Setting a Foundation for an Intro to Kink with Bondage, Impact, and Sensory Play
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There’s no right way to kink. And I believe there’s no shame in the kinky needs we all seek. No one kink is for everyone, but every person can find ways to explore, express, and open up their kinky pleasure and play needs in ways that are empowering. This can be achieved by becoming familiar with and following important foundational elements that will help you to integrate, consider, and practice so that you are sharing and fulfilling your desires most ethically.
There is an abundance of knowledge available to help guide you along your journey, and within this article we will touch in on some basics to help get you started if you’re new to the game, or if you’re already playing to help refresh and expand your connection and perspective so that you can build a foundation that opens up safety and alleviates shame for many kinds of pleasure and play.
Tapping into some common and popular kinks for exploring deeper intimacy, connection, pleasure, and play.
This article will cover:
Setting a Foundation for kink
Basics on Bondage, Impact, and Sensory Play and a few ideas of how to get started when you’re ready to explore and play
Resources for diving deeper
Setting a Foundation for Kink
Each person's experience, desires, and needs will look differently but some of the foundational building blocks is creating intentional avenues for exploring dismantling internalized fear, shame, and creating ways to allow fantasies to come to life that are consensual.
Informed consent, education, negotiation, safety, education, and aftercare are common building blocks for all kink-centered connections. Not all kink activities are high risk, but all connections hold potential for risk and harm. Centering safety, communication, consent, negotiation, education, autonomy, and aftercare can help build connections that are empowering, liberating, and expansive.
In addition to the foundational principles of intentional intimacy and kink centered connections, one should also consider, include, and hold space for navigating cultural reverence, ancestral and lineage ties to activities, and the possible risks and challenges that activities may bring to the surface for individuals based on their social locations and lived experiences.
Here are 6 important building blocks for creating an ethically-centered and trauma informed approach to intimate and kink connections.
Informed Consent includes communication of the needs, boundaries, and known information of and from each person involved in a scene or connection. It can include information about about the activity, history and experience, what would be useful to know for the situation.
Negotiation is often used to set up the scene and come to a common agreement on what the details, boundaries, desires, and communication will be during a scene or time of play. The negotiation can shift with each connection and may shift based on the details of the activity. When getting to know someone and first exploring play together, longer and more detailed negotiations are common and they may shift into shorter styles that feel like check ins over time or with lighter play. Negotiation is important and each person should find a way to feel and allow the other to feel comfortable communicating and exploring options until they’ve reached a place of agreement that feels collaborative and autonomous.
Vetting is the process of getting to know someone you'd like to connect with before opening up kink-centered connections and higher risk activities. Vetting is multidimensional and often includes speaking with others in the community about your potential kink partner, watching them in action, negotiation, checking with their current + past play partners, and anything else you need to gain a deeper sense of who they are that will allow you understand if they are a good alignment for you.
Safety is one of the most important foundational elements to consider in connection overall and kink centered play. Safety can include discussion of personal needs to feel mentally, emotionally, and physically safe and cared for, risks associated with the activity, consent and acknowledgement of the understanding of the risks and possible outcomes, and ensuring that the scene is set up in a way that should something need to be tended to with urgency, that you are prepared. Safety is self determined, so it's important to create space for conversation to gain an understanding of personal needs to feel safe alongside technical safety awareness.
Education is something that is not always discussed as a part of foundational exchange in kink but I feel this is important to include and aligns with informed consent and safety. Education can be obtained in a variety of ways and my favorite and what has proven to be most useful to me in learning is to absorb knowledge from a variety of sources including mentors, formal/popularly acknowledged educators, those who hold origins of the culture from which it came, professionals and practitioners who have spent a significant amount of time in their craft, peers who are learning, online research and resources, and in active practice on my own. I feel that the greatest importance of education is to expand your knowledge, confidence, and accountability to practice, play, and share your curiosities most intentionally.
Aftercare is simply how you’d like to be cared for and what will make you feel good, connected, nourished, and returned to your power after a scene has ended. Aftercare can look differently for each person and for each scene. Tea, cuddles or loving touch, conversation or debrief on what occurred and what was liked/disliked or what you’d like to explore in the future are a few examples of common aftercare. It is recommended that aftercare include a check in the day following and if/as needed the days following. It’s each persons responsibility to inform what their needs are and even if the other is not able to meet them they can collaboratively find a solution that allows everyone to feel supported, safe, respected, and cared for.
Basics on Bondage, Impact, and Sensory Play
All kink activities can be explored from a place of non-sexual intimacy, sensuality, embodied healing, mind-body training, exploration of pleasure and pain thresholds, or to deepen connection with self or another. Note that the information here is outlined and shared with a center sexually centered connections but the activities are not exclusively limited fulfilling sexual desires. Here are a few things to get you started and open the doors to welcome your curiosities to come to surface.
This information is simply for conversational and topical educational purposes. For more information on this and to get a greater understanding, please commit the time to do your own research, explore conversationally and build connection with like-minded community, and find learning-centered workshops and spaces.
Bondage can and will mean different things to different people and can have a variety of intentions from moment to moment. Basic definitions outlined on dictionary.com include:
(1) involuntary servitude; serfdom. (2) the state of being bound by or subjected to some external power or control. (3) the state or practice of being physically restrained, as by being tied up, chained, or put in handcuffs, for sexual gratification. (4) Early English Law. personal subjection to the control of a superior; villeinage.
Bondage can be explored with a variety of tools including handcuffs, cloth, rope, and more and can be used for a variety of reasons. Some common ways bondage is used is exploration and practice of power dynamics, creating a scene centering role play, enhanced pleasure and pain thresholds, for intentional intimacy and deeper connection, and to guide embodied healing.
Bondage can be fun and exciting but holds a variety of high risk factors to consider and center in order to create connections, play, and pleasure that is safer for all involved. Risks can include temporary or permanent nerve damage, loss of circulation, psychological distress or damage, and death. When practiced intentionally and ethically, risks can be mitigated and lowered and in the case that a problem arises, bondage should be removed immediately and the areas of concern tended to with care that aligns.
Impact play according to Kinkly.com is a sexual practice where one person is struck by another person for the sexual gratification of either or both parties for the sensations. It is a form of BDSM.
Spanking, flogging, caning, cropping, and paddling are all activities that are considered impact play. The difference lies in the implement chosen to deliver the impact. For some the preferred method of “impact play” is to cause deep tissue bruising, but this is more dangerous than other forms of impact play and requires more practice to master.
Impact play can expand sensory stimulation and enhance depths of feeling within the body. There are areas on the body that should be avoided when applying impact such as the hard/boney parts such as shins, head, and spine, any areas where internal organs are stored or nerves are exposed. It’s highly recommended that you take educate yourself whether you are giving or receiving during impact play, start small and build over time and across scenes, keep verbal and non-verbal communication centered, and if any problems arise, you stop the scene and play immediately and address and care.
Sensory Play involves a concentrated focus and exploration of bringing your body-mind-heart-soul into deeper connection, presence, and curiosity. Sensation play can be used to do this through intimacy and as defined in Kinkly.com describes a wide variety of activities, both vanilla and kinky, that use the body's senses as a way to arouse and provide stimulation to a partner. Although sensation play is often related to skin sensations, it doesn't have to be so limited. Sight, taste, and hearing can also be included in sensation play.
Understanding of trauma triggers, activation points, and risks of harm or injury are important within sensory play. A few ways sensory play can be explored is by removing senses (such as applying a blindfold or bondage), heightening sensations through temperature changes like ice or body safe wax, with music or noise, adding elements that activate tastebuds, or different pressures, textures and touch sensations through feathers or clothes pins.
A few ideas of how to get started when you’re ready to explore and play
Practice, play, and connect ethically and consensually. Hold others to the same standards across every connection.
Start small. Explore one curiosity at a time and build over time.
Take your time to run through the foundational principles for each connection and every scene. This will not only help you ensure you’re practicing and playing ethically, but it will also help you co-create a sense of safety that can help you and those involved really drop into the moment and explore pleasure, connection, and sexuality in more open ways.
Listen to your gut from a place of informed consent. Part of what we explore in kink is dismantling embodied shame, fear, guilt, and expanding our pleasures. Take time to get to know your true nos and the things you are feeling no from a place of shame. As you explore healing through the shame-spaces, center play and activities that brings a FUCK YES to surface and spend more time with yourself and in conversations with people who you trust gaining a better understanding and self consent to explore what is a maybe for you.
Play with others who’s values align with your own. This will support you in not only having experiences that you can feel good about, but will also hold you in places of empowerment over shame.
Create a safety plan before you begin. Make sure you have all the safety needs for the scene and elements you are exploring including first aid, safety sheers, emergency contact, exploring POD mapping, and a plan to call for support or help if a larger problem or emergency arises. Kink and BDSM are often and generally speaking received with mixed feelings in the general population and in vanilla spaces so using discernment with how you handle each situation but also knowing your limits and not going outside of these will help keep yourself and the community at large in a place of greater accountability and allow greater options for safety within high risk activities. In the case that a non-urgent incident arises, lean into the community and trusted sources for rupture, repair, and to create resolve.
Lighten up and don’t take yourself or anything too seriously! A big part of kink is letting go. When you take the time to set up a foundation and do your own research, educate yourself, and build a connection or scene utilizing the foundational principles, you will have more ease with allow yourself to let go and enjoy. Go ahead and give yourself permission to experience, explore, and exchange pleasure, play, and joy through your kinky desires.
Check out our other articles for more information and self-lead study and support with your embodied healing and intentional intimacy journey. If you’d like to dive deeper with guidance, euni offers private sessions, mentorships, and programs for individuals, couples, polycules, and expansive relational dynamics. View our sessions to explore options and contact euni for more details or to set up a container that aligns with your current desires and needs.
This coming Tuesday, euni + Submissivetiger will be leading the Intro to Kink, Part 2 as the 4th of 5 workshops and part of the Fall/Winter Embodied Healing + Intentional Intimacy Series at The Rope Collective. Below you will find details to help you prepare your body-mind-heart-soul for this guided informative + integrative experience. If you’re in San Diego and desiring to connect with community, join us.
Learn more about the events in the the Fall/Winter Embodied Healing + Intentional Intimacy Series
The Fall/Winter Embodied Healing + Intentional Intimacy Series can be experienced by purchasing single tickets to each event or you can buy a bundle which will give you access to all 5 events. Attendees will receive access to information, tools, and for selected events, products they can purchase to take home with them to continue expanding their own integration and exploration journey. Single events are available for purchase on a $25- $75 sliding scale range or the all access bundle to full series is available for $200.
Series line up:
Foundational Pleasure + Play, 10/25 at 7pm
Intimacy + Aftercare, 11/6 at 10:30am
Intro to Kink, Part I, 11/15 at 7pm
Intro to Kink, Part II, 11/22 at 7pm
Tantra, Intimacy + Connection, 12/13 at 7pm
Questions or access accommodations, please email euni at hi@selfstudylab.com
