Nature has put mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pleasure and pain.
Jeremy Bentham, 1789
everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-pain-pleasure-and-you-never-dared-to-ask Conscious Kink is a perfect tool to play with and explore these masters. But let’s get this straight first, a kink session can but doesn’t have to involve pain.
Keep on reading if you want to learn more about pain and pleasure.
Pleasure and pain trigger similar neural pathways and the same hormones are released such as endorphins, adrenaline and anandamide. Thus pain can add to pleasure and pleasure can reduce pain.
You might ask yourself how beings can get pleasure from pain besides the release of those feel good hormones. Here are some further reasons:
- Brings you in the body immediately
- Calms the mind
- Reduces fear of pain outside of bed situation
- Increases your resilience also in out-of-bed situations
- Induces another state of consciousness
- Play consciously with your emotions
Types of pain
In BliXX we differentiate between;
1. Rewarding pain – Good Pain
Usually it comes from building up slowly allowing the body time and space to release endorphins. If the session is skilfully given, the bottom is working with the breath and willing to surrender, everybody who is open to it could enjoy receiving this type of pain.
* If the purpose of the session is trauma healing, we suggest to stay at this level.
2. Edge pain – Challenging Pain
The top finds the pain’s edge of the bottom. The goal can be to satisfy the top’s sadist tendencies and inflict domination or to explore darker parts of the self.
We will share more about playing with the edge in our next post.
How to work with pain?
We use pain…
…to add to pleasure
…to expand comfort zones and discover new depths of being
…as a path of healing, by rewriting negative past experiences in a safe and loving container.
In BliXX we teach by a principle called “domination from the bottom”. This means the recipient is the one guiding the experience with agreed words / number systems and the mandatory safe word that stops it all.
We make sure we don’t overstretch growth zones and move into trauma zones.
All unpleasant sensations must be met later with a loving presence.
This is where aftercare comes in.
*****
We use pain as medicine
inflicting it from our heart,
never from suppressed anger,
never from a need to feel superior.
We build-up the intensity of pain slowly.
They hit and pause.
We observe what this new sensation brings up.
They check in with our partner, with full presence.
The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
Anais Nin