There are songs I enjoy. Songs I love. Songs I dance to, sing along to, play on repeat.

And then there's The Old Religion by Florence + The Machine.

Gosh.

Every time I hear it, I get goosebumps.

Even writing about it gives me goosebumps.

Because Florence has put into words something I've felt for years about BDSM.

Something that runs so deep in my understanding of this work that I've often struggled to put it into words in the past.

When she sings about being wound so tightly she can hardly breathe, about that hunger for release, I think of all the people I've encountered who spend their lives holding themselves together. And of how desperately I used to hold myself together.

Being appropriate. Responsible. Agreeable. In control.

Keeping your voice down. Your desires in check. Your darker impulses carefully tucked away where nobody will see them.

And then there's that image of an animal instinct awakening again.

Oh, that sooo gets me.

Because to me, BDSM isn't simply a peculiar subculture of people dressing up in leather and latex and doing supposedly outrageous things to each other.

It's A Way Of Encountering Something Ancient Within Ourselves.

Something that was there long before we learned how to behave.

Something that, no matter how thoroughly we try to civilise ourselves, hasn't gone anywhere.

I sometimes wonder how much of our modern lives is spent trying to keep that ancient part of ourselves under control.

We're no longer hunting for our dinner or fighting off wild animals. We sit in offices, answer emails, attend meetings, pay our bills. We learn to be considerate, diplomatic, reasonable.

And yet, underneath all that civilisation, our bodies still know how to fight. To flee. To freeze. To hunger. To want something so badly that it hurts.

We can be sitting perfectly still at our desks while our bodies are bracing for a threat that exists only in our minds.

We can spend an entire day swallowing our anger, holding back our tears, smiling when we want to scream.

And then wonder why we're so bloody exhausted.

There's something in Florence's longing to stop being careful, to stop being still, that speaks directly to this.

That almost desperate urge to have something to push against. To crush. To finally do something with all that energy.

We Haven't Lost Those Instincts. We've Simply Become Extraordinarily Good At Keeping Them Out Of Sight.

What I find most fascinating about BDSM is the sheer vastness of it.

It’s not so much the floggers, the restraints or the rather unusual activities people broadly associate with BDSM.

It's what happens underneath.

When someone who has spent their entire life being responsible and in control finally has somewhere to put all that responsibility down.

When someone who has always been told to be nice, polite, easy and considerate discovers what it feels like to bare their teeth.

When a part of someone that's been carefully kept out of sight, perhaps for decades, finally gets somewhere to go.

And we don't just sit there talking about it.

We play with it.

We give it a body. A voice. Somewhere to exist.

You Can't Outrun Yourself.

That's another part of Florence's song that gets under my skin.

Because how many of us have spent years trying to outrun the parts of ourselves we don't particularly like?

The rage. The hunger. The desire to overpower someone. The longing to be overpowered. The things that make us feel ashamed, ugly, disgusting, perverted.

We push them away. Lock them in the closet. Hope they stay under the bed.

Perhaps we're even frightened of what happens if we let them out.

But they're still ours.

And if we spend our lives pretending they don't exist, they have a way of showing up anyway. In the things that trigger us. In the relationships where we keep repeating the same patterns. In the anger that comes spilling out sideways after years of being agreeable.

BDSM offers something extraordinary here.

Instead of running away, we turn towards these parts of ourselves.

In BDSM, We Roll Up Our Sleeves And Say, "Right. Let's Fucking Go There."

We look at what we're going to explore. What is welcome and what is off-limits.

Sometimes the encounter is meticulously planned, with elaborate rituals, precise instructions and protocols. Sometimes we have no idea what will emerge.

But there's a frame.

And within that frame, we get to enter places we might never dare venture in everyday life.

Someone kneels and discovers what it feels like to surrender.

Someone gives an order and feels what it's like to be obeyed.

Someone screams, growls, begs, resists, yields. Discovers what happens when they stop trying to be the person they're expected to be.

And what emerges is so wonderfully unpredictable.

Sometimes it's wild and animalistic. Sometimes exquisitely tender. Sometimes hilarious. Sometimes frightening. Sometimes there are tears, and a moment later roaring laughter.

Sometimes it's all of that in the same encounter.

And sometimes nothing particularly dramatic happens at all.

Still, what I find extraordinary is watching what happens when people begin to melt into it.

It's Like An Exhale On A Cellular Level.

The carefully maintained identity starts to soften. The person who's spent years being a particular version of themselves doesn't have to keep holding that version together quite so tightly.

That’s where something else gets to come through.

I can often feel it happening right beneath my hands.

And afterwards?

It's as though something has finally clicked into place.

A part of them that was always there, but somehow never quite had somewhere to belong.

And the beautiful thing is, I don't have to set out to transform anyone.

We can simply play.

And somewhere in the playing, something changes.

When It's At Its Darkest, It's My Favourite Bit.

Oh, Florence.

Because there's another part of this that I absolutely adore.

The deliciousness of the darkness.

The thrill of doing what we're not supposed to do. Of being gloriously inappropriate. Of entering those places that our carefully polished, everyday selves would go above and beyond to pretend they don't exist.

And discovering just how incredibly juicy they can be.

I think we've become really good at sanitising even our spirituality.

Let's light some incense. Sit in a circle. Breathe together. Sing something beautiful. Hold each other tenderly.

There's a place for all of that.

But What Happens To The Parts Of Us That Don't Want To Sit In A Circle And Breathe?

The parts that want to scream. To bite. To be cruel. To be humiliated. To be absolutely ridiculous. To crawl across the floor. To beg for something that would horrify our polite, everyday selves.

Where do those parts get to go?

Are they somehow less worthy of being met because they don't look beautiful?

I don't think so.

In fact, I think some of the most extraordinary things happen when we stop insisting that our encounters with ourselves must look dignified, peaceful or spiritually respectable.

BDSM Doesn't Give A Shit What It Looks Like.

It can be sweaty, messy, filthy, absurd.

It can be a beautifully choreographed ritual or an extremely wicked afternoon.

And to me, one is no more sacred than the other.

Because the sacredness isn't in how spiritual the encounter appears.

It's in what we're touching.

Scratching At The Door Of Heaven.

There's an image in Florence's song of someone crawling on hands and knees, desperately reaching for heaven.

And every time I hear it, I think of how extraordinarily intimate BDSM can be.

Because sometimes you really are on your hands and knees.

Perhaps you're crawling across the floor. Perhaps you're begging. Perhaps you're doing something you would never, ever admit to wanting in polite company.

And someone is seeing you.

Not the version of yourself you present to the world.

Not the carefully maintained identity.

But the part you thought was too much. Too little. Too ugly. Too shameful. Too perverted.

And they're not running.

They're right there with you.

In fact, they might be the very person who invited you into that experience. Who created the space, held the frame, encouraged you to go there.

And you don't have to hide.

Can you imagine the intimacy of that?

Of being seen in the very places where you expected someone to recoil, and discovering that they're willing to meet you there?

To Me, That Is Heaven.

Not some pristine state where we've finally managed to get rid of everything difficult, uncomfortable or undesirable about ourselves.

But becoming whole.

Knowing our own darkness as intimately as our light. Knowing how to meet our grief, our rage, our tenderness. No longer having to exile parts of ourselves just to feel worthy of love.

And then getting to meet another human being from that place.

To touch them. Love them. Make love to them.

Sometimes the experience of being so completely present with another person, so completely in our bodies, feels like meeting God.

I don't think we get there by sanitising our humanity.

I think we get there by embracing the whole bloody thing.

And that's why BDSM feels so sacred to me.

The Old Religion.

I think about the things human beings have been drawn to for thousands of years.

The stories we've told about gods and goddesses. The rituals we've created. The ways we've sought to encounter something greater than our ordinary selves.

And I think about what I experience in my scenes.

When things that have been held back for years finally get to come through. When carefully maintained identities soften, and something much older seems to emerge.

That's what I hear when Florence sings about The Old Religion.

Not merely a hunger for release, but something ancient calling us back to ourselves.

To the parts we've forgotten. The parts we've hidden. The parts we've been afraid to meet.

And to the extraordinary possibility of finally letting all of them belong.

What We Call BDSM May Be Contemporary. But What We Encounter Through It Is Ancient.

And to me, that is sacred.

That is the old religion.

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