CraigJustCraig

Tag: meditation

  • Bondage as an act

    Rope engages both the body and mind in profound and fascinating ways, triggering a range of physiological and psychological responses. The sensation of rope on the skin activates the somatosensory system—especially the nerve endings in the skin and fascia that process touch and pressure. This stimulation begins to shift the brain out of scattered mental activity and into the parasympathetic “rest and digest” state, where healing, integration, and deep sensory presence become more accessible.

    Depending on intention and context, rope can evoke responses ranging from soothing comfort to cathartic intensity. Beyond the physical sensation, it quiets the noise of external distractions and draws awareness inward. This inward turn becomes a somatic anchor—a tether to the present moment that opens pathways for emotional release, spiritual attunement, and energetic transformation.

    By intentionally engaging the nervous system through rope, we invite a kind of sacred surrender—a state in which the body, mind, and spirit align in vulnerability, presence, and connection.

    Rope is more than physical restraint—it is a catalyst for powerful internal shifts. The combination of pressure, controlled stress, vulnerability, and deep trust initiates a cascade of neurochemical and physiological responses that reshape not only the body’s state, but also the emotional and spiritual experience of the scene.

    At the heart of this transformation is the release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers. Intense or restrictive ties stimulate these neurochemicals, which reduces pain and induces sensations of euphoria, relaxation.

    Oxytocin, often called the “love hormone” or “cuddle chemical,” plays a crucial role in the emotional and spiritual bonding that can occur during rope play. Released through touch, trust-building, and co-regulation, oxytocin promotes feelings of safety, intimacy, and attachment. It is especially active during aftercare, where grounding, cuddling, and affirming presence help partners integrate the experience. oxytocin supports “cathexis”—the investment of psychic energy,  process of attaching emotional significance to something.

    The experience engages the sympathetic nervous system, triggering adrenaline and cortisol. While often linked to danger, in a safe and consensual context, these chemicals heighten awareness, sensation, and excitement. increasing heart rate, sharpens focus, and flooding the body with energy. When experienced mindfully, cortisol can help release stored emotional tension, facilitating a cathartic, and spiritual, release.

    Following the scene, the body often shifts into parasympathetic regulation, producing serotonin, this feels like peace, safety, and completeness

  • reflections of the bald one

    Today, I had a fascinating conversation about why I use tantra and energy work in my rope practice and how I started down this path. It was such an insightful reflection that I wanted to share it here.

    When I first began tying, it was simply to learn a new skill. But as I practiced and studied—reading books, taking classes—it quickly became something I loved. The shift happened when I learned about somatics and tantra. I started seeing rope as a spiritual practice. Somatics taught me that we are connected beings, not only to each other but also to ourselves. Our bodies reflect our emotions, and unless we embrace all emotions, even the difficult ones, we remain influenced by invisible forces. It reminded me of the saying, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.’

    Exploring tantra was initially challenging; I struggled to connect it with somatics. But when I began to see energy as a force that can be directed with intention, I gained clarity. This led me to explore intentionality, lifestyle mastery, and the art of loving, eventually guiding me to sacred kink, paganism, sex magick, and erotic hypnosis. Sacred sexuality became a path toward carnal alchemy, transmutation, and even entheogenics.

    I now seek a coven that embraces mysticism, ritual, and ordeal. I want to build a community with those who don’t avoid shadow but embrace it, who revel in wicked desires, and who see ordeal as a crucible for transformation. I seek those who view intimacy and the erotic as a powerful, expansive force—one that isn’t about control or reduction but about embracing the uncontrolled and the limitless.

    Reflecting on this journey reminded me of how much my rope practice has evolved. I’m still learning and growing, but it’s beautiful to see how far I’ve come and where I hope to go.

  • Last Night’s Scene: The Awakening

    I’ve noticed the changes our scenes have caused already. You’re more aware of your boundaries now. You defend them better. You advocate for them with ease. When we started, you knew no fear. That was admirable, but also dangerous—a blindness to the wisdom fear provides. We must have fear; it gives us information we’d otherwise miss. Fearlessness is not the goal; courage is. To be courageous, you must first know fear. Feel it. Confront it.

    I wonder what deadened your fear before. What shock or loss buried it deep? In time, I’m sure I’ll learn, as all truths reveal themselves. For now, we continue this process of awakening. Tonight, we honor the intentions you’ve set for yourself, the path you’ve chosen, no matter how difficult it may be.

    Your intention is clear: to stay true to yourself, to walk the path meant for you. My intention is equally resolute—to help you manifest that.

    We set the table, laying out the tools one by one. You watch, nervous yet curious, asking questions in a soft, wavering voice: “What’s that for? Are we using that too?” I see you trying to piece it all together, but tonight isn’t about certainty. It’s about trust—trust in your resilience and in the path you’ve chosen. Doubt and hesitation are killers of magick, and we won’t let them take root.

    I smile as I move slowly, methodically, setting everything in its place. I see the tie settle into your body, and I feel your nervousness climb to new heights. Life, like a sadist, waits for consent—neutral until given direction and purpose.

    When I lay you on the table, I ask for a mantra, a truth you want to make real. Your words are beautiful, full of power, and I tell you to hold them close as we begin. You’re secured now. I ask you to move, and you laugh nervously: “Wow, I really can’t move.”

    “You only know the half of it,” I reply, securing my favorite cuffs to ensure your helplessness. Tonight, you must endure.

    Small bites along your body tease the reality of your immobility. I let the helplessness settle over you like a weighted blanket. My aura expands, filling the sanctuary, feeding off the pain and pleasure you radiate. I return to the rack and carefully select the next tool.

    Your nipples, so sensitive, now house my clamps. A bear claw rakes your flesh, drawing out gasps and shivers. Tucked securely in your bonds, I let the knife skitter across your skin, leaving surface-level nicks and cuts—just enough to imply the danger.

    You’re slipping now, retreating into the world we’ve created together. I hear your mantra echo in the space, grounding you as I step through the door you’ve opened. Your subconscious is waiting for me, beautiful and raw.

    “Lovely what you’ve done with the place,” I tease, as the ritual begins.

    I take the wax and trace the rune we prescribed. Tonight, it’s leadership—a heavy burden, but one you’re ready to bear. The wax drips slowly, deliberately, searing its purpose into your skin. Your screams shift to moans as the heat transforms into acceptance.

    You slip further into the trance—not quite as deep as during the Table Challenge, but deeper than before. Your consciousness takes a back seat, and your subconscious takes the wheel, repeating the mantra like a sacred hymn.

    By the time we finish, you’re utterly still, the ritual’s purpose etched into your body and soul. I pour the same care into aftercare as I did the scene, cleaning and soothing with precision. We read together, grounding ourselves in the mindset needed for this work—the awareness, the responsibility, the magick.

    You’re more receptive tonight, still unfolding from within yourself. That’s okay. Your journals will help guide you until next week, when we’ll take the next step in this journey.

  •  Intentional Kink Modalities For Healing?

    “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung

    Jung’s words ring especially true in the realm of sacred kink. Our unconscious desires—especially the taboo ones—shape our reality, even if we don’t recognize them as “ours.” These disowned parts of ourselves, the ones we repress or ignore, still manage to fulfill themselves. And because we’re disconnected from them, we often misread their arrival in our lives as tragedy rather than fulfillment.

    But what if we could see them? What if we could meet those desires in ritual, in sensation, in play? That’s the heart of intentional kink—a sacred, embodied practice of conscious transformation.

    Seven Axioms of Sacred Kink

    To begin practicing sacred kink intentionally, we start with these seven axioms—guiding truths that reframe sensation, shame, and desire:

    1. Having is evidence of wanting.
    2. We have a choice as to whether we experience sensation as pleasure or pain.
    3. Every happening in life is a “stroke”—and we can get off on all of it.
    4. The degree to which we’re turned on or off is shaped by approval.
    5. Desire evolves through fulfillment—not repression.
    6. Shame is the magic killer.
    7. The truth is sensational.

    These axioms challenge us to stop resisting life, to stop pathologizing desire. They ask us to lean into the body, the breath, the truth of what’s happening right now.

    Intentional kink teaches that our thoughts, like our desires, are tools of creation. The mystical and the neurological meet here. As Urban Tantra reminds us:

    “Every thought you think is creating your future… With self-acceptance and self-love, you can create or change anything in your life.”

    This echoes the neuroscience laid out in The Body Keeps the Score: the only way to access and change the emotional brain is through self-awareness—through interoception, or looking inward. When we engage in kink consciously, we activate this internal gaze. We stop outsourcing our lives and begin witnessing ourselves again

    There’s a darker truth, too. For many, trauma and pleasure have become entangled. As Bessel van der Kolk notes, “fear and aversion can be transformed into pleasure.” Trauma lives in the body and builds patterns that repeat until we interrupt them—through ritual, through embodiment, through sacred play. This is where kink becomes alchemical: it transforms the pain of the past into the power of the present.

    At its deepest, sacred kink is about radical, soul-deep acceptance. When we surrender to what is—when we stop resisting our fears, our shame, our desires—we reclaim the “alarm system” of the body and restore it to its sacred function. The body knows how to care for us. Through intentional kink, it remembers.

    As Dossie Easton describes in The New Topping Book:

    “Play directed to the purpose of attaining altered states of consciousness… becomes a quest for vision, guidance, personal truth, or spiritual communion.”

    Kink becomes a ritual container for trance, surrender, and revelation. It isn’t just play—it’s pilgrimage.

    There are many ways into this sacred terrain. Here are eight powerful modalities—erotic gateways into transformation:

    1. Rhythm – Dance and movement as portals into ecstasy.
    2. Ordeal – Challenge and intensity (rope, balance, endurance) to confront fear and awaken strength.
    3. Flesh – Pain as revelation, skin as scripture.
    4. Ritual – Daily devotion, service, worship, and structure as spiritual discipline.
    5. Breath – Erotic breathwork, connecting energy circuits and expanding presence.
    6. Horse – Roleplay and possession, invoking archetypes and the divine.
    7. Asceticism – Erotic monasticism, obedience, simplicity, and quietude.
    8. Sacred Plants – Entheogenic tools to expand consciousness and dismantle ego.

    Each path opens a different door in the psyche—offering catharsis, communion, clarity, or collapse. And each one, when practiced with intention, brings us home to ourselves.

    Here’s the truth: we are always doing magic, whether we know it or not. Intentional kink simply teaches us how to do it well. When we repress our truth, when we deny what we feel, we don’t stop creating—we just create chaos. As Erich Fromm warns:

    “Avoid the company of zombies—people whose soul is dead although their body is alive.”

    To dissociate is to disappear. But to feel fully—to accept and embody desire, sensation, pain, pleasure—is to come alive again. Magic works either way. Sacred kink lets us choose how.

    To truly heal, we must also confront the stories we live inside. Our ideologies, our fantasies, our inherited myths—these shape our consciousness just as much as our actions do. Until we understand what divides us—internally and culturally—we cannot complete the alchemical journey. This final step, often referred to as “meeting Yurugu,” is the confrontation with the colonial, fragmenting force within us and our society.

    But that’s a whole blog post on its own.

    Sacred kink is not about performance or preference—it’s about presence. It’s about confronting ourselves in the mirror of eroticism and asking: what do I really want? What is my truth? What am I ready to feel, love, and integrate?

    If you’re practicing kink without intention, you’re still doing magic—but you’re blindfolded, spellbound, and chasing shadows. Sacred kink removes the blindfold and hands you the wand.

    The work is deep. The stakes are real. But so is the transformation.

    Welcome to the path.

  • Nihilomancy: “divination from nothingness”

    I’ve been reviewing some old material for an upcoming class on bondage as a tool toward spiritual release. This book is one of my hard-to-find treasures: Earthly Bondage by Brigett Harrington. https://www.passionandsoul.com/blog/soul/earthly-bondage

    I’ll be teaching this class with Goddess Dior and the House of Diamond, About the Many Path Of Earthly Bondage and one of the core paths we’ll be diving into is the art of Nihilomancy: divination through nothingness.

    “I call upon thee, wisdom in darkness…”

    From that invocation, the chapter plunges us into a world where silence, restraint, and the absence of external stimuli become gateways to the divine.

    The practice of Niihilomancy dark and sensuyal exploration of how sensory deprivation can be used not just for kink, but for deep inner work, divination, and astral travel. It walks a fine edge between mysticism and embodiment, showing how blindfolds, hoods, vows of silence, bondage, and mummification are not only tools of restraint, but instruments of revelation.

    By removing outside distractions (sight, sound, movement), the body and mind enter an altered state where messages can rise from deep within the soul, and from the spirit world.

    It’s where the world is stripped away until only the question remains:

    • Where do I go from here?
    • What choice is mine to make?
    • What truths lie beyond the body?

    Their is a ritual to preparing for this; laying out sacred items and calling upon spiritual forces before entering the sensory void. With each layer :rope, hood, scent, silence. you get closer to the inner realm where wisdom lives.

    What stands out most is the gravity of ritual. Each object whether rope, oil, or spandex becomes charged with intentionality. There is a rhythm to the preparation, an architecture to the ritual that feels devotional, erotic, and sacred all at once. The ritual explores both the somatic and the spiritual experience of sensory deprivation as a threshold art: the portal.

    Think less “nothingness” in the empty sense, and more the void, the liminal space, the fertile dark.

    Whether through fasting, purging, or embedding sigils within the wrappings and around your ritual space, it evokes/invoke something powerful. Death lingering in the margins: the surrender of control, ego, movement, consciousness. But instead of despair, it offers a promise… answers.

    while doing this ritual it describes you’ll feel the shadows settle around you. You’ll hear the call to your own dark silence.

    what is clear the path is laid in layers:
    Fasting or purging .
    Setting the ritual space
    Laying out tools.
    Invoking spirits guides or ancestors.
    Embedding sigils.

    With every layer, with every sense denied, a different kind of awareness opens.
    Sometimes, that leads to wisdom from self.
    Sometimes, it leads to channeling a presence.
    Sometimes, it leads to delicious dissolution.

    Let’s be clear:
    This is erotic mysticism: raw, reverent, and real.

    For those in our coven of kinky mystics and sensual scholars, that aren’t afraid to talk about getting ridden by godforms.

    Because even in darkness, we need witnesses.

    If you’ve ever longed to use your body as a spell, your silence as a question, and your restraints as a roadmap to spirit
    this one’s for you.

  • What is Remembered, is Restored

    In a recent session, we focused on decompression and fascia release.

    In a world that trains us to split, divide, and dominate,
    this work moves us gently: allowing tension to soften and giving space for something deeper to emerge.

    An undoing of all the ways we’ve been trained, controlled, and fragmented.

    This is woven into our everyday experience. It lives in the body, pressed into the breath, curled around the spine, locked into the tissues. Unintegrated it becomes part of us.

    We are taught this is normal; to see the world in split pieces. Strong vs weak. Good vs bad. Mind vs body. Spirit vs reason. These splits are reinforced again and again, until the natural unity of self is broken and compete. This shapes our behavior. It shapes our beliefs, our imagination, and our body itself.

    In rope, we begin to reverse the fragmentation. We invite the Self to slow.
    That slowing creates an opening to shift.

    Seekers come to this work carrying chronic pain and a long history of discomfort, often managed through medication, endurance, and bracing.

    They’ve learned to survive it.

    But, many experience significant relief even after the first session. The pain doesn’t vanish: it moves, shifts, softens.

    With each session, The pain lessens.
    And slowly, the body begins to feel like home again.
    This kind of healing moves beyond treating symptoms. It invites the body to participate in its own restoration. Through intentional effort, we help the body learn safety from the inside.

    Rope offers a return, a experience, felt beyond the skin. The body is fully present. And within that learns that safety is possible. That holding does not have to hurt. That surrender can be healing. That rest is spiritual.

    The goal is not to conquer or control. It is to listen, and to reconnect with what’s been split. To allow meaning again, not another problem to solve, but a story to be told.

    When we treat with rope, we step out of logic. We return to knowing—that knowledge comes from immersion, and not distance.

    This is sacred .