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

You can choose to have all the sensations that go along with wealth, but first you need to get crystal clear on your fondness for all the sensations that go along with scarcity.

The essence of growth is to put more attention on context rather than on content.

the ultimate context of who you are remains, because the context of who you are is presence, awareness, consciousness, pure and simple.

Eros as the love of the context in which all life and beauty unfolds, the formless context that is beautiful because it holds all possibilities.

When you're wrapped up in feeling miserable about something, it often seems that the content of what you're miserable about is very real and important. What if it's just not? What if it has no intrinsic meaning whatsoever? What if whatever “problem” you're hung up about is just a vehicle for numbing yourself to the massive turned-on joy and fulfillment you could otherwise be feeling?

if the content of your experience feels awful, if your thoughts are grim, your energy leaden, your feelings flush with self-pity: I suggest getting very, very curious about what element of reality you're denying, repressing, and hiding from.

also notice exactly how long you are willing to tolerate feeling good before you start to turn yourself off with worrying, doubting, getting offended.

What's your favorite mode of turning yourself off?

when you are more focused on the how (the subtle processes) of your experience rather than on the what (the content), you are getting closer to knowing yourself as the divine Self (the total context, the field of awareness), the ultimate Who.

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?

To be “turned on” about any feeling state, including feeling any variation of “turned off,” just means to be in total, unreserved approval of that state.

Adopt an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude to your feeling states.

reaction formation occurs when a situation stimulates a forbidden feeling, so before you can become consciously aware of that forbidden feeling, your ego stages an over-the-top performance of an emotion which is opposite to the forbidden feeling, as a way of hiding the forbidden feeling both from you and from other people.

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.

The most repressed item in your unconscious is your own total grace.

The thing about the ego is that it needs a sense of opposition, of refusal, of rejection in order to maintain itself.

the divine often actively seeks out extreme experiences of pain in order to show off how divinely accepting it is.

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

For a single session of Tonglen, aim to do ten taking-and-sending breaths, giving yourself ample time between taking-and-sending breaths to breathe normally while you visualize the healing of others.

The most common way that we block the rare quickening that we are is by worrying that our pain and suffering mean that we're uniquely terrible or uniquely cursed (in other words—feeling guilty or resentful about it).

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.

people with sociopathic narcissism are so burdened by neurotic shame that they can't empathically feel their impact on other people, or even feel their own authentic desire for connection.

humans tend to experience the sensations of life through an emotional spectrum that ranges from hedonistic pleasure to profound grief. Plenty of us have a hard time going fully into grief, but it's very important to do because if you don't fully feel your grief, you can never fully feel your pleasure.