How to find your intuition
If you feel like you need some help finding your intuition, here is a meditation you can try sometime when you are by yourself. Practice it a couple of times a week. You will find that it gets easier and easier, and that your intuition will be easier to find when you need it.
This is not a short-term project, but it it’s kind of a fun one, and we think you and your partners will both reap a lot of benefits from it – not just in the bedroom or dungeon, but in all your personal interactions.
Sit in a comfortable chair in a place where you won’t be interrupted for at least twenty minutes. Make sure you re not hungry or thirsty, that no light is annoyingly in your eyes, and that your bladder is empty. You may wish to place a notebook and pen nearby in case you have any thoughts that you want to write down afterwards.
Close your eyes and breathe deeply from a place deep in your belly. With each breath, let outside worries and distractions drop away, and move fully into your body. Simply breathe like that for a couple of minutes.
Now, bring your attention to your toes. With the next breath, notice if there is any tension in your toes, and exhale that tension out. With the following breath, exhale out any tension you find in your feet. Then your ankles. Then your calves. Keep on breathing out any tension you find in your body until you have gone all the way up your legs, hips, torso, chest, up your hands and arms, shoulders, neck, face and scalp. While you search for tension, if you find anything about your position in the chair that seems uncomfortable, adjust it.
Now, imagine yourself standing at the base of a large hollow tree. Step into the tree, into the dimness. There you will find a circular staircase leading down, lit with torches so you can see. With each of your breaths, take a step down this staircase, until you have reached the bottom.
At the bottom of the staircase you will find yourself in an open area with a stream running through it. Look around you and register what you see. You might want to explore this space with a dance, or feel your toes in the stream. Spend some time in this space. This is your own space, the space where your intuition lives. You can come back here anytime you want to.
Now, with your mind, invite your intuition to join you here, in whatever form it chooses. Your intuition may be a person, an animal, a voice or perhaps even just a feeling. Only you will know what form your intuition will take.
When your intuition arrives, spend a moment registering the form of your intuition. Then see if there is anything your intuition wishes to say to you. Are there questions you wish to ask it? Some suggestions: “How can I invite you into my life?” and “How will you guide me?” and “How willyou connect me with others?” You may have some other questions of your own.
When you have finished talking to your intuition, wish it goodbye for now and send it back to where it lives. Turn back to the staircase. Continuing your breathing, slowly climb the stairs, gradually bringing yourself back into normal consciousness as you do so.
Spend a minute resuming normal awareness and bringing yourself back into your body. Open your eyes.
Did your intuition tell you anything that you ‘d like to remember later? If so, write it down in your notebook.
Next time you’re feeling annoyed by a thought at the periphery of your consciousness, or having trouble reading someone, or otherwise feeling stuck with a problem that your conscious mind isn’t having much luck with, try summoning a mental picture of your intuition and see if it has any messages for you.
Mind Journeys
Whee — a whole day with Daddy! This was an unprecedentedly rare opportunity, since he had a full-time job and I had a primary relationship; usually we only got to squeeze in an hour or two in an evening. So we’d set up a lengthy and elaborate role-play with plenty of our favorite nasty sexy punishment games. I didn’t know exactly what he had in mind, but he’d asked me to bring along “something to be punished for.” Knowing the kinds of things he liked, I’d borrowed a handful of extremely smutty magazines from my roommate, and showed up as my nine-year-old alterego “Jessie,” in pigtails, an indecently short schoolgirl outfit, and a hangdog expression.
All had gone quite satisfactorily so far: Jessie had been a very naughty girl indeed. Daddy and I had been doing some magnificent improv based on the magazines, and it had evolved that Jessie had not only showed up at school with the smut, but she’d been showing it to her little friends, and she’d been selling peeks for 25 cents a look, and she’d stolen the magazines from the corner store, and her purse was full of against-the-rules candy she’d swiped while she was in there, and she’d told the principal that she’d taken the magazines out of Daddy’s nightstand! — all this, of course, extracted from her after many threats and many more spankings. What could possibly be a nicer way to while away a pleasant Tuesday?
But then Daddy decided that I had to apologize for my terrible behavior. He sat me down at the dining table with a lined pad and a ball-point pen to write a formal letter to the principal, Mr. Fisher, detailing my many transgressions and offering my apologies.
I was instantly catapulted nearly forty years back in time. At eight years old, I was promoted to do reading and writing with kids a grade ahead of me. The reading, and the content part of the writing, were no problem — I could easily have kept up with children a lot older than that. But I was a poorly coordinated child even for my age, and kids a grade ahead of mine were learning the flowing Palmer cursive that was being taught to schoolchildren in the early ‘60s — hand motions far beyond my physical abilities. I spent hours that year struggling, frustrated and tearful, over smudged pieces of lined yellow paper, trying to get my letters to look like the perfect ones on the strips that hung over the blackboard in every classroom, and failing every time... not understanding why I was the only one having to do this special, impossible work, and bringing home report cards with A in every square except for the mocking Cs in Handwriting.
Daddy would never have known the difference had I decided to print my letter to Mr. Fisher, but it never occurred to me to do that: I was nine years old, and I wrote in cursive. Laboriously, I wrote in the best Palmer cursive I could manage: “Dear Mr. Fisher: I am sorry for being a bad girl. Love, Jessie Hardy.” I tore off the paper, and handed it to him hopefully.
He looked at it and tore it up. “You have to write everything you did wrong and apologize for each thing separately,” he said. “And you don’t sign ‘Love’ to a letter to the principal, you sign ‘Sincerely yours’.”
Mutely, I began again: “Dear Mr. Fisher...”
He found fault with that letter, too, and made me write it over. And the next one, and the next one — I’d left out one of my naughtinesses, or I’d spelled a word wrong (OK, so I did that one on purpose), or it was too short, or too messy. I sank deeper and deeper into my old space of shame, anger and frustration, closer and closer to tears.
Finally, abruptly, he accepted my latest letter — to my surprise, since I didn’t think it was as good as its predecessor — and we moved on to more spankings and sex and fun. (He told me later that he’d seen me getting more upset than he felt that he wanted to handle, and so had decided to move on.)
So my special day with Daddy had turned out to have a special gift in it — a visit to my own past, and a reawakening of a buried memory, a chance to re-experience feelings of injustice and frustration — and to see where, perhaps, similar feelings today might have their origins. Not bad for a day of playing hooky and a couple of pieces of borrowed smut.
We have spoken so far mostly of journeys into altered states in which the vehicle that carts us down the road to somewhere else is the body: sensations in the body, stresses to the body, the breath, the skin, physical connection to another, intense SM stimulations, sex, or any other way the body can lead us into ecstasy.
But within the enormous repertoire of BDSM, there are also many journeys in which the vehicle is the mind... where what is sexy, what raises the life force, what wakes up kundalini, is mind
games.
Who knows what evil lurks...?
We have a theory, perhaps better described as a metaphor, for how SM works in the psyche. This theory explains, for us, a lot of our drive to travel in dark dirty places, and why playing these games often results in our feeling more whole, more ourselves and perhaps healed in some way.
Carl Jung’s “map” of the mind (please remember that the map is not the territory – this is a metaphor!) can look something like the ocean. If you think of it like this, the air is our everyday consciousness: things like grocery lists, things we do for work and so on. The water is the unconscious mind, which we usually perceive in nonverbal or nonintellectual forms like feelings and dreams — the oceanic depths of the psyche, where are found sunken pirate ships, fabulous stories, archetypal creatures like mermaids and dragons. At the very bottom of this metaphorical ocean Jung places the Collective Unconscious, which he saw as the divine energy that animates and connects us all, the gate to spiritual awareness.
Jung talks about a gray area between conscious and unconscious which he calls the preconscious mind. It’s sort of like tide pools: sometimes you can see it, sometimes you can’t, sometimes it’s under the water, sometimes it’s in the air. Here we find dreams and fantasies, fleeting desires, experiences we only occasionally remember. Like the creatures we see in tidepools, certain parts of ourselves thrive better in this alternating environment than anywhere else.
Now imagine a big iceberg floating on this ocean, a small part visible above the surface, much more of it hidden beneath the water. Jung called it the Shadow, and thought of it as the repository of everything we have forbidden ourselves to be aware of: painful feelings, shame, trauma, family secrets, the things Aunt Edith did when she had too much to drink, cultural taboos, incest and sin, doubts we have about what we are told we are supposed to believe. We have all been brainwashing icky stuff from our awareness since birth. A lot of our deposits into this scary account were made when we were small children and afraid of things we no longer fear. Everything in the Shadow carries a huge emotional charge: Forbidden!
We suspect that many of the dark fantasies we love to explore in SM are paths to the Shadow – paths to parts of ourselves that we wish to bring back into consciousness, split-off parts that we want to welcome back so that we can be whole. Seen in this way, the theater of SM is a sort of psychodrama, tracing a scary painful path to some dark cave in our iceberg, but with someone else to share in the journey and act as mirror to validate our experience. What if we can walk that path and write a script that gives the story a new ending – a denouement that resolves conflicts, leaves us feeling more sane and more powerful? What if our companion on this journey, our top or our bottom, then sees us as lovable or desirable? What if when we shoot that story full of eroticism we are injecting it with the healing power of the life force? What if bringing our dark fears into the light of awareness can heal us, make us more whole?
This is what we and the players we know have done, time after time, in the mind journeys of deep BDSM play. For many of us, ecstasy and traveling in the Shadow are one and the same thing: from the messy bottom of our fears, from the roots in the dirt, up through us and out to the cosmos. Many, many people find healing in the Shadow.
We believe that shadowplay often entails a different sort of journey than the embodied practices we’ve described so far in this book – a sort of emotional or spiritual deconstruction, a breaking down of the component parts so that they can be reassembled into a structure that feels stronger and better afterwards. Janet writes here about her discovery of such a possibility:
I bottomed for the first time this weekend to someone new, someone who I think will become very important in my life. And I already know that he’s used to playing very differently than me — not with the simple straightforward give-me-pain-and-let-me-fly scenes that I’ve always excelled at, but with twisty little games of give-and-take, mindfuck and control, confusion and misdirection: a whole new roadmap for me, as different from my skydiving ecstasy as the jungle is from the Antarctic.
Partway through the scene, I felt myself teetering on an unknown edge, and wasn’t sure I liked it. I couldn’t find the words then, but what I figured out later was this: there’s a kind of SM that’s about getting to win, and a kind of SM that’s about getting to lose. And I’m used to playing the kind that’s about getting to win. About both people getting to win.
I once watched a workshop/demonstration on interrogation play come close to a fistfight, when the demo bottom realized that being interrogated meant that you didn’t get to win. You could see it cross his face — this was going to hurt more that he could take, and all these people were watching, and there was an awful moment when it was clear that he was about to take a swing at the instructor (who was about half his size and twice his age), and then he safeworded. I felt awful for the instructor, and I knew just how the bottom felt. Winning feels awfully good, and if you’re not turned on to it, losing feels lousy.
Last year, when I was recovering from a painful breakup, I started wanting scenes where I didn’t win. In fact, even when people tried to give me scenes where I won, it didn’t work — I broke down anyway. I didn’t have it in me to be big: I needed to be small, to fall apart into all my little component parts so that they could reassemble in new ways. I sought out some of the strongest, meanest sadists I knew, people who were willing to push me further that I’d ever gone before — frankly, further than I’d have been willing to push me under the same circumstances, right up to the edges of consent, into full cathartic shrieking begging meltdown. It was then that I began to learn something of the reward of smallness, of being reduced to my irreducible minimum, of finding out what I was made of.
It takes trust to go this far. When I bottom like this, I trust that my top will respect the bare quivering pink self that’s all that’s left when I let myself lose: a hint of the wrong kind of mockery, the slightest indication the next day that anyone’s opinion of me has been lowered, and I may never, ever be able to go there again. And I could never top anyone this way whom I didn’t trust absolutely — it takes the strongest person in the world to let themselves be this weak, and if I can’t trust their strength I certainly don’t feel safe playing with their weekness.
So now, when I look back on my experience of this weekend, I think I may have discovered a new limit for myself. Once upon a time, I might have said, “No losing.” Now, I think my limit is, “No losing on the first date.” The second date?... well, that’s an essay for another night, I guess.
Roles and games
Before we get too deeply into the subject of roles, we want to clarify one issue. We’ve talked to a lot of people who are turned off to the idea of role-playing, imagining something very theatrical like Robin Hood and Maid Marian, because they think it would feel artificial and awkward to them. Our belief is that everything we do in life is to some degree role-playing, and most especially that everything we do during sex or BDSM has to do with playing roles. We suspect that the way you behave with a lover or play-partner isn’t the same as the way you behave with your boss or your mother-in-law. So in this section, when we discuss roles and games, we’re not necessarily talking about very theatrical scripts with props and costumes, but simply about the intensified roles that we adopt in order to find our turn-on and our ecstasy.
Roles we play in mind games tend toward archteypal extremes: we polarize the power between dominant and submissive to turn up the voltage.
In Janet’s scene at the beginning of this chapter, the roles were polarized by age, by making one player the child and the other the adult in power. In other scenes, the top might have the flavor of the teacher, the guru, the empress, the slave trainer, etc. The heat of the scene often comes from the extreme polarization of roles, with the dominant taking on enormous power and with it enormous responsibility, and the submissive giving over that power for the delight of feeling free in a myriad different ways.
BDSM primarily
focused on the mind journey is often called DS, or dominance and submission, to distinguish it from sadomasochism, which gets defined as playing with intense stimulations like pain and sex. Actually, in our experience, much of DS involves physical connection, and much of SM involves mental domination, so there’s probably more gray area than pure anything. Your authors aren’t known for valuing purity of any sort.
What role does the role play?
The roles we play in SM, and the power exchanges we practice, offer us infinite ways to connect, and present many confusions of which we need to stay aware. Especially the difficult truth that who we are in our fantasies is part of us – an important part, but not the only part.
Many submissives’ fantasies are of the big bad wolf, the Klingon, the ice queen, the arrogant unyielding bitch or son-of-a-. They dream of complete subjugation by an ever-dominant and ever-certain Someone. And the same submissive may also want a romantic hero or heroine who will gaze into their innermost soul and wholeheartedly accept whatever is to be found there. They want to be cherished, respected, recognized for the valuable beings they are.
Therein lies the paradox of dominance. Love and domination seem, at least on the surface, to be mutually exclusive. How can we love unconditionally while demanding subjugation of will? If we love someone just the way they are, how can we require them to be another way? If we want them to be happy, how can we make them do things that they don’t want to? Yet if we don’t provide adequate subjugation, if we don’t enforce our will on theirs, they feel uncared for, abandoned. It’s enough to make a boy or girl go vanilla.
The problem arises, we think, when people get “stuck” — stuck in the source material for their fantasies of control, ownership, force. We all want our play to seem “real” — some go so far as to disdain the word “play, “ insisting that what they do is real ownership, real control. And the harder we push to make it real, the more we may lose track of an essential truism of kink:
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