Back in the Saddle

As of today, I declare myself officially back in the saddle.

Not that I was completely out of it. In the last year, I've attended several SIGs, one rope conference, and was even the rope bottom at a kink event's rather public demo.

What I've been missing is regular practice, the kind that transforms dilettantes like me into true masters.

New Year's Resolution: to learn the classical katas so that I can practice better rope jazz. For this moment, planning and plotting for the afternoon SIG.

Not sure if anyone reads this thing any more, but it's good to be back.

How to Fuck Up

There's an interesting thread going on right now over at Mistress Matisse's journal about codependency and rescuing. In short: guy is at wits end trying to help his addict girlfriend, guy appeals to Matisse for advice in how to help girlfriend, guy ends up getting some advice he probably didn't at all expect about dealing with his own codependency. Unsurprisingly, the entry touched a nerve. The comments board is on fire with folks' opinions on all this.

Somehow, from links of links of links, I ended up at an oldie but goodie from the Alt.Polyamory FAQ. I haven't read Elise Matthesen's "How to Fuck up a Relationship" in a while, but it's still a good one. (And no, it's not just about polyamory.) If you want to fuck up a perfectly good relationship, there probably isn't a better game plan.

Go read it. I'll wait . . .

Seriously, though, building a healthy relationship keeps coming down to pretty simple strategies.

• Develop tools to know and understand yourself.
  
• Develop tools to communicate.
  
• Use them.
  
• Take on responsibility for your own "stuff": actions, emotions, feelings, desires. Be accountable.
  
• Respectfully decline to take responsibility for your partners' "stuff".

Sadly, while this stuff is "simple," it's sure as hell not easy. What is the saying? A minute to learn and a lifetime to master? It's that. It doesn't help that we're up against an entire culture that encourages dysfunction.

And everyone has their own stumbling blocks. It's not easy, not at all. But looking at the alternatives of codependency and mutual resentment, I can't imagine intentionally going the other way.

And its all on a foundation, one block on the other. If "you can't exchange power you don't have," it's equally true that you can't be in a relationship if you don't have a self to relate from.

It all starts with knowing yourself. I don't care what your practice for knowing yourself is. I'm fond of sitting practice and Julia Cameron's "morning pages" but everyone has their own way. Meditation, yoga, trancework, therapy -- whatever works for you is your way. But without that practice of self-knowledge, there is nothing to communicate. No responsibility to take, and none to withhold. There are no clear desires and no means to articulate them. There are no means to determine if something is working for you or not. And that feels like a very dangerous place to be, and a very dangerous place to take others.

More practical rigging

At first I was a little embarrassed to see that someone made it to this lil blog from Googling for gardening info. But then I remembered: I'm shameless. And I followed the link back to see how I'd showed up.

And, being shameless, I'll share back with the rest of the class.

Got twine? Got bamboo? Well, then, you can also get thee a fence with very simple traditional Japanese knots. I suspect the basic fence- and trellis- skills on this site could also make very nice, sturdy play racks for the more shameless among us.

The spirit of the rope

Being a good pagan, I realized early this week that I should try to build an alliance with my rope as a tool by creating a relationship with the spirit of the rope itself. Yes, those of you who are not pagans may think this is gobbeldygook, but it all felt very profound to me.

For the most part, this has involved lots of using a 15-foot rope to tie myself into a lovely crotch rope with a "happy knot" and masturbating, while focused on increasing my erotic ties to the rope.

Unsurprisingly, it's been a very good week. ;-)

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 . . .

Resolute

Happy new year! Again. Being Jewish and pagan, I've had two since fall, but who's counting?

I'm looking forward to 2007. I have a lot of opportunities and fun ahead in the kinky and pagan fronts. In just the first half of the year, I'll be at the pagan conference Pantheacon, a local witchcamp, a Feri intensive, and Shibaricon. I'll be teaching a (non-kink) pagan class. I also look forward to more time in my rope SIGs and doing more private play. I shall be a busy little rigger, which is generally how I like it.

If I have a challenge for myself this year, it's about integrating all the different parts of my life. That means things like packing rope for Pantheacon and pagan tools for Shibaricon. It means trying to use more rope ties in my non-kink life: in my garden, for example, or for non-kink spellwork. It means writing in more public pagan and kink forums about what it is that I do. Look to see lots more rants over this way.

But first: packing. There are parties to attend! Boots, check. Cincher, check. Tube o' canes? Double check.

Happy New Year's to all, and to all a good bite.

For the eels among us

One of my friends is discovering talents as an eel - someone who gets into ropes for the challenge of working back out again. He's a top, as a general rule, but a curious top. He's also all kinds of double-jointed, which makes for interesting (if dangerous-looking) play.

I get a kick out of watching him in ropes. It's not quite my thing - it's fascinating, but the psychology of it never quite makes sense to me. For most of the folks I tie, the ropes and the submission go together, at least a bit. For myself, I tend not to submit in ropes these days (and more's the pity . . . ), but I do have that part of my brain that adores the rope aesthetically as well as the other "track" in which I'm learning ties by being tied. In both scenarios, getting out of the ropes is usually the disappointing part. None of which helps make sense of the eel phenomenon.

So as I've got this on the brain, this lovely article from Graydancer on Ropes and Submission couldn't have come at a better time.

But not only was there never a time when I felt like submitting, but there was never really even a time when I felt vulnerable. I’m a big fan of leg sweeps and kicks and knees and head butts; I also, from lots of dance experience, am comfortable on the floor, or using other’s bodies as bases, and so there was never a moment when I felt that frisson of "what are they going to do to me?" And it makes me wonder more at that little psychological switch that seems to be in some of us, and not in others; the difference between surrendering and constantly evaluating the options to figure out what you can do next.

Hmm. I think that makes sense. And, as a contrasting backdrop, I think it helps me better understand what I'm looking for as a rope top. Which is probably the subject of another entry . . .

Make your own training adventures

Most days I tend to approach writing here with some calm and well formed thoughts. This morning, I'm feeling . . . not frustrated, but antsy maybe.

I want a dojo. I want a studio. I want somewhere I can go on a more regular basis to practice rigging. I want mentors.

I am blessed with the perfect rope bottom. (Who lives three hours away.) I have willing victims - er, volunteers - locally, but haven't been able to swing the time. It looks like it's have to be weeknights given my schedule. I already do two monthly SIGs. I have a wealth of riches. I feel almost ungrateful to have these longings at all, thinking back on how good I have it.

And yet. There's a yoga studio in my city where there are classes all day, all night - all levels. I wish I had something like that for rigging, where I could just make time to drop in and take a class, repeating it until I reach competancy and then getting on to the next one. There are days I want it to be that easy, or that challenging.

Thankfully, I've been doing this witch thing long enough that I know a bit about make-your-own-class adventures. I just finished helping to coordinate and priestess a local ritual that many of us also used as a catalyst for our Work in the last several weeks. Running up to Hallowe'en, I did the same thing kinkwise before a play party -- spending a couple of weeks really thinking about and practicing to do my best at a corset on a very attractive lass.

So: this is the point of suck it up. This is the time when I get past the holidays and start scheduling my own time in the dojo, even if it's on weekdays and even if I end up practicing mostly on myself. (Which, if I schedule right, I won't.) This is when I start figuring out what it takes for me to graduate to the next level, and reconfirm my committment to this art.

In any training, if I am doing it right, I hit a plateau of frustration about once a month or so. I'm there again. I want it to be easy, and it won't be. I want mentors that I don't necessarily have. So the important thing is that I continue the committment to teach myself, and that it's worthwhile. (It is.)

Yule

My first thought was to write about gift giving this morning. A couple of problems with that. First, I don't want to out to anyone that reads this what kinky presents are in the works for them! And also I've sworn so many times that I don't want presents it would be truly bad form to start pining over canes or whatnot now. (And goddess knows that anything I can eat is truly off the menu. The more pics I get back from the SIG last week, the more I swear I am getting back in Pilates, stat.)

So, instead I'm thinking about rituals of the season. Here are a few things I'd love to do as kink rituals in the dark of the year . . .

Mummifications. There's something about Yule that gets me in a mind for very floaty, passive trance. Also, it seems the time of year for very long rituals; many communities do all night vigils. So a nice mummification seems perfect. Also: you really can't do a mummification in the summer in the South. Not. Going. To Happen. (And finally that part of me that wants to lose a few pounds thinks all that Saran Wrap can't hurt!)

Fire play. What better way to honor the festival of lights but with some lovely blue fire dancing across the body? How festive!

Rope play. Well, of course. I'll probably find a reason to put rope play on my list for every other holiday for some reason, too, because - well, rope. But think of all that lovely wrapping, and unwrapping, and wrapping again. It's just a lovely way to celebrate objects of great value through even further decoration. Mmm, rope.

And last, but not least:

Pony play. Because who never wanted a pony for Christmas?

The other powers of the imagination

When I was younger, I didn't have a very powerful feel for the senses in trancework. Several years of practice (and some new conceptual models) later, I am able to see, hear and feel in trance fairly well, and smell and taste a little.

Which can sometimes lead to very interesting moments. Like last night, when I was practicing trance for a public ritual with a good friend and co-priestess. We were doing pairs trance, and when we created the anchor cord between ourselves for me to go back, she said to create a "cord . . . or a rope". Good call! Yes, great imagery for me. And I decided to very quickly imagine an energetic rope harness to use for the work.

"And you are falling back, into warm supportive water."

At which my first thought was, "Oh fuck! Hemp rope!" and I could actually feel the rope tightening for a moment, before I decided: "Nylon! It's nylon rope."

My friend must have seen the quick look of panic on my face; we had a great laugh about it later. "Next time, I'll watch for the water ahead," she said. Maybe, "It might be nylon rope . . . "

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 . . . )