Getting more into the public and local BDSM scene in the past year, I've noticed a fair amount of the people who lecture, blog, or demonstrate list themselves as, in one way or another, "spiritual." In their headers or their bios, along with "teacher," "practitioner," "educator," and "artist," I often see titles like "shaman," or "healer," or "priest." And although this is just a general impression, I get the sense that the BDSM community overlaps a fair bit with the more new-agey, alternatives-to-christianity spiritual crowd.
For a while, I chalked this up to the Fringe Group Reduction Theory (capitalized for my own enjoyment; this is not a real thing). Meaning that, if two or more far-from-the-ordinary groups aren't opposed to each other in any kind of real way, they tend to get together. It's why you see nerds and geeks in BDSM; it's why you see ravers and fire dancers and hippies all hanging out together. For a while, I thought it was why people at BDSM events also offered to balance my chakras and read my Mayan calendar. And maybe I still think that a little bit, but I'm not sure that's all there is to it.
First, a little background:
I was raised a catholic/protestant/buddhist. My parents were both lapsed catholics, sort of, and my mother and I attended a presbyterian church growing up. I was an adamant part of the youth group, but that was mostly for the service and community sides of it, and not the religious aspects. I've never really believed in capital G god, or a god, or Jesus. I mean, I think he was a pretty great dude, but I capitalize his name because it's a proper name, and not because he's a deity.
My mother also took me to visit a buddhist monastery for a weekend every summer, where we would stay as guests (they ran a small guest-house program, sort of like a retreat center, out of part of the monastery. It funded that monastery, and their other two locations). It was called Tassajara, tucked in a valley of the Santa Cruz mountains at the end of a fourteen-mile dirt road. It was beautiful, and I loved it even as a baby, and it's where I started to learn about Zen.
When I was sixteen, I decided to try a few weeks as a full time student at Tassajara. They usually require students to be of legal adult age (eighteen), but because I was somewhat familiar with the place, they made an exception. They gave me a mentor, a woman named Joan, who has since become an abbot at the city center. She made sure I stayed out of trouble (mostly), and we'd have long chats over tea or chess. We talked about Zen, about practice, about the dharma and the sangha. And although I identified with Zen in a lot of ways, I learned fairly early on that I would never take vows, never be a Zen practitioner very seriously in my life. But the great thing about buddhism (or the way I've experienced it, anyway) is that there's no attempt at conversion. There's no pressure or alienation for hesitance. So I stayed a few weeks as as student, went back to the city for week, and then decided to return to the monastery for the remainder of the summer. I woke up in the early morning, sat zazen (formal meditation), ate breakfast, worked a full day cleaning bedrooms or tending the garden or chopping vegetables, ate lunch, worked, ate dinner, sat zazen, and went to bed. I had one day off every five days, during which I wasn't required to work, but was encouraged to sit extra zazen periods in my spare time. Which often, I did.
I moved away from Zen during college, and then, when my first serious relationship ended, I returned to the Bay Area to live with my mother, and found that Joan was teaching a class at the city center on the Five Hinderances. Much of class focused on how to sit with the difficult things (the hinderances); how to sit with rage, how to sit with anxiety, how to sit with depression (sitting with too much sitting, we used to joke). It was perfect for that time in my life, and I took sanctuary in the large brick building a couple times a week, sitting zazen again and then going to class. Talking about loss, talking about grief. Talking about the dark emotions as things to be honored for their power and their energy, for their possibility.
I'm getting to the BDSM part, I promise (and starting to sound a little new-agey myself in the process, it seems).
It wasn't until I went to kinkfest this past year that I started putting these two things together; that I started linking the way I felt about buddhism, and the tenants I loved about it, with the way I felt under a flogger, or kneeling at someone's feet. So this is still relatively new, but I'll do my best.
One of the things I have always loved about buddhism is its stress on the present; stay present, be in the present moment; the present is all you have. I believe in that (maybe not the last one as much, but sort of), and I know that when I can do that more often, I'm a more fulfilled person. I'm more contented and more at peace. I also agree with the tenants of Zen that talk about accepting oneself as imperfect, as flawed, as dark and human. These are, at their essence, many of the central tenants that I also love about BDSM, about my own masochism and my own submission.
*The jump that I don't make is that, through some amount of sitting, there is a letting go of the dark and flawed and the desire, and the belief that that is better. I may not always like my dark or my desire, but I think they're really important, and living with them is important, and I'd like to keep them. So that's where Buddhism and I part ways. But that's another post, or another blog altogether.
When I'm in a scene, I create (with my partner) a space in which my own dark feelings about myself (my own loathing, my own fear and my own doubt) can be expressed safely. That leads, for me, to a space where they're not only given free reign to do their worst, but where they are, in a way, valued. The same is true, for me, of buddhism. The darkness** is powerful, and should be honored for that power. So not only do I get to take all the bad and, in a way, excise it, but I'm actually valued (in part) for having this bad in the first place. And I think all people, no matter how hunky-dory their life is, have bad in them. Have dark in them. The problem, I think, lies in how we're conditioned to feel about it, and how we're told it's okay to express (or not express) the feelings that come from it. How darkness is something we're told to put away, push under, deny and cover up.
**I realize I'm using "darkness" a lot. I don't mean it in a woo-woo sort of way; it's just the term I like best to sum up all the negative emotions, negative psychological states/reactions, etc...
When I'm in a scene, there is also pain.
I love pain for many reasons. Some of them I can only describe in flavors; "tangy" is one my favorite words to use when doing this. There's a certain kind of pain that's sharp, but not sting; that's acute, but not instant. It's the moment of the perfect-force hit of cane on a well-warmed ass; enough to make me gasp for breath, enough to push me right up to the edge, but not over it (and I know, a cane is the ultimate sting, but sometimes it's... more than that). It's best described, I think, in the moment when a clothespin left long on my breast is removed, maybe right after an orgasm. A hot rush, filling first the place once pinched and then moving up into my head, up out of me in an open mouthed-scream. That's tang, and I can't get enough.
But I also love pain because, just like sitting zazen, it takes me into the present moment. Getting there through sitting zazen is a lot harder; it doesn't happen as easily or as often, and it's usually fleeting and interrupted by many bouts of non-present-ness (oh man - word choice is getting sloppy). But it's there. In the same way that, each time I'm hit, or flogged, or caned, there's a tiny moment in which I'm nowhere else, thinking about nothing else; completely present in the taste of that impact. With kink, the little moments bleed together, and it's easier to stay present than it is when I'm sitting. They're too entirely different practices, so that makes sense, but even so (differences aside) I think it's fascinating that one is so active (and easier), while the other is passive (and harder).
I miss sitting zazen sometimes, even with a regular kink practice (do I dare start to call it that? Maybe not. Maybe just this once...). But I think I get some of the same aftereffects out of kink that I did out of zazen. I feel more centered and more aware in my everyday life. I feel more at home in my body, and have an easier time making decisions. I feel more awake, more confident, more sure of what I want. And I feel more fulfilled. I like to use that instead of "happier," because I think happiness is both too easily glossed over (and faked), and it's also too simplistic a word. It doesn't carry enough weight for me to hold it on the be-all-end-all pinnacle it occupies for some people, or in some cultural tropes. I choose the Pursuit of Personal Purpose instead. Or some equally as cheesy acronym.
So. This is rambling on. To the point!
I think part of what attracts people to the BDSM lifestyle might also be what attracts them to the alternative religions (and no offense meant there - I just honestly don't have a good word to encompass the group). The emphasis on the present, maybe less so. But the honoring of dark spaces, the honoring of the less-accepted, deeper parts of ourselves? Not the mention the ritual (it's an obvious one, so I didn't get into it as much). So maybe, it's less the Fringe Group Reduction Theory and more the Fringe Group Aspect Overlap Theory. That one's less cool sounding, but maybe more accurate.
And I think it's great, not just in general, but for me and my own perspective and judgment. I tend to be really turned off by the new-agey, horoscope, star sign destiny bullshit (see? I'm calling it bullshit, right here. I should stop doing that). I don't believe in higher powers (my higher power is the complexity of people, but that is, again, another post). But I do, after thinking about this for a long time, have more respect and a greater capacity for acceptance of people who do believe these things. To be able to acknowledge a persons beliefs as completely implausible to myself personally, while at the same time identifying with the reasons why they believe what they do, and the aspects of their belief that draw them to it: I think this is good for me. That it is good medicine in general.
And, looking back, the overlap comes up in all sorts of funny ways.
At the beginning and the end of each of the hinderances classes I took, back in the Bay Area with Joan, we would repent, and then we would take refuge. I don't really believe in repentance in the traditional, culturally-laden sense of the word "repent," and I don't think buddhists really do either. But I loved, loved when we would do this. The idea with the class was, at the beginning, to repent in a way that laid our dark parts out on the table; that took ownership over all we were, including our more shadowed aspects, in order to have an open, honest, and accepting class (both of others and of ourselves). And at the end of class, after we'd splashed around in our own muddy waters, so to speak, we'd take refuge in the buddha, the dharma, and the sangha, as if to ask for some relief from the all of the hard things we'd just dealt with. And I liked this model, in a broad sense. I liked the acknowledgment of the sinking into a thing, and acknowledgment of the coming back up for air. I liked that we knew, in plain words (sometimes not english words, but plain none the less), that this was hard to do, but also worth doing; that we could ask a lot of ourselves, but also ask for help.
I liked the refuges at the end of class, but I liked the repentance more. This particular repentance is called "The Atonement Gatha," and it rings loud and clear in a discussion at the recent kinkfest of the word "atonement." Lee Harrington (I promise, I'm not a stalker - I just like him. A lot) was writing buzzwords up on the board that came to mind when we thought about protocol. And when someone shouted "atonement," murmurs of ascent and understanding rippled across the room in an eerie wave. It surprised everyone (even me - who was among those murmuring ascent). I haven't thought about it hard enough yet (and it too will probably have it's own post), but the word "atonement" and that moment in the lecture was what started this wheel turning in my head.
Below, you'll find the repentance from class. It's a Zen chant, but I can't read it now without thinking of it in a kink context, as if it were meant to be uttered before a scene, or at the beginning of a play party.
ALL MY ANCIENT TWISTED KARMA
FROM BEGINNINGLESS GREED, HATE, AND DELUSION
BORN THROUGH BODY SPEECH AND MIND
I NOW FULLY AVOW
Happily bruised, as always,
The Good Girl
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