By Mako Allen
Back in my early teens, I was convinced that if I didn’t get a spanking and soon, I’d just about die from unhappiness. I thought that all I had to do was get that spanking and I’d be fine, and everything would be great. Some pain in my bottom would forever remove that lingering pain in my chest, right? Sadly, that just wasn’t the case. After I began to get regular doses of spankings, they’d almost always be followed by that hideous sensation of “drop”. I loathed the feeling and longed for a cure for it. Lao-tzu does have an answer for this.
Verse Seven:
The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.
Why is it infinite?
It has no desires for itself;
thus it is present for all beings.
The Master stays behind;
that is why she is ahead.
She is detached from all things;
that is why she is one with them.
Because she has let go of herself,
she is perfectly fulfilled.
Before we can understand Lao-tzu’s answer though, we have to understand exactly what the problem is. What exactly is drop, and what causes it? Every time I’ve experienced drop it’s been after some amazing high, from a scene, or being with a group of people, or attending an event. It’s like I reached the top of the fun rollercoaster, and felt the crashing descent as I traveled back down.
That descent is a hideous cocktail of negative feelings. There’s wistful longing for the fun you just had, despair that you’ll never feel like that again, regret that you have to move past what seemed like a perfect moment, too.
I remember once at a spanking party a friend spanked me savagely, and afterwards, as she was cuddling me, I softly cried a bit. Not because my bottom hurt so much, but because I knew that I’d never get spanked like that ever again.
Here’s the funny thing about that: that’s actually true. You can’t ever do the same scene twice. That however, is actually good news. The truth is that Tao provides, and that there are no shortages. There will always be another spanking. It might be better, it might be worse. It’s definitely going to be different. I think that drop comes from an unspoken implicit sense of abandonment. But it’s an illusion – the Tao will bring you more spankings, never fear.
If drop is what happens after an event or scene, I think perfectionism is what happens before it. We go looking for that perfect spanking; strive to be that ideal top, or submissive.
But chasing perfection is a waste of time. The truth is, everything’s already perfect just the way it is. If you waste your time worrying about how things should be, you lose sight of how amazingly wonderful they already are.
That’s the big issue: attachment. When you obsess about how something was, or how it might be, you don’t get to fully embrace how it actually is. Detachment is the very opposite of this behavior. By not fixating on needing or being anything, we become one with everything.
Being detached doesn’t mean you don’t care about things, though. It means that you experience things fully as they happen, and then let them go, as you move onto fully feeling the next thing. It’s a skill. I’m very fond of saying that enlightenment isn’t something you are, it’s something you do.
Tao is funny though, it’s an ever patient teacher, and nursemaid. It follows us around, taking care of us, gently and with humor. When we become convinced that we’ve found the greatest experience of our lives, the Tao snatches it away. It’s not laughing at us, it’s laughing with us. We just forget to join in sometimes. (It also makes the worst experiences go away too, by the way.)
A big reason why we forget to laugh is because we’re too busy being occupied with how we, or things should be. The more we focus on how things might be, the more joy we suck out of our lives. It’s like we blunt ourselves, reducing the amount of feeling we have. It’s a form of hell. Which is why I say the hell with should.
When you do make a habit of avoiding the idea of should, you’ll find that it opens you up to all sorts of power, potential, and possibility. For example, when I stopped worrying about the kind of spanking partner I should have, I met all sorts of new ones. When I stopped obsessing over how I should be spanked, I learned to love being caned. Does this mean you should do like I have, and try to eliminate the very concept from your life? You can probably guess what Lao-tzu and I have to say about that.