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

My deep dive into psychology taught me that we human beings have a major habit of taking unconscious pleasure in the “bad stuff” in our lives. This was well-known to the founding giants of psychology like Freud, Jung, and Lacan. Freud called it “psychic masochism,” Jung recognized it as “the Shadow,” and Lacan called it jouissance—pleasure that's so intense we repress it. All of these psychologists recognized that a major component of helping people involved getting them to acknowledge and “own” this kind of weird underlying desire for and pleasure in stuff that they ostensibly hate and feel very frustrated by. It's strange, but it's true. Jung said—and I'll repeat it a few times throughout this book—“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.

This is an insight that can be very, very offensive to our egos: the idea that on some level we could want or enjoy “awful” things in our lives is scary and troubling to most people. We tend to think we only want or enjoy “good” things, or that we should only want “good” things. But acknowledging our secret bliss in “the bad stuff” doesn't have to be a troubling recognition; it's just a normal part of human nature. We all do it, and there doesn't need to be any shame or blame in it at all. In fact, setting aside shame and blame is what allows us to make the enjoyment conscious, and thereby lets us remove its power to sneakily control us.

The very good news is, the minute that we're willing to make that previously unconscious pleasure a conscious one—-the minute we're willing to deliberately celebrate it and savor it—we create a massive pattern interrupt. We allow ourselves to finally receive the “dark secret joy” we've been (unbeknownst to ourselves!) seeking. We let the desire that motivated the negative pattern be fully known and satisfied, and then we're free to move beyond it and create something new.

As Milton said, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

What if, deep within you, you had a never-ending reservoir of wrongness? Like, what if deep down inside, everything about you was totally detestable, dangerous, a source of pain to yourself and other people? And what if that was absolutely great?

I've noticed that pretty much all of us human beings who aren't completely enlightened (so: the population of earth minus Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, the Dalai Lama, and some humble shamans who lack PR agents), 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.

Even those in the “functional adult” camp with relatively mild addictive tendencies often find that despite their best efforts and intentions, dark patterns repeat in their lives. And repeat.

Somehow, one way or another, for the majority of us humans—whether it's through our addictions or through our lousy patterns, our hidden sense of wrongness makes itself felt. So a question arises: what the fuck are we gonna do about this? I say: let's transmute that feeling of “wrongness” into raw, hot, glorious power.

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! Now, you might guess that a thought like that would lead to some kind of terrible nihilistic breakdown. But for me . . . actually, it didn't. Instead, it made me smile—perversely—and gave me a feeling of lightness, play, and possibility. Because I had also stumbled upon this further thought: maybe I'm one freaky-ass motherfucker too! What if—seriously what if—all the bad stuff had manifested in my life because I like it that way?

Then he'd come back, there'd be some nice kissing, and within minutes we'd be back to yelling and he'd be throwing things at me (coffee mugs, books, etc.). I hated how controlling and violent my partner was. And yet, after much inquiry and reflection, I realized I actually loved how controlling and violent he was. Loved, loved, loved it. I adored the feeling of being important that came from having this guy treat me like I was a supply of heroin that he had to manage in order to have it available at all times. In other words, my existence had meaning. Just as in the tale of Persephone and Pluto, I could use him to keep me contained, so that I didn't have to risk exploring myself or the world without him. Part of what kept me hooked into the relationship was the joy of resenting him and his controlling violence. Another part of what kept me hooked in was the feeling that I could only have this terrible relationship because I was terrible, and if I could just become un-terrible, then I could leave him.

I allowed myself to consciously feel the previously unconscious pleasure I felt in being violently controlled. It was in fact a previously unconscious turn-on. My “aha” moment. Turn-on is magnetic. Now I was faced with the stark realization that I had been unconsciously magnetizing abuse and scarcity and rejection to myself all my life. It occurred to me that I had been unconsciously enjoying and magnetizing self-devaluation for years, but I had never before let myself know it because it's a shameful, freaky, weird thing to be turned on by devaluation and scarcity in real life. I mean, in sophisticated circles it's totally cool to be turned on by devaluation in some spicy S&M bedroom scene—but in real life? That's just fucked up. 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.

You see, what I'll be sharing with you here is 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. Those hidden and shamed parts? That's your shadow. And in the course of this book, you'll meet your shadow and learn how to dance with it.

As Jung emphasized: “Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.” But Jung also pointed out: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Jung's observation that “Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate” means that your unconscious desires and curiosities have great power to shape your experience.

To his unconscious, this is a giant victory and a great fulfillment of the deep underlying desire—his desire to want to be taken care of. Unconsciously, Alex is enjoying living with his parents and being taken care of. The ironic thing is: as long as Alex resists allowing himself to consciously experience his job loss and his being “taken care of” by his parents as a great victory and fulfillment (in other words, as long as he resists consenting to experience it as kinkily awesome the very same way his unconscious experiences it), then the more he will feel out-of-control and cursed by Fate. As long as Alex refuses to consciously enjoy his circumstance, he'll be inclined to see himself as a loser and a failure, he'll lose confidence, and he'll stay stuck. Paradoxically, the moment Alex becomes willing to “get on the side” of his taboo unconscious desire for dependence and goes ahead and deeply savors its victory—at that moment he can feel empowered again. He can realize that his taboo wish to be dependent has been fulfilled, and let himself receive the hot weird pleasure of that. Then, rather than being a loser, Alex is actually a massively fulfilled person. From this vantage point of deciding to consciously allow himself to enjoy and be satisfied by his previously unconscious pleasure, it's then much easier for him to go ahead and make his way in the world. In essence, he's no longer guilty; he's not beating himself up anymore. He's no longer resisting his situation, so i...

Dissolving unconscious patterns by making them conscious (and thereby integrating your being, your will) allows you to wake up out of this powerlessness and become the captain of the ship of your own life.

What this book proposes is a different method—the “EK” method—a method for rapidly making the unconscious, conscious—so that your unconscious desires and curiosities no longer rule you. When that happens, a huge vista of possibility opens up in your life. This method of integration works within days, weeks, and months rather than within years and decades. Why? Because Existential Kink doesn't just identify your shadow self. Existential Kink teaches you to embrace and love your shadow self.

Through consciously enjoying and giving approval to these previously unconscious “guilty pleasures,” we interrupt and end the stuck patterns so that we can get what we really want in our lives.

Let's return to a point mentioned in the Introduction: if the ancient wisdom of Vedas are correct and the whole universe is just God playing elaborate rounds of hide'n'seek with Godself, then God is a super-freak. We need only look around our planet to see that God's idea of a fun time includes some seriously edgy, ultra-taboo, hard-core stuff—including war and poverty and pain and ravaging and abuse and atrocities of all variety. That's a whole lot of sadism and masochism, dominance and submission, bondage and torture—in both extreme and subtle forms—that God enjoys playing out with Godself. I propose that all our suffering and stuckness in life comes from forgetting that we're divine sparks playing a wild kinky game and that great miracles can come forth in our lives when we reverse the process of forgetting by deliberately reclaiming the pleasure of the game—not just in our minds, but in our hearts and genitals.

And contrary to some airy Law of Attraction notions, we rarely get what we consciously want (unless we do the kind of deep solve work addressed in this book), but we always get what we unconsciously want. And if you're curious as to what you unconsciously want, you don't need thirty years of psychoanalysis to figure it out: you can just take a look at what you currently have in your life and know that that's exactly what your unconscious wants, because what your unconscious wants, it gets

The unio mentalis is a being that is not in conflict with itself; it's undivided and thus is extremely powerful.

“Until you make your unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.” In other words, the emotions and desires and positions that our ego disowns inevitably haunt us (personally and collectively) by generating painful synchronous experiences that urge us to confront and reintegrate the disdained side of a polarity. This is what Jung's predecessor, Sigmund Freud, called “the return of the repressed.” Polarities include all sets of “opposites”—masculine and feminine, fire and ice, night and day, violence and healing, creation and destruction, good and evil, fulfillment and deprivation, power and powerlessness, etc. Let me give you an example: most of us have grown up in a society that exalts wealth, and we have disowned and denied the other side of the polarity: a love of scarcity. In doing so we make our love of scarcity unconscious, and thus scarcity synchronously shows up in our lives, until we agree to consciously, deliberately, “insanely,” shamelessly love it. The Great Work involves making the unconscious, conscious and thus changing the locus of our agency and taking charge of our own fate. To change the locus of your agency means to stop aligning yourself with your ego's one-sided choices (the ego tends to want only what it labels “the good stuff”) and to instead align yourself with the kinkier, more adventurous choices of the underlying total divine presence that we all are: the strange, vast Self which enjoys and is very curious about abso...

In waking up out of our absorbing fiction of separation, we link up the gigantic sexual, taboo, electrical energy (the shakti, the turn-on) in our bodies with our most inspired ideals and intentions. Then our ideals and our intentions gain the high-voltage electric “oomph” that they've been previously missing.

The Basque word for witch, sorginak, means “one who makes her own fate.” What I'm presenting to you here is a way to make your own fate: a witchy, tricksy, feminine path to enlightenment that's quite a bit different than the more publicly vaunted, masculine routes of asceticism, contemplation, and yogic saintliness. The witchy path of the Great Work involves learning to get off on (and thus to tangibly, viscerally reintegrate) the darkest, scariest dimensions of ourselves and our existence. It's a sexual, worldly, orgasmic, ecstatic path which bears a good deal in common with Hindu and Buddhist tantric traditions. To be completely blunt, this Existential Kink work is the left-hand path. The left-hand path is also known as “the lightning path” because it wakes you up very quickly (quick as lightning) and it destroys who you think you are (lightning torches what it hits). Sounds exciting, yes?

If you want to know who you unconsciously believe you are, just take a look at your life, your surroundings, your relationship. Your life mirrors those deep beliefs.

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?” Who you think you are is largely a societally constructed fiction held together by some compulsively repetitive thoughts and stories, and it bears little or no resemblance to the being that you actually are. As the wise and pithy magician Mr. Lon Milo Duquette says: “Magic is indeed all in your head, but your head is a hell of a lot bigger than you think it is.”

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. When the spirit exclaims “perfect!” the conscious mind/the ego tends to hear that as “make things more perfect! They suck now!”—but actually what the spirit is saying is “everything is perfect right now!” Yes, everything. The world and our selves in all their fucked-up glory. That experience of total approval and total embrace, total absence of shame or aversion, is what the spirit is always trying to teach us about and it's ironically what our conscious mind mistranslates as all those “shoulds” and judgments.

Existential Kink is a potent form of magic (also known as: “psychological integration”) in which the receptive feminine—the unconscious, the disowned and denied, the soul—becomes pregnant with the perfection-vision of our spirit—the masculine, projective part of our being, and eventually gives birth to positive synchronous manifestations in our lives.

What that means is you're going to take all the embracing-approval-seeking-inherent-perfection-perceiving power of your spirit, tell your ego “thanks but you can shut the fuck up for a while,” and send all that embracing-approval-seeking-inherent-perfection-perceiving down to your actual life, body, emotions, and present situation. In the process of Existential Kink you invite your spirit to have the realization that your life on earth—right now, right here, in this animal, human body—is actually exactly what it has always wanted to celebrate with its exultant songs of perfection. 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.

The paradox is that once you fully commit to being who you already are, having what you already have, and hugely celebrating it, you become a masterful practical magician, a force of nature capable of shifting circumstances very easily.

“Having is evidence of wanting” is another way of phrasing the pithy quote that we previously read from the old wizard Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it Fate.”

Whatever desires are in your unconscious, will be “born,” will happen, and the results of those desires will seem to be come toward you from some unfathomable outside agency—in other words, “fate.” The good news is, when you do the uncomfortable work of making these strong, unconscious desire-curiosities conscious, by giving them a vast, taboo-level of approval, they lose their fateful power to fuck with you.

Here's a rule of thumb: If we're talking about an annoying pattern that seems to recur specifically for you, and you know a lot of other folks who are free of that particular pattern, chances are good that it's something that's being created specifically by your own personal unconscious. But if we're talking about endemic human problems like war or racism or child abuse, odds are it's more of a collective unconscious issue.

A more extreme example: childbirth is a notoriously painful process, often depicted in modern media as filled with screams and groans and facilitated by numbing drugs. And yet there's something called the Orgasmic Birth movement, which consists of women who train themselves to experience the intense sensations of child birth as pleasure, and many women are indeed able to experience their births as an orgasm instead of a horrible painful ordeal. That's not to say that it's easy to train oneself to experience the very intense sensations of childbirth as pleasurable, but just that it's possible. And the fact that it's possible points very directly to the immensely flexible capacity of the human organism to choose how it perceives sensation. Exercising choice over how you perceive the sensations of happenings in your life and psyche is a profound step in releasing attachment to being “helpless” and at the mercy of “cruel fate.”

It was in reflecting on this phenomenon of sexual kink/BDSM especially that Existential Kink was born. I started to wonder why it is that we don't usually experience the painful parts of life as similar playful pleasure. I think it has to do with the matter of choice. People participating in BDSM consciously choose to be tied up and flogged, and that element of deliberate choice allows them to experience that pain and bondage as a kind of play, as something fun. But usually when painful things happen in our lives, we don't feel that we have a “choice” whether or not to experience them as pain, so we don't find it very fun—instead we tend to experience it as very disempowering and defeating. So a big part of Existential Kink involves deciding to at least start by “pretending” (i.e., experimentally accepting the axiom “having is evidence of wanting”) that some hitherto-unconscious part of you playfully, humorously, curiously chooses and desires a given painful situation, behavior, stream of thought, or mood. When you make a kinky game of it, you greatly expand your sense of agency, you unite your will, and you open up room for a sense of fun and playfulness to come into the scene.

The notion of “getting off on every stroke” is something I learned while in the Orgasmic Meditation movement. In Orgasmic Meditation, a “stroker” strokes a woman's clitoris very lightly for fifteen minutes, within a very specific container involving a timer, gloves, lube, and a “nest” of pillows and blankets. Orgasmic Meditation is a kind of very simplified, “Zen” sort of tantric practice (if you look up traditional Hindu or Buddhist Tantra you'll see they're quite complicated) where the goal is to focus on the sensation at the point of contact between finger and clitoris, much like the point of Vipassana meditation is to focus on the sensation at the point of the breath entering the nose. If you're a woman being stroked in Orgasmic Meditation, you soon notice that there are certain kinds of clitoral strokes that you automatically prefer and enjoy, and some that don't feel as good, or even that feel a little uncomfortable or painful. So an advanced challenge in the Orgasmic Meditation practice is to attempt to open oneself to enjoy, to be turned on by, and “get off on” strokes that are outside one's automatic range of preference. In this way, one learns to expand one's experience of orgasmic (i.e., pleasure) energy (in Orgasmic Meditation, as in Existential Kink, the definition of “orgasm” or “getting off” is not limited to the convulsions of climax but extends to all pleasure), and thus to become more aware and awake in high sensation. This practice of “getting off on eve...

It's possible to experience exactly the same set of events in a way that's a turn-on, or in a way that's a turn-off and this includes the “internal events” of your emotions and thoughts. How turned on and approving you are tends to have a lot to do with whether you're willing to playfully perceive your life as a wild, kinky game or whether you're hell-bent on taking it seriously and believing that it “should” follow a certain ego-pleasing pattern. The more you allow yourself to be “turned on,” the less resistance you offer to the positive, creative current that's always attempting to move through you into manifestation.

It's possible to be sad, angry, disappointed—in a turned-on way. It's just a matter of giving yourself permission to fully feel the raw sensation that those emotions present, to meet the sensation with your innocence rather than your cynical judgment and “stories” about what these emotional sensations mean. In other words, it's magically useful to take an aesthetic, imaginative, artistic approach to your life and feelings rather than a dire, moralizing approach.

Let's take the feeling of sadness as an example. An open, receptive approach to this emotion might be, “Ah, a deep heavy feeling of sadness, how exquisite. Hmm, let me feel into this, what is the texture, the sound? It's rather spongy, and when I pay close attention, I notice in my heart it sounds like a slow xylophone melody playing in a rainy alley.” As opposed to, “Oh no, a deep heavy feeling of sadness. This must mean I'm a failure and my life sucks and I'm screwed. Everyone knows only losers feel sad.” The first attitude is a playful, aesthetic one. The second, a serious, moralizing one.

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.”

We have all these unconscious desire-curiosities, and many of them are quite taboo and “wrong” according to the standard of our conscious mind. Some of these include the desire for scarcity and limitation, the desire to feel wronged, the desire to feel rejected, the desire to feel not good enough, the desire to feel offended. Even though these unconscious desires are met in our lives by circumstances and events, we tend to miss a crucial step: celebration of fulfillment. We don't usually allow ourselves to consciously experience a turned-on sense of fulfillment and joy when these desires are met, because we habitually deny having them in the first place. The longer we deny the fact that these dark, “fucked-up” desire-curiosities are a part of us, and that we enjoy their fulfillment, the more they continue to shape our lives. When we deliberately allow ourselves to gratefully feel, celebrate, and receive the fulfillment of our previously denied and disowned desires, we give those desires freedom. We give them space and light in which to evolve and change. For example: once I've realized that I'm fulfilling my previously unconscious desire to feel “not good enough” through various dramas in my life, and I go ahead and (madly, irrationally) celebrate the fulfillment of that dark desire that's happening in my dramas . . . . . . then that previously unconscious desire is free to morph into a desire to feel “good enough,” and I'm free to move on.

can know right away that anything in my life, any attitude, any feeling, any situation I have shame about, that's an area of my life where I am accidentally suppressing my magic, and seeding the procreation of what we would call negative synchronicities—bad luck. 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. You are the only one who can grant this permission, at the level of your actual agency.

1) Get yourself into a relaxed state. Do whatever it is that helps you to relax. You could simply sit or lie down and breathe deeply for some moments, or you could precede your EK work by taking a nice hot salt bath or doing your favorite yoga stretches. Be flexible and experimental in how you go about getting yourself relaxed. Relaxation is key. I recommend relaxing yourself as part of EK because the more relaxed your body is, the easier it is to feel subtle sensations flowing within it, and this practice is all about sensation.

2) Create a container for yourself by lighting a candle and some incense, and setting a timer for 15 minutes. Creating a container means setting up some basic bounds of space and time to contain your experience so that you can more deeply sink into it. When you have a container, you don't need to worry about getting “lost” in this far-out bizarro meditation, because you have set aside a special, finite time and place for it. I suggest that you create a spatial container for this work by going into a comfortable room where you can close the door and not be disturbed. I also suggest that you create a temporal container for this work by setting a timer for fifteen minutes and lighting a candle and/or burning some incense. If incense smoke doesn't agree with you, you could spray some rose water or Agua de Florida.

Lighting a candle and burning some incense also signal to your deep unconscious that you are doing important transformational work, something special and outside your ordinary activity. Sending this kind of signal to yourself can help you feel more grounded and centered in the process.

3) Identify a situation in your life that your conscious mind, your ego, does not like.

Also, EK is best applied to “don't like” situations that are repeating, persistent patterns in your life. If you've been fired from three jobs for the same reason, then yes, that would be something to work on after processing your grief. If it's a bit of a random happening that you've been let go from your job, then perhaps just grieve it and apply your EK work to things that are more recurrent issues in your life.

4) Identify exactly what feelings and emotions you associate with this situation. This is important because EK works best when we do it on the feelings, emotions, and sensations associated with a situation, and not on the fact of the situation itself.