Understanding Your Boundaries

If you’re into meditation or yoga, you might be familiar with the practice of staying present in your body. Vassalage can be a helpful tool in the same way. In bondage, you have to be present. You have to breathe. You have to understand where your edges are and be worldly-wise to share them with your partner or practitioner. A lot of people don’t have practice in naming their boundaries like that—or plane in knowing what their sexual boundaries are.

Here’s what it might squint like in practice: Pause and notice what you are feeling in your soul and where. Where are you feeling that discomfort, or that fear, or that shame? Are you feeling it in your chest? Are you restricting your breath? Are you feeling it in your gut? In your bowels?

Once you identify what you’re feeling and where, investigate it. Try asking yourself a question well-nigh where the feeling is coming from. Who am I trying to impress? Or: What am I trying to prove? We’re our own worst critic. We’re constantly judging ourselves. If I am in a situation and I think, Oh my god, they’re going to think I’m so uncool considering I’ve never been tied up before, it begs the question of whether I finger unscratched in that situation. Am I crossing my boundaries trying to impress this person? Am I stuff honest with myself? Considering if you don’t finger safe, you can’t let go and really wits your own pleasure.

Communicating Your Boundaries

It’s nonflexible to speak up for your boundaries when you finger insecure or when you finger like you’re going to be judged for not doing something. And I see that insecurity come up a lot: In my work virtually sex, 80 percent of the questions I get start with some form of “I know I should have figured this out by now,” or “I finger like it’s too late for me.”

The reality is there is no guidebook given to us at an early age on how to handle our sexuality or our bodies. We all have to winnow that we’re at where we’re at. And that’s the heady thing well-nigh sex, anyway: We’re never washed-up learning well-nigh it. In the same way you get to learn to melt some fancy French food, can you come to sex excited to tideway something new? Can you wits getting tied up for the first time with a beginner’s mind, instead of expecting that you’re going to come out of the gate as a mistress of the ropes?

We aren’t taught to talk well-nigh sex. We’re taught that it is shameful and taboo, so most of us are not practiced at it. When you do start talking well-nigh it, it’s like stepping into an ice suffuse for the first time; once you’ve started, it becomes much easier. And the increasingly of a unscratched container that you can create, the increasingly you can let your freak flag fly.

In bondage, you discuss your boundaries beforehand. Considering if you’re playing in a space where there are risks involved, you don’t want to push anyone past their limits. So you talk well-nigh the specifics of what you’re well-appointed and uncomfortable with: This is where I don’t want to be touched. I’m interested in getting this tropical to my edge. I’m interested in my feet stuff tied, but I want my hands free. Or: I’m going to ask you to go a little harder, but if I say the word “yellow,” that ways stop.

That detailed conversation is a standard practice from the kink space that everyone can wield to whatever sex they’re having. And it’s washed-up well in advance, like when you’re out to dinner or sitting with your coffee. It’s not five minutes surpassing your partner wraps their headphone string virtually your wrists.