I work the flogger up to a string of truly brutal blows, hard as I can put out, loud, yelling at him to breathe, to take it in, and he stays with me till I throw down the flogger and throw myself over his back again. We catch our breaths as I reach for the cane.
The cane is my favorite implement for a pain-trance scene. I have two with me that I varnished myself — about half an inch thick, sanded and burnished with layers of marine varnish to glow like lacquer. I had soaked them in the bathtub of my hotel room last night, so they are supple and weighty — a dry cane is too light to carry the sensation deep into the body, and can be very stingy without much reward. It’s also my experience that rattan canes give a little as they land, some very strict version of sponginess, so I prefer them to canes of less resilient materials.
I start tapping his back with the cane, and he tenses, scared. “Keep breathing, you’re all right, you’re just fine, I want you to stay down for me, honey, that’s sweet, yes.” I tap around lightly till he relaxes again, gets into the sensation, forgets about what might happen next, he’s in the present moment, which is exactly where I want him.
I hold the cane across his back and instruct him to take a deep breath, breathe it out, again in — I’m taking more intimate control of his breath and the flow of his energy. At the end of an exhalation, at his most relaxed, I slash down with the cane and immediately, with my other hand, rub hard across his back to wipe out the sting.
This is a technique I was taught years ago — if you wipe out the sting from a cane before the muscles have time to tense up, then a lot of amazing sensation gets into the body and kind of reverberates, which is so fascinating and compelling that one forgets about the sting. It is important to leave time after each stroke so the bottom can fully process the sensations before you strike again — too many strokes too close together too soon can lead to involuntary and uncontrollable tension and resistance. It’s also a good idea not to hit the same spot over and over again — the skin, I think, gets raw, and then the cane can feel too sharp, not the right sensation.
So I massage his back while he feels the cane’s blessing rolling around inside him (at least, that’s how it feels to me!), and wait till his breathing slows before again telling him to take a deep breath, let it out to my pace, I slow him down till he feels ready and slash and rub again. We find a deep slow rhythm, one strike then another, each time a complete experience. I explore different spots on his back — limited a little by needing to have both hands in position, one to strike and one to rub, but his back is broad, his shoulders are strong, and I’m not going to run out of skin soon. He is breathing with me beautifully — at first he had gasped for breath, and I would wait until his breathing slowed down again, blowing on his back to remind him to breathe. But now he is taking the cane in without tensing at all, just blowing out his breath through the intense part, and taking in a smooth long drink of air as the sensations do their thing inside him.
So now he’s got it, he knows how to do his part in taking in the cane, and I can up the ante. I start hitting sooner, on the edge of what he can process, and harder, now that I’ve got my aim down. He’s breathing with me and it feels like we are one thing, two people doing their parts in riding one energy as the cane flies faster. Soon we are whirling in the center of a hurricane — me shouting, “Keep breathing that’s great excellent I love it you’re so good yes!” and his body clear and flowing under my cane. Wow.
We do this for a while — I’m entranced too, and who knows how much time is passing — later, I think this whole scene took about two and a half hours. While I was in it, there was no time but the next breath, the next stroke: when we are so connected, the top gets pulled into the present too.
Now he has entered what I call the Forever Place, and we could, indeed, do this forever, except that we are, indeed, mortals, and my arm will wear out eventually. So we dance in the storm for a while, and then I get close to his face and hold him and whisper, “You could do this forever, couldn’t you.” He grins, it’s true, I tell him that we will have to find a way to get to closure, and ask him to pick a number from one to seventeen. “Seventeen,” he replies instantly, not a moment’s thought, just wants more. Yummy. So I beat his back with all the force I can muster, and am gratified to see welts starting to come up — this from the boy who couldn’t take sting! And we are still one being, riding a tidal wave of sensation.
So who can count? Eventually I figure we should stop, so with a few last seriously vicious strokes, I take him in my arms and just tell him we need to end. I sit on the arm of the couch, and he throws himself into my arms and shakes for a while — I hold him tight, the connection is bliss, there is no reason to go anywhere, we are perfect right where we are. We take plenty of time to return to a more ordinary state of consciousness, enjoy our blissed out wildness while it lasts.
When we finally get up, and pee, and eat something, and land back on the planet, he makes love to me very sweetly — another long slow scene, very sensual, very hot. He gets me all slowed down with infinite patience so I get to go on another trip. And we get high again, and he turns into a cougar and bites me all over, and I turn into a snake and writhe a lot and it’s all sweetness.
And light.
Connection
When you set out to play with another person, first you need to make connection. This is the beginning of warmup, foreplay, trance induction, whatever you want to call it. The breath is a powerful way to make connection. Some people like to lie like spoons and relax as their breathing synchronizes – it will fall into rhythm even if you don’t try. Spoons is nice, lots of skin, sensual touch, warmth, cuddly feelings. You can also sit tantra-style (the tantra folks call it yab yum), facing each other with your legs wrapped around each other, and share the breath while gazing into each other’s eyes. Some say the eyes are windows into the soul, but we also note that sustained direct eye contact is rare in normal social interactions, and tends to generate, after perhaps a little embarrassment, a sense of deeper intimacy.
If you sit yab yum, you can undulate together, which is very sexy. You will very soon discover that the out-breath can be a form of dry humping, with your crotch banging against your partner’s. If this isn’tworking right, you can adjust your pillows to bring you to the right heights. And since you are going to practice your breath for a while to get to a truly trancy state, the dry humping needs to be entered into without being in a hurry – so what if you’re turned on, you’ve just begun, and it’s not time to get off yet. We want to do this for a long time. Think of when you were a teenager and you could kiss for hours. Try alternating breaths, breathing in and out of your partner’s mouth – more connection.
Other ways of connecting are also about aligning the energies of our bodies. Dossie recalls a top who, after securing her in standing bondage, just stood close behind her for a while, where she couldn’t see, not touching, just there. The connection built palpably while they were doing utterly nothing.
Skin
Touching skin is another happy way to make connection. Start touching shoulders, necks, arms – warm touch, light touch, sensual touch, delicious touch. Focus on what you are touching. Move your hands very slowly. If you are the dominant this time, you can imagine that you are collecting everywhere you touch, making it your own. If you are the submissive, you can imagine that you are worshipping everything you touch, making it sacred. Imagine your own fantasy. Take your time, touch for the sake of the delight it brings, stay in the present, the future will get here soon enough. Dossie finds being touched feels to her like little swarms of snakes traveling inside her body to meet where her friend’s fingers are trailing – she feels the flow of energy opening up as her friend wakes up her skin, and all the nerves become roads from the surface to somewhere deeper inside.
Touch may or may not lead to immediate sexual arousal or desire for orgasm. That may happen later, or not at all. Stay in the moment and stay with the touch, and enjoy it for what it is, and let whatever h
appens go ahead and happen.
Sounds and senses
Another path to trance and turn-on operates by playing with the senses, putting them to unusual uses, giving our senses something else to do, breaking our minds out of their habitual algorithms. The blindfold is the simplest form of sensory deprivation, and has the effect, for many people, of shutting up the verbal thought train and the nagging voices of self-doubt along with vision. Oddly, wearing a blindfold may make a bottom feel safer, less exposed – even though they are more dependent on, and thus more connected to, their top. Helping someone walk around the room while they are blindfolded will probably get you very connected.
Music and rhythm are tremendous stimuli for trance and turn-on. Choose your music carefully. You might want a slow rhythm, or a faster sexy rhythm. Consider avoiding songs with words in any language you understand, as we’re really trying to get away from the language centers and into less commonly traveled parts of our brains.
Silence is powerfully sexy. Your authors once played a kidnapped-pleasure-slave-training scene in which they pretended that they had no language in common. Communication was entirely through touch and body movements, and it worked. We both got very into it and flew out of reality for a while.
Rhythm, especially anything polyrhythmic (that means more than one rhythm at a time, most highly developed in wonderful African ritual music), sends most of us into trance; and dancing to polyrhythmic music, as we have described elsewhere, can be a journey in and of itself. It can be very trancy to be a drum, getting beaten with two hands or canes by a ritual drummer, and to feel the rhythms take you over as you fly away into drum-ness.
The chakras
The chakras are junctures, spots where many people perceive intense energy: seven points along the spine, sometimes represented as a caduceus with coiling snakes, or glowing spots along an inner flute, or disturbances in a waterfall. Here is a list of them, with their traditional colors and locations. There are many individual differences in where we feel them in the body and what colors we might see, so please understand this list as places to start looking.
First Chakra: Root. Red, base of the spine, genitals or anus, connection to the earth.
Second Chakra: Sex. Orange, where your womb is or would be, sexual turn-on.
Third Chakra: Power. Yellow, solar plexus, center of gravity, chi.
Fourth Chakra: Heart. Green, middle of the chest, emotions.
Fifth Chakra: Throat. Sky Blue, center of the neck, speech and peace.
Sixth Chakra: Third Eye. Midnight Blue, between your brows, vision.
Seventh Chakra: Crown. Violet or white, slightly above your head, connection to the universe.
Following is an example of a chakra visualization taken from Dossie’s meditations. She likes to work with the snake image of kundalini. You will find out what you like.
The root chakra at the base of my spine starts out with connecting to the earth. I feel it at the base of the spine, as a sexy red swelling, especially at my asshole. Here we can let go of anything that no longer nourishes us — compost all our cares and woes, grow roses from shit. The root is also a gate of entry, where we can welcome into our bodies intense sensation, sexual penetration, and the red hot energy from the core of the earth. What I imagine at the root is a small snake that forges a path into my body through my anal sphincter, which feels both scary and sexy to me, and then climbs up my spine, pausing at each chakra for more focus. I got to know this snake through a garter snake who lived under my house, and came out and draped herself across our doorstep whenever we did ritual with drums.
She climbs to my second chakra and fattens in the womb, coiling thickly, glowing orange in the crucible. Her skin gets tight and she needs to crawl out of it, like getting born.
Thicker and more invasive, me breathing harder, she progresses up my spine to the third chakra at the solar plexus, where I see a yellow sun whirling into spirals, sometimes shooting out swarms of tiny snakes, and the feeling is of strength, central heating, source of tremendous energy and personal power.
From here Snake crawls up my spine to wrap herself around my heart, constricting rhythmically to massage that muscle and soften up my emotional center. Now I feel harmony and sweet unconditional love. If sadness or fear shows up, my snake comforts me. Bright green ivy sprouts out around the snake and spurts all through my body, tendrils up my arms and out my fingers, branches down to my feet with roots digging into the dear sweet earth. And I get happy. A big foolish grin on my face, yelling with the breath, I am a child without a care in the world, giggling with delight.
Flowing up from my heart to the fifth chakra in my throat, Snake grows huge, charging up to fill my whole body like the trunk of a tree, I am stretched around her. In my throat, she opens her jaws very wide and I yell, I bellow, I scream, I whisper syllables in no particular language, I hiss contentedly. When my throat opens, I feel a tremendous love of my truth, my feelings are clear and real and important. I might cry. Sorrow, grief, anger, joy — the entire range of feelings, shouted out in enthusiasm.
Then Big Snaky pokes her head up into my skull and peers around. She sticks her tongue out through my forehead, as snakes do, testing the air for smell and taste and warmth. A big red eye opens up on the top of Snake’s head, above the two eyes with their vertical pupils: her Eye is mine.
The night sky arches over us full of stars, mystery of darkness, gateway to dreaming, so we play in visions for a while, till Snake gets impatient.
The crown chakra, at or slightly above the top of the skull, is the seventh and final nexus. My skull resists this final opening, like a shell resisting a hatchling, and Big Snaky pokes her head against the roof and pecks and butts until the bone splits and she leaps up to the stars, her mouth gaping open to suck down sheer white light into me. The feeling is brilliant, shining, I know for sure that the cosmos is full of love, that I am loved, everything in the universe is love, love is the real cosmic principle, the initial force from which everything else flows.
And I am strung on Snake like a bead on a string, on kundalini’s journey from the earth to the stars. She flows, and I get to ride.
That’s how I do it. You, of course, will do it your way, which will also be wonderful and amazing. And different. And yours.
Ritual containers, ritual paths
When we talk about ritual, many people assume that we’re talking about something formal, with candles and incantations. That kind of ritual works for some people and not for others, but it’s not necessarily what we mean when we talk about ritual: part of your morning ritual is probably brushing your teeth; your scene ritual may have to do with turning down the lights, setting out the toys, connecting beforehand with a hug or a collar.
Ritual has two uses (among many) that are important to how we get into states of ecstasy, how we travel safely, and how we get back out again. For our purposes, ritual can be like a container that defines the mental space we are operating in, and that protects that space, keeping it, and us, safe and inviolate. We have spoken already about how so much of what we do is about letting down boundaries to find new paths, and to enter into more unbounded states of consciousness. So when we let down our everyday boundaries, what will keep us safe? We can use rituals to set and define sacred space. Many players borrow ritual from pagan practices, and might make a circle around the space we intend to play in with sage, or water, or herbs, and a prayer to banish everything that doesn’t belong in the space – anything intrusive or inharmonious from outside, and any distractions or anxieties that might rise up from inside ourselves. For example, we might decide to leave agonizing about the size of our bodies outside of this circle. Some rituals make a place for that – a glass of ice water, or a trash can. When you put parts of yourself outside the circle, you need to promise them that you will come back and reconnect with them when you leave the circle. Our cares and woes won’t accept permanent banishment – wouldn’t life be easy if they did? But they can learn to delay gratification. Y
ou might even provide them with a comfy place, like a baby blanket, to rest while you travel elsewhere.
The goal of setting a circle is to be in a safe and contained space, with its own particular rules, and where we intend to behave with particularly high consciousness. So we are protected, and reminded that we are sacred.
Dossie likes to walk a symbol path through the four elements when she sets up sacred space – air, fire, earth and water each contributing their own special wisdom to the endeavor at hand. However you make the space, and however you enclose it with your imaginary circle, when you are through, you will exit by reversing your steps: walking the circle in the other direction, blowing out the candles you have lit, with perhaps a few words of thanks for whatever wonderful journey you got to go on. Closure is important, and can be as simple as a warm cuddle until you are both ready to get up and go about life in whatever extraordinary way comes next.
When you pick your cares and woes back up, you may find yourself able to welcome them home with more insight and compassion than you had before you dropped them off.
The second use of ritual, for our purposes, is to create a symbol path that gets us to the state of consciousness we are looking for: the role we will play, the acts that will open us wider than we thought we could. Roles are in and of themselves the ritual, the story of the scene the myth we are exploring. Costumes can be symbols of shifting consciousness, and nakedness a further, sometimes scarier opening.
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