territories of self-exploration, creativity, and, most importantly, unconditional love.

In our view, unconditional love is the key ingredient of healthy and happy relationships, and the secrets to bringing unconditional love to all your relationships are what we will share with you here. But in order to bring unconditional love to our relationships, we first want to note two key stumbling blocks that keep us from experiencing unconditional love in the first place: domestication and conditional love. To be more specific, unconscious domestications and adherence to the practice of conditional love lead to almost all of the trouble we experience in our relationships. Please allow us to explain.

Much of what we learn about relationships comes to us from our domestication, or the system by which we learn society's acceptable modes of behaviors. When it comes to relationships, this means that we learn what we are supposed to gain, how we should behave, and what we are to expect from a multitude of clues, actions, and directives. This includes the ideas we get from movies, songs, and TV, as well as what we witnessed in the behavior of our parents and others as we grew up.

In order to have a truly happy and healthy relationship, we must be willing to examine the ideas that we have been domesticated to, because as you probably know by now, many of those ideas simply do not work. Even the aforementioned happily ever after is a simple example of an idea that many of us are domesticated into believing as children. Once we reach adulthood, most of us realize that this particular idea doesn't describe relationships accurately, yet we still cling to itsometimes subtly or even unconsciously.