The New Topping Book (25 page)

E
NDING
.
We empower ourselves when we replay old scripts and arrange for them to come out differently. Ideally, all scenes end in a win for both players. The successful completion of a scene gives feelings of competence, mastery, control and empowerment, and as the top you can reinforce those feelings in your bottom by offering praise for how well she took the sensations, or followed your orders, or by letting your bottom know how good you feel, how turned on you are. He can tell you how wonderful you are too.

Most of what we dig up from our shadows consists of feelings or roles that we have some shame about, so sharing that piece of ourselves is powerfully intimate. We are letting another person into a part of ourselves that we ourselves may have rejected. And when that person accepts us, complete with our old tapes, and responds with erotic enthusiasm, then we get the ultimate validation: love given to the part of ourselves that we may fear the most.

You close a deep scene just as you close any other scene, only make sure you do it. Don’t skimp on time and energy for the return trip to the so-called real world. When you prepare for voyaging in the shadows, discuss how much time you will have afterwards, if anyone thinks he may want time alone, if you will sleep together, whatever feels most comfortable. Do allow lots of time for snuggling and good feelings, and do check back in over the next several days so you both can talk about any aftershocks you may experience.

W
HAT
A
BOUT
T
HERAPY
?
Does deep psychological play make the top into a therapist? Emphatically not. Shadow play can be therapeutic, and indeed healing, but is very different from a therapeutic relationship. Ideally, your relationship with a professional therapist is an island where you can explore your inner truth with no consequences in the rest of your life. A BDSM scene is also an island, but with very different rules and boundaries.

If you find yourself digging up a profound conflict, maybe in the form of intense emotions, panicky feelings or flashbacks to old trauma, you might well want to seek therapy, whether or not you plan to play with this dynamic in S/M. When an old conflict opens up, there is opportunity for healing, and therapy will not only protect your partner from having to be your therapist, but will allow you to work on your issues at a time that is very likely to be profitable for you. In the Resource Guide, you will find a website that lists BDSM-friendly therapists and a couple of books that can help you find and talk to one.

S
HADOWS AND
R
EBIRTH

There is a Native American medicine story about Crow who dances between the worlds. At one time Crow became fascinated with her shadow. She could not leave it alone. She kept looking at it, scratching it, poking at it, pecking it, until her shadow woke up and came to life. Then Crow’s shadow ate her.

In this story, Crow gets chewed up to emerge transformed, with the ability to travel between the everyday world and the spirit world. Many myths feature heroes and heroines who travel into the shadows, get destroyed and then reborn, transformed and enlightened by the experience. These stories warn that travel in the shadow is both dangerous and rewarding. We have written here what we know about how to travel as safely as possible in your precious darkness. If your intuition tells you that this kind of play does not feel safe or growthful to you, we suggest that you trust your inner wisdom and refrain. Perhaps later you may feel differently, and perhaps you will not. Perhaps another path will work better for your journey to self-knowledge.

Once again, all BDSM play is shadow play – when we play together, we find acceptance for emotions and behaviors that would be unacceptable outside scene space. And we believe that all play is potentially, and potently, healing and growthful. When we venture purposefully into our darkest shadows, we get to write our own script, determine the outcome, validate forbidden and rejected parts of ourselves, reclaim parts of ourselves that we had lost or buried, and find ways to grasp all the parts of ourselves, every single one, in a profound act of self-acceptance through which we may become whole.

16

S/M S
PIRITUALITY:
F
ROM THE
T
OP

S
ex 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
S
PIRIT

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 R
ITUAL AS
S
PIRITUAL
P
ATH

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.

E
DGE
P
LAY
. 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.

R
OLES
I
N
R
ITUAL
. 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.