I got Master a ball gag for Christmas. He’d pointed me to a web site when giving me His wish list, and said, “Anything from here.”

It was quite the experience shopping for toys for Him…knowing full well that I am the recipient of any selected toy. Picking your own torture device is quite the head trip! I told Him I didn’t think I was brave enough to purchases the most extreme toys, yet I found myself fascinated by them and wondering what they would indeed feel like.

I’d “wrapped” the gag with an undershirt I’d also purchased for Him. (He opened the undershirt gift first, then I asked Him to take the undershirt out of the box where He found the ball gag.) Interestingly, I was infinitely more comfortable shopping in the adult toy store asking, “Where are the ball gags?” than I was asking, “Where is the men’s underwear?” in the high-end department store.

He said He got hard just looking at it! He was a bit surprised this is what I got. I’ve always expressed an aversion to breath play, and early on in our relationship I shared how uncomfortable looking ball gags looked. I worried that I would panic and not be able to breathe.

That aversion has definitely been subsiding, though. I love burying my face into Master’s chest while He’s fucking me and feeling that moment of suffocation. I’ve grown more fascinated with ball gags while watching kink.com videos. I’d started fantasizing and longing for knowing what being fucked while wearing one felt like.

I went to the bathroom before He fucked me that day. As I wiped, I realized I was already sopping wet. He was hard, and I was wet…obviously we were both turned on by the thought of me being gagged!

I wondered how I would ask to cum while being gagged. Turns out, mumbling in the context of being gagged is quite understandable.

He warmed me up with some nipple play. He slapped my breasts hard, and I almost came just from that! I begged Him to let me cum, and He withheld permission momentarily. I wonder if I would have been punished for cumming just from having my breasts slapped. It took all of my energy to wait for permission.

With the gag on, I was surprised how quickly my level of surrender deepened. I felt myself open up to Him in a way and to a level I have not felt yet. I had the wherewithal to ask permission to cum as required but wave after wave of orgasm came over me. Instead of fearing being out of control, I relished the shift – where His movements and His commands controlled my body.

Interestingly enough, I have now been working out with a personal trainer for six months now. In the past couple of weeks, I noticed that I passed a milestone I didn’t even I know I’d hit, and that is I feel so much more in control of my body. I notice it when I walk, when I go to sit down and even when Master is fucking me. My strength to hold positions has greatly improved.

What’s even more interesting and curious to me is that just as I feel more in control of my body, I have a deeper experience of surrendering to Him.

Since my punishment on Saturday, I’ve been noticing a new feeling.

I shared with Master the next day that I’m not sure I’ve felt this feeling before. I described it to him as new level of contentment. The past couple of days, I still find myself fishing for the right word(s). I even turned to the dictionary to help me out.

The best word I came up with is docile. In reading the definition of docile, words like “willing to be led” and “yielding control” resonated.

In anticipation of my punishment, I wrote how I longed for Him to beat my will out of me. After writing that post I had epiphanies about compliance vs. submission.

When He commanded me to lay on the bed face down, I silently said to myself, “Be open.” I knew what was about to happen was going to be a new level of intensity and pain. I didn’t want to just comply with my punishment. I wanted to submit and be open to receive it fully.

When He suggested that 100 lashes might be too much, I silently agreed. That sounded like a lot. He’s given me 25 swats before with a body brush I own and that seemed like it would never end.

So, I laid there centering myself as He prepared me. I didn’t focus on past experience or even try to anticipate how it would be…I just focused on surrendering.

When He was finished and he was putting the collar on me, I do remember wondering if it was over. I felt like I could take more. That is why I was surprised when he eventually told me I’d taken 115 lashes. It didn’t feel like that much. It felt like only the beginning…

…and I say that not wishing I’d received more that day. It wasn’t a hungry, sub frenzy reaction of wanting more right then right now. It was a calm, centered reaction knowing that I am capable of handling this – that I can let Him take me to new levels of intensity and pain and trust my well-being in His capable hands. It was a glimpse into the places He’d take me if I’d surrender my will…and how much I would enjoy those places.

Punishment can be seen as a type of aversion therapy: associate an unpleasant experience with a behavior in order to stop the behavior. I’m seeing my punishment as having an opposite effect: if I don’t change my behavior of hiding and not being emotionally transparent with Master, then I won’t get to experience the wonderful place and feeling where Master took me on Saturday.

Master took me someplace new with my punishment. Since discovering my submissiveness, I’ve also embraced that I’m a masochist. I’ve enjoyed the mix of pleasure and pain that Master inflicts on me. But this was new; this was different. Master said maybe he’s flipped a switch, and I think he has….in more ways than one.

My mind seems to have switched from wondering what I’d give up if I let go of my control to wondering what I will miss if I don’t.

“There are many things on my agenda today. First, go sit on the bed,” He says.

I go into the bedroom and sit on the bed. He enters the room with a bag, sets it down and starts to open it while he declares. “Today is punishment day.”

My pussy immediately tingles. Punishing a masochist with pain is an interesting paradox.

He blindfolds me, and then tells me to lay face down on the bed with my hands just at the edge of the bed. I hear him jingling items around until he walks to my hands and starts to cuff them. He also places a bar in between the cuffs.

The tail of the blindfold has fallen over my mouth. With my head close to the bed, I start to have a bit of trouble breathing. He asks me if I can breathe, but I manage to move the blindfold away from my mouth with a few strategic open and closings of my mouth.

He spreads my legs. He lubes my ass and works an object into it. Many things can remind me that I’m owned, but having Him play with or fuck my ass is near – if not at the top – of the list. In order to let Him in fully, I have to let go. Relaxing my sphincter puts my whole body into a very receptive state.

He caresses my body while He tells me a bit of His thinking. He was trying to decide how many lashes: 25 seemed like too few and 100 seemed a bit much. He suggests the number will be something in between…and tells me that I don’t have to keep count because He predicts I’ll be too overwhelmed to do so.

The first lashes start. I want to keep count, but lose my place after about 4. I know it is important to keep my legs spread, and I feel grateful for the bar between my arms to help me keep them in place. I’m writhing, and the lashes are painful. Then one hits right at the small of my back and top of my buttocks. It’s the one that sends me over the edge to crying.

He alternates between what feels like a flogger and what feels like a cane (although I’m not sure exactly what instruments He’s using). The stings on top of the tender skin from the flogger feels almost unbearable. I grab the bedding with my fists and mouth, trying to diffuse the pain. When I let the bedding out of my mouth and gasp for breath, I feel the drool running out of my mouth.

He tells me to turn over, and helps me maneuver the spreader bar to do so. I keep my legs open although I fear that my pussy is next. Instead, He starts swatting my nipples. I don’t have time to warn Him that something is wrong with my left nipple. He hits it and I scream while starting to curl up into a ball. He commands, “Keep your legs open!” In between sobs and trying to catch my breath, I say that I have to tell Him something. It’s hard to put together the words, but I manage to spit out that the left one has a small tear or something near the nipple ring. I’ve been soaking it in salt water, but it is not healed yet. He works around it with subsequent lashes, although he does end up hitting it again. These are the only two times I move my hands and legs from their assigned positions.

Before I know it, He is lashing my pussy. He’s using the cane-like device, and the pain is intense. He comments that I like it, and I do in way that I’m still trying to comprehend.

As He finishes, he asks, “The next time…will you talk instead of reacting?”

I say yes but it kind of eeks out and doesn’t match my conviction, so I repeat louder, “Yes.”

He has me sit up. I hear rustling. He then comes up behind me on the bed, and pulls my hair to the side. I feel the collar around my neck and take a deep breath. I take several more as he works to lock it. I feel His hand brush my hair lightly in circular motions as he turns the wrench. I couldn’t be happier.

I looked in the mirror as I was cleaning myself up after sex. I just smiled. I’ve often told Master that when I look in the mirror, the person I see isn’t how I see myself in my mind. Wearing His collar starts to change that. I look and feel more of who I am when wearing it.

Sitting on the couch in the living room afterwards, I asked, “Did you count?”

“Yes,” He replied.

“How many?”

“115″

My nipples are still tender from Master’s visit yesterday.

Every twinge makes my pussy wet.

I play and pull and slap and tug on my own nipples. I’ve now even started masturbating with clothespins on my nipples. Each of these activities produces a certain level of pain that gets me off. Yet, nothing compares to the pain Master inflicts on me.

I’m thinking about that scene in the movie Secretary where she is trying to use a hairbrush to spank her own ass. I’ve always identified with this scene, although my feelings toward it right now are different than when I first saw it.

That scene describes – without words – the craving for something that feeds your soul. When I first saw it, I felt her desire to recapture the feeling she had tasted and seemingly lost. In the context of the scene, she was trying to recreate something that seemed elusive.

Given where I’m at in my relationship with Master, I’m not worried that the feeling or the fulfillment of that need is so elusive anymore. Now I view this scene with the eye that there is only so far I can go to inflict pain on myself. Even when I’m trying to inflict pain on myself, there is a part of me afraid of it. Can I really stand it? Will it be too much?

I’ve spent so much of my life avoiding pain. When I’ve felt intense pain, I’ve numbed it….anything I could do to manage it and keep it at bay.

I now seem to be at a tipping point. I’m afraid of it, but I want it. I’m craving it. I’m craving pain.

I have a punishment coming. I’m not proud of what I did to deserve the punishment. I don’t imagine or pretend it will be enjoyable, but there is a part of me that is craving it. I want to feel the pain. I want to feel His power over me and through me. I want my resistance broken down with every stroke. I want to open myself up to Him and let Him in in ways I haven’t allowed before.

I want to feel the pain.

My mind has been going all sorts of places lately. I’ve been trying to concentrate on a work project that’s due, but it has been hard to keep focused. Besides wandering to regular life stuff, I find myself having flashes….sexual flashes if you will. I wouldn’t call them full blown fantasies. More like my mind trying to pull in a different direction…

I’ll be working on the couch when flashes enter my head of Master lifting my legs to fold me in half and fuck me. I don’t let my mind go there since I’m trying to concentrate on work, but then it will happen again…and again.

I have been horny the past few days but just masturbating isn’t satisfying. I find myself craving pain.

I wanted to masturbate with my dildo in my ass. Since I regularly do this, I don’t experience a lot of pain now but if it’s been a while, it can take a few, painful moments to relax. It has been a while, so I knew it would provide a few moments of luscious pain when I inserted the dildo. I imagined Master entering me with very little prep, gasping as he grabbed me hard and pulled me toward him.

With the dildo in my ass, I stuck my g-spot toy in my pussy and started playing with my nipples. Master is training me to come from nipple stimulation, and so it doesn’t take me long to cum once I start touching my nips. It felt good, but I wanted more pain.

I took out the clothespins. It seemed a little strange to put them on myself, so I hesitated…but not for long. When Master puts the clothespins on me, he does so rather quickly and the pain is very intense. I wasn’t sure I could do that to myself, so I eased into it a bit by not placing the clothespin directly on my nipple. That pain was not very intense. So, I took a deep breath and placed it on my nipple…and then placed a second one on the other nipple.

As happens with Master, the initial pain is intense! My breathing gets shallow and instincts kick in to take them off and stop the pain. When He’s in control, it’s a little easier to give into the pain, although I admit when it gets really intense I’m more hanging on until it ends than enjoying it.

I could have easily taken off the clothespins and stopped the pain on my terms, but I asked myself, “What if I gave into the pain? What if I surrendered to it rather than endured it?” I took a deep breath and let the sensations sink into my body.

I was pleasantly surprised how the sensations came in waves. After the initial intensity, I didn’t feel any pain as the endorphins started to kick in. Then I’d move a little bit and pain would shoot through my body. Even when I would lie still, though, the pain would subside and then rise again and then subside. The mix of pleasure and pain emerged in a new way. I felt myself going deeper and enjoying it more.

I played with the clothespins again today. I put them on and left them on for a little bit. I even flicked my nipples while they were on as I played with my pussy. When I removed the clothespins, an orgasm welled up from inside me and I squirted a lot! That felt sooo good, I did it again…and had yet another orgasm when removing the clothespin.

In some ways, it feels like I’ve been “battling” pain most of my life…how to avoid it, how to contain it when I feel it, how to soothe it, striving to figure out ways to make it stop. Different strategies work at different times, but I’m realizing that I’ve mostly learned to endure it. Enduring it is better than giving into it because my fear is that if I succumb, it will somehow destroy me.

What if I didn’t endure but surrendered? physically? emotionally? spiritually? What if I let the sensations and feelings sink in take their natural course rather than trying to control?