PS025 - October Podcast : Educational Excellence

Oct 17

Written By

Episode: https://shows.acast.com/660e243b2f834f0017de9181/episodes/660e2440acbcaf00174d9947

My October podcast has gone live! With the world of kink growing, we deserve skilled educators, and skilled learners! Join Lee Harrington as he discusses learning styles, educational approaches, and ways to improve getting your needs met in sexuality-based (or really, any) adult education. From fun events and funny stories to a vast amount of resources, dive on into finding the best ways that you learn, the gifts that can be found by teaching from your authentic voice, and in doing so… craft excellence in education for all of us.

[music intro]
Announcer:
Welcome to Erotic Awakening, an exploration of all things erotic. Every Thursday, your hosts, Dan and dawn, share with you their experience and insights on kink, power exchange, and erotic life, as well as bring you interviews with exciting people from various lifestyles. Then every Monday, you'll hear from our various guest hosts. These nationally-known educators bring a variety of experience to the mics and share with you an ever-increasing diverse world of alternative life.
Erotic Awakening is intended for mature audiences. If you are offended by adult topics or prohibited by law, we recommend you stop listening right now.
Lee:
Hello, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit, and welcome to Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington. I am recording today from a space in beautiful Toronto, Ontario. I've never been to Toronto before, and I've got to say, I have been delighted. This weekend, I'm up here to do an intensive called Delving Into Power, which is my three-day intensive exploring dominance, submission, and all journeys in between.
And I also had a chance - I'm recording on the Friday, so you'll be getting this Monday - And I had a chance last night to teach for GTARS, which is the Greater Toronto Area Rope Social, G-T-A-R-S. And they were such a blast. We packed in 50-plus people into a space, and did speed bondage for two, two and a half hours, and it was crazy and fun. And having those moments where people's eyes started twinkling, and the lightbulbs started going off, and it was so much fun.
And it was really interesting to me, and that’s where today's topic comes from. It was really interesting today that I had somebody write me on Twitter - and my handle on Twitter is PassionAndSoul - and I had somebody tweet me and say, “Hey, thank you so much for last night's class. It was the most well-laid out and accessible that I had in a really long time.”
And it really got me thinking this morning, as I was looking at this tweet and going, “Well, why isn't more of our education that's out there in the kink community, or to be honest, in the world at large, accessible? Why isn't it reaching out to people and having them get it?”
And a while back, I was part of a conference about two years ago called ALPSEC, the Alternative Lifestyle Presenter Skills Education Conference. Is that right? Yeah, that's right.
And it was hosted in Chicago, Illinois. We rented out the theater space at the Leather Archives and Museum, and we took 30-plus students plus five, six instructors, and walked through some really intense, beautiful - in some cases repetitive, for things that people already knew - but for other people, you know, eye-opening information about pedagogy, teaching skills, techniques for understanding use of media, learning styles, all that kind of stuff.
And we went through it in a pretty, you know, not formulaic way, but a way that was accessible to a lot of different people and was specifically applicable to the kink community.
I've taken that material and I'm now doing the occasional teaching intensive of, you know, one-day trainings for people who are in the sex education world, or alternative education world - so pagan, polyamorous, folk music, whatever it might be. Because one of the things I've noticed is that a lot of the classical pedagogy books out there teaching, understanding how teaching minds work, are really wired and built for a specific model of educator.
There is an assumption in, say, Impact Teaching - which is a great book - that what we're going to be doing is - in adult education - is that we're going to be being college lecturers, or college professors, or college teachers, somewhere in that range, and we're going to be doing reoccurring classes that are the same every single semester, and that we need to have certain standards of not being sexually involved with our students, not - you know, all of that kind of stuff. Like these classical concepts of ethics, for one, but also that we're going to be talking about topics like World War II grain concerns in Poland.
That's cool, and it's really important that people are teaching those things, but in sexuality education, we're dealing with slightly different issues, but the teaching techniques and theories still apply. They really do. And what I'm seeing is that there's only a handful of types of education that are happening out there on a rote system, that are happening over and over and over again. But what's really interesting to me is when people break out of those modalities, and start getting creative with their teaching styles.
So let's talk about teaching styles. I myself do a couple of different ways that I have - my “fallbacks,” as it were.
I love interactive lectures. Now, this is my own language for when I have, say I have a 90-minute class slot, which is pretty common in a lot of kink educational format spaces. Let's say I have 90 minutes, and what I do is I pre-prep a minimum of 45 minutes of actual core lecture. I actually pre-prep, to be honest, an hour and a half to two hours with the material, but I pare it down based on who my audience is.
But instead of just lecturing all the way through, what I do is: every five to ten minutes, I make sure to ask some sort of question, or have people raise hands, or physically or verbally get involved, have people think in some way, because the reality is the adult mind can't trace, at tops, more than 15 minutes of information at a time. It just can't, it has to be involved in some way.
Some teaching theory argues that you can't have more than seven or eight minutes of just talking, before the brain starts to drift off in some other direction. This is not just talking.
This also applies to demonstrations, that if all we do is show people at the front of the room, for an hour and a half, “the cool things we can do,” it's not actually going to help the person who's watching learn how to do any of the cool things themselves. It's just not.
I love going to demonstrations on things that I already know that go on for an extended period of time because my internal dialogue allows me to fill in that information. Every few minutes I go, “oh, that's really interesting how they did that,” or I'll whisper over to a friend, “Hey, you know how we did that thing two months ago? Look at how we could have done that better.”
But if I'm dealing with an audience who has not seen this thing before, an hour and a half of flat-up demonstration or flat-up lecturing is not going to engage them. At least it's highly unlikely to. We'll get that occasional student who does get it, but it's a smaller percentage.
And so for me, when I'm lecturing, I like to stop every few minutes and be like, “well, when we're talking about power exchange relationships, what words come to mind for you?” And I take that big dry erase board, or that flip chart, and I take my pen out and start writing.
Now, what I'm doing is actually twofold. It's not just taking a mental break to engage people and have them come back to the topic - which is part of it, it's actually a big part of it. But I'm also engaging different types of learners.
Some people learn through audio, they learn by listening. That's fantastic. Some people are visual learners, though, and they learn by watching things. Some people who are visual learners can learn through the written word. It's usually a combination between audio learners and visual learners. And to be honest, a lot of my material falls into those three categories. And I admit it - which is problematic, because there are lots of other types of learners out there.
There are people who are more helped by different types of what we can call types of intelligence, as you were. So I already mentioned visual or spatial intelligence, people who really find useful reading, or writing, or looking at charts and graphs, people who can really be drawn in by the manipulation of images, by metaphors and analogies, right? So think about those kinds of people.
And we also have folks, and if you're somebody who went, “oh my god, I am somebody who learns by puzzles, and reading, and writing, and all that stuff,” you might be a visual and spatial learner - sketching, painting, all that kind of stuff.
There are people that I mentioned who are verbal and linguistic learners. They learn also by writing, but they also learn by listening, and storytelling, and themselves talking out and explaining to someone else how they got to it. They might find it useful to hear humor about a topic, or they might be really able to remember information that's given to them.
But there are also people who are logical minds, that they need to be able to have it proven to them that something actually works. They need to hear the examples, they need to put it into application. So for them, having a whole bunch of theories strung up for them isn't going to be nearly as useful as being able to puzzle it out - either for themselves or hearing how the equation worked for them.
There are some people who are kinesthetic or body learners, and I will admit that my rope bondage class is real - my rope bondage classes are really excellent for kinesthetic learners, but that my other classes tend not to be. I know it's one of my faults, as an educator, that I haven't been able to figure out really good ways to do this, and I'm trying to get better.
A really great example of kinesthetic learning in a verbal context is what happened to me when I went to Body Electric. Now, Body Electric is a three-day intensive where people dive into the topic of, in my case, queer sexuality, and non-body-conformative sexuality.
And one of the exercises that they did is they had one group of people in the very center. They split us into two groups, and they had the center group face outward. They had the second group face inward, paired up with someone. And then what they did is they asked us all a question. We answered in both directions, and then we moved one step to the left.
And then on the next one, we had each of us put the hand on the heart of the other person, if we consented - it was a consent culture-based experience. Put the hand on the heart of the other person, and say something based on the question that was asked. We then flipped, you know, sides of the other person to the same exercise, and we then moved one step to the left.
We then did another thing where we are mirroring each other with hands moving up and down. And what we were doing was engaging our bodies by the movement - left, right - engaging with a different set of eyes, which can be huge for people who are moved to education through interaction with others.
It also breaks us out of our comfort zones. Because for me, as a learner, I have times where I'm with one partner, doing exercises throughout the entirety of a class, but I'm only learning what that's like to be with that one partner. That's a great thing if all of my sexuality exploration is with that one partner; I get to know that partner better over and over and over again.
But if I'm someone who plays with lots of different people, let's say in a rope bondage context, I'm going to play with 20 different people over the course of a year, but I only learn and practice on one body? It's going to be much harder for me to find it applicable down the road. It's just part of that reality.
There are other people who learn and have a great amount of intelligence through music and rhythm. I am moved by the work of Zamil, who's a bondage instructor out of Berlin.
Zamil, when he started practicing rope bondage, had a metronome. [imitates ticking] Moving back and forth, back and forth, and he put the metronome on in the background, and he started tying. Left, move - right, move - twist, twist - turn, hitch. And he did this tie, like, over and over again, with his different ties. With the same [imitates ticking] moving back and forth, back and forth.
Now the amazing thing with that rhythmic experience, is that he was able - once he got that down, and did the same kinesthetic practice of doing it over, and over, and over, and over again until his hands remembered something. Not just his mind, but his hands remembered something. He was able to then move it up [imitates faster ticking] and have that same tie apply quicker, faster, and eventually easier.
In a romantic setting [imitates slow ticking] - it was because he was whispering in between tones. But when he was on stage, it was movement, and fury, and transformation. People with musical intelligence or rhythmic intelligence also remember things by recognizing tonal patterns, by remembering medal - melodies, excuse me, but remembering melodies. They are people who remember structure.
But beyond that, they are also people who, when they’re at play parties, are able to better apply the information that they have learned ahead of time by having music in the background. And being able to apply that [imitates ticking] to the music that is playing. And if it's frenetic - if it is Linkin Park - it's going to be a takedown scene. And if it's Dead Can Dance, it's going to be melodic, and moving back and forth with that piece of rope.
Which means if you're somebody who has a great amount of rhythmic or musical intelligence, it's going to be really hard, potentially, to play in what's considered a “dead space.” And if it's something that has no music, no rhythm, nothing going on, it's going to be hard - unless you start bringing your own rhythm into the experience of applying the knowledge you already have.
I think of Captain Gordon, who is a kink educator out of Maryland, and also amazing tattoo artist. He did both the dragon tattoos on my legs, and my newest piece that says Know Thyself on my wrist.
And I remember being in a play space with Captain Gordon and some of the people from SMS, Sacred Mark Sanctuary, and there was some music going on in the background, but they wanted to have a more intense and rhythmic experience with the play partner that they had there.
So what they did, which I thought was brilliant, is that they started doing drumming on their partner's body. [imitates fast, repetitive beat] And as that happened, with hands falling on someone's flesh, they were able to transform the experience through the type of intelligence that worked best for that play partner, and able to make the scene more memorable and more connective.
So these types of intelligence don't just apply to educational experience, they also apply to how we as individuals can engage sexually.
There's also people who have a great degree of interpersonal intelligence. They learn by listening, by seeing things that other people are doing or have done. They do stuff through discussion groups, and through connecting with another person. Interpersonal learners are often the folks who will, after a class, sit down with somebody and go, “Oh my god, that amazing thing I learned, I want to have a conversation with you about it, so I can go back and forth with you, and learn it better.” These are the folks who do not sit well with “after a class, sit with yourself and think about this topic.” Their brain won't absorb it.
I'm an interpersonal learner. And this was really important for me to discover, because I had people who were saying, “Wow, you always talk so much and want to share about stuff.” But what I'm doing is trying to absorb information.
If all I do is read something on BBC, that's cool, right? I try to read BBC News every day or so if I can, just for the top stories if I have the time, and more if I have more time. And for me, if all I read was that there was a whole bunch of killing in Somalia, all I remember is that there was a whole bunch of killing in Somalia.
But if I have a conversation with somebody within six hours about the deaths in Somalia, and what took place, and how I was disturbed by the experience, and what I want to do to be able to enforce change in the world, or at least change within myself with this new knowledge of how that incident came to pass… if I discuss it, it gets integrated into my core being for a longer period of time, right?
Now, this is really different than people who are intrapersonal learners. Intrapersonal learners take the information they are given, go home and think about it. These are the folks that, when given an exercise in a class, need that good five minutes to dialogue or journal with themselves. They need to be able to have that time to go, “Oh, that's what's happening,” and have those little aha moments for themselves.
I think of a story that Joshua Tenpenny tells - who is the property of Raven Kaldera. And Joshua Tenpenny, in one of his tales of talking about slavery - I think it was their class on sacred M/s - and he mentioned that he was doing the exact same exercise, or more accurately type of service, every single day for his Owner. Every single day, until one day, a year-plus later, he had an “aha” moment when he was doing that same thing over and over again.
And I think that's a crossover between intrapersonal reflectiveness and kinesthetic learning. It was the same thing over and over and over again, but - or, so, it could be considered rhythmic as well - but it was also a chance for him to reflect over and over and over again, until he had that “aha” moment.
So this brings us back to the idea of teaching styles. That if there are some people who are kinesthetic, and some people who are visual, and some people who are intrapersonal, some people who are extrapersonal, some people who learn through all these different ways - it's important for us as a community, and communities in the world at large, to approach information in different ways.
That there are some people who are going to be deeply moved by academic presentations. But there are other people who are going to find discussion groups really useful, because they'll get to hear lots of different stories, for those people who have the logical minds. They get to see it from different perspectives.
But people who are intrapersonal learners are able to go back and forth and discuss everything, right? Other people who are kinesthetic might be more moved by game playing. I recently got forwarded - and I'll be posting them soonish, fingers crossed - a bunch of crossword puzzles that Jay Wiseman devised. Where there's a whole bunch of questions at the bottom, and there's actual crossword puzzles where you fill out with topics on polyamory or SM 101, and you play games. And for people who are kinesthetic learners, game playing in a physical context can be huge.
This also goes with practical application. I, at Rope Camp, recently did a class where it was on decorative bondage. And I gave everybody a basic tie. I said, here is a karada, a body harness. Here is the step-by-step technique that I want everybody to do along with me: where it's a rope down the center, with or without knots; I tie off or loop through and back; and then I create the diamonds by going back and forth and back and forth, between the front and the back of the body.
I said, “Okay, you've got a body harness.” Actually, this was in my asymmetrical class. I didn't - anyway, it doesn't matter. Somewhere at Rope Camp, I did body harnesses. [chuckles]
And then I said, “Okay, now that you've got the technique, what I want you to do is take this and apply it. See where your hands go.” And this was a form of experiment, experimental-based learning, where they got to try out different things, taking the technique they had and then exploring.
This is the same exact concept that's applied in field trips. When we think about elementary school, or middle school, or in some cases high school, where we went and - at least in my school - where we went to, say, the aquarium. And we wandered around, and got to see lots of stuff and hear lots of stuff, but then we got to actually reach our hands in and touch the things that we were doing. And in experimental-based learning, we got a chance to, say, afterwards, experiment with how different fish would - taking the theory - we got to puzzle out with equations, how a certain type of fish that worked with saltwater, why would their gills not work with freshwater? And our brains got to puzzle it out, with different mental exercises and mental experiments.
There are other people, and other presenters, who create stuff that is about mentoring. Presentation and education does not have to just be in a large group setting. There are some presenters that thrive, and learners, that thrive in that 10 person group. I don't know if it's still the case, but I know a couple years ago, there was Dungeon 101, which I think is now up to Dungeon 801, 901? Where what they did, is they limited the conference to like 120 people. Maybe it's 100 people, and all the classes are less than 15 people. All of them. So that there's a chance for that one-on-one experience.
And there are other learners who thrive, and other educators, also known as mentors, who thrive with having just one or two students at a time. Or one student with two or three educators at a time, two or three teachers at a time, two or three mentors at a time, where they get to hear lots of different presentation, or information, from different voices.
I've done stuff where I was doing a suspension bondage one-on-one with someone, but it ended up being me and my demo bottom in this one-on-one experience.
(And I actually have information about hiring me one-on-one on my website SacredConsort.com, it's also my pro-dom site.)
And I was doing this stuff, and it was really interesting to me - where I was teaching him technique - and then what was great is my demo model, Cannonball, who is excellent at doing - sharing what her experience is between classes, like, during classes. While we were tying, she could say to him, “Hey, that chest harness you just did, it's really great on placement, because it avoids my nerve bundles here and here, which is going to be different on different people. But the way you firmly anchored that in was really hard and jarring to me, that if we were doing a takedown scene, it would be really sexy, but in a kind of slow and methodical way - or slow and romantic way - would have shaken me out of subspace.” And having somebody of the bottom experience share that made him go, “Ohhhh,” in a different way than me sharing the exact same information.
There are some types of education out there that are what I would call - so we talked about demonstration - that are what I would call entertainment, or edutainment. And edutainment is where people get on stage, and joke and laugh, and show you a whole bunch of stuff, and it's education. But it's also a performance. It's a little bit of both, or both mixed in with one another.
There are some places where the educational model is based off of rituals. I have a ritual that I do, that I'm going to be doing at BASK, which is the Bay Area Sacred Kink group. I'm going to be doing this for them in November, I've done it a couple of times. Where we, or I, have a ritual that I've constructed. In this case, it is a sacred knotwork and ropework ritual.
Where we take everyone and we build a spirit catcher, also known in some circles as a dream catcher. And we make a big one out of a hula hoop, or out of a large piece of willow that's been bent into a circle and lashed off.
And I teach everyone how to dedicate their cords that they're going to be using. How to tie an overhand knot, and talk about the symbology for me there, and have everybody share for themselves what the symbology might be. We talk about a figure eight knot, and everybody does a figure eight knot. We talk about a chain stitch, a chain sinnet, or a daisy chain for some folks. And we talk about these different techniques of rope tying, what they visualize and mean for us. We talk about color. We talk about intention. And in doing so, they then get the practical application of doing so in a ritualized context.
And for some folks who are - especially people who are coming from a pagan, or a Catholic, or a spiritual background that relies heavily on ritual, these kinds of things allow it to anchor better into their constructs, into the schema that are already present in their mind.
A schema is a thing - for people who aren't familiar with it - a schema is the thing that allowed the cavemen, as it were - cavewomen as well, don't want to be gender biased there, my sincere apologies - a caveperson, to be able to hear a rustling in the bushes and run. Right? They heard the rustling in the bushes and they ran. Not, “I hear rustling in the bushes. I wonder what that is. Oh, no, it's a saber-toothed tiger!” Run, run, run, run, run! Nom, dead. Or at least nom, seriously hurt.
And I think that's interesting, to consider the schemas that we have, because they're what allows us to skip from point one to point two. Now, schema can be dangerous in some ways because - or frustrating - because the schema that we've already built, say, around gender, have us look at people and go - and group automatically, “are you a boy or are you a girl?”
And this is dangerous for those of us who fall outside those gender norms, because of how those schema work. It allows the world at large to go, “oh, you're a boy, I should treat you this way, this is information that I have,” I'm going to move to the next category. And if you're male but fall outside those gender norms, it can be really challenging for people who have anchored specific schema. Anyway, that is what it is.
There are also people who thrive and learn through what I would call smut-as-education, right? Tristan Taormino has an expert guide series out there, that's really great. Where you watch a hot scene, and then they stop and go, “okay, let's look at how they got to do those different things.” And I do the same thing in my book Sacred Kink, where I share a story throughout a given chapter, where it applies the information that you're learning during the chapter.
Master Skip Chasey, who is doing a D/s intensive in November in Vancouver, BC along with his slave Rick - I love them because they do… they talk about the fact that, Master Skip Chasey talks about the fact that, if his dick was not invested, if his dick was not invested in the stuff that he was teaching and doing, he wouldn't be able to remember it.
And I think that's really important to consider, because there's all of these really clinical approaches to sex education. “All right, so we're going to do this thing, and let's follow along, and everybody's dressed, and everybody is supposed to follow along really clinically, and there's no play allowed.”
I think of these as play-shops as well. There's smut-as-education, there's play-shops, it's a whole spectrum there. And when we look at those kinds of exercises, it allows people to get sexy. And for the folks out there who learn through smut-as-education, there's a chance to get raw and raunchy and do it with their partner. They're in the room! They're in the room.
I love the idea of being able, and I love getting to apply it as well with my D/s weekend that I do, dominance and submission weekend that I do. It's theory, and conversations, and workbook exercises, and all of that kind of stuff, and lecturing, and listening, and one-on-one discussions, and all that kind of things.
But on Saturday night, we have a play party. So you can actually apply it in a sexy manner and do it - whatever it is. Or if you came as a single, get to watch what it is, and be able to bear witness to those kinds of things.
And as a note, there are people who learn by being voyeurs. There are people who learn through small discussion groups. There are people who do stuff where they learn from their partner, and go back and forth with their partner. There are some people who learn by doing…like for people who do intensives, and being able to explore a topic for a week or two at a time, and dive into it.
There are people who learn really well through making artwork, or doing artwork. I love the classes where I get to go through, where it says, “and now you get to,” and the teacher says, “and now you get to sketch this.” At Queer - it wasn’t Queer - at Transcending Boundaries Conference in Massachusetts, I got to go to a class on expressing gender through poetry and writing. And throughout the class, she had us stop and write. And we got to write our own poetry, and then share pieces of it with the room.
And there was another teacher that I went to - I wish I could remember their names - but at PantheaCon, who did the same thing about the sacred muse, as writing. And I love that kind of stuff because, again, it's how artwork applies to our educational formats.
And I think it's really important for us as learners, because I'm learning all the time. I learn from my students, I learn by going to classes, I learn by reading books, I learn by going on websites. Learn, learn, learn, learn, learn.
I get frustrated by educators who are like, “Oh, well, I've been doing this for 15 years. I've got all the information, I don't need to learn anymore.” I'm like, “Of course I need to learn!”
Last night at GTARS, I learned a different way to - not for suspension bondage, but for bedroom stuff - do a speed release hitch-off, because I had a student - actually I invented it/learned it. Where I had a student who said, “Well, on everything else, we're only slipping through. How can we anchor this by just slipping through this, you know, this lark’s head, instead of going through, and having to pull it through, and then knot it off, or then do a slipknot off of it.”
And I looked at it and said, “Let me think about that.” While everybody was practicing the tie that I taught right before, I grabbed and said, “are there, is there anybody who's open?” And I pulled somebody out of the room, and I just started practicing a couple options, until I - we’re pulling on it, and I finally got it after the fourth try.
And I'm like, I went back over to that student, said “what do you think about this?” And he tried it, and he's like, “that works really well.” And so I just stopped the whole room and said, “we got an idea over here.”
And people are like, “oh, what's the new idea?”
We learn by experimenting, or at least I do. There are other people who learn through rote systems There are other people out there who learn through rote systems. And I think of them as katas, right? I think of martial arts, where you learn step one, step two, step three, step four, all the way up to step 72. And then you do them until you're excellent.
And for people like myself who are experimental, what I think of in rope bondage as West Coast Jazz, where I, you know, I learned a whole bunch of different techniques. And then… I made jazz music out of it, and I riff with people, and I go up and down the scales, and I see what I can come up with.
But there are people out there who have learned, you know, a specific school of Japanese-style rope bondage and know it with excellence, and perfect it, and hone it. And those 12 ties they do, they can mix and match in a thousand different ways. And because they have learned it with excellence, they don't have to think about it or make it up every single time, they are able to deliver. And able to have their mind, and their spirit, and their energy connect with their partner over and over and over again in different ways, because their body and their hands can take care of the tie. Because their hands know it inside and out. Neither is right or wrong. It's being different kinds of learners and different kinds of players.
So I encourage the educators who are listening to think about these different modalities. You don't have to do it the same way just because you saw a different Tantra instructor teach it a specific way. You can take similar theories and apply it to a different educational model.
And for you as a learner, learn - or think about, at least, or practice and experiment - which learning modalities work best for you. And if you learn that you're a kinesthetic learner, and if you only go to a lecture? You're not going to retain any of the information, no matter how many discussions, or how many journal entries you're going to take. If you don't learn that way, if you see a class description that says “this is a lecture on blah, blah, blah,” think for a moment about whether you want to invest your time and energy into that learning style and experience.
Now, maybe if you're a kinesthetic learner, right, and you want to go to a lecture, think about whether you're also a rhythmic learner. Because I've had some people who come to lectures and bring their knitting, or bring a notebook and write stuff down at the same time, and they're able to learn it in a different way.
Or people who bring that same notebook to the edutainment experience. I'm a very note-takey kind of person, and I remember being in a class recently that Lew Rubens did. And I had people look at me and they're like, “This is an intermediate, an introduction-to-intermediate level rope bondage class. Why is Lee Harrington in it?”
And I looked at them, and I had somebody ask that, and I'm like, “Because Lew's probably going to teach me a couple of things that I hadn't thought of that way.” And he did. He showed me that there's a style of lark’s head based wrist cuff, that locks off in a different way than the bula bula/one column tie does, or the Somerville Bowline, that allows that the middle wrap of a three-wrap wrist cuff isn't going to slip in the same way.
And I went, “Oh, that's a really interesting thing to consider for dynamic suspension ties, or for things where people are going to be struggling, and that middle tie can start loosening up or tightening up.” I won't use it necessarily all the time, because my hands really know the one column tie, and my hands are starting to learn the Somerville Bowline as a backup. But my hands know this one tie really, really well. Can I train my hands to know something else? Absolutely.
But it's something to really consider for you as a learner, what's going to work for you. And speak up for your needs. If you need two more times to practice something, consider going up to the instructor and saying, “hey, can we have time to do two more practices?”
And if they say no, they're moving on to the next thing, pause for a moment and say to yourself, “well, if I need to practice this a couple more times before I retain it, is it even worth it to go on to the next exercise if I'm not going to retain the first tie?” Listen for a second to what the second tie is going to be, and think to yourself, “wow, you know what? I would rather remember the first tie than learn that second tie.” And then practice and practice. It doesn't matter if the rest of the room is moving on to the next thing! If it's not going to help you and you're going to lose all of it, who cares if the instructor is teaching eight different bondage ties? If you're not going to remember all of them, what was the point of going to that class?
When you have the opportunity to listen to your own needs, to look - as I do at my wrist right now - and to know thyself, to stop and go, “OK, I am this kind of learner today. I need this today.” And I'm going to get to go home with two or three ties that my hands know, and I can use with my lover. That's fantastic. Speak up for yourself. Do it with excellence.
It is really important to me, as we move forward, as communities, to really think about this stuff. I'm really moved by this as we continue to grow as a community, and it's not just the Fifty Shades Of Grey thing. It's bigger than that, it's more than that, I think.
And as I sit with that fact, that we're growing - I mean, look at fetlife.com, it's exploded. We are a giant community, and there's more and more people coming out of the woodwork every day. That I really think we deserve more, as a community, for excellence in education. I really, really do. You deserve it, I deserve it. we as a community deserve it.
And so as educators, really think about this stuff. As learners, really think about this stuff. Take the time to learn how to be a better educator. Take the time to learn how to be a better learner. Learn how to be a better learner, because we all deserve it.
For folks who are learning more, feel free to go look at my podcast notes on this. I'm going to post both on Erotic Awakening, and on my own website, PassionAndSoul.com. There are going to be lots of notes for this one.
I am working, like I said, I'm doing one-off educational experiences for people who want to be better learners. So if you've got a whole bunch of folks in your area that want me to come out, please let me know. I love doing this stuff, I'm really moved by how to have a better educational experience.
And if nothing else, know thyself. Know thyself.
If you have any questions about sexuality, spirituality, kink, learning, gender, connection, whatever it might be, feel free to drop me an email at Lee, L-E-E, at PassionAndSoul.com, preferably with the subject line “Ask Lee.” If I don't reply within three or four weeks, please drop me an extra note. Sometimes things fall through the crack, and I will acknowledge that.
You can find me anywhere by typing in PassionAndSoul anywhere on the internet, or type in Lee Harrington, if it's about sexuality, it's me.
So thank you so much, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit. This has been Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington, and until next time, stay cool, have fun, be authentically yourself, and have a fantastic journey.
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