Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power (A method for getting what you want by getting off on what you don't)
Rate it:
Open Preview
Kindle Notes & Highlights
12%
Flag icon
we are never not doing magic. We are always doing magic,
12%
Flag icon
All of the aforementioned popular “vibration raising” practices have a way of brightening the light in our being, which tends to intensify and sharpen the presence of our latent darkness.
16%
Flag icon
avoiding desire, aggression, and socially taboo experience doesn't help; avoidance only deepens the trap of aversion and attachment, which causes the wheel of illusion to keep spinning.
16%
Flag icon
I propose that all our suffering and stuckness in life comes from forgetting that we're divine sparks playing a wild kinky game and that great miracles can come forth in our lives when we reverse the process of forgetting by deliberately reclaiming the pleasure of the game—not just in our minds, but in our hearts and genitals.
19%
Flag icon
most of us are walking around with terribly divided wills, and thus a weakened ability to fulfill our true potential.
21%
Flag icon
If you want to know who you unconsciously believe you are, just take a look at your life, your surroundings, your relationship. Your life mirrors those deep beliefs.
27%
Flag icon
Exercising choice over how you perceive the sensations of happenings in your life and psyche is a profound step in releasing attachment to being “helpless” and at the mercy of “cruel fate.”
27%
Flag icon
When you make a kinky game of it, you greatly expand your sense of agency, you unite your will, and you open up room for a sense of fun and playfulness to come into the scene.
37%
Flag icon
The truth is you're allowed to experience bliss all the time, whether you're lying in a gutter, getting yelled at by your boss, getting ignored by your date, whatever.
39%
Flag icon
every unpleasant feeling we have has an unconscious motivation. Some part of us believes that by feeling the yucky feeling, we'll “get” something that will enhance our survival.
48%
Flag icon
Write it down in your journal: “I have a kinky, weird, fucked-up desire to ________ and I'm going to do it, just ‘cause I'm a nasty freak like that.”
53%
Flag icon
With your consent, your previously unconscious sadistic prohibitions can resolve, thus emancipating the previously stuck energy in your psyche, which you are now free to put towards your creative endeavors.
54%
Flag icon
The ego/conscious mind may think that it's frightened of failure and humiliation (in matters of wealth, love, body, creativity, etc.), but fear and desire ARE IDENTICAL.
54%
Flag icon
“Hot damn, I am infinitely willing to feel every painful thing in the world! I'm the crazy, infinitely willing one!” That's who you are, simply, in honesty, already.
54%
Flag icon
You already get off on all your shadow stuff, you just haven't let yourself know it yet.
57%
Flag icon
The Work is a practice where you take a stressful thought and you question it, thereby releasing the grip it has over you, which eventually sets you free.
61%
Flag icon
How do I know that you're a cosmic pain slut? Because this material world of ours is the world of apparent limits, constriction, gravity, finitude.
61%
Flag icon
You wouldn't have incarnated here if you weren't attracted to the rollercoaster ride.
62%
Flag icon
The essence of growth is to put more attention on context rather than on content.
67%
Flag icon
What if worrying and doubting yourself and feeling lacking were just the tools that you use to distract yourself from the work of living centered within the high sensation and high energy of the bliss that is your inherent nature?
68%
Flag icon
I'm saying: Adopt an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude to your feeling states. In doing this, you practice being the artist of your life rather than the judge of it.
68%
Flag icon
Practice liking that you're feeling what you're feeling. Practice liking that you like what you like to feel. I know that sounds a bit silly, but most of us habitually practice not liking that we like what we like to feel. Why not try it the other way around?
69%
Flag icon
In other words, at a fundamental level, we have all these reaction formations to hide our own saintliness, our own willingness to experience everything with total love. The most repressed item in your unconscious is your own total grace.
70%
Flag icon
The thing about the ego is that it needs a sense of opposition, of refusal, of rejection in order to maintain itself. It has to say: “No! That is awful! I don't like that! No, that's not me!” to something in order to define itself as separate from the undulating whole of the weird fractal hologram of life.
73%
Flag icon
You might notice that after a week of practicing Tonglen, you begin to feel a deep, soft sense of connection every time your painful affliction comes to your attention.
73%
Flag icon
Tonglen is a great support practice for shadow integration work and is actually similar to EK—the key practice outlined in this book—in that it invites you to take the courageous step of feeling the pain fully and bravely, with good humor and kindness, without resistance or resentment, fear or shame, as a heroic act on behalf of all other beings who have the same pain.
74%
Flag icon
paradoxically, your real power, your real specialness, your actual ability to influence and help others, rests in you ever-more-deeply understanding and enjoying your “garden variety-ness.”
75%
Flag icon
Being fully willing to feel what's already present without contracting, without tensing into aversion (resentment) to avoid it—that is an exercise of your own deep divine power and sovereignty, that is the loving willingness that transforms, that transmutes.
84%
Flag icon
Your problem is not that you torture others; it's that you don't torture them exquisitely enough.
86%
Flag icon
On a physical, emotional, and intellectual level, I enjoy being bound by other people's beliefs and desires. It makes me feel self-righteous, and I take a huge amount of pleasure in making them feel guilty over how they've made me a victim.
93%
Flag icon
So Existential Kink is different from the conventional Law of Attraction approach in that it says: don't ignore or deny those stark realities, go right into ‘em with tons of shameless sadomasochistic glee, enjoy the fuck out of ‘em, and be honestly happy instead of weird-denial-fake-happy.
94%
Flag icon
I also (speaking as a human being and not as any kind of psychologist or medical professional, since I'm not those) recommend practicing Brahmavihara meditation as an antidote to depression.