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

Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.”

I learned first-hand that by embracing my “psychic masochism,” by recognizing and empowering the darkness of my “shadow,” and in the end taking “pleasure” in my yucky stuff that I could do something amazing. I could completely integrate my “good” self with my “bad” self and become a whole person. Healed.

I realized that when you only focus on the light and positive thinking . . . then it's like you're staring up at the sun without looking down to notice that you were standing in a pile of feces. Something smells bad, but as long as you stare at the light then all the bad will go away. And instead of cleaning up the poo you spray perfume (affirmations) all over it. Meanwhile, shadow work is looking down at the shit so you can clean it up or even compost it into a lush garden.

In my own life, I have practiced consciously, deliberately allowing myself to feel those intense sensations, which previously I had labeled as “anxiety, humiliation,” and I noticed those feelings came with flushed cheeks and faster heartbeat—arousal.

“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.

Here it's important to acknowledge that every difficult thing in life—whether it's poverty, racism, sexism, or relationship, health, or creativity issues due to childhood wounds—all of these obviously are not solely individual inventions. None of us individually invented these “dark secret desires” for painful things in our lives, and none of us is individually, solely responsible for the fact that they exist, or that we experience them. There are things that go beyond the individual, that are part of the mass “collective shadow” (as Jung would put it).

For example, the poverty that I experienced for years wasn't my single-handed creation. It had to do with systemic, collective issues of sexism and corporatism, no doubt. But the thing is, me wailing about sexism and corporatism (which I loved to do, I loved to go to protests like Occupy and to righteously post on Facebook about all the injustices affecting me) never did a damn thing to alter the bare fact of my lack of funds, or my suffering. Nor did it really alter the situation for anyone else, as far as I could tell. The only thing that changed my life was me becoming willing to look at my existential kink: my previously unconscious desire for what I experienced—to look at it, own it, embrace it, and accept the jouissance. And this let me become much more creative, happy, and healthy, and to help others to do the same.

Becoming whole means we recognize our dark, kinky side, and that we not only accept it, forgive it, and take responsibility for it, but that we love it, enjoy its antics, and finally integrate it into our whole being.

all of us feel, at some level, that there's something unbearably deficient, horrible, ugly, and lacking about ourselves that we need to cover over (to hide, to bury, to run from) and we cover it over with accomplishment, with the approval of others, or with black tar heroin.

And as I listened to these people “let go and let God,” one distinct thought gradually formed in my mind: God is one kinky-ass motherfucker. God—the divine—whatever He/She/IT is—creates this world, and this world is a gonzo horror show of war and rape and abuse and addiction and disaster. If God is running the show, God must like it this way!

And then it dawned on me: Shit, I don't just have bedroom kink, I have existential kink. I have perverse desires for pain and bondage in my daily existence.

Well if God is a kinky freak and I'm a part of God like all these “spiritual” people say, maybe deep down I'm a kinky freak too. And maybe I can get more in touch with my divine nature by giving myself permission to like all the scary stuff in life, instead of just resenting it.

In order to transmit to you the state of awareness that is Existential Kink, I'm going to need to take you down some immensely strange corridors of the psyche.

Existential Kink, a radical, somatic, hot, and eminently practical & quick method of coming to love the previously hidden and shamed parts of your own self, so that your old negative patterns dissolve.

And in the course of this book, you'll meet your shadow and learn how to dance with it.

Mastering practical magic involves learning what changes in yourself and your environment correspond to changes in the “outer” world of your experience.

our conscious minds and identities (that is, the people we usually imagine ourselves to be) are just the very tippy tiny top of the immense underwater icebergs of our actual psychic totalities. And oh, what giant, gnarly icebergs we all are!

when a person does not know how to become conscious of their own vast unconscious (and most people haven't the faintest idea of how to do this), they tend to be controlled by it, meaning their lives are dominated and limited by stubborn and painful patterns kept in motion by their disowned unconscious desires . . . which is something that no amount of visualizing or affirming can fix.

But Jung also pointed out: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

When we know how to consciously, deliberately work with the contents of the unconscious, we gain an amazing degree of control over our waking lives—just as a lucid dreamer gains remarkable control over their night-time dreams by first becoming conscious that they are asleep and dreaming.

Throughout all schools of tantric gnosticism (Hindu, Buddhist, and in the Western Esoteric tradition), there's an emphasis on learning how to stay present in high sensation. By “high sensation” I mean both intense physical feelings like pain and pleasure—and also intense emotional feelings, like anger, fear, and lust.

I'm going to make explicit a concept that I will probably repeat many times, because it's key to this work. Please learn it. The concept is this: You are not who you think you are. Whoever you happen to think you are, I assure you, you are not that. I suggest that you remind yourself of this often, because it makes this work easier.

When you brush your teeth in the morning, 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. Hmmmm. I wonder what I really am?”

So the trick is to make space and time to honor that sadistic part of you, to affirm the dictates of the Inner Villain in their full glory, to stop resisting them for a moment and instead to go along with them. When you do this, it's as if you allow your unconscious shadow to finally complete a dance that it's been trying to finish for years.

Instead, we must temporarily drop your argument with the inner sadistic prohibition, and instead to play with giving it your full consent for a little bit of time. When fully consented to, when not resisted at all, the inner prohibitions lose their hold (because they're only kept in place by our resistance to them).

With your consent, your previously unconscious sadistic prohibitions can resolve, thus emancipating the previously stuck energy in your psyche, which you are now free to put towards your creative endeavors.

What if worrying and doubting yourself and feeling lacking were just the tools that you use to distract yourself from the work of living centered within the high sensation and high energy of the bliss that is your inherent nature?

rather than resenting that something made you angry, try getting excited that you're angry.

Rather than thinking you shouldn't be sad, try celebrating the tender exaltation of your sadness.

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

Feeling very anxious in social situations (A way to cover up feelings of budding connection and intimacy, and also vicious aggression—usually both)

Genuine responsive emotions have an open, connecting, “moving” quality to them. They feel fresh and spontaneous including “dark” genuine emotions like anger and grief.

Reacting, covering-something-up emotions have a hard, closed, robotic, repetitive quality to them.

Q. My life right now is okay but I know it would be better if I wasn't burdened by all the childhood trauma issues that I have. Should I do EK on my childhood trauma stuff? A. Short answer: no.

What I like about doing EK on frustrating situations in your present life is that to get great freedom from your old negative patterns you don't need to figure out fuzzy spiritual matters like karma and reincarnation; you can just work with well-established psychological truths—specifically, the psychological truth that we all have repressed sadomasochistic shadow desires for things that our conscious mind and ego heavily disapprove of, including jolly classics like patterns of financial scarcity, romantic rejection, and creative blocks.

Option Method I ask myself “What would it mean about me if I wasn't unhappy about that?”and my mind just draws a blank. I don't know what it would mean. But just the action of asking the question draws my attention to the fact that being unhappy about something is a subtle unconscious choice that I habitually make and it's a subtle choice that I can make conscious and change, thus changing my fate.