…you’ll soon have yet another medium in which you may listen to me carry on!

Dan & Dawn of Erotic Awakenings (among many other things!) have picked meeeee to be the latest addition to the amazing roster of podcasters! I will be joning the OMFGamazing Lee Harrington and those PanPolyPerverts Barak & Sheba with my own unique flava in a  monthly festival and hootenanny celebrating Leather, Kink, BDSM, and EPIC RANTS about…something!

If you have a suggestion for a topic or a question you’d like for me to address or a topic you wana hear me rant about leave a comment! If it is super personal and you’re shy, jump up to me “Contact Me” link and send me some love on it!

Keep an eye out, the inaugural ‘cast is looking to be sometime in October, 2011!

I was nonplussed to find myself trailing along…again…trying to keep up with The  DominantGuy which is a challenge on a slow day and OMFG! WTF!! SMH… on a busy day. And I turned around and he’d vanished, again. And I’m standing there, feeling at loose ends. Waiting. Again.

Much of being in service is of course, waiting. For orders. For answers. For time. To be seen. To be praised. To be corrected. For calm. And I am much better about being patient than I was when I was first in service. But this time things are very, very different. Expectations are clearer, communication is better, I’m more present, and less fearful.

Except when I get the scent of abandonment. Then it becomes seriously problematic. I have what feels like very mild low-level panic attacks when gears shift faster than I am able to parse. If I am unable to keep up with him, and he goes about his business, I get fish out of water gasping floppy panicky and that is NOT ME! I am strong, I am invincible…I am…I am a mess. (more…)

Strong Slaves, Bodacious Bottoms & Ass-Kicking Submissives:
Embracing Dichotomy

For the uninitiated: it is a common practice among kinksters to default "lower-case" (and thereby diminutize) the term submissive/slave and capitalize Dominant/Masters Which pisses me off.

I’m unplugging today, the way I often do when I feel like I’m about to short short-circuit on emotional shit.  It is post Folsom weekend.  The Dominant Guy and his wife are headed back home, and I barely held it together through the weekend as I fretted about not seeing him for an extended period of time. I’m in the beginning of rehearsing for a show, couch surfing for a few months, and thinking I’m probably setting myself up for a massive crash.

It isn’t all that easy for me to think about my life in terms of what is safe and healthy because it is so relative, and because I am still getting to know who I am without alcohol to erase emotional difficulties. Four and a half years isn’t much time in recovery, and every day feels like a new adventure.

Strong emotions…at least the way I experience them…are rough. I have a slight degree of synesthesia, and am easily triggered to full physical emotional and spiritual recall as a result of certain stimuli.

Add to that I’m a pretty twisted pervert and it is really tough, some days,  to figure out what “healthy” means.

Struggling with this today I was surfing Twitter and trying so hard to muster the energy to take my bruised body and put it back into the play of the default world when an eye-catching post crossed my timeline. (more…)

“The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.” ~Buddha

As a submissive – someone who prefers relationships where there is a mutually beneficial unequal power dynamic – I have done quite a bit of self-exploration around my needs and desires. And as someone who seeks out a master / slave relationship – a relationship where one human secedes power and control over themselves on an ongoing basis to another human – I have had to navigate some very rough seas before finding a safe harbor of self-acceptance. This is an ongoing process, and one in which I’ve been participating for many years. My experience has been inclusive of several years of real-time experience, and may more years of exploration, self-examination, trial-and-error, and research. But research and bits and pieces of experience and all of these things can only get one so far. So much about relationships involves…well…relating. You can spend years in study but until you’re field tested? It hovers in the realm of theory.

I have always been an advocate of self-advocacy. It is so very vital for those in power-exchange relationships to do their very best to negotiate carefully. All relationships have a degree of vulnerability: those of us who voluntarily accept the will of another as superseding our own, or who agree to accept additional responsibility for another human as their “property” have an additional layer of vulnerability. From the perspective of those who submit, the need to remain open and transparent can feel extremely risky. The same holds true for those on the other side of the slash. Dominants and masters put themselves on the line, too. It is important to maintain a balance amidst the inequality.

Sounds like a paradox? It is and it isn’t.

(more…)

In one year…

I have grown so much. I’ve pushed myself beyond the bounds of what I thought I needed to find joy, what I thought I found desirable, what I thought was possible.

It was a year ago today I shook hands with a man who, I would very soon learn, was to become central to my life.

Last weekend I found myself on the floor in a play-space that had been made sacred by the labor and intentions of a close-knit group of people. There isn’t anything particularly special about a hotel ballroom. And there sure as hell isn’t anything special about the hideous carpeting in said ballroom.

But there is a magic when you realize that you are being pushed into the aforementioned hideous carpet and you feel every inch of skin being abraded against it as you writhe on the floor, trying to breathe.

I was past coherency. I didn’t think about anything clearly except how it was becoming more and more difficult to breathe. I was surprised to learn that my previous issues with breath-play had been neatly circumvented. I’ve had breath-play on my limit list since the first time someone had put their hands around my throat and I immediately experienced a stabbing headache. I though this was probably a bad idea.*

The Ongoing Epic Battle Royale about breath-play aside? I’m an advocate of only doing shit the outcome of which you’re prepared to handle. That stabbing headache occurred even with mild pressure restricting the flow of oxygen to my brain or air to my lungs, so it was right out.

The Dominant Guy happens to enjoy this type of play, and he has partners with whom he can explore that, so I did not think I’d be the recipient of such an event as a full blown breathplay scene.

(more…)

As a prominent member of several of the alternative lifestyle communities in which I run, I admire Lee Harrington. As a prolific publisher, I am wowed by his tireless efforts to educate and illuminate dark places.  As a co-conspirator, I have had the pleasure of hashing out thoughts and ideas into new and amazing forms. As a friend, I love him very much.

He has hit a rough patch, and could use some help.

Please, take a moment to read

Lee Harrington’s call for help.

And assist if you can.

Thank you.

Love

Mollena

I’m starting to envy those who actually have time for “drop.” That whole “con-drop” thing isn’t something I’ve personally processed, it isn’t a cycle to which I’m accustomed, because I always have the next convention on the horizon. And the rare times I go over a month without a major kink event are the times when I’m in a show, so there’s hardly an energy drop there.

But service drop is a whole different thing and I’m not an adept at managing this. Working on it, but I’m clumsy at the controls. This summer has seen a remarkable increase in the time I’ve been fortunate to spend with @TheDominantGuy, and that has been a blessing.

Folsom Fair weekend will be the last time I see him for over 2 months and that is making be absolutely miserable.

(more…)

Glitter & bruise are COPE souvenirs...the odd halo effect seems to be a reflection from the pendant.

Having a memory as surreal as mine is, occasionally, amusing. I can recall some conversations with freakish clarity, be they the day before yesterday or Valentine’s Day 1993. But please don’t ask me what I ate for lunch yesterday. So this makes for fun times when I buy something for myself, totally forget, then feel like it is Christmas in September when I get something in the mail I sent to myself. Add to that I’m entirely nomadic for the next 3 months or so and the fact that I ordered something for myself and managed to time its arrival for when I was going to be in a particular place and you have a series of small miracles.

After a fulfilling and exhausting and delightful and challenging weekend, I got back to the home of The Dominant Guy and Mrs. The Dominant Guy to a small package in my name. I stared at it, with absolutely no idea as to what the fuck it was. Upon opening it, I remembered ordering the somewhat unusual piece of jewelery and put it on. My thought process rewound to a few weeks back when, in a conversation about something or other (Really, I can’t recall what it was about at the moment but I’m sure I will in three or four weeks)  The Dominant Guy asked me what I knew about hyena medicine. Understand he didn’t mean the science and art of healing animals of the family Hyaenidæ . Rather he was referring to medicine in the framework of Native American cosmology. I didn’t have any clue. I’d thought since there aren’t many hyena running around North America, there probably wouldn’t be much, if anything, around the hyena in their particular belief system. And there isn’t much. What I did find generated one of those moments of  “Oh good grief. Really?”  when I read the following bits in one of the pieces on hyena symbolism:

Hyena medicine teaches us balance, realizing our own powers, and being happy with what we are given; not wanting for what we do not have. medicine teaches us balance, realizing our own powers, and being happy with what we are given; not wanting for what we do not have.

 

Whatever.

(more…)

I have been invited to be a part of IvyQ. IvyQ is a rad badass LGBTQ conference, jointly hosted by a few schools of which you might have heard, like Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Penn, Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Dartmouth.

I am seriously so excited and honored and…and lots of stuff. That these schools not only see the value of educating folks on alternative lifestyles, but that I am able to represent US…us Leatherfolk, us perverts, we kinky people… and speak to hundreds of people about kink, leather, sexual freedom…yeah.

I am so proud, SO honored. I am feeling pretty awesome.