Yoga for Rope Enthusiasts: Pt. 1

I started taking yoga a little over two years ago to expand my capacity and flexibility as a rope bottom.

By luck, I began to practice perhaps the best type of yoga for rope enthusiasts. I study Iyengar Yoga, a style which emphasizes the use of props (blankets, blocks, straps) to intensify and better align poses, works strongly on balanced standing poses, and has an emphasis on mental discipline.

Now that I am topping, I'm even more intrigued by yoga as a mental and physical discipline. I watch with dual awareness as my teacher aligns students. I note how long people can hold certain poses. I observe how I come to inner quiet after an hour of struggling with and against the poses. Bridgett Harrington, in an article for Pagan BDSM and the Ordeal Path suggests a link between the way yoga uses straps and props and the way bondage folks use rope, and I'm inclined to agree. If there is one single practice I could recommend to rope bottoms (besides being in rope more often!), yoga would be it. That's not because I'm looking for the proverbial 98-pound model who's as flexible as Gumby, either. What really intrigues me is the self-discipline it takes to really do yoga, which is (in my opinion) the same self-discipline it takes to dance in the ropes.

To that end, I'm going to dedicate a few Tuesdays to poses I'm interested in for rope bottoms. For starters . . .

Beginners

Any pose whatsoever. At this point, I'm less interested in what you can do and more interested in the fact that you can make it through a one-hour yoga class and stick with it. I'm particularly interested that you can get through savasana, the corpse pose at the end, and still your monkey mind for a while.

(to be continued . . . )