No, it wasn’t on Blueberry Hill, unless that is a new nickname for my buttocks! Ha, you’ll never listen to the song the same!
I hope this post is not overly esoteric. I try to get to the bottom of my feelings as it allows me to dismiss that feeling when I recognize it as petty or false or to own the feeling when it represents who I want to be or not want to be. Well, I think I found a way to articulate why I get a thrill from submission. Unfortunately, in typical Jenny style, it takes a lot of words to explain it.
I was reading an article called the Power of Openness and realized it could have been called the Power of Submission. Much of the rest of this post is based on re-purposing the points (i.e., gratuitous copying) of that article to reflect how I connected my Submission with the concept of Openness.
As I look back at my life pre-DD, I realize I was living much of my life as an impartial observer. I was in a constant rush to achieve my goals, pursue my dreams, and I was suffering from not having a free moment to myself. I was overburdened and lived in constant stress. What was important to me was truly unimportant in the scheme of things. I thought I was living life, every moment, every day, but it was fake. It was a hypnotic dream.
This dream was the consequence of how the mind works. The article calls it the “nature of the mind.” Once the mind has focused its attention on something, intention automatically appears to us. “Intention” meaning purpose, aim, goal, or objective. Thus, for a goal oriented person as myself, when I take on something, intention appears to me in spades. The intention will focus my attention, and by focusing, it must narrow my attention. It narrows it down to a specific idea and narrows it further down to the specific desires and emotions connected with that idea. At that moment, my life was no longer under my control, but under the control of the intention.
Put another way, I intended for my life to be x (and y, and z, and every other letter), therefore all my focus was on achieving x, and y, and z (and every other letter). As such, my attention and focus, my entire consciousness, was obscured and narrowed. This creates a tension as my alphabet soup of thoughts compete for top priority. The “tension” of my intention made me have to use more of my energy to stay highly focused on my many specific goals. The result was that my intentions took control over my actions. I was not living, I was a slave to my intentions.
My actions were all part of my hopes that someday in the future, my intentions would become reality. I would achieve my goals and would harvest the fruit of my efforts. I could then rejoice and be free, having achieved some admirable hopes and dreams. There are two errors with that thinking.
One is that assuming I did meet my goals, I sacrificed truly living and experiencing life along the way. Is that really worth it?
The bigger error is that intentions are never-ending. The hope of making intentions a reality was a futile hope. It will never happen. I simply replaced one goal with another as there were so many things I wanted to achieve in life. All my energies and time are limited, so most of my goals are inaccessible for me. Even when I reached one (and I reached many), very soon a hundred new ones vied for my attention.
The act of focusing on my intentions was hypnotic. That hypnotic work locked me up in a prison of my desires and objectives. That hypnosis made it impossible for me to consider accepting a state of submission. I was loving life, or so I thought. What a falsehood. Although I was unable to articulate it at the time, I now understand why that once I opened myself up to the idea of submission, the sense of falseness in my life came rushing in and I immediately knew that submission was my path to truth.
Full submission is a state of pure attention, which is not narrowed down by any kind of desire. This level of consciousness is not focusing on anything, it does not aspire to get anywhere, it plainly and simply is here and now.
That is the source of my thrill about submission. I feel free, I feel clarity, I feel connected, I feel a oneness, I feel an openness. I am here. I am present. I am now.
In my state of submission the fire of desire is not burning in me, my glance is not blocked and obscured by various opinions and thoughts. My hopes are now in ashes because after a great deal of suffering, I have finally realized that my hopes were the sources of my suffering. The openness that I have been searching for was available to me from the beginning, it was just locked up behind the bars of my intentions.
This is where the article I mentioned ends, so I am left to connect more dots on my own.
MY HOPES IN ASHES?
It sounds sad that my hopes were the source of my suffering, but I believe the point is hope is just a feeling that weighs you down. Hope is not a plan. Hope is like a giant “maybe” weighing around your neck. Action is where it is at. Commitments, Duties and Obligations are not hopes. I freed myself of hopes. I don’t hope to do anything. I just do. And if I fail in my commitments, duties, and obligations, I have clear consequences. Once I am served those consequences, the failure is immediately dismissed. It is behind me. I am refocused on the here and now, no “hopes” to weigh me down.
For the author of the article, oneness is about total surrender of the physical, emotional, mental self. It is a state of pure bliss. Hmm, that’s how I see my submission. I guess the unanswered question is whether or not submission in the DD sense or some other submissive “kink”, can provide the level and/or consistency of oneness the author is talking about? Perhaps not. We shall see.
I no longer mortgage my present for some elusive promise of the future. Remember, even if a promise is fulfilled, it is immediately replaced with dozen new mortgages for a dozen new promises. The more I think as a submissive, the more my mind is freed from my intentions. As it becomes free, it craves even more freedom, thus my Sub Frenzy. That freedom not only feels good on the inside, it brings with it a clarity of mind that allows me to live, every moment, every day. I am more present as a wife, as a mother, as a sister, a daughter, aunt, cousin, friend, you name it. I am living life.
Through my submission, I will no longer be a slave. I’d like to say “I am no longer a slave,” but I am not there yet. As long as I have that craving, I am not fully free, I am not fully one. Satisfying that craving is my new intention, and I can’t be free until I let that intention go.
And so my submission deepens.
NEXT – 31. June Butterflies – 10 Day Total Power Exchange
Domestic Discipline, Jenny style! 