What do rope bondage educators want you to know when it comes to the topic of learning harnesses? It’s time to put down your ropes and grab a notepad as Shibari Study’s very own Education Director Fuoco and Discord Community Manager Mo Bights combine their vast rope bondage expertise to talk all things harness learning. If you’re in the early days of your rigging journey, still figuring out how to even approach learning rope harnesses or simply want some nuggets of ropey wisdom from two experienced (and opinionated) riggers, nerd out and tune into the full conversation above or read on for the must-know highlights…
Are there things that you do or recommend that people do before they start learning a shibari harness? Mo: I think it’s important to understand your intention for learning a specific harness since not all harnesses are appropriate for all uses. You should have a good understanding of your why, both from a top and bottoming perspective. Are you approaching this from a problem-solving perspective? Is it something that you want to achieve a certain goal? Or is it a specific pattern that you’re after? All of these things are valid, but understanding your underlying intention is a definite prerequisite before we even get into any of the technique.
I encourage people to take a minute to think about the anatomical form that they're tying on top of and where the bondage is created within it. Illustrator: Eysar Vargas
Fuoco: The other thing that comes to mind is to think about body position. It's common in pattern-based classes for the very first set of instructions to be "put a single-column tie somewhere". I encourage people to take a minute to think about the anatomical form that they're tying on top of and where the bondage is created within it. So if I'm tying a mermaid tie , that's really simple. I bring two legs together, they meet and block each other in some direction. I put rope over the top to block them in another direction. If I'm tying some sort of tengu form, as I move the body around, I might discover before I think about where the single-column tie is placed, I might start to manipulate my partner's body and talk to them about how it feels. We might then discover certain stretch sensations or certain mobility limitations. And so just thinking and paying attention to the body before you start getting lost in the sauce of single-column ties and X-frictions will lead to much better results.
If you had to break the process of learning a pattern down into steps, how would you name the steps of that process? Mo: The first thing I do now, which I haven't always done, is look at the components. What techniques do we have within the harness? It’s kind of like looking at the recipe card of the harness and asking, ‘Do I know all of the skills that are in there?’ So if it's something that's going to involve X-frictions, do I know how to do those competently and mindfully?
The first thing I do is look at the components… It’s kind of like looking at the recipe card of the harness and asking, ‘Do I know all of the skills that are in there?’ Then the other thing that I do much more now is try to understand the modules or blocks that build this harness up. Is it just a single block that you tie end to end and when you get to the end of it, you lock it all off and that's it? Or are these pauses and rests built in? If you think about a box tie, your single-column tie, first wrap and that initial friction is a block. At that point you kind of have a rest to then assess things. I see frictions as though they’re rests and pauses in the musical score of building a harness. Break your harness down into these smaller chunks because it makes it easier to digest. And there's a lot of repetition in harnesses in this way. So what looks like a complicated harness actually isn’t – it's just a set of simple modules that are just layered over the top of each other. And I think that mindset makes it easier to approach learning harnesses. Fuoco: Yeah, I agree. I really like the idea of a recipe card. Being able to look at the recipe card and identify that the components are familiar to you. Being able to look at the form and see it as familiar to other forms that you've tied, and to see the overlap between what you're learning now and what you've done. So in your harness learning journey, you want to start with these smaller recipe cards with these familiar forms on them, and by doing that you're going to build up to more and more complicated recipes.
Illustrator: Eysar Vargas
Then I think, for me, a second step, maybe after getting to a point of memorization, is getting to a point of flow on the floor. It’s feeling like there is a moment where the experience of tying a harness moves out of your brain and a little bit more into your fingers, and you can pay a little bit of attention not just to what comes next, but also to how the rope feels moving across your partner's skin and how you're holding your body as you're tying. I think a general sense of “I can put this on with a bit of flow" is a prerequisite to "now I'm going to play with loading this".
After getting to a point of memorization is getting to a point of flow on the floor. It’s feeling like there is a moment where the experience of tying a harness moves out of your brain and a little bit more into your fingers… Mo: And if you're paying attention to the minutia, it’s because the big details are there and you've gotten to a level of unconscious competence. Then you can focus more on how your partner feels. When your mind is freed up to be more conscious of the overall experience of the harness being tied, not the steps and how it is being tied, are very distinctly different experiences.
How do you move a shibari harness from practice into play? Fuoco: You just said something about being able to pay attention to the minutia. I think it's important to name that knowing what minutia to pay attention to is going to be something that you iterate upon. So in the beginning you'll have learned a harness. You'll have the steps of it memorized, hopefully before you load it for the first time. And then in the process of loading it, you're going to learn a lot about exactly that. "How do I want to change my tension next time? How do I want to move? How do I want to move the placement around?" You're going to have a period of time when you feel like you've achieved a great degree of comfort in the harness, and then you're going to put it under load and that's going to rock the boat for you a little bit.
Illustrator: Eysar Vargas
So let's just take a quick minute and talk about the iteration of this. We've got a harness that we've tied. We've put a suspension line on it. We're testing it out in a low stakes partial suspension or brief full suspension experience. We come down. What are the things that will help us understand how we change the application of the harness the next time?
You're going to have a period of time when you feel like you've achieved a great degree of comfort in the harness, and then you're going to put it under load and that's going to rock the boat for you a little bit. Mo: As soon as you put load into the upline, things are going to move. And understanding how and why they move is also an important part of the journey. Anticipating the behavior of the harness under load is a skill that has taken me a long time to acquire. And the skill of explaining that even longer. But ask yourself, “Is load being felt where it's supposed to be felt?” When you're learning that harness, you're probably going to be told what the harness should feel like. You need to be in communication with your bottom to understand how it feels. Does it feel balanced? Does the tension feel secure? Or are things moving around in ways that don't make you feel comfortable and confident?
Fuoco: Just to expand a little bit on something you said. As you mentioned, you put the harness under load, the harness moves. We should anticipate that this will happen. In your early days of your rigging journey, it's really normal to put a harness under load and see it move in a way that sort of permanently disfigures and distorts it. Which is a good indication to you that there is more attention to your tension and compacting your frictions that could be done on the floor. But I think that something that is often missed in that moment is to look back at the anatomical form. So did the harness shift a lot more than you expected because your tension was too loose or because the anatomical form that you were tying over top of wasn't positioned in a place of internal stability. That's also a thing to be talking to your bottoms about: how much force is the harness exerting on the body and moving it around in ways that feel good or suboptimal?
Illustrator: Eysar Vargas
As a new bottom, it's really hard to answer the question of whether something is good or not. You're told that rope should hurt. And then especially if you're working with somebody who's also new to their own learning journey, you're probably going to go up in harnesses and it's probably going to hurt – and then you're going to wonder if that is the correct hurt or not. I would say to anybody reading this that unless a harness has been flagged as a specifically sadistic harness, there shouldn't be a sensation of sharp pain and there shouldn't be a sense, especially in a test loading scenario, that you just don't want to be in it. I think a really good standard to adopt for yourself as a bottom is, simply, do you want to play in it yet? Do you want to add a blindfold? You want to add candle wax? Could you sink into this and have a sort of deeper embodied experience? And if not, keep giving feedback until you get there.
I think a really good standard to adopt for yourself as a bottom is, simply, do you want to play in it yet? Could you sink into this and have a sort of deeper embodied experience? Mo: One of the things that I aim for with any harnesses, regardless of the pattern or anything else, is sustainable forms, because the challenge of rope shouldn’t be coming from a hot spot in the harness. I want it to be coming from the body in twist or stretch or compression or any of those things that we might add with intention.
When bottoms say that they're working too hard to stay in harness, the harness was tied poorly and it's not their fault that they're tired and they can't last or endure. Your harness is just pretty shitty and needs to be improved upon. And you know, maybe it's a bad harness for that person. Maybe it’s incorrect anatomically for that person and that's a conversation that is very unique to the partnership that you've got.
Illustrator: Eysar Vargas
Is there anything that we haven't talked about that feels really important to say within this broader conversation of how do you start learning harnesses? Fuoco: The only final thought or thing that I wanted to add to this conversation is to encourage people to think about body positioning when evaluating their harnesses. I teach a class on positional problem-solving and one of the first things that I do is throw on a three-tier hip harness and sit down into it and we observe that all of the load is under the thighs. Then I lay back into it and observe that the load is pretty evenly distributed throughout the harness. And then I tip my ankles up to the point and we observe that all of the load is in my waist line, right? In none of these three moments does that load bouncing around the body indicate a problem with the tension within the harness. It just indicates how the body is acting and positioned within the harness and where you ought to expect load. I rarely see harness courses that discuss positionality well enough, and I think that makes sense. It's often just not contextually appropriate within the context of a harness class or maybe it's a bit of a level up, but we should be considering position. If a harness has one upline attachment at any given moment and we pivot the body all around that pivot point, then we should feel load bouncing around on the body and changing and that is normal.
Mo: I do have one final thought. There's this kind of “gotta catch 'em all” thing with learning new harnesses. People like to collect more and more harnesses. But when you’re learning something new, it's always this kind of discomfort with the fact that it’s new, right? And that can often be a barrier to people enjoying what they're doing. You can get stuck in a labbing mindset. It's a really important step to me when I'm learning for myself or when I'm teaching anyone else to go back to something that feels familiar and fun. It's nice to just take a step back and go do something that you find fun and simple, because it can become quite cumbersome at times when you're learning new harnesses or you're learning new techniques. It's nice to have a reminder why you do it in the first place.
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