Better than yoga?

Articles on BDSM and mindfulness have been popping up across the web in recent days. The first I spotted was at Time magazine, and since then I’ve seen similar articles at sites like Bustle, Instinct Magazine and Medical Daily. They were triggered by research published in the journal Psychology of Consciousness that claimed that BDSM could put people in a state of ‘flow’, where the rest of the world falls away and their concentration is heightened on the present moment.

It’s good to see positive BDSM stories on mainstream sites, and I doubt many people in the kinky world would dispute the idea of BDSM leading to altered mental states. Getting into subspace might not be the only reason people play, but it’s often an important one. That said, I do have problems with the study (as it’s described in the mainstream press)…

1. They only picked 7 couples, which is a tiny number to study. On top of that, the couples had a variety of relationship states (from long term to just met), introducing more variables into the tiny sample.
2. They randomly assigned top/bottom status. If everyone involved was a switch that might be OK, but if not, then it would seem very problematic. Ask me to top someone and you will not get mindfulness. You’ll get anxiety, stress and a partner stuck in a tangled web of granny knotted ropes. Switching for non-switches is not a good measure of normal BDSM play.
3. It doesn’t appear that they distinguished between top and bottom space. I’m not an expert on top space, but from what I’ve read it seems quite different to bottom space. Both have elements of being in the moment and the rest of the world falling away. However, top space seems to be about concentration and focus, a sense of mastery that aligns with the more traditional ideas of mindfulness and flow. Bottom space, for me at least, is not like that at all. It’s about not thinking clearly, surrendering to the moment and disassociating. I hear tops describe their state as having heightened intuition and understanding, where I can barely form words when deep in bottom space.

Hopefully the study will at least be a good starting point for further research. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with an image of a couple in their own particular state of flow. From the watermark I assume it was something to do with this event (I found it here).