I have given lots of thought to how control fits into my life but it is only very recently that I have managed to put the bits together for myself and create one full picture. I feel much better equipped to understand the need for control not just through the eyes of the bottom but also through the eyes of the top.
In Stephen Covey’s ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’, the fifth habit states, “Seek first to understand and then to be understood.”
I think I very much wanted to understand the other but I was missing a clear understanding for various reasons. Perhaps I was too absorbed with the personal experience through my own set of eyes to give due attention to what was happening to the other person; the person that makes it all possible for me to experience what I do. Perhaps I was holding onto ideas about how I thought it should be and could not see the truth before my eyes. We learn when we are ready to learn and although I learned late I am grateful to have learned finally. I am being vague quite deliberately because the specifics of any given person do not relate to the simple yet powerful message I wish to convey.
If you read the words of the Dalai Lama, as I have recently, there is one word he uses over and over, compassion. When we seek to understand someone else, someone who means a great deal to us, we give ourselves to them. We surrender. This surrender takes place both ways, if we are attuned to the possibility. The line is blurred as to who is the top and who is the bottom at certain pivotal moments in our lives because a form of loving has taken place that does not ask, well, who is the top and who is the bottom?
When we seek to understand the other and achieve that outcome as I feel I have now finally done, there is at first a sense of shock and then very quickly a new found sense of peace. I seek and am the bottom in the dynamic and yet I bring to the role my strength of mind; my intent for a positive outcome; my understanding of the other. In so many meaningful and powerful ways there is no bottom nor top but just a whole when those two complementary entities come together in a spirit of union. This is when a spiritual experience takes place. This is service to the other.
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"In so many meaningful and powerful ways there is no bottom nor top but just a whole when those two complementary entities come together in a spirit of union."
ReplyDeleteThe sadist gave me an assignment to help me see this. It was a piece of classical music, which I was to listen to over and over again until I had the passages settled in my head. Then, still listening, I was to consider a series of questions, starting with:
"[L]isten specifically for the interplay, the back and forth between the orchestra and the soloist. Who seems subservient to whom? Does that ever change? Do they both seem to be urging each other on?"
There was one section which was like those trick pictures where, depending on which part you choose as the figure and which the ground, it could be either a vase or a pair of faces. Depending on how I listened, the orchestra was either reacting to the violin soloist or pushing him on.
Need, obsession, inspiration, service... we seem to be on opposite sides of the seesaw, but without both of us it will not move and we will not reach the heights.
o.g.
OG: He sounds like a very clever one, that Sadist of yours!
ReplyDeleteI have come to adore classical music and I go to a fair number of concerts these days. One of my favourite moments is when we wait for the music players (and sometimes the singers) to begin. They wait for that very instant when they are in communion together. I attended a few concerts last year of groups that improvise. I am thinking particulary of Tony Gould and his band here. Tony is the dominant, if you will. It is *his* band but he seeks out highly talented musicians and he likes to nurture and mentor their growth. Sometimes, he is in control and sometimes he is just a bit player in a musical experience, but at all times he is smiling, raptured in the experience. Perhaps he just has the confidence within himself to submit himself to the other musicians and let them take over sometimes, confident that he can take the reins if he should choose to do so. In any case, the band is always in unison; always giving to the other and that is what makes is such a soulful experience for me. The first time I heard them, the singer took me to a place so truly divine I didn't move a muscle for the whole concert. My husband said that he had never seen me so completely still.
I recently had a D/s experience where I felt a similar stillness - a similar connection with some divine force. Quite instinctively towards the end, we both thanked the other. We had both submitted to the ability of the other to provide food for our souls.
"Need, obsession, inspiration, service... we seem to be on opposite sides of the seesaw, but without both of us it will not move and we will not reach the heights."
ReplyDeleteNever truer words spoken Vesta :)
shape shifter: OG's sentence was simply wonderful. I will never look at a playground in quite the same way again!
ReplyDelete