Hey everybody, welcome back to Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers, the podcast devoted to exploring the frontiers of psychedelic medicine and what it takes to cultivate a healthy mind, body, and spirit. As always, Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers is brought to you by Numinus.
I'm Dr. Steve Thayer, and today in my co-host Dr. Reed Robinson and I are joined by Dr. Carolyn Lovewell, aka Carolyn Elliott, PhD. Carolyn wrote a book called Existential Kink, unmask your shadow and embrace your power, that Reed and I really liked, so we reached out to her to have her on the show to talk about it.
In our conversation today, we'll discuss this unique approach to shadow work, the importance of surrender when trying to integrate our shadow parts, how the mysteries of a loosist inspired Carolyn to create what she calls her sleepover mystery school, who existential kink is for and maybe some folks it's not appropriate for, and of course much, much more. Carolyn is a delightful human, and I think you're really going to enjoy this take on shadow work.
Folks, there are still a few spots left in our January 2024 cohort of the fundamentals of psychedelic assisted therapy course. So if you're interested in good training on how to use psychedelics in a clinical practice, click on the link in the show notes or go directly to Numinus.com forward slash our research to learn more about the trials we're currently running. If you'd like to support the show, please do so by leaving us a rating or review.
If you're watching on YouTube, you can like the video, subscribe to the channel, share it with somebody you think might enjoy today's episode, and without further ado, here's our conversation today with Dr. Carolyn Lovewell slash Elliott. Welcome back everybody to psychedelic therapy frontiers. Reid and I are excited to be joined today by Dr. Carolyn Elliott. How are you doing Carolyn? I'm good. I just like to wave, but I can hear my name.
I noticed in your title here on our little recording, it says Carolyn Lovewell, did we get your last name wrong or change it? Yes, well, it's a complex thing because my name was Carolyn Elliott, and that's what my book says. That's how many people know me, but recently my husband and I created a new last name for our family. So our last name is Lovewell now. Yeah, and so we're in the process of legally changing it, changing it on my social media email. So it's a big process.
And I'm still not sure how to navigate that with the book. I'm like, I'm the author of that book. Please believe me. That's really neat. I'm so curious how that idea came to be because as you share it, I'm wondering why more people don't do that in this world of just questioning. Take on some of his name to hyphenate, keep versus this cool idea. Oh, thank you.
Well, I could go on and on about it, but basically both my husband and I wanted to create a fresh dynasty apart from all the intergenerational trauma that we've inherited. So we chose a new last name and we're running with it. Cool. I think it's a good choice to love well. So Carolyn, you mentioned your book just to kind of give the audience a peek at why Read and I asked you to come on.
We were talking before we hit record that we were thinking a little over a year ago, Read and I came across your book, Existential Kink. And as mental health professionals, you know, very, very interested in it and working closely with shadow work, I thought it was a really, really curious and fascinating and potentially really, really powerful take on shadow work.
And I don't want to oversimplify it, but I would love to just dive right in and give our listeners an idea of what existential kink is all about. Sure. I can try to briefly explain it. So existential kink is both kind of a life attitude and life philosophy and a specific meditational practice. So I'll talk about sort of the general philosophy, the general idea of existential kink. Is that all of us humans have desires that we are utterly unconscious of.
Our conscious ego personality is not aware of these desires and their desires for things like rejection, scarcity, humiliation, all of these sort of like dark sort of painful things. And like I said, they are unconscious, the ego definitely does not want those things. Our egos tend to want really good stuff. We want approval, we want everybody to like us, we want lots of money and good health and all of that respect. But there's these, like I said, unconscious desires for other stuff.
And the premise of existential kink is that, well, it's based off of a famous quote from Carl Jung. But Jung said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate. And of course, there's tons of stuff in the unconscious. There's these disowned, repressed, weird desires, like I'm talking about. And there's also all sorts of other stuff.
But the premise of existential kink is we can make, how do I say, that these desires sort of shape our life in a sideways kind of way. They become our fate as long as they're unconscious, as long as I don't know that I have desire to experience scarcity and rejection and humiliation. I will accidentally create that for myself over and over again in my life.
So the notion is that we can make these desires conscious by giving them radical, improve approval, radical embrace and actually celebrating, really just insanely celebrating the results that they create in our life, the fate that they create in our lives. And when we do that, there's this kind of, there's this alchemical meeting of the conscious and the unconscious minds, which can be really orgasmic and release all this energy, heat and energy and light.
It's kind of like a creation of a sun, almost atomic, energetic burst. And when that happens, we no longer need to keep repeating those patterns in our life any more. So those unconscious, shadowy desires for bad stuff, for humiliation, for rejection, for scarcity, I named those because those are really like the top common ones. They become conscious and they lose their power because in so many ways the unconscious really is.
It's the deep dark feminine womb part of us, the generative part of us. And once those desires are conscious, they become neutralized in a way. And I have a whole metaphor for it based on courtly love. Should I go ahead and give my courtly love metaphor, the existential king? It's not in the book. So maybe I'll be interested. I would love to hear it. Yeah, so I think of it as the conscious mind that ego mind is like a knight who wants to go on a quest.
Our ego is like, I'm going to go out into the world, I'm going to get love and success and good health and make people like me. That's what all of us are wanting. We're all like identical in that way. Humans are so adorable. And that's what the conscious mind is doing. But the conscious mind, the knight needs the support of the lady. So the lady in this metaphor would be the unconscious mind.
So in order to get the support of the lady, get the ladies love, get the ladies approval, get the ladies blessing, that's what the knight needs so that he can fulfill his goal without that blessing, without that love, without that empowerment from his lady, the knight is powerless in a way. But he can't berate her into it. He can't say, look, I want this. So you better give me your approval. You better get on board with what I want. That doesn't work with the lady. The knight has to kneel down.
He has to totally devote himself humbly, vulnerable in love to the lady and the way that the lady already is and what she's already doing. And when the knight humbles himself and surrenders in that very, very deep way, when the conscious mind surrenders in that very, very deep way, there is a union in love between the knight and the lady, between the conscious and the unconscious mind.
And in that union, there is a fertilization where the unconscious mind actually becomes fertilized with the desires of the conscious mind and begins to be able to, well, lesses and empowers the knight to go and fulfill his dreams.
And so the conscious mind, the conscious personality becomes blessed and empowered by the unconscious, and the unconscious begins to give birth to synchronicities which match up with the desires of the conscious personality instead of the other way around, which is how it tends to be before that deep humbling and surrender starts to happen. So that's my fun little chivalric metaphor about it. Oh, I like it. Thank you for that. I love the metaphors.
And in fact, I was going to ask when you mentioned these common categories of our unconscious desires, like humiliation, rejection, scarcity. If you could share an example or two, an example of one or each or whatever, because those I found in your book were the only way for me to really grasp these shadowy things enough to try them on, you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, I certainly give examples.
So like you might remember from my book, the big example that I give is that I really was in a condition of scarcity for most of my 20s. I was in a PhD program. I was broke. I was broke after I got out of the PhD program. No matter what I did, no matter how hard I worked, I could not seem to get beyond this like very tiny, pathetic level of income. I was like standing in line at the food bag. I was sleeping on friends, couches.
And this sort of the inception of existential camp was me getting very, very honest with myself and very, very curious because I read all this psychology stuff in grad school. And I'd also read all of this sort of new thought and manifesting law of attraction stuff. And I was like, gosh, if my desire is create reality, if my unconscious creates my fate, could it be that I have unconscious desires for this scarcity, this poverty that I'm experiencing?
And I really, I just sort of held it as a gentle periodicity and I observed myself and I observed that I did indeed actually get physically turned on when I thought about nobody ever paying me for anything. It was this sort of deep experience and I was like, what if nobody should ever, ever ever pay me for anything? I was like, wow, immediately turned on by that. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is, whoa, I don't just have a bedroom, kink. I have an existential kink.
This applies to my whole existence. This is my concern, it's my whole life. And I realized that I couldn't end. So I said to myself, well, this is happening. I might as well let myself enjoy it. I might as well consciously get on the side of this apparently, you know, previously unconscious desire that's been shaping my life in such a deep way. And you know, that scarcity that I was experiencing with money had rejection and humiliation wrapped up in it because I was humiliated all the time.
Every time my friends from college would ask me to go out to dinner, they all had jobs. I totally didn't. And you know, I could barely afford dinner and drinks or I'd be whatever scraping from credit cards or having other people come to my bill, humiliating, humiliating, having to tell the landlord why I couldn't pay rent. Oh my gosh, end rejection. Like I was constantly feeling rejected from like possible jobs, feeling rejected by possible clients. It was intense.
So anyways, I was like, okay, well, this is happening. And maybe this part of me enjoys, maybe this part of me deserves love and deserves fulfillment as much as any other part of me. And that's a big part of the existential kink philosophy that I really, I like to emphasize because sometimes people don't understand it as much, which is that all parts of us, conscious or unconscious are totally innocent and totally worthy of love, even if they're creating results in our life that we don't like.
That's not because they're malicious. It might just be because they're unskillful or whatever they're in a certain, they're doing what they're doing. So anyhow, I found that I could set time aside each day, and this is where the existential kink meditation developed, that I could set time aside each day to just practice getting on the side of the part of me that loved it, that just loved the humiliation, loved the scarcity, the tension, the like, will I make it this month, won't I make it?
And I found that the more that I could consciously, deliberately do that, well eventually I could let myself actually have like physical erotic orgasmic experiences with it, and for sometimes it would be more like a heart orgasm, it would be like a laughter and like a heartfelt release.
And as that happened, I would actually have different reactions to the scarcity, to the rejection to the humiliation when it came up, which was I was actually so crazy that I was able to enjoy it and like find it fun to get a bail and bail in the mail and have no idea how I'm going to pay this bill. And instead of it being like this painful anxiety thing, it would be like, oh my god, this is delightful. How did I, all my dreams are coming true?
There's a huge part of me that wants it and it's getting what it wants. Yay, I'm winning. And I honestly, I became so, I honestly started to feel completely fulfilled. I could feel all of this genuine delight that a large, deep part of me was receiving in these circumstances. And it was so interesting as soon as that happened, I was very soon after that. It was just a matter of, I think it was a couple of months. My whole perspective on life changed.
I started to receive, sort of to be open to ideas that I was not open to before because my identity shifted. And that's another thing that I like to emphasize, which is that this existential kink stuff, change happens when the identity change happens. When I stop seeing myself as a fundamentally deprived person and start seeing myself as a fundamentally fulfilled person, I became able to access all sorts of thoughts and ideas that I wasn't able to access previously.
And very soon after that, it was crazy. I started making 10 times as much money as I had been making. And it's just been escalating from there. And well, that was a bit of a rambly response to your question. Was that, did I do what you wanted me to do? Yeah, no, that was so helpful. And just a follow up, I'm wondering where you think that scarcity comes from for you or in general, is this like someone being addicted to their own suffering because it's familiar, for example?
Totally, it absolutely can be that. I mean, I often wonder that, like, where is this happening? What's up with this? Because this phenomenon that I write about in existential kink and that I noticed in myself and that I've experienced with lots of people that I've worked with and helped them move through it. You know, the Freud and Jung and Adler, the founders of psychotherapy, were well aware of it. Freud called it psychic masochism. Obviously, Jung talked about people having shadowy desires.
I read a book of Freud's letters years ago. I wish I'd written down the citation of exactly which letter it was. But in his letters, he was talking about how I can't just tell people that they want taboo things. I have to use dream interpretation to get them to understand that their own psyche is telling them that they want taboo things because they won't just hear it from me.
But that's the essence of the therapy is if I can get people to understand the way that they are participating and creating their own problems, then I can heal them, then they can get some relief. So anyways, as soon as anybody begins to really start to focus on how the unconscious works, becomes very apparent the way that we humans create our own problems, wait, wait, wait, I've lost the track of the question that you asked me. Ask me the question.
There's just the origin of these, and I guess related to that, is the origin important to understand or in many cases irrelevant because you just know that this force is there. But if you can trace it back great, if not, it's still transformative to embrace and have a party with that part of you that wants something kind of maladaptive or that might seem counterproductive. Absolutely. So that's a great point.
And I think in a certain way, yeah, the question of why or how do we get these desires is a little bit, yeah, we don't need to be able to answer that question in order to do great, chemical work to resolve those issues. And I have seen, you know, people do tend to get hung up on that question like, well, why do I have this issue? Is it because my mom yelled at me because my dad lost his job? Is it because in my last life I burnt down an orphanage? Why? Why? Why?
Yeah, the why doesn't matter exactly as much as the fact that it's there and it's part of you and you can celebrate it and embrace it and get crazy with it. Or you could just continue to be tortured by it, whatever you like. Cool. Oh, thank you.
Yeah, it's such, it's such a, I think for a lot of people, so counterintuitive, this idea that, I mean, they notice that they get stuck in self-defeating patterns and you, you know, lay out several of them in your book like the stereotype of I continue to date the person that hurts me the worst. And I just sort of keep coming back to that type of person over and over and over again. All my friends see the pattern and I even see the pattern.
So how do I explain to myself that I'm doing this and it's really, really tough to say, well, it like you might say, it's because you get off on it. It's because there's a part of you that really, really likes being controlled or likes being humiliated or rejected or undervalued or whatever it is. And your work kind of reminds me of other approaches to shadow work, one in particular from Phil Stutz's book The Tools.
He talks about, you know, approaching one's shadow and also approaching the things that are outside of the comfort zone in this paradoxical way, right? You shift from a place of radical rejection to a place of radical acceptance. And so far as you even say, I want the pain because the pain signifies something that's helpful or it means I'm on the right path, you know, if it kind of from a stoch philosophy perspective, the obstacle being the way or whatever.
So I just, I noticed some universal principles, I think in reading your book, but the kinky approach, Carolyn, is so alarming to me as sort of this, you know, boy raised in a Mormon household in Utah who has since left his religion, so fascinated by the use of kink and sexual energy, but also, you know, maybe even a little terrified by it, which is maybe what makes it so exciting, but I was going to ask you, a lot of your examples in your book are of women using this.
Do you, do you feel like it is more accessible to women than it is to men or is that distinction unhelpful? What's your experience as sort of a creator of this and also as a coach? Yeah. So I mean, interestingly, women by self-help books and spirituality books, it much greater rates than men. And that's part of why my book is marketed towards women. It's been a successful marketing strategy. It's absolutely applies to anyone though. It's absolutely applies for all humans.
In fact, I have a large amount of ex-mormons do seem to particularly enjoy the book, so that's really awesome. And it's, I mean, I've definitely had plenty of men, male clients and men in my classes in my mystery school. And it's, I don't know what to say. Yeah, absolutely. Anybody can find it within themselves to give this utterly insane. It's insane from the perspective of the ego.
It is absolutely insane to humble oneself to the point that one says, you know what, actually, there's a part of me that likes this awful thing and I'm getting on the side of that part. I'm just going to do it because I'm that fucking crazy and I don't even care anymore. And when one gets to that point of like, it's this mad. Like I feel like I'm a mad hatter, you know, holding a tea party lots of times. That level of madness is, is alchemically healing in a really marvelous way.
And in a way that, I mean, so like I said, I run something called sleepover mystery school, which is sort of like a combination between a very serious mystery school of antiquity and a very naughty teenage co-ed slumber party. And you know, it's really marvelous and it part of why it works is because existential kink very rapidly tends to get people in touch with the more magical dimensions of themselves with their soul.
As one explanation for like, why do we have these weird shadowy desires that seem to shape our lives in these negative ways? Why is that there? My answer to that at the deepest level, beyond like, yes, trauma past lives, everything.
The deepest answer to that is, I believe the soul, you know, what young called the self the capital S is interested in the whole schmorgas board of potential experience in human incarnation, life and death, pain and pleasure, being powerless, being powerful, having, you know, experiencing humiliations, scarcity and rejection, experiencing fulfillment, wealth, you know, respect, all of those things. It's like the soul hungers to taste all of it.
And the ego, which you've also talked about, ego suffers this, it's a psychotic delusion and it's a psychotic delusion that it is the whole of ourselves. It is the whole of our being. And the psychotic delusion has reached a fever pitch here in, you know, modern Western society at the end of the 21st century, the mind, body, dualism of Descartes.
It's just amplified to this like crazy extent where people are very, many, very, many modern people who don't have the wisdom and the insight to be involved in healing work and psychedelic work are like completely oblivious to what's going on in most of their being.
They don't pay attention to their dreams, they don't try to interpret their dreams, they don't, you know, they have very one side and political views or very one sided ideas about how life should be, how people should be, anyhow, it's utter psychosis. And the antidote to that psychosis seems psychotic from the point of view of psychosis, which is to go ahead and enjoy the taboo thing, enjoy the, because, yeah, enjoy the thing that takes us closer to death, you know, rejection, humiliation.
We fear that because we humans are social beings and we know that rejection and humiliation can lead to exile and death. So there's a certain level of surrender to death, of surrender to the complete unknown, which is necessary to do, to do this integrative work and to do this healing work. And well, anyways, that's why I ran a mystery school because ritual is a very effective way to help people open up to that level of surrender. And now just because I forgot what question I was answering.
Oh, I like it. And the mystery school, and if I heard it right, the sleepover mystery school sounds intriguing and super cool. Yeah. Like a modern elusive elusive. Oh, absolutely. Oh, you said my favorite word, my daughter. I actually named my daughter elusive. We call her a big short. Oh, that's how serious I am about elusive. Yes, exactly. And as fans of psychedelic therapy and practitioners of it, not just fans, you must be familiar with that.
The whole mythos of elusive, which many people do speculate that there was a psychedelic substance that was used in those mysteries, ceremonies. And for me, that's like the center of my life's work is the revival of mystery culture, which goes hand in hand with the emerging psychedelic therapy things. I'm so grateful for the work that you two do and for that loss of being that renaissance that's happening. Because we have been at this psychotic state for so long.
We have to learn how to inhabit our wholeness if anything is going to change. Yeah. So many parallels. I'm noticing as you discuss kind of the ritual aspect of your work, the what I call sort of maybe counterintuitive from the perspective of the ego approach, right, to actually open yourself up to and say that you like the things that your ego would say you need to destroy or you need to overt completely control or you need to completely change.
I'm noticing a lot of parallels between that and often how we coach people to navigate a psychedelic headspace, right, an ordinary state where the resistance is the thing that amplifies the suffering. It is that surrender to this thing that you think you want to avoid that you don't want to see that allows you to pass through it and experience bliss or experience healing or experience wisdom or teaching.
So I wonder if in when somebody is trying to practice existential kink if there is an element of surrender. I'm also thinking about sort of leader follower dynamics in, you know, relationship kink, but there is this the safety in surrender. So I guess my question for you is what's the role of surrender in existential kink if any? Oh, yes. It is the primary action of existential kink is surrender to life as dumb. Life as the leader or the top in the BDSM scene.
And the funny thing about, you know, life or the universe or god as a dumb is that there is no safe words. There is no safe words. There's no, you know, most of the time we don't have any recollection of creating some sort of consensual scene agreement with life with God as our dumb, which is it seems like it's happening very non-consensually. It seems like I'm very be honest, totally non-consensual.
This whole incarnation and everything that's happening to me within it, including all of this, you know, physical vulnerability and potentials of death and illness and wow, I'm going to die. Everybody that I love is going to die. This whole thing can seem really pretty miserable from the point of view of not consenting to it.
So part of an existential kink practice is we have to, you know, create those agreements and that surrender and that consent within ourselves that in a BDSM experience would be created between, you know, two partners in a conversation before the scene, right? So part of what I focus on all of the time is inviting myself to realize that there's a certain way in which God, life, the universe is the perfect lover, is the perfect dumb.
And they're always stroking me on the most resonant spot of my being. And this is something I learned from being in the orgasmic meditation community. It was all sorts of scandals associated with that community, but I like to say that, you know, the practice itself was brilliant, just like hot yoga is brilliant, even if the dude who popularized it was scandalous.
So it was the practice of orgasmic meditation, a brilliant practice, which one focuses meditatively, or two people actually, on the sensations of, you know, a finger stroking a clitoris, and I did thousands of hours of orgasmic meditation.
And there's a certain way in which in, or an orgasmic meditation practice, one discovers, at least I discovered, that there would be times, you know, so the stoker, the goal of the stoker, and again, there were stokers that I worked with who had spent thousands of hours stroking. The stoker's finger magnetically gets drawn to the place on the clitoris that most wants to be stroked, you could say.
There's like, there's a certain magnetism that happens between finger and clitoris, and there's this deep experience that I would have, which would I know, I would notice, that there would be times when the magnetic spot that the stoker was tuned into did not feel good to me, and my mind had zero approval of it, and I would want the stoker to change the stoker. And of course, that's part of a orgasmic meditation practice. Sorry, I'm getting kind of ahead of myself.
I realized probably lots of your listeners have never heard of this before. I'm talking about like the deep specifics of a really esoteric practice to give a little bit more context. Or a orgasmic meditation is a partner practice. It's 15 minutes long.
It's this very regimented, almost militarily precise sort of thing where there's a stoker who wears gloves, there's lube, there's a set of whole set of procedures, and a woman lays down in like what's called a nest, which involves pillows and blankets. She butterflies her legs open, the stoker sits beside her, the stoker would usually be a guy, although obviously it could be anybody.
And would stroke the clitoris in this very precise way for 15 minutes with a timer being set, and there was this whole language around it up strokes and down strokes, and you know, this resonance. And after the stroking session, the person being stroked and the stoker would share what we're called frames about what they experienced during the meditation session.
So it was from this sharing of frames that I learned in conjunction with the people doing the stroking, that there's always this limbic connection, there's always this psychic, energetic, sort of magic happening of this kind of magnetism that I'm spreading. So anyways, I had this first hand embodied experience of I knew that the stoker was stroking the most magnetic spot this, and that I didn't like it, that my conscious mind did not like it.
So the invitation in the practice would be to see, you know, for the people being stroked, for the people being stroked, to see how much you can expand and surrender, to being stroked at the most magnetic spot, even though your conscious mind doesn't like it, doesn't sense it doesn't feel good, see what's like to surrender. So that's what I would do. I would practice surrendering.
And so that would be like opening the window of sensation that I could say yes to, that I could orgasmically receive. And I found through practice an experimentation that I could open that window really wide and have this, well, very literally orgasmic experience in the meditation. And I realized that life is just exactly the same way. Life is always stroking me on the most magnetic, resonant spot. We're all just giant clitorisers or cocks or whatever.
We're all being stroked, we're all being made loved to by life. And there's lots of strokes that are magnetic, resonant, potentially orgasmic strokes, to which my mind says, oh no, no, I do not like that. That is all wrong. It should be happening this way. I don't know if that's it. And my mind is a liar. The mind is just pure lies essentially. Because if I can surrender and open myself to the resonant strokes of life, which are always happening, whatever is going on is always that stroke.
Then my life can be utterly ecstatic and utterly joyful and utterly outside of my conscious mind's control and utterly a billion times better than my conscious mind's preferences would ever happen be. And you mentioned actual real life relationship dynamics. So I wrote my book about a terrible abusive relationship I had with a guy who was like really jealous and controlling. So what's funny is I'm in a relationship now with a wonderful, beautiful man. My husband is so sweet, so loving, so kind.
And he also does these things sometimes that like my mind will label as controlling. Like he's trying to control me. I hate that. How dare he is so rude. And you know, this is not within a, not within a specific container that we've created or anything. Well, I mean, we sort of have a long story.
But I have found that again, if I give myself permission to like really in the moment, just open up to like whatever the stroke that he's giving me, which is be something like, oh, maybe you could try it this way or honey, why don't you do this? If instead of, you know, refusing that and resisting that and judging that as controlling, if instead I'm like, well, I guess sense a mask your husband, please tell me what to do.
You know, there's this like wonderful joy and eroticism that opens up that my conscious might go finds very awful, just really still quite resistant to it, even though I experiment with it a lot. But obviously my body loves it. And I've married a man who behaves that way. So clearly I love it at a deep, deep place. And anyways, it's just so funny to me, humans and my own humanity are endlessly funny. Yeah, that's another really useful example, I think.
And of one of your axioms too, of having as evidence of wanting, like you said, like obviously I married this man. And as you were talking about this, I was remembering an interview I listened to where you mentioned some that you're also a fan of Byron Katie's The Work. And we've talked about that on there. And I'm wondering, I'm starting to see some things that you mentioned you drew from or the orgasmic meditation experiences.
And I think you talked in that interview about how Byron Katie's The Work influenced it. And we could talk about that a little more and if there are some parallels with that approach. Oh yeah, well, second is getting warm, talking about all of this. How much I enjoy being controlled. So yes, I love Byron Katie. Love, love, love Byron Katie, she's an endless inspiration to me. And yeah, that was the genesis of how I was touched on a little bit earlier.
In the beginning phase of me discovering that I had this existential kink, I was doing the work Byron Katie one day on this judgment that I had. Because I was really, I had learned that there was this other person I knew who was being a coach who was getting paid $1,000 an hour. And I was like inching by on far, far less than that. So I was doing the work by Byron Katie with the statement, you know, people should want to pay me $1,000 an hour.
And then I was doing the inquiry questions and then I was turning them around to the opposite right. And I turned it around, people should want to pay me $1,000 for coaching to nobody should ever want to pay me anything for coaching. And that's when I felt this like credible zing through my body. And I was like, well, God damn, Carolyn, that's why nobody's paying you for coaching because it turns you on so fucking much for nobody to want to pay you for coaching.
If it really turns you on for people to pay you lots of money for coaching, then that's what would be happening. But anyways, so yeah, I find the work of Byron Katie to be a very helpful warm up for existential kink practice because it helps to loosen the mind from these, you know, dogmatic ego beliefs that we can get so easily attached to like, I really believed that I wanted money that it turns out my body says something completely else.
And yeah, that's it's anyways of something that I find to be very interesting with Byron Katie is that there's, there's, it's such a potent first hand way to learn that we don't have to believe our thoughts. And that in fact, believing what we think can be a very fast way to make ourselves completely miserable. So I just, I love that practice of like turning them around the opposites and finding ways that the opposite thing is equally true. So Carolyn, I'm curious.
And you talk about this a little bit in the book. Who is the, this work, this existential kink work for and who is it not for? Or you could reframe the question anyway that you would like, but you know, would this be inappropriate for certain kinds of struggles or for people that struggle a certain kind of way, maybe? That's a wonderful question.
So I hit a wall with my own existential kink practice in connection to patterns I had that were tied, that were definitely tied to distinctive, really acute, intense childhood traumatic experiences that I had. So I do tend to think that existential kink works best on issues that we have which kind of come from maybe pervasive cultural conditioning and not so much from like acute, terrible, traumatic events that happen to us.
So it ended up that I needed to seek other tools to deal with that and that's how I found my wonderful mentor, Robert D. McDonald, who does really, really deep work with something he calls the destination method, which is amazing for resolving trauma. So anyways, I found that there's other tools that work best for that.
And also if somebody is depressed and ruminating or so depression is not some, I mean sometimes people are sad to hear this because they're like, well, I'm depressed and I want to use existential kink to get out of my depression.
It's just from my personal experience and from working with clients, I don't think it works very well because for the alchemical magic of existential kink to work, you have to, I like to say, you know, it's very unscientific, but you have a certain amount of free floating positive energy in your body. You have to have a certain amount of pleasure, of humor, of perspective to, you can actually know, zoom out to the point and make that, you know, orgasmic, surrendered leap.
Usually if somebody is depressed, they're, you know, they don't have that sort of resource in their body to get that spark going. So trying to do existential kink seems to lead just to like rumination for them or else they warp it, you know, and this is something that I hate to see because existential kink is absolutely not about blame or shame.
Like those things just keep things repressed and unconscious, but people can definitely take, you know, take this attitude of like, oh, I'm just having this experience because I like it. And I'm so terrible. And it's just, just why am I so fucked up? I just like this horrible thing. And they make it into like this weird self-flagulating sarcastic, ironic thing. Like, oh, I must really like living with my parents because it's happening.
It's like, maybe you're just taking this tool that I'm trying to give you to get out of your situation and turn it into like a weird sarcastic self-pity thing. Like, please don't do that. But because, yeah, because obviously like we're talking about for the existential kink practice to work, it demands a completely unironic, totally surrendered, totally humble, actually open orgasmic surrender. So yeah, there's definitely, so depression, a grief.
Oh my gosh, sometimes people have come to me and they've been like, my father died. How am I going to UK this? And I'm like, um, you're not. Please don't try to. That doesn't make any sense. I mean, obviously like grief, I mean, grief is a part of human experience and we all have to encounter it in various ways. And there can be a certain deep joy and pleasure in grief. Anyways, but it's not like, it's just not the sort of thing that existential kink responds to.
You can't eK your father back to life. That's like, yeah. Yeah, but maybe after a certain point of the grieving process, I know people have different ways of trying to define when one has grieved and not and what is enough. And one of my teachers, I remember saying grief is like a river and it's just going to flow in some way forever.
But point is I wonder if along the way somewhere, whether it's depression or grief or on the healing journey from trauma when you're resourced and stabilized enough, if this tool, this approach could be used productively with the right kind of guidance, perhaps knowing those are careful situations. Like one example that came to mind when you're talking about depression. And I appreciate the comments, by the way, the warnings of when you might not want to just dive in recklessly.
But I remember working with a client with depression, I've done this several times of having them celebrate, throw a party for their depression. But that's at some point on the way to give it some love, give that part that chapter, some love in that, you know, the positive direction in line with all the parts of you to help move through it. Like in this adage that Steve and I often say, the only way out is through and with existential kink, you might as well make it fun, right?
The way through that. Yeah. Well, I love, I hear you and I love that you've had that experience with clients who are depressed and getting them to throw a party for their depression. And yeah, I can totally see how it's support and, you know, good timing and existential kink approach can be useful. Yeah. Carolyn, I'm curious, I know, as you coach people to practice E.K., what are some other ways that people, quote unquote, do it wrong, right?
Or they're, you know, they think they're doing it, they think they're applying it in the way that you instruct, but they're missing something. Can you think of any of any examples? Oh, boy, let me think for a moment.
I mean, I think the main way that people miss the mark is what I was just talking about, which is when they take it on as sort of like this fun intellectual thing and they take it on as a, oh wait, another way that people miss the mark is by taking it on as something that other people should do.
So I've had people get very, and this is, I mean, I've had, how do I say, sometimes people immediately somehow want to apply it to like collective societal issues, because I mentioned there's like two minds in the book about, you know, the potential for collective shadow integration. And actually more than I think about collective shadow integration, the more I think about like, well, you know, the archetype of the shadow for the collective unconscious is pretty much the devil.
So a reckoning with the collective shadow is a reckoning with whatever you take the devil to be. And the most successful example of that that I can find is actually Jung's essay, an answer to Job, which is sort of like this very deep personal essay where he's wrestling with God's dialogue with Satan in connection with the sufferings of Job. Anyhow, that's a confrontation with the collective shadow.
But of course there's this big vogue for what does one call, you know, like woke social justice sort of thing. So I'll hear people go on tears about like, oh, this group of people should do existential kink and get off on their problems. So they stop causing problems for other people. And how do we get these other people to do shadow integration?
Sorry, it just makes me laugh so hard because obviously with shadow integration, like it's fucking do it yourself project, like be the change you want to see. If you want any shadows to be integrated, you must integrate them in yourself. So anyways, that's one way that people miss the mark. The other way is what we just talked about with people taking this like intellectual attitude and then using it to like be weirdly sarcastic.
And when they do that, like, oh, it makes me sad because it's like they're taking something which is, you know, potentially revolutionary truth that could utterly transform their being, which is that a part of them, a completely innocent, lovable, worthwhile part of them, desires the situation that they're in. And they make that into like this sarcastic thing to beat themselves up with and ruminate about.
So the perpetual challenge with existential king and with, you know, in my online communities, the coaching that we do and then we have a nice central king coach training program is helping people create the kind of trust and relaxation and belief in the deep innocence of all parts of themselves to the point that they are able to unironically open up to that surrender. I'm trying to think another way that people miss the mark, they get it wrong.
I would say starting with things that are too big like trying or, you know, like trying to like what was one that somebody was talking about, you know, they wanted to find a way like the love of their life had dumped them. They just had like somebody had broken up with them. They were heartbroken about it. And this is sort of connected to the grief thing. They were like, how do I e-k this? I'm like, again, you really, you actually have to grieve it. You actually can't skip the grieving part.
Like, maybe after you thoroughly, thoroughly grieve it, you can find open up to the pleasure and the rejection. But really, what I recommend to people is that they start with something that's not like a momentous, awful thing in their life, like a singular, awful event. But rather something that's sort of like a chronic, ongoing thing. So like feeling, you know, feeling weird, feeling like an outsider. And like, can you open up to that? Can you, you know, can you let yourself get off on that?
Like more like a daily level sort of thing, rather than like a singular, painful event? Carolyn, this seems to be very delicate work and vulnerable work, right? And when you describe the intellectualizing piece, sort of this sarcastic, intellectualizing approach that is a mistake, it sounds like a defended approach, right? It sounds like an egoic, defended approach.
As to surrender, as we've been talking about, to the reality that there's a part of you, that really gets off on these self-defeating patterns, can be really, really, I would imagine scary for a lot of people. So to do this work sounds like it is, it takes a lot of courage and requires a lot of vulnerability. Do you find that people need a lot of encouraging? They need a lot of education or are there some people that sort of just settle right into it intuitively? Oh my goodness.
There's certainly some people that get it instantly. I mean, there's people that I've met who get it way better than I do, who are like my dear friend, Leila, who is my collaborator with Mystery School and she and I do a podcast together. And recently put her in charge of the online community that we have called Electric Yes. Leila's love of the taboo and her ability to give approval and to like really dark and twisted things is magnificent and so, so beautiful and has healed me so, so much.
There's some people who are just like, you know, yeah, they're born shadow integration geniuses. They can just do the thing. And there's some people who are really fascinated by the idea that just, you know, don't know how to give themselves that kind of permission. So it's sort of an interesting thing because when I first devised existential king, I was like, well, this is a solo meditation. This is something that you read the book because I experienced it as a solo meditation.
But yeah, a lot of people don't, they want guidance with it. So I have all these guided meditations that we've created. And again, part of why I created Mystery School was to create an environment where people could have, well, and the online community, but sort of Mystery School, since it's in person is even better.
It's sort of like, it's much easier to get off in EK when you are surrounded by just like crazy, kinky, integrated, deep motherfuckers who do not, like, just do not give a fuck and are like completely insane. It's far easier when you're in that environment to have that kind of deep release and surrender.
So there is a certain thing where it's like, yeah, it's getting on the vibe, getting attuned to somebody who has that noses and has that ability is a really powerful thing, you know, almost like a classic, right, like, shock depart from a guru kind of thing.
And the example that I'm thinking of is, I have a friend of mine from the orgasmic meditation community, it was this gentleman named Leslie and Leslie went on with his partner, Tony, to create this wonderful thing called the Light Dark Institute where they would teach these, they would do these in person kink intensives and these in person workshops.
And anyways, part of the inspiration for Exocentric Kink was, I'd be hanging out with Leslie back in the day and he would just be, he would have this bizarre look on his face. I would have like no idea what was going on with him and I'd be like, Leslie, what's up? And he'd be like, oh, my heart is broken, I'm dying. And I'd be like, yeah, but you, okay, your heart is broken and you're dying, but you're kind of having fun. He's like, it's so good.
He just like knew how to aesthetically appreciate his own profound suffering. Again, in this like rather insane, you know, enlightened, full sort of way. And that transmission from Leslie, like stuck with me forever because I was like, wow, Leslie knows how to orgasmically experience his suffering. Let me try to do what Leslie does. Let me see if I can give myself that same mad level of embrace for my pain. And I mean, when I think about Leslie, I'm like, you know what?
Leslie could get off on being dumped by the love of his life. He could get off on his father dying. I'm 1,000 percent. I know that he could do it. Most of your mortal's not. But anyways, yeah, so was that transmission from him and the sort of the level of genius that he had reached with that that empowered me to do it?
So there is a certain way in which when people, you know, come into the online community or come into the mystery school, they get that transmission that like, yeah, it's actually possible to have an entirely different relationship with your sensations and emotions. You can, you know, what makes a sensation painful or pleasurable is the amount of deep approval and presence that you are able to give it.
So when people learn that, they are able to begin expanding that window that their mind can receive as pleasure and begin to, I mean, this often happens. We see this with the people in the mystery school is they do go into a sort of orgasmic condition in their life where, you know, so it's something that's interesting about physical orgasm, right? Is that it is, there's an involuntary limbic element to it where it's just like, you know, you're out of control.
And we do see that there's like, their life, their lives tend to get like out of control awesome in some ways. Like they're just like, oh my, all of these things are happening. I'm meeting all of these people. I'm having all of these new opportunities. I'm having this new creativity and the old structures of my life are unraveling in some ways. And obviously it's very disorienting and magic and initiation are kind of inherently disorienting because they're taking us into a new orientation.
Yes, that is the answer to some question I was asked. Yeah. That reminds me of something I wanted to ask earlier when you were talking about your experience with kind of feeling this orgasmic bliss around your scarcity.
And when Steve was asking about some gender differences and like in the case of that electric jolt or how people experience uniquely their own pleasure, what might it look like for someone to quote unquote, get off on their shadow or what are other ways if someone has a hard time connecting with that was, I feel orgasmic to this or I have a jolt of energy. How do you know if you are subconsciously craving, getting humiliated or scarcity or something like that?
Yeah, the main way that you know is that it's happening. Have evidence of having is evidence of launching like you say. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so this gets into this whole deep thing, but the relation between psyche and world and non-dualism and how exactly is it that this, what is this reality that we seem to be experiencing? And I do think ultimately that world and psyche are somehow mysteriously made of the same stuff and do have this deep interaction.
So yeah, there is, if it's happening and if one has a somatic, I mean, if it's happening period is a sign to get curious about it and to experiment with opening up to like, okay, here's the sensation of humiliation. Can I let myself die into it? You know, there's this ego part of me that wants to resist it, that wants to push it away, but what we resist persists, can I experiment with letting in this divine, this is how the divine lover is touching me right now?
Can my love for God and the universe be so crazy and so intense that I let myself be willing to receive it? Yeah, it reminds me of how these fun parallels that show up mostly in the other religious schools of thought like Eastern and Hinduism, but just the, or how they describe an orgasm in France would be lipid-y more, little death and just the symbolism of all of this is quite fascinating. It is fascinating.
It's sometimes, yeah, there's the dance, the interaction, the dance, the dance, the interaction of the opposites, like electricity, how we get light from electricity and there's like two poles and they're in this relationship and they're creating light and heat. That seems to be what it's all about. So one way that I think about existential kink is I think about the scales of Libra, the scales of Ma'at.
So there's a certain way in which our, oh boy, my mind starts going into all this Alistair Crowley, the laymick stuff because that's how I think things often. But, um, yeah, fascinating stuff, by the way, Crowley. I've been thinking of some of his esoteric work as you've been sharing about mystery school as well. Oh, yeah, you're familiar with Alistair Crowley. Yeah, I have a strange fetish of getting books from that era and reading them. So, me too. That's a fantastic fetish to have.
Well, so Crowley talked about the various aons of time, right? So if you would say there was the aon of ISIS, there was the aon of Osiris and now we're in the aon of Horus.
And the aon of Osiris is sort of this patriarchal age where this unnecessary evolution of consciousness happened that was sort of an adolescence, adolescent phase for humanity in the sense that we, at least, you know, in Western Europe and the Western world, we became very into this dualism and this like, you know, sort of ego psychosis.
And we've gotten, you know, the world became obsessed with like, how do we measure things, this control things, exploit and extract in this kind of vigorous fashion that the philosopher Heidegger called the inframing. So this very inframing, extracting attitude where something is always highly valued and something is always devalued. So the ego, the conscious mind is valued, the unconscious mind is devalued. Science is valued.
There's a certain way in which, right, like being in control is valued, being out of control devalued. So anyhow, this big devaluation has happened within this recent 2000, 3000 years. So part of what needs to happen as far as I understand and I think Crowley would agree with me is that the new evolution of human consciousness involves a balancing of the values so that the, you know, magic and science are at an equal value, conscious and unconscious are at an equal value.
And this, so with existential king, there's a way in which it's a deep valuing of the unconscious mind that happens. The unconscious processes that are already occurring and that balances out the scales to where this, you know, we talked about this meeting is able to happen. This, the conscious, the unconscious come into a relationship that is quite like the poles of, you know, negative and positive in electricity.
And there is a release of heat and light and love, all the fun, solar, ecstatic things happen. And as far as I can tell, that's also how the universe is created every moment. Yeah. Well, so do you know who Timothy Leary is? Yes. It's so funny. I was just talking with my husband about Timothy Leary. Yes. Yeah. I figured you're quite familiar. Of course.
But I remember seeing an article about Leary and how, and he might have just been tripping at the time, but how he said he was an incarnation of Alster Crowley. It was, and he loved the tarot decks to bust them out. But he really identified with Crowley's work, it seems. Yes. He's very understandable that Leary would have an identification. I think I remember that interview that you're talking about. And Crowley, I think, is, I mean, who? I think he was a super underrated genius.
He laid the groundwork for so much of what Jung was able to do in a way that, you know, I don't think, how do I say? Like, it go on about this for a long time. But Jung's book, Aeon, I think that came out in the 1950s, 1951 maybe.
So Aeon is about the relationship between Christ and Antichrist and how there's a way in which it's only through understanding and accepting the relationship of Christ and Antichrist and holding them at equal values that one is able to have like the total noses of the self.
And Jung talks about, you know, how crazy society has been and that we've, you know, we've been through for thousands of years in Europe, you know, this image of a purely good God who was only merciful and only kind created this freaky shadow of, you know, whatever the Antichrist, the opposite of that, which is like totally vicious and evil. And there has to be a balancing and a recognition that those are part of a larger whole.
And anyhow, Alex from Crowley styled himself as the great beast, 666 and saw himself. Bring him Satan back. Totally.
And in a new way, in an actually an integrative way, I really think that honestly by inhabiting that archetype, he did a giant favor of really like a bodhisattva level, self sacrificial level favor in kind of completing that Christian mandala of Christ and Antichrist in a way that opened up what we can call the second coming of Christ, which I would call the second coming of Christ, which is the increasing availability to mass human awareness of the whole archetype of the self.
Cool. Yeah, coming into wholeness. Yeah, fascinating. And you mentioned at some point recently an Egyptian God and, you know, going to the underworld, maybe way into the heart, wondering if you can expand on that because I love those metaphors and archetypes too, just for anyone who might have missed that reference. Oh, baby. Boy, do I love them. Yes, so much. Yeah, I was talking about a Cyrus and Isis and Horus and, yeah, so, you know, it's funny.
I mean, I've had like deep visionary experiences with a form of Horus is known as raw pork wheat. And I also had deep visionary experiences with another Egyptian deity named Maat, who's the goddess of balancing the weighing of the heart, Maat is the one who weighs the heart. And when we can learn to bring the unconscious and the conscious into an equal level of valuation, that is really, that's the key to so much of everything.
That's the key to Jungin individuation, that's the key to magical initiation, that's the key to fulfilling the great work, that's the philosopher's stone, that's the, that's the alchemical big shabang right there. And when one dies and one has one's heart weighed in the scales of Maat, right? So she puts a feather on the other side. So there's your heart and there's a feather. Your heart is as light as a feather than you go to the realm of the immortals.
To me, the only way to have one's heart be as light as a feather is to have a deep, deep, deep integration of everything good and evil, masculine and feminine life and death, because if you don't have that integration and that relationship and acceptance, then of course you're going to be devaluing something. And that devaluing makes your heart heavy.
Yeah, yeah, in fact, I was thinking of that, weighing of the heart and being lighter than a feather when you were talking earlier about taking kind of a, a comical approach to laughing at this suffering we find ourselves just coming back to subconsciously when we
realize it or just having, having fun with it seems to me to be maybe one of the ways people in that metaphor emerge from the underworld with, you know, hearts light as a feather after conquering some inner demons or dancing with inner demons is probably a better way to think about it. So we can really kind of move forward in life and all its craziness with, you know, more contentment and playfulness and joy. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. So well said. I think that really is it.
I think, you know, laughter is a sure presence of God, a sure, sure sign of the presence of God. Laughter is God. So everything is, but yeah, I really agree with that. Very cool. Well, Steve, I've been hogging the questions. What's coming up for you? To be honest, I got all my burning questions in early. So Carolyn, I'm wondering, is there anything else you'd like to say to our audience about the UK about the work that you're doing?
We'll certainly put everything in the show notes, your website, your pot. You mentioned your podcast, but I don't think you mentioned the name of your podcast. What's it called? Yeah, the podcast is called Sleep Over with Carolyn and Layla, and we talk about all sorts of far out stuff. So especially if people like magic, they should check that out. We also talk about existential can't quite a lot. What do I have to say about it? Well, it's really great. Everybody should do it.
The more you do it, the better your life gets. That's what I found. Yeah, it's really important. And it's also, I also am a deep participant in other methods of making the unconscious conscious. So dream work, remembering one's dreams, doing work to interpret one's dreams, I think it is so, so important. But also the kind of theoretical work that I do, that we teach it in electric yes and also in the mystery school.
And it's theoretical work that is directly tied to the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn, the mystery, temple at elusis. I mean, there's this whole lineage way that elusis eventually, over the centuries, the inheritors of that were the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. And also Alistair Crowley was in that organization. So we do that mystery, theorgy, invocation of God into ourselves.
And I'm really enthusiastic about, it's this odd little book called The Middle Pillar by a gentleman named Israel Regardi, who was also a big fan of Carl Jung. And Regardi wrote about how a theorgy makes the unconscious conscious. You just really made that brilliant connection. And I wish more young hyens knew about it, but they don't, because he was a magician. And not a scientist or a therapist. But anyway, I truly believe that this, anyone who could go onto any rants, but it's possible.
I just want everybody to know that it is possible to do the work of individuation, to do the work of initiation, and to have a much more balanced, equilibrated perspective on life, which has a lot of joy and laughter and orgasmic ecstasy in it. And that materialist science has lied to us all. Life is way better than advertised and magic is real. And anyways, yeah, there I, we are currently in the last little bit of time taking applications for sleepover mystery school 2024.
So I do hope that if folks listening are interested in this approach to life and in deeper integration and kind of a joyful holistic approach to spiritual noses that they go ahead and check that out. The mystery school, well, and also the online program is amazing. Electric yes, has all sorts of existential kink coaching opportunities. We have social events, we have guided existential kink meditations, we have all sorts of tutoring in magic and theology in the online community.
And the in person sleepover mystery school is four weekends to our in Miami. One is in rural West Virginia and one is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I live. And we take people, well, they undergo a vow of silence and they experience a profound initiation into a mystery tradition, which is directly inherited from a loose us.
And that's the thing that I'm most excited about because, well, anyways, I just have this, I'm an evangelical hermetisist and I'm very deeply interested in getting as many people as possible to realize their wholeness and enjoy it. So I love doing that in the mystery school. And anyways, I think that's what I wanted to say. I'm such a pleasure talking to you gentlemen today. I hope maybe maybe, okay, as my join us at mystery school, I think you would have a really fun time.
Um, the training game. I'm going to check it out. And treating was the word the kin of my mind too, right? Well, you know, Carolyn, you seem like a person who is very aligned with her purpose and that you have discovered something that was really helpful for you. And you know, you made it a life's work to share it with others. And I respect that a hell of a lot. And I really appreciate how articulately and skillfully you communicated this process in your book.
You're willing us to come on our podcast and share this gift with our audience. So yeah, feeling a lot of gratitude. Thank you so much. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, babe. Yes. It's been wonderful. Thanks for joining us. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
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