The Invisible Toybox: Incorporating Energy Work Into BDSM

Many folks in the various segments of the Neo-Pagan community move energy around for various purposes -- healing, spellwork, nourishment. It's one of the basic things we are taught when we first come to these paths. Yet most people don't think about incorporating magic and energy work in their S/M practice, perhaps because it seems dangerous. This chapter will discuss uses for energy work that are reasonably safe, or at least can be made so. After all, if we have it, why waste it?

The drawback to these techniques is that they are really the top's job, like learning to wield a whip or a cane. While there are techniques for bottoms to learn that help them to achieve certain states of mind, these are generally things done to themselves, and not skills used between two people. If anyone knows differently, they should let me know. That disclaimer aside, these techniques have been beta-tested for effectiveness by many tops and found to be very useful.

Chi Whip

Some folks have a great eye, terrific reflexes, and awesome spatial skills. They can wield a cat or a single-tail like nobody's business, with nary a miss. (Years of practice don't hurt, either.) However, some of us have lousy spatial skills, and are clumsy to boot. Hitting a target right is a best-three-out-of-four proposition. Rather than give up flailing instruments altogether, there are ways to compensate for this, for those who can work with energy. (I'm using the Chinese term chi to describe the energy within all of us; it is also called ki in Japan, prana in India, huna in Hawaii, and by many other names. Take your pick.)

Start by concentrating on pulling magic out of your fingers, and drawing it through the whip or cat. Hold the handle in your dominant hand, and with your other hand take long strokes from your fingers to the end of the whip. As you do this, visualize pulling the energy out form your fingertips so that it fills the whip strands, making the whip another part of your body, an auxiliary limb. Practice doing this for a while. (One way in which you'll know it's working is that if you put the whip down, you'll feel immediately uncomfortable, as if part of your hand had dropped off, and you'll feel the need to have it back in your hand again.)

Now practice swinging it at a target. For this exercise, we strongly suggest a nonliving target, like a pillow or a wall. As you begin, focus on feeling the whip end as the extended tips of your fingers; your brain tells them to hit there, and they do. You may need to stop periodically and do your chi-stroking again if you begin to get clumsy and lose the feeling. When you're tired of practicing, sit down and stroke the other way, working the energy back into your hand, removing it from the whip. (If you skip this step, your chi will dangle and feel funny for a while unless you're experienced enough to just make it zip back up into you like a tape measure. Even if you can't do that, it will eventually retract, and be fine.)

Like all things, this takes practice. I've found that by extending my chi into the whip, I can compensate wonderfully for my spatial dyslexia. However, there is another reason to extend your chi into the instrument...or rather, there's a side effect that can become a reason unto itself. Chi can be a weapon by itself; just ask any experienced martial artist. Being hit with an implement that is full of someone's extended chi hurts a lot more. That's because while the implement strikes the physical body, the chi strikes the astral body and wounds it. "You hit harder than you hit" has been an accusation leveled at me before I realized that my aiming technique was having repercussions.

When I was a teenager, I was initiated into a traditional British-style Gardnerian Wiccan coven with very strict energy-working guidelines. As an advanced technique, I learned "soulsword", which is basically creating a sword out of chi that could then be used to fill any long object -- a shinai, a broomstick, a tire iron -- or even just be used by itself, a noncorporeal sword. The technique was used for dispatching noncorporeal creatures; the physical objects one could attach it to were more for the use of focus. Certainly it was never meant to be used on human beings, or at least my teachers didn't bring that up.

However, after being drilled in this technique month after month, I found that the "soulsword" would pop out every time I picked up a long thing and swung it. This didn't matter much when I was chopping wood, but when I began taking a cane to a bottom, problems arose. I found that heavy masochists who could take thirty strokes form another top would crumble and safe after three or four strokes from me. They would bruise more spectacularly, and take longer to heal. Rather than being something to brag about, this usually turned out to be a bad thing. Scenes were over in short order, bottoms were accusing me of being too rough, and I couldn't seem to "work anyone up" from a small amount of pain. It took an very energy-aware bottom to point out what I was doing, and then the light dawned.

So this is something to be warned about if you fill an implement with chi. The person on the receiving end will feel a lot more pain than they expected. Marks may be worse, depending on the energy level of the bottom, and they will need healing aftercare on two levels: physical and spiritual. If you aren't an energy healer -- and being at least something of an energy healer is a useful thing for a top -- then you might want to send them to a Reiki or Ch'i Gong practitioner afterwards. Remember that the physical implement will strike the skin, but the extended energy may keep going well into the astral body, so astral wounds may go deep. Since astral wounds can take longer to heal, they can also retard the fading of bruises and dissipation of pain in the physical counterpart.

One good thing to keep in mind is that when you extend your chi into the implement, give it a "blunt" or "thuddy" flavor in your mind. If you're working with fine whip strands, perhaps giving it a fine or silken feel that won't actually do any injury may be appropriate. Part of my problem was that I'd been trained in visualizing my extended energy as a sharp thing that could slice through a human body, which isn't what you want to be doing to any bottom. If you don't want to make it hurt extra, keep your chi "soft". On the other hand, if you're a top without much arm strength and you're working on a bottom who's a pain-sink, deliberate use of this technique can keep you from tiring your arm out.

Sticky Hands

This is one way to get a submissive to stay up against the wall when there's no bondage in sight. Have them hold out their hands, palm up. Stroke their palms, visualizing smearing energy onto them that is as sticky as rubber cement. As you do this, let flow a trickle of energy onto their palms that feels "sticky" to you. (Tell them what you're doing as you're doing it; they need to know what's going on with their astral body.) When their palms are good and "coated", put them flat against the wall. Tell them that their hands are now stuck to the wall and they won't be able to move them.

How well this works will depend on a lot of things: how good the top is at energy work, how much the bottom wants to fight it. A well-trained, obedient bottom, of course, will simply put their hands against the wall and stay where they are told, and testing it won't even be an issue...but it's a rare bottom who can refrain from testing it just a little. Physically there's nothing there to prevent them from removing their hands, but if you've done this right, then when they pull their hands away just a little, it will feel disturbingly "wrong" to move them from where they've been placed. This isn't just suggestion, it's a pulling on their astral hands. They can do it; they can actually rip them away if they try, but it will feel "icky" to try.

You will need to clean the sticky energy off, if it doesn't wear off by the end of the scene. I do it by licking their palms and reabsorbing it. You can just wipe it back into yourself, or you can energize some water with "clean" energy and rinse them off.

Invisible Needles

Play piercings can be a way to physically "sink" a spell into another human being, directly into the inner part of their aura. To do this, take the needle and energize it so as to give it an astral "twin". This second needle of energy is then filled with some kind of "intent" towards a particular goal, and then put under the skin of the bottom. Then the top carefully separated the two and draws out the physical needle, leaving the energy twin in place. At this point, you can go one of two ways: you can rub the energy needle in and deliberately blur its boundaries, which is a good thing if it's going to be permanent, because otherwise, having that astral needle in there can give shooting pains for days or weeks afterwards until it's absorbed properly.

Another option is to make the spell temporary. In this case, just wait a couple of days, insert a needle into the same place, meld the two, and pull the whole shebang out. If you can't find it, if it's "sunk in" and become one with your submissive's astral body, that likely means that there was something about that spell that they really needed or at least deeply desired on some level, and their deep mind took it in and made it permanent.

Psychic Leash

This is a fun one for a dominant-submissive pair who are both fairly energy-aware to play with. The dominant stretches a piece of their energy out from their own body, and attaches it to the astral body of the submissive. This is different from the strong cord created by a couple who do sex magic together, as the psychic leash is temporary and can be removed. (However, if a couple does have a strong psychic cord between them, it can be used as a "carrier" of the psychic leash and it is especially effective.)

You will probably want to start with an actual leash, running from the dominant's body to the submissive's body. Although some dominants may object to the idea, it's best to tie it onto both people while the exercise is being set up. The dominant should run the energy down the leash and twine it into some chakra of the bottom's. I suggest the lower two chakras for those who are playing casually. The third chakra works well for people in a full-time D/s relationship, as it deals with the will. The heart chakra should only be used in the couple is also emotionally and romantically involved as well as physical players. Don't use the throat chakra, as it causes strangling feelings, or the head chakra which can cause headaches.

Once the leash is "attached", the physical leash is removed form it, and the bond is there. From this point on, the bottom will have to stay within a certain physical proximity of the top, or they will being to feel uncomfortable. Using the lower three chakras often gives a feeling of vague nausea, or "butterflies in the stomach", or "belly-dropping worry" if the top gets out of their sight. The bottom, of course, needs to be completely informed of what is happening, and be able to give consent.

Where a psychic leash is useful is generally at crowded parties, where a real leash would tangle around other people and become an obstacle. People can pass through the psychic leash without much of a problem, although someone standing directly in its path for an extended period of time will trigger the feelings of discomfort. I've found it useful to keep my (rather distractable) boy in check at an event where he's supposed to be my attache, and I'm moving quickly from one person or activity to the next, and I don't have time to keep track of him. With the psychic leash firmly attached, if I move on, he will too, and I know he'll always be within visual distance, and just taking a few steps will bring his attention right back to me.

I can imagine the sadistic tops who are thinking, right now, about how wonderfully horrid it would be to restrain a bottom and then leave the room, putting uncomfortable pressure on the leash and making them almost sick for want of the top's presence. All I can say is that such things should be negotiated out first, so that the bottom has an idea of what they're getting into. There's also that doing this can snap the leash.

After you're done, the top should deliberately remove the leash from the bottom's chakras. Don't leave this as a permanent thing; even if you live together 24/7, you may not always want to be joined at the hip. You may want to go to the bathroom alone, for example. Leaving a psychic leash attached for too long can "set" it, resulting in a panic attack for the bottom when it comes off. At the very least, remove it before falling asleep, so it won't get "set".

Other Suggestions

As with all things, energy work on bottoms should be done only with informed consent. That means that they should be aware of the possible problems, so that they can let the top know if something's going wrong. Informed consent also implies not doing it on people who don't believe in all this energy stuff, but will nod their head and smile in order to please the dom. This is a problem when magicians play with non-magicians, or at least with people who don't share the same world view. Please be ethical and be safe. Doing energy work on someone who doesn't really understand what's going on can make them think that they're crazy, and this is not the way to treat someone who is willing to be vulnerable to you.

I will suggest, again, that tops should look into learning some sort of energy healing in order to do better aftercare on their bottoms. Also, bottoms who are in service relationships (or want to be) should look into such things as well, as it appeals to tops who are tired and sore and just want a rubdown and some Reiki. Being trained in ways to make someone feel better can make you a lot more valuable as a BDSM commodity, to put it in the language of the marketplace. It can also help if you ever screw up with these techniques, so I strongly recommend it if you're the sort who can manage it. Not everyone is "wired" for healing, but if you are, it's a useful skill.

Some tops who use energy work like to work directly on the body of the bottom, diverting the flow of sexual energy temporarily to give greater pleasure. When the flow of energy is diverted away from the genitals, at least partially, it delays orgasm. This can be used as a kind of sexual-frustration torture, keeping the bottom at a peak of pleasure for a longer time, and perhaps finally allowing them to come....after an extended period of begging. Working with energy on this level, however, takes a good deal of talent and training, more than the scope of this book can offer.

Remember that anything you do to change the energy flow of someone's body should be dealt with afterwards, just like you'd clean up physical wounds. Sticky should be scraped off of hands, leashes detached, and astral cuts massaged and filled. What you inflict, you are responsible for. Don't forget that.