Conscious Kink is a term that defines those sexual practices that have the purpose of increasing awareness: a way for the spirit that passes through the body. As it does, for example Tantra, or rather tantric sex.
Last summer I happened to read a very nice article on the connection between the spiritual path and the transgender experience. It was not new to me, I knew the ancient traditions and knowledge of the Native Americans about "two spirits", people who do not identify themselves in the birth gender and carry within them both energies, masculine and feminine. As well as I have studied the ancient Sumerian myths and traditions related to the transgender priesthood in the cult of the goddess Inanna.
The article referred to a festival that began shortly thereafter in the English countryside of Somerset, England, a few miles from Glastonbury, which is said to be where the heart chakra of the Earth resides. The name of the event was QuintaSensual: Spirituality, Sexuality and Tantra Queer Festival.
With my usual impulsiveness, credit card in hand, the same morning I booked a flight to Bristol and my place all-inclusive for the festival, where I stayed for the entire week.
Before telling you what has happened to me, I want to mention what has long been my vision of the spiritual path, and more generally of life, heavily branded and limited by the sense of sin, that almost all of us, here in Italy, live because of the cultural imprinting of Catholicism.
There have always been two instincts in me, two forces that have always fought frantically against each other. In short, one is the power that I could call "angelic", which appears made of light, chastity and divine spirit; on the other hand I could call it "diabolic", bearer of darkness, eroticism and demonic spirit. These two drives have always struggled to find an agreement, and I found myself living periods of my life where one excluded the other: once it was my body and its desires to organize and plan my everyday life, another time it was the my mind and its angelic aspirations.
As you have noticed in this dichotomy between body and mind, the spirit is missing.
Yes, it's missing, because I realize now that in fact it has never taken part in this diatribe: it has always been there, quiet, observing my evolution, patiently waiting for me to untangle things by myself.
As much as I tried to find a bridge connecting the two forces, I could not do it. If I walked along the angelic path, I always came to a point where the negation of the body and its desires made me cold and detached, separated from the world and its inhabitants; if instead I walked the diabolical path I entered a tunnel of guilt and lost the sense of what I was looking for, with a similar result of coldness and detachment. In both cases I always came to feel the lack of that joy of life that celebrates and sanctifies life itself.
From the first evening, with all the eighty participants gathered in a room with a towering dragon (the devil! I thought) sticking out of the wall, I perceived instead that the vibrating energy in that place was that one of love. I felt it tingling on the palms of my hands and then vibrating in the rest of my body and when we began to move hand by hand in a spiral, silently meeting everyone's eyes, I was hit by a wave of joyous emotion and I realized that I had arrived in the right place.
What we did in the following days was a succession of workshops and meetings all centered between the relationship between the body (in a sexual way, because body is essentially sexual) and the spirit (the creative energy, and this is also essentially sexual) . I attended workshops where you learned to manage sexual energy, to discover thousand ways to touch and discover your body and others one; I learned some basic rules for practicing conscious BDSM techniques, used to increase one's awareness; I had hints of Shadow Tantra, the techniques to bring out our part in the shade, the one that we keep hidden for fear and for social constraints.
Often, when we hear about these things, we open files of violence and Satanism that disturb us and scare us (at least it happened to me) and although there are indeed many people who use these methods for the simple animal pleasure, I discovered that these practices can lead to states of perceptual alteration very similar to those that occur with meditation, yoga and other spiritual techniques. As was rightly remembered in the laboratories, BDSM, as almost always happens for sexual activities, can be practiced in a totally unconscious way, and sometimes the drives that drive to do so come from "fucked up" places and not from healthy mental conditions and awareness.
This is the huge difference. Conscious Kink makes it clear that the exploration of one's personal fetishes has a very profound potential effect. It often produces a great healing process, as the recent psychological doctrine also states. During the practices we obtain a production of emotional releases, spiritual experiences, deep healings and altered states of consciousness. Which are the same things that spiritual traditions suggest for personal evolution to enlightenment. Conscious Kink does this by developing tools and techniques to immerse yourself in these experiences and, in doing so, creates a powerful and marvelous map of our inner erotic world. Basically it helps us to illuminate those dark parts that prevent us from being totally what we are. It is a priceless journey. It seems strange that using practices such as spanking, bondage, whipping with whips and scourges, dominant-submissive role-playing games, slapping or pulling hair can act as tools for greater awareness, but what about all the religious or shamanic traditions that use pain to access higher states?
When I asked for a private meeting with one of facilitators, to ask him how to solve my inability to match my two inner drives, he just answered me: "A road serves you to find the divine outside of you, the other is the one that takes you to the divine within you. "