Booknote: The Mastery of Love

GoodReads offers a feature where you can use some HTML code they generate of any book review you write on their site so you can blog it. I am trying it out here for the first time. I may use a bit more often. We'll see. Anyhow, anything below this is what the site generated with what I wrote:


The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship: A Toltec Wisdom Book by Miguel Ruiz

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I liked this book, but compared to The Four Agreements, it is not as tight or tidy, so to speak. The book presents some very good points, but it is a bit repetitive at times. In other words, what he did in about 200 pages, he could have done in 100, or at least 150, without losing the essence of the message.



The main thing I took away from it was the need to look into ourselves. This is a common sense concept and important because it leads to the idea that we cannot love or respect others if we do not love or respect ourselves first. You need to be aware, then you need to work towards forgiveness, then attain love. Some of the ideas from his previous book are here, particularly the idea of not taking things personally. Very often, people do things which may seem personal but are not. Notice I say "very often." I have struggled with Ruiz's idea of not taking it personal because there are always one or two not so nice people out there more than willing to harm you. Maybe it is the cynic in me, or maybe I just need to work more on some things. Anyhow, it is a book well worth reading. I think it may be beneficial for some couples as well, but do be warned, it can get a bit wordy sometimes. And that wordiness is what made me give it just the three stars instead of four. It made the pacing go a bit slow for the reading.


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