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.

often sensations that we experience as terrible or painful are just pleasure without approval.

You might be up against some very big, very painful societal or familial setbacks, and yet when you become willing to really excavate your previously unconscious role in your difficult situation, you gain exactly the freedom, courage, and creativity that you need to overcome those setbacks and to even lift up other people.

Pluto also represents the possibility of alchemy itself, the deliberate, miraculous transformations that become available when the powers of the Unconscious Divine are recognized, remembered, embraced, forgiven, loved, and made conscious.

The dark side of our personality—the “other,” the shadow side, is dark not only because we don't (or won't) see it; it's dark because it's comprised of what we would consider our primitive, primal, or

negative impulses—all of which we choose to keep hidden from our consciousness, and denied.

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.

when you integrate your shadow, you become much more capable of receiving big beauty and big bounty in your life because you're no longer accidentally, unknowingly rejecting it.

When you change something “small” within yourself or your immediate environment, you automatically change something very “large”—the whole world.

the brighter we turn up the lights, the darker the shadows become.

Only being able to earn a certain amount of money each month, no matter how hard or how much you work

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.

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—

transmute the raw energies of emotion and instinct (especially sex and aggression) into the luminosity of free awareness.

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.

start to perceive our lives from the perspective of the divine curiosity within us, instead of from our grasping egos.

always get what we unconsciously want.

unio mentalis, the creation of a unified mind.

symbol of the unio mentalis would be a high-powered, whole heart.

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

This first unio mentalis stage of the Great Work that we're concerned with here involves healing the disconnect between our ideals, intentions, and inspirations (our spirit, the “masculine” or “projective” part of our being) and our embodied, emotional, sexual, creative energy (our soul, the “feminine” or “receptive” part of us, which is also the part of us that gets fertilized and “gives birth” to synchronous experiences in the outer world).

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.

You are, however, as an individual, the only person capable of altering your unconscious conditioning and identity, and restoring it to its divine reality. You are capable; you are not “at fault” or “to blame.”

The concept is this: You are not who you think you are.

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

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.

So what usually happens is that the creative, receptive part of us (the unconscious) gets pregnant with these seeds of refusal, shaming, judgment, rejection.

unconscious is the fertile, receptive, magically efficacious part of you. The unconscious is generative because the emotions, symbols, and attitudes within it create the synchronicities, or meaningful coincidences, that shape your experience.

turn-on is a matter of deep approval.

meet the sensation with your innocence rather than your cynical judgment and “stories” about what these emotional sensations mean.

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.

Also, EK is best applied to “don't like” situations that are repeating, persistent patterns in your life.

focus on allowing yourself to take sadomasochistic pleasure in the sensations and emotions stirred up by your “don't like” situation. Don't put your energy into trying to get yourself to like the bare facts of what you “don't like.”

It's impossible to desire something without also fearing it a bit, and it's impossible to fear and dislike something without also desiring it.

This part of the Existential Kink process is crucial. Until you deliberately let your unconscious self fully receive and enjoy and delight in the situation and emotions she's creating (however “fucked up” it may be), that situation will just hang around and stay the same. The scarcity/romantic rejection/self-hatred will stay there, because your unconscious will keep just keep enjoying what she enjoys.

Doing this kind of work at a time when you already feel miserable can often just result in rumination or self-blame, and that is emphatically not what this practice is about.

you've forgotten that you're playing the game or have the ability to

play the game.

Each day for the next two weeks, identify a situation that you don't like in your life, and spend fifteen minutes applying the steps of the Basic Existential Kink practice.

Writing from the perspective of this all-powerful being, explain what dramas and games and fictions are being played out in your life.

the consciousness that shines through each of us as individuals is the same consciousness that shines behind all projections.

“Negative” projection is one of the main mechanisms of the human psyche and it's a tricksy, tricksy thing, because it creates a certainty that whatever problem we're facing is “out there.”

the ancient tension in the human soul between the deep unconscious part of us that wants to be separate (and thus threatened, alienated, lacking) and the part of us that wants to experience union (and thus bounty, harmony, beauty).

Finding and healing the unconscious, lack-obsessed part of you with deep erotic love (not weak-sauce “acceptance”) is the essence of Existential Kink.

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.

turn each fear into its super-positive opposite

fear and desire ARE IDENTICAL.

A havingness level is a kind of internal imprint based on past family and cultural conditioning that determines the amount and kinds of sensation that you're willing to feel before some part of you unconsciously decides it's “too much” or “too good to be true” and then goes into fight, flight, or freeze—usually for some highly fictional (but seemingly factual) reason.

We do always get what we deeply desire, but most of us aren't that aware that much of what we deeply desire is some highly unpleasant, painful, secret, repressed, fucked-up shit.

Both scarcity and bounty are highly sensational.