Notes on Kinbaku
Why do you practise shibari?
Andrei Tanto
When people ask me how to begin practising shibari, I suggest answering another question first: why do you want to do it?
Before choosing a course, buying rope or looking for your first tying patterns, it is worth understanding what attracts you. Do you want to learn to tie? To experience being in rope? To create photographs? To find a particular way of interacting with another person?
Your answer influences what you will learn, which teacher you will look for and how you will assess your own experience.
You do not need to define a grand goal straight away. “I am curious, and I want to understand what attracts me to this” is an answer too. But it helps to distinguish your own curiosity from a wish to recreate someone else’s picture or meet someone else’s expectations.
Learn
Some people are drawn to working with rope itself: the structure of ties, hand movements, tension and body mechanics. There is pleasure in understanding how things work and why one solution works while another does not.
Progress can then be noticed in specific things. You understand your actions better, handle rope more confidently, pay closer attention to the person’s position and recognise sooner when something needs to change.
The complexity of a tie, however, says little on its own about the quality of the work. What matters more to me is whether you understand why you are using a particular solution and whether it suits the person you are interacting with now.
Create
For some, rope becomes an artistic medium. The interest lies in form, line, light, composition, movement or an image they want to realise in a photograph or on stage.
Other questions arise here. What do I want to express? What role does the space play? What does the model bring? Why does this particular work need rope?
The result might be a photograph, a performance or a form you discover. But the person taking part remains a co-creator: their presence, capabilities and responses affect what emerges.
Connect
For some, the shared experience matters most: trust, attention and the possibility of communicating with each other in a different way.
The value of what happens is not always visible in a photograph. A seemingly simple session can be deeply meaningful for its participants. Conversely, an impressive form does not mean that the people involved found what they were looking for together.
Here I would look at how well you listen to each other, whether you can talk about your wishes and boundaries and whether you share an understanding of what is happening. Rope can become a way of communicating, but it does not create that communication on its own.
Goals can change
These directions can overlap. Today you may want to understand a technical problem, tomorrow to make a photograph, and another time to spend time with someone close to you.
The reason you practise shibari at all may also change over time. What first brought you to rope will not necessarily be what keeps you with it a few years later.
There is no contradiction in that. It matters to return from time to time to the question: what am I looking for now?
I am not asking you to choose the one correct reason. I want people to understand their own. That makes it easier to choose learning opportunities, reach agreements with a partner and recognise the result that matters specifically to you.