Erotic Humiliation As A Spiritual Practice
- -Teaching by The Reverend Dasa William Griffith
- Apr 27, 2015
- 5 min read
When it comes to matters of BDSM - or erotic humiliation - the church turns away from it, rejecting even those who practice it within the confines of their marriages. The church also ostracizes those who participate in it. However, as I have addressed in my teaching on BDSM IN A CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE, the same church that condemns these practices thrives upon them. Religious art, saints, and texts are all deeply influenced by this topic.
Let us look at some definitions:
Humiliate: to lower the pride, the dignity. To mortify, humble.
Degrade: to reduce in rank or grade. To reduce in worth or value. To dishonor or disgrace. To deprive to demote.
Humble pie: to apologize abjectly.
Humiliation? Yes! Degradation? No!
To be humiliated is to be able to recover rather easily from the act on your own or by the grace of another. To be degraded is something else. As someone said, “It stays with you.” It is meant to. It is the breaking down of your self-centeredness and forces you to abandon control over your comfort zone. There is also an additional part of the taking away of your time and privacy on the road to deep enslavement. For the Christian practitioner, the erotic energy can be transformed into spiritual empowerment in massive quantities.
A few very easy illustrations from secular humiliation circles:
For a man it might be a trip to the shopping mall in sandals with your toenails and fingernails painted, along with a dab of mascara.
For a women, it might be something as simple as having to walk thru the restaurant with your just removed panties in your hand and give them to your “master” when you sit back down, or He might stand on your foot in public and you are not allowed to react
To have to be at the bar with legs apart facing the bandstand might be humiliating for someone, but to have a chain choker collar on and be “leashed” and led out through the crowd is a common practice.
To be spanked naked in front of others and then handed over by your master/mistress as they invite others to take their turns might also be humiliating.
There are endless examples and what is degrading to one might be humiliating to another. But there are important differences, and one should understand the rules which that relationship must set. Humiliation, degradation - it can be cold as ice or a wonderfully intimate series of acts. It is about a deep rooted desire and need in the animal brain (the oldest part of the brain) a primitive part of out biological make-up. If it's degradation, humiliation, dehumanization, de-feminization, objectification, etc. there is an underlying purpose: deconstruction. Deconstruction in art literature music, visual, and academic studies are plentiful if you wish to explore it further.
There is a spiritual lesson to be absorbed here: to become less, to “disappear", to become more…..this of course is tied into self image, self worth. The automatic assumption attached to this is one who “suffers” from low self-esteem, but this is not necessarily the case once you look deeper.
All these things above really relate to one thing - a form of ego death.
As radical followers of Christ, this is demanded of us. We are to deny ourselves daily, pick up our crosses and follow Him. If slapped in the face, we are to turn the other cheek. If we are attacked by our enemies we are called for forgive them - not once, but perpetually. This is a a Master/Slave relationship. This is the Christ as master and we as slaves. The lowliest form, by the way.
In fact, this is a universal element in many religions of the world; it is seen as a necessary place to be before one can move onto to further spiritual knowledge and enlightenment.
A cursory reading of the Lives of the Saints - or any similar volume - which speaks to midieval Christian self-flagellants and ancient forms of meditations, Asian, American, and African tribal rituals include practices that, in some way, humiliate or degrade the participant - often in groups and sometimes alone, but they all have one thing in common: a belief it is a necessary step to go “down” to be able to be “reborn” up.
Many argue about the concept of duality running throughout our awareness of life and the universe at large; this is a good illustration from my vantage point, of the truth of duality.
If you are already prone to humiliation on an erotic level, the energy created by being humiliated and stimulating you sexually is to be harnessed for spiritual enlightenment. The Sacred Art of doing this requires meditative discipline and training.
Within the Oikos Intentional Community, dasa is translated in sanskrit as "servant/slave". When I became dasa of the community I became a servant to our new monastics. My vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience are a part of my lifestyle. I became accustomed to humiliation and learned to embrace it long before my period of spiritual enlightenment. Even in my marriage, a dominant-submissive relationship was injected into the arm of our union. What is most fascinating is how the erotic dynamic has been wholly transformed into a spiritual journey. My senses are heightened and my awareness focused with clarity. My sexual or physical humiliation has only added the erotic energy to be refined into atomic spiritual energy.
All of the sexual practices known to humankind have been passed down through the ages. Our masters and mistresses exist even outside of the sexual realm: We are currently slaves to our government and a broken system. We are slaves to money and power, selling precious time and pimping our time with our spouse, friends, and children in order to make more money and buy more material things. There is nothing at the end of it. Things are new and quickly become old. They break, they wither, they are discarded, and they are, then, donated to a church or Goodwill and become someone else's “new" thing.
We are all slaves to something or someone. By being a slave to the divine we find purpose. Our masters and mistresses can be spiritual teachers without even knowing it. If we are meditating on the energy of the humiliation, and transforming the sexual into the spiritual, we are on the path to enlightenment. This can apply to nearly any consensual sexual act you can think of. What creates sexual energy has the potential of building a spiritual powerhouse within us. Discipline and humiliation as erotic practices are the same ingredients in a spiritual journey. Whether it is for sexual pleasure alone or a higher purpose, some are meant to be master/mistress and others wired for humiliation. And it is the later from which saints are made.
The exchange of power here is clear and well defined: We must all render ourselves submissive and subservient to someone or something with more control. In doing so, we must give consent. We have no consent when it comes to government or a filthy political and religious system. We do have consent, however, when it comes to our relationships and our spiritual journey. To be able to harness your sexual energy to fuel your spiritual energy you have already conquered the walls of social enslavement and have found true liberation transcending this world.
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