Covid-19 & Flu Season Response

New to rope bondage? Need a primer on how to navigate the kink community? Want to learn how to throw that flogger you just bought? Looking for a knowledgeable and understanding mentor?  Let's sit down for truth and tea in my living room, or get  into techniques in the dungeon.  Bring your partner with you, or come alone.  

If "what the hell is wrong with you?" is your idea of seduction, you'll get along just fine in this class. Rapid fire demonstrations (with audience participation!) of one terrible idea after another, that can help push a scene from intense to terrifying, or serious to ridiculous. Xanthine will go over bad ideas that turned out to be actually bad ideas, and bad ideas that have become favourites. +10 to creativity, -10 to sanity.

Have you ever been stuck trying to remember that chest harness you learned, but can't recall which way the rope goes next? Are you tying someone who is differently abled, or need to adapt to a persistent injury and don't have a tie for it in your bag of tricks? This class will help you to understand the dynamics of tension and how rope works, allowing your rope to flow more smoothly, and adapt to every situation with a new tie. Free your rope!

With fifteen years of bodyworking under their belt, Xanthine has naturally incorporated healing into their BDSM. Sore muscles and injuries can hinder your play, or with a bit of education and assessment, they can allow you to unleash your sadistic side in the name of science and healing. Identify issues, assess rope placement and positions, make your bottom call you every name in the book and thank you for it afterwards. For Science!

This class is for the dark, perverted, shadowy corners of your brain. Each person’s unique psychology influences their stress reactions, perceptions of fear, and responses to stimuli. We will explore how to mold environmental factors to heighten and accentuate individual perceptions, and discuss the subtle, tricksy knack of negotiation for fear play. We'll get into methods we can use to identify, assess, and manipulate fear, conflict, and strain for physiological response and emotional release.

We often call BDSM ‘play’, and shy away from exposing the therapeutic, cathartic side of what we do. But what if you want to explore? If you want to integrate spiritual, emotional release and transformation into a scene, this class aims to give you tools to arm yourself for a journey into the dark part of play. We will learn to use tools, psychology, and environmental factors to induce altered states, push past,  surprise ourselves with what mind, body, and connection is capable of achieving.

Negotiation is a necessary part of play and....zzzzz......Yeah, it's usually boring. And often ineffective. Get past the doldrums and into the science of brain chemistry. Learn how we make decisions and why, and how that can help you turn pre-scene negotiation banter into tactical, enticing, informative foreplay.

Psychology, physics, and anatomy combine with a side of eastern medical philosophy and a hefty punch of sadism to create a bio-kinesiological brute squad of techniques to hurt, heal and surprise. Evil fucker impact play with a side of helpfulness. Come with a partner or be paired up.

How do people make decisions? You want to play with predicaments but how to predict the outcome? Learn to use cognitive bias and new discoveries in neuroscience to predict how a bottom will react and be motivated, and use this to structure the scene. Predicaments give goals to look forward to and shake up the usual "beat me, Seymour" of dungeon play. Looks of consternation, pleading eyes, mad scientist in the lab - get your creativity flowing and your bottom looking for a hole to crawl into.

Pokey, stabby, bleedy. Needle play is intoxicating – shiny, visceral, methodical.

. Why do we put needles where we do? How can needle placement change the feeling in our bodies, aside from just the pain?

Learn how to use just a few needles to create an intense scene, and how a lightweight needle bottom can take hundreds, if given the right environment and attention. Learn to place needles in places to help chronic pain and mental fatigue, and to bring forth energy and emotion.

Switches are tricky beasts. How do you decide who plays which role? How do switches in a long term relationship get their needs met? What are the stereotypes around switches and how do we dismantle them?

Join So It Goes & Xanthine for a series of anecdotes, demos, and examples of how two switches can play with each other, how to switch mid-scene, switch games, getting your needs met as a bottom while still being a fierce top, and how to feed your top creature while still submitting as a bottom.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Jung said that what we deem evil, inferior, and deny in ourselves becomes the shadow self. How do we access it? How do we keep ourselves safe, know what to touch, what to stay away from? We'll explore the shadowy corners of our subconscious through psychology and a guided meditation exercise, animate our inner demons & safe spaces, tickle the ids of our partners. 

An all-levels mean rope class from the depths of Xanthine’s witchy dyke heart. Minimal knots, rough textures, chemical assists, tension, compression, and attention to reaction and rhythm layer on a slowly encroaching, encompassing, snarly, sexy, woo-soaked blossoming bondage onion of pain and sensation that capture and snare sadist, masochist, and rope partners together.

Bring rope (ideally sisal, manilla, coconut, and other scratchy fibres if you have them. 

 How can we foster acceptance, gratitude, compassion, and accountability in ourselves and others? How can these things help our kink and relationships?

Using recent findings in neuroscience and psychology, we'll talk about how to improve our communication with each other, our self worth and self evaluation, how to find empathy without drowning in it, and how to care for ourselves and each other in a sustainable, fulfilling way that increases our potential for joy, in-scene and out.