“Just Breathe” She said.
Breath is powerful. So much so that in many old languages the word for breath is the same word for soul. There have been studies into how breath combined with stretching (yoga) or with conscious thought (mindfulness) impacts our bodies, brains, nervous systems.
Breath is important stuff.
But for the most part, we ignore breath. We treat breathing like an unimportant thing that just happens — until such time that it does not happen anymore — but breath is so much more than that.
Before I became a dominatrix, and even before graduated to become a badass lifestyle domme, I started out exploring the bottoming side. Something that is incredibly difficult in Melbourne as Australian men and their egos are famous world wide. It was tough to find anyone with the least bit of experience who didn’t want to automatically tell me that because I wanted to see how the other half — submissives and bottoms — felt during play, that meant that I must secretly have submissive fantasies.
I don’t.
What I wanted was to understand what it felt to be on the receiving end of BDSM play, so I could be a better domme, and in turn, a better dominatrix.
The way I thought of things was very old guard leather. I thought I would start on the receiving end, then when I understood the psychology of bottoms — and by extension the psychology of submisives during play — I would then be able to graduate to dishing out great BDSM and fetish play. After I had done that for a while, I could move into a more professional space.
Of course, I am always learning. There is always a new and exciting kink, or a new angle on an old favorite fetish. When BDSM starts to get boring, I’ll hang up my whip. Until then though….
Something I consistently noticed throughout this journey from bottom to top to professional, was the messages our bodies send during play that oftentimes people don’t know how to read. The first thing that changes which oftentimes inexperienced players don’t notice is that the submissives breath was the first indicator that something was up.
Of course this can be mid-play in intense scenes, or it can be over the phone when a skilled domme is pushing all of a submissives buttons and he’s feeling overwhelmed, excited, humiliated, scared, turned on.
Not everyone is quite as this level, and there are a lot of shitty tops and doms out there. If some idiot “dom” was smacking me too hard before I was ready, or doing things that I just couldn’t enjoy — and there are so many, oftentimes things that weren’t even bought up in pre-scene negotiation — I would first start breathing shallow, then start moving away from them, then finally call a safe word and smack them when I got out of whatever restraints they had been using. Hey, they assaulted me first by doing things I hadn’t agreed to before the scene. They needed a whack. And sadly, a lot of submissives wouldn’t have given them that whack. Thank god I’m not a submissive!
It was an awful time, and I swore to myself that I wouldn’t do this to my playthings when I finally felt comfortable having play things. I would show them the respect they deserved when they gave me the gift of submission. I wouldn’t use our time together as a terrible advertising board for whoever I had my eye on to play with next as often happens in public play spaces.
You’ll know those doms when you see them. They’re hitting a sub harder while making eye contact with another sub who is watching the show completely ignoring whoever they’re actually playing with, or sharing every single online interaction in their status — not just the hot ones they are dying to show off, and tease the sub they’re playing with by showing off!
Sure, I would celebrate my own pets and play things, I would show them off at the right time. But my energy wouldn’t be going towards others, but would be trained on them, as they had earned their place as my plaything, or my sub. Strangers on the internet have not.
So that’s the first lesson. Pay attention to how they breathe.
If they’re talking, you can pay attention to how they’re saying things as much as what they’re saying.
If they’re physically in front of you — or you are watching them on cam — you can look at their body, and body language.
But the secret is to start with their breath.
Extra points if you time your breathing to theirs. Breathing together will give you some idea of how they feel in their body as you are tethering your own nervous system to theirs by timing your breath. You will have better empathy and be a better play partner when they need it.
A quick hack too — if their breathing is short and sharp, they’re hurting or are uncomfortable, and not in a fun sexy way. If their breathing is slow and steady they’re probably not feeling a lot, or, they’ve floated away into boredom or subspace, experience will tell you which. There is a happy medium, a knife edge you want to keep them on during play where they are just enjoying the moment and being challenged by it enough and not bored. That knife edge moves, and their breath is what will tell you it is time to go harder or slow down and enjoy the moment together.
Good luck. Let me know in the comments if you have used breath in the past, or if you started using it after reading this and how it went.
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Victoria Gray 