Coping with the pain - comfortably?

Hands up!

It’s a traditional position of submission – who hasn’t seen images of captured soldiers with their arms raised above their heads?

And anyone who’s visited a BDSM studio will have spotted plenty of equipment which can be used to immobilise a slave’s arms above their head. Beams and bars suspended from the ceiling, carabiner clips, and the iconic piece of furniture everyone associates with sadomasochism: the X of the St Andrew’s Cross. Before I ever entered a studio, I fantasised frequently about being spreadeagled at my mistress's mercy on one of those crosses.

Over the years of SM play, I have indeed been strung up many a time – for example for a memorable ballbusting session, legs spread, arms raised. Strangely, though, it isn’t my favourite posture in which to receive pain. In fact, I prefer my arms in pretty much any other position.

The reason is very simple: keeping one’s arms above one’s head means that the arms tire quickly. At least, mine do. Notwithstanding the sheer pleasure of the pain from the treatment itself, I’ve sometimes had to ask to be taken down. 

I am in fact writing this a few hours after a wonderful session with Mistress Bella Lugosi in which I was immobilised standing up with a neck brace and wrapped in foil, my legs spread wide and my balls in a crusher containing electrodes. The combination of spread legs, buzzing balls and weighted nipple clamps was almost as glorious as the vision of femdom perfection standing before me. The electricity was gradually increasing, the balls were gradually being crushed further, the nipples were being cruelly twisted and turned. Sheer bliss.

 

From the session:
I would have loved to spend another half an hour in this position...

 

However, disaster struck. Even without my arms above my head, I started to feel nauseous and faint, and said “I think I may need to come down at some point.” (That's a British way of saying "Help! Untie me now!") One of the wonderful things about Mistress Bella is that she is constantly aware of how her slave is faring, and she immediately started releasing me and reassuring me. But I was shackled and bound in several different ways, and I actually did lose consciousness before she could extricate me. I came round again – I don’t know how much later, but it was surely less than a minute – to find her holding me and saying my name (and I was so glad that we use my real name!). She sat me down and brought a cola and a sugary sweet, and a few minutes later we were able to continue the session with me in a seated position. To her enormous credit, Bella was absolutely professional, confident in her skills and expertise, and not in the least fazed by my fainting fit.

In fact, she gave me a minute or two and then sat me up and started placing so many weights on my balls that we ran out and she had to fetch more from the studio's stores. How well she judged the required level of pain can be seen from the precum dripping from my cock.

The point I would like to make is that we engage in some fairly extreme physical things in a session, many of which fall under the heading “Don’t try this at home”. The body and the mind have a lot to cope with – in today’s case, electricity through stretched and crushed balls, plus nipple torture – and finding a comfortable and endurable position is an important part of a good session. Having one’s arms up above one’s head may look good, but a satisfying session of, say, cbt can easily last half an hour or more, as the pain levels are stepped up gradually, and as a slave, I want to be focusing entirely on coping with those sensations, not worrying about how long I can last with my arms up there.

So whilst all of that furniture and equipment is very photogenic, and it turns me on no end to be fixed to it, it is often the case that the best way to make the most of a long drawn-out session of pain and humiliation is - ironically - to be placed in a position of comfort.