spirits in bondage

[arctic-stranger]

After spending years working in a church setting, i stumbled into the world of bdsm, and was surprised to find some similarities between the two.

First, submission and authority are important concepts in many religions. Zen masters give their students tasks, and in the submission to the task, the student becomes enlightened. The word "Islam" means submission, and the whole religion is structured on lines of submission. Christianity is rife with images of pain and suffering, which is, in the end, redemptive. Their central figure is called "LORD" (Both Jesus and the Old Testament God). the whole monastic movement is based, in part, on submission to a Father or Mother.

What other connections do people see or live out? How has your life within the practice of bdsm affected your spirituality, and how has your spirituality affected your practices.

Two stories come to my mind. The first concerns a missionary i know from russia. she goes there to serve the orthodox church and has a very interesting relationship with the bishop there. I am sure there is nothing overtly sexual about it. But each time i visit, she is deeper and deeper under his authority. Now she lives and works in a cell there, and is at his beck and call. She needs his "blessing" to do almost anything.

Both would be shocked to hear their relationship described in terms of a Dom/sub interaction, but that is very much the case. Again this is not, to the best of my knowledge, overtly sexual at all.

Second is a bit closer to home. Like i said, i am new to this community, and am coming to grips with my Dom tendancies. I was in a Christian bookstore and heard two women talking. I was immediately attracted to them. Now i cannot even tell you what they look like. I never saw either of them very closely, and both were surrounded with kids. but somehow i could tell it was a meeting of two subs. Again, both would probably be very surprised to be described that way, but from their postures, their language, and my feral attraction, I just had a strong feeling that at heart that is what they were. They live that out through their submission to God and their husbands.

What do the rest of you think?

 

[TaintedB]

You make a lot of different points and it's hard to hit on them all in the time I have, so I'll settled for just a couple.

First of all, regarding the story of the two women in the bookstore. I am trying to put myself in your shoes. If the women were physically or emotionally attractive to me, I would be questioning my judgement about their sexual orientation, (not writing it off completely but scrutinizing it more carefully than I do other judgements) because physical attraction makes me want to project the non-physical traits I like the most on the attractive person. It's very easy to view a stranger who says something or does some mannerism that turns you on as a dominant (or submissive if that's type that interests you) when it is just an isolated mannerism, almost random, and has very little to do with the rest of their personality. Because I have a little glove fetish, in the past (distant past I must add--I hope I am not so dumb today!) I've been fooled into thinking someone was a dominant by they way they put on their gloves. And I even started a relationship based on that! LOL, needless to say, it was not a long lasting one as my exorbident expectations for this person did not even begin to be met in good old reality.

"What other connections do people see or live out? How has your life within the practice of bdsm affected your spirituality, and how has your spirituality affected your practices."

I don't know if you're going to like this answer, but here goes. I am something of a truth junkie and so my spirituality, up until the point I met my dominant, was attached to philosophies that claimed to deal with discerning truth. I know that all religions focus on that to a greater or lesser degree; I'm talking about the ones where they aren't just saying "this is the truth," but are also saying, "so here's how you determine what is true." Those were the ones that interested me.

But all this changed when I met my dominant because he seemed to me more "truthful" than the philosophy behind my spirituality ever could be. So I chucked my spirtuality! To this day I don't consider myself as having a spirtuality. The ironic thing is, if I hadn't spent so many years immersed in this philosophy's methodology for discerning truth I might not have recognized my dominant for the quality of person he was, as I initially didn't have much of a clue as to what truth really consisted of or where to find it.

Truth can take on some pretty queer and anti-intuitive forms, and until I learned what some those forms were and, equally important, how to tolerate them (!), I was totally suckered in by conventional apparences of truth. Which isn't to say I don't get suckered these days; just not as much, I like to think.

The big difference to me between master-student spiritual relationships and master-slave bdsm relationships is that in the former one person is obedient to another in order to obtain some spiritual goal that has nothing to do with obedience per se. Obedience is just one technique that is used to obtain whatever the goal is. In the the latter relationship, obedicence is often a huge sexual turn-on to both people and is it's own point, or goal.

There are people out there (don't get me wrong, I am not saying you are this way, just reporting what I've observed in the past) who try to mix bdsm and spirtuality (see all the bdsm christian websites, for example). I'm not saying this can't be done, but there's a big potential for confusion: when you do so, it's so easy to lose sight of the fact that you started the bdsm relationship for the same reason you'd start any other lovers relationship: your and your partner's mutual sexual and emotional gratification. Many people drawn to bdsm as spiritual often are doing so because they cannot accept themselves as sefish sexual beings looking for kinky gratification. They spiritualize the bdsm in order to make these "baser" (not so, but that's how they see them!) desires acceptable to themselves. In other words long as you're being kinky for a good objective "higher" reason, the kink is OK.

 

[rosco rathbone]

As far as I know, there is actually a whole "Christian BDSM/traditional marriage" scene. Makes sense to me--honor and obey and all that good stuff. As Netz once said, male dom is just fetishization of the traditional role.

 

[catalina_francisco]

And though Buddhism is not so much a religion, sex can be seen as something very positive in that it helps to develop trust, commitment and intimacy. Promiscuity is not overly favoured, but caring relationships between people which involve sex, heterosexual or homosexual, can be seen as a positive. In this context, perhaps many aspects of the Master/slave relationship can be seen as productive and in keeping with spiritual health and growth.

Catalina