Podcast 089 - What is Worth It?

Jun 30

Written By

When assessing personal journeys, the choices we make are profoundly personal. Lee Harrington takes us on a journey into ourselves and what we decide in this podcast that discusses breath play, $18 dollar sandwiches, attending events, gender transition, being out, diet, types of kinky play, and so much more. From negotiation styles to privilege to why someone else’s choices may not be your own, join him on this quest into worth, worthiness, and self-determination – complete with a side ramble about Bolivian culinary varieties.

Announcer:
BDSM and non-standard relationships, power exchange and polyamory, sacred sexuality and fetishes, as well as Simply Fun Kink.

You're listening to The Erotic Awakening Podcast Network.

Welcome to The Passion And Soul Podcast, an exploration of personal and interpersonal desire, faith and connection.

Your host, international sexuality and spirituality author and educator, Lee Harrington of passionandsoul.com, will take you on a sultry and intellectual journey through the soul of intimate experience.

Take a moment and breathe deep, and get ready for an adventure.

This podcast is a chance to glimpse into the ever increasing diverse world of alternative life.

The Passion And Soul Podcast is intended for mature audiences.

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Lee:
Hello, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit, and welcome to the Passion And Soul Podcast with your fellow adventurer, your guide, your troublemaker, Lee Harrington of passionandsoul.com.

I was having a conversation online with someone recently about breath play.

Now, for folks who don't know, breath play is this overarching umbrella of concepts involving breath and erotic adventuring.

So it actually gets broken down into two different categories.

Air flow and blood flow.

Air flow, how air goes in and out of the body.

Blood flow, how things run around inside the body once it's there.

And they asked me the question of, is the high of the erotic journey of breath play worth the danger?

And I was thinking about this because, and I've been thinking about it ever since their conversation with me, that worth it is profoundly personal.

In the case of breath play, especially with the blood flow side of things, there's a lot of invisible calculations.

There's a lot of things that we can't see that can go wrong.

Breath play can kill.

One of the biggest forms of death in BDSM is autoerotic asphyxiation.

People who were asphyxiating themselves.

Some of this is people who were strangling themselves.

Some of this is people who were putting a plastic bag or a gas mask over their head and capping it off so that they can't breathe and are re-breathing the same breath over and over and over again.

Now, some people get a high out of this.

Some people don't.

The challenging thing is and why it's such a deadly issue is because it leads to hypoxia, where you get less and less oxygen to your brain and you can't tell when things are going wrong or when you feel like you need to actually stop something.

Your fingers and your muscles don't work in the same way anymore and you might not even be able to get yourself out from the situation you put yourself into.

And I know a lot of people go, well, it's the issue is autoerotic.

You need to just have a partner.

And other people who say, well, you know, these things we're doing, these chokeholds, it's the same issue as people who do judo.

And, you know, and other people go, well, actually, it's the same thing as chokeholds being used by the police.

And they cite these numbers back and forth.

And then the debate happens of, well, which are we more like, judo practitioners or people who are on drugs running from the police?

Which are we as sexual adventurers?

And as we look at these things, it's not about the statistics.

It's not about the numbers at the end of the day.

Though those things are really important to look at.

It's important to know that both of those things, when we're talking about breath play, are apples to oranges.

Yeah, they're both fruit.

They both are going to give you a sugar rush of sorts, but they're totally different when we're comparing that to saying, kissing air back and forth, while you're breathing in and I'm breathing out, and back and forth, and back and forth.

And we go into each other, my breath into you, your breath into me.

They're different issues.

But even beyond that, there are people who will say, it's not worth it.

And there are other people who will say, it's completely worth it.

I used to teach a two-hour long, really involved breath play class that covers all of these issues in a lot more detail.

And then a lot of ways to...

the ways that people do this stuff, why the different types are sexy.

And there's another presenter in our community who I adore, Jay Wiseman, who does a class that's just on the legal, physiological, et cetera, issues around breath play.

And our two classes together are great, in my opinion, right?

Doing them side by side, I got a chance to do that at an event called The Floating World one year, and it was a great double header.

And one of the producers for an event that I went to that had gone to both classes said, you know what?

I went to Jay's class and I started doing breath play.

And her logic was that if people are dying, literally dying from this, and we know it's so risky, then it's got to be worth it.

Clearly, there is a reason people are making these choices.

It's got to be worth it.

And then she came to my class where I'm laughing my way through it and putting a plastic bag over my own head and trying to talk through it and showing the difference between, you know, when it is blowing up and when it is flat and all of this ridiculousness.

And she watched me do this while also saying, and I could die like this right now if no one came forward and released me.

And she sat at it when she got home and she stopped.

She stopped doing any of those forms of breath play, because she realized that the reason she thought it was worth it was based on other people's choices they make about worth, not about her own.

And it made her go home and really assess what's worth it to her.

Worth and that question of what's worth it comes up all the time in our culture.

All the time in our lives.

Is that sandwich worth $18?

Well, to one person, of course it is.

To somebody else, it's like no sandwich is ever worth $18.

Now, for some people who have lots of resources, $18 isn't a drop in the bucket, and it doesn't matter if it's good or not.

It's just what a sandwich costs.

Some parts of the world, it's going to be a different answer than others, because that's just what a sandwich costs.

For other people, that isn't an available option to even have $18.

So the privilege in place says that no, no sandwich is worth $18.

And if it is, it's got to be the best sandwich in the world.

And if it isn't, and I just spent all of those resources on the $18 sandwich, what was all the hype about?

This didn't actually change anything in my life.

I didn't have an aha epiphany moment.

This thing that everybody's been talking about as being life-changing and worth it, I saved up for, I slaved for, I worked so hard for.

Is the event, is going to the event worth it?

It's a different question, not just around finances, but time away from family.

How much free time you have.

Where you value getting your connections.

How you value getting your connections.

If you're an introvert who loves having, you know, just you and your partner at home, reading a book, maybe going to one class where you can sit in the back of the room and remain anonymous and not have to talk to anyone and go home with new resources, that's great.

But if you're somebody who's looking for new play partners or more play partners, or you learn by watching people play, or if you learn better by going to 30 classes in one weekend and having a buffet assortment of opportunities educationally and vendor-wise, great.

But if you're overstimulated, what is worth it to one person?

There are more calculations than can be present when we look at what other people's choices are.

I know a lot of people recently in discussions around transgender issues have finally been having conversations around privilege and around financial privilege especially, right, and social privilege and how that plays in.

That Caitlyn Jenner's reality and, you know, the realities of people who have money are different than people who are people who don't, or different than people who have a different ethnic reality, different racial reality, different socioeconomic reality, different cultural reality, just there are so many things.

People in the United States have a different reality right now than other places.

The fact that in England right now, they're advising, they have on the watch list kind of thing for people traveling out of the country, that LGBT people from England traveling outside of the UK, if they're going to the United States, should be aware that visiting different states have different laws for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer, and that you need to do your own research state by state because some of those are not first world.

Wow, right?

That's interesting.

But we're not necessarily talking about the different choices people make as a whole about whether it's worth it.

Even coming out as being gay, people say, be out, be proud, it's worth it.

Well, is it?

Yeah, I don't talk to my family of choice and my family of birth anymore, but it was worth it to get to be me.

If you're growing up in a culture and in a personal reality where your family of birth is part of what makes you you, is something that you value to the core of your being, the core of I am.

People say, oh, well, if that church isn't going to accept you for what you are, you have to show it that, you know, you can, you don't have to need them.

Well, what if your church is part of who you are?

Is it worth it in the same way?

It is not a simple equation of worth where A equals B across the board.

It's not.

And the story that it should be is from a place of privilege.

It really is, on so many fronts, even the privilege of being self-aware already.

I know people who say, well, culture should have caught up by now.

Well, you know what?

Culture hasn't.

I have a friend of mine who's earlier on in transition who came out recently to his family.

And his sister isn't dealing well with it.

And that's neither here nor there, but she's not doing okay with his new self on a lot of different levels.

And so mom and dad, when they were coming and visiting, when he was coming and visiting, said, hey, we'll just show up at her house, and that way you can get to visit your nieces and nephews.

And he had to put his foot down and said, no, no, we can't.

We can't do that to her.

They said, well, now, why not?

You know, she'll get used to it.

It'll be okay.

And he said, consent, because she's not there right now.

Because as a trans person, he might have been thinking about this for a long time.

And his parents might have been more aware of it in different ways through different parts of their exposure and different ways that they live their life.

But for her, she's not ready for her brother's changes.

And her brother's next steps in life.

Now, does that mean that he has to cut his niece and nephew out of his entire reality?

No, not necessarily.

Still know that your uncle loves you.

We'll talk about why I'm your uncle now, if you ever want to.

I'm here.

You're not being abandoned.

This is a really interesting concept that people expect, that just because we've been thinking about a thing forever, that other people will understand it.

I went to Bolivia two years ago, and I refer to myself as a mostly vegetarian, or a I eat happy food person.

But most of my life, my body just feels happier if I don't put mass-produced meat products in it.

Animals that have been living in situations where they have to live off antibiotics to stay alive.

I just don't.

My body doesn't do well with that type of animal protein.

It just doesn't.

And I know that about my body.

And I could go into the politics of it and why I know that doing so is also better for the environment and doing so is also better for animals as a whole, et cetera, but that's not why I do it.

But I am very acutely aware of it in the decisions I make around eating meat and around eating food in general.

And so for me, when I went down to Bolivia, I usually say to people, I'm a vegetarian, but that occasionally I'll eat something off your plate if it's really good, but I'll eat it if you caught it.

And I was down there and they said, oh, you're a vegetarian.

Okay.

They just didn't know what that meant.

And when I showed up the first time, like my partner tried for months to try to explain what this meant.

He's a vegetarian.

He doesn't eat meat.

And they're like, okay, so he doesn't eat a lot of beef?

Because carne in Spanish translates as beef, right?

Like there's not an overarching meat product word really, because like it is, but it isn't in that concept and culture.

And so like they were trying to, she was trying to explain to them and it just didn't make sense.

And my first meal visiting her family's house was meat, meat, meat, meat, meat and peanuts.

And I spent months before I got there training my body's enzymes, enzyme capacity, like training my body into not clenching up when I eat meat.

Because if you take somebody who's been vegetarian, especially vegan, like if you take somebody who hasn't had meat products in their body and try to give them a steak, their body will clench up on itself because it doesn't have the ability to process it.

They will be sick.

They just physiologically can't.

And so I spent months having a little bit more, a little bit more.

And so I was there with those five types of meat.

I had a little piece of each of those five and said, thank you so much.

And actually I was pretty full.

And they said, well, don't you like the food?

And I said, yes, I liked it very much.

You know, I thought it was very delicious.

They're like, but you didn't eat a lot of it.

And they're trying, we're trying to explain it by trying to say thank you because they're putting their best food before me.

Putting your best cuts of meat before someone is how you show your gratitude and your honor and your, you know, your hospitality.

That's what you do.

And so it just couldn't get through.

Even in Santa Cruz, which is like the really hip, right?

It's where, you know, it's where you could go to Hard Rock Cafe.

They went, oh, you're a vegetarian.

Awesome.

And they took us out to sushi.

And I went, okay.

A couple steps closer.

And my buy does do pretty well.

Pascotarian, not shrimp, but the rest of the ballot anyway.

And so I did really well that night.

My body was really happy for the come down from so much meat.

But I had to love and explain each time, like, no, really.

My body loves these beans.

My body loves this vegetable salad, these salads you've made.

And the thing they call salad, there's lots of salads.

There's not just what we in America called salad.

Like, it's a whole genre of foods.

And so I could have four types of salads with my two ounce little piece of meat to still show that I was eating it.

And it was really interesting to me that there just wasn't a piece in their vocabulary for the concept of vegetarian.

There just wasn't.

Now, did that mean that there weren't people?

Oblivion is one of the most amazing agricultural bounties on the planet.

Like, it's huge.

Going to the markets, there's no such thing as a farmer's market.

Just going to the markets, having the senses hit us.

Like, one of the things that Butterfly and I did every single time we went to a market is we got another food we'd never tried.

And we asked, what is this?

How do you eat it?

Oh, it's a fruit, but you open it up, you pull it out of the pod like a pea, and inside it will be fuzzy things, and you slurp it out of the fuzzy part.

And there will be seeds inside.

And we bought one, and we ate one, and we said, this thing, I will eat it again.

Or next time, let's ask if they have sweeter ones.

And the adventures of things that, for people who, I could, my favorite word became drasno, peach.

Because I could smell the peaches from a block or two away, women rolling out their shawls on the street corner, that their husbands for day labor would come into town, into Cochabamba, and they would drop their daughters or their sisters or their wives off on the street corners with their fruit and sell it out of their scarves, out of these giant satchels.

When I say scarves, I mean these, they're like four foot by four foot pieces of fabric that could be wrapped around.

It could be used to carry a baby, carry a load of groceries, carry a load of anything, or be balanced up, or be used to keep yourself warm at night.

Like, it's this shawl.

And it was amazing.

The fruits and vegetables and so much bounty of types of beans.

We talk about beans in the United States, or we talk about potatoes in the United States, and you think, oh, well, maybe there's those purple potatoes or yellow or white, or maybe about those really russet ones, or four or five, right?

We're talking 80.

Right?

80 species of potatoes to top peaches from in that region of the world.

And yet it is the meat that is held up as king, because that is how you show your wealth, your appreciation, even if those who are...

Basically, to say that you are not eating meat means that you are poor.

And I wish I could have said, I want to be poor here, because what I meant here was the culinary variety that was so healthy for the human body.

And as a note, what people don't know, because people go, Oh yeah, quinoa or quinoa, as some Americans seem to pronounce, but quinoa, Q-U-I-N-A, quinoa, right?

These things that people are eating in the United States, people go, Oh, it's so high protein.

These comes from the mountains of Bolivia and Peru.

And you know what?

The prices of quinoa that are being driven up because of a Western market that has exploded, please produce these in the United States because the price of them has made quinoa so expensive in this part of the world that you can't afford it.

The people who need it, literally need it for their diets to stay alive, can't afford it anymore.

Our behaviors ripple out into the world.

Our language around transgender issues, and even calling it transgender, ripples out into the world.

It affects the world.

Our language about BDSM and top and bottom, and seen and this and that, our language in English is, through the privilege we have of establishing through mass media the culture that is being spread worldwide, we are telling others that they are wrong.

And they're not wrong because people always say, well, you have to be a top or a bottom in BDSM.

Are you a top or a bottom?

Are you dominant or submissive?

What type of scene do you like?

How do you like to negotiate?

What's your negotiation checklist?

These are great systems for a lot of people who have developed them here in America and in other places who have taken them on.

But there are other places that instead of a scene, it is painting a play that we are creating something beautiful together.

We are having an engagement.

We are enjoying our session.

We are having fun.

We are doing our work together.

Let us explore.

We are being adventurous.

Let's have fun with our sex.

We like being a little naughty.

Let's have some hanky panky.

I like being kinky.

Do you like kinky?

I like kinky.

Do you like kinky?

Yes, I like kinky.

Do you like handcuff?

I like handcuffs.

Yes.

Handcuff me.

And hands the handcuffs over.

End of story.

You choose yes or no.

It's not four pages of negotiation.

Now, the conversations around consent, profoundly important.

Profoundly important.

But I think it's worth considering what is worth it.

For some people, being able to have the exact script of what's happening and knowing that you are taking upon yourselves to make sure that everyone is consenting to all things ahead of time is what is worth it.

For other people, the choices that are made are different.

That what they choose is to say, do you like handcuffs?

I like handcuffs.

Play?

One person gets handcuffed to a bed, and you play.

And afterwards you say, you know what, that thing?

Let's not do that again.

Or in the middle of it saying, stop, stop, no, this isn't working, something different.

And having it not be somebody's hearts that are bent out of shape, but that, no, stop, this isn't working.

Well, for others, it's handcuffs.

Somebody gets down on their knees, do handcuffs, and you enjoy that night for what it is, whatever it turns into, and it is simply what it is and what it was.

For other people, that's never worth it.

The amount of people whose hearts have been hurt, whose bodies have been violated, whose trust has been taken, because they said, I like handcuffs.

Do you like handcuffs?

Because they thought they knew what the other person meant.

Now, bad, good?

I'm not going to tell people either way.

Risk?

Minimization?

Yes, that we need to talk about, and that I will offer, that so many forms of negotiation lower our risk factors.

Because I now know that when you say handcuffs, what you mean means you like bondage and a little bit of rough sex, not you want to do cuttings.

Oh, I thought when you meant handcuffs, you mean hand over your entire body to whatever I want to do and you want your body pushed to the limits.

That's what handcuffs means to me.

Oh, well, when I mean handcuffs, what I mean is handcuff me to the bed and give me a blowjob.

Oh, well, I can see how these things didn't match up.

The worth involved in the negotiation is worth it for many people.

For other people, there are some who go, it's not worth it or that's not a concern to me.

I will take it upon myself to take that risk.

Is the thrill of going down that mountain slope that's been uncharted as a skier worth it, knowing that you could die literally on the slopes?

There's a lot of people who will say, Uh, no.

A lot of people even who say, That's outright idiotic.

What the hell are those people thinking?

But are there those percentage of people who say, Yeah, man, totally worth it.

Absolutely.

Hands down.

How can it not be?

That's beautiful.

I'm not going to tell them they're wrong.

But what's amazing is that they've learned to know themselves that to them, that slope is worth it.

Even if the equation makes sense to only 10 people on this planet, that slope is worth it.

Now, are those of us who will watch their adventure on IMAX and be like, wow, that is never going to be me?

But wow, that's amazing.

Who look at people who do barbed wire suspensions and say, wow, that's never going to be me, but because the risk factors are not worth it.

And you can't tell me how much risk mitigation can be taken because there are chances of permanent keloid scarring.

And some of the people who are like, oh yeah, there might be a little bit of flat scarring here, are all talking to little tiny white chicks who don't weigh very much, at least not all of them.

But a lot of them that I'm seeing who are teaching classes are working and talking about bodies who don't keloid scar, who are body weight light weight, who have high pain processing thresholds, who know how to go into trance states, and in some cases are doing this as a form of dominance and submission.

There are outlying factors that you're not necessarily looking at, that for other people, those risks too need to be looked at.

Do I know people who keloid scar, who have those raised puffy scars, as I notice what I'm talking about, rather than those flat or slightly indent scars that don't show a lot or show as much, or people who scar with a color to them, or a loss of color to them?

Do I know people who say, oh yeah, now you're able to tell this is a problem because it starts to turn a little bit pink?

Well, what color of skin are you talking about?

Because if I'm playing with somebody who's got a really dark hue to the tone of their skin, I can't use your linguistic system.

That doesn't work, right?

That doesn't happen.

And so it's really important that when we're having these conversations, I might look at that barbed wire suspension person and be like, go you.

I might watch from over here.

I might be awestruck.

Just like watching that person going down that slope on the IMAX film and being awestruck.

And I mean struck by the awe of the beauty of it.

That my mouth is partially agape and amazed at what is happening before me.

Like the beauty of a sunset over the mountain for the first time.

That moment of awe.

That first time really seeing a sunset in Los Angeles and going, wow, this pollution is horrible.

But behold the beauty of this sunset and the oranges that exist nowhere else.

But this mountain turning, and the mountains that are the skyscrapers here, I see them fall below and beyond that the Pacific, and it goes on forever.

And I pause in that moment, and I'm awestruck.

And to me, that's kind of like saying, I want that person's diet, has nothing to do with the fact that I want the class disparity that is in place in Bolivia.

No interest whatsoever.

It's pretty horrid.

That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about somehow I wish I could pluck this one piece out.

But the reality is, these pieces are intertwined, and I have to nod to them and acknowledge them.

In the West, we so often want to choose the best of this one thing.

Let's just choose this one thing from this culture and raise up this culture and this piece of it for being so fantastic.

I've got to look at the whole thing, folks.

I really do.

These things are not...

These things are interlinked.

We have to stop for a moment and look at the full worth of a thing.

There's choices with every action we take.

There's choices with every action we take.

Every single piece, right?

Sitting right now in a house that just two of us share with a dog, we are making a choice to not share it with others.

But we end up making the equation decision, and we make it a lot actually, of how our mental health does when we have the ability in the morning to wake up at our own pace and not have to, with only people who know how we function in the mornings.

And on those days that we have bad days, be able to have a bad day without having to filter around others, we're making that, weighing that out every single time.

We really are.

We're making choices every single day with what we have.

When you decide to eat a specific diet, and I'm not talking meat eater versus vegetarian, I'm talking about where you do your grocery shop, and I'm talking about how those plants were raised, I'm talking about whether you're growing food on your land and how much water it took to pour into those almonds that you're using for your organic almond butter that are contributing right now to the drought that's happening in California.

It's all an equation, folks.

And we are each part of a complex web, every single one of us.

And when people say, it's worth it with breath play, I'm okay if I die, to me we have to say, yeah, but is your partner okay with it if they have to go to jail for secondary manslaughter?

Even if you wrote and said, I wrote a contract that said I am choosing of my own free will to engage in autoerotic breath play with my partners and taking all of it on upon myself as my risk.

Actually, there is not really to my awareness any court of law that's going to hold up with that.

Because insurance companies, they're going to go after whoever they can.

They really are.

And that's not personal.

It's not.

So it's an awareness point of what's your partner going to be like, and how are they going to feel if they're the one who killed their partner?

It's not risk factors just for the bottom.

It's risk factors for the top.

And I know people who say, well, I agreed to do a light flogging with them, and I said, no barks.

Well, you know what?

There is an inherent risk factor with receiving any strike to the skin of receiving a mark.

Period.

I can bump into a coffee table and receive a mark from a bump that I didn't think was going to mark me up.

I can.

And I've had days where I didn't have enough water or where my diet was a little bit different or I was feeling a little under the weather or I was tired that, you know what?

The single tailing that I did that was exactly the same as the force and whatever that I had done months earlier ends up bruising more and having marks that end up lasting longer.

And that's not about the top.

They delivered as a technician the exact same thing.

And so I, as a recipient of sensation, have to look at worth of exploration and risk factors for everything because the person giving them is, even as a technician, might be reducing and mitigating risk factors as much as they can, but there's still risk in everything we do, in everything we do in life, because if we can't have marks because we're an erotic performance artist or we're a whatever, and we bump into a coffee table or drop a skillet on our foot, people joke, what's the most dangerous thing about going to an SM play party?

And the answer is, driving there.

That's the joke, but it's true.

Or more actively, driving home, and it's not because you're high on endorphins or whatever, it's because you're driving home at 2 a.m.

when people have gotten out of the bars.

That's the risk factors, folks.

And the question is, is it worth it?

Is your polyamorous relationship worth it?

Yeah, love, love, is it worth it?

Well, yeah, we're doing this, and people just don't know about that, and we're being really careful about this, and is it worth it?

Because everything you do, no matter how many I's you dot and T's you cross, life happens, but you can't live in fear.

Because when we live in fear, we are not living, we are in fear.

We are living in a land called fear, and fear is profoundly healthy.

Fear is a gift.

Fear is information coming into our body that brings us awareness of around what is risk factors.

But to look for nothing but risk factor and to go out into the world seeing nothing but risk factor everywhere we go, when we look at our children and say everywhere we go, it's another risk factor, this could happen, this could happen, and oh my God, if they fall on the playground, they could scrape their knee, and well, if they don't scrape their knee, they're not going to get the dirt into their bodies and not going to be able, like they're going to get out antibiotics sooner and this and that, like, it's a, life's a risk factor.

But living is worth it, I would argue.

Living is worth it.

But all of this requires that we believe we're worthy.

To think something is worth it requires the belief that we are worthy of having what is worth it to us.

That's what worthiness is.

It's worthiness.

It's what is worth it.

It's that we must be of worth.

It's all intertwined.

So is it worth it to you?

What are you worth?

I meet some people who say, oh, well, I'm not worth a lot, so if I die, it's okay.

Well, what are you worth?

It might be worth looking at that.

It might be worthwhile.

Look at this word worth, and everywhere it appears in our culture and in our language, it's embedded.

What are you worth?

What is worth it to you?

Because these choices are profoundly personal.

Thank you, everyone, for joining me.

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And for everyone else, please visit passionandsoul.com.

Click on the audio button, and you can go ahead and listen to any of the podcasts there.

Subscribe, as well as see the show notes for the various things we talked about on today's podcast.

And until next time, stay cool, have fun, be authentically you.

Listen to yourself and what's worth it to you, and be authentically yourself.

Thank you.
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