Bating Your Prayer, Praying Your Bate

"The penis is the exposed tip of the heart, the wand of the soul."

--James Broughton

You can adapt the use of prayer beads--a meditative tool used by many religious traditions--as a rich and flexible resource for a mindful practice of self-love. 

Choose a set of beads that doesn't carry negative baggage from your upbringing. The mala of Buddhist and Hindu traditions, a set of 108 undifferentiated beads (plus a head bead that marks the beginning and end of the set) offers a possibility that doesn't carry as many unhelpful associations for some as a Roman Catholic rosary. For others, a mala might be the wrong choice for many of the same reasons. 

(This is a great example of why queer spirituality needs to draw on the resouces of traditions that don't carry previous toxic associations: we need to borrow and adapt. We're doing radical drag of the soul here. Think RuPaul meets Sister Mary Ignatius.)

Breathe in deeply for a count of five on the first bead. Exhale completely for a count of five on the next. And so on. You'll soon settle into the rhythm, although it might feel artificial for the first few cycles, until you slow down.

You'll be touching your cock with one hand and telling beads with the fingertips of the other. As you breathe, take five strokes for each bead. After a few beads, change your stroke. Break out of your habitual pattern. Explore new ways of touching yourself: there are dozens or hundreds. You may or may not be erect at any given time. Or not at all. Breathe into the sensation you're experiencing in the present moment, not into an expectation of how you want to feel, or how hard you want to be. 

You can move the beads around on your body to spread the erotic energy. Rub circles on your belly. Drag the beads across your chest, your thighs, your perineum. Over your heart, over your throat, over your third eye. Wrap them around your shaft and balls. Be creative, as you continue to stroke and breathe. Experiment with closing your eyes sometimes, then sometimes opening them to take in the wonder of your penis in your hand.

If you find yourself getting close to ejaculation, change your stroke and slow it down. Focus on your breath and on how the beads feel touching other parts of your body. If you need to, pause and just breathe for a few counts of five to cool down. The more deeply you breathe, the more pleasure you can hold without spilling over.

If you're nowhere close to ejaculation, then that instead is exactly where you're supposed to be. Be here now. Be someplace else later. It's not so complicated.

At the end of your practice, which will take anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five minutes, you'll have given yourself 540 moments of pleasure. 

At that point, maybe you'll choose to ejaculate. If you do, don't clean up instantly. Bask in the afterglow. 

Or an alternative to ejaculation: take twenty quick, forceful "charging breaths," followed by three full breaths as deep as you can. Let the first two out with sound. Then hold the third for as long as you can, while you tense every muscle in your body. When you're ready, release the breath, relax your whole body, and stay still while the energy flows.

Either way, at the end of your practice, please breathe out some gratitude for your one wild and precious life.

Photo by Andrew Graham

I offer my thanks for the inspiration of an online friend at Bateworld--the only social media site that feels to me like a genuine community.

Sympathy for the Devil

Feeling empathy for J.D. Vance this morning has left me feeling a little freaked out.

The New York Times website today posted a profile of how he converted to conservative Catholicism in his mid-30's. It's a religious world-view I couldn't be much more at odds with. I've rubbed shoulders with enough of its proponents over the years--eager young intellectuals in grad school convinced that Thomas Aquinas more or less said it all, and what he didn't say can be extrapolated from his writings--to know just how dangerously repressive and exclusionary a world view it is. I've listened to the juggernauts of Catholic Truth steam rolling over the lived experience of others in conversation because, well, Correct Faith is Correct Faith, everyone else's feelings and experiences be damned. More or less literally.

But I can also relate to the younger Vance's longing for certainty in reaction to the chaotic upbringing he described in his memoir. I can understand the pull of an ancient faith and its dramatic rituals, for someone who's experienced precious little stability in his previous life, and who desperately craves solid ground on which to stand. God knows, I've been there myself, before my karma ran over my dogma.

It can take decades to wear the inhuman edges off some people's pivotal religious experiences. If it ever happens at all. As the gifted comic novelist Stephen McCauley quips in Alternatives to Sex, "I'm sure there's a place for religious conviction, but on the whole, freedom of religion pales in importance next to freedom from it." 

Somewhere inside the carapace of Vance's militant, masculinist version of virtue, of his hostility and inflammatory, antifeminist, homophobic and transphobic rhetoric, there's a desire to belong, to find meaning in life, to connect to something larger and more authentic than the self-absorbed preoccupations of American materialism. And then somewhere along the way, that desire took a hateful wrong turn.

I don't know exactly what I'm feeling toward Vance. Not forgiveness, exactly, for the choice he made to sell his soul to the narcissistic huckster, serial abuser, and aspiring dictator to whom he is now running mate. But awareness of something at the core of his life that isn't erased by the shitty choices he's making.

Maybe it's my own edges that are getting worn down.

 

Infinite Needs, Finite Lifetime

 "Humans can create infinite needs. The market dominates us, and it robs us of our lives. Humanity needs to work less, have more free time, and be more grounded. Why so much garbage? Why do you have to change your car? Change the refrigerator? There is only one life and it ends. You have to give meaning to it. Fight for happiness, not just for wealth."

--Pepe Mujica, former president of Uruguay, as quoted in The New York Times

What is Essential

"Know that a person needs to cross a very, very narrow bridge, and what is essential is that one should not be overcome by fear."

--Rabbi Nachman of Bratislav

L'dor V'dor

 From generation to generation...