Tristan Taormino - The Ultimate Guide to Kink - BDSM, Role Play, and the Erotic Edge

Try it on your arm or leg. First try a touch that’s too gentle and soft. Feel how it’s kind of creepy and annoying? Now try a touch that’s too hard. Feel how the body tries to pull away, or goes rigid to defend itself? Now find the place—it will feel like a kind of holding—where the touch is just right. Begin to massage your arm or your leg. As you continue the massage, notice how your touch changes. As the body relaxes, you can go a little deeper.

The Resilient Edge of Resistance applies to all kinds of touch including the kind of intense sensation that happens in some BDSM play. We all know that we can’t start off using our heaviest toy with our greatest strength without burning out our bottom in two strokes. We start with warm-up strokes, staying at the bottom’s Resilient Edge of Resistance, gradually building up the intensity, until we’re both flying happily on the exquisitely extreme sensation.

Sounds of pleasure can be embarrassing or frightening for some people. Remember the Quiet and Quick Rule? We learn at an early age not to make too much noise while having sex. However, sound moves energy—a lot of energy. Whether you are enjoying a long delicious fuck or a long intense night in the dungeon, you’ll get a lot more turned on and reach higher ecstatic states if you make some noise. In Tantra, the body’s energetic anatomy is made up of chakras—spinning spirals of energy located in approximately the same areas as the glands of the endocrine system—at the perineum, lower belly, solar plexus, heart, throat, forehead (aka third eye), and crown. Each of these seven chakras has a sound associated with it (as well as specific physical and metaphysical qualities, colors, and symbols). The first chakra has the lowest pitch, the highest chakra the highest pitch. You can move energy up and down your body by making sounds of different pitches. You don’t have to know any Sanskrit chants—all you have to do is remember to make sounds

PC squeezes, also known as Kegels, are little squeezes of the pubococcygeus muscle. The PC muscle is the muscle you use to stop the flow of urine. Find your PC muscle now and give it a little squeeze. Your PC muscle is your own personal erotic energy pump. Think of it as a heat pump on the furnace in your erotic basement. Use PC squeezes to help you get turned on, then to move your turn-on up through your body and out into your arms and legs. Without your PC heat pump, sexual energy might eventually get into all the rooms of your house, but with PC squeezes it will get there so much faster and more effectively.

The Tantric technique of eye-gazing is at once challenging, intimate, and a trust exercise of the highest order. It is also mesmerizing, erotically hypnotizing, and deeply comforting. Tantrikas believe that prolonged eye-gazing gives you a glimpse into your partner’s soul. At the very least, eye-gazing and breathing together will create a deep connection. Different Tantric traditions have different opinions about which eye to gaze into and why, but it really doesn’t matter. I like to gaze into my partner’s eyes with relaxed, softly focused eyes. However, in a scene involving power exchange, my gaze would likely turn more direct and commanding.

Traditionally, the six ways to generate and circulate sexual energy described above have been considered Tantric techniques. “Safe, sane, and consensual” (SSC) and “risk-aware consensual kink” (RACK) have been considered exclusively BDSM principles. Agreeing to take proper safety precautions, connect in a sober and conscious state of mind, and play consensually is excellent advice for anyone engaged in any sort of erotic play. From an energetic point of view, these principles create a safe enclosure where we are able to take the kinds of emotional risks that are necessary to fly in intimate connection with others and within ourselves. They are, if you will, the magic carpet on which we ride.

Now that you’ve got the basics, let’s practice some kinky twisted Tantra, or if you prefer, Tantric BDSM. We’ll do this by looking at two of the most basic components of BDSM—Power and Pain—through a Tantric lens.

There is virtually no human interaction that does not involve some exchange of power. Because BDSM is a consensual erotic art form, the power exchange we play with is power sharing with someone, not power over someone. So long as the safe, sane, and consensual rule is in play, our power is on loan, never taken away by force. The roles in power exchange might be named dominant/submissive, top/bottom, or any number of other more personalized descriptions of this temporary binary. Whatever the labels, both partners are regarded as equally powerful. After all, you have to have some power in order to be able to gift it to someone for a while.

There is an equivalent dynamic in Tantra, where the labels are more likely to be yin/yang or masculine/feminine. In Tantra all genders are considered equally powerful. The energetic principles of consciousness and energy are represented by the god Shiva and the goddess Shakti, respectively. As legend has it, when Shiva joined in sexual union with Shakti the union of pure consciousness and pure energy gave birth to the world. Obviously, everyone has aspects of both consciousness and energy, just as everyone has both masculine and feminine qualities. In some branches of neo-Tantra these energetic principles were mistakenly reduced to the binaries of male and female. This created not only a gender bias but also a heterosexist bias. In Tantric circles today, this misconception is now much less prevalent than it once was.

We all have our issues around power and gender. As the daughter of a mother with borderline personality disorder, I lived in a nonconsensual D/s relationship for the first 18 years of my life. As such, I have had a lifelong uneasy relationship with power exchange—even conscious, consensual, power exchange. As a radical queer (I describe myself most frequently as a young black drag queen in a blonde female body), I have had an uneasy relationship with the masculine/ feminine binary. My sensitivity to being boxed into any of these roles meant I had to reinvent them to be able to find my own path in both Tantra and BDSM. I needed to find new language—language that did not stir up old traumas.

I looked for words that described the essence of the energy exchange, not the identity of the participants. I have tried giver/receiver, creative/receptive, initiator/beneficiary. The words that work best for me? Active and receptive.

For me, active and receptive are like positive and negative poles on a battery. One pole is not better or stronger than the other. You need both to create energy. In practice, assuming active and receptive roles is a delightful, efficient way of amping up energy. Once the energy is firing on its own, the roles begin to slip away, becoming unnecessary and even meaningless—as both active and receptive partners are carried along on currents of flowing energy.

Let’s try an erotic exercise in which you can experience the essence of active and receptive power exchange.

This exercise will require a partner, a blindfold, and wrist restraints. If you don’t have a pair of wrist cuffs you can make wrist restraints out of a 15- to 18-foot piece of rope. Choose ¼-inch to ½-inch-thick soft rope. Although this is not a bondage exercise, you will need to know how to tie wrist restraints safely without damaging nerves or cutting off circulation. Instructions for simple wrist bondage follow below.