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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Deida
Read between
March 3 - October 19, 2024
Men were supposed to go out and earn money. Women were supposed to stay home and take care of the kids. Men often manipulated their women through physical and financial dominance and threat. Women often manipulated their men through emotional and sexual strokes and stabs.
The “mission” or the search for freedom is the priority of the masculine, whereas the search for love is the priority of the feminine.
It is important to admit what is real if you are going to really deal with your life.
spend a minimum of one hour a day doing whatever you are waiting to do until your finances are more secure, or until the children have grown and left home, or until you have finished your obligations and you feel free to do what you really want to do. Don’t wait any longer.
Limited money and family obligations have never stopped a man who really wanted to do something, although they provide excuses for a man who is not really up to the creative challenge in the first place.
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.
edge is where you stop short, or where you compromise your fullest gift, and, instead, cater to your fears.
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.
Good friends should not tolerate mediocrity in one another.
Choose men friends who themselves are living at their edge, facing their fears and living just beyond them.
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.
The superior man is not seeking for fulfillment through work and woman, because he is already full. For him, work and intimacy are opportunities to give his gifts, and be vanished in the bliss of the giving.
A man must be prepared to give 100 percent to his purpose, fulfill his karma or dissolve it, and then let go of that specific form of living.
It’s easy to feel disappointed by life; success is never as fulfilling as you think it is going to be.
For their sake, your sake, and your woman’s sake, discover your deepest purpose,
If you choose to be a householder and raise children, you are responsible for serving them with as much authentic love as possible, which you can only give if your life is aligned with your deepest purpose.
life amounts to nothing other than what is the deepest truth of this present moment.
A woman often seems to test her man’s capacity to remain unperturbed in his truth and purpose. She tests him to feel his freedom and depth of love,
A man should never think his woman’s testing is going to end and his life will get easier. Rather, he should appreciate that she does these things to feel his strength, integrity, and openness.
Every moment of your life is either a test or a celebration.
“Keeping your word” is a masculine trait,
In the feminine reality, words and facts take a second place to emotions and the shifting moods of relationship.
the masculine means what it says. A man’s word is his honor. The feminine says what it feels.
Whenever you are surprised by your woman’s actions, and you say to her, “But you said…,” you are forgetting that she has a feminine essence. What your woman says is like a cloud passing in the sky: well-formed, coherent, and unrecognizable moments later.
The basic rule is this: Don’t believe the literal content of what your woman says unless love is flowing deeply and fully in the moment when she says it.
Praise her freely.
Men grow by challenge.
So, as a man, you probably have a masculine habit of challenging people,
Only the masculine side of your woman will grow through challenge. The feminine side thrives on support and praise.
Praise always magnifies the quality of your woman that you praise. “You’re so beautiful when you smile,” is much more effective than, “You’re so ugly when you frown,”
Praise is literal food for feminine qualities. If you want your woman to grow in her radiance, health, happiness, love, beauty, power, and depth, praise these qualities. Praise them daily, a number of times.
you must learn to praise the very qualities you feel are not yet praiseworthy in order for them to become so.
Praise motivates. Challenge doesn’t.
The whole point of an intimacy is to serve each other in growth and love,
Intimacy is about growing more than you could by yourself, through the art of mutual gifting.
superior man sees his woman’s moods not as a curse, but as a challenge and an amusement.
talking with her helps, but not as often as humor and physically expressed love.
The feminine’s moods and opinions are like weather patterns. They are constantly changing, severe and gentle, and they have no single source.
As a man, you probably want to find the cause for the problems in your life. That way, you can eliminate the source of the problem.
so, when your woman seems to have an emotional problem, you want to know why. You want to know what is upsetting her. You assume there is a specific cause. You want to know what triggered her bad mood so you can fix the situation.
90 percent of a woman’s emotional problems stem from feeling unloved. So don’t stand back and analyze her, like a doctor diagnosing a patient, or like a therapist questioning a client. Give her your love—the same love that is motivating your questioning—immediately and unmistakably.
The next time your woman is in a bad mood, try this: Assume she is not feeling loved. Simply assume it, even if it seems that it can’t be that simple,
Assume she is more like a flower that needs watering than an engine that needs a carburetor adjustment.
Look into her eyes with love, touch her how she likes to be touched with love, and speak or sing to her with love.
If you ever find yourself asking your woman questions about her mood while she is still in it, you are already on the wrong road. First, give her love through your eyes, touch, movement, and tone of voice. Then and only then, after the connection of love has been made, find out what remains to be talked about.
Asking a woman to analyze or try to fix her own emotions is a negation of her feminine core,
So, you determine that you’ll be happier if your wife cooks more and massages you more. You then think maybe your wife wants you to do something more for her. So you tell her what you want from her, and then you ask her, “What do you want from me?” You tell her to think about it and let you know. This seems fair to a man, but it is not. It is a no-win situation for your woman. Why? Because what she really wants is a man who can figure it out for himself.
One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy is precisely not to have to always figure it out for her man and guide him. She wants to be able to trust him in his direction.
Suppose it’s your woman’s birthday. If it were your birthday, you’d love it if your woman would do anything you wanted. So you think she’d like that, too. You say to her, “Happy Birthday! For your birthday, we can do anything you want. We can go anywhere and do anything. And I’ll do anything for you. What do you want to do?” This is exactly the opposite of most women’s idea of an ideal birthday present. Most women would get far more excited if you were to say, “You’ve got thirty minutes to pack your bags. Don’t ask me where we’re going, but we’ll be gone for the weekend. Everything is taken
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Like the ocean, the native state of the feminine is to flow with great power and no single direction. The masculine builds canals, dams, and boats to unite with the power of the feminine ocean and go from point A to point B. But the feminine moves in many directions at once. The masculine chooses a single goal and moves in that direction.
