Class follow-up: Flying Fusion
This material accompanies the Flying Fusion class, and is not intended as stand-alone material.
Begin with intention—why bondage? Why suspension?
Safety
Never leave someone alone in bondage. Bondage + alone is the #1 cause of kink-related fatalities.
Practice emergency descents!
While you should have an appropriate cutting tool, cutting rope is often not the safest option.
More information:
BondageSafety.com
Basic Suspension Safety, by Topologist: crash-restraint.com/ties/123
Nerve damage is a significant risk to be aware of for bondage in general and suspension in particular.
Learn to identify different kinds of nerve pain: numbness, burning, sharp, cold, tingling.
Upline attachment
“Always be more than one fuckup away from disaster.” —Topologist
Upline tie-offs:
There are many different and perfectly valid upline techniques.
There is a trade-off between speed and security. Generally, speedier tie-offs (like quick-release techniques) are less secure, and very secure tie-offs take more time to tie and untie.
Are you more concerned with falling or getting stuck?
Other factors include aesthetics, how soon you want to adjust the upline, whether it’s a primary or secondary line, and the risk of rope jams.
Body awareness
Be aware of health issues and warning signs—see bondagesafety.com
Ask your doctor if you have any questions or concerns.
Pain is entirely mediated by the brain and is your body’s somewhat paranoid guess about how much danger you are in.
Distinguishing between warning signs of damage and intense but not harmful sensations is a crucial skill for being in rope. This skill takes time to develop and can vary widely between individuals and within the same person across different times and situations.
Cumulative damage also plays a role in many injuries.
Cultivate mindfulness and monitor your body on an ongoing basis.
Err on the side of coming down sooner rather than later.
“It is a defining characteristic of human sensory and motor systems that they habituate with repeated use.”
Intro sequence
This sequence is carefully designed to mitigate risk; there is always a fully tied-off critical line that is not adjusted (until another critical line is secured). This is optional and choose-your-own-path! Please modify it to meet your individual needs and preferences.
Attach the chest upline to a carabiner, ideally on a ring or rigging plate, at a comfortable standing height for the flyer. Have an instructor check your chest upline tie-off.
Partial
Raise a leg using a cuff on the ankle, foot, or thigh, or foot or calf harness.
Tie this off in a way that creates separation between the chest and leg lines (so that you have space to run the hip line between them).
Ultimately, this leg should be in front of the flyer, but you can experiment and move it around first. Collaborate on how high to raise the leg.
Face-up
Attach the hip upline as an open hanger on the thigh bands.
Run the hip upline in between the chest and leg lines.
Flyer can help with the hip lift by putting weight into the chest and leg and pushing the hips up.
Tie off the hip upline, optimally at the same height as the chest or just below it.
Use your non-dominant hand as a brake to tie this off under load.
Consider adding support to the other leg, head support, etc.
Inversion
Have an instructor check the hip line & height before untying the chest line.
Slowly lower into an inversion. Consider leaving the chest line tied off low.
Remove whatever you tied to raise the leg.
Play in the inversion! Consider expanding and contracting variations.
Re-attach the chest
Option 1: Re-attach the chest line from the front of the chest harness and come back into the face-up. (Note that the flyer can help pull themselves up if needed.)
Option 2: Attach an upline from the back of the chest harness and tie off low, then lower the hips to come into a low face down.
Option 3: Attach an upline from the back of the chest harness and pull up to come into a high face down.
Lower
One option is to lower the legs first to come down into a kneeling position. Or consider tying one or both legs into bent leg ties and creating low partials.
Try to start getting down before it becomes urgent or anyone involved is at a limit!
As they say in Alice in Wonderland, you can always have more, but you can’t very well have less.
