Polyamory, emotional distance, and practice

Mistress Matisse has some very astute things to say about polyamory this week.

And I think she nails the absolute key quality that helps keep things working: perspective.

No one can predict with perfect accuracy how he or she will feel about anything, but exactly how you feel isn't as important as how you respond to those feelings. There is a key trait in people who do polyamory well, and it's this: They are good at regulating their strong emotions. By that I mean, when something emotionally intense is happening to you, either good or bad, you're able to see it as part of a larger whole and keep it in perspective.

There's a lot of very good, pithy examples in the article -- go forth and read it.

As a magickal person, I'd add that this is yet another place where having a daily practice fits in for me. I don't particularly care what someone's daily practice is, but I am a huge fan of having a solid anchor to return to when emotions get off kilter. For me, that's my morning pages (unpublished writing in which I can rant for twenty minutes), my sitting practice, and my yoga. For someone else it might be regularly grounding and centering. Or aikido. Or a regular workout routine. For a poly person, it might be a regular time to personally sort through their feelings before a checkin with their sweetie.

The key to me is that these kinds of practices create just a small moment of distance between ourselves and our emotions. I have emotions, I feel them - but I am not the same as what I am feeling. "I am angry," has one set of implications. The difference between this and "I feel angry" is more than semantics.

The other thing for me about a daily practice is the discipline of it. I'm very good at pushing through the steep incline of learning something new. I absolutely detest the long plateaus that inevitably hit my practice afterward. Working through the sore muscles of renewing my workout practice? No problem. Actually getting on the mat twice a week no matter how I'm feeling? A lot harder.

But, I'm thinking a lot about what Matisse has to say about maintaining existing relationships in the face of new ones.

But you can't act like a junkie who needs an endless New Person fix or your original partner will freak out. You have to feel all the good emotions your new relationship is bringing you, while continuing to love your existing sweetheart the way they need to be loved.

True, that. And, also the lesson of a daily practice. Daily practice -- with the emphasis on daily -- is all about returning to center in the face of the new shiny. I write my morning pages as close to daily as I can, no matter what's up. At my best, I do the yoga whether or not I feel like it. And, the real nugget there for me is that despite all of my resistance, I always feel better after those practices than I did before. When I am on the mat, I may feel a ton of resistance. I tend to bargain with myself to make it through just five more minutes of class. It's just like trying not to safeword, some days. But when I make it through, I never have the thought that I wish I hadn't. I never once leave feeling that that investment is a waste of time. In a way, my practice is my existing sweetheart, and my practice gives me the skills to (one happy day) nurture a primary partnership through both the inclines and the steep slogs.

Practice

I'm thinking a lot lately about compensatory poses. In yoga, we take on challenging poses of some sort, and then resting poses that deliberately reverse the strain on those muscles. My practice partner and I had both been doing strenuous outdoorsy work on Saturday, so going into this Sunday's Rope SIG, I was thinking about ropework that would at best help with easing those muscles and at worst not hurt.

I've had hogties on the brain, and he's a meditative type, so we started with a gyaku ebi - a "reverse shrimp," or Japanese hogtie, in which the ankles are anchored to a chest harness. I left him in just long enough for a short meditative rest. He mentioned later he could have gone much longer and probably if we'd been working in my studio we would have. But I wanted to check out my theory, and so brought him up to sitting and changed him into the Ebi, or "shrimp", attaching the chest harness forward to the legs, which are folded and tied in a simple cross. Ebi can be very difficult on the legs and neck after a while, but for this short while the poses seemed to do what I wanted -- compensating for each other's stretches, and putting some ease on overworked muscles.

Later, I did some "rope jazz" (read: Miriam making stuff up) in which I anchored his ankles to an ottoman's legs, created a spread two column tie between the ankles in front, put his arms in niwatori, then anchored the niwatori forward to the two column tie. Great fun, and a perfect position for a nice flogging with my rope floggers.

All this, and I got to finally try a cupcake chest harness on a lovely rope virgin, which turned out beautifully.

Sadly no pictures. I really do need to do more pictures soon, not least because I find I'm a lot more precise with a camera around.

Yoga for Rope Enthusiasts: Bow Pose

So, you like hogties, do you?

Well, who doesn't? They're very pretty, and pretty darned helpless to be in. Lovely thing, the hogtie.

But perhaps a bit hard to hold. Legs arched up, arms or body arched back. Those lovely ones with the hair tied in? Exquisite, and tiring. But you don't want to disappoint . . .

Well, that's where Bow Pose, or Dhanurasana, comes in. Bow pose is a self-bound pose, in which you lay face down and use your hands to grasp your ankles for a deep backbend.

Tonight, I did regular bow poses as well as an upper-body variation in which we put a folded yoga blanket under the ribs, kept the thighs on the floor, and very deeply stretched just the upper part of the back. In all of them, I got that strange thrill of pushing myself to hold the pose just a bit longer, just a bit deeper, and imagined trying to do them bound. I was able to figure out my triggers for leg and foot cramps, and plans to work through those outside of ropes.

After the active stretch of Bow Pose, I imagine it would be easier to hold a good hogtie. Experiments are in order . . .

Yoga for Rope Enthusiasts: Gomukhasana

The upper part of Gomukhasana, or Cow Faced Pose, is excellent for creating more flexibility in the arms, and the range of the arms behind the back. See where I'm going with this?

This shot shows more of the back piece of the asana, and helpfully cautions to have a belt nearby if necessary. Indeed!

Seriously, though -- beginners can use straps as a stopgap until they can get their hands to touch behind the back. No yoga strap? Well, if you have some rope handy . . .

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 . . . )