Pull

CW: cursory descriptions of body modification, needles/hooks

This past weekend, I executed the fourth flesh hook energy pull I’ve done in my life. If you don’t know what that is, the internets have excellent demonstration videos that you absolutely SHOULD NOT VIEW if needles and/or blood squick you.

TL;DV: You put large hooks through your body, use them to tether yourself to something/someone you can pull against, and dance like that for hours.

The ritual calls for one support person per dancer (that is, per person taking hooks). The support person’s job is super important. They hold your hand (or your intention, or your worry) through the piercing act. They check in to make sure you’re not quietly going into shock.  They help secure the tethers to whatever it is you want to pull against, un-clip and re-clip you to different objects. Make sure you have what you need to keep dancing – keep you hydrated, keep the earth below your feet, keep you functional enough to sustain the high.

Seems like something nearly any close friend could do, right? But they also have to be respectful of religious practice, not be squicked by blood and needles, and not get in the way energetically with their own presence. Turns out, that’s a rare bird.

I was extremely fortunate to have a friend able to fulfill that role for me in the eleventh hour, after all my previous arrangements fell through. He had never done this before, nor seen it done. I tried to explain what it was going to be like, and … mostly failed I think, because he talked later about having had different expectations than what actually ended up happening.

Part way through the pull, he said to me, “Um … this … looks a lot like sex.”

“You have your metaphor the wrong way around,” I said. “Sex looks a lot like this, if you’re doing it right,” which got a laugh. It seemed to make sense to him I think.

But this exchange highlighted a disconnect I often have when talking to friends and family about my spiritual practices. Most of them can’t understand why I do this. I thought it was mostly a failure of our vocabularies/terminologies to shake hands, but I think there’s a Chomsky-esque chicken-and-egg problem too. We can’t talk productively about it, because they don’t have the concepts in their heads to map my words to in the first place and my attempts at trying to explain why one would want to go through such an ordeal don’t seem to get the concepts through.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” they ask.
“Yes,” I say, “that is kind of the point.”

“Why not just stub your toe really bad?” they ask.
“It has to be couched in ritual,” I say.
“But I thought you were a Christian!” they say.
“I am,” I say, “My religious tradition has a long and glorious history of body trauma for the sake of the soul. This is in no wise incompatible.”
…and they shake their heads.

“What is it like?” They ask.
“It’s hard to describe,” I say.

But here’s an attempt, anyway:

During a hooking ritual there are other people around helping me, helping others, or participating themselves, but the energy flow mostly isn’t between us. It’s goes into me – into each of us – from above, and because of the way we work it, more of that energy gets caught than normally does.

Here, have a didactic metaphor.

Imagine you are a teacup, positioned at the bottom of the Niagara Falls. You fill up instantly with the weight of the metric tonnes of water crashing down on you from the waterfall, and after a very short while the water just bypasses you completely. It doesn’t fill you anymore or even disturb your position, because it is energetically easier for the water to choose a pathway that avoids going into the filled teacup altogether. It slides off of you without ever entering you in the first place. You already contain enough, there is not room for any more than that.

This is your standard steady-state of being.

Now imagine that teacup gets two holes drilled through it, they don’t weaken the porcelain enough not to cause the teacup to break, but now some of the water can escape out the walls.

The energetic flow of the water now changes. Water that was bypassing the teacup in favor of other paths now has an energetically favorable path by which it can enter the cup. It doesn’t stay there — it flows out again, and some still escapes out the top — but the water that is in it now is not the same molecules that were there 3o seconds ago.

The hooking works like that, with the added bonus that the teacup isn’t just an inanimate object, it’s a human that gets to use the force of the water (divine energy) while it’s flowing.

The ritual is built such that the longer the dancing, the deeper you go, and the more long-lasting the high. It is a tool for energy work, and extremely useful for a variety of things I might want to do with that energy.

I find that for up to two weeks after the day of the ritual I have a bigger well of energy to draw from, an increased spiritual awareness, improved communication with the Divine, and a pervading feeling of calm and peace.

That goal might be worth any amount of hardship to get there. But it is a mistake to think about the results as being a separate thing from the means to achieve them. A hammer-and-nails-built wooden barn is a different construct from a fastener-free wooden barn made from seamless joinery. They take different final shapes, informed by the constraints of the tools used to build them. And if you try to do an energy pull, and you take on the pain only as something that you endure or something that you use to get a thing to happen, rather than both something that you transform and that transforms you, it does. not. work.

I’ve blogged elsewhere about “people built like me”, and I want to use a more descriptive and precise term here. I would call what I am a pain alchemist, which means I both transform pain and am transformed by it, and that I can use that kinetic moment for work.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I’m not the first person to use that term since it is so obviously the right term, but there are things I’m not going to google search from work, ya’ll. So for now, my apologies to the original coiner.

In the context of this ritual, being a pain alchemist means I don’t have to sit for a week under a tree. I don’t have to fast in retreat for a month. I just have to suffer swift acute physical trauma, and add a few other bits, and *boom*.

I am practiced at it, which means I can transmutate pain without significant preparation or elaborate accouterments. I’m good enough at it by now that it may as well be a fucking cantrip.

Yet despite all that practice, I find I am utterly unable to teach someone else how to do it.

I hate to think about spiritual practices — really about anything that I get better at with practice — as being something that you have to be born a certain way to do. I am willing to hypothesize about there being a genetic component to masochism, but am in no way convinced of that with data. Plenty of testimonials, zero controlled studies found.

Given my considerable training in neuroscience, I’m much more willing to buy that this ability is an emergent property of the neurophysiological setup of being human. That all humans have the substrative underlying groundwork to do what I do, which improves with practice, and it’s just that I’m just shite at teaching it.

Maybe my inability to teach is also a failure of words/concepts matchup, rather than a lack of inherent capability, and I will improve with, of course, practice.

Suffice it to say for now, if you are reading this and are someone who wants to get better at transforming pain, keep practicing. It’s worth it.