Advanced Guide

At this point I want you to stop….

Take a look back on your progress and appreciate the skills your have developed and ask yourself why you find yourself here.

Advance Shibari techniques can take literally years to become proficient in, and decades to master. This isn’t something we recommend you learn from online resources alone. If you haven’t been to any in person classes/workshops, tied with those more experienced than you, tied with different people or had any problems in your rope scenes that required you to stop, assess and resolve, these techniques probably aren’t for you….. yet.

Going back to our Beginners Guide we focus heavily on safety and if you have any doubt in your mind about whether you are ready to attempt advanced tutorials…. you are correct. Many of the people we respect and admire within the rope community simply wont put advance techniques, resources and tutorials online and for good reason, rather these are taught in person at day long, or sometimes weekend long intensive workshops, with the correct level of dedication and support to teaching that ensures a minimum level of proficiency for safety and technique.

At this level you should expect your skills in the core concepts to be second nature and if you haven’t felt the gravitational pull to looking into workshops and making rope friends that you can share skills and knowledge with in person, its important you reflect upon why this is and if you are truly ready to approach advanced Shibari/Kinbaku.

If you find yourself here for posterity, research and a purely academic look at what you can work towards as a form of inspiration, that’s amazing, just remember before you jump into trying any of the tutorials in this section when things go wrong, people get injured, sometimes permanently or at worse, become paralysed or die. For those with experience Shibari/Kinbaku is seen as one of the most extreme forms of edge-play within the kink scene, with ramifications far exceeding those of other edge-play techniques such as knife-play, needles or breath-play.

For any of the ground based techniques here the advanced level is reflective of the complexity of the ties, the fundamentals required and the balance to achieving the correct tension and placement. For any suspension based techniques it is our opinion that you should NEVER….. attempt suspension without first having had in person tuition to ensure that your fundamentals are correct.

Although it is possible to lab uplines with heavy bags and practice your technique for a solid harness, putting these two complex ideas together is a different headspace, for both the top and bottom.

From a Tops perspective this requires lateral though on multiple elements at the same time, its both mentally and physically exhausting, while you are attempting to create an emotional connection with your partner and not drop them on their face at the same time.

From a bottoms perspective your ability to maintain a conscious awareness of your own body, limits and safety, while potentially experiencing feelings of sub space that can impair our ability to retain a complete grasp on reality is a delicate balance.

For both people involved this takes a great degree of trust and communication, something which can be greatly aided by the addition of a third more experienced top to act as a spotter and assistance should you get into trouble. We were super grateful for that experience in Christian assisting us to get airborne, some three years after we learned partial suspensions in a workshop and spent many hours practicing those skills before taking the plunge to progress to full suspensions.

Personally for Seraphina and I, we have been exploring and educating ourselves in Shibari/Kinbaku for 5 years (at the time of writing in 2021), yet only decided to commit to learning full suspensions in the last few months, due to our comfort level in our technique, albeit slightly delayed from 2020 due to the Covid pandemic.

Although we recognise this as an advanced technique, we still feel that our journey has so much more depth, understanding and learning ahead of us. Suspension is by no means the goal, or destination and even with our experience we still feel that the amount we are yet to learn far outweighs the years of knowledge and experience we have built so far. At this point in our rope journey we have developed the confidence to explore our own style and methods, with a humility that there are so many amazing, talented and experience people that can teach us more than we have ever learned about the wonderous art of Shibari.

With that in mind enjoy the tutorials in this section with an air of caution and understanding that these should not be practiced alone, or without guidance and act only as a reference guide to reiterate learning that should be undertaken in person, or for purely academic research purposes.