David Deida Quotes

You must listen to your woman more as an oracle than as an advisor ~ David Deida

The energy that moves life is the force of the Feminine. She is unstoppable. She is the source of all life, the mover of blood, the breather of breath, the flow of the river's water. The Feminine is life. We can feel Her moving and living in any moment we are open to Her, or as Her. ~ David Deida

You'll never get what you really want. All you can do is give what you really want! ~ David Deida

If you don't know your purpose, discover it, now.
The core of your life is your purpose. Everything in your life, from your diet to your career, must be aligned with your purpose if you are to act with coherence and integrity in the world. If you know your purpose, your deepest desire, then the secret of success is to discipline your life so that you support your deepest purpose and minimize distractions and detours. ~ David Deida

The feminine in each of us longs for deeper love
and tries to find it in intimate relationship, family, or friends. ~ David Deida

In an effort to create safety and self-reliance in your life and relationships, you may have built walls around your heart and accumulated tension in your body. Although sometimes these walls of protection are useful, they can, over time, act like shells of fear that block your true love. These shells can keep in the love you want to offer fully and keep out the love that your heart yearns to receive. ~ David Deida

A life lived well embraces death by feeling open, from heart to all, in every moment. Wide open, you can offer without holding back, you can receive without pushing away. ~ David Deida

[To the masculine lover] Without a deep sense of purpose to direct your daily life, you will be directed by externals-financial need, your children's needs, your lover's needs-and you will begin to blame them for your lack of fulfillment. You will feel trapped in obligations, and your resentments will show. You will hold back in your relationships with your lover and family, not really wanting to be there, unsure what else to do, mired in ambiguity, guilt, and anger. Your actions will lack integrity and follow-through. Your feminine lover won't be able to trust you in everyday life or open to you sexually. [Pg 121] ~ David Deida

How do you react with your body, breath, and eyes? Notice if you react to a person or situation that hurts you by withdrawing, hiding, or closing in on yourself. Notice if there are times when you find it difficult to look into someone's eyes, or times your chest and solar plexus become tense and contracted. These are signs of an unskillful reaction to hurt. ~ David Deida

Love is beauty, consciousness is trust. One of the deepest feminine pleasures is when a man stands full, present, and unreactive in the midst of his woman's emotional storms. When he stays present with her, and loves her through the layers of wildness and closure, then she feels his trustability, and she can relax. ~ David Deida

We're here to learn how to worship consciousness and radiance, evoke it in each other, and tolerate nothing less than our deepest love. ~ David Deida

Stop waiting. Feel everything. Love achingly. Give impeccably. Let go. ~ David Deida

By healing our internal divisions and fully accepting ourselves as we are, we learn to accept and empower our sexual core, and we learn to honor our unique expression of Masculine and Feminine gifts. We fully incarnate in our bodies, at home and at ease in a man's body or a woman's body. And we learn to love with complete abandon, as free men and women, without rules or roles or guarded hearts. ~ David Deida

But if we are truly happy inside, then age brings with it a maturity, a depth, and a power that only magnifies our radiance. ~ David Deida

You should do whatever feels right in your deepest heart. Feel deep as consciousness, open as water, now, and feel how to live with a wide-open heart. Feel how to live as love without bondage. ~ David Deida

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The Way of the Superior Man Quotes
The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida
The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to...
by David Deida
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Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn't about truth, love, or the divine.

If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding form it.

Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured e ~ David Deida

I am going to speak some reckless words, and I want you to listen recklessly. ~ David Deida

When you are in love with a man or a woman, the love you feel does not come from him or her; it is the love flowing from you own heart that you feel. Your partner is simply giving you an excuse to love. Love is always found flowing in your heart, not in your family, lover, career or art. ~ David Deida

Everything you do right now ripples outward and affects everyone. Your posture can shine your heart or transmit anxiety. Your breath can radiate love or muddy the room in depression. Your glance can awaken joy. Your words can inspire freedom. Your every act can open hearts and minds. ~ David Deida

Your suffering is shaped exactly by your refusal to open. ~ David Deida

As you open yourself to living at your edge, your deepest purpose will slowly begin to make itself known. In the meantime, you will experience layer after layer of purposes, each one getting closer and closer to the fullness of your deepest purpose. It is as if your deepest purpose is at the center of your being, and it is surrounded by layers of concentric circles, each circle being a lesser purpose. Your life consists of penetrating each circle, from the outside toward the center. ~ David Deida

The word "surrender" is often interpreted as giving up, as weakness, as admitting defeat. Although this is one way to use the word, we will use it in a different way. Surrendering means letting go of your resistance to the total openness of who you are. It means giving up the tension of the little vortex you believe yourself to be and realizing the deep power of the ocean you truly are. It means to open with no boundaries, emotional or physical, so you ease wide beyond any limiting sense of self you might have. ~ David Deida

Masculine anger is always because you are feeling constrained, trapped by life. Feminine anger is always because you are feeling unloved. ~ David Deida

Closing down in the midst of pain is a denial of a man's true nature. A superior man is free in feeling and action, even
amidst great pain and hurt. If necessary, a man should live with a hurting heart rather than a closed one. He should
learn to stay in the wound of pain and act with spontaneous skill and love even from that place. ~ David Deida

Masculine and feminine aspects exist in all beings. ~ David Deida

Men are terrified of a woman's depth of love and the energy that moves as a woman's sexuality and emotions. And, at the same time, men want nothing more in this life than to merge completely with a woman's devotional love and wild energy. Only as a man outgrows his fear can he handle a woman's tremendous love-energy without running. And only such a man is worthy of your devotional offering in a committed intimacy. ~ David Deida

A man with a weak Masculine is especially prone to despise and fear these qualities and may attempt to suppress the more destructive elements of the Feminine force in his partner. ~ David Deida

Anyone who separates being and doing is still enjoying separation. ~ David Deida

Yes, you can get a man to do just about anything, and you know it. So, what are you going to attract him into doing? Buying you a nice house? Giving you the space to guide your own life? Or, offering his deepest gifts to you and all beings while opening his heart to God?
Are you a selfish witch, a self-sufficient witch, or a witch for the sake of drawing your man and all beings open as a gift for all? ~ David Deida

Chocolate or a good man can instigate your heart's surrender, but full-bodied pleasure and overflowing love - opening until you are exposed fully to God as love's bliss - is the only way to live true to your deepest desire, with or without a trustable lover or a tasty dessert. ~ David Deida

The masculine grows by challenge, but the feminine grows by praise. A man must be unabashed and expressed in his appreciation for his woman. Praise her freely. ~ David Deida

Live with your lips pressed against your fears, kissing your fears, neither pulling back nor aggressively violating them. ~ David Deida

Every moment waited is a moment wasted.... ~ David Deida

Nobody gives you faster feedback about your mediocrity than your woman. ~ David Deida

If knowing the truth is sufficient for you, then practice the art of philosophy. If only living the truth will suffice, then practice the art of love through your mind, your emotions, and your body. ~ David Deida

Successfully completing a lesser purpose doesn't feel good very good for very long, because it is simply preparation for advancing toward a greater embodiment of your deeper purpose. ~ David Deida

Your close men friends should be willing to challenge your mediocrity by suggesting a concrete action you can perform that will pop you out of your rut, one way or the other. And you must be willing to offer them your brutal honesty, in the same way, if you are all to grow. ~ David Deida

You are only punishing yourself when you want to be in a relationship with a woman more than she wants to be a in a relationship with you. ~ David Deida

Chronic dissatisfaction is how you sense that you are living a lie. ~ David Deida

Instant enlightenment is to give all your happiness away to others. ~ David Deida

One misunderstandin g is that if you do the right thing, then life's storms will stop. If you do the right thing, the storms actually get bigger. This is because they know they can't blow you down like they used to, and now it's going to take a lot more energy to find out if you are conscious. ~ David Deida

Your fear is the sharpest definition of your self. You should know it. You should feel it virtually constantly. Fear needs to become your friend, so that you are no longer uncomfortable with it. ~ David Deida

Only when the front of your body is relaxed and opened, your breath full and deep, and your gaze unguarded and directly connected with another person's eyes, can your fullest intelligence manifest spontaneously in the situation. ~ David Deida

Stop hoping for a completion of anything in life ... Do what you love to do, what you are waiting to do, what you've been born to do, now. ~ David Deida

Just remember that self-discipline is not self-suppression. Suppression is when you resist and fight against your desires, keeping them as buried and unexpressed as possible. Self-discipline is when your highest desires rule your lesser desires, not through resistance, but through loving action grounded in understanding and compassion. ~ David Deida

Every man knows that his highest purpose in life cannot be reduced to any particular relationship. If a man prioritizes his relationship over his highest purpose, he weakens himself, disserves the universe, and cheats his woman of an authentic man who can offer his full, undivided presence. ~ David Deida

Make your own decision, based on your deepest intuitive wisdom and knowledge. You may make the right decision or the wrong one, but whatever happens, it is your best shot, and you will strengthen your capacity for future action. ~ David Deida

You are only willing to surrender open if he is fully present with you, committed to claiming your heart with his absolute integrity of being. And he is only willing to commit his presence with you if you are willing to surrender open and offer your heart's light and devotion as love's yearning. ~ David Deida

If your purpose is to liberate yourself and others into love and freedom, then you should do whatever magnifies the love and freedom in your life and in the lives of whom your actions affect. ~ David Deida

The most loving women are the women who will test you the most. She wants you to be your fullest, most magnificent self. She won't settle for anything less. She knows it is true of you. She knows in your deepest heart you are free, you are Shiva. Anything less than that she will torment. And, as you know, she's quite good at it. ~ David Deida

You are either withholding your love in fear or giving your deepest gifts. ~ David Deida

We eventually learn that emotional closure is our own action. We can be responsible for it. In any moment, we can choose to open or to close. ~ David Deida

The superior man is not seeking fulfillment through work and woman, because he is already full. For him, work and intimacy are opportunities to give his gifts, and to be vanished in the bliss of giving. ~ David Deida

Practicing love often means feeling through fear: intentionally opening yourself when you would rather close down, giving yourself when you would rather hide. Love means recognizing yourself as the open fullness of this moment regardless of its contents
trenchant thoughts, enchanting pleasures, heavy emotions, or gnawing pains
and surrendering all hold on the familiar act you call 'me'. ~ David Deida

Ongoing passion and growth in intimacy requires us to let go of our ideas of what we
"should" be doing and instead trust the wisdom inherent in our unguarded heart and uninhibited body. ~ David Deida

Very few of us trust our immediate connection with nature, or the intuitive intelligence of our body. All too easily, we align ourselves with the logical world of Masculine intelligence. As a culture, we have become so Masculine that we are much more comfortable with analytical problem-solving than with ecstatic dancing! ~ David Deida

Whatever is your present experience, you can recognize the spaciousness that allows it to be. You are this spaciousness, this awareness, this love. Deeper love and more spacious awareness is the best lesson you can get from any experience. ~ David Deida

Your lust reveals your real desire to unite with the feminine, to penetrate as deeply as possible, to receive her delicious light as radiant food for your masculine soul, and to give her your entirety, losing yourself in the giving, so that you are both liberated beyond your selves in the explosion of your gifts. ~ David Deida

Infinite Love is who we really are and who we refuse to be. This refusal is our most essential tension. ~ David Deida

Your only real choices are to open fully and receive their gifts or crucify them and be relieved of their force ... But you must be willing to feel your heart's terrors and wounds or else you will close and protect yourself, striking back at the source of openness you most yearn to become ... ~ David Deida

You are not only a man, you are a superior man: a man who does his best to live as love in the world and in his intimacy, a man whose heart remains open and whose truth remains strong ... ~ David Deida

The positive and negative poles of a battery create an electrical flow. The masculine and feminine poles between people create a flow of sexual energy in motion. ~ David Deida

Every moment of your life is either a test or a celebration. The same is true about every moment with your woman, only doubly so. Not only is her simple existence a test for you, but one of her deepest pleasures in intimacy is testing you, and then feeling you are not moved off course by her challenge.

The most erotic moment for a woman is feeling that you are Shiva, the divine masculine: unperturbable, totally loving, fully present, and all-pervading. She cannot move you, because you already are what you are, with or without her. She cannot scare you away, because you already penetrate her in fearless love, pervading her heart and body. She cannot distract you, because your one-pointed commitment to truth will not bend to her wiles. Feeling this hugeness of love and freedom in you, she can trust you, utterly, and surrender her testing in celebration of love.

Until she wants to feel you as Shiva again. And then the testing will begin anew. In fact, it is precisely when you are most Shiva-like that she will most test you. ~ David Deida

In any given moment, a man's growth is optimized if he leans just beyond his edge, his capacity, his fear. He should not be too lazy, happily stagnating in the zone of security and comfort. Nor should he push far beyond his edge, stressing himself unnecessarily, unable to metabolize his experience. He should lean just slightly beyond the edge of fear and discomfort. Constantly. In everything he does. ~ David Deida

Whereas women are most turned on by a man's depth of presence,
men are most turned on by a woman's radiance and energy:
how she moves, moans, smiles, and opens in love. ~ David Deida

The masculine in each of us struggles for greater freedom
and tries to achieve it through financial, creative, or political challenges. ~ David Deida

Your heart knows the truth of openness and suffers the tense lie of your closure. ~ David Deida

You can ravish your woman so deeply that her surrender breaks your heart into light. ~ David Deida

A man must be prepared to give 100% to his purpose, fulfill his karma or dissolve it, and then let go of that specific form of living. He must be capable of not knowing what to do with his life, entering a period of unknowingness and waiting for a vision or a new form of purpose to emerge. These cycles of strong specific action followed by periods of not knowing what the hell is going on are natural for a man who is shedding layers of karma in his relaxation into truth. ~ Deida David

You are that which you seek, but you have left your own deepness and are looking elsewhere. The stress of not finding it creates its own need to be released. And so the cycle continues. You are chasing your own tail, and much of the time that tail looks suspiciously like a woman. ~ David Deida

If you are waiting for anything in order to live and love without holding back, then you suffer. ~ David Deida

Sex and money: the sources of most of our desire and disappointment, our hope and fear. ~ David Deida

Men who have lived significant lives are men who never waited: not for money, security, ease, or women. Feel what you want to give most as a gift, to your woman and to the world, and do what you can to give it today. Every moment waited is a moment wasted, and each wasted moment degrades your clarity of purpose. ~ David Deida

It is honorable for a man to admit his fears, resistance, and edge of practice. It is simply true that each man has his limit, his capacity for growth, and his destiny. But it is dishonorable for him to lie to himself or others about his real place. He shouldn't pretend he is more enlightened than he is - nor should he stop short of his actual edge. The more a man is playing his real edge, the more valuable he is as good company for other men, the more he can be trusted to be authentic and fully present. Where a man's edge is located is less important than whether he is actually living his edge in truth, rather than being lazy or deluded. ~ David Deida

You can open to God through sex. By learning to open your heart and body while embracing and trusting all energies from rough ravishment to sublime gentleness, you can open to be lived by the mystery that lives the entire universe. You can open to be lived by love with no limits, so you are alive as love, offering the deepest gifts of your heart spontaneously and without hesitation, in every moment, at work, with your family and friends, as well as in bed with your lover. ~ David Deida

The very dogs that sullenly bay the moon from farm-yards in these nights excite more heroism in our breasts than all the civil exhortations or war sermons of the age. ~ Henry David Thoreau

European Muslims need to feel ownership of security, rather than viewing the police as an occupying army. ~ David Ignatius

Natural history is not about producing fables. ~ David Attenborough

The window of opportunity to avoid dangerous climate change is closing more quickly than previously thought. ~ David Miliband

I'd not known such mistakes to happen
but we don't learn so much
from those things we do correctly
so perhaps it's best we see poorly
through our misconstructed eyes ~ David R. Cravens

What is true for you in your private heart is true for all men. ~ David Shields

The all-seeing eye of God beheld our deplorable state; infinite pity touched the heart of the Father of mercies; and infinite wisdom laid the plan of our recovery. ~ David Brainerd

The Health and Human Services preventive services mandate forces businesses to provide the morning-after and the week-after pills in our health insurance plans. ~ David Green

When we are not connected with our emotions, we are not connected to ourselves. ~ David W. Earle

It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I have always worked a bit with fashion people. I worked with Issey Miyake for a while, then Dolce & Gabbana; now we're working with Valentino. It's fine. The fashion world is a fairly weird world, but there are good people in it. It's weird because their timetables are unbearable. ~ David Chipperfield

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time. ~ David Bowie

In the gospel of Jesus, God is love. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and He sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike.3 At the fullness of time, He gave His greatest demonstration of love by sending His beloved Son so that men might not perish but have eternal life through Him.4 ~ Paul David Washer

And what is a man? He is someone who rises when life has knocked him down. He is someone who raises his fist to heaven when a storm has ruined his crop
and then plants again. And again. A man remains unbroken by the savage twists of fate.
That man may never win. But when he sees himself reflected, he can be proud of what he sees. For low he may be in the present scheme of things: peasant, serf, or dispossessed. But he is unconquerable ~ David Gemmell

No, in Lethal Weapon I was a taxi cab driver that Mel jumps in front of the taxi and pulls me out of the car and steals the taxi. Then I did some other indie driving for some of the car sequences. ~ David R. Ellis

I've been in therapy. I know enough about myself now to know that I really don't need to know anymore. ~ Larry David

Blue jeans are hot in the summer and cold in the winter. They are not the dumbest clothing in the world, but the fashionable folks who insist on wearing them are not exactly the brightest brill in the ocean. ~ David Gustafson

On 9/11, all the hatred and murder could not compare with the weight of love, of bravery, of caring. I have to believe that. I honestly believe that. I think we saw the way humanity works on that day, and while some of it was horrifying, so much of it was good. ~ David Levithan

My parents are very hard working people who did everything they could for their children. I have two brothers and they worked dog hard to give us an education and provide us with the most comfortable life possible. My dad provided for his family daily. So, yes, that is definitely in my DNA. ~ David Oyelowo

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance. ~ Henry David Thoreau

For the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I don't make decisions based on money. ~ David Duchovny

May your wonder always exceed your certainty. ~ David Wolpe

Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His companion's prayer is forgotten. ~ Henry David Thoreau

A gift of truth is the gift of love. ~ David Icke