don Miguel Ruiz Jr: The Path of Wisdom
Don Miguel Ruiz Jr. passes along the wisdom of his family’s traditions in helping others to achieve their personal freedom and spiritual health.
Don Miguel Ruiz Jr – Trailing the Path of Wisdom
Interview by Sandra Sedgbeer
“I come to you asking for a favor, and that favor is to help me to change the world. I’m not referring to the world of humanity, not the one “out there.” I mean the world you create in your own mind— the world that is only true for you and not for anyone else. You see, you create the story of your life. You create an entire reality that is only true for you. There are seven billion people in the world, all who create their own story. I create my personal world, but it is just a story. It’s not real, and it’s not true. In that same way, your story is not true either. The difference is that you believe it is true, and I do not. You begin to change your world the moment you realize it is not true. It is only a story.” The Little Book of Wisdom
At the age of 14, don Miguel Ruiz Jr. was apprenticed to his father, don Miguel Sr. and his grandmother, Madre Sarita. He was called upon to translate Madre Sarita’s prayers, lectures, and workshops from Spanish into English from that early age. In this way, through constant repetition and review, he learned the content of her teachings in both languages. Through interpreting for Madre Sarita, don Miguel Jr. came to understand the power of faith. He saw firsthand how she manifested her intent to heal people, both physically and spiritually. don Miguel Jr.’s apprenticeship 
lasted 10 years. When he reached his mid-20’s, his father intensified his training. At the apex of this power journey, don Miguel said to his eldest son, “Find your way out. Go home and master Death by becoming alive.”
For the past 13 years, don Miguel Ruiz Jr. has applied the lessons learned from his father and grandmother to define and enjoy his own personal freedom while achieving peace with all of creation. Today, he is married and has two young children. As a Nagual, he continues to pass along the wisdom and the tools of his family’s traditions in helping others to achieve their own personal freedom and optimal physical and spiritual health in his lectures and workshops. Miguel Jr. has taken the lessons of his father and grandmother and discovered his own unique path to freedom. Being able to apply his teachings to the world around him gave Miguel Jr. a new understanding of the lessons his father and grandmother had passed onto him, once again giving him the desire to pass on this awareness through his books.
He is the author of the books: “The Five Levels of Attachment,” “Living a Life of Awareness,” “The Mastery of Self,” and “The Don Miguel Ruiz jr’s Little Book of Wisdom.” He also co-authored the book “The Seven Secrets to Healthy, Happy Relationships” with his dear friend, HeatherAsh Amara. He now helps others discover the best physical and spiritual health through his books to achieve their own personal freedom.
My Father’s Wisdom, which he began teaching in the mid-1980s, springs from our family’s Toltec tradition.
The Toltecs were a group of Native Americans that came together in south-central Mexico 2,500 years ago. They are the builders of the pyramids in Teotihuacan, Mexico.
The word Toltec is a Nahuatl word that means “artist,” as the Toltecs believed every human being was the artist of his or her own life. My family’s Toltec wisdom has been handed down from generation to generation, sometimes in secrecy when the politics of the day required it. My father learned our tradition from his mother, Madre Sarita, and from his grandfather, don Leonardo. What many people do not know is that earlier in his life, my father was not very interested in the traditional wisdom of my family. His passion was medicine, and he attended medical school and became a physician. Shortly after graduating from medical school, however, he had a near-death experience that was to change him greatly. (I have included his first-person account of this event at the start of this book.)
It was after this near-death experience that he became interested in our family’s wisdom tradition, and he began an apprenticeship to Madre Sarita.
Don Miguel Ruiz Jr sat down with Sandra Sedgbeer and talked about Wisdom, Family, and Spiritual Enlightenment
Sandra Sedgbeer: don Miguel, your book, the 5 Attachments, made an impression – synchronicity of the symbolism this past year that we are still learning how to let go.
don Miguel Ruiz Jr: If you’re so attached or you identify yourself with something in this world that all of a sudden if you go through a harsh contrast because you keep holding onto it, you’re going to suffer. If you’re able to attach and reengage differently, this year will be a little simpler—it’s going to be difficult, of course. Still, the suffering will be slightly different in the sense that you’re not holding onto something that no longer exists. You engage with what is, and that’s what life is. You engage our relationship with life at this very moment and who we are changing just as much as life changes in front of us. In that ability to detach, we’re able to see who’s in front of us—especially seeing who we are within ourselves. Of course, I am talking in a spiritual sense.
Sandra Sedgbeer: Tell us something about your relationship with your Ancestors, your family, and your children.
don Miguel Ruiz Jr: People ask me, I should write a book about parenting, and I say, there’s no need. It’s already been written. How To Raise An Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims. is that book. It came into my life in a moment of anxiety. What’s going to happen to my kids after I’m gone. Of course, that’s been in my mind for as long as my kids have been around, but also when I was a kid… what’s going to happen to me when my parents are gone and how it affected me back then.
Two things happened at the beginning of 2018. Puberty hit my son, and puberty and autism are interesting things. It’s the first time I realized he’s going to be 18 in just a good 5-6 years from now. What world did I bring him into? It’s the first time I really felt anxiety. The first thing that came into my life was a movie called Black Panther, where the king…in the storyline, the Black Panther, his father dies in a terrorist incident and the whole Marvel universe, comic book world, he goes in, finds justice, whatever, but now he becomes the new king. To become the new king, he has to take on all the challengers. For that to happen, he has to remove the power of the Black Panther. He takes this solution that makes him a normal human being.
When he comes out victorious, he has to take this other essence from this flower that gives him back the power of the Black Panther, but he has to go into the underworld. When he goes there, he sees his ancestors, and the very first person he sees is his father. The Black Panther tells the father, I am so happy to see you. I wasn’t ready for your death, to not see you. The father, who was so happy to see him prior, became serious and says, The one job of a parent is to prepare his child for his own death. Have I failed you, my son? The rest of the movie is entertaining, but that line made me shift.
We’re teaching our kids how to thrive without us. Let them experience the consequences of their own actions and realize what drives us to be a helicopter parent because we’re so afraid of them making the wrong decision that we take over and make decisions for them. The result is many kids go to college or universities and have no idea how to even navigate. We’re expecting our kids to go out in the world, and since we’re making all these decisions for them, when they’re alone, they have no idea how to pay a bill, how to apply for a grant, how to apply for school, how to sign up for a class. They’re so used to us doing it for them that we never gave them a chance to make their own choices and how to navigate the consequences when things don’t go as you plan. Julie Lythcott was the Dean of Admissions at Stanford University here in California. She witnessed firsthand how she saw her students come in and so many not knowing how to even function.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with don Miguel Ruiz Jr
