Radical Ecstasy Read online

  And afterwards, he hugged me, and thanked me, and made me a cup of tea, and helped me put away all my toys.

  When I try to think about the “me” that was breathing hard and getting wet as I whipped the cane down again and again, the first thing I think of is a Victorian schoolmaster, a figure out of Dickens: solid in my sense of righteousness, implacably, impossibly cruel, letting a lifetime of repression and anger pour its strength into my clenched jaw and my descending arm. How am I going to sleep tonight, thinking of that?

  Yeah, yeah, I know the standard line: it was all consensual, we both wanted it, consenting adults in private, blah blah blah. But the hell with that: it was a vicious, savage beating. And I’m still shocked and a bit scared. And I wish I could do it all again right this very minute.

  Because somehow, as the blood rose up under his skin and his ass got redder and harder and darker, it was as if he, his essential self, was what was rising up to the surface, pushing up to greet the cane, reaching for my cruelty like a delicious treat.

  All his layers disappearing, melting into the rising tide: the clever writer, the respected academician, the family man, the athlete, each melting into the surging heated blood so that nothing remained between him and me but a thin layer of skin...

  ... and when the first spot of blood appeared, I felt an exultation, a triumph: the last layer dissolving, perfect connection. His wails transported me like music. I was nothing but the arm that beat him and the ear that heard him and the cunt that oozed and the heart that pounded with exertion and bliss and love and, yes, cruelty.

  A kind of perfection, really: a being that gives hurt, and a being that gets hurt, and nobody and nothing else. Where else could I ever find that kind of purity, that clear untainted sweetness?

  Tonight I am surfeited with that sweetness, a child on Halloween night, and I will sleep badly, dreaming of schoolmasters. But soon I’ll crave more; I always do. Because, you know, I’ve always had a terrible sweet tooth.

  When we’re playing with such dark fantasies, how can we know that we’re ethical people? The ethics of SM are often expressed as “Safe, Sane and Consensual.” What that means is respect for physical safety, respect for emotional safety, and tremendous honoring and respect for each person’s autonomy, for every person’s right to choose their experience.

  Our ethics are internal, subjective, based on how we feel, because we want to feel good about who we are and what we do. We want to live in a world where people treat each other well. We want to like who we see when we look in the mirror every morning.

  Making space for difference

  Honoring vulnerability becomes even more important as we explore our differences. Sacred space in conventional temples has often been a problem for leather perverts and other sex radicals. Most places where we go to learn spiritual practices that don’t involve sex pretty much expect that our sexual differences will be left outside. Leatherpeople have too often had to attend their spiritual practice in the closet.

  Sacred space is intimate space: our temples, our playrooms, our dungeons, everywhere we gather together to practice. So we must put serious attention into how our playspaces are going to be safe spaces for everyone who comes to play.

  We are all perverts, and we all arrive in the dungeon fearful of judgment as we contemplate baring our most intimate kinks and our juicy (and often wounded) selves to all who are present. It is a gross violation to be anything short of totally respectful to anyone who opens themselves up in our rituals.

  The wide-ranging sexual diversity of our community can create tensions. Gay men, transmen, transwomen, drag queens, hyper-femmes, straights, gays, bis, genderqueers, people covered with tattoos and piercings and inhuman colored hair in dreads, people who look like the folks who live next door to your mom and dad. We come from a huge diversity of backgrounds: class difference, racial difference, cultural difference. Tops and bottoms and switches, doms and subs, those who follow protocols and those who are extremely loose – we have a lot of difference. Our entire society deals very poorly with difference. Our differences rub together when we gather in a playspace, and we get to discover the fears that we still carry around, and the myths and stereotypes about “those other people” that still infest our thinking and our feeling.

  We maintain that we are enriched by all this difference. We have a whole lot to gain from connecting with people who are different from us – who look different, whose experience is different, whose expertise is different, who have different wisdom. Wisdom that might make us wiser, if we listen carefully.

  The difficulty is that difference has so often been persecuted. Many of us have serious reasons to fear assault, battery, bashing, rape, even murder. Those who come from cultural or sexual minorities have generations of history of oppression and enslavement, lynching and genocide, entire societies attacking them not for their individual differences, but because they are a member of a group that the culture in power hates or fears. people of color, people of ambiguous gender, women, people from other countries, people from other cultures…

  At a panel at a recent Leather Leadership Conference presented by people of color within the leather community, each panelist responded to the question, “How would a person be polite to me?” This can be the first step in understanding another person’s experience – asking, respectfully, how they wish to be addressed, asking what works for them, what they need to feel safe.

  Think of how you have felt anywhere where your kind was the minority. (If you are heterosexual and of European ancestry, and have never been anywhere where you constituted a minority, let us recommend the experience to you.) Did you feel awkward? Self-conscious? Was it hard to be understood? How did you fit yourself into somebody else’s milieu? What were the culture gaps, the unfamiliar forms of communication? They say a fish can’t see the water, and we can’t see the air, but maybe, when we try an excursion out of our own familiar atmosphere and struggle to understand communications from elsewhere, we can start to see beyond the paradigms of our own culture that constitute our assumptions. Maybe we’ll learn something new. Maybe we’ll take a few steps outside our box. Maybe we’ll feel freer.

  If you are a member of a group that has been oppressed, for whatever reasons, how do you feel among people who look and act like the people who oppressed your ancestors? Are they stereotyping you, assuming they know who you are and where you come from by how you look? Do you feel on edge? Poised to defend yourself? Angry? Fearful of being treated as anything other than the beautiful wise proud sexy individual that you are? What do you need to feel safe here?

  As we contemplate sharing intimate space with people who are very different from us, let us also remember that those of us who explore the world’s religions to extract practices that fit into our SM spirituality are borrowing from cultures that we probably don’t understand very well. Reading about a culture is not the same as growing up in it.

  We perverts borrow ritual technologies from a lot of cultures and redesign them to our own purposes. Who do we borrow from? Native American sun dance, African polyrhythms and possession, Hindu kavadi, Malaysian tai pu san, Maori tribal tattoos, piercings from Irian Jaya. We don’t think of this as stealing, since nothing is lost from the original; on the other hand, we don’t really have any way to return what we have borrowed. Many of the people who have preserved traditions from old roots – shamanic practices, initiation rituals – are native peoples who are mightily oppressed by the mainstream culture.

  We need to be thoughtful about other cultures’ rites. Members of these cultures are not always happy about our borrowing, and they justifiably feel disrespected if we lightly and casually colonize their sacred traditions. Europeans have, after all, colonized just about everybody else (not to mention frequently each other). So back again to learning how to be polite. we need to value the sources of our traditions, and to respect the truth that the people who grow up in a particular tradition and have years of study and practice know more about that trad
ition then we do.

  We have a vision of cultural pluralism. If we only play in groups restricted to people who are exactly like us, then the people we are truly restricting are ourselves. We would like to continue our explorations in communities populated by a huge diversity of people. Where there is conflict, we like to remember that friction makes heat, and heat is energy that can blast us out of our boxes and into a wider understanding of everybody else, and ultimately ourselves.

  What Does It Feel Like?

  The ability to achieve ecstasy is not like a black belt in karate. You don’t have to study for years to get it – it’s in you right now: if you doubt it, watch any six-month-old baby exploring a mound of soap bubbles.

  Many of the characteristics of an ecstatic state happen to you every day. For instance, you experience an altered time sense whenever you get so involved in a task that you lose all sense of time — like when you’re reading an exciting book and look up in what seems like a few minutes to find that a couple of hours have passed. You may have moments of unusual clarity when you let your attention drift: many people find that solutions to problems just “come to them” in the shower, or in the moments just before they fall asleep. And loss of boundaries between self and other are, of course, characteristic of the feeling of being in love – many of us can remember gazing into the eyes of our beloved, feeling as though we were falling into a deep well; or watching our newborn infant sleep as raptly as we would watch a Hollywood thriller.

  All these experiences have two characteristics in common: presence and acceptance.

  When you are present, you are completely occupying the space and time you are in. You’re not thinking about the past or the future, or any place but where you are right now: a chant we like to use for this practice is “reborn every moment.” (Of course, as Janet moans, by the time you notice how completely you’re in the moment, you’re not in the moment any more!)

  When you are accepting, you are receiving each moment for exactly what it is, not wishing it were anything else or striving to make it more or less than it is. You are willing to accept yourself as you are today, perfect in this perfect moment. There may be other times for striving, such as when you set up your scene – but when you set out on the road to ecstasy, you must welcome each instant exacdy as it is, then let it go to welcome the next one. Let go of attachments – they are anchors, and you want to fly. Release desire, fantasy, yearning, any lust for results: the wanting mind only gets in the way.

  You can’t force yourself into presence and acceptance, any more than you can pry open the petals of a flower. (“I’m not being accepting enough, goddammit!”) The breathing, relaxation and movement techniques we will explain in a later chapter are all designed to help you move easily and naturally into these states of mind, so don’t worry too much about them here – presence and acceptance are best recognized after the fact.

  When the world is too much with us and our busy brains won’t shut up, we very often need some help in getting present and open — and while it’s certainly possible to get there solo, a willing and skilled partner is better yet. Here’s Janet’s account of a scene in which Dossie took her back into presence and acceptance from a place where she had neither:

  The trouble with being known as a painslut is the number of tops who think that means that you never need warmup, scene-setting or an occasional break. I’ve had too many scenes like that lately, usually ending in emotional meltdowns that I didn’t want, and I was beginning to wonder if my bottom space was gone for good.

  So I’d asked Dossie if she could please give me a nice long slow-building session, hot and entrancing. And we’d already wanted to breathe together, so we decided to combine the two — her first time consciously combining topping and breathing, my first consciously combining bottoming and breathing.

  The music she chooses is women’s voices in soft, rhythmic chanting, complex and soothing. When I start to unbutton my shirt, she firmly moves my hands back down to my sides and unbuttons it herself. I feel my armor start to slide off my shoulders as the shirt falls to the floor. The bra comes off, then the slacks, then the underpants, and the first time I’m allowed to move is to step out of the garments as they puddle around my feet. A prism hangs in the window, throwing flickering rainbows around the room like confetti.

  She begins to weave a harness, thick soft purple rope. Bondage usually makes me tense, worried about damage to my injured shoulders, but this is completely comfortable, constantly present against my skin but not pinching or hurting or twisting my body. Each pass of the rope across my skin is a reminder to feel, to let go of thought and to move fully into my body. All the small sensations that are normally beneath my consciousness, the pressure of feet against floor, the tiny creak as one muscle slides over another, the redness of sun from the window against my closed eyelids, all take over my brain, filling it too full for any thinking. I become a beautiful, symmetrical purple package, a gift from her to herself.

  We sink to the floor, her legs under mine, crotch to crotch and breast to breast. We begin to breathe, slowly at first. Our faces are so close together that she has one big eye, and I sink into it like blue quicksand. I let her set the pace for the breathing — she’s more experienced than I, and besides she’s the top. I am consciously working to be receptive, to let her energy pour into me instead of forcing mine into her as I often do. I swim along the currents of our breaths, feeling the column of light sucked upward into my body on each inhalation and letting the top of my head open so the beam can go all the way to the sun, then letting it fall back into the earth on each exhalation.

  She picks up the pace and I follow. A tremor of energy shakes her from her hips up through her torso, and she giggles with pleasure. My receptive state is so soft that I have no corresponding tremor, but I don’t miss it; I’m floating. We switch to alternate breathing — I suck in her exhalation and pull her essence into my lungs, then blow my own into her mouth, an act of astonishing intimacy, like an infant and mother.

  She takes our breathing up to one last crescendo, both of our voices sounding like sobs, like orgasms as we let ourselves open flowerlike to one another. Then we hold each other and giggle together a bit as the intensity ebbs.

  We stand. We breathe together a bit more, building a bridge from tantra to SM. She attaches my wrists to overhead chains. She fusses for a few minutes to lower the chains and take the strain off my shoulders; I am swaying gently to the music, barely noticing as she adjusts links and connections.

  The first caress of the flogger, nothing but a whisper across my ass, makes me sigh with longing. So slow, so gentle, nothing that pushes or startles. I go on swaying, my entire being focused on the sensation. Exquisitely it builds, from a whisper to a murmur, to an audible whap! as the skin of the flogger meets the skin of my backside. I breathe it in and wait expectantly for more. There is more.

  “Take it in, green lady,” she murmurs in my ear. “Look at that green rising up in you.” And suddenly I am emerald, a woman of emerald, clear and shimmering in the sunshine, the green flaring up like flame with every stroke of the flogger. I have a sudden vision of myself as a superhero, a magical being of green light. I am entranced by my own beauty.

  Then the bite of a paddle. I flinch away from it at first, and wonder if this is really such a good idea. Then I remember my pain-play mantra: Don’t judge it, just feel it; and I breathe, and the next stroke is all heat and light and it rings me like a chime, and I push my ass out for more.

  I won’t bore you with a toy-by-toy account of the rest, from paddles to crops to canes. Every time she strikes me with a new toy I freeze for a moment, frightened by the sting and unsure of myself, then I remember to let myself feel and a new layer falls away from me. And at the end I hear the whir of the cane and some distant part of me thinks, Wow, she’s hitting me pretty hard, and my skin soaks the pain up like dry earth absorbing the rain. And at one magical moment, the cane slices into me exactly as the prism in the window flash
es a beam of pure clear red into my eye, and all my senses explode in perfect unison.

  And then it’s over. She takes me down and we move onward to sex. And I’m sorry to disappoint you but I’m not going to write about that now, because I’ve experienced the magic of sex a thousand times and so have you, but the magic of the breathing and the bondage and the flogging and the music was a journey into a whole different world, a world that I must write about now before I plunge back into quotidian life and forget how to hold onto it.

  What is this bliss?

  So what is this bliss, this ecstasy, that we seek – through religion, through meditation, through sex, through SM? Definitions are always too small to fit the amazing reality we experience in ecstatic states. This ecstasy, as we and many others who write about it experience it, adds up to experiential proof that the universe is bigger than us – lots bigger. And if some people want to call the universe God or Goddess, there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as we understand that God or Goddess is a name for something so immense that we cannot in any way begin to describe it with a name.

  So we can only describe ecstasy by how we relate to it. That part we know: we know how we feel and how we travel in mind and body from everyday states of consciousness to what we think of as divine ecstasy.

  Dossie writes:

  I can only describe to you what it feels like to me. First and foremost, it feels undeniably real. When I am dancing in the storm of a flogging, to the song of the whip; when I am writhing in the throes of orgasm; when I am undulating to the breath of tantra; when Kundalini the great snake is awake all through my body and beyond and I am thrashing and bellowing on my meditation mat, I know that the divine is real. I can feel it rushing through me, like sap flooding up a great tree, like swarms of sparks, like an iridescent fountain showering over me, like a river coming up from the center of the planet and driving through me, from my root out through my crown and thence up to the stars and galaxies. I feel all this, as surely as I can feel my feet on the floor, my butt on the chair, as certainly as I can feel when I’m hungry or tired or angry or sad or joyous.