Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power (A method for getting what you want by getting off on what you don't)

by Carolyn Elliott

the key to a magical life rests in delving into the other end of the spectrum: finding the power of the darkness.

“Fear is excitement without the breath,” as Fritz Perls said. Well, often sensations that we experience as terrible or painful are just pleasure without approval.

I say: let's transmute that feeling of “wrongness” into raw, hot, glorious power.

think to yourself, “I'm not at all who I imagine myself to be. I'm something entirely different and far more vast and strange.

You see, the super-power of the spirit is total approval, total embrace, total celebration, the total perception of the already-existing perfection of life.

Another way of saying that is that the practice of Existential Kink is the work of becoming attuned to practical magic; you decide to fully incarnate, to agree fully to be who you already are, however messy or stinky that may be—with no reservation, no hold-back, no “if-only,” no judgment, no shame.

it's magically useful to take an aesthetic, imaginative, artistic approach to your life and feelings rather than a dire, moralizing approach.

As Oscar Wilde once observed in a letter to a magazine in response to criticisms of The Picture of Dorian Gray, “If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.”

The more you give yourself permission to be shameless, the more the channel of communication between your conscious and unconscious mind opens, and the more effectively you can generate positive results.

the (profound, emotional, relational) truth is always sensational. Literally.

There's a lot of power in not looking for “reasons” to do things, because equally compelling reasons can be found for everything. When you just own your desire, without trying to prop it up with reference to anything, you gain a sense of responsibility for that desire which can clarify all your actions and slice through the Gordian knot of your conflicts.

Want what you want just ‘cause you want it.

The point is: who you know yourself to be, right now, is a kind of fictional-yet-utterly-real-seeming blueprint that defines how much good stuff you'll let yourself have.

Plus, let's not forget—she feels the righteous resentment of the evil rich corporatists and politicians who made this world so unbalanced—and well, there are few things more luscious in this sublunar realm than a big stinging heap of righteousness.

“Is it possible that these judgments, complaints, criticisms, resentments are meaningless mechanisms whose sole purpose is to help me avoid feeling tremendously good, loved, valued, inspired?”

Practice liking that you're feeling what you're feeling.

The most repressed item in your unconscious is your own total grace.

But it's just not true—you can experience anything with total grace, and your total grace can transmute the most gruesome brutality into shining presence.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious,” our old friend Jung liked to say.

This “becoming-aware”-ness is also a process of re-membering, of discovering the whole of the world as your extended body, and of your soul as the soul of the world, the Anima Mundi.

Consider the idea that all the best artists and the most inspiring leaders are masters of torture. They torture us by getting us to feel deep emotions, by exposing taboos, by leading us through almost-unbearable sensations of anticipation, surprise, and revelation. Your problem is not that you torture others; it's that you don't torture them exquisitely enough.

Faith in an outcome is just a sensation of certainty.