Cultivating spiritual resiliance through Kink

How well can you stay centred through stress?

How much discomfort can you hold?

Do you run and hide from pain?

Or do you open and explore it when it comes knocking?

Kinky people are often resilient because they don't try to avoid or run from things like discomfort or pain- they face it head-on and alchemise these energies into power and pleasure.

Being resilient is an antidote to trauma- stretching your ability to be with the harsher aspects of life and not let them collapse or defeat you. A lot of people, particularly in the modern spirituality scene, run and hide from discomfort. They just want to feel the pleasurable and good parts of life and do everything they can to avoid discomfort... and crack as soon as things don't go their way.

Kinky scenes are like a training ground for some of the harsher and more challenging aspects of embodied reality. You consciously go into energies that others usually run from, and you find your peace and enjoyment in these typically unendurable scenarios.

You find peace through, and at the heart, of pain.

While a consensual and desired pain scene is very different from an accident or unwanted pain experience, we can learn in these intentional experiences how we can separate intensity (whether its pain, humiliation or something else) from the 'don't like' mental story (the root of suffering), and see how our relationship to that situation changes when we have a different 'story' about it.

Once we learn how we can do this, we are less likely to waste our time and energy avoiding feeling uncomfortable, which shows up in all areas of our lives.

If we run from discomfort and pain at all costs then we are afraid to love, afraid to speak our truth, afraid to stand for what we believe in.

This is why ancient Tantrikas even had meditation practices where they pierced themselves and meditation on the intensity of the pain, letting their consciousness expand and rapture into the intensity.

This is why initiation rituals for those seeking to become enlightened often involved pain and torment.

There is no freedom when you refuse to face pain.

When we embrace and transmute discomfort, we can stop resisting and fighting the flow of life and the struggle that comes with it.

We can be with what is, and feel strong in the face of challenges.

In the online course, Art of Tantric Kink, we explore how to consciously and intentionally dive into these waters as a spiritual practice- to face taboos and our shadows and transmute them into aliveness.

You can also join us live and in-person at the Sensual Arts Retreat to explore these practices.