don Miguel Ruiz - The Circle of Fire: Inspiration and Guided Meditations for Living in Love and Happiness

Copyright 2013 by Miguel Angel Ruiz, M.D. and Janet Mills

Formerly published as Prayers: A Communion with Our Creator, Copyright 2001

Published by Amber-Allen Publishing, Inc.
P.O. Box 6657
San Rafael, California 94903

Cover Illustration: Nicholas Wilton

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Printed Book: ISBN 978-1-878424-64-8

Digital Book: ISBN 978-1-934408-34-6

To the heart of a woman where the divine love is reflected in the integrity of humanity.
To the mother, the wife, the daughter, and the friend.

I wish to express my gratitude to Janet Mills, the mother of this book, and to Gabrielle Rivera for her valuable contribution. All my gratitude to our Creator for the inspiration and beauty that gave this book life.

In my teachings, The Circle of Fire ceremony celebrates the most important day of our lives: the day when we merge with the fire of our spirit, and return to our own divinity. This is the day when we recover the awareness of what we really are, and make the choice to live in communion with that force of creation we call Life or God. From that day forward, we live with unconditional love in our hearts for ourselves, for life, for everything in creation.

This book, first published in 2001 as Prayers: A Communion with Our Creator, will remind you of what you really are. It has always been my favorite book, and now in honor of my favorite prayer, it has been appropriately renamed The Circle of Fire.

All of us, at least once in our lives, have felt a communion with our Creator. There are moments of inspiration when we feel the immensity of creation, the beauty and perfection of everything that exists. Our emotional reaction can be overwhelming. We feel the most wonderful inner peace mixed with intense joy, and we call it bliss, or a state of grace and gratitude. We feel the presence of God.

At other times, we feel overwhelmed by the pressures of life. Everything seems to be going wrong in our lives, and we dont know what to do. We feel too small compared to the immensity of life, and we want to be rescued from our problems. Our emotional reaction might be helplessness mixed with sadness, fear, or anger, and we pray, Oh God, please help me. We feel that we are being heard; we feel the presence of God, and we are comforted.

Prayer is a communion of the human with the divine. Whether our prayer comes from love, gratitude, and inspiration, or from fear, despair, and desperation, we talk heart-to-heart with divine spirit. In prayer, we quiet all the voices talking inside our heads that tell us why something isnt possible, and open a direct channel to our faith. When we pray we use the voice of the human, but we align with the voice of our hearts, our spirits, and that is what makes the prayer powerful.

Prayer fulfills the need humans have for God, for inspiration, for affirmation of our own spirits. In prayer, we communicate with the essence of everything that exists, including our own essence. And when we believe in what we pray for with all of our faith, we multiply our intent.

To pray is an act of power because it is an agreement between the human and the divine, and we invest our faith in that agreement. If we imagine a wolf howling at the moon, that is how we want to pray. We have a message to share with life, with God, and we want to share it with authority. The message is coming directly from our hearts, we are talking with our own divinity, with God.

The power of prayer can lead us into love, truth, and personal freedom. In this book we intend to use the power of prayer to awaken the love and the joy in our hearts, and to experience a communion with our Creator. May you find love, truth, and freedom in your own personal way.

Is it not true, my angel of life, that walking hand in hand into the dream of life every step is blessed by God?

Every human is an artist, and our greatest art is life. Humans perceive life and try to make sense of life by expressing what we perceive with words, music, and other expressions of art. We perceive life and then create a story to justify, describe, and explain our perception and emotional reaction. All humans are storytellers, and that is what makes us artists.

Everything we believe about ourselves is a story we create that is based in reality, but is just our point of view. Our point of view is based on our experience, on what we know, on what we believe. And what we know and believe is just a program; it is nothing but words, opinions, and ideas we learn from others and from our own life experience. Humans perceive truth, but the way we justify and explain what we perceive is not truth; it is a story. I call this story a dream. The human mind mixes perception, imagination, and emotion to create a whole dream. But the story doesnt end there, because every mind of every human mixes together and creates the mind of the planet Earth the dream of the planet.

The dream of the planet is the dream of all humans together. We can call it society, we can call it a nation, but the result of the creation of the mind, individual and collective, is a dream. The dream can be a pleasant dream that we call heaven, or it can be a nightmare that we call hell. But heaven and hell only exist at the level of the mind.

In human society, the dream of the planet is ruled by lies, and fear is the result. It is a dream where humans judge one another, find one another guilty, and punish one another. Humans use the power of the word to gossip and to hurt one another. Misuse of the word creates emotional poison, and all that emotional poison is in the dream. It goes around the world, and that is what most humans eat: emotional poison. The dream of the planet prepares newborn humans to believe what it wants them to believe. In that dream, there is no justice; there is only injustice. Nothing is perfect; there is only imperfection. That is why humans eternally search for justice, for happiness, and for love.

For thousands of years people have believed there is a conflict between good and evil in the universe. But this is not true. The real conflict is between truth and what is not truth. The conflict exists in the human mind, not in the rest of nature. Good and evil are the result of that conflict. Believing in truth results in goodness; believing in and defending what is not truth results in evil. Evil is just the result of believing in lies.