friends with benefits

I had a great day learning.

Max had a new student for private lessons who needed a rope bottom to try things on during the lessons, and long story short, I ended up the lucky winner.

This was a perfect thing for me. I would never answer some random advertisement for someone looking to practice bondage. But because the whole thing was through Max–whom I trust completely–I had no important hesitations.

And what better way for me to learn more about bondage? I get to essentially “audit” the instruction, adding to my own repertoire during the lessons, but I also get to zone out a little here and there and just have a nice rope bottom experience. I mean it’s not like I really have to be paying attention to how to tie one knot or another … but if I do, I learn more.

But today what I learned most were some nuances about the experience of bondage that I hadn’t honed in on before.

This was in part because I was trying to give good feedback to Max’s fledging top–by verbalizing certain bits of my experience. For example, while Max was teaching his student a chest harness, student asked about wrapping the harness from behind versus wrapping it by walking around and around me.

And I tuned into the processes–they really are different. When my rope top stands behind me and wraps the harness strictly from that position, there’s some degree of “stranger danger” quality because I cannot see this person who is applying the ropes. But there is also a large amount of connection and intimacy, because of the closeness of our bodies, including the warmth of the top’s breath upon me.

But with a harness that is built by walking around me to make the wraps, there is a flow that emerges, and a soothing cadence that develops by virtue of the repetition of the top’s body (and hands) moving around, and around, and around, and around. In repetition there comes a predictability that humans find agreeable–because we know what to expect, a sense of safety emerges.

I will try and get back here tomorrow and write some more about the nuances I found, but this girl is tired and is off to bed now.