Content note: This piece discusses consensual BDSM, including Shibari and impact play, through the lens of embodiment, trust, and nervous system healing. So, while I don’t share anything explicit in this piece (I may in others), it explores practices some may find unfamiliar.
When I first began writing publicly about Shibari, I knew some people would struggle to understand why anyone would willingly want to be tied up.
Now I’m writing about impact play.
If you’re new to the world of BDSM, that phrase “impact play” may immediately conjure images of violence or abuse. And I want to name that it certainly doesn’t help that our culture tends to collapse all forms of consensual kink into caricatures, assuming that pain is the point or that power is something one person takes from another.
I am here to tell you that my experience has been almost the opposite.
The deeper I’ve ventured into these practices, the less they have been about pain, and the more they have become studies in trust, communication, nervous system regulation, conscious choice, and of course, pleasure.
Before sharing where this journey has recently led me, it may be helpful to offer a little context.
From Sensation to Impact
I’ve talked about Shibari before and how it introduced me to the idea that restraint could be something I chose rather than something that was imposed upon me.
Within rope, I discovered an extraordinary paradox: I could surrender without giving away my agency. My body always retained the ability to slow down, stop, or change course. What looked from the outside like restriction actually felt like profound freedom inside my own system when I was in rope.
Just as important was the care surrounding the experience.
There was ritual and intention before rope ever touched my body. There was continual check-in with my rigger while I was suspended in sensation. And afterward came the aftercare: the physical and emotional tending that helps the system integrate an intense experience and return gently to baseline (or better than baseline).
That quality of care changes everything.
It taught me that intensity doesn’t have to exist in opposition to safety. Most of the time, it’s safety that makes the intensity possible.
Over time, my curiosity naturally expanded. I found myself wondering what other embodied conversations existed beyond rope. That curiosity eventually led me to sensation and then impact play.
Broadly speaking, sensation play explores the body’s response to different forms of stimulation—touch, pressure, temperature, texture, movement. (One concrete example could be a silk scarf being drawn across your body without clothes on… the softness and richness of that experience.)
Impact play is another expression of that kind of exploration, using hands or implements such as paddles, canes, or floggers to create different kinds of sensation (i.e., spanking). Like rope, it is built upon explicit consent, negotiated boundaries well before anything takes place, continual communication, and attentive aftercare. The implement is only one small part of the experience.
The other really important thing is the relationship between the people involved—and the trust they cultivate together—is what makes the practice possible and pleasurable.
Learning the Other Side
Unlike rope, I entered the world of flogging with a different intention: I wanted to learn how to give. More accurately, I wanted to learn how to channel my innate power into loving someone in this particular way.
Immediately, I was fascinated by the responsibility that came with it; there’s a lot of leadership that is required. Every experienced top I’ve encountered seems to possess a remarkable attentiveness. They’re not simply delivering sensation; they’re reading another person’s body, adjusting moment by moment, listening through their hands (and their eyes). The more I watched, the more I realized that impact wasn’t about force at all; it was about attunement.
So I called a mentor and began learning the fundamentals.
What drew me to learning how to flog was responding to requests. Within a week of one another, I had a sacred intimate client and a lover each name their desire to be flogged by me… and I respond very well to clearly stated needs.
The deeper I step into this role, the more I appreciate how much presence it requires. What surprised me was the amount of responsibility the practice carries and how, for me, the flogger itself has become an extension of me—and how I can demonstrate my love for another in a brand new way. Exciting!
Meeting My Edge
What I didn’t expect was how much receiving would become part of my own education and rewiring.
Before I could learn to give impact well, I needed to understand what it felt like in my body and on my skin. I did not walk into the first lesson expecting to receive, but that desire emerged the instant a flogger was put in my hand. I felt the responsibility of the moment.
Receiving required me to notice anticipation before each throw, to observe the stories my mind created, and to discover the subtle place where sensation transformed into something unexpectedly expansive.
I realized that anticipation initially carried more charge than the impact itself. That breathing could completely change the experience. That staying present with sensation is very different from enduring it. Most surprisingly, I wasn’t learning how much pain I could tolerate; I was learning how much sensation I could remain present with. Those are two very different things.
Growing up, being struck by my mother meant fear.
It meant unpredictability.
It meant a body bracing for what might come next.
That’s why I kept impact play at arm’s length for so long (for nearly 40 years).
This was something entirely different. Every impact was negotiated. Chosen. Anticipated. Responsive. Welcomed—or stopped. The physical sensations occasionally overlapped. Everything else was different.
For perhaps the first time, my nervous system had the opportunity to separate intensity from harm.
When Intensity Is Held by Devotion
Recently, I commissioned my first custom flogger, one designed to deliver a deeply thuddy sensation through its many buckskin falls or tails.
Holding it in my hands feels different than borrowing someone else’s.
It wasn’t simply acquiring another tool or implement. It marked a quiet acknowledgment that this wasn’t a passing curiosity anymore. This had become another language my body desired to learn well.
The very next day after it arrived, I brought it to a professional session (where I was the client).
We negotiated the container beforehand, as we always do, and I handed my new flogger to my practitioner. Emotionally, what unfolded for me was a mixture of vulnerability, excitement, delight, longing, and satisfaction.
I found myself making requests that would have surprised an earlier version of me. I asked for verbal adoration. I asked for my hair to be pulled harder. I asked for more heat from the flogger.
Looking back, what stands out isn’t the physical experience, though.
It’s what I was actually asking for beneath it.
I wasn’t seeking intensity for its own sake. I was seeking the experience of intensity inside profound safety. I was asking to be deeply seen while in intense experience. To be celebrated rather than merely tolerated. To be held in affection while standing at the edge of sensation. The impacts landed inside an atmosphere of devotion.
And that combination changed everything.
What I discovered in real-time was that rewiring love and impact was possible.
Uncoupling Abuse from Intensity
From the outside, this journey can look increasingly intense while from the inside, it can feel increasingly gentle. Not because the sensations are softer, but because my relationship with them is.
These practices continue to dismantle assumptions I once carried: that intensity and violence are always synonymous, that surrender means powerlessness, that pain and pleasure exist on opposite ends of a spectrum rather than occasionally meeting in unexpected ways when held with exquisite care.
What I’m discovering instead is that my nervous system is capable of holding far more than I once imagined—not because I’ve become tougher, but because I’ve become safer inside myself and with people who have earned my trust.
The implements are almost beside the point.
Whether it’s rope, buckskin, or leather, what keeps drawing me back isn’t the sensation alone.
It’s the relationship.
The negotiation.
The consent.
The attunement.
The exquisite care before, during, and after.
The reminder that love sometimes arrives not by avoiding intensity, but by creating a container sturdy enough to hold it.
Perhaps that’s what I’ve been rewiring all along.
Not my capacity to endure. But my capacity to remain fully alive inside my own body while being profoundly cared for.
I’ve come to believe that our nervous systems don’t simply remember what hurt us.
They also remember what heals us. Sometimes healing arrives as softness. Sometimes it arrives wrapped in rope. And sometimes, unexpectedly, it lands inside an atmosphere of devotion.
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