Radical Ecstasy: SM Journeys to Transcendence

by Dossie Easton, Janet W. Hardy

For millennia, seekers have used physical and emotional extremes to achieve transcendence and exaltation. Today, many BDSM and leather practitioners are discovering the potential of these practices to reach personal, interpersonal, and spiritual goals.

With trademark frankness and humor, these popular BDSM/sexuality authors document their journey into the realm of transcendent kink and radical ecstasy. Here, they share techniques that join BDSM with tantric sex practices to create a state of transcendence during sexual practice.

Genres: Sexuality, BDSM, Nonfiction, Relationships, Spirituality, Self Help, Erotica

223 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2004

Reviews

[okyrhoe · Rating 1 out of 5]

"It is with a considerable sense of risk that we decided to write this book on our own authority."
I expected more from this book.
The writing of Easton and Hardy fails to do the topic justice. I believe there is a connection between the 'blissful' states of tantra and those heightened states achieved by physical means, even those of the extreme methods of BDSM. I do not need to be convinced of it by this book. However, this book doesn't explain this sensitive and complex issue in a comprehensible manner. I wasn't able to adequately understand the 'meaning' of the BDSM episodes that Easton and/or Hardy provide as their personal testimonies to support their points.
I don't mean to devalue their life experiences. Far from it. I just don't think that their manner of writing is organized enough, inspired enough, challenging enough, to convey the emotional or spiritual depth of their 'transcendent' experiences.
Maybe the 'egalitarian' format of the writing here (at times a shared point of view, at other times presenting the points of view of two separate writers) detracts from the subject in question, and distracts the reader. There doesn't appear to be a unified or focused approach to the subject matter, just a collection of ideas and impressions, which, although presented here in earnest and with honesty, nevertheless fail to merge together into a comprehensible thesis or focused point of view.
(I'd have to say that the answers to my questions on the subject are better answered by Jack Rinella's online column. He has often touched upon the techniques for enhancing and transforming sex into a 'transcendent' experience. I find that his manner of explication is somewhat more edifying than what I read in Radical Ecstasy.)

[Tristy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I went into this book with high hopes. A discussion of "radical ecstasy" as it relates to sex and intimate connection? Yes please! And while authors Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy write with heartfelt authenticity and earnestness, this book was unfortunately, a bit of a mess. When two authors share co-authorship on one book, I am sure it can be tricky to both have individual voices as well as a unified message, but I know it's possible and have read many books where two authors pulled it off. Unfortunately, that did not happen here. The first half of the book is literally the authors telling you how different they are and how difficult it is to write a book together. They tell us for several chapters, what they will NOT be writing about. It was maddening!

Then, when we finally get to what they DO want to write about, we get half intimate diary entries and half meandering musings about ecstasy and spirituality. They are being so careful to explain every term they use and re-iterate that they are being secular while still being spiritual and explaining all the aspects of BDSM (even though they say at the beginning of the book that if you are a BDSM newbie, you should read some beginner books first). WHY? Why didn't they have one introductory chapter and then get to the meet of things? In fact, reading this book was like reading the notes of a long series of couples' therapy sessions.

Now, all that being said, I did read it all the way through, despite being REALLY frustrated with the wishy-washy, meandering, conversational writing style, because when they finally DID break through and actually talk about ecstasy as it relates to sex and BDSM in a concrete, conclusive way, it was fascinating and a great read. The tiny section on intuition as it relates to sex play which then leads to a greater spiritual life could have been a whole book in itself!

I think these two women are too close and too intimate to write a book together. They talked about how sensitive they were to each other's edits - how if one wanted to change one sentence the other wrote, the other would fly off the handle and they would then have to process for hours and it shows, because as I said, this book is a complete mess.

BUT if you are a fan of either of these women, or get turned on by detailed BDSM sex scenes (with a spiritual/ecstatic framework) you will probably be able to dig it.

[Ivana]

Ovo je zapravo prvi non-fiction o BDSM-u koji sam počela da čitam, jer mi je delovao super zanimljivo. I onda na početku vidim autorke kako savetuju da oni manje upućeni prvo postanu malko upućeniji, odnosno da pročitaju još poneku knjigu, od običnije vrste, o BDSM-u, da bi imali jasniju predstavu o tome kako tu stvari funkcionišu.

Kao štreber, to i uradim, što možete i sami da primetite ako obratite pažnju na prethodno pročitane knjige.

Pa se onda vratim ovome.

Elem, i jeste ispalo super zanimljivo: autorke pišu o svojim iskustvima sa izmenjenim stanjima svesti (ekstazi, transcendentnom, mističkom...) do kojih su stigle putem BDSM praksi, a ta stanja svesti imaju poprilično sličnosti sa onima do kojih su drugi stigli tantričkim seksom, sportskim naporima, flagelacijom, predanom meditacijom ili molitvom... Okej, neki do nečeg sličnog stignu i raznim ne baš legalnim supstancama, ali ovde se sve to lepo postiže i bez drogiranja, plus svima bude lepo.

Plus je i duhovito.

Plus je tu i tamo i pomalo štucavo, jer su pisale o poprilično emotivnim i ranjivim stanjima i iskustvima, što uopšte nije lako.

Vidim ja da ću da čitam još njihovih knjiga, prosto jer mi se dopada kako pišu.

[Nicole Field · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book a great amount. I highlighted a line out of almost every page. It got to the point where I was like, Janet Hardy, dearheart, are you in my head?

Reading and rereading as I went along was what took so long to actually finish this book.

Essentially this book is where eastern philosophy meets kink and comes out with lots of personal stories by both authors. It's about being true to yourself, true to everyone you come across out in the world. Just truth and excitement and authenticity and expression of self in all of its various forms.

There was just so much good information in this book, and I feel like the only way to write a good review is to summaries some of it here:
- We can only see the world from our unique point of view
- Often we ignore our feelings and intuitions, to our own detriment
- Transcendent experiences shape up our brains and change the way we see the world
- We always have the choice to let go of our thoughts rather than hold onto them
- There are so many innate benefits of letting go our inner boundaries for a time
- Being truly seen for ourselves is something that is severely underestimated
- It's important to figure out what we want, and what we need
- Everyone involved in any scene is in service to that particular scene
- We also need to navigate emotional limits as well as physical limits in our play

[bun.noon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I appreciate the sex positive, shame free and self exploring nature of the way these two write, but it felt meandering. I felt some of their point was lost in some of the example scenes. Ehhh nicely spicy but ehhh.
I read this for book club, so I’m excited to hear if some friends connected more.

[Yinzadi · Rating 5 out of 5]

They are brother and sister, their connection happy and profound and familiar, visible in the shifting space between them. I feel the warmth and dearness of participating, even only by watching, in their lifelong connection.

If I knew Dossie Easton in real life, I think I would be a little bit in love with her. I wish I knew who these siblings are who are so confident about being public in their relationship like this, and so trusting of others to greet their closeness with acceptance rather than judgment, because I would follow everything they wrote & said.

I am so surprised at how aggressively critical some of the reviews are of Ms. Easton's & Ms. Hardy's work. To me, most of those reviews are coming from a place of tremendous privilege. Ms. Easton was born in 1944. The world we get to live in, the information & community we have access to, the multigenerational dialogue that helps us be okay with ourselves and our difference, that gives us choices, literally did not exist for them. In significant part, these two women created the space for difference that probably everyone who reads their books needs, they experimented in a brave new world so that we could have that information, they were strong enough to start the conversations that we are now allowed to have. I've read reviews of this book criticizing them for saying that they're smart, different, independent - reviews that have a take-you-down-a-peg tone like "You're not so special." Fucking-A they're special. Though it looks rather different for me than it does for them, I am also a non-straight, non-vanilla woman who does not conform to patriarchal sex roles and who lives outside of the conjugal system. I know myself well enough to know this: I guarantee that if I had been born in 1944, to a normal family, I would not have grown up to be Dossie Easton. I probably would have killed myself.

This book was hands-down the best book on BDSM I've read. I come from a different perspective on some of the subjects they were examining, but it also touched the closest to my own experience of many practices considered BDSM. It was a genuine gift to read. I know I'm going to be coming back to it many times and sitting with some of their insights.

[Bridgid · Rating 4 out of 5]

p86 The Chakras
First chakra - Root, red, base of the spine, genitals/anus, connection to the Earth
Second chakra - Sex, orange, where your womb is or would be, sexual turn on
Third chakra - Power, yellow, solar plexus, center of gravity, chi
Fourth chakra - Heart, green, middle of the chest, emotions
Fifth chakra - Throat, sky blue, center of the neck, speech and peace
Sixth chakra - Third eye, midnight blue, between your brows, vision
Seventh chakra - Crown, violet or white, slightly above your head, connection to the universe

Dossie's description of opening to kundalini energy is beautiful. Some snippets:
"....a sexy red swelling...here we can let go of anything that no lounger nourishes us - compost all our cares and woes, grow roses from shit. The root is also a gate of entry, where we can welcome into our bodies intense sensation, sexual penetration, and the red hot energy from the core of the earth."

p88 "....The crown chakra...the feeling is brilliant, shining, I know for sure that the cosmos is full of love, that I am loved, everything in the universe is love, love is the real cosmic principle, the initial fore from which everything else flows."

p167 Discussing Jung, the conscious and unconscious, and the Shadow: "We suspect that many of the dark fantasies we love to explore in SM are paths to the Shadow - paths to parts of ourselves that we wish to bring back into consciousness, split off parts that we want to welcome back so that we can be whole. Seen in this way, the theater of SM is a sort of psychodrama, tracing a scary painful path to some dark cave in our iceburg, but with someone else to share in the journey and act as mirror to validate our experience. What if we can walk that path and write a script that gives the story a new ending - a denouement that resolves conflicts, leaves us feeling more sane and more powerful? What is our companion on this journey then sees us as lovable or desirable? What if when we shoot that story full of eroticism we are injecting it with the healing power of the life force? What if bringing our dark fears into the light of awareness an heal us, make us more whole?"

[Squirrel · Rating 3 out of 5]

4 stars as erotica, 2 stars as useful guide. This book has the same weakness as The Ethical Slut in that it shows the possibilities of a path rather than providing a solid road map of How To Do It.
For example: the section on ethics is made up of several anecdotes and some gesturing towards "cultural appropriation is bad, other white people, m'kay?" which is all the more noticeable after having read books with rigorous ethical frameworks like Eve Rickert's More Than Two. I'm not sure that in 2021 the poem about being ravaged by Kali would have been included or it might have been rewritten to not be appropriative of Hindu practices. But in lots of ways, this was written in 2004 and it shows.
As a memoir of their sexual and kink practices and how they link to experiences of transcendence, I think this book works much better. Especially as significant chunks of the book were devoted to vignettes of scenes that they had with each other or other people. There's value in saying, "this is how I do it," especially for helping newbies with the more intangible parts of how to play and connect. In a way this book is almost too honest, as Dossie and Janet lay out a lot of the deeper psychological reasons for why they do what they do and how it feels.
As a content warning: there are multiple scenes of play piercing and cutting and multiple scenes of age play.

[Steve Cotterill · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book by Greenery Press, Radical Ecstasy concerns sex magic. To be precise it looks at BDSM and
spirituality and how the two interconnect, drawing parallels between BDSM, Tantra and the sort of Shamanic ritual practiced by Fakir Musafa.

As always with Greenery Press, whom I confess I'm very fond of, the book is written in an approachable style, with the authors, Dossie Easton and Janet W Hardy, drawing on their own experiences and providing anecdotes to embellish their points. I like this approach, it makes me feel as if I have two mentors rather than being preached at by someone sat in an ivory tower, even if its not going to be for everyone. It shows me how human the authors are and that they have their own troubles and so on, rather than painting an unbelievable, but very pretty image of their lives as perfect. Tales of relationships ending, of the troubled pasts the characters recount may not leaving their troubles at the door, but does tell you that they are real people, and I feel in this sort of work, dealing as it does with self discovery, that's important.

The meat of the book is dedicated to helping people find ecstasy, not in the drugs sense, but in the manner of letting go of your body and 'flying'. Here we find something interesting about the authors. One, Dossie, is a pagan and practitioner of magic, the other, Janet, is very much more left brained and skeptical, looking for evidence - they're like the Mulder and Scully of kink in many ways. These different perspectives allow them to dive into the spiritual side without getting too 'woo woo' about it all. Despite this there are mentions of chakras, kundalini energy and so on, so if you're seriously allergic to such things, this may not be the book for you.

The book is structured into various chapters, as you might expect, and delves into beliefs, ethics, and where we find love, and indeed what love actually is. This last is interesting, as it discusses what society tells us love is (raising a family, a joint account and so on) and how it clashes with the emotional/hormonal truth of it; the feeling of connection, openness, and affection with another person. They dive into others subjects from morality play, to how to find your intuition and other matters. All in all, its very grounded and sensible, they don't promise to make you a wizard, or to teach you things that will make all your problems disappear. The frankness of their discussion helps with this, showing that you won't be a yogi by the end of the book but will have a stronger sense of your own spirituality. There are anecdotes throughout, some of them very personal, there's a real sense of the authors putting themselves on show, often in ways that must have been painful to recount. It is hard not to see the effect that writing the book had on them, especially since they openly discuss it. They talk about the fears they discovered within themselves, how one feared that everything she wrote was bunk and the other that if she did a workshop that did not go well would become upset. Over the two years it took to write the book, they became closer and shared much of the same headspace, everything became devoted to the book, to the extent that in the closing chapter, Janet admits that she hadn't played without the book in mind during that time. Transformative as the experience obviously was, it also just as obviously took its toll.

Roleplaying (not in the D&D sense) takes up part of the book with a discussion of the various roles you can undertake and how they may work in psycho sexual terms. This delves into areas that many people might find uncomfortable, including animal roleplay and age play. These, obviously, don't connect to anything more significant than playing about with an idea and shouldn't be construed as a tendency to do anything that's not legal and consensual. The appeal seems to lie as much in being able to shuck the responsibilities of the modern adult and to dive into a world of innocence. They also discuss more adult roles, Mistress and slave, sex slaves and so on, taking each in turn to explore them, whilst at the same time making it clear that these are roles, not something you do 24/7 - this isn't a book to prepare the reader for the idea of a formal lifestyle arrangement, and where they do mention it, it is the context of a long term, almost high ritual, role rather than anything else.

One of the later chapters delves into the idea of psychodrama, shadow play - literally dancing with the darker parts of your psyche, possibly brushing up against old wounds that lurk beneath the surface. This might be something from our own lives, a shame, humiliation or trauma we have carried with us, or it might be cultural, something we take for granted as 'normal' but which is troubling, like sexist attitudes or the ideas that go to make up our perceptions of what each sex and gender is about. This reads as if it something for the more advanced practitioner, not something to be undertaken lightly. I feel I am only a novice in BDSM and I would want to gain more experience before attempting it, partly because I would want to be more sure of myself and would also want to know I could trust the person I was playing with absolutely before placing that amount of faith and responsibility in their hands.

I found it rewarding to read and felt that it was very illuminating. It was nice, in part, to read something that explored another side to kink, a deeper side than just whips and chains and rock n roll. As I feel I have neglected my spiritual side I will be using some of what this book imparted in an attempt to find my own path to ecstasy,

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book helped immensely with feelings of shame about having exposed my darker desires to peers in the community. This is not to say I have been judged or shamed by such folk, on the contrary, folks have been enthusiastically welcoming, but even so I have had to cope with sharing some of my secret faces that I have come accustomed to guarding rigidly.

This book will teach you to come out to the world and find spiritual joy in your vulnerability.

[Mark Flowers · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a kinky person, I found Radical Ecstasy powerful, sexy, and ultimately readable. Janet and Dossie are excellent authors, and their synergy really shines from the pages. If you're in BDSM, this is a must-read, in my humble opinion.

[BT · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a cute book with some good practical advice and interesting experience shares written with humour by its two authors.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've always really appreciated Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton's approaches to BDSM and ethical non-monogamy, and I would say that this is an excellent follow-up to The Ethical Slut and their Topping and Bottoming books. I recommend this book with the caveat that it is definitely not for beginners and is a bit messy in terms of being more autobiographical and rife with personal anecdotes on the queer convergences of Western Tantra, sex magick, and BDSM. It's not necessarily a how-to, and deep-dives into more complex topics with little organization or preamble. The anecdotes are heartfelt, and what I really get out of this book is a personal exploration of the friendship between these two writers as they support one another through a really tumultuous time in their lives together as colleagues, co-writers, scene partners, lovers, and friends. It reads mostly like a tribute to their friendship and to kink as a cathartic, joyful, healing art, and also instills the reader with a deeper understanding of the nuance of the "queer/trans leather" take on BDSM, versus the cis het scene or the cis gay male scene.

[~Ivy~ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book in a bdsm, tantra, edge of woo woo sort of way. They walked the line without loosing me in deep spirituality. I can relate to a lot of what they say on energy and tantra and have hard time describing just the same as they state they do. By just stating their experiences, you can imagine or get a taste of what radical ecstasy is like for them. They also don't seem like they want to push it on anyone, but just state their experiences and you can take it or leave it. If you take nothing away from this book then at the least, there are some very hot scenes described which make it all worth the possible woo woo suffering you may endure.

[Dawn Serra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dossie and Janet offer a personal look into their own experiences with BDSM and ecstasy. Not really a how-to and not exactly a narrative, this book is terrific if you're looking to take a peek inside the experiences and thoughts of two folks who have a great deal of experience with BDSM and the ways they use it to reach altered states of consciousness. Some of the stories are wickedly hot. A nice addition to a kinky person's bookshelves.

[Delvina Greig · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a cool book to read with some things for me to think on. I can see this book having a great reread value as I'm sure I would pick things up at a later date when my head is in a different space. While the focus of the book is on sexual pleasure, there are lessons in here for living every day.
The story examples were great naughty fun to read as well as being explanatory.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit slow, taking half the book to describe what the hell they plan to talk about, but a good job for an attempt at a non-denominational stab at a complicated subject.

Definitely good for sparking discussion with lovers and friends.

[Joli Hamilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some misinterpretations of Jungian theory towards the end I think, but overall a very respectable introduction to the potential psychological work to be found in BDSM. A good read for both beginners and seasoned folks.

[Jenyb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dossie always writes from a place that feels like she said what I was thinking.

[Lex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woo-woo

[Kay Baird]

see notes & quotes file in Org sources

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic read for anyone interested in the esoteric side of bdsm