BDSM: Is this not also an invitation to feel differently?

It seems important to me to say here, before going any further, why I am writing these words in this place. My work belongs to the realm of eroticism, and I know how misunderstood this territory remains. Too often, people see only the surface, an appearance, without perceiving the depth it holds. For people often do nothing but project onto things their own constructs: inherited, sclerosed patterns; and all the more so onto this one, because it touches on universal fears and wounds. So yes, it matters to me to make visible what usually remains unspoken.

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The question of the relationship we maintain with our own existence, and more particularly with what we feel, is often obscured by a certain form of intellectual comfort. We go through our days following the furrows carved by our habits, by the frameworks we have ended up taking for absolute reality.

Yet our personality is a construction. The product of a sedimentation of environments, conditioning, and habits repeated with such constancy that we have forgotten their origin. What we call "our way of living" is rarely a conscious choice; it is, most often, a choreography of which we are unaware that we are both the authors and the performers. To deconstruct the familiar is to accept questioning our architecture, it is to admit that most of our reactions to what happens to us are not dictated by the event itself, but by the pre-existing framework we have imposed upon it. Two individuals, two bodies, can face an identical situation and yet inhabit distinct worlds, because everything plays out in the inner gaze one brings to what one goes through.

When we seek to flee what disturbs us or to fill the silences of our existence, we create narratives, we tell ourselves stories to mask uncertainty. These narratives are cognitive crutches: for fear of the vertigo produced by the absence of immediate meaning, we resort to inherited structures that reassure, even when they are stifling. The truth does not reside in these constructions, but in the recognition that these frameworks are fabricated. Our reality is not what happens to us, but what we decide to make of it, what we decide to perceive of it.

To be moved differently, then, is to accept being affected, stirred, not by what we expected to feel, but by what we actually experience, without the filter of judgment. Emotion becomes a sensory and psychic datum that does not immediately need to be categorized, labeled, or even rejected. For what we feel physically is never raw data; it is tinted by our emotional state, colored by our frameworks, our expectations, our history. Bodily sensation itself is therefore, in part, constructed. Too often, we seek to lock reality into pre-formatted boxes, for fear of losing our bearings. But as soon as we begin to observe ourselves, to question what we are experiencing and what colors it, a new space opens up: that of being able to choose to feel differently, not by denying the sensation, but by ceasing to endure it as though it were self-evident.

The ordeal of the self, which one might call "experiencing oneself," is the second facet of this transformation. It is about traversing oneself, which implies experiencing one's limits as well as one's zones of tension. To traverse oneself is to undergo the test of one's own matter, of one's sensations. It is also to accept remaining present to what is happening, even when it is uncomfortable, instead of immediately seeking to fill or flee. Tensions, resistances, and tightenings are not obstacles but rather information to be listened to. Experiencing oneself is not a performance; it is a process that requires time and patience.

Inhabiting differently, finally, is the logical consequence of this approach. If being moved is a reception and experiencing oneself is an exploration, inhabiting is an occupation. But to inhabit is not merely to occupy; it is also to enter into a relationship with the space of one's life, to transform it as much as it transforms us. To inhabit differently is to pay attention to what is there, instead of going through on autopilot. The space of daily life then becomes a space to be discovered, no longer a backdrop taken for granted.

In reality, experiences in themselves possess no transformative power; they do not change us through their mere occurrence. What transforms us is the way we choose to inhabit these experiences. That power belongs entirely to us, although we tend to abandon it as soon as circumstances become complex. We have been conditioned to believe that experience shapes us from the outside, as if we were passive objects under the blows of fate. But this is a mistake: we are the co-authors of every event we live, through our interpretation, through our decision to let the experience penetrate us, in one way or another, or else to keep it at a distance.

You continue to trust what you believe to be right. But what happens when the very beliefs around which you have built your life are the things preventing you from seeing the truth? For societies, too, are constructions: they sediment through inherited narratives, institutions, and collective habits, and end up presenting themselves as natural when they are fabricated. We unconsciously fear losing our identity by abandoning our frameworks, our cultural inheritances, our certainties. The mind is afraid of emptiness.

Identity is not a rigid block but a process, a living form that is sculpted according to our experiences and our reflections. The more capable we are of inhabiting different spaces, the more our identity gains in richness, complexity, and depth. To be moved differently, then, is to enrich oneself through the welcoming of otherness, and to understand that even if it appears external to us, it is ultimately always internal. Curiosity breaks open the shackles, opens the doors that allow the being to unfold beyond what it believed itself to be. To let oneself be carried is to accept discovering that one is ultimately far vaster than one had imagined.