No more bad feelings

de-wooifying existential kink meditation

Lately I’ve been crying and slowly convulsing with pleasure like I’m being exorcised because of a mental move I learned after being inspired by these understated posts: The Craziest Thing That Ever Happened To Me and How I Attained Persistent Self-Love. The technique is from a book called Existential Kink, which I wouldn’t recommend for everyone, because the first half is about magic and alchemy and a BDSM-framing of all your recurring unwanted patterns. But I would recommend the technique, because it makes normally-unpleasant emotions feel good, and this has cascading benefits.

The simple instructions:

Think of any recurring unwanted pattern (internal narrative, life event, emotion. etc.), find the unpleasantness associated with that recurring event in your body, then savor those sensations as if you actually enjoyed them. Keep doing that for like 15 minutes. That’s it. Post over.

So the first step. This can be any recurring yikes event. Like if you continually eat lots of microwaved sourdough bread and applegate organic hotdogs after late night workouts and you feel bad that this keeps happening. Or maybe you keep dating the same type of person who you know isn’t good for you and you regret dating them after the fact. It can be a recurring emotion, or a recurring thought pattern that isn’t fun. Any little way that you beat yourself up mentally. Sometimes these self-made suffering contracts are hard to see, but that’s what friends are for. A buddy of mine recently pointed out such a blindspot for me, and it was a huge relief to use that as a starting point for this type of meditation.

from my meditation logs

Any recurring unwanted thing is a trailhead to explore using this type of meditation. Repeating stuff you don’t like is an indicator that some underlying emotion needs to be fully felt, but that isn’t happening. The returning unwanted thing is just your body and mind giving you yet again another opportunity to feel the underlying emotion, but you slap it away, avoid it, or react with shame (reputable source of this theory? me).

from @thepostbuddhist on twitta

So you’ve mentally summoned some situation you don’t like using internal imagery or verbal narrative. Whatever works to cause the slightest hint of the recurring emotion you don’t like, or some way of producing the thing that triggers you. Either way, you look for where the unpleasantness appears in the body. And perhaps you can label the emotion you don’t want to feel. That’s great, but not necessary. All you gotta do is find where you’re contracting, where the tension is, or wherever your experience is unpleasant. Try to get a handle on the location, shape of the sensation group, and the sensation quality. Is it dense, coarse, prickly, tiny bubbles of pain? It’s not important to find a label for the sensation quality, what’s important is that you’re honing in on the sensations of unpleasantness. And doing so doesn’t have to be super precise or serious, it’s just useful to separate what feels shitty from the narrative and conceptual layer that it spawns or that creates it.

Next we savor the unpleasantness that’s emerged. I’ve found the easiest way to learn this technique is to really exaggerate the savoring. There’s a few ways to do this. Recall or generate some reference experiences, some mental imagery and scenes like a really enjoyable massage, sinking back into a warm jacuzzi, nuzzling into the last bit of honey from a jar, savoring a juicy steak, or the best stretch in the morning you’ve ever had. How would you act in those situations if you were experiencing three times the pleasure they would or have given you? That’s the kind of savoring you can simulate with your imagination and act out internally while doing this technique. It’s also possible to get a feel for how to savor by doing so with positive valence emotions and sensations. I’ve written about that here.

from me meditation logs

Okay, so it’s not necessary to incorporate the original book’s philosophy into your working identity, that you’re a messed up person who loves trash situations and suffering, but I think using a lightweight frame of sexy enjoyment of the unpleasant sensation works well to trigger the valence flip. How sexy exactly? I don’t create mental image scaffolding to interpret the initially-unpleasant sensations as if I’m enjoying them in a sexual way. I mostly just use narrative helpers, and these fall into two categories.

I’ve been working with sadness a lot using this type of meditation. It may be small at first, just behind my eyes in little concentrated points, and I’ll have the intuition that there’s probably more of it to feel. At this point I’m very motivated to feel it fully, and there’s an eagerness to feel it fully, because I know it’ll feel good during and after since I’m using this type of meditation.

from meditation logs

The sadness may have started to emerge in a number of different memories or recent events that I’m recalling in the meditation context. For example, I felt some shame about not getting good sleep even though I know that’s how I feel the best and whatnot. In this case I would lean into the sensations I’m calling sadness and also say things like, “I’m so fucked up,” and “Why can’t I do the right thing?” This type of narrative device pumps the woe-is-me narrative. It’s an aid to pull out the emotion a bit more that you’re trying to process. Maybe there’s some hesitancy about reinforcing patterns, but that hasn’t happened in my case, and I don’t think others would love this technique if it made the problem worse or created new ones. That fear of making the problem worse is another thing to savor as pleasure!

The other narrative device I use emphasizes the masochistic narrative. It’s so helpful to switch between lamenting the suffering you’re experiencing, using internal verbal monologue to reinforce this, and to savor the unpleasantness or tough emotion as if you enjoy it in a sexy way. Okay Fine, some real internal verbal examples that I’ve used to pump the slut-for-suffering frame lol (Hello, future grandchildren reading this. I am not sorry): *more like dom sexy voice* “Mmm, yeah, you fucking love that don’t you?”, *more coy sexy voice* “Oh no, I’m gonna be sad / in pain forever”, and of course *really into it voice* “Fuuuck yeah”, “Oh yeahh”, and “Mmm”.

from logs

You don’t really need to make it sexual, but that’s a very helpful device if savoring is not coming easily. Currently, I’m mostly savoring nonverbally as if I’m having a really good stretch, with a couple of those shorter verbal cues sprinkled in.

In the past I used this technique within a parts work frame, but now that feels unnecessary, like adding lots of extra concepts. Just using the raw power of an upgraded emotional heat-sink is enough. But I think it’s probably skillful to experiment with both, just doing the technique and integrating it into other integration practices and moves. Especially if you pull this move in a meditation context, where you’re trying to cultivate collectedness/concentration, staying at a lower nonverbal level of abstraction is more helpful in my experience.

from meditation journal

It can be a bit tiring to go through five to ten cycles of emotional release in a fifteen minute period. I’ve found expressing gratitude between these waves keeps my energy up. To do so, simply thank yourself for feeling tough emotions, for doing this practice, or thank the pleasure for being there, or give thanks to any easeful elements of your experience. One of the main benefits of becoming more friendly with emotions we’ve been suppressing or not feeling fully is that joy, happiness, and other traditionally “positive” emotions become more available. It’s fun to experiment with a bit of this type of meditation, followed by fifteen minutes of gratitude practice or jhana stuff.

Eventually, the act of savoring initially-unpleasant emotions as pleasure becomes natural, nonverbal, and like an invisible lever that’s available for you to pull. It’s been interesting to explore when to pull the savor lever, to trigger the valence flip, because sometimes sadness will be blooming, and if you don’t savor it immediately, it’ll grow even larger and feel cathartic without the savoring move at all. And if you do the savor move just as an initially-tough emotion is erupting, it can result in that pattern of tension in the body to dissipate very quickly or immediately. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Watching the emotion naturally come and go is just often a slower process, and savoring it speeds up how quickly it’s metabolized.

from meditation logs

I doubt the idea of fully feeling an emotion is a metric that matters. What’s been more useful in my experience is to notice when I’m contracting in events throughout the day, to notice when I’m not following through on intentions, or to notice when joy is stifled in and out of meditation, and to use those as trailheads for integration/emotional work like savoring. Whenever the question emerges of whether I’m feeling something fully, it’s usually been spawned by fear, and a subtle lens that I’m broken and need to be fixed. I just spot that and do the moves described in this post on that fear. 

When and if to pull the savor lever on “unpleasant” emotions is just an interesting exploration to explore. Sometimes savoring isn’t necessary because there’s acceptance to just let the emotion be felt on its own, and when there’s no resistance to arising emotions, they feel cathartic already. It’s also fun to let the emotion rip, then pull the savor lever, then stop savoring, almost like edging the savor move. And what’s really cool is to get both going at the same time, savoring the pain or sadness or something, but doing it lightly so the pleasure doesn’t totally dominate the experience, so you’re feeling the pain and pleasure simultaneously, like you’ve created an emotional forge of some kind.

excerpt from meditation logs

At times an emotion will start to bloom and emerge, but will hang during its deployment. The body will be frozen in tension. It feels like you’re emotionally constipated or something, like you want it to be emerging fully and dissipating, but something is stuck. In these cases, it’s helpful to do the savor move on the fear that the hanging, stuck emotion won’t ever resolve. You take a step back and do the savor move on the present situation of stuck, frozen emotion. Recursive savoring in this way can unblock the original emotion.

If you practice savoring as I’ve described, you’ll be able to do that thing in action movies where the villain gets punched in the face, but licks the blood from their lip and smiles. Joking, but there’s real positive, prosocial effects from this practice. Massively reducing and totally dissolving major areas of our shame and other emotions we’ve been avoiding, and burning up all the little contracts we make with ourselves to suffer– doing this reverberates into our behavior and relationships with others. And it also gives us more agency. If I feel meh about writing, I can just notice those unpleasant sensations in the moment and turn them into a pleasurable emotional release. Then I feel refreshed and excited to write more instead of approaching the rising resistance as a taskmaster who shoves down the bubbling emotion to be dealt with later. This type of meditation feels like a hack in the system, and I’m just happy to share it with you.