Decency

 I was raised by my WWII veteran father, and my mother who was seven years his junior. They both bore the marks of the great depression. There was an inherent decency to their generation; a willingness to reach out and lend a hand. They helped their neighbors with whatever was needed: childcare, a yard project, sitting with a family in grief, dropping off a meal when someone was ill… whatever might be needed. Their skills and their hearts seemed to be able to reach well beyond our own walls and our own front door. We didn’t always have a lot, but we always seemed to be able to make what we did have stretch far enough to help someone else. My folks were eminently decent people. It feels like times have changed in this America.

Over the last few months, as a whole host of awful disasters have rolled across my television screen, I have been struck by a single overarching thought: how is it that we have come to lose our sense of decency?

When a screaming, destructive, murderous mob breaks down the barricades to storm into our capital, and attempt to stop the constitutionally defined process of certifying the result of a duly conducted national election, where is the outraged reaction of decent people?

When a winter storm knocks out the power, plunging thousands of people into cold and dark, and then leaves those same people without potable water for weeks; when the United States senator who represents those same people picks up and leaves for a family vacation in Mexico while his constituents are suffering and dying; when the power companies that couldn’t manage to keep the lights on then churn out bills for thousands of dollars to customers who froze in the dark; does that seem decent?

When, again, our evening news broadcasts are completely pre-empted by word of our neighbors being murdered while doing regular things, in places like Atlanta, Georgia and Boulder, Colorado by young men who no one would have even noticed on the day before, there is something terribly indecent happening. 

When, in 43 states, here in a nation that is founded on the notion that we operate by the power of our vote, state legislatures are working to pass laws that remove that right to vote from their own citizens, a powerful indecency is occurring on a daily and hourly basis. 

When we have established an immigration system that declares that it is illegal to offer aid to a mother who arrives on our doorstep carrying her child, fleeing from violence and poverty, where is our humanity and our decency?

And, when after a year when more than half a million of our neighbors and family members have been lost to a deadly virus, we still cannot do the simplest things to protect one another, like wear a mask and keep our distance for just a few more months. Instead, great crowds of partiers are gathered for spring break, as if there were no threat; as if no one had died; as if it simply doesn’t matter. It is indecent.

A society and a civilization stands on a number of things, but foremost among those, it seems to me is the ability to count on the good will and good faith of your fellows. We need to be able to trust that the people that we meet in our shops and our workplaces and our schools are basically decent sorts. It is simply a fact that life is a risky proposition. For each and every one of us, disaster is a heartbeat away, and we rely at some level on the good graces of our fellow citizens to hold us up in our hour of need. We hope that our neighbors and co-workers and friends will show up with a helping hand and a casserole to shovel the sidewalks and take care of the kids and walk our dogs and sit at our bedsides and comfort our widows and do all the thousand kind things that knit us all together. It is just decent. We don’t expect to be kicked while we are down, and we never intend to be the ones doing the kicking. We just are not that sort of people, except that, as it turns out… maybe we are. Really, what has become of us? Have we changed, or is this who we have always been?

Sue

Reclaiming Myself

 I was a school teacher for thirty-five years. I loved the work. I loved my kids. I was pretty good at it, I think. Sometimes, in some small ways, I made a difference.

I had no teaching credential. All of my own educational background was in science, engineering, mathematics, and computer programming. When I left a seventeen year long career in the oil and gas and mineral extraction industries, I was determined not to go back to that work. I had found it to be soul destroying. On a long shot, I applied for the computer instructor position at the Catholic elementary school that I had attended as a child, and because it was the middle of the year, and they were in a desperate situation, they hired me to begin on two-weeks notice after the Christmas holiday. I put together a program for 3rd through 8th grades from almost nothing, and taught there for a number of years. I learned to teach by teaching. I watched my kids. I listened to them, and if something didn’t work, I didn’t do it again. They taught me way more than I ever did teach them. In time, I moved into a 5th grade homeroom class, teaching math, and science, and religion of all things. Then, I moved away to Ohio, and in time, I came to teach middle school math and science. For about half of the time I taught, I was divorced, and that was my persona: the middle school teacher lady who lived alone with her cats. I kept to myself, and kept my life pretty seriously private. I devoted myself to my work and my kids, and people knew only what they could see of me; which wasn’t much.

That lack of a state issued teaching credential kept me tied to the Catholic school system, and because I needed the work, I danced to their tune. I almost always taught science, even when I might also be teaching some math classes or some social studies classes or even some religion classes. I taught science with a sincere passion and love for the subject, and I wanted my students to love it too. I wanted them to sense the connectedness of it all; to understand how they fit into all of it; how beautiful it all was. I taught the Big Bang and I taught Darwin’s evolution through natural selection and I taught climate change, even when doing that caused me to raise the eyebrows of the higher-ups and the church hierarchy. Through much of the last decade of my career I taught a health curriculum that included sex education. Although constrained by the limits of the Catholic church’s teachings, I did my level best to give my kids as much as I could of a healthy and positive education about their bodies and their sexuality, even in the face of resistance from some parents and the parish priest. That work ultimately led to my untimely retirement from the teaching profession when I simply could not accede to demands that I refrain from addressing topics like menstruation, wet dreams, intercourse, and childbirth in an 8th grade sex education class. There are limits beyond which truth will not bend.

Through it all, there was never any real reason to disclose my personal life to my students or my colleagues. What I did outside my classroom had no bearing on my teaching. I worked to teach with compassion, care and respect. I taught with integrity and with academic rigor. My goal was to find a way to help every student succeed. Whatever they brought to me, my job was to help them use all of their skills and talents to build their very best pathway forward.

And, then I retired. I left my life’s work behind, and I walked away one very early February morning, and I never looked back. There was no ceremony, and there were no goodbyes. It was sudden, and it was very, very final. I took a deep breath and stepped from one part of my life into the next. Now, three years later, I find my life is slower, quieter, deeper. I am also very glad to find that many of those former students remain connected to me through the miracle of social media. For all of its many very real flaws, it does provide some definite paths to those connections. I am so grateful.

Lately, though, I’ve been contemplating the fact that those young people still have little sense of who it is that they think they “know.” My Catholic School Teacher costume was just that...a disguise. It served to allow me to function in a world where I could work, earn a living, and make a valuable contribution in the lives of young people, but it required me to keep much of who I was hidden from view. The vast reality of who I really am would have made that teaching life untenable, but without the truth of it, these current friendships are flat and one dimensional. There are so many potentially interesting conversations that have no place from which to begin.

I have no reason to hide any longer, and really nothing of substance to lose. So, at the risk of alienating some, I want to step into the daylight and perhaps open the door to a deeper set of understandings with those who might choose that. Like everyone else, I am a person with many levels of complexity. There are many sides to “Ms. D.”

I am politically liberal and unashamedly progressive. I simply believe that all people ought to be able to live in safety with health, comfort, and dignity. I am anti-racist, although I still have much to learn about how to fully live out that aspiration in the world. I have been a feminist since my teens. I believe that no one ought to be treated as less because of their sex, sexuality, or gender identity. I think every person ought to be able to earn a decent living wage doing work that has dignity in a workplace that is safe and protected from abuse. I believe everyone should be able to obtain a full range of healthcare services, and that paying for those services should not result in economic hardship. People should have adequate housing, food, and drinking water. Our air, water, and food supply should all be safe. Education should be accessible and affordable to every person from the preschool to the very highest level for every single person. Your zip code or your family’s last name should not determine your ability to access educational opportunities. We must prioritize the protection of our planet’s environment. Failure to do so dooms our future; dooms the future of every living thing on the planet. There might me more, but that is the gist of it. Honestly, I don’t feel like most of that is so very radical. It seems like what decent people ought to think about things.

I am a masochist. I eroticize pain. I participate in a sexual-erotic relationship as the masochistic bottom partner with a sadistic top. He likes to inflict pain, and so we are well matched. The dance that we engage in together works to our mutual gratification. I get regularly spanked, flogged, caned, paddled, strapped, and whipped. It is a sexual practice that is likely not for everyone, but it takes me places that I cannot get to in any other way. I reach heights of humming, roaring ecstasy that are beyond my reach without this particular kind of power play. I don’t prescribe it for others, and I never impose it on others. I am careful about consent. However, in a world that assumes that people all engage in a particular sort of “normal” sexual relating, to not acknowledge and honor my own sexual expression is a kind of amputation that I will not tolerate any longer.

I also live within a polyamorous family. There are three of us. Tom and Teresa are legally married to each other. I am divorced; no longer married, but firmly committed and connected to the two of them. We love one another. Ours is a family, no different in most ways than any other. We own a home together, we manage our finances together, we eat together, cook together, handle the household chores together, support one another in times of health crises, work around one another’s schedules… just do the things that families do. We are not looking for other partners, so we are more closed than some poly families, and we are all straight, so we “love” one another in the ways that work best between the different ones of us, but we DO love one another.

So, yeah. I am not exactly that Catholic school teacher lady with her cats that I projected for all those years. I am a bit more alternative than it might have appeared to those who sat in my classrooms back in the day. I have no idea how that might land, but I am ready to live out here in the world. I am completely comfortable with who I have come to be. There is no need to ask for anyone’s approval. I am always happy for the friendship of those who offer it, and glad to offer it in return to those who might find it of some value, but I will not hide any longer. Let it be what it truly is.

Sue

Safe Words in Adult Consensual Spanking: Pain is not Harm

 Let’s talk about what is entailed in an agreement between adults to participate in a spanking experience, with a particular focus on the (often misconstrued) concept of the “safeword”.

A spanking experience is an intentionally inflicted crisis in the form of slaps, blows, strikes of some sort administered to someon’s buttocks resulting in pain.  We are most of us aware that in history spanking was administered by adults to children as disciplinary punishment.  Less well known spanking was widely used as a means of punishing adults in servitude, penal environments etc.  We have also seen an increasing awareness of adults who engage in consensual spanking experiences in the interest of sensual erotic or psychological gratification.  It also goes without much in depth thought that a spanking transaction, whether as part of a lifelong relationship or a one time encounter, requires there must be a partner who administers spanking (i. e.,  the Top partner) and a partner who is spanked (i. e.  the bottom partner).  Inherent to painfully striking another or to being painfully struck by another is risk of harm or injury.

All my thought about practicing adult consensual spanking is underpinned by the assumption that spanking partners, whether Top or bottom, are to have their risks of harm minimized while they are engaged in spanking.  Both partners consent to partcipate in spanking relies on this assurance to protect each other’s safety.

So far we have found, and agreed that adult consensual spanking is the agreement of two adults that one adult will spank the other.  That spanking will result in pain experienced by the bottom partner.  There will be effort to assure that despite this intentionally inflicted and intentionally accepted painful experience both partners will, to the degree possible, be kept free from harm as a result of this spanking.

I realize I may seem to be going on and on about obvious points.  Please hang in with me.

So the bottom partner is going to intentionally submit to pain in the form of spanking.  When one experiences pain, the natural human response is to attempt to end or lessen that pain, or to object to that pain.

People being spanked will frequently reach back to block blows, or attempt to move away from the ability of the Top to reach them, or object, demand a halt to the spanking, or beg the Top to stop spanking them to lessen or end the pain they are in.  These behaviors are all reflective of the bottom partner’s growing degree of crisis experienced as the spanking progresses.  It is important to recall that both parties to the spanking have agreed to intentionally create this crisis.

An important protection in terms of spanking partners avoiding harm is the “safe word”.  The safe word is a mutually agreed upon signal word, for example “giraffe” that both partners agree will, if it is uttered by the bottom during the spanking, halt the spanking, so the bottom’s unsafe situation can be remedied before the spanking resumes, if in fact it is even possible for the spanking to resume safely.

 Pain, resulting from spanking, is not harm.   If one is undergoing spanking and they can’t breathe, have chest pains, their legs or arms go numb, they lose vision, or hearing, or start to lose consciousness, it is totally imperative they must use their safe word signal.  The spanking must halt and whatever is necessary to remedy the situation must be done……..even if emergency medical services must be called.   If much more likely, the ongoing spanking results in steadily building pain, distress, this crisis is the exact crisis intentionally and consensually agreed to at its outset.  It is not unsafe.  The crisis through which one passes during an adult consensual spanking is the very stimulus that is the pathway to sacred sexuality.

I have been amazed at the proliferation of popular “Zen Spanking” websites on the net that purport to discuss spanking as a means to Tantric sex, almost all of whom encourage erstwhile spanking partners they don’t have to worry any spanking they get will hurt “too much”, because they will have a “safeword.”  All they have to do if their spanking becomes uncomfortable, is call out “red!”……...the spanking will halt.  They even explain that they, the bottom partners, are always in control of their spankings.  Thus, the Top partner is simply pretty much non-interactant in the process.  The pain and distress a bottom partner experiences during a spanking is not harm.  It is precisely the experience both partners agreed to collaboratively create.

Thus defined, control that the bottom retains thwarts the very dynamic that Sacred Sexuality requires.  It is in passing through the pain, the loss of control, the vulnerability, a spanking entails that releases one to sacred sexual union.

Safe words are vital to protect bottom partners from harm.  They are not a means to enable bottom partners to prevent their surrendering control during spankings.  Surrender of control, i. e., power exchange is a keystone of sacred sexuality.

Tom the Heretic

Relationships in the BDSM Universe

 I have a lot more time to read these days. I retired from my 35-year teaching career three years ago, and so now I read whatever I choose. I wander from book to book; sometimes following a single author through their entire catalog, and then getting stuck in a particular genre, and then finding a topic that intrigues me, and so reading deeply in that realm for a time. Too, a couple of times a year, I end up with a stack of books that are intended for my grandson, because being the Gramma that sends books brings a certain set of responsibilities with it.

As Tom and I have become engaged in deeper conversations about the potential meanings behind our own BDSM practice, I found myself looking at some of what has been written about that lifestyle choice… and finding the offerings disappointing. The fiction seems all of a type, and the how-to’s seem pretty dry and lifeless. Where, I wonder, are the discussions of what this all means in terms of relationships? Why is it all so mechanistic; so oriented to win-lose; so lacking in human feeling and connection? Is it just me?

Because here’s the thing…

Life happens.

No matter who spanks who; no matter how prettily you string each other up; no matter how many piercings; no matter how much candle wax you pour on your bottom partner; when all the slap and tickle is done, there is still plenty of good old day-to-day living to get through. When the regular, and not so regular living happens, it can be really important who is standing next to you. “Kneel before me, slave!” just won’t get you through everything. It won’t.

Outside of the dungeon, people die. They get seriously ill. Your kids turn out in ways you never, ever expected. Your job goes all to hell. Pandemics show up out of nowhere. Finances get stood on their head. Some idiot runs into your car. The IRS comes calling. There is shit to clean up, sometimes literally. Addiction happens. Oh, and you keep on getting older and older. Yeah. Life. 

That sexy, hot as hell Dominant, who swings a mean whip might be just the ticket when the world comes crashing down. Maybe. Or, maybe not. He or she might also turn to a quivering mess of “I don’t have a fucking clue what to do.” Some folks who look great in scene are as useless as teats on a boar hog in a crisis. 

So, why is there so little conversation in our BDSM circles about how to build good, strong, stable relationships? Why do we talk about how to tie 15 different kinds of knots, but not how to discover whether a potential partner is of sterling character? How does a person, considering a D/S or M/S relationship make that decision with some confidence that their partner is stable, secure, reliable, trustworthy, and dependable? 

I want to know more than what your scene cred might be. I need to know if you will sit up all night at my bedside in the hospital. I want to be sure you will sit vigil with me when my loved one is dying. I have to be sure you will go with me to help bail my wayward teen out of jail… again. I want to know if you have issues with drugs or alcohol or gambling or sex. I need to know about your debt picture and your retirement plans and your ex-wives/husbands and any kids you have stashed in the wings. If I am hitching my wagon to yours, then I need to know what sort of train this is going to be. If that all seems terribly intrusive, and your response is that it is all off-putting, then you probably ought to meander on down the road, because I really don’t need to get spanked THAT bad (and I really do need to get spanked). But, if you aren’t a real partner for all of it, then you aren’t a partner, and I don’t need you. Move along.

Sue

Consensual spanking: archetypal pathway to sacred sexuality

 I am old.  Yeah it’s true.  I have repeated the daily rituals of life……...the proverbial practices needed to have life continue, called by Buddhist monks, “chop wood, carry water”,  so often that now, I awaken to face the mirror, the same mirror I viewed my reflection in as a boy, to see an old man staring back at me.  

My life while at times a repetitive grind of everyday existence, has been anything but boring.  There have been births of my children,  spectacular loves with women who gifted me with their respect and caring, even at times when I could not find my own self-respect.  Especially the love of my life-mates, sue and teresa. There have been heroic strivings through drugs, philosophies, religions, literature and psychology appreciation and study…...to find some way to answer existential questions like why, how, and even more poignantly perplexing at my stage of life, where am I headed?  Throughout the tedium, the peaks of joy, love, sensual satiation, victories, things that just felt so good, there has been pain.  There is an adage that if you love being part of the ecstasy of childbirth, don’t enter the birthing room, unless you can deal with agony and blood.

My life, with its peaks amidst its mundanity, has been, at least as frequently, punctuated by pain.  There have been medical crises during which I was in such agony that the maximum of the most potent opioids they dared give me, could not begin to give me relief.  There has been defeat.  There was the end of a love and family unit: divorce--which I barely survived.  

My greatest peaks, my joys, have been tangled and enmeshed, inseparably with pain.  I am not alone in this.

My earliest memories as a very small child featured sensual experienc that, for me, translated as a fascination with the experience of SPANKING, giving and receiving.

As I type that, I can imagine readers reacting at this point, “WHAAAAAT ????”  Where does that come from?  

“LOVE HURTS”

Throughout time, throughout human experience, it has been clear that there is no love without pain. Adults must learn to entwine the ecstasy of love with its inextricable companion, pain.  Over thousands of years human beings have made consensual spanking a means to not merely increase their erotic arousal and connection, but to deepen the depths of their love, and to mutually attain, share, and even give to others, the sacred.

Coming to terms with, then embracing, then delving into becoming proficient in the practice of adult consensual spanking over forty years, has been a central theme of my life.

Adult consensual spanking is a potent means to merge the sacred universe, within which medium we all float through our existance, and present reality.  Consensual spanking is so well documented, and so universally practiced, that our culture’s  collective unconscious responds to spanking as an archetype. Thus, it is thus a part of our inherent, inborn psychological and spiritual “infrastructure.”  It is perhaps a metaphor for this pain/pleasure paradox inherent in human made tangible as part of our sexuality.

By the way, when I refer to adult consensual spanking, I mean to include practices which have come to be called BDSM (i.e., bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism), DD or domestic discipline, Tantra, sacred sexuality, and there may be others I am not aware of.  Over the decades I have identified within the BDSM and DD communities.  I have witnessed endless attempts by some of those communities to state their community’s inherent superiority or “rightness” over the others.  All of us are like the blind men and the elephant.  Each is as “correct” as the perspective of our experience to date has afforded us.

I don’t support any community’s attempts for tribal superiority.  I now choose to identify as a lifelong practitioner of consensual spanking.  I know that soanking per se is not the sum total of BDSM practice. My own practice has incorporated knife play, bondage and restraint, flogging, caning, switching (both by striking with freshly cut tree branches or exchanging roles as Top, bottom, Dom, sub), disciplinary spanking, spanking therapy, mentoring novitate explorers and practitioners, recreational spanking (birthday spanking, initiation spanking, spanking sporting event wagers, competitve spanking), weight control disciplinary spanking, smoking cessation spanking, and I am sure others I’m forgetting.  I’ve played with and in front of others many times, and had the opportunity to witness and learn from others.  I’ve attended seminars on piss play, slapping, kicking, breath play, shibari bondage, suspension, creating “mind fucks”, and other things that so far I have no intention or aspiration to include in my life.  However, central to the practices of each of these communities, is adult consensual spanking. 

I’ve been through three days of Foundation for Shamanic Studies education along with teresa and sue (purportedly, I am “certified” to perform shamanic soul retrieval).  I have undergone my own soul retrieval with a Shaman I respect.  I am graduate degreed as a counseling psychologist.  These experiences lead me to feel some degree of awareness of sacredness and its role in our adult lives.

Through all of this, there is one central theme: Adult Consensual Spanking: a portal to the sacred, if practiced well enough, long enough, and with others you love.  I am grateful it is part of my/our life.  I believe it can add joy and ultimately sacredness to others, if they choose to embrace it to enrich their lives.

Tom the Heretic

Thoughts From the Bottom

 Perhaps it is time to pick back up here.

Ten years have passed. We have aged. Life has settled, and we have grown some. Of course, we have changed, evolved, learned some things, both as individuals and together. We are not as we once were, but we are still “we.”

Our conversation lately has turned to spiritual sexuality and how our own BDSM practice intersects with that world. Tom, being who he is, seems very intent on doing lots of research, seeking out the experts who have all sort of things to say on the subject. He finds all of that affirming, and it seems to really fire him up. So, good. I find that, for myself, my days of chasing spiritual “experts” are behind me. My tendency to spiritual backpacking leads me to look with jaundiced eyes on the teachings of gurus. I grew up Catholic, studied with a Lakota Sioux teacher, and spent many years with Quakers. These days, I find that what works best for me is to get my head to quiet down, and find my way to a quiet space inside myself. It is there that I find what I experience as the great mystery. That, for me, is one of the real magical part of our BDSM practice. It can, when we hit it just right, take me into that place. So…

I am a masochist, and claim the part of submissive bottom partner. Partner is important to this whole narrative. Tom and I do this thing together. I have come, over all these years, to see it as an intricate sort of dance. We don’t do exactly the same dance, but we do dance together.

He is doing a good bit of writing about his view of all of this. From my perspective, he is the dominant force. He is the one who inflicts pain. In session, I sometimes picture him as The Count from Sesame Street, because I can often hear him back there behind me counting under his breath.

For my part, I do not count strokes. I do, generally, practice an eight-count. There are two reasons for that. The first is that it reminds me to breathe, and breathing is really important. So, in one-two, out three-four, in five-six, out seven-eight. The other reason for the eight-count is that it prevents me from counting strokes. I really, really don’t want to know. I don’t want to know how many there have been, and I for sure don’t want to know how many there might still be, or how many I think there should still be. That way lies fear, panic, and probably, at some point, rage.

What I have discovered, walking this path, over all these years, is that I need to go into a session without expectations; without a whole lot of mental chatter (yes, I can hear those of you who know me well); with as little fear as is possible; with a sense of openness and willingness. And then…

It hurts! The beginning of nearly every single spanking hurts like the very devil. Nevermind what the spanking porn videos with all those picture perfect models with their makeup that never runs might suggest, I find that I fight and struggle, and frequently rage through the start of most spankings. It isn’t fun, or sexy, or hot. It doesn’t turn me on. It just fucking hurts, and I hate it, and I most often hate him! In a modern-era BDSM ethic that says that the bottom partner ought to maintain absolute control; that there ought to ALWAYS be an inviolate safeword in place that has the effect of stopping the action, I would never, ever get past the first few minutes of a spanking, because well, DUH!

Now, before anybody loses their shit, I am never unsafe in a session. I am absolutely required to tell him if I am in some sense in danger. So, if I am experiencing chest pains, or shortness of breath, or unexplained loss of vision, I would be expected to make that clear to him. He would stop the session, and tend to my needs. If necessary, I would receive appropriate medical care. The point of our BDSM play is that he chooses to hurt me. He does not ever want me harmed. With that said, I do not have the capacity to stop our play because it hurts. The hurting is the point of the whole thing. For us both. Stopping the action because it hurts is utterly off limits for me. Further, if I were to do that, I would miss out on the possibility that exists beyond that beginning place where it just hurts. It is in the territory beyond that place of just hurting where the magic and the mystery lies. 

Now, as always, my way is mine. It isn’t for everyone. I don’t presume to prescribe. I have, however, found that, if I can tough it out and hang on through that initial difficult place; if he does not stop when I am fussing and whining and raging, then I may, possibly break through to something else. I may, if it all works just right, reach the top of the first big hill on the world’s tallest roller coaster, and drop over the edge in a breath-taking rush. When it happens, I’ll swoop down along a deep violet tunnel, following some presence that I can sense, knowing that I am safely guided. The noise will quiet down and turn to colors; purples and blues. The pain will fade into the background and I will float along, following my guide. I can still respond to him if he speaks to me, but I no longer worry about the intensity of the sensations he is eliciting… that is his realm, not mine. Time slows down. Sometimes I see things, or learn things, or hear things. Sometimes I fly away. I always have the impression that the experience is something that he “allows.” Occasionally, I will hear myself roaring like an animal; my power unleashed. 

I know he sees it all. He refers to it as my “getting off.” I understand that it sets him free; liberates his sadistic urges, and allows him to go to a higher level of play than he might otherwise, because he knows that my tolerance is much higher in that state.

When he calls me back, I tend to come to rather slowly, as if from some sort of trance. I tend to feel a bit stupid for a time. I imagine most of that is the effect of the endorphin rush. 

So. Spiritual? Perhaps. I tend to not put too much stock in such descriptors, but make of it what you will.

Sue