By RedSabbath

One of the most typical ties in Japan, where traditional houses are full of beams and vertical posts for the nature itself of the architecture, takes place to a vertical post, and it’s called Hashira Shibari (being tied to the vertical post).

I had the luck to experiment this in Studio6 during our lessons with Akira Naka and now that I have a portable Hashira in house, it has become one of my favorite settings.

But why this has so much fascination?

First of all, there is a main, fundamental difference with any other tie or suspension. Even when you are tied really tight and suspended to a beam, or a bamboo, you feel the space all around you. It gives you anyway the feeling that you could move a little bit, that you are partially free, for example, to sway in the air.

Just to give an example, imagine the different feeling you’d have if you were closed in a small room without windows, even without the possibility to escape, and, instead, if you were closed in a coffin: you FEEL the hard surface of the coffin walls surrounding you, you cannot avoid touching them. As soon as your Takate Kote is fixed to the Hashira, you can’t go anywhere. One of the surfaces of your body quickly realizes that not only the ropes, but a hard point limit its possibility to move, and reduces even more the expansion degree of the ribcage.

You have the strong feeling of the wooden column behind your back, and it gives you a lot of pressure, and this immediately makes you feel less free, less capable to escape.

You cannot turn a millimeter. You cannot hide. You cannot nicely bend, and take a pose. The Hashira makes the rules.

When even your legs, maybe your waist too, are attached to the post, this sense increases, and makes you feel more and more helpless.

I personally associate this feeling to two suggestions that come directly from my child and teenage imagery.

The first is related to the torture dedicated from ancient times to women accused of witchcraft. They were stripped, and tied to a pole, then eventually burned alive…

The great level of exposure that the position you assume on the Hashira produces, fastens the effect on the model. You are there, visible, you cannot adjust in any way your position, and you look like a martyr ready for the execution. The post frames you, and offers you on a stage to the sight and humiliation of the viewers in a greatly amplified way.

Going back to the concept of martyrdom, this leads to another reference deeply rooted in my imagery, that is the Crucifixion. I found there are lots of people into “Erotic Crucifixion” as a fetish. And I can easily relate to it: it’s one way to be immobilized and freed in helplessness submission, with a very religious tinge.

And I perceive that Crucifixion is particularly connected to Semenawa (erotic torture through ropes) for its timing (it’s in fact a form of slow and painful execution), but even for the particular shape the body assumes, that magnifies that sense of sad, but calm abandonment and acceptance.

In conclusion, being tied to an Hashira it’s definitively a completely new feeling and dimension to space in, if you never gave a try..

By RedSabbath

Quite often models ask me how do I deal with pain.

First of all, let me remind that good semenawa favors the experimentation of suffering, not pain.

I’m not a masochist. Never been.

Outside a session in which I feel submitted, I hardly can manage painful stimuli.

So what are the tools, the techniques, I personally use to deal with the painful sensations, with progressive suffering, and to turn them into something I can space for?

1. Breathing
I breathe slow and deep, when possible, slow and extended, when my breathing capacity is limited from the tie. Breathing has an immediate natural effect on the perception of pain, helps me relaxing, detaching, and getting rid of negative feelings.

2. Surrendering
I do not fight and resist to the discomfort: I follow it. The moment my brain and my body let go, the bliss begins.

3. Offering
I let my brain focus on the fact that the suffering I am living is an offer to my Top/Rigger at that moment. I love managing, as I live that act like an offer to him. I give him the time to admire me in suffering.

4. Sensory splitting
I found I apply this quite often. It’s a technique that involves dividing the sensation (pain, burning, pins and needles) into separate parts. For example, when a shoulder is in pain for a hard Takate Kote, and this kind of feeling is identifiable as “hot”, I just focus just on the sensation of the heat and not on the hurting.

5. Mental analgesia
This is really nice. It works like that: you have to imagine a strong pain killer drug, like morphine, entering into the painful area. What I personally do, is imagining my brain while producing endorphins. As I know that this is happening, and that those endorphins are having effect in a short time, I just wait for them to flow.

All of them are behaviors I experimented, and studying around, I even found a word for some of them. (You can read for further reference this list of techniques used to control chronic pain)