Don Miguel Ruiz, Jr. is a Nagual, or a Toltec Master of Transformation. He is a direct descendant of the Toltecs of the Eagle Night lineage, and is the son of don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements. In his new book, The Five Levels of Attachment, Ruiz, Jr. details the path to authentic living. Here are 5 keys from the book we knew our readers would love. Here’s Don Miguel…
Living authentically is being in complete acceptance of our selves, or you can say, living with unconditional love. When we model ourselves to conditions of our own acceptance, then we are not free to live life in our authenticity, because who we are at the very core will be rejected for the image of acceptance that we create for ourselves. This is the contrast that allows us to see the choice we have in life.
Here are Five Keys to Living Authentically
- Choose to love yourself unconditionally
The first key to living authentically lies in this point of awareness: only I can choose between loving myself conditionally or unconditionally, no one else can choose for me. From here, the choices I make in life reflect that love.
- Respecting our own intention
Respect is at the root of unconditionally loving ourselves, and it is manifested in the way we respect our ability to say “yes” and “no”, the instruments by which we construct our life as an ever evolving work of art. For every “yes” we give, we are able to manifest something in life as we focus our energy into its creation; with every “no” we say, we stop our energy from creating anything in our life at the moment. This is the power of our intention, the way we control this life force to move and take action in life.
- Respecting someone else’s intention
Life, people and nature, has all the right to say “no” or “yes” to us; in being able to respect our own intention, then we have the ability to respect the intention of another. Because together we make the agreements by which we create the dream of us, and when those agreements are based on mutual respect, the foundation of our relationship will be based on a solid foundation of love. If you look outside your door, you will see the building that we as a community said yes to, but what you don’t see are the buildings we, as a community, said no to. Our Yes and No is the binary code by which we construct the dream of the planet, and the mutual respect allows us to create the dream of us in harmony.
- Coming into peace with fear
To go beyond fear is to come to understand what function fear has in our life, and the main job of fear is to keep us safe from harm. When we are in real danger our fear comes in to protect us by freezing, fighting, fleeing or succumbing to that danger, as our body reacts to a real threat to our life. It is a normal emotion for us to feel. But the fear that impedes us from living our life authentically is irrational fear,
which is triggering our fear when we are not in real danger, a danger that only exists in our mind. If we treat this in a similar way as we see addiction or an attachment, we can see how we are the ones who abuse fear in our life. Accepting our truth, as we let go of an illusion, is an act of love, thus allowing us to come to peace with fear. - Enjoy life
The whole point off all this work is to enjoy life, as we let go of the conditions and the fear we have in life, we begin to engage life in the preference in the way I want to express my unconditional love. “I want to” now becomes an expression of my free will, because as I am saying “yes” to something I want to manifest in my life, with the complete respect I have for my intention. In my hands lays the power of my intent, I can create the most perfect nightmare or the most beautiful heaven on earth with it, and it has no other master but me. The “authentic self” is an empty definition whose definition is subject to an agreement, and it is my yes that gives power to that agreement. I am life, and I’m enjoying being me, that is living authentically.
