The Road to Shambhala

So when am I going to get to the S&M stuff, already? Where are the whips and chains? Isn’t that what S&M is all about?

I’ll get to all that eventually, but right now I want to talk about another book. I went to an introduction to meditation class a couple weeks ago and the teacher recommended this book:

Turning the Mind into an Ally by Sakyong Mipham (2003)

I started reading it last night and I was only on page six when this paragraph caught my eye.

That’s the point of talking about mind and meditation. The more we understand about ourselves and how our mind works, the more the mind can work. The Tibetan lesu rungwa means that the mind is functional. My father used to sometimes translate this as “workable.” It means that we can train the mind to work in order to use it to do something particular. For example, if we want to generate compassion and love, that’s work.

My S&M journey is all about working toward a better understanding of my own mind. I didn’t realize that when I started, I just knew that I was drawn to this world of eroticized pain and submission. The thing that fascinates me is the degree to which the above statement is equally true about the body, and the endless interplay between body and mind.

The first step for me was working up the nerve to book a session at Rapture last November. I pored over the Domme profiles and was drawn to Miss Mitsu’s. I have learned that she means every single word, starting with “Kink is about experimentation.” A full description of that first session will appear here sometime soon, but nothing could have prepared me for that first taste of Sub Space — that first trip into another part of my brain; an alteration of my consciousness.

I have read a little bit about the chemistry of endorphins and the other brain chemicals activated by pain/body play, but I’m convinced there’s much more to it than that. After a few traditional sessions, I did a trance session in which Mitsu hypnotized me. I didn’t go to exactly the same place as Sub Space, but I certainly tapped into another part of my mind. The basic direction Mitsu gave was to let my subconscious mind out of its box. Let’s not worry too much about WHY I have masochistic urges, let’s just play with those urges as they emerge.

The tiny taste of meditation I have had is enough to make me realize that it’s another method for adjusting my brain. It’s going to take a lot of practice before I’m able to quiet my bewildered mind through meditation, but I know it’s possible.

I think that passage above sheds further light on what Miss Mitsu means by “carefully cultivating, modifying, and nurturing my specimen. Feeling out your mood. Getting inside your head. Manipulating from the inside out.” The human mind CAN be manipulated and trained. Maybe that much is obvious, but what I find exciting is the vast untapped potential — the mind is capable of so much more than daily life demands of it.