Nick DiMaggio > Recent Status Updates

If you’re anxious-preoccupied, your insecurities will build in the absence of reassurance, and you’ll do great damage to your social ties by acting clingy, possessive, and jealous. The controlling nature of the neediness shown scares away potential partners who don’t want constant drama in their relationships, and the anxious-preoccupied’s fear of abandonment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday — the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life’s hidden richness — is where success, let alone happiness, emerges.

Happiness is not the immediate goal of a successful relationship; the goal is a bond that strengthens both of you and helps you be more the person you want to be.

Those who excel are those who maximize each moment’s creative potential — for these masters of living, presence to the day-to-day learning process is akin to that purity of focus others dream of achieving in rare climatic moments when everything is on the line. The secret is that everything is always on the line.

In most situations, we need to be aware of what is happening around us, and our processor is built to handle this responsibility. On the other hand, armed with an understanding of how intuition operates, we can train ourselves to have remarkably potent perceptual and physical abilities in our disciplines of focus. The key, of course, is practice.

Anxious people’s unmet needs for closeness were expected to cause them to misinterpret a partner’s desire for privacy or autonomy as a sign of rejection, which could tempt them to escalate demands for intimacy to such an extent that, paradoxically, it might cause their partner to withdraw or flee.

If you want to be the best, you have to take risks others would avoid, always optimizing the learning potential of the moment and turning adversity to your advantage. That said, there are times when the body needs to heal, but those are ripe opportunities to deepen the mental, technical, internal sides of your game.

Couples in which an anxious person is paired with an avoidant one tend to produce destructive pursuit-distancing or demand-withdrawal patterns of relating. In such couples, the anxious partner’s needs and demands frustrate the avoidant partner’s preference for distance, and the avoidant partner’s tendency to create distance frustrated the anxious partner’s intense distance for closeness.

One of the most critical factors in the transition to becoming a conscious high performer is the degree to which your relationship to your pursuit stays in harmony with your unique disposition. There will inevitably be times when we need to try new ideas, release our current knowledge to take in new information — but it is critical to integrate this new information in a manner that does not violate who we are.

Avoidant people do not generally approve of expressions of need and vulnerability, whether their own or those of their partners, and they have no desire to get entangled with someone whose weaknesses and needs are all too visible.

The fearful-avoidant can be thought of as the avoidant who hasn’t given up.

“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.”