Nick DiMaggio > Recent Status Updates

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”

The best partner is responsive to your signals, and you as a good partner signal only when you really need help. Most of the trouble in relationships is about bad signaling and poor responses.

A man wants to walk across the land, but the Earth is covered with thorns. He has two options — one is to pave his road, to tame all of nature into compliance. The other is to make sandals.

While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy, short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy.

One has to investigate the principle in one thing or one event exhaustively… Things and the self are governed by the same principle. If you understand one, you understand the other, for the truth within and the truth without are identical.

“Trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.”

“Patience is not passive; on the contrary, it is active; it is concentrated strength.”

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

The more you seek happiness, the more it will elude you. Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy.

The first thing to remember is this: As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain.

To know yourself as the being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

Hence, the ultimate purpose of the world lies not within the world but in transcendence of the world.

Just as the sun is infinitely brighter than a candle flame, there is infinitely more intelligence in Being than in your mind.

The wider the time gap between perception and thought, the more depth there is to you as a human being, which is to say the more conscious you are.

When you are on a journey, it is certainly helpful to know where you are going or at least the general direction in which you are moving, but don’t forget: The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step you are taking at this moment. That’s all there ever is.

When your deeper sense of self is derived from being, when you are free of “becoming” as a psychological need, neither your happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome, and so there is freedom from the fear. You don’t demand that situations, conditions, places, or people should make you happy, and then suffer when they don’t live up to your expectations.

Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.

So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of the mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.

“We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation. This is not the same as being alone. It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation. In the extreme, psychological isolation can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation. People will do anything to escape that.”

To claim the truths about who we are, where we come from, what we believe, and the very imperfect nature of our lives, we have to be willing to give ourselves a break and appreciate the beauty of our cracks or imperfections. To be kinder and gentler with ourselves and each other. To talk to ourselves the same way we’d talk to someone we care about.

If we’re going to find our way out of shame and back to each other, vulnerability is the path and courage is the light. To set down those lists of what we’re supposed to be is brave. To love ourselves and support each other in the process of becoming real is perhaps the greatest single act of daring greatly.

“I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.” - Carl Jung

Yes, we are totally exposed when we are vulnerable. Yes, we are in the torture chamber that we call uncertainty. And, yes, we’re taking a huge emotional risk when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. But there’s no equation where taking risks, braving uncertainty, and opening ourselves up to emotional exposure equals weakness.

What makes this constant assessing and comparing so self-defeating is that we are often comparing our lives, our marriages, our families, and our communities to unattainable, media-driven visions of perfection, or we’re holding up our reality against our own fictional account of how great someone else has it.

When we spend our lives waiting until we’re perfect or bulletproof before we walk into the arena, we ultimately sacrifice relationships and opportunities that may not be recoverable, we squander our precious time, and we turn our backs on our gifts, those unique contributions that only we can make.

Just as with dancing, relationships need work and practice. While you must rely on your partner, you must also feel balanced within yourself. Acknowledge that there will be missteps, but focus on the positive. Doing so can help you to move in harmony with your inner self and with your partner.

A good partner can help you become more of the person you want to be. This is termed by psychologists as the Michelangelo phenomenon. Much like Michelangelo would, through sculpting, bring out the beautiful forms that he could see in a block of stone before him, a loving partner can bring out your optimum or “ideal” self and reveal this beautiful nature in you.

Remember that a fulfilling life is one that you appreciate in the moment, even as you continue toward a better future.

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.”

In addition, the more strongly you identify with some aspect of your personality, the more motivated you are to interpret your actions from that perspective and then continue to behave accordingly.