Shibari: the more I learn the less I know

The importance of learning something well enough to do it with your eyes closed

I love taking courses on this, that, and the other.  As I write this, I am sitting on the front stoop of a law office as I wait in a patch of the fading afternoon sunlight.  Like a lizard, I need the warm sun to sustain me…and I search out those patches out of the wind where I can wait and catch up and not get cold.  

What am I learning this time?   The Japanese art of Shibari.  Rope bondage.  There are few things I love more than being tied up.  Why?  So many reasons, none of them logical.  The profound feeling of sub space swallows me whole the moment the rope begins to caress my skin.  It is a spiritual departure from this earthly realm that welcomes me as my body loses its freedom of action.

I have been invited to Japan to study under one of the world’s leading practitioners of the art form.  She is one of the only women in the world to have been given the highest honours of being the living embodiment of a particular style.  If you know you know.  I asked her, “but I’m a bunny.  If I am to study under you, I had better figure out why I would do that.”

“Yes, you do need to figure that out.”  But she is convinced that I will take to it. As I have explored with a growing number of teachers, I have discovered that many of the practitioners I admire began as bunnies. As much as I tie, there is no escaping my deep love of the surrender associated with being tied. I will have to incorporate this into my somatic therapy practice, but that is a journey of its own.

I look at my BDSM test results: 100% rope bunny, 1% rigger.  Is there any hope?!  And yet, I have begun to study in earnest.  I have spent many, many days in rope studios in Europe and America learning the art.  I have had private lessons with some amazing teachers, and am loving the variations in style, and what they are teaching me.  Am loving meeting people in the scene.  And I am enjoying participating in “rope jams” where you just show up and see what happens.

Even if I like to be tied, I have not been tied by anyone other than a clutch of incredibly talented people.  And as I grow into this, I am tying more and more widely.  Am I good at it?  No.  And in truth, I do not enjoy the obsession with knots and the aesthetics.  I do love the beauty of it, true, but more in an intellectual way.  But what I do love is the emotional connection.  Feeling someone cross over into a state of surrender as they are in my arms.

I know what it feels like.  And one thing I have learned is that all of the people I am working with, and strangely enough, they are all women (and one trans man), every single one of them began their journey in rope as I had: as a bunny.  

On the particular night in question, after shivering on a doorstep, she scooped me up in her protective aura and led me into her warm studio space.  After settling in and a short chat, we were practicing a style of Shibari called Ichinawa, which is the use of only one rope…maybe only one knot.  How you can create the feeling of submission, gain control over someone, manipulate their body with so little.

It was hypnotic.  And it made me realise, there is no point in thought.  We learn these exercises, to tie, not to know, but to feel.  And the process of knowing is almost a process of unknowing.  We become familiar with something, so familiar, so as to not have to think about it any longer.  That we can just do.  That tying becomes like breathing, not conscious, not rational, just a feeling.

Has it ever occurred to you that the goal of “knowledge” is unknowing?  I tell you: when faced with an art form as complex as Shibari, the only response I have is to know so deeply that you unknow, become instinctual, become animal.  That is not a boast.  It is a recognition of how far I have to go before I will consider tying up someone who matters to me.  And the Queen awaits.