113 Getting Off On Every Stroke

56:30

56:30

113 Getting Off On Every Stroke

by Ruwan Meepagala

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talks

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Meditation

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"Getting off on every stroke" is a skill of turning unpleasant experiences into enjoyable ones. On the one hand, it's a nice metaphor for alchemizing suffering. On the other hand, it's a literal physical skill. Some people asked if I could break it down, so here it is.

Awareness Empathy Grounding Surrender Pain Psychology Existential Kink Sensory Awareness Emotional Maturity Social Dynamics Eroticism

Meet your Teacher

Ruwan Meepagala

New York, NY, USA

Meet your Teacher

Ruwan Meepagala

New York, NY, USA

Transcript

The Ruando podcast is an exploration of the unconscious in the game of life. Be sure to visit ruando. Com to get a preview chapter of my upcoming book Infinite Play and free access to my content library. Enjoy the show. So in my interview with Carolyn Elliott, Author of Existential Kink, We speak about a concept that's in her book called Getting Off on Every Stroke. And a couple of people have asked me to explain what this means, How do you do it, Can I flush this out a little more. So that's what we speak about in this episode is how to get off on every stroke. So Carolyn's book, Which is great, You should check it out, Kind of expands on this and uses this root, Which can be taken as a sexual metaphor into dealing with challenges in life. And actually I think one of the main pieces of her book is Reintegrating Your Unconscious. She references this great quote by Carl Jung, And I'm not going to get a word for word off the top of my head, But something like, Until you make your unconscious conscious, It will run your life and you will call it fate, Which I think is a beautiful quote. She mentions it a few times in that book. That's essentially I believe the root of existential kink and the function of getting off on every stroke. This idea which I will explain in this video, Which is regrouping, Regrouping your dissociated archetypes, Reconnecting to patterns in yourself or unconscious behaviors that are pulling you in different directions and seemingly causing you suffering. So I'm not going to speak too much on existential kink, That's Carolyn's term. There might be nuances to it or things she's added to it that I'm unaware of, So I'm not going to try to explain that. But this idea of getting off on every stroke, I do feel very qualified to speak on because Carolyn and I met many years ago in a, I used to say this euphemistically, But I'll say it straight, In a sex cult, A matriarchal cult called One Taste, Where they explored different mysteries of the human experience or different aspects of human consciousness through a sexual practice called orgasmic meditation. So this idea of getting off on every stroke was one of their famous or their common axioms or things that they would kind of drill into our head. It was a skill, It was also words to live by, And it can be taken on a few different levels. On the most superficial level or the most surface-y level, You can look at it just as an analogy, Right? It's an analogy of a sexual experience, Of a sexual skill that can be applied metaphorically, If you will, To dealing with uncomfortable life moments. If you like mystical language, You could call it alchemizing your suffering or alchemizing pain or alchemizing frustration into pleasure or joy or happy experiences. And I actually believe that one of the reasons why Carolyn chose the term existential kink is it's drawn from BDSM imagery or kink, Kink, You know, Sexual kink imagery where say a bottom really likes getting spanked and, You know, Even though it's something that causes physical pain on some level, The bottom says, Thank you, Daddy, And it makes it feel really good and it heightens her pleasure. That's one level. But it actually can be taken a little bit more literally where the actual physical skill, Because there's a skill to this, This is something that we trained in, Specifically women trained in, In one taste, That can be practiced in sexuality. I think it's most easy to practice in a sexual setting, But it can be applied into life. It's a physical skill, Just like grounding or somatic awareness. In fact, They all, They're all kind of, They're all lumped together. And on kind of a spiritual level, If you will, Or you can almost look at it as like extreme Taoism, Which I know is an oxymoron and, You know, Perhaps there's a, You know, A Taoism expert watches this, He'll wag his finger at me for my explanations, Or maybe he'll just shrug because he's Taoist. But it's like, Instead of just going with the flow, It's like aggressively going with the flow or like, Yeah, Getting off on the flow, Like achieving like orgasmic states potentially on whatever life is throwing at you. So I'm going to flush this all out. So for definitions, To get off on every stroke is to derive pleasure from everything. In one taste language or in this worldview, I should say, A stroke can be like a physical stroke of touch from a lover or some sort of partner. But also, I mean, When you go deep into this kind of worldview, It's like every moment can be a stroke, Every time you engage with reality can be a stroke, Every quantum of attention that you use with reality is a stroke. So I'm not going to go too deep into the mystical stuff, Especially not off the bat. But the idea in general, And the reason why this is an applicable life skill to everybody is that if you can really learn to get off on every stroke, You can basically handle everything that life throws at you and handle it with a smile potentially. And this language, Getting off on every stroke, Existential kink, Obviously they're kind of more feminized language. It's like getting off on every stroke is created by a woman from a female perspective. I'll explain the sexual practice. Even existential kink, Obviously Carolyn's a woman. I think most people, Even if you're really kinky, Most guys probably aren't, They don't relish at the idea of getting spanked by Daddy Dom or getting spanked by the universe even. So maybe that imagery doesn't fit for most men. So one of the things I'm going to do in this episode, Just because I'm a guy, Is kind of share perhaps a male translation or a more male applicable translation of these terms. But essentially this is staying grounded and engaged. The same stuff I speak about in the aroused control episodes of being able to fully engage with a stimulus from reality, Whether it's a sexual stimulus or just some experience that causes some feeling in you physically or emotionally and having the capacity to enjoy it rather than experience it as frustration or suffering. And if you caught the episode I did on the road of trials, This will pair up with that. The road of trials kind of viewed hard times in your life from like a top-down perspective or from looking at it like as a stage in your hero's journey. This is more the immediate like physical side of things. So this episode has three parts. First I'm going to speak about the origins of the idea in orgasmic meditation and some of its roots in Western occultism. We're going to speak about the more grounded side of the skill, The physiological experience and what's going on mentally, The psychological skill if you will, Using some analogies from BDSM. And then at the end I'm going to touch a little bit on what we might call the mystical side of things which for me anytime I'm speaking about anything mystical it's about how you create your subjective reality without being deluded of course. Because essentially you know especially if you're a masculine person you might be hearing this and being like oh this getting off on every stroke that sounds like you're just learning how to endure unpleasant things. Well no, No it's not exactly that. There's a bit of that but on a level that maybe is a little bit unprovable but I'm going to try to show it when it comes to social dynamics a lot of mystical concepts can like be observed very clearly in social dynamics. Even the skill can be used in manipulation which is not my point here. Please do not use this for the dark side. I will share how it has been used or have witnessed it being used. In a way getting off on every stroke is kind of a way of guiding reality. If you're familiar with BDSM it's kind of a way of topping from the bottom in a sense because really what you're learning here is deep, Deep surrender which if you are a spiritual person is probably a word you like. And as I mentioned I'm going to try to apply all of this stuff or translate it for a more masculine worldview. Yeah, Because a lot of these terms are from the woman's perspective. First let's jump into origin. So I learned this at OneTaste. I met Carolyn at OneTaste and OneTaste's main thing that bound the community together where a lot of their analogies were drawn from where a lot of the very applicable life skills are like social skills that we all developed in terms of developing intuition and reading people and yes manipulating people came from a practice called orgasmic meditation abbreviated as OM. I found out about it through a TED talk that the founder did in 2007. I jumped into the organization for various reasons. I was kind of going through my own existential crisis as a 23 year old but also they were featured in Tim Ferriss' book. I was a huge Tim Ferriss fan at the time in Tim Ferriss' book The 4-Hour Body. The orgasm chapter in that book or the sex chapter was written with them I believe. And if you want to learn more about that whole thing and my journey with OneTaste you can check out my when I was in a matriarchal sex cult episodes. But this practice of orgasmic meditation essentially trained sensitivity. It trained empathy on a very practical level. It really demystified empathy to me at least. I'll explain the practice first actually. So typically a man would stroke a woman's clitoris for 15 minutes in a prescribed fashion. It was on a timer. It was kind of like a Bikram yoga class where everything was very strict on the timer. But the entire stroke was just up and down. There's no circles. It wasn't even stroking her entire clitoris. It was stroking a specific spot on her clitoris, The most minute spot where the most sensation could be felt. And this practice actually had roots. This what they call the container, This 10 step ritual done over 15 minutes was created by OneTaste and Nicole, The founder. But it was adapted from another organization, Cult-like organization called the Welcome Consensus that teaches about sexuality and a different kind of clitoris stroking practice called Doing, A deliberate orgasm. If you have studied tantra or into conscious sexuality, You may have heard of the Bodansky's. They had a different version of this clitoris stroking practice called extended massive orgasm. Yeah, Well you can imagine. You can imagine something like that. And then all of these had roots in another organization which still exists, A commune that started in the 60s called Lafayette Morehouse, Run by a guy named Vic Barranco who many consider to be one of the prominent cult leaders of the 60s. He was buddies with L. Ron Hubbard who founded Scientology and Werner Earhart who founded Est which became Landmark Worldwide. Anyway, I talk about all that cult stuff in my cult episode so I'm not going to go too deep into that. But this is kind of a lineage that goes all the way back to Aleister Crowley, Basically western occult sexual practices. Now the 15-minute Ohm container, One taste became the most popular of all of these organizations because they were really good at marketing and one of the things that made them really good at marketing is that they took this pretty esoteric kind of or this practice that had a cult, What's the word, Roots and made it a lot more marketable. One of the things is making it only 15 minutes like most people were down to try this weird thing for 15 minutes and it had a specific container so that people from all over the world and there's many thousands, Tens of thousands of people Ohming at its peak doing their own practice, They'd be able to link up in the same way that you go to a Bikram, Actually I don't know if Bikram even still exists because he's had his own things, But if you go to a certain kind of yoga in a different part of the world, You expect okay, Ashtanga yoga is always the sequence, Whatever. But it trained sensitivity on a deep level because the reason why it was just an up down stroke, The reason why you weren't supposed to vary your stroke or do anything fancy was that it wasn't about learning how to, I should say that becoming a good stroker was about learning how to empathize on a sensational level down to the most infinitesimal moment. So both partners is typically a man stroking a woman, Sometimes a woman stroking a woman, Always stroking clitoris. The strokers who are typically men would learn the skill of precise empathy, Would give you this moment to moment feedback of learning how to read a woman's body and in the beginning a stroker would, There'd be a lot of communication between stroker and strokey. They're both trying to find the speed, Pressure and location on the clitoris that allow for the most sensation. But as a stroker become more and more sensitive and I noticed this in myself after doing this a lot over the two years, Later on I would just be able to sense exactly what the woman wanted sometimes before she could open her mouth, Sometimes before she even realized it herself. And this might seem a little crazy to someone, To some people, But if you've ever done any sort of repeated practice where you're getting feedback from another body, Like tango dancing is a great example, All tango dancers understand what I'm explaining because if you've ever danced tango, It's all about feeling like the minute movements or the minute weight shifts or even kind of feeling the intention of your partner before, You know, In sync. That's what make good tango dancers good tango dancers. Obviously, If you've done something like tantra, This is a skill developed and I would even say if you've done a grappling martial art like Brazilian jiu-jitsu or judo or wrestling to some degree or Aikido, I guess, And I've actually really done Aikido, But or tai chi push hands, Which I know a lot of people don't consider to be a real martial art, But it is there's tai chi competition and it's kind of like judo rules, But you can't grab, Like you have to throw your opponent without grabbing them. So you really have to sense each other. Anyway, These are all that basically I'm trying to show that this own practice is not the only place where this skill is developed, Right? This is a thing. Actually, I'm going to do another episode on this idea, But thinking with your body, I've been reading this book. It's really great book by John Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf. Thinking about the physiological shifts when we are entering high stress environments, He's mostly speaking about testosterone and things like that, But he does have a whole chapter on how our preconscious nervous system works and for a long time since one taste, I've been trying to have a model of understanding of how it was that a stroker like myself could sense what a woman's body wanted before she even did. That seemed kind of crazy. I remember my finger can move to the spot that it was supposed to move before she could even realize it herself. That always seemed like this magical thing. I only recently learned from this book that our reptilian nervous system, The nervous system that moves our muscles can react to things many milliseconds before our emotions can process and certainly before our conscious mind can process. So a lot of times it seemed pretty magical that my finger would move to the right exact moment before she could even realize it. A lot of women when they would own with an experienced stroker would be like, Wow, You moved there before I even realized I wanted that. That's basically the skill. We were learning empathy on a very deep level and this translated into being able to sense people's feelings. I became very confident in my intuitive guesses on people's emotions because I just learned through this stroking practice, I know it sounds crazy to some, Through the stroking practice being able to really trust when I had a gut feeling. I had so much feedback from communicating through this clit stroking practice that I developed that. So that was the stroker side of things. But there's also a skill for the strokeys, The ones receiving. A lot of people would be like, Okay, I get the skill that the man gets from it, Like he's learning how to read over his body, But the woman just lays there and feels pleasure. Like no, Not exactly, Actually not at all. There's also a skill to receiving and that's where this getting off on every stroke comes from because if a good stroker, This is the analogy I use, A good stroker is like a, Basically both partners are trying to find the most precise, Perfect stroke between them where the most sensation can be felt. The exact speed, Exact pressure, Exact intensity, Exact location on the clitoris, Right? So a good stroker, The axiom for strokers would be stroke for your pleasure because if a guy was thinking too much, As I just described, Like the conscious processing is too slow and a woman's body especially can shift before the conscious mind, It can shift in these infinitesimal moments. The way to like disengage the guy from thinking too much and trying to read her moans or like look at her face, Like the way that is shut all that off and just like feel was a stroke for his pleasure. So instead of trying to get her off or get her to like him or try to do something for her, He would try to stroke her clitoris in a way that actually felt good for his finger and that kind of like tuned him in. So a good stroker was like a precision shooter, Even like with, If you think of a basketball or like archery or something like the target's really far away, The hoops really far away, It's really small, But a really good stroker can still find the perfect stroke even under sub-ideal conditions, Meaning like a really good stroker could find the orgasmic zone with a woman who perhaps is really numbed out. Let's say she spent years of being closed off or years of using hard vibrators or whatever, Right? On the woman's side, The woman's version of a stroke for your pleasure was what we're talking about here, Which is getting off on every stroke because in the way that a good stroker was a precision shooter, Can like shoot a tiny target from far away, A good strokey, A good receiver was a really big target. So either one, A good stroker, A good strokey can make up for a lack of skills in the other partner. And again, If you've ever tango danced, Well if you haven't, I'm just going to explain it and I've done a little bit, It's like a lot of people think, Oh, I'm not a good dancer, I better dance with inexperienced people so we can, You know, Because the experienced person will be too ahead of me, Like in martial arts. Especially with dancing, Since dancing is cooperative and not competitive, It's actually the opposite. It's a lot easier to dance with an experienced person, Even if you're in the leader role, Right? Like I, You know, I've done a little tango, If I dance with someone who's done tango a lot, It's almost like driving a high performance car that like does the perfect thing even though I'm not a great driver. Whereas dancing with a person who's not used to tango, A woman who's not used to dancing tango, It's like requires a lot of effort, We end up tipping over a lot, Like it actually, Is actually harder. Same thing with this own practice. A woman who could really get off on anything, And I'm going to break down exactly how one learns that, But if a woman could really get off on anything, Even if a guy is really clumsy or he doesn't have, He hasn't built up his intuition or he's nervous, If she can still get off, Then they're both, Then each stroke is a success, Right? It's because this whole own practice for both parties kind of creates this positive feedback, Anything they can get on the stroke, On the stroke of pleasure or sensation, It kind of creates this positive feedback where he feels more comfortable or he can tune into the right stroke better and then she's getting off even more because he's even better on the stroke and it goes back and forth, That's like a positive home. Whereas if you've ever been in bed with someone, Maybe you were nervous and your partner was nervous and you're both getting more and more nervous and it makes you fumble more and you're both getting more and more nervous and after a while, It's just like, It doesn't feel right. This happens with a lot of types of interaction. That's the opposite of negative feedback. Even if these are all new ideas, We know what the opposite of someone who doesn't get off, Right? Like that resting bitch energy is the opposite, Right? That's being super numb. You can't feel someone like that. This is kind of like the. . . Anyway, You guys know what I'm talking about. You've probably interacted with people where maybe everything on the surface actually looks great like they're trying to seem friendly, They're trying to be happy but you have this feeling of something is being blocked off, Something's being untrue. We can sense these things. We all have some level of empathy. But anyway, This whole thing of getting off on every stroke is where a woman could no longer. . . If a woman can really learn how to get off on every stroke or anyone but we're speaking from the woman's perspective in this own practice, Then she could cover for any kind of bad stroking and this would translate into life. The thing that I've gotten probably the most hate on is that I speak about my matriarchal cult experience mostly positively. People don't seem to like when someone has an experience with an oppressive group of people where the person doesn't go to victim mode. People give me a lot of shit. My cult videos have some mean comments because I'm just not a victim about it. And obviously bad things happen. That's a whole other thing. I'll leave that for other videos. But what a lot of people don't understand and which is why I'm actually pretty critical of some of the series that I was in. One Taste has been covered by a lot of major outlets. It was that a lot of them missed the point of this was kind of a really interesting sociological experience where. . . I mean one of the few matriarchal run organizations in modern cult history. But anyway, This whole getting off on every stroke thing was an example of extreme female empowerment. A lot of people are very quick to be like, Oh women were touched. They must have been oppressed. No, No. It was a matriarchal organization where women had a lot of power and one of the things that gave women power was not the fact that they were coddled the way that a lot of people think is the right way to protect historically. . . What are these words? Historically disadvantaged groups. Historically oppressed groups like all of women. This whole skill of getting off on every stroke put all the power back in the woman's hands because if you just take it out of the sexual setting, If you can get off on every stroke, It doesn't matter what's going on on the outside. You become independent of external things, Especially if you're talking about how a man treats you. You can take it to extremes but if you could really derive pleasure from a sub-ideal stroke, Well then you're not suffering anymore. But beyond that, And here's where it maybe gets a little bit trippy, And this is something that would be experienced in the own practice, Is that when a receiver, When a stroke-y could get off on every stroke, That getting off somehow guided the stroke. The positive feedback loop that I was speaking about, Maybe a guy would be a really bad stroker, He'd be totally off, But the woman was a really skilled stroke-y so she could get off on his bad stroke. The analogy to tango is the best I can do to really break this down but somehow that would communicate to him how to stroke correctly. I taught for one taste for a while. You would see the best thing for a guy, And I coached a lot of men in this organization or in this community, The best thing for a guy to learn intuition was to partner up with women who could really get off. Something about that taught them to stroke better because when a woman could really get off she could guide the stroke. This is the skill called bottoming. When it comes to getting people to do what you want, Most people think of the masculine version which is topping, Dominating people, But bottoming, Which is the feminine method of control, The feminine technique of getting power over people, Is getting off so hard that the other person naturally wants to have you get off more. I made a video a couple of years ago about bottoming to cops. If you get pulled over and the cops were adding you a ticket, Try to argue with him or try to dominate. The stupidest thing you could do is dominate a cop because forget about the guy's ego or whatever. For a cop to maintain his role in society, He has to maintain top position. Whatever your opinions are of policemen, That's just the reality of their job. They have to do that. Obviously some are dicks, Some are not dicks, But they have to maintain top position. If you do what most guys do, Try to argue with the cop or get in their face, The cop has to be a dick to dominate them and reassert top position. Otherwise, They can't do their job. A better thing to get out of a ticket, Which I've done a number of times, Is to bottom. To be really kind, Not to be servile, But to really get off and assume. You're almost assuming a reality or incepting a reality that, Hey, We're on the same team here. I know maybe some feminists will get angry at this idea, But this is how women have had the women who have had power throughout 5, 000 years of oppression. This is how they had it. It wasn't that it was a famous line by Anton LaVey. There have always been women in power despite the patriarchy. They weren't leading the armies. They were sleeping with the men and controlling the men who ran the armies. That's real power because they didn't even have to go into battle. I did this own practice for a while. I noticed that. . . Actually, Hold on. I'm jumping around. I have a lot of arrows off of this one point. I just want to make sure I'm going in order. The skill of bottoming can be applied. This is one of the things where this getting off whenever stroke was applied to manipulation because you would see where in sales, For instance, One taste would do this a lot, Where a person would maybe put up resistance because most people have some sort of resistance to sales. But even it's almost like every negative thing that seemed negative, Every resistance point, A really skilled one taste salesperson or really skilled Omer would somehow bottom to it or somehow get off on it that made it feel good. The thing about bottoming is kind of like Abe Lincoln's quote. He has a quote. He had a quote. I destroy my enemies by making them my friends. This is essentially what bottoming is. You're getting people on the same reality. You're getting someone to do the thing that you would want them to do of their own volition because they now want to do it. The skill of receiving, Even though I was in the stroker position most of the time in Oming, I grew a lot in one taste. I spoke about that more in that episode. But specifically with this getting off whenever stroke, One of the things that. . . One of the impetuses that had me join one taste, Aside from my existential crisis, But related to my existential crisis is that I had a psychogenic sexual dysfunction. I just basically had become so closed off emotionally that my dick stopped working. I had ED. That was one of the reasons why I was particularly interested in this sexual organization to get my mojo back. I spent a period of time because I was so closed off. So not getting off on reality. I was so numb to reality. Things didn't work down there. Part of my healing or part of my recovery from this was I spent a month where I mainly received. I stopped trying to have intercourse because that was giving me this stress response all the time. I was contracting a lot. I'll explain what that means in a second in part two. I spent a month where what it looked like is I ended up getting a lot of head essentially. In that, I got to practice the experience of getting off whenever stroke because in the beginning, Because I was so numb, I couldn't even feel much from oral. That's how numb I was. By putting more attention on it, By accepting reality, By not resisting. . . I'm going to speak about the how-tos, But by doing this over and over, Eventually I need to become more sensitive because sensitivity is a skill that you can work on. Even if you're a guy who's working on being more grounded, Like in the Masking Archetype Challenge, I have seven different techniques for grounding, Several different things to use your attention on to become more grounded. But they all are essentially putting your attention on physical reality. You're putting all of your attention on physical reality and dropping value judgments and dropping whether things are good or bad or worrying about the future. All of your attention is going into feeling the moments which calms your mind, Which allows you to handle more as opposed to trying to escape the moment, Which is what people are doing when they're in their head or when they're anxious or whatever. What I found over time is that yes, I did get my mojo back. It was a wonderful healing experience, Which is why even though I can condemn one taste and all the bad things they did to people with everyone else, I also have to admit that it was an overall positive experience for me. I did get a lot from it. I did experience a lot of healing or recovery, If you will. What I started to notice is that as I learned how to get off on things, People seemed, I mean women, Seemed to want to touch me more. The best analogy I can use for this is if you've ever given someone a gift and it seemed like they didn't like it or they didn't care about it, That doesn't feel very good. If, Or to use a sexual experience that probably most of us have had, If you've ever gone down on someone and they're just giving you no feedback, No reaction, That feels pretty bad. It's not that interesting to go down on someone who is just like ice up top. But on the flip side, To give a gift to someone who's really genuinely excited to receive your gift, That feels really good. You kind of want to give them more gifts. In fact, My girlfriend and I speak about this a lot. The thing I need, I like to do stuff for her. The thing that I need in return is not for her to do stuff for me, It's just for her to appreciate it. When I build something for her and she gets super excited and super happy and appreciative and grateful, That feels so good and I want to do more things for her. That's already a fair exchange. Same thing with sexuality. If you're going down on someone and they're really getting off, It makes it more fun for you. It allows you to share in the pleasure. As I learned how to get off more and more, It was like people wanted to give me things. People wanted to touch, Women wanted to touch me more. Down to the point where the same skill, And this maybe sounds weird or whatever, It will come off however it comes off, But I remember being in bed with women. This was still during my healing phase early on. Sometimes clothes will still be on just by pre-getting off, Getting off on this thing that hadn't even happened yet, This idea of receiving oral, Let's say. For some reason, It all could be in my head. Maybe there's other cues that were happening. I'm not saying this is a one-to-one thing. I'm not trying to make a causal relationship here, But what I noticed was when I would get into this skill of getting off on something, Even before it happened, It seemed like women wanted to do it. Maybe there's other signals I was giving off. Maybe I was unconsciously looking down or something. I don't mean if that's the case, Then this is not a. . . Well, Anyway. There's something about really getting off on something that makes people want to do it. You could even mystify this a little bit or a lot of the law of attraction people, A lot of people with positive mindset stuff talk about the importance of gratitude, Being grateful for stuff that you want as if it already happened as opposed to longing for it in the future. Something about that, Whether it's in your head, Whether it's self-fulfilling prophecy or somehow it does actually make the universe move, There's something positive about that. Getting off on the thing that you want before it even happens often makes it happen. Going back to the speeding ticket thing, The times that I've gotten out of tickets, I just felt. . . I got into this mode of feeling so grateful to the cop that he decided to not give me the ticket. The times that I've gotten. . . I mean, I haven't done this 100% of the time, But the times I've gotten out of tickets, It's been exactly that. I just gave that, I just got into that reality, Not that I said anything or tried to convince him. I got into that reality and the cop was like, All right, Just check your speed again in the future, Whatever. Anyway, These are my experiences with it. Let's go into part two on actually how to do it. Something that they would often say, Another axiom in one taste, When it came to any experience, They would always say it's just sensation, Which is a line that could be used manipulatively, But there's truth to it. Every experience we have, If you think of the triune brain, There's our reptilian nervous system, Which I mentioned reacts way faster than our emotional nervous system. There's our limbic system, There's our conscious mind. They've kind of evolved on top of each other or they've grown on top of each other, Developed if you will. On the most root level of experiencing reality is sensation. Sensation is value neutral. A lot of us, When we feel a sensation or we feel an emotion that corresponds to sensation, Usually in our torso, We are quick to judge it. Like, Oh, This is a good feeling, This is a bad feeling. But you probably know there's a lot of feelings that can be reinterpreted. One of the terms that Tony Robbins does a lot, Or one of the terms that he's popularized is reframing. It actually might come from Jim Rohn. It doesn't matter. Personal development people, They talk about reframing a lot. They talk about reframing sometimes. What is a reframe? It's essentially you have this experience, You have this sensation, You have interpretation, Which is unpleasant. You create a new interpretation of it so that now you have the same feeling. It's like the sensation didn't go away, The reality didn't go away, But now you're experiencing it positively. In one taste, You practice boiling things down to the value neutral sensation because when you can really just pay attention to how it feels in your body, There's not necessarily a good or bad. And what this comes into, Because obviously some sensations are painful, Some are pleasurable, Our reptilian nervous system experiences the world this way because anything that's painful is probably bad for our survival and we should go away or we should close off to it or not take it in. Whereas something that's good for our survival, We should open our aperture, We should take more of it in whether it's through our mouths or through our eyes, Through our senses, Through our being. Pain and pleasure. And the thing that one taste would often say is so-called bad feelings is simply sensation beyond your ability to approve. That dog barked because he knows it's true. Pain is essentially the interpretation that you must contract to the stimulus. Rollercoaster is typically the experience of expanding to the stimulus. Now we know that some people love rollercoasters, Some people hate rollercoasters. Some people love scary movies, Some people hate scary movies. Different foods. Some people make it makes you contract, Some people say, Yeah, Give me more durian or whatever it is. Contraction is the effect of the fight or flight nervous system, The sympathetic nervous system. It's getting away from something, It's hardening against a challenge, Something bad for you. The relaxation is an effect of the parasympathetic nervous system, The feeder-breed nervous system, The opening. And even down to physiological responses, When your sympathetic nervous system is active, Your pupils contract. When your parasympathetic nervous system is active and your sympathetic nervous system is not, Your pupils expand and take more in. Like when we were looking at someone we're attracted to or we're aroused or pupils get big. In one taste, Everyone's pupils were always really big. Everyone was turned on, Everyone was happy, Everyone had a flood of oxytocin, It was a very chill environment. So essentially, On one level the skill of getting off on every stroke is expanding and accepting and approving of the stimulus you're experiencing so that you can experience it in a positive way as opposed to contracting against it, Which is what causes suffering. And just for maybe a more masculine spin on this or something that maybe relates to men a little more, We can take a sensation, Because obviously you can imagine some sensations, It's hard to conceive that a normal healthy person could possibly derive it from pleasure. We can imagine it's a lot of painful things. But for something that's kind of within the realm of reason, Say if you've ever been in a fight, If you've ever sparred or anything in boxing, There's kind of a mode you can get in where I think a lot of guys, If they have any machismo in there, Maybe you've been in this head space where you're just in that come at me bro experience, Where it's not like getting punched in the face ever feels good. No one's ever like, Oh, Orgasmic pleasure, Hit me in the nose again, Hit me in the jaw. But there is an experience where instead of cowering and contracting, Like, Oh, Please don't hit me again, Which is extremely painful experience. It's like, I can't me again, Like it almost feels good, Right? In those moments, Obviously, It's still killing your brain cells, It's still bad for you. There's something about like welcoming the experience that makes it not be a suffering experience and like, Say for sparring or in a fight, It's actually kind of useful, Right? Like to immediately cower when you get punched in the face. Perhaps it's not the best thing if you actually have to deal with a threat. It's not going to break down getting off on every stroke. It's reducing everything down to the physical experience, Right? Lobotomizing and dropping your interpretations, Which is often what causes the worry and stuff. Believe when we're talking about existential kink, The applications, Most people aren't thinking about like how to find a spank pleasurable. Most people are thinking about like how to, You know, The fact that I'm worried about money, How to make that manageable and how to move through that so I'm not stuck. How to have the terrible experience of writer's block and not take it as this like painful, Awful thing, But instead feel it and move through it. That's part one is, And this is why we reduce things down to sensation. You drop that experience. And you know, When we did the Road to Trials episode, I was speaking about kind of rewriting that narrative. This is kind of dropping all narrative and reducing it down to the feeling. Essentially this is what grounding is, Is reducing things down to the sensation. From there, Once you have the sensation, The value neutral experience in your body, Instead of contracting against it, Can you welcome it? If you're familiar with the Sedona Method, This is essentially what the Sedona Method is. It's questions that allow one to reclaim agency. And Sedona Method is obviously like a mental version of this. It's like welcoming instead of resisting, Which resisting causes suffering. Welcoming is like, Well, If you choose something, Kind of like in boxing, You know, Like if you are choosing to be in there, If you're choosing to fight, If you're choosing to put yourself in the way of a punch, It actually doesn't hurt as much as if someone just punches you in the face out of nowhere. Right? I mean, In combat sports, They often say the punch that really hurts is the one you didn't see coming. When you see it coming, There's some level of agency, Some level of choice. And you know, This, This getting off on every stroke has both an ability aspect and a willingness aspect. Are you able to feel it? And are you willing to feel it? Are you willing to welcome it? Are you willing to accept that this is reality? Like being brutally honest with like, This is the truth of the matter. It's not about positive thinking in the sense of, Oh, My bank account's in the negative, But I'm just going to imagine it's in the positive because like some part of you is going to be like, That's not fricking true. Right? That's, There's something, There's something a unwhole there. Like you can say all those flowery lava, Traction things, But if some part of you is like, But in the frigging negative, You're going to always have that disconnect and your, Your, Your whole self is not going to be working together. And then that's where like the young quote that Carolyn quotes often comes into play. Like if you leave that part unconscious, It will run your life and you will call it fate. Like this is all about integrating. It's welcoming the fact like, Okay, This is the reality of the situation. So all of your archetypes, All of the parts of you that all of your parts of your awareness can be like, Okay, This is the reality. But instead of fighting it or worrying about it or crying woe is me or wishing that this wasn't the case, You welcome it. Beyond welcoming it, Getting off on it. So existential kink for instance, Or getting off on every stroke, You know what one could translate this, Like, Are you talking about gratitude? Aren't you like, You know, Just talk about being happy with the way things are or in the Sedona method is kind of a flower, You know, It's kind of a, I shouldn't say flower, It's a lighter way of looking at things. Existential kink or getting off on every stroke is kind of like a more animalistic or almost like aggressive version of gratitude. Obviously existential kink draws on symbols from BDSM. One of the great examples and the one that made BDSM make sense to me was a demonstration that my friend Om Rapani did at an event I hosted for men, The Mask and Underground Symposium. He was trying to explain to this crowd of guys, Like someone asked why women like getting choked and he asked for a participant, He asked like, Can I put my hands on you, Whatever, And he grabbed the guy's throat. Like this is a guy, He's a buddy of mine, Like, Om just like grabbed the kid's throat and then he let go. And then he was like, Well, Where was all of your attention? And the guy was like, Like here on my throat, Right? Because like when there's a threat to our survival, All of that stuff, When there's a threat to our immediate survival, All those worries about stuff that are real kind of disappear. Like you're just worried about the hand on your throat. And almost explaining one of the reasons why so many women like being choked in bed is that when there's a hand on your throat or like, Or a lot of things that maybe seem that they should be unpleasant, Like getting spanked or whatever, Everyone's got their thing. It forces all of your attention onto your body. And if you can have all of your attention on your body, Obviously you can feel more of your body. And if you can welcome it, If you can accept it, If you can, You know, And I'm saying this phrase, Thank you, Daddy, Because that's the thing that people who are into BDSM, You've probably heard it before. Something about this accepting or welcoming or feeling grateful for this experience that's happening to you. Instead of, Instead of contracting, It turns into pleasure or it mixes with your pleasure. And that's how it fuels the arousal for a lot of people who are archetypally feminine. And because like with pleasure, You know, It's nice to imagine yourself as, You know, Being worshiped or whatever, Or, You know, All that stuff that is a lot of people's fantasies, Men and women as well. But it's very easy to check out on pleasure because there are no stakes with pure pleasure. The idea of like having all these concubines fanning you and feeding you grapes, Like that's a nice thing to think about. But it's easy to float off in your mind when you, When you, Even if that was your reality somehow. I don't know if Dan Vilsarian has this experience, But like, You know, It's easy to like think about other stuff because there's no stakes when things are just abundant and pleasureful. When there's a threat to your survival, Everything comes back into reality, Right? There's no room to think about other stuff. Everything comes back into reality. This whole thing of getting up on every stroke is like, It's like extreme gratitude that turns the pain or the suffering or the frustration of the unpleasant experience into pleasure. You're basically having some, You're, You're allowing this thing as maybe negative. Like if you'd speak about, Think about this in life, Like let's say you're broke or let's say something, Just something bad happened to you or like you just experienced a failure or you experienced some sort of setback. It's forcing all of your attention, Right? Like we, We like to look at car, We were, We're wired to look at car crashes and focus on problems and obviously to try to fix them, But it is forcing your attention into the moment. Let's say you just like lost money in crypto. It's forcing all of your attention to your bank accounts. The way to move through this, The way to get off on it is to really pay attention, Not to block out reality, Right? Like this whole thing about feeling sensation in your body is, Is analogous to like really taking everything of what the reality of reality is like what is actually going on, But willingly looking at it, Not having someone force your bank account in your face or, Or forcing the stupid thing you said or did or the mistake you made or the unpleasant circumstance, Your bad luck in your face, But like actually choosing to engage with it, Choosing to engage with it willingly and then see if you could open so much that it actually becomes pleasurable because the more you welcome or feel an experience, The higher fidelity of your reality is the higher resolution you allow reality to be as opposed to when someone lies to themselves or tries to put a flowery gloss on things or tries to be like, Oh no, My bank account's not negative. There's a million dollars in there. Obviously that's not true. So to overcome this dissonance, You kind of have to make your reality fuzzy. It's like, Yeah, Yeah, That's a 10, 000 because I mean obviously I'm speaking metaphors, But like you kind of make your perception of reality fuzzy so you don't have to see this thing that you're trying to resist. And finally this whole thing, This whole thing of like pain or unpleasant things is what brings you into the moment. These so-called dark things or unpleasant things is also what makes your life interesting. And I say this in every hero's journey episode. Like if you'd had no hardship in your life, Your life would have no story. If there was no conflict in a movie, There'd be no movie. You wouldn't want to watch that. This is now we're going to what could be seen as the mystical side of this. You could also just take this as the poetic or metaphoric or hero's journey part of it. The rest of this episode is stuff that I can't prove is true, But these are the perspectives I choose to have and I find them to be enjoyable. If you look at things from a hero's journey perspective, Let's say when you resist reality, When you try to pretend that things that on some level you know is true, But you pretend they're not true or try to not think about that or you try to avoid this situation, You try to avoid the hard conversation, You try to avoid the thing that you know you're supposed to do, The thing that you know you want inside, But you're afraid to do it. You just try to push this away. That's a recipe for apathy. I was talking about that in many of the apathy episodes. Usually especially when a guy kind of goes numb or anhedonic or kind of like dead inside is because there's something he knew or she knew that this person really wanted, Maybe out of fear, Convinced or out of shame from a cultural programming, Convinced him or herself that they didn't want it. So to overcome that dissonance, Everything has to go fuzzy, Right? Everything has to become not interesting and then they can't feel their desire anymore because they said no to it. Getting off is the opposite, Right? Getting off even on a thing that seems unpleasant instead of hitting the brakes because like this resistance or lying to yourself is hitting the brakes on reality. It's like, No, No, I don't like this one scene in the movie, So let's just stop the movie and then this person goes through life kind of dead and dead to the world and numb and one day they wake up and they're 60 years old and they didn't live their lives because they were afraid to deal with an experience from when they were younger. I don't mean to judge the person. This is in a way what trauma is. So we can have empathy for such a person, But if this is you on some level, Whether it's a big thing or a little thing, The way to move through it is to learn how to get off on it. Getting off on it is opening up to reality and it increases the speed. And I can't prove this is true, But I did experience things like this in the sexual practice I spoke about. It's like when you say yes to the thing that is right now, It moves on to the next thing faster. Let's use my embarrassing example. When I could accept the fact that I was dead from the waist down, I couldn't feel anything, But I just paid attention to it and I was with it and I accepted everything that I was or wasn't feeling, It moved on to the next thing. The emojia came back really fast actually when I stopped resisting and then it went to higher and higher and higher levels because I was just able to be with it is the phrase often used. Because mystical idea, But I believe this is true that feeling or your subjective perception and objective reality or our closest perception of objective reality will always eventually sync up. Which is why again the law of attraction people will say be grateful for the thing that you want as if you already have it. Danielle LaPorte speaks about instead of setting goals of what you want to have, It's like how do you want to feel? Because if you get into the feeling of the thing that you want to experience, Reality will come to match it. Whereas if you get into the feeling of things you don't want, You're worrying about the future, Those things often happen. Can't prove that's true, But that has often been my experience. I'll just end with this and you can hear the construction outside so we're going to close up. The challenges, The hardships, The conflicts that you experience, The frustrations, The hard times, The road of trials if you will is exactly what makes your life story interesting. If you didn't have those things, You wouldn't have anything, Your life wouldn't be interesting. Like I'll say I speak about it a little bit critically, But a lot of people want to be life coaches these days. A lot of people ask me, People who want to be life coaches ask me like, Oh, Should I get a certification, Blah, Blah, Blah. Life coaching has become this thing that actually has certifications now, Which is kind of ridiculous I think. As a life coach I say this is ridiculous because the thing that makes someone credible other than whatever skills or intelligence or ability to help people they may have and whatever skills they learn is that they've lived through stuff. They've lived through stuff that makes their life interesting and empathizable. If I didn't have problems to talk about, I would never have any episodes to make. The only things I can share that anyone gives a shit to hear about are times that I've had troubles. Not that I want more troubles, But that's what is interesting, That's what makes a story. There's a conflict and there's a resolution. In closing, Getting off on every stroke is essentially opening your aperture to take in more of life, To take in more of reality, To feel everything to the degree that you're so accepting of what you're getting that you can find pleasure in it and really play all of life. When you do this deeply, One, Life frustrations, Life challenges, Stop being suffering and instead being a sensation that maybe can become pleasurable. Two, You tend to move through it and three, Whether you're interacting with a sapient human being or perhaps impersonal reality, If you can really get off, Things tend to match up with what you want. People tend to do what you want when you can really be appreciative of what you hope they do without attachments and on some perhaps mystical level, Reality gives you what you want when you can really get off on it, When you can really pre-feel the gratitude. Thank you for listening. If you want to learn more about grounding exercises, If you're a man and you want to go deeper into the unconscious parts of the male psyche, Then we can call them Mask and Archetype. You may want to check out my Mask and Archetype challenge at MaskandArchetypechallenge. Com. It still comes with a free coaching call with me, So it is the most cost-effective way to work with me one-on-one, To do a call with me, A video call with me. That is at MaskandArchetypechallenge. Com. A couple of people have asked me about my history series. I'm still working on it. It's become a much bigger project than I initially intended when I started last December, But I do have a site up where you can be notified when it does come out at historyofmasculinity. Com. You just put in your email and all it is is I'll notify you about the series when it comes out. I'm trying to play with an ad model that interests me with it. You may or may not have sponsors for it, But I'm trying to figure out this NFT thing in the crypto space. Is there a way I can fund this operation? Because it's taken me six months of my life. Obviously, I do things. I'm a capitalist. Anyway, This is all I'll say. I'm trying to come up with a mutually beneficial ad model for everyone so I can get this out and put out more episodes faster because I think it's a very interesting series. I'm tracking the development of cultural masculinity from the earliest prehistoric roots through the stages of warfare and the growth of society, Which is war is obviously, Maybe not obviously, But it's my thesis of the argument that warfare is what has shaped cultural masculinity. And finally, My public service announcement always, If you've been on your phone, And actually I will say I'm re-engaging with YouTube. I realize it's a necessity. If you're watching this on YouTube, Thank you for watching. I would appreciate it. Subscribe. But I have to say this from my own conscience. If you've been on your screen for more than 30 minutes, Please get off your screen. All of my content is on the Veronit Podcast. In fact, Some of my content is not in video form. It's on the Veronit Podcast. It's everywhere where podcasts are found so you can consume this type of episode without having to stare at a screen, Which is bad for your brain. It's bad for your attention span. You know, Whatever. Stuff, Dopamine, Whatever. Thanks for watching. I'll see you guys next time.