At the moment, between knitting and sewing and cooking and trying to write a novel, I’m working my way through reading Radical Ecstasy
Radical Ecstasy was published about ten years ago – it’s an oldy but a goody, as they say – and it’s about using S/M techniques to reach ecstatic states.
… Sort of.
It’s about rough sex as religious/spiritual experience;
It’s about building western style tantra techniques into kink and pain-play scenes;
It’s about sado/masochism as sex/magic as sacred/mystery;
It’s about sex and kink and woo.
Right up my alley in other words.
I love the woo that I find in my leather community. I love the discussions that come up at leather women’s brunch, talking about a particular colour of blue and how it matches from person to person to person even though it shows up in different ways and for different reasons, it means the same thing. The way people get cuttings or brandings to commemorate something important to them. The way we can have quiet conversations about I think I might be a vampire and where to find sustainable sources of food.
I love listening to Lee Harrington talk about energy and sacred sexuality on his podcasts, and poking my head into the kinky spirit-workers’ blogosphere to see what the Tashlins and other folks of that ilk are up to. I love Barbara Carrellas’ work on ecstatic states as necessary to human well-being
But trying to translate that work into my own life is… harder for me than I was expecting.
Again and again, the message comes back to me: Slow Down!
And, again and again, I ignore it. I rush and push; reach for the vibrator and forget to breath; try to move too fast out of fear that I’ll run out of energy, run out of steam, before I can get her into the Blue; try to hit those high notes without warming up first; lose patience with myself and flip my girl so that she doesn’t have to wait (and wait, and wait, and wait) for me to maybe get off. Embarrassed by my less-than-reliable “results”, as if there had ever been any goal beyond getting each other naked and hot, awake and aroused, hooked into each other with all our nerve endings singing.
I have to slow down.
I have to push through (or away from) the shame and the fear of not having enough or being enough, of wanting too much or not being able to follow it all the way through.
I have to remember that she’ll crave, in her body, the pain that feeds me if I work her skin up to it sloooooowly. I have to remember that I will have the energy reserves to keep it up if I actually give myself a warm-up, too.
There’s vulnerability here. In the slowness, in the warming up and working up. The fearsome chance that I’ll crack my voice, get too tired, resent the amount of time/work/energy this is taking/draining from me… and not see it through. That it, or I, won’t be as good as I once was.
A zillion years ago, I read The Mists of Avalon
This feels like that.
The fear of Doing It Wrong, of not being good enough, of having lost “too much”, of not being able to do X or Y or Z “anymore” just because I’m rusty. The shame around needing to relearn this technique, that breath, that patience with myself. The fear that, if I let myself open up, that I’ll just cry and cry and cry and not find ecstasy, not find my power, not find joyful release… just fall into a bottomless pit of grief and not be able to pull myself out unless I stop feeling again.
This is, I think, clearly about more than “just sex” at this point. But it’s all tied up together. Sex, death, music, ritual, orgasm, scene, power, magic… It’s all part and parcel of the same flow. And I think a lot of it, a lot of getting it back and making it something I can reach for without a lot of angst, comes back to breath and patience, to slowing down. To having the will to wait it out, to warm myself (and my partner) up appropriately. To open myself, with each breath, unblock and unfreeze and let wonder back in. Let magic come through again.
syrens 
Reblogged this on Urban Meliad and commented:
Reblogging this from Syrens as it fits on this blog as well. 🙂
Many people, when starting out on some spiritual practice, feel a sense of urgency about it. If they want to learn to meditate, they sit down and try to sit for an hour in complete silence. When they repeatedly fail to achieve whatever it is they thought they would get, they beat themselves up and/or decide the practice is somehow “not for them”. Even now, when I get new meditation students, I start them with 3 minute homework meditations, and they look at me like I’m putting them in water wings and gently walking them into the shallowest part of the pool.
And yes, that’s what I’m doing. Totally. The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with that.
When we are children, there are certain benchmarks that equate age and level of achievement. People can usually tell you when they started readings, when they learned the multiplication tables, and so on. There were standardized tests that said, “If you can’t pass this, you’re not a sixth grader.” Teacher began subjects under the assumption that you had picked up the basics last year.
And if you didn’t keep up, if you struggled or just plain couldn’t add (like me), you were considered “special needs” and would be educationally, and more importantly, socially removed from your peers and placed in a class with other students with wildly different levels of ability. Unless something miraculous happened, chances were that you would be in remedial classes for the rest of your educational career; no one would assume that you were interested in pursuing higher education, and would gently suggest learning a trade.
With all of that baggage surrounding learning things, it’s no surprise that as adults, we approach new subjects with a great amount of anxiety. If we see someone younger than us with a higher level of study in a subject, we may assume that we’re *already* behind, or it may even be too late to start. When you find yourself in conversations about subjects you’re interested in, it can be difficult to admit you’re still at the 101 level. You might be afraid that if you were honest, the people who you could most benefit from being around will snub you and call you a newb.
Where this all leads, is that when someone is passionate about a new practice or subject, they pressure themselves to pick it up as quickly as possible. Read one book and become an expert! Try a new skill five times and if it doesn’t work, it’s obviously not meant for you. Or maybe you aren’t meant for it. It’s so much easier to try and fail as an excuse for not revealing vulnerability; it sounds much cooler to say, “Oh, I tried being a vegetarian three years ago, but I love chicken wings too much” than to say, “After a week of tofu and broccoli, I hated it and decided to give up.”
I try to encourage people to see things as an epic adventure poem. The hero – you – comes from humble beginnings and decides to take a plunge into the unknown. Many times the hero will want to turn back and go hide in their hobbit hole and feel safe and comfortable again, but their passion keeps them pushing forwards even if their bellies grumble and their feet hurt. At first, they feel like they fail at everything they try, but as the story progresses they begin to develop muscle memory and they win a battle or two. By the peak of the Big Battle, they’re still not An Expert, but they know enough to get what they need (and yet can rely on other things they’re already good at to apply things in a new way).
I didn’t mean for this to get so long, but you get my drift. Good luck. Go slowly. Don’t be afraid to be a beginner. When things don’t work, focus on what you did right and what you can do better next time, rather than listing all your failures and focusing on how badly you did. Don’t be afraid to mix in things that you have confidence in, so you have a bit of a safety blanket to comfort you as you push further out of your comfort zone.
Nicely done, incorporating the “water wings” into your response. 🙂 The ocean, quite frankly, is a scary, scary place. It has baracudas and sharks in it. O.O At least in a pond, all I need to worry about it leaches, and you can get those off with salt. (I’m not entirely sure how metaphorical I’m being on that one, granted).
Re: Long: Don’t even worry about it. I like long comments. They allow for more conversation. 🙂
Some of the stuff I talk about in my post – the music, specifically – is stuff that I *have* spent years and years working on. But it’s been a long time and the rust is caked pretty thick. :-\ Getting going again is daunting. Easy to say “but I sang *yesterday*…” and let it go for another week another month, rather than risk doing it wrong giving myself nodes or something. (Excuses, I know…)
A lot of it, though, is stuff that’s (relatively) new to me, and that I don’t have tonnes of aptitude for (yet). As someone who grew up being the “dumb kid” in the “smart class”, I’m still used to being able to pick things up relatively easily. What you said about trying something a couple of times and then chucking it when no visible progress has been made? I can relate. Learning to play piano (at “grade six” level – so for people in the 9-12 years old range) so that I could get a particular certificate in music studies? Frustrating as all get out, and kind of embarrassing, too. (I still did it – and passed! – but yoi… I was so glad when that bit was over…)
That said, these days, I’d rather do “level one” six times and be sure that I’ve got it than move on to “level two” before I’ve really got the hang of the basics. The trick for me is making sure the “move slowly” doesn’t turn into “don’t move at all”.