Radical Ecstasy Read online

  1 Viking Books, 1998

  How We Get There

  Beginning the journey

  Good SM, like all good sex, involves a transition from our everyday mundane grocery-list state of consciousness to another state – the state of excitement. Someday the scientists will be able to tell us what interactions of neurotransmitters, what parts of the brain light up, which dim down, what shifts in brain waves are required for the trip to turn-on. What we know about starting the journey to transcendent eros is gathered from a lot of sources, much of it our own years of practice in SM, and explorations of other spiritual practices rooted in the body: yoga, prana, ritual dance, drumming, western-style tantra – and, let’s not forget, sex.

  What they all have in common is following a path in the body to transform what is going on in the mind. We will describe for you techniques of shifting consciousness that have worked for us and people we know. We want you to know that it’s fine to experiment with these scripts. You can change anything and try it a different way, and the order in which we describe various techniques and sensations may be different from the order that works for you. There are no hard-and-fast scripts, no “right” ways – there are only the ways that work for you and your partners. Try things different ways, and if you light up with pleasure and joy and arousal, then you’re doing it right.

  Letting go

  The first task in setting off on the road to ecstasy is to clear away the obstacles. Release mundane worries, forget about the bills, free yourself of any of the daily trash that you trip over in ordinary consciousness.

  Dossie likes to do a lot of preparation in order to cast off all her cares and woes. She prepares food and drink as for a long journey, cleans the house, changes the sheets, puts out the toys, cleans herself (squeaky inside and out), dresses in costume, sews on the buttons. She takes care of all the details that she can think of, and the process both satisfies her anxiety and starts getting her excited as she fantasizes about where on the soft freshly vacuumed rug she intends to get ravished. She likes to wash away worries and cares as she bathes and shaves, imagining all the distractions whooshing down the drain, transformed into compost.

  Janet uses a different sort of checklist to take care of her preparation process:

  To have the kind of experiences we talk about in this book, the first thing I have to do is want them.

  Sounds obvious and simple, no? Well, not really. These experiences aren’t always easy to have: occasionally they’re scary, often they’re deeply moving, once in a while they alter your life. And that’s not something I always want, or should want.

  To travel in the realm of radical ecstasy, I have to let go of many of the things that keep me safe in the rest of my life — my identity, my coolness, my worries about how I look or what people think of me. While these are important things to have — they help me do my work, maintain my relationships, find my place in my world — they are all mediators of my experience, filters that alter the way I see and the ways I’m seen.

  Irony, that ever-useful Swiss Army knife of 21st-century culture, is a very good way to appear hip and knowing, and a very bad way to travel through inner and outer space. Irony is a way of holding the world at arm’s length, of saying to the universe, “Oh, did I say that? — well, surely you know I was just kidding.” Which means it’s also a way of holding myself at arm’s length, of building a wall between what I’m really feeling and what I think I ought to feel. Out it goes.

  Self-consciousness: very important. If I don’t know how I appear to others, I will say and do inappropriate things; I’ll dress funny and walk weird and make the wrong facial expression. Self-consciousness is an inevitable outgrowth of self-awareness, I guess. But it’s also a way of creating a second self, the “me” that I see as other people see me. And only one of me gets to journey in these lands: the self that’s as close to my core as I can get, my undecorated soul.

  Fear — now there’s a two-edged sword. Without it, I’d walk into danger every day. Fear is the parent that keeps me from running into the street, the cop that keeps me from slapping the obnoxious sales clerk, the vertigo that sends me staggering back from the edge of the abyss. But sometimes the abyss is exactly where I want to be... so I must give up my fear to you and to the scene we do together: trust you not to laugh at me, not to betray me, to cherish the naked pink vulnerable self I’m giving up to you.

  Distraction, one of my favorite addictions. How can any one problem become too important when I have so many to keep my mind whirling? Did I feed the dog? Will today be the day I overdraw my checking account? That cute woman I met at the last munch, did she like me? What’s for dinner? — a soothingly familiar agitation, meaningless and omnipresent as Muzak. But how can I be there for you, totally focused on you and on whatever we’re building between us, when my brain is skipping like a pollen-seeking bee? So out with distraction, perhaps the hardest of all to relinquish.

  So: here I am, just me, as pure as I can become. I am touching you, hoping that you are as naked as I, no walls between us, all the filters gone. Let’s play.

  For most people, what works for releasing whatever needs to be let go is just that: release. If you find yourself holding onto thoughts or patterns or emotions that are getting in your way, just notice them, unclench your psychological hand, and let them float away. You don’t need to push or shove, or beat yourself up for having the thoughts or feelings – just let them go.

  Think for yourself of all the ways you can do the equivalent of taking a psychic shower. Imagine washing off your bad body image stuff. Imagine a box in which you could put your resume, your job search, your boss, your taxes; close the lid and lock those things away until you are ready to deal with them. Put the key somewhere comfy and give it a rest. Imagine yourself in a beautiful environment, dancing with nymphs and satyrs. Imagine whatever you like to imagine while you’re getting to sleep or masturbating. Your imagination is a powerful tool: imagine a movie in which you are the gorgeous, confident, powerful star – rehearsing for a great performance.

  Because when you get ready to do a scene, that’s what you are doing – getting ready to be a star. A very bright shining one.

  The breath

  So you think you already know how to breathe? Chances are you do, if you’re reading this. But there is an amazing amount to know about breathing – another never-ending exploration. We have borrowed wisdom about breathing from yoga practice and from bodywork therapies, starting with Wilhelm Reich, who indeed borrowed his ideas from yoga. Here are some new and interesting ways you can play with your breath.

  Put your hand on your belly and take a deep breath and hold it. Pay attention to how your belly feels, your shoulders, your face, your sense of yourself. Now release the breath thoroughly – let this take a few seconds – and register how different you feel in your body and in your mind. First principle of breathing: holding the breath adds to tension, physical and mental. Releasing the breath promotes relaxation.

  Take a few slow breaths and let yourself relax a little. Let the air flow without halting it or holding between the ins and the outs. Now imagine that the air you are breathing in is cool and fresh and blue, and that the air you breathe out is orange and hot. Imagine that the more of that hot orange air you breathe out, and the more cool fresh blue air you breathe in, the more comfortable you become. Imagine breathing out all your tensions into the hot orange air, releasing any charge, any burden.

  There, you’ve done your first breathing exercise. Now you know how to increase and release tension – very useful in sex and play. Just about everybody builds up a lot of muscle tension as they approach orgasm, so if you want to last longer and not come yet, you can learn how by physically relaxing your body and slowing your breathing. And if you feel that a whip or a clothespin is getting challenging, you can relax your body and let the pain flow through you with the breath. And when you do that you will feel more. Take more, too. And have more to give.

  Further breathing t
ricks we learned from tantra are about raising eros in whatever form you like by breathing like a pump. First, you need to know how to squeeze your PC muscles. These are the pubeococcygeal muscles which stretch like a sling between your tail-bone and your pubic bone. Animals who stand on four legs don’t need as strong PCs as we do, because their internal organs hang down tidily from their spines, swinging freely. But we stood up, and developed strong PCs to keep our internal organs from falling out the bottom. And, lucky creatures that we are, lots of our sexual nerves travel with the PCs.

  To find the PC squeeze, move the muscles you use to open and shut off the stream of urine when you pee. Those are the front PCs. Then squeeze and release the muscles you use to control taking a bowel movement. These are the rear PCs. Doing PC squeezes will also get you a little turned on (goody!). This is a fun way to find or increase your turn-on during sex or play. You can practice anywhere – in line at the bank, for instance. When you get good at it, you can amaze anybody who has some part of themselves inside you.

  The breath used in tantra as a pump for eros is an undulating breath. Sit on the floor with your tail on the edge of a cushion, or on a chair with just enough of your butt on the chair to be comfortable. Take a breath in, and simultaneously rock your pelvis so that your pubic area pushes downward toward the chair. This will arch your back, bring your chest forward and up and, if you let the movement follow up your body, bring your head up. Try that a few times. That’s the in-breath.

  Now, while breathing out, rocky our pelvis forward, which will bring your pubic bone up, make your belly and chest curl up and your head go down. That’s the out breath. Try it a few times to get the hang of it.

  Now we put them together, sensibly enough, inhaling while rocking the pelvis back and arching, exhaling while rocking the pelvis forward and curling. Arch and curl, that’s the motion. Like your pelvis is a hinge, opening and closing, and the rest of your body follows like a wave. The tantrikas call it undulating.

  You can also do this breath lying on your back on a firm surface with your knees, pushing a little with your legs, that same rocking undulation.

  When you get good at undulating, you can add the PC squeeze. Most folks start by squeezing on the in-breath, and releasing on the out-breath, as if your body was a big pump that could draw up eros from the earth like hot red water to fill up your body with excitement and turn-on. (Other folks prefer to release on the in-breath and squeeze on the out-breath. One of us does it one way, the other does it the other. We don’t care which way you do it, as long as you’re pumping up plenty of hot energy for yourself.)

  As this breath starts to work for you, pay attention to how you feel, physically and emotionally, and what you are imagining. It’s lots of fun to practice this and fantasize at the same time. That’s a good way to get familiar with the process of your own turn-on.

  As the energy gets stronger, practitioners often speed up the breath, maybe with a loud noise on exhaling, like “Hah!Hah!Hah!Hah!” or any other noise that works for you. This will feel silly at first, but if you give it enough time it will make you very happy. As you get more excited and move faster, you may find yourself doing it differently, curling on the in-breath and squeezing on the out – that’s fine, whatever works. If you lose the thread, go back to how you learned to do it first and carry on from there.

  Breathing like this is intoxicating: it will get you high. If you feel dizzy or uncomfortable or further out than you want to travel today, slow the breath down and make the exhalation longer than the inhalation.

  When your authors do this breath together we get really loud.

  Here is a story of a scene Dossie played that started out with the easiest breath.

  Slow Hand Trance Dance

  It’s not easy to find language to write about a person as gender-queer as the one I’m flirting with. Only two pronouns to choose from to describe this friendly, sexy person — not enough. Crewcut, slight beard, abundant tits, that sexy testosterone-rasped voice that promises all the horny surging hormones of a fifteen-year-old boy in a substantial warm body, and the connected sensibilities of a thoughtful woman — mmmmm. Best of both worlds — I love people who defy categorization.

  “Do you prefer he or she?” I ask politely. “He, and thank you for asking,” he responds, settling visibly. Which is fine by me.

  He explains to me that he has a hard time with stingy sensations. Later, when I told my buddy Fang about this, she collapsed laughing. “Oh, the poor innocent had no idea who he had run into.” Fang knows about me and sting, she has felt my cane before.

  Well, it is sort of like telling Dracula that you’re a little phobic about blood. So I let the cute boy know that I think I could help him with that, put my wicked grin on hold and we talk a little about limits. Poly agreements, his partner is at this party; pants on (his); wants it on his back; no ropes, claustrophobic. So he takes off his shirt and it’s pants and boots and a broad strong back, complete with freckles. Very nice.

  I’m wearing my front, a studded leather garment I devised that looks like a superhero with cleavage from the front, and utterly nothing on the back but a few crisscrossed bootlaces that hold it on. Lots of skin — whenever I wear it I get petted a lot. Yum. Stockings and heels, of course; black, of course, with a loose mostly unbuttoned black chiffon dress over it all that keeps me a little warm and you can still see through it, if you like. We look good.

  The party is in a set of crowded hotel rooms cleverly organized at the end of a corridor. A portable screen bars the gaze of the uninvited, and relays of volunteers make sure that entry is forbidden to the uninitiated. Hotel beds are stripped and re-sheeted to accommodate softer landings, and a bondage table and portable sling have been set up in the “living room.” We find a spot on a couch, where he kneels on the cushions and rests his elbows over the sofa back; this lands him at a good height for me to work on. Two other women are sitting on the couch — fine, there’s plenty of room if we’re friendly. They will duck when I swing.

  I am teaching a technique here, as well as playing a scene. It’s been said that the last stage of learning is teaching, and so as we go along into the play, the connection, the turn-on, a part of my mind is registering what I do and why, how does it all work, so I can relay all that later. Right now, what I want is to get him entranced and deeply relaxed.

  First I show him the breath. “Put your hand on your belly. Breathe in deep and hold it — pay attention to how you feel. Now breathe out even and all the way. Keep breathing, keep breathing. Feel your torso relax? Keep breathing. If you tense up, you won’t be able to let the sensation in. And I want you to feel a whole lot. So I want you to remember to breathe. I’ll help you.”

  I’m touching his back, his shoulders, his head, crewcut silky on my fingers — firm strokes down his spine, smooth, soothing, nothing tickly or sharp. Arousal will come later, this is about going down, down, down. I kneel behind him, my thighs holding him, and press myself against his back, my arm around his chest, and breathe with him. I can feel the energy in his spine rising, his heat rushing up to meet me.

  I first learned about the breath when I was about thirteen, from a Readers’ Digest article written by Wilhelm Reich, believe it or not. This would be about 1957. He pointed out that we don’t exhale enough. I tried breathing per his instruction, and it helped with my asthma. Later I learned a lot more about how breathing relates to feeling, through yoga and meditation and childbirth.

  One useful fact I learned: our bodies are hardwired to perceive the excess of carbon dioxide, not the absence of oxygen, as the signal that we are in danger of suffocating. In the presence of too much carbon dioxide — perhaps you have felt this in a crowded room — our bodies get defensive, we are struggling to breathe. So there are concrete physiological reasons why holding the breath can lead to tension and panic, and releasing the breath leads to relaxation and feeling safe.

  In a massage workshop I learned to deepen a person’s breath by placing a hand on
the belly, lifting it slightly on the inhale so the stomach will reach for the warmth and take in more air; and pressing down lightly on the exhale to encourage further release. This is a good way to take control of someone’s breathing. And their psyche.

  Here on this couch at this party, I’m using another trick. Surrounding my bottom with my body is at once comfort and intrusion. My face close to his, my belly on his back, I follow his breathing for a bit, until we are easily breathing in tandem, and then I slow my breath down, just a little, and he slows down with me. Got that trick from Neurolinguistic Programming.

  So we breathe till I get him real slowed down. My goal is to top my bottom’s relaxation, to carry him into a trance state. So I continue till I feel his energy deepen, as if I could collect him under me, and then I get up, careful to keep my hands on him not to break the connection, and start shaking his shoulders, loosening his back. By moving his body with my hands and without asking, I am taking more control.

  He is deeply entranced now, and responding to me very nicely, so I start punching his back with the soft outside of my fists, introducing a new level of intensity. I like this, feel my energy rising up to charge through my arm with a full-body smash, as if I could punch my energy into him.

  I start to alternate the punching with a knee in the crotch — it would be too early, a distraction to go for erogenous zones, but some generally wide-spread attention to the crotch is nice for waking up the first chakra. I can feel red heat running up his spine, and my hands are attracted to the nexuses of power — the chi, the heart, the throat. I grab his head to my chest and hold my hand over his third eye. It pulses. He sees me.

  He’s ready for some challenge, I judge, so I pick up a thick heavy flogger and set the energy flying through the air — softly at first, while I get my aim and he adjusts to the new sensation. One of the onlookers pushes the crowd back to make room as I step back for a bigger swing. When we have sunk into the rhythm of the flogger, I up the intensity, striking the broad muscles of the back with all my strength as if I could pour my power into him. I’m talking to him now like a labor coach — “Keep breathing, yeah, that’s good, I like that, yes!” And if I am the labor coach, I wonder what he will give birth to. I especially want to honor the magical creativity of the bottom.