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

let go of your attachment to outcome.

you're allowed to experience bliss all the time,

It's best to do Existential Kink work when you're already in a good mood.

Doing this kind of work at a time when you already feel miserable can often just result in rumination or self-blame, and that is emphatically not what this practice is about.

in a bad mood,

already so absorbed in your kinky game that you're identified with it,

forgotten that you're playing the game or have the abilit...

Practice Existential Kink

fifteen minutes

Working with guilt

So feeling bad/guilty/wrong as an adult doesn't actually improve your odds of physical survival, but it does, however, guarantee the survival of “you as you currently know yourself to be.”

if you lost your ability to feel bad, you might hardly recognize yourself.

ask yourself these questions slowly

The Game of an All-Powerful Being

Write in your journal in response to this prompt:

Here are some example answers to the prompt:

We're all Psyche, and we all need to make that scary journey to the underworld in order to have our reunion with Eros and to then be able to give birth to the field of consciousness that is Joyful Pleasure.

We're all just fluid swirling emanations of an endless nondual reality, so in an ultimate sense it really doesn't matter whether or not you pay your bills, find true love, save the world, raise a family, or get enlightened.

get stuck when we look for “reasons” to motivate us to action,

some part of us knows that there simply is no “reason.”

You don't need a reason to do anything. Your own kinky, hot, fucked-up desire to do it is enough.

Here's an example:

Here's another example:

There's a lot of power in not looking for “reasons” to do things, because equally compelling reasons can be found for everything.

just own your desire, without trying to prop it up with reference to anything, you gain a sense of responsibility for that desire which can clarify all your actions and slice through the Gordian knot of your conflicts.

Choose just one desire to focus on for the ne...

Accept that there's no “reason” to pursue this desire.

Write it down in your journal:

Want what you want just ‘cause you want it.

Do Existential Kink on both the pain of pursuing your desire and the pain of not already having it,

either decide to keep pursuing the same reason-less desire, or choose a new one.

It just doesn't matter.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond all measure.”

the reason you don't have the thing you say you want is not because

or

it's because there's a strong part of you that's afraid of the thing you say you want for a host of reasons, th...

you have to see the division clearly before you can heal it.

To do Deepest Fear Inventory:

twenty fears associated with your resentment and refusal of the thing you claim to want.

other person should just say,

Then you say,

Note:

your unwillingness to feel

the sensation of other people doing that thing.

It might seem like

or

just spontaneously happens to you, bu...

unconscious choice, a strategy designed long ago by your child mind to get you something, namely, the approval of the people around you, whom you dep...

guilt

most of us continue to use it long after its value expires.