Don Miguel Ruiz – From Heartbreak to Healing
Don Miguel Ruiz doesn’t need long introductions. Don Miguel Ruiz is a renowned Nagaluan master, the acclaimed author of “The Four Agreements,” and a revered spiritual leader. In his latest insights on death and loss, Ruiz imparts his profound wisdom, emphasizing the opportunities for expanded awareness that arise from every challenge.
Don Miguel Ruiz – Grief and Renewal, from Heartbreak to Healing
“Grief and Renewal” delves into the common tendency to use grief as a pretext for prolonged suffering. Ruiz enlightens us on the diverse paths people tread in coping with loss. He highlights how societal norms and our own apprehensions about death often amplify our emotional turmoil during trying times. With his unique approach, Don Miguel provides invaluable guidance on navigating through loss with dignity and self-compassion, steering us toward greater consciousness.
Don Miguel has spent the past three decades guiding people to personal freedom through his profound insights regarding the nature of human reality.
OMTimes: Don Miguel, it is wonderful to be speaking with you today. Let’s talk about your book, Grief and Renewal, which invites common people to transform our grief and sense of loss into experiences that will bring us more self-awareness and spiritual development. How did the idea of a book like this come to you?
Don Miguel Ruiz: Well, I wrote nine or 10 books already, and this is the logical one to come now because everybody needs to see Life differently. At this time, I use just the point of view of Life, which means the spirit, and I see Life as the great artist who always creates everything that exists. Life is creating and destroying, creating, destroying, creating, destroying. Then, I use the point of view of each of us, authentic people, and how we see how Life is working around us. We can see evolution through time and civilizations that started, grew, and became very powerful. And then they are destroyed with time. Then, we can say that everything with a beginning will have an end.
If we look from the point of view of Life, we can see the creation of the entire universe and our solar system as the creation of our beautiful planet Earth. And we know the planet Earth as a living being that is alive. It has all the organs and systems and works in a perfect equilibrium as a living being. We see entire species born on the Earth, many species disappear, and new species occur then sitting. That way, we can also see humanity as one living being. As living beings living on and working for the Earth, we are a new species on this beautiful planet. I don’t know how many millions of years we have here, but as an organ of Earth, we have a mission to do.
We work for the Earth, just like other systems and other organs. For example, the forest, the atmosphere, the oceans, and every single species on Earth. Then, if we see humanity as one living being, we know that it replaces itself every maybe a hundred years or 120 years, which means that for everybody living right now in a hundred years or 120 years, none of us will exist. Many other humans will replace us. And humanity keeps going and going. Then, during the experience, as humans, we don’t see ourselves as an organ of planet Earth. We see ourselves in our little community where we live, in our little world, you know? Yes. When we were born, humanity existed already as it is, and we didn’t create anything.
Everything was already here. And we’re not responsible for anything that happened to that humanity, even that. They program us to make us believe that we are responsible for whatever is happening on this beautiful planet Earth. But the truth is that no, we are not. Still, we are part of humanity and serve humanity because every single human is serving all the time from the most prominent people. Everyday people we are always serving anyway. We live on service all the time, and, uh, we witness everything that is happening around us. We see destruction. We see, uh, war, we see, uh, um, starvation disease.
We witness all the catastrophes happening all around us, and we see that in our own family. We see that in ourselves. We lose something, and we agree for that, something, but it’s the reaction that we have for them, for Life working all the time, and we are just, uh, we are alive. Life lives on us and our lives. We also create all the time. What makes humanity, uh, special is our imagination, is our dream. Because we’re dreaming all the time, and we have self-awareness. We know ourselves; we understand that we live, form, and create many wonderful dreams.
We see the transformation of our dreams. We see our dreams growing and being destroyed. Then the grief is about everything that we lost, not just our family, but our business, our illusions. Yeah.
Everything that broke our hearts is a loss. And we grieve. Of course, when someone very close to us dies, it looks so difficult. But if we just understand, we can approach everything from a completely different point of view. First of all, we need to accept our mortality. We will die, like we said before, we are going to live, I don’t know, one year, ten years, ten years, 40 years, 80 years, a hundred years. Then, the lifespan of a human is very short.
When you accept your own mortality, You start to accept the mortality of everybody around you and everything. Any relationship, whatever you create, will end because Life works all the time.
OMTimes: Perfectly said… the wheel of Life in action…it’s interesting. Don Miguel Jack Cornfield once said that grief is a storm inside our hearts. My question is, how can we alleviate this storm? Are there any spiritual practices we can do, or how can we use them to pacify our hearts when dealing with loss and grief?
Don Miguel Ruiz: Well, it’s a, it’s a very, you know, it’s very interesting to see welfare. The first step is to be aware and accept how Life always works. And because we are Life, we see ourselves working all the time. We see life-transforming our physical body. We see Life working in the people that we love. Then, in our dream, we have that attachment, a strong attachment with the secondary characters of our story, of our dream, which means our parents, our beloved, our children, our friends, our business, the sports, everything that happened, in our personal dream with our unique point of view. The first step is accepting that Life is happening, and we are part of Life, and everybody around us is part of Life, and in order to have new children, new ones come and take our place. We need to go; sooner or later, Our body will not survive the time.
If someone that you love dies? Of course, you will feel it; it will be hurt. But when you accept already, that is happening. You will not accept any emotional poison that makes longer the time that you grieve. But you should not accept opinions from other people telling you the way you should feel because your son died, your daughter died, your husband died, your father died, your best friend died. Everybody has opinions. We can listen but don’t have to react to whatever they say. Yes, there are all those different religions. There’s all those therapists, there’s all those books. All those teachers tell everybody how they should feel or not feel.
Well, none of that is good or bad or right or wrong because when you react in your own personal way, if you don’t add any emotional poison coming from outside or coming from yourself, then the time of grief will be much easier. And you can see that this is going, but you are still alive, and you can renew yourself in so many different ways.
If you use the emotional poison that comes from other people and yourself, that time of grief will be very long. Of course, you will always remember and have some kind of emotion, sadness, or whatever, but it is not the same because now you understand, and it’s okay. It is okay to grieve. It’s okay to feel what we feel.
Then, when we have that awareness and somebody else has a loss, we just do not say, oh, I’m sorry. Your pain is my pain. No, it is their pain, and it’s okay if they just feel our support. If we don’t poison them, it’ll be much easier for them to heal as soon as possible. Then there are all those different ways to see because there are so many people, cultures, and ways to deal with death that what we feel has to be the same for everybody.
No, the advantage that we have is that we have awareness. I know I will die. In fact, I died three times already. We can say I had a big heart attack in 2002. I had a heart transplant in 2010, and last December, I had a second heart transplant, and I’m still here. And it’s not that I’m afraid of diet, death, or whatever. No, no, it is. It’s like, it’s my physical body. It’s my temple, and I just do my best for my physical body.
OMTimes: Yeah. I think it’s amazing and I believe it’s because you haven’t finished what you came here to do. What is your personal opinion? What is the role of ancestors, your ancestors, in dealing with grief with us? Is there any ritual that we can do that would connect us with our loved ones to have access to this understanding that everything is cyclical and that, even if the matter is not here anymore, the energy continues? What is your opinion about it?
Don Miguel Ruiz: You know, like the image of your parents that you have in your mind. The real ones are completely different. That the ones that you had in your mind and your parents, the parents that you know, are the ones who live in your mind. Their spirit is part of Life. Now. They’re no longer them but the secondary characters; they live in my mind, in my dreams.
OMTimes: What do you see that would be different in our world if our humanity embraced this? What is your perspective on it? What changes?
Don Miguel Ruiz: It’s so amazing that we evolved that way in a very short time. Imagine that you wake up tomorrow, a thousand years in the past, or 500 years in the past, knowing what you know, believing what you believe right now, and seeing what everybody else believes. If you try to teach them what you know, they will think that you’re a witch, and they will burn you alive. For them, everything will obviously be a lot of superstitions. And they will be very fanatic, trying to protect the way they live when it’s not even worth it.
Then, humanity is being evolved a lot. The way of believing, the way of thinking, is shifting and interchanging. And we have more and more awareness. Now imagine that someone comes from a thousand years from the future and sees us now, the way we live now. That person will believe that we’re barbarians.
Humanity will embrace it, of course, because they will have more and more awareness. You know, humanity has evolved rapidly in the last hundred years, maybe 200 years before. It has evolved very slowly, especially in the last 30 years.
Grief and Renewal: Finding Beauty and Balance in Loss [Urano World Publishing)
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