The Simple yet Bizarre Ritual that Transforms You into a Preternaturally Calm Person

The weird yet easy way to release patterns that restrict your psychological freedom

Preternatural is a fun word. Merriam-Webster defines it as “inexplicable by ordinary means” or “exceeding what is natural or regular.”

The ritual I’d like to share does indeed exceed what is “regular”, especially within the mainstream non-culture.

Most people are starved for calmness because we’ve been conditioned to orient to reality in a way that is anything but soothing.

Among the many harrowing forms of conditioning we’ve received, one of the strangest is our habit of identifying with a only narrow range of perceptions and sensations we call our “selves” i.e. our egos, our conscious personalities.

This is unsettling because our egos are prone to all sorts of hang-ups: worry about the future, agony over the past, and the obsession with approval and security.

The following ritual can give you the experiential recognition that who you believe yourself to be is only a small fragment of who you are.

By getting in touch with the parts of yourself that fall well outside the bounds of your ordinary consciousness, you’ll see what used to strike you as horrible afflictions as fun, even adorable games your unconscious plays to keep your darling ego entertained.

Affirm your harrowing thoughts with reverse psychology affirmations

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” — Carl Jung

You’re likely familiar with traditional affirmations. They help you shift out of distressing thought patterns by consciously repeating attitudes and qualities you’d like to strengthen in yourself.

But as many people have noticed, affirmations work best when you’re already in a relatively happy state. By contrast, when you’re feeling prone to apathy, stress, or a similar palate of emotions, affirmations usually aren’t the most potent medicine.

In the massively life-changing and uplifting book, Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow & Embrace Your Power, Carolyn Elliott recommends taking a fresh angle and doing essentially the opposite of traditional affirmations, experimenting instead with what she calls reverse psychology affirmations.

To do this, note the negative thoughts that regularly haunt you, write them down, and recite them in front of a mirror in a spooky voice.

You get extra credit for cackling in between affirmations or before you leave the mirror.

How to work with your mind’s obsession with contrarianism

This practices makes the negative thought patterns that usually happen under your radar explicit.

With traditional affirmations, most people do the opposite. They focus on replacing their negativity with positive alternatives.

They repress and deny the negativity they experience consciously while completely overlooking that which haunts them unconsciously.

Reverse psychology affirmations honor the contrarian nature of the human mind in a way that traditional affirmations do not.

To even understand a concept, our conscious minds are quick to evoke its opposite, especially if we’re feeling uneasy or apathetic.

For example, if you affirm, “I’m an ambitious, clear-minded person,” memories of times when that was not at all the case tend to flood the mind, particularly if you’re feeling cynical.

But when you instead say, “I am a powerless being and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to control my fate,” you’ll feel a subtle opening, a lightness, and a sense of release.

The logic behind this sense of release is this: The darker parts of our psyches corrode our well-being not because of the darkness itself but because of all the acrobatics involved with their suppression.

When you’re not wasting energy suppressing, managing, and denying your negativity, you free up a massive amount of energy.

All that released energy then can fuel more enlivening pursuits, like creative projects, new adventures, enhanced boldness, etc.

This creates a positive feedback loop — that long-suppressed energy becomes the fuel for novel ideas and creations. Then those novel ideas and creations become the source of further inspiration and expansion.

Psychological freedom only comes when you bridge the gap between your conscious and unconscious minds

Reverse psychology affirmations have a clarifying effect because they expose the darker (and usually repressed) parts of your being to the light of your conscious awareness.

By playfully embracing the dark stuff you’d normally deny and suppress, you create an opportunity for alchemy, or the transmutation of pain and suffering into other forms: creativity, power, compassion, etc.

Instead of pretending like your not-so-admirable qualities don’t exist, you unite them with your desired traits and aspirations. This gesture gives rise to novel and revolutionary qualities and adventures that are not built in denial, suppression, and/or fear-based management.

With this gesture, you vastly broaden the context through which you narrate your experiences.

More and more each day, you relate to yourself as a powerful, creative, force of nature — rather than a hapless victim of fate.

For other frameworks that support self-transformation in holistic, compassionate, and non-bypassy ways, read on..