If we refrain from identifying and defining the intrinsic aspects of our nature, we risk categorizing them under overly simplistic labels such as "dark" or "occult." To facilitate a fulfilling shibari experience, it is essential to delineate and distinguish the concepts that constitute its fundamental essence.
The essence of eroticism lies in erotic desire.
The generation of erotic desire is the condition under which we will classify a situation as erotic, regardless of the practices being performed.
Desire is an emotion, more specifically, an emotion linked to the activation of the dopaminergic reward system.
In other words, we experience desire when we anticipate a reward, and when that reward is related to the erotic, we speak of erotic desire.
Emotions
To understand how desire works, it is first necessary to understand what emotions are and how they function.
We can define emotions as affective predictive schemas that our brain creates to interpret both elements of the environment and our internal states.
Don’t worry, we will calmly break down what "predictive schemas" mean and what "affects" are so we can understand them.
Schemas
The human brain works as a prediction-making machine, and to carry out this function, it uses what neuroscience calls "schemas."
These schemas can be described as the set of rules and explanations through which we filter our experience and interaction with the environment. You can think of them as the lenses through which we perceive reality.
Schemas enable us to understand what is happening and to foresee possible outcomes, allowing us to adjust our behavior according to our goals. This helps us adapt better to the ever-changing environment in which we live.
Each individual develops their own schemas throughout their life, and these are strongly influenced by the socialization they have experienced, including both the influence of the society we live in and the education we have received.
Based on our previous experiences and learning, the schemas we have found most useful will be strengthened, while those that do not provide a satisfactory explanation will gradually be relegated.
They are not completely eliminated, at least not always. The less-used schemas become increasingly less accessible.
This is somewhat similar to how we organize our clothes in the wardrobe. The clothes we wear regularly are within reach, while those we rarely use are pushed to the back, requiring a deeper search to find them.
The primary function of our brain is to ensure our survival. For this reason, it will always seek to conserve energy and optimize the efficiency of the strategies we have at our disposal.
In this sense, for energy efficiency and to maximize survival chances, our brain will prioritize activating those schemas that have historically been most useful to us, as they are more likely to prove effective in similar situations.
Schemas are extremely useful because, by providing us with a simplified version of the environment, we require much less effort to navigate it.
Without these schemas, every situation we experience would be completely new to us. We would have no prior references or concepts about what it entails, what to expect, or how to act.
This is because this type of information is what the activation of the various schemas we manage provides us.
Only when a particular schema has proven ineffective in a specific situation will our brain discard it and seek another that is less accessible.
An example of this: One day you wake up, look in the mirror, and are surprised by how much your hair has grown. Well, hair grows more or less uniformly throughout our lives; it doesn’t grow suddenly overnight.
So, what happened? It’s because, for efficiency, your brain was using an image of your appearance with your hair at a certain length. It continued using that image, and you saw yourself that way, until the actual length of your hair differed from the image stored by your brain beyond the tolerance margin needed to identify yourself.
At that moment, your brain discards the old schema and creates a new one, taking a new snapshot of your appearance with your current hair length.
These validations and activations occur at great speed in our brain and are processes we are not conscious of, meaning we have no direct control over them.
Our perception and what we experience happen after we have activated a schema that gives meaning, affective or not, to the various input signals we receive. Therefore, our experience will always be biased by the schema through which we are interpreting reality at that moment.
Understanding these concepts and mechanisms is essential to understanding the process of managing desire that we use in erotic shibari.
Affects
When we refer to affects, we are talking about a label that encompasses everything we call feelings. That is, the set of predictions our brain makes about the internal state of the organism in relation to the surrounding environment, generating perceptions that are not limited solely to the somatic.
In other words, they are the schemas that are activated when an experience has some kind of value for us.
Let’s take the difference between pain and suffering as an example.
The perception of pain refers to a mere bodily sensation and has a predominantly somatic meaning.
On the other hand, suffering falls within the realm of affects, as it adds a context in which we assign value to the situation we are experiencing.
This is precisely the fundamental difference between these two experiences: when we attribute value to that perception, we are giving it a meaning of an affective nature.
For example: If I trip and hit my foot, I will feel pain, nothing more. I may manage that pain better or worse, it may be more intense or milder, but at the experiential level, it has no affective component.
If we add to that the fact that the blow was so severe that it makes it difficult for me to walk, and I had plans to go for a walk, that pain will have a different meaning for me.
In this context, it is easy for it to generate suffering at the prospect of canceling plans I was looking forward to due to the pain in my foot.
In the field of eroticism, an example could be the difference between arousal and desire.
Here, arousal would be the somatic perception, as it pertains to the bodily sensations we experience, but which are isolated from context and do not add meaning to the experience. Meanwhile, desire is the affective predictive schema that allows us to interpret and classify that situation in which we feel arousal as erotic.
If we bring this to shibari, we can clearly observe this difference in the following example.
Imagine you attend a rope event where various people are practicing. At some point, someone asks if they can practice a figure they are learning with you, and you agree.
The practice begins. In this situation, we are dealing with a purely somatic meaning, as the sensations you experience derive from the ropes on your skin, the pressure they exert, and the physical effects they have on you.
However, if instead of being a random person, the one proposing to practice is someone you are attracted to, the dynamic changes. This interaction and everything you do together takes on a different meaning for you because you are assigning value to the act of tying with that particular person.
Now, it is no longer just about the physical sensations of the ropes; the experience is enriched by the interaction with that specific person. Your experience in both cases will be completely different.
Emotions are inherently ephemeral, as each predictive schema generates a unique emotional moment.
However, these moments occur in rapid succession, creating the illusion of a more lasting emotional state. This is similar to the mechanism used in cinema, where a series of static frames, presented sequentially, creates the illusion of movement.
This phenomenon gives rise to what we know as moods, which represent our global and diffuse perception of the emotional moments we experience over time, whether in days, weeks, or months.
Although we experience them as relatively stable and constant, we must remember that these moods are composed of the emotional moments we generate throughout the day.
Therefore, depending on the type of moments we experience throughout the day, our mood can vary, being lower or higher.
Desire vs. Love
While desire and love can occur simultaneously, we must learn to differentiate them and keep in mind that one is NOT a prerequisite for the other.
This distinction is based on the functionality of both emotions.
Emotions related to the activation of the dopaminergic reward system share the characteristic of motivating us to achieve things that our brain values as positive for us.
To do this, we release dopamine, which not only provides us with a pleasurable sensation but also gives us the energy to move toward obtaining that reward, with the expectation of receiving more dopamine.
Proactive emotions like love are generated with the establishment and/or strengthening of bonds, as humans are social beings and need others for our survival and well-being.
We also release dopamine, as the reward is precisely bonding with other living beings, but this type of emotion has a peculiar characteristic.
When we feel love for another person, we are capable of accepting present situations that are not favorable for us but are for the person we feel this emotion toward. We do this with the expectation that, in this way, the future will be more beneficial for both and our bond will be strengthened.
It is important to distinguish them, as there is a risk associated with equating desire and love, especially when we talk about erotic interactions, such as in the case of shibari.
If we approach these types of interactions from love, our purpose will be bonding rather than the satisfaction of erotic desire.
This can lead us to engage in practices or behaviors that are neither pleasurable nor satisfying for us, with the goal of reinforcing or establishing a bond with the other person.
Persisting in such behaviors will eventually affect our reward system, creating "precedents" that over time will prevent us from generating erotic desire, as experience tells us we will not derive satisfaction from it.
Placing ourselves in this context increases the likelihood that our interactions will range from unsatisfactory to unpleasant and, moreover, puts us in a highly vulnerable position to potential abuse.
Desire is never related to "enduring for..."