An open, receptive approach to this emotion might be, “Ah, a deep heavy feeling of sadness, how exquisite. Hmm, let me feel into this, what is the texture, the sound? It's rather spongy, and when I pay close attention, I notice in my heart it sounds like a slow xylophone melody playing in a rainy alley.” As opposed to, “Oh no, a deep heavy feeling

In other words, if you lost your ability to feel bad, you might hardly recognize yourself. You'd be stepping into an unknown horizon. You might risk offending people in your life who expect you to feel bad and who believe that certain situations require feeling bad. None of this would actually kill you, but it would kill your old idea of who you ar

So to emphasize: focus on allowing yourself to take sadomasochistic pleasure in the sensations and emotions stirred up by your “don't like” situation. Don't put your energy into trying to get yourself to like the bare facts of what you “don't like.”

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. Your unwillingness to let yourself have big fat happy pleasure until you get “the good thing” is the very essence of sado-masochistic self-denial.

I suggest that you create a spatial container for this work by going into a comfortable room where you can close the door and not be disturbed. I also suggest that you create a temporal container for this work by setting a timer for fifteen minutes and lighting a candle and/or burning some incense. If incense smoke doesn't agree with

To do this, we have to greatly humble our ego's denial and fictional (if we were feeling feisty we might even say delusional) sorting of all experience into “good” (what appears to benefit me) and “bad” (what appears to not benefit me). When we succeed in this, the ego loses layers of its absorption in the fiction of separation, and comes more and

All we need to do is shift the context in our imagination from one of “awful thing happening to me against my will” to “kinky fun thing happening that I fully consent to.” Get off on this thing, this situation, this feeling that your ego thinks that you hate. Feel the freedom of that, the liberation of it. Allow yourself to be touched by the magnet

Consider: the unconscious rules not only our night-time dreams, but to a great extent (a far, far greater extent than is comfortable for us to acknowledge)—it also rules the patterns, desires, and curiosities that shape our waking experience. Our day-to-day waking experience is also a kind of dream—more dense and more slow-moving than our nighttime

The fact that “the truth is sensational” matters a lot in Existential Kink practice, because as you explore the possibility that “having is evidence of wanting” you'll begin to notice that when your body is relaxed, it responds strongly.