[NOTE: I have created a - 19 page sacred workbook for the shadow of sexuality: companion to the transmission on Existential Kink, shame, safety, and the door you keep walking past.]
I want to begin with a dream.
I do not dream very often. So when a dream comes with this much vividness, sensation, and charge, I pay attention.
In the dream, I was bound by rope to a steel bed. There were two men and a woman around me, all wearing leather masks. I was not fully naked, but I was dressed in black, kinky leather clothing. I knew, immediately, that I was in the territory of BDSM.
But what I felt was fear.
I could feel it in my body. I felt trapped. I wanted help. I wanted to shout, “Let me go.” I could not speak. Then I woke suddenly in my own bed, my breathing fast, my body distressed.
I stayed there for a while, asking myself so many questions. Why did I dream that? Who were they? What did it mean? Why was I experiencing this?
But I did not want to dismiss it. And I did not want to over-analyse it, either.
I treated it as a transmission.
A door.
This became an entry point into a much deeper exploration of the shadow side of my sexuality. Around that time, I encountered Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliott. Carolyn passed away on 28 July 2026, and I want to honour the impact her work had on opening a very nuanced, confronting, and important inquiry for me.
The central teaching of the book is powerful: sometimes a recurring pattern remains because some part of us is receiving something from it.
Not because our conscious mind wants it. Our conscious mind may be exhausted, frustrated, completely fed up. But another layer of the psyche may still be attached to the pattern because it offers identity, familiarity, protection, belonging, control, or even a kind of moral superiority.
Healing can begin when we become willing to see that attachment with curiosity rather than shame.
There is mind curiosity, which asks, “What does this mean? What does this symbolise?”
And then there is body curiosity, which asks, “What does this want? What does this desire?”
For me, the body was asking to be listened to.
After the dream, I felt called to explore—not by performing a fantasy, but by becoming curious about the part of myself I had made hidden, forbidden, or shameful.
There was a Honey Birdette boutique in the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney. I walked past it several times. I wanted to go in, but I hesitated every single time.
What would people think?
What if someone I knew saw me?
What did it mean that I was a 45-year-old Asian mother standing outside this door, afraid to enter?
And then I realised: the threshold was not the dream. The threshold was the shame around the door.
I did not shame myself for being afraid. I spoke to the little girl in me with tenderness and authority. I took the seat of the director.
I told her: “You are allowed to explore. You are an adult. You are safe. You get to choose.”
When I finally entered, the saleswoman was warm, respectful, and welcoming. She gave me space to explore freely. And in that moment, I understood something important.
Safety and conscious kink are inseparable.
Without safety, consent, containment, and the ability to speak, it is not kink. It is harm.
Safety is not the opposite of intensity. Safety is what makes intensity holy.
Once I felt safe, I felt playful. Sexy. Young. Magnetic. Radiant. Intimate with myself.
And I began to understand that the hidden part of a woman is not weak. Often, it is radiance that went underground because radiance was once unsafe.
From the fitting room, I FaceTimed my lover. What began as an exploration of lingerie became a mutual revelation. It was not only sexual curiosity that opened. It was a deeper intimacy wound.
I was not afraid of sex.
I was afraid of being seen while being wanted.
I believe this is far more common than we realise—in marriages, in relationships, in women who are successful, capable, intelligent, and deeply self-led. We may know how to be loved for what we do, yet still struggle to be witnessed in our desire, our body, our softness, and our wanting.
For me, 2023 became a profound year of healing. It included sacred sexuality healing, past-life material clearing through my body, feminine-lineage healing, root and sacral opening, cervical awakening, whole-body orgasm, and energetic intimacy.
I asked my lover—who has studied tantra since he was 19—to mentor me in this territory. For a woman who had built so much through her own authority, allowing myself to be guided was a significant gate.
Not surrendering my sovereignty.
Expanding it.
I did not enter the world of BDSM to perform it. I entered it to clear the distortions attached to it.
Distorted sexuality is sexuality severed from consent, safety, reverence, and the heart.
The real work is not about rope, technique, or aesthetics. It is about the place where power and surrender meet—and whether that place has been made sacred or dangerous.
In my dream, I was bound without consent. I could not speak. I was terrified.
In waking life, I chose. I spoke. I was met.
That is the entire alchemy.
Same territory. Opposite architecture.
The variable is sovereignty.
And I want to offer an important caution here.
The inquiry in Existential Kink can be deeply liberating when we apply it to patterns within our own agency: procrastination, financial ceilings, choosing unavailable partners, making ourselves small, hiding our gifts, repeating familiar forms of self-abandonment.
But we must not extend that logic to abuse, assault, illness, poverty, or racism.
Nobody’s shadow is equivalent to their violation.
If someone was harmed, they did not want it.
No framework should send a person looking for hidden pleasure in their own violation.
If a framework cannot be wrong, we must hold it carefully. If you are in acute distress, living with unprocessed trauma, or feeling emotionally overwhelmed, please do not do this work alone. Let a therapist, practitioner, mentor, or safely held container support you.
What I want to leave you with is this:
The dream is not always a symbol to decode. Sometimes, it is a door.
Shame often lives at the threshold, not in the desire itself.
The good-girl part of you does not need to be fought. She needs to be thanked. She was trying to keep you safe.
And a sexual block is often an intimacy block: a fear of being seen while being wanted.
So perhaps the question is not, “What am I secretly enjoying?”
Perhaps the more compassionate question is:
“What have I made forbidden—and who did I have to become to keep it that way?”
There is likely a threshold you already know. It may have arrived in the first moments of listening to this.
The place you avoided.
The desire you dismissed.
The door you walked past.
Remember: you are an adult. You are allowed to explore.
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Thank you for being here with me.Heartitude,Lilian_________________1:1 Healing, email to [email protected]
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