Want to know what Don Miguel Ruiz Jr, Lin-Manuel Miranda & President Obama Have In Common?
The answer is “uncomfortable.”
Being pushed to think outside your comfort zone is a challenge for anyone. No one likes to do it because it feels unnatural and even disconcerting. And yet, doing so stretches you in ways that can bring forth enormous clarity and required change.
We are seeing it across our nation today. United States’ citizens are aggressively pursuing change, having realized a new power in which President Barack Obama, unknowingly, unleashed when he stated “I have a pen and a phone.” Those words made the people of the United States realize how, grossly and detrimentally, entrenched we’d become in accepting our government (system) as it had evolved to be -- a new form of the “master-slave” dynamic, where “government processes” and “government officials” had become the masters and those whom they govern, the slaves. In our acceptance and attachment to this ideology and practice, we relinquished our freedom and continued to sleepwalk forward, until President Obama woke us with his candor. On that fateful day, we were reminded that we ALSO had pens and phones and we wanted to use them to invite significant change. Little wonder our current frontrunners on both sides of the Presidential parties are who they are.
“The best way to let go of illusion is choosing to accept the truth as it is presented to us just as it is. As it has been said, “The truth will set you free,” says Don Miguel Ruiz Jr, spiritual leader and world-renowned author of The Five Levels of Attachment. In my recent interview with him, we discussed everything from politics to his family’s longstanding history as highly-respected teachers in Toltec wisdom to his upcoming book The Mastery Of Self.
Not only did I find our conversation to be extremely enjoyable but also enormously revealing, particularly when it came to deciphering our nation’s current political climate. Ironically, Don Miguel Ruiz Jr. pushed me out of my own comfort zone as he explained how this country had been pushing itself out of its -- no longer content in remaining in a cocoon fashioned by a singular, fanatical belief that the “old” way is the “only” way.
He explained that in accepting the ‘process’ at face value, without defining who we actually wanted to be as a nation or considering the impact that definition has on others, we've been limiting the basis in which this country was founded upon -- freedom. We are a nation which has been domesticated beyond its own comfortability. It is this truth that has triggered a detachment from our previous beliefs (and the proponents of them) and opened the door to significant change. We are fortunate that it has done so.
Without these attachments, we can come up with new and viable solutions that will work for our current circumstances and citizens; classic Toltec transformation and opportunity. It is amazing what can happen when the things you thought you couldn’t live without are removed -- such as the harmful ways government integrates, impacts and controls our lives. We are finally starting to listen to the pulse of our nation (if not, the world) rather than the personal narrator that continues to drive us to destruction.
Just as Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams and the rest of our founding fathers fought for our ‘independence’ so long ago, we are now readdressing what that particular word means to us today by pushing politics out of its previous comfort zone once again. We are experiencing a revolution of sorts beyond just on Broadway, and given we adopt the Toltec approach as successfully as Lin-Manuel Miranda has in creating his unprecedented musical named after one of those forefathers, our nation’s success will be beyond compare.
Suffice-it-to-say, as each of us weighs one Presidential candidate against the other over the next few months and endures all of the arguements, mistruths, and finger pointing that will, undoubtedly, continue to plague this election, we might want to pick up a copy of The Five Levels of Attachment or visit Don Miguel Ruiz Jr.’s site. In my humble, newly enlightened opinion, doing so will help to ensure the needed clarity, authenticity, and personal beliefs required to cast a confident vote, truly representative of the most important person in the room -- you.
Many thanks to Don Miguel Ruiz Jr. and his team for making this interview possible