Existential Kink Quotes

“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.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“But Jung also pointed out: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“The English word psyche, meaning “soul” or “mind,” comes from the Greek word psyche, meaning butterfly.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“The magical worldview is this: As above, so below. As within, so without.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“Fear is just excitement without breath.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“Fear is excitement without the breath,”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“Remember, “having is evidence of wanting”—if there's a situation or a feeling that's present in your life, no matter how awful it is, it's present with you not because it's “true” or “real” but because some part of the vast, strange, kinky Self that you are finds it fascinating, compelling, beautiful. And it's time to let that part of yourself and its taboo pleasures come to your conscious agreement and embrace.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“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.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“While society sometimes carelessly refers to sociopathic, narcissistic behavior as “shameless,” 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.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“the unconscious divine Self that we all are wants to experience everything; it deeply wants to experience it all. Otherwise, why would the Self that we are have bothered to incarnate into duality?”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“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.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“Reminder: I am not a psychologist or a medical professional. That said, as another human being who has suffered trauma, I suggest plenty of regular ole' therapy, exploring bodywork and acupuncture, gathering tons of support from friends, and moving heaven and earth to get thyself to many ayahuasca ceremonies and to legal MDMA therapy sessions if you can find them. Ayahuasca is the most useful, beautiful, and rapid means I know of for addressing deep trauma (it has helped me immensely), and studies have shown that MDMA in a therapeutic context is also quite powerful for resolving trauma. I am proposing that you consider using these kinds of intense entheogenic substances only in well-held spaces with experienced healers, not just because I'm a giant hippie, but because they work.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“Finally, I suggest that you read The Mood Cure by Julia Ross and follow the protocol she recommends for your particular condition, as depression issues are often hormonal and Ross has well-researched supplement suggestions for most forms of mood problems. I've greatly benefitted from following her protocols myself.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“Also, if you're depressed I suggest that you check out EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), which involves tapping on acupressure points while saying helpful statements. You can also easily find demonstrations of this process on YouTube.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“When I've been depressed, The Work of Byron Katie inquiry practice has helped me immensely. We humans tend to make ourselves depressed by believing bleak narratives about ourselves and other people. When you question these, often the heavy feelings tend to lift. So, definitely do that. See the Appendix for more information on The Work.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“But if you're bringing a “don't like” situation to mind in order to practice giving yourself deep permission to feel hot, nasty, electric joy about it, well then, that's quite a bit different, isn't it? Because in this later scenario, you aren't wallowing in negativity; you're wallowing in hot electric bliss.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“Two of the most popular TV series in the world at the time of me writing this book, for example, are Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. Both shows feature big piles of violence, grief, pain, and horror. There are also heroines and heroes striving epically against all odds to survive and help others to survive as well. These shows are terrifying and people love them.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“If you boldly claim and revel in your previously suppressed desire for power, allowing yourself to savor the intense secret pleasure of all the times you've “accidentally” inconvenienced or upset others, you will find this doesn't morph you into a murderous fascist. Instead it gives you the opportunity to compassionately feel your connection to all us other “awful” humans out there who have the exact same desire for power, and it liberates your awareness and energy so that you can start finding energizing, gorgeous ways to make your power felt in the world rather than acting it out in sideways, resentful, passive-aggressive fashions.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“The desire to make others wait is a desire for power. Similarly (to mention some other common patterns you may have), the desire to pick fights with your partner to get attention, the desire to troll people on social media, the desire to bad-mouth colleagues as a way of gaining leverage at work, are all sideways manifestations of a desire for power. This desire for power, this desire to have an impact on the world around you and to be significant, is an immensely normal, lovely, garden-variety human desire. The fact that you have it doesn't make you uniquely evil; it makes you just like the rest of us.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“Your blood flows while you're asleep, doesn't it? The tides roll in and out without asking you about their timing, yes? To “make the unconscious, conscious” involves becoming personally aware of just how nonpersonal and interdependent all experience is.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious,” our old friend Jung liked to say.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“So yes, in a roundabout way, it does. The more you practice Tonglen, the more you come to experience pain and suffering as “the pain and suffering” rather than “my pain and suffering which proves that I am uniquely wrong, bad, and unworthy.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“Pain becomes suffering when we take it personally, as if it reflects something uniquely meaningful (and bad) about us. And of course it does—it reflects that we're willing to take pain personally. Haha!”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“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.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“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.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“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?”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“When you're in total, turned-on approval of your state, you're deciding to see that state as a way that you are “good for yourself” rather than as a way that you are “bad for yourself.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“We turn ourselves off because we actually just really like it in a secret, freaky way. The good news is that it's possible to get turned on about being turned off. I know that sounds weird—but you can be: Angry and turned on about it Sad and turned on about it Tired and turned on about it Defeated and turned on about it Grieving and turned on about it Disgusted and turned on about it Scared and turned on about it Self-pitying and turned on about it . . . you can be “the turned-on version” of anything. 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.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“The essence of growth is to put more attention on context rather than on content.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power

“Imagine that you're a kind of cosmic masochistic slut (and I mean that in the nicest possible way—yay sluts!) who just beamed down into your life and body. She feels the heart-pounding panic of impending doom too, and she loves it. She feels the pressure of having to find a way to make ends meet again this month, and it turns her on. She feels the stretch and strain of having to prove herself worthy of support in this hard, cold world, and she trembles and moans and asks for more. Plus, let's not forget—she feels the righteous resentment of the evil rich corporatists and politicians who made this world so unbalanced—and well, there are few things more luscious in this sublunar realm than a big stinging heap of righteousness.”
― Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power