Holding On and Letting Go at the same time

This is probably the last reasonable chunk of time I’m going to have to myself before I take off for vacation. I feel really great about my kinks right now. I had a great time with Miss Mitsu earlier this week and a video we did went up online.

The title of this post is something she said to me as she started sliding a glass dildo up my ass: “…holding on and letting go at the same time…” That’s not just the key to successful anal penetration, it’s kind of the key to life.

That’s how I’m thinking about Mitsu lately, the nature of our relationship. The holding on is the easy part; it’s the letting go AND holding on that’s challenging. It’s difficult not to think of her frequently, sometimes obsessively, but I’ve been trying a technique from what I’ve learned about meditation. In seeking peaceful abiding, one of the first things is to train your mind to let go of thoughts that distract your focus from your breath. Instead of fighting intrusive thoughts, acknowledge them, then let them go. 

So when I think of Miss Mitsu, I sometimes choose to relish it — maybe relive a session moment or fantasize about future play — but I sometimes simply acknowledge the thought and send it on its way. That seems to be working fairly well. I think I’m finding a good balance for how BDSM practice fits into my life. I’m also feeling more confident both of my desires and my true physical and mental delight. I have a real sense of accomplishment about what I’ve been doing. I’m proud of myself for finally following through on exploring something that has been a part of me for as long as I can remember.

Another thing Mitsu said was:

“I’m just training you so you can take it really rough and fast.”

Which is very exciting. And once again I’m going to move from anal penetration to the world of Buddhist meditation: the basic idea is that the mind is a naturally calm and strong thing. It’s the swirl of distracting thoughts and our efforts to maintain a public persona — the constant struggle for ME! — that throw us off balance. Once we train the mind toward calmness, we will be able to remain balanced even in the roughest and fastest storms.

I get thrown off balance a lot. I’m starting to feel the strength at my center — strength I’m building through yoga and meditation and S&M. 

And then she said:

“You like it when Mommy’s mean to you and nice to you…”

Yes.

Yes I do.

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.

Who I am and what this is

I am a middle-aged man living in New York City who has taken his first steps into the amazing world of S&M. I consider myself extremely lucky to have connected with an exceptional person to guide me along this path: Miss Mitsu, one of the Dommes at Rapture.

The current phase of my journey began on a cold and cloudy day last November when I had my first session with Mitsu, but my interest/fascination/obsession with the worlds of kink and S&M has very deep roots. Something I am learning about myself is that I am a masochist. I intend to use this space to explore exactly what that means.

To begin at the beginning would be to go all the way back to when I was about three years old. This is an incident I have no memory of, but my mother has told me the story multiple times. Mom was working in the garden and I was playing outside. She heard me crying and came running. According to her, I was standing at the fence that separated our yard from our neighbor’s yard. The two next door neighbor boys were poking me in the belly with sticks. I just stood there, bleeding and crying while they jabbed away.

My earliest memory of auto-erotic sado-masochism is from when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old. There’s a Buggs Bunny cartoon called “From Hare to Heir” (1960) that contains this exchange between Yosemite Sam and his Advisor (who has a huge, phallic nose):

Advisor: But Sire, there is no more money. Your uncle, the king, has cut off your allowance.
Yosemite Sam: You know the penalty for not having the books balanced!
Advisor: Oh no. Not the ‘nose-in-the-book’ penalty.
Yosemite Sam: Yeah, the nose-in-the-book.
[Advisor puts his nose in the book and Sam slams it]
Yosemite Sam: WE’VE GOTTA GET SOME MONEY!

I acted out this scene by myself, but instead of slamming my nose in a book, I slammed my cock in the toilet seat.

Hmmm…

There’s plenty more where that came from, which I’ll write about here from time to time.

For now I’ll just explain the title of this blog.

Mitsu has kept a blog for a while, and I often write her long e-mails about what’s going on inside my brain before and after our sessions. Last week she suggested I post some of those thoughts to a blog, so here we are.

I kicked around a few ideas for the title “Masochism World,” “The Masochist Monk,” “The Center of the Cyclone” and others. A few days ago I was reading a book by Alan Watts called What is Zen? and I sent Mitsu this quote:

The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is — as all of a piece. This has to be done in a special setting of some kind, because you can’t just gaily walk out into the street and suspend the rules. And if you do, you’ll create traffic confusion of every conceivable kind! But we can set up a certain environment in which we have an agreement to suspend the rules — that is to say to meditate, to stop thinking for a while, to stop making formulations.

When I first climbed the stairs to Rapture over six months ago, the last thing I expected was a reawakening of my interest in Zen philosophy and Buddhism. But this journey is way more complicated than I ever imagined, thanks to the brilliant wide-ranging mind of Miss Mitsu.

I have come to see my times at Rapture with Mitsu as the special setting in which I can safely suspend the rules. Rules about what your body is for; rules about pleasure and pain; rules about what part of the brain gets to run the show.

The title is also perfect because one of the things I enjoy immensely is suspension bondage. There’s something indescribable about being bound with ropes and hoisted into the air. The total vulnerability; the total faith in my Mistress; the endorphin rush; the whole damn package is mind blowing.

Mind-blowing. That’s probably my favorite way to describe the experiences I have had so far. I’m eager to keep exploring the limits of both my mind and my body with the guidance of the incredibly skilled, wicked smart, and utterly gorgeous Mitsu.