{"id":15540,"date":"2011-06-19T07:35:16","date_gmt":"2011-06-19T11:35:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/horizonsmagazine.com\/blog\/?p=15540"},"modified":"2013-10-26T01:01:45","modified_gmt":"2013-10-26T05:01:45","slug":"does-kinky-sex-make-you-lose-the-subtle-nervous-system-response-you-need-to-meditate-effectively","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/horizonsmagazine.com\/blog\/does-kinky-sex-make-you-lose-the-subtle-nervous-system-response-you-need-to-meditate-effectively\/","title":{"rendered":"Does kinky sex make you lose the subtle nervous system response you need to meditate effectively?"},"content":{"rendered":"

My friend Everett is newly interested in altered states and how to achieve them naturally through meditation. \u00a0He\u00a0takes a combination of prescribed medication that has taken away his sex drive the past many years, and he\u2019s into unconventional sex with his wife i.e.\u00a0BDSM<\/a>, an erotic practice involving consensual use of restraint and \u00a0intense sensory stimulation.\u00a0 He’d not yet been successful in achieving what he considered meditation, and he asked me how much I thought the medications he was taking affected that. \u00a0I told him that in my experience, anything that heightened or suppressed my brain activity might affect my ability to “get in the slot.” \u00a0That included the restraint and spankings he was so fond of. \u00a0I told him: \u00a0“We meditate to bring ourselves to a stillpoint several times a day, in order to refine our perception and enable us to grasp the more subtle nuances of sensory input via our neuro physical<\/a> makeup.\u00a0 The more we are able to bring ourselves to a place of detachment from external stimulation, the more subtly our nervous system will become attuned to respond to the nonphysical environment around us. \u00a0When you are in a habit of bombarding yourself with ever increasing modes of external stimulation, you are likely to lose the subtleties entirely and that could keep you from reaching certain altered states of consciousness.”<\/p>\n

When you go into the silence alone and achieve higher states of meditation, it’s not so much an emptiness as it is an enormous presence of a world that remains hidden during daily waking consciousness. \u00a0The more often I attune to this world and allow it to bring me back to center, the more fully I can handle all areas of my life in the physical world. \u00a0The more power and influence it gives me to operate in my physical world.<\/p>\n

Last night I was sitting in a friend’s <\/a>studio listening to some music he’d made twenty years ago. \u00a0As a musician\/singer\/songwriter, he had many cds of his own music<\/a> spanning many styles over many years. \u00a0I wanted to hear some of the late 80’s and we did so, facing each other in big swivel office chairs. \u00a0 \u00a0I sat with eyes closed and listened, \u00a0recalling some of it from early WFIT days. \u00a0 I was having a very full and lively subjective, internal experience and all he could see was me sitting there with my eyes closed.<\/p>\n

“What are you thinking?” he asked after a bit. \u00a0I was totally digging it, so much so that I thought it’d be obvious to him. \u00a0I laughed as I remembered how often we sit just inches apart from someone who is having a different experience than we are. \u00a0My experience was listening to some really great industrial music and being transported back 20+ years in time. \u00a0It was all I could do to sit in the chair. \u00a0I could feel every cell of my body alive with being into it. \u00a0The endorphins<\/a> were flowing big time. \u00a0His experience, however, was watching me sit before him with eyes closed, with no \u00a0indication of how the music was landing \u00a0on me and what I thought of it.<\/p>\n

I had to laugh. \u00a0Him thinking I might be bored by what I’m listening to, all the while I was enjoying it on so many levels. \u00a0He’s heard his music for his whole life, he’s used to it, he hears it now with a critic’s ear and in light of new knowledge and experience, it’s become almost ordinary for him. \u00a0Yet when I hear it, me being someone who has trained my nervous system, through meditation, to detect and respond to this world on a deeper and more subtle level, when I hear the music it transports me into a very expanded and sensory filled world.<\/p>\n

This is the world that my friend Everett tries to achieve in his BDSM games. \u00a0But the remedy is to remove stimulation rather than add more. \u00a0Not remove forever, just remove it for a break so your body can reboot itself and find a new zero point. \u00a0One that allows you to tune into the world at a more subtle level, to derive more intense enjoyment of each moment of it. \u00a0Then you’ll find that less is so much more. \u00a0And when they don’t know that your quiet smile means you’re having an enormous ecstatic internal experience just by sitting and breathing in the same room with them, you don’t care. \u00a0You’re having enough fun for both of you.<\/p>\n

Later, I got an email from a friend: \u00a0“Gotta tell you privately. . . \u00a0I’m a dominatrix, sweetie! And you have BDSM all wrong–it’s NOT all about the external stimulation, not at all. The externals are as much a part of BDSM as a caress is to “normal” erotic stimulation. It’s about the consensual exchange of control. Sometimes physical, but ALWAYS psychological. \u00a0There is a term in the “lifestyle” (what we insiders call it) called “subspace”. That’s the goal of most lifestyle practitioners–for the dominant to get his\/her submissive into “subspace” which is a mental state that transcends the physical. There are many ways to go about this, but the primary stimulus is mental. \u00a0So–does BDSM prevent one from a meditative state? NO. It’s not all about spankings and being tied up. There are SO many different practices. . .but the one thing they have in common is that one person submits to another, and that the person in control is trying to fulfil that person’s expectations and bring them into subspace.”<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0Andrea’s Meditation Process<\/a><\/p>\n

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