The Wildness of Woman
By Roxanne Noor
Featuring Alina Spittan
With assistance from Shibari master Kati Bird
Content warning: This piece contains nudity.
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Women have been pressed with limitations and fear, transgenerationally and culturally. There are many shapes to this unmetabolized fear in the experience of womanhood. It's the chokehold that prohibits us from pursuing our greatest desires and reduces us to passive spectators.
For personal evolution, we must confront what we're afraid of, or the fear travels underground to the subconscious and pollutes the mind.
Shibari, a Japanese style of erotic bondage, makes the unconscious conscious through the realm of bodily feeling. It's a practice of radical vulnerability as the model is bound by ropes, which can create discomfort.
Paradoxically, expansion and liberation occur in this state of restriction. When pain is met with presence instead of resistance, negative emotions are released instead of stagnating in the body and manifesting as illness and disease. Shibari is the process of seeing and letting go.
This is the highest power of the feminine, to surrender and flow with what is. Joy and discomfort are witnessed at their root, as simply sensation. Pain transforms into a tingling feeling, and bliss becomes a heart-opening state.
The wild woman meets life outdoors in a culture that tells her to stay inside and safe. She uses fear as something to work with and examine rather than submit to. The wild woman knows that life is risk, and to live richly is to involve oneself in all of it.
