The healthy way in which D/s is gradually instructing my life

I have had a lot to think about of late.  Divorce, changing sex, coming out, work and whether I will be able to work in my field much longer, financial matters (I am being buried alive at the moment by legal bills), physical well-being and the changing nature of dysphoria, my children and how they are coping with divorce, how they are coping with me being trans, my friends, my colleagues, but most of all, love: with whom, how, in what ways, where, when.  For starters.

Over dinner the other night, someone who is emerging into my life as a very good friend, opened up to me and described her fear of having nothing underneath her.  She described two times in life where she was utterly and totally alone, once as a child, once as an adult.  She described her time as a child as coming home one day and finding the house locked, and nobody home.  This was before cell phones.  She was 10.  Her father was already gone, and her mother was dealing with it, but forgot about her daughter.  Her primary back up caregiver had passed away.  She spent several days living and sleeping rough.  At the age of 10.

Later, as an adult, when a relationship blew up, she had to move out of the apartment she shared with her BF for her safety and sanity, but had no place to go, so lived in her car for a month.  That was two years ago.  Her stuff is still in his apartment.  In a weird coincidence, she can see his bedroom window from mine.

I had recently told her that she was welcome to live in my house.  I just rattle around in here, so, if she needed a place to stay, she could stay as she transitioned from one place to another.  At the time the offer was made, it was in relation to the living arrangement she has now, which she may need to change in the coming months.  I repeated the offer, acknowledging that my own life was hardly stable at the moment, but that she could count on me being solid ground beneath her feet.

“I know that,” she said, “thank you.”

We are friends, though our conversation at times strays into the world of dominance and submission.  She knows I am a slave.  She is exploring her own dominance.  At times, when we are out together, she flexes her dominant muscles, and every time, is delighted with the results.  What we will eat, how much we will eat, where we will eat.  And as for me, the pleasure of knowing that this choice comes from a place of dominance inside of her, and that it should take root because of her own emerging certainty that not only will I comply, but that I will take pleasure from complying, becomes a mutually feeding philosophy.

One of my favourite bloggers and a sometime mentor has written a fabulous post recently on the subject of establishing protocol in a D/s relationship.  She describes steps to take which can lead to the formation of habits and rituals, protocol, which inform and reinforce a D/s dynamic.  As with all her work, it is a well laid out post with plenty of food for thought.  

What struck me as I read it, was how applicable her approach was to any aspect of life.  The word “habit” can have very positive meanings, but more typically seems to be associated with “bad”…Bad habits, but also being stuck.  The habitual as a sign of non-change.  And as we think about the self-help industry, or the bonfire of New Year’s resolutions which go up in smoke every year for not leading to any lasting change, the world is littered with failed breakaway.  

How many people have said in relationships to try and change someone is futile?  How many people have put up walls simply because someone is trying to change them?  How often do we give up on change because it is too hard?

I am reading a book given to me by my favourite therapist, and I will admit, our relationship as patient/client, has moved firmly away from something which is purely vanilla.  She has become sometimes “mommy” and has also become a dominant female presence in my life.  Ex-Mistress was horrified that my therapist would encourage me to have “mommy” feelings for a mental health professional, but what other than transference in the open is this?  I remember my first voluntarily chosen therapist, and the stated goal at the beginning of therapy was transference, as this enabled us to explore issues in the relationships that I transferred.  In those days, it was almost exclusively my relationship with my mother, but I felt guilty about it because it seemed shameful to have those feelings about a therapist.  Here, it is out in the open, actively encouraged, made okay, and this has resulted in us being able to talk about it in real depth, to feel it in the body.  When I say that she and I cover therapeutic ground that is deeper and faster than any other I have experienced, which is why I came back to her, this is why.

And with her, I have uncovered some deeply traumatic memories, things long forgotten, buried deep.  Acts of abuse.  The temptation of the reductive human mind is to make connections, to blame abuse for the emergence and evolution of kink.  I know that I am a fetishist, or at least was, because it became a way to cope with life.  I developed a love to wear diapers because it took me back to a moment of feeling safe, protected, held, to a moment before strife, pain, abuse.  It was a safe space.

With current mistress, this is the mental-emotional space we go to together.  Even though she has experience with clients in the adult baby world, we have never gone there.  With ex-Mistress, it took six months, but then we pretty much always went there.  This is going to sound terrible, but I found going there with her after the first one or two times, as kind of lazy, mostly on her part.  I didn’t always want to just go there, but it was an easy trigger for sub-space, and I think as a provider once someone is in that trance-like state, a session becomes different and perhaps less stressful.  New Mistress and I go to the same emotional-spiritual place of comfort, safety through the sensual, through touch, and through a very gentle and quiet experience together.  It is meditative.  She was the one who introduced me to shibari.

And in part because she is such an absolute stud, at the very pinnacle of the scene, just being in her presence is fulfilling in ways that are deeply empowering.  Perhaps more importantly, the style of domination which she has is not theatrical.  It is.  She lives it.  That means that she is at once both more human “in session” but also more authentically having life on her own terms, the terms of a woman in full possession of her power.  

Being around this kind of domination is very, very different than any I have experienced before or ever read about.  It is not overt.  It is rare that she tells me to do something, has never raised her voice, but her dominance is no less real.  I make the parallel that she herself has made, “if the teacher has to raise her voice, she’s already lost control of the class.”

This is very powerful for me.  Because it means that our pro-client dynamic is parallel to much of what I am working on in my life more generally.  My life’s purpose is emerging.  It is to live and be in such a way that a woman, women generally, come into their power and feel comfortable in exercising it when they are with me, and hopefully, more generally in life.

In other words, through her way of being, and this being true to who she is, not being some artificial construction for the male gaze, the kind of submission that I live for, that is healthy, and which is about adapting to how she is, is a very important teaching moment for me…for it is this dynamic which embodies the type of dynamic that I wish to have with all humans–respectful, respecting their autonomy, being grateful for what is given and also for what is not, learning to accept the other exactly as they are. And so this one dynamic, the universe.

In other words, putting up our spiritual antennae. Learning to listen and hear and feel.

The spirit world moves in very unusual ways.  As a small symbol of this, I have recently been asked to join the board of a charity which supports teenaged girls in finding bodily autonomy.  The topic is menstruation, having access to menstrual products, being educated about this bodily process, and learning that it is not shameful, but something of beauty.  In a somewhat bizarre twist of life, my very first professional job in NY oh so many years ago, was the marketing of menstrual products to teen girls.  Yes.  Isn’t it apt that this then man was made responsible for such a topic?  When someone said God is having a laugh, that divine will is humour, this is what was meant.

I remember being asked by friends, “why on earth did they ask you, a guy, to organise focus groups about menstruation with teen girls?” I remember going around shopping malls talking to girls about menstruation as part of my job. They talked to me. I still don’t know why, but I guess that’s why I was asked to do the job. People have always talked to me. Why else? God is laughing.

New Mistress, a bit of a misnomer, since I have now been with her for longer than I was with ex-Mistress, and can seriously contemplate the possibility that the dynamic is settling in for the long-haul, is an important metaphor for the type of connection that defines my relationship with the feminine—actual, aspirational, desired, and past.  Because of how she is, her mode, her way of being in herself.  Not because of dominating me in any way.  And the object lesson in this is that we can change and adapt and grow when it comes from inside of us, but it is much less likely to come about, even when we are willing, when the force for change comes from without.

Does that make sense?  In other words, by being as she is, she has embodied her own power, and what this produces in me, is a desire to adapt to that power.  A reader who has travelled with these posts over time, will know that this journey, this process which I describe here as an interaction between a domme and her sub, is symbolic of the entire journey.

I referred to many things in this post, to fetishes, to habits, to change, and they all lead to this place.  All of the changes which are taking place in my life, as if a glacier has broken apart and the stream is choked and flooding with chaos and tree trunks and roiling water, are putting things in motion.  Change is all around me.  What this means is that being intentional is important, but more important is that intention is likely to lead to its goal.

What am I saying?

Understand what you want in life, why you are here, what your purpose is.  What your “why” is.  Easier said than done.  We could our lives and then some on that one.  I am blessed, however, for having stumbled wild and blind, scratched and choking through the jungle, and have suddenly emerged into a clearing.  And in this clearing are gathered all of the threads of my life, past, present, future.  Embodying the feminine, finding an acceptable natural masculine, unfurling as a trans creature, both male and female, beautiful mainly in my embodiment, I have found that giving voice to the woman inside of me, is symbolic of what I wish for my purpose in the world, to encourage and enable all women I know or meet to embody their full power.

And I can do this.  As a shaman.  As a healer.  As an entrepreneur.  As a human.

I walked across a restaurant recently, crowded with cheerful diners, and the strangest thing happened.  There were no men there.  In actuality, of course there were, but I couldn’t see them.  They were all blurred out, as if they were part of the furniture.  What I saw instead was a room full of women, and they all stood out for me, stark, lit up, clear and easy to say, and very alive.

It sounds weird, but it is not.  It is something which seems to be happening to me in my perceptive field.  For one, I am more often seeing people’s auras.  Seeing into them, seeing their energy field.  This has been happening for a while now, but seems to be more accessible after becoming a reiki practitioner, and something I now practice daily.

On the friend I opened this post with, she sat reiki with me recently.  She felt “clean” afterwards, she said, which was different from her experiences previously, where she had felt ill or dirty after the session.  And that is my goal.  I could feel the filth, the bad energy coming into my body when we worked, and I was having involuntary movements as I shook it out of my system.  The same thing is happening to me when I practice the somatic therapy I do…This work, learning to practice, is also helping me to be in harmony with the energy around me.  The energy which I describe as proof of God.  Our connectedness, the universality of energy, that is the language of life, of existence itself, of all meaning.

I am just one little thread, but the colour of the thread, what it is made of, how it manifests, is my purpose…why I am here.  This transition is my purpose.  Being trans, giving voice to my own feminine, letting myself out, because that is exactly what it is, is a powerful act of liberation.

I love my main therapist.  And I love my lawyer for telling me that she wanted to see me back on regular therapy, not just when I was feeling trouble.  She was right, I so need it right now, and it is very reassuring to have these two amazing therapists who have now been with me for three years, to help me on this journey.  Why do I love my main therapist right now?  Because she explained something to me about me which I found deeply nourishing and joy-making.

I was marvelling at why all these people in my life are so open to me, so natural, so vulnerable in themselves.  Why it is okay to speak of being a slave, for example, and that not freaking them out.  And she said that it was because it didn’t come from a twisted place inside of me but was healthy and balanced.  My lawyer, who talked me off the ledge the other day, said “you are one of the most sane people I have ever met.”  And this came right after talking about how being a slave is so utterly core to my way of being.

Earlier in this post, I noted that fetishism is learned.  My friend stated that she feels slavery, at least in my case, my submissiveness, is genetic.  There is certainly evidence of it along my family line.  The akashic records which a medium consulted for me, went straight to my slavery in a past life, not knowing the first thing about me.  I will be visiting a medium again very soon, as seeing into the shadows, into the non-world, is central to developing my ability to embody my purpose.

And in the meantime, I revel in the joy that my wife’s belongings and energy have been purged from my home, and that four nights a week I get to hang out with a group of lovely ladies who have adopted me as the trans ballerina giraffe that I was born to be.

Something else.  The breasts that I was so afraid of having, are becoming an incredible source of joy.  Yes, they feel amazing to touch, even if they are still sore because they are growing.  But they are the ultimate advertising.  Summer is here, and I have taken to going braless and wearing a tight shirt, as my gravity-defying teen-girl breasts really show themselves off nicely.  Men stare at them all the time, and then quickly look away in guilt.  But women stare at them too now, but then look up at me and smile.  And with that, I know there is understanding.  A bond.  Acceptance.  I don’t need to say a word.

The last place I have not come out fully, is gradually opening up to me.  The importance of being fully and utterly out lies before me.  Not in your face.  Just there.  I am what I am.  And this personal liberation somehow seems to rub off on the people around me.

Who wouldn’t want that?

What else? Ahh, the purpose of this post. Protocol. When we really want something. When that want is true to our very core. When we are prepared to make the change. That is when protocol really steps in as a tool to help us to remake ourselves in our own desired image. We can take ownership for how we wish to be, to live.

In other words, what kind of person do you aspire to be? What are the hallmarks of that? The habits which are the bedfellows of your aspiration? Why not make your version of protocol embody those things.

D/s is for me at its best a tool to help us grow as people. It is to look yourself into partnership with another person and to work together to progress. Yes, it can be fun and kinky, but it is even more fun and kinkier when that work drives the fundamental changes we need to grow and be fully in our potential. Sex and sexuality are the most powerful energies we have. What turns us on speaks to the divine and the mangled within us. Harnessing that energy for personal growth is the greatest guarantor of progress.

Why not have a wank and grow?