“We can live our own story in rope, no matter how simple the tie is. All we need to do is to lower our expectations and open up ourselves to feel. And this is our practice.”

Is that all you can do?

Rope bottom leaning backwards in an upper-body Kinbaku tie
Photo: Brandon Betterrugged

I was asked the other day: “would you like to be tied in other forms than Gote?” After some thinking, I had to answer twofold.

First, I don’t mind being tied into anything. I love being touched and enjoy the feeling of being restricted and impacted and held and and… by my partner. Whatever he chooses to do to me, I can enjoy that. 

But also, I would dont mind being tied only into Gote till the rest of my life. Because there is so much in it. Because it’s different every time anyway. Because it’s not about the form… Because there is no form, but only our perception of it. 

Obviously, both answers say the same. Which brings me to the other point. 

When we ask rope bottoms at workshops for feedback, sometimes we hear: “Well, it was not so hard / challenging…” Said with this slightly questioning intonation, meaning: “…they didn’t mess it up completely, but there was potential for so much more”. 

When we catch ourselves thinking like that, we really have to stop and reflect: 

What is this “is that all you can do” mindset? 

Why this constant hunger for grandiosity and novelty? 

I really think we can do better than transmitting a feeling of disappointment to our partner. 

We can live our own story in rope, no matter how simple the tie is. All we need to do is to lower our expectations and open up ourselves to feel. And this is our practice. 

We can have a very different emotional experience even if we have been tied in the same thing a hundred times. All we need to do is to anticipate less and start appreciating the nuances of what is there in the moment between us and our partner. 

And this, too, is our practice.

MORE POSTS

Mut nichts zu machen

The moments I have felt most seen in ropes were rarely the most technically impressive ones. Often, they were the quiet pauses when nothing happened. We tend to believe that first we master the technique, and then we become free to play spontaneously. But presence is a different capacity, one we need to cultivate alongside technical skill. Mut nichts zu machen — the courage to do nothing — means learning to stay with uncertainty long enough for something authentic to emerge.

The stubborn “little bone”

We all have a stubborn “little bone” inside us – something our bodies learned to protect a long time ago. In somatics, we speak about conditioned tendencies: patterns of resistance, dissociation, shrinking or fighting that appear when we feel under pressure. They may limit us today, but perhaps before trying to get rid of them, we should understand what they were protecting. That stubborn little thing might also be the place from which we love, create and remain unmistakably ourselves.

When it’s going to be wrong…

The more experienced we become in ropes, the earlier we sometimes know: this is not going to work. But what happens when that knowledge gets in the way of the experience itself? When anticipation replaces feeling, corrections replace communication, and both partners end up frustrated? Perhaps the practice is not to know less, but to trust ourselves enough to stay with what is actually happening – until there is something real to respond to.
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