16
S/M SPIRITUALITY: FROM THE TOP
Sex is spiritual. We live in a culture that has historically insisted that sex and spirituality are mutually exclusive, in a country founded by puritans who were convinced that God hated sex. But as radical perverts, our experience and our belief is that sex is spiritual, and that a simple honest orgasm is a spiritual experience.
Sexuality has been a path for both of us – the road we originally took to question our individual and social programming. Discovering the ways in which we as women could grasp our sexuality was a powerful way to heal from our childhoods and from our sex-negative culture. We have proceeded from that healing to further self-exploration, and to celebrating our spirituality in the practice of S/M.
Michel Foucault, a 20th-century philosopher whose insights into the relationship between power and sex have informed a great deal of current thinking about BDSM, tells us that attempts to distinguish and set apart specific “sexualities” are an artifact of a culture that fears and fences off sex, especially unusual sex. Your authors believe that if our culture truly accepted its sexuality, we would all instinctively understand that sexual energy flows through everything all the time, like spiritual energy, like the life force, like the Tao, like a river. The cosmic river flows through each of us, bearing nourishment, washing away what we no longer need, making us wet. With S/M as our boat, we can travel on that river to and beyond our wildest dreams.
SHADOW AND SPIRIT
Remember the diagram in the previous chapter of Carl Jung’s map of the human mind? Jung understood spirituality as both a personal and a universal awareness that he called the Collective Unconscious. We told you before about the Shadow, that dark and scary reservoir of everything we have decided to banish from our awareness. And in this murky realm we find the archetypes we play with, the pantheons of villains and rescuers, that offer us scripts for exploring our Unconscious minds, and ultimately that Collective Unconscious. We explained how we use S/M to explore our darkness, illuminate it with our clear awareness, and reclaim forbidden territory as psychological healing, a way of becoming whole. And all of this is spiritual.
When we add ritual to our S/M, performing it with spiritual intention, we can travel deeper yet… beyond the personal unconscious mind and into universal consciousness, or spiritual awareness. So the shadow, our personal garbage pit, becomes the gateway through which we pass to travel in realms beyond ordinary consciousness, like Crow who dances between the worlds.
S/M RITUAL AS SPIRITUAL PATH
Ritual S/M is edge play directed to the purpose of attaining altered states of consciousness, of traveling beyond our habitual perceptual screens to another way of being in which everything becomes special, extraordinary, brilliant. Goals for such a scene might be a quest for guidance or a vision, the pursuit of personal truth and understanding, or the experience of spiritual communion for its own sake.
S/M players have devised rituals for these purposes by mixing our sexual exploration and our own personal mythologies (our S/M roles and stories, like The Kidnapping of the Pleasure Slave) with spiritual practices we learn from other traditions: kundalini yoga, the rites of Kali, vision quest, wherever we find the images that help us manifest what is beyond our ability to imagine. Take, for example, a scene based on the simple act of chanting. Dossie recalls:
My bottom and I were in deep grief over a mutual friend and mentor we had lost to AIDS, and we had decided to seek release in ritual S/M. I tied her to a padded table and flogged her to the point of weeping, all the while chanting “Om Krim Kalyae Namaha,” an invocation to Kali, the terrifying Hindu goddess of death and birth. As I struck with the whip in rhythm with the chant, I felt myself go into trance, the words of the chant serving to occupy my conscious mind, leaving me free to feel the energy flowing through the whip, my bottom’s grief surging beneath me, until I felt in myself Kali the inexorable, the implacable force of nature which dictates that everything we love must die. My partner struggled with her grief, writhing and thrashing, held safe by the bondage, and wept copiously, chanting “Jaia Ma,” an invocation to the Mother goddess, over and over, until both of our grief and despair had been fully poured out, and we had reached a sense of exhausted peace with the universe. The Hindus say of Kali that there is no way to understand her, no logic to explain her, no justification – she is like a storm, we have no choice but to love her, and in that love, come to acceptance of our human condition.
EDGE PLAY. The edge in edge play is found wherever your edge is, wherever things start to feel risky, where you start to feel vulnerable, the edge of the cliff that looks over your personal abyss. Playing on the edge challenges the top into heightened awareness. A bondage top of our acquaintance specializes in rope suspension, the art of hanging a bottom in mid air supported by nothing but rope. The challenge of playing on the edge of her skill and knowledge brings her into her top space, and awakens her psychic and spiritual power. Sometimes she has visions and sees animal spirits. She sees her task as to open and balance the body so the spirit – kundalini energy – can flow through freely. When the bondage sends the bottom flying, sex may have a place as a grounding sensation, bringing the person back into his or her body in a state of bliss. In the balance of bondage, we play with suspension, with suspense, with gravity, with the energy of the entire planet.
People experience spirituality in many different ways, and all of them are valid. It has been said that any path, walked with mindfulness and honesty, can lead to enlightenment. What different descriptions of spiritual awakening often have in common is the feeling of casting off everyday consciousness and opening to beautiful, potent energy from inside or outside yourself. BDSM has the power to open up perceptions so that you can see more than you usually do, become hyperconscious. Imagine the slave who is completely attuned to his master’s needs, wants, and whims, reading signals with extraordinary accuracy, predicting a desire before it even becomes conscious. Now imagine that hyperawareness extended into the outer and inner universe…
Let’s not forget that ordinary consciousness is really extraordinary too, a miracle whose workings we have not even begun to fathom. Even our defenses, that we complain about when we have difficulty opening up, should be honored, because they form the skin that protects and contains us. Our ego is both our mask and our means of communication, how we define the boundaries between ourselves and the person beside us, how we hide and how we show ourselves. So honor your defenses, your shell, your mask, even when you are in the process of putting them aside. Thank them for protecting you.
ROLES IN RITUAL. To top in ritual S/M, you need to be a responsible guide. You need to train yourself, develop your own spiritual practice, and educate yourself far beyond what you can learn from reading this one chapter in this one small book. You must be ready to care for your bottom, to operate from your own most serious wisdom, to trust and honor your bottom’s wisdom, and always to empower your bottom. To use ritual to aggrandize yourself or to bolster your flagging ego by belittling your bottom is unethical, and a violation of sacred space. The priest’s role is often to serve the communicant.
When both people in a ritual let their masks down they recognize one another in a way that permits that validation of all the parts of themselves. They may express those parts as personae they have discovered through the archetypes, the images of the divine manifest in human form that we call gods and goddesses – or they may simply feel what is absolutely real, needing no further definition.
Start by knowing yourself, and knowing your intention. Be clean in your intentions, and keep the boundaries clear. Respect that the bottom is allowing you to come into his or her most precious places, opening up to allow you deeper contact, contributing spirit and courage to this journey.
S/M ritual requires mutual openness, which means that you, the top, must also be willing to expose yourself, to get vulnerable, to make connection. It is possible to open a bottom’s psyche up with good ritual technique, but to
pour yourself into him when he is open, and to allow him to pour into you, requires that you be open too. When you open the energy in yourself it becomes a light by which you can find that energy in another. You put yourself in a position that requires empathy and psychic connection, and so you are more likely to find it.
The top starts out as a caretaker, and that task and the empathy it requires can open up the dance for you. When we set out to teach a spiritual truth to another, we must consciously grasp our own wisdom: the final stage of learning is to teach what we know to another. The skilled top becomes the shaman, the dramaturge, the spirit guide, the magician who pulls down energy from the cosmos. The bottom contributes to and shares in that energy as you send him or her out spinning into personal visions, while you, as top, get to ride your bottom’s energy and discover yet more of your own potential, your potency, your power. When we see our spirit reflected in the magic mirror of our bottom’s glowing eyes, we become free to realize the god/dess within.
RITUAL PRACTICE
So how do you make an S/M scene into a ritual? A ritual is the performance of a series of symbolic acts that work like keys to change our state of awareness. To do ritual successfully, we begin by creating a sacred space, a place free of interruptions or everyday constraints, a safe space of mutual trust and respect, an optimum space to focus on the journeying. We clear the everyday stuff out of the way so we can feel the subtler energy of spiritual consciousness.
Start with cleansing both of you, individually or together. A bath scented with fresh lemons or a bubble bath will do fine – it’s the attention you focus on the cleansing that achieves it. Imagine washing all the tension off and letting it gurgle down the drain. Let your attention travel over your entire body, feeling how the warm water relaxes each part, allowing vibrant energy to fill you up. Visualize each little source of tension, each little worry, each little attachment dissolving and flowing into the sea.
Pack up all your cares and woes… try writing them on a piece of paper and putting the paper in your freezer for a time. Respect your cares by promising them that you will return to pick them up again when your ritual is over. They may be different by then.
Cleanse the space, the room in which you will play out your ritual. Sweep, dust, remove dissonant objects, bring in fresh sheets and towels, sweeten the air with herbs or incense. Perform these humble acts with all the consciousness you can bring to them.
Create a focus in the space, a setting for your journey, with candles, music, pillows to nestle in, perhaps an altar of objects that carry special significance. In time you may develop your own symbol system – images and stories, deities, crystals, bones, whatever resonates for you – your personal symbol structure is your web of connection with the flow of nature and the divine, keys that open the doors to heightened states of consciousness.
In ritual space, choose carefully who and what you allow close to you – when your mask is off, you are both more open and more vulnerable. As we cleanse and protect our sacred space, we build a safe hearth to contain some very wild fires.
PLANNING AND NEGOTIATING. Rituals get negotiated just like any other scene, by talking about what is important to each of you, preparing to validate and respect everyone’s needs and limits. An S/M ritual may or may not incorporate genital sex. It may or may not incorporate pain. It may or may not include opening the skin. And then again it may. You can ritualize anything by doing it with intention, and you give a special significance to instruments that you employ in ritual. So clean all your toys too.
The physical focus of a ritual might be a flogging, or other intense stimulus to raise endorphins. Bondage can be ritual in and of itself, a meditation on rope and constraint, muscles and limbs, balance. You can open the skin with piercings or cutting, for the sensation of it, to imprint a mark of symbolic meaning, or to connect through that opening.
Good ritual has a beginning, a middle and an end. It starts by defining where you are, by cleaning and by forming a circle or enclosed psychic space, and by defining your intention – perhaps with a statement to your partner, perhaps with an invocation to whatever deity has relevance to your purpose. In the middle you perform the acts you have agreed upon, and see where they take you. The end is closure, in which you return to normal consciousness, often by going back over the symbolic path that you walked in the beginning, thanking the powers and deities on the way, and returning any energy you may have raised that you can no longer use. Some players offer that energy to the greater good, like world peace or healing the environment: the Buddhists call this a dedication of merit.
Ritual works. Symbolic acts have real consequences in our lives, the power of pulling down energy to manifest in the real world, of bringing spirit into our bodies and onto the planet, of realizing. It is dangerous to treat ritual frivolously, as if symbolic acts won’t change anything. Magic works. Take care, be mindful. Have respect.
We are using the metaphors of power and cosmic energy interchangeably, because our understanding is that personal power is the universal life force, power that we can access whether we envision it as coming from within or from outside us. Janet, when a scene is working well, feels energy from some external source pour into her like white light – others report seeing that light in her too. When this is happening, she feels as if she can do no wrong, that she is totally connected to what she is doing with her bottom. Dossie feels the energy welling up from within herself, or perhaps from underneath her, power from the earth’s hot molten interior, and when that power is with her she also feels totally empowered and in total communication with her bottom.
With that power – personal, planetary, cosmic – comes the understanding that we are all manifestations of the same energy, and that we have the power to change how we manifest ourselves. This is the power of transformation, and of transcendence. To manifest is to realize, to make real and thereby understand. In S/M we take a fantasy, a myth, a vision or a dream and manifest it, live it out in our bodies, sculpt it with the forces of endorphins, eroticism and consciousness, and bring it into the material world.
17
THE LIGHT THAT SHINES IN THE DARKNESS
Who tells me Thou art dark
Oh my Mother divine?
Thousands of suns and moons
From Thy body do shine!
— translation of a Hindu chant to Kali
We sadomasochists are always playing out heroic myths, and exploring altered awareness. What lies beyond the edge, over the cliff? The journey leads into darkness, into the unknown, where we must walk with care because we cannot see our footing, like exploring in caves deep under the earth. Thus, all BDSM is to some degree ritual – a voyage of self-discovery, a journey through the darkness and toward the light of transcendence.
The darkness may be of our own creating, but we still cannot see what is in there until we are courageous enough to enter it. Then it is our own consciousness that becomes the light that shines in the darkness, that illuminates our inner landscape as if we carried spotlights in our metaphysical (or metaphorical) eyes.
The archangel of the territory of the Earth is Lucifer, often pictured as a frightening goatish demon of evil and darkness. But the name Lucifer actually means light-bearer; he is the fallen angel who goes into unfathomable darkness with an unquenchable light inside him, and who carries the power of the villain and of the emancipator.
It is within the darkness of the earth, in the cool depths where seeds germinate, that the material of waste and decay is transformed into fertilizer for new life. When we evoke our personal demons in an S/M scene, we dig up the darkest and most difficult aspects of life’s journey, and with the magic of erotic energy transform that shit into our rose garden.
S/M is sex magic, and you are the magician. The bottom is the cauldron in which you perform your miracles. Wave your wand, and make magic happen… as you mix your bottom’s power and your own, heat them up with the fire of passion, and with that potent precious power turn lead into gold, m
isery into exaltation, bondage into liberation and sex into revelation.
So have a great journey, with our blessings – and more power to you.
Catherine A. Liszt
Dossie Easton
January, 2003
RESOURCE GUIDE
We can’t possibly include all the excellent resources – print, online and groups – that can help you in your journey as a bottom. Please consider this section as a jumping-off point so you can go on making discoveries on your own.
BOOKS
Note: Some of the best books on BDSM are currently out of print. We encourage you to seek out used copies if possible.
Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M, by Samois. Alyson Publications, Boston.
The Complete Guide to Safer Sex, Ted McIlvenna et al. Barricade Books, Fort Lee, NJ.
Consensual Sadomasochism: How to Talk About It and How to Do It Safely, by William A. Henkin, Ph.D. and Sybil Holiday. Daedalus Publishing, Los Angeles.
Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission, by Gloria G. Brame, William D. Brame, and Jon Jacobs. Random House, NY.
Exhibitionism for the Shy, by Carol Queen. Down There Press, San Francisco.
Jay Wiseman’s Erotic Bondage Handbook, by Jay Wiseman. Greenery Press, Emeryville, CA.
Learning the Ropes: A Basic Guide to Safe and Fun S-M Lovemaking by Race Bannon. Daedalus Publishing, Los Angeles.
Leatherfolk, edited by Mark Thompson. Alyson Publications, Los Angeles.
Leathersex: A Guide for the Curious Outsider and the Serious Player, by Joseph Bean. Daedalus Publishing, Los Angeles.
The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual, edited by Pat Califia. Alyson Publications, Boston.
The New Topping Book Page 18
