Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power (A method for getting what you want by getting off on what you don't)

by Carolyn Elliott

The thing about reaction formations is that they are reactions, and not responses to life. Genuine responsive emotions have an open, connecting, “moving” quality to them. They feel fresh and spontaneous including “dark” genuine emotions like anger and grief. Reacting, covering-something-up emotions have a hard, closed, robotic, repetitive quality to them.

Pain becomes suffering when we take it personally, as if it reflects something uniquely meaningful (and bad) about us.

And this loving-willingness to feel pain without avoiding or contracting is the Philosopher's Stone, the Diamond Body, the secret indestructible, indivisible substance that changes the cold lead of shitty life experience into sparkly hot gold.

Gods of magic are always trickster gods. You get what you want, but along the way, the “you” in the equation changes. And that's not a bad thing at all. Eventually you come to identify less and less as your small, embattled ego self and more and more as the Self that inhabits all reality, in all bodies, in all times and all places.

The simple observable fact is: as children we are quite powerless in our choice of surroundings and companions; as adults we have immense power in our choice of surroundings.